The Night Listener : A Novel (10 page)

I turned on my heels and walked down to Montgomery, then descended to the neon hubbub of Broadway. Night was falling, but the sky was briefly on hold at purple. There were tourists streaming down to the strip joints from the cafés on Columbus, so I wove my way through them with mounting irritation, intent upon my mission.

At the first newsstand I could find I approached a clerk and asked a question so unlike me that it seemed to be coming from somewhere else:

“Where do you keep your
Playboys?
”

SEVEN

A GUY THING

LOOKING FRETFUL, Anna took the parcel from me with unnatural delicacy, as if it might contain a letter bomb.

“You sure you want to?”

I thought she’d see my gift to Pete as something harmless and fun, a generous hands-across-the-sea gesture from old to young, gay to straight. She was not someone I’d expect to be prissy about a skin magazine, especially one as tame and mainstream as
Playboy
. Then I remembered her lesbian parents and wondered about their sexual politics—if they were followers, for instance, of Andrea Dworkin.

“You think it’s degrading to women?”

She looked down at the padded envelope as if the women in 90 / ARMISTEAD MAUPIN

question were actually inside. “They’re grownups,” she said, “and they can do what they want. I just don’t think in
his
case…oh, never mind.”

“C’mon? What is it? He’s too young? What?” She shrugged. “My brother Edgar used to have those when he was twelve.”

“Then why on earth shouldn’t I…”

“He used to
do
porn, didn’t he, this boy? He was in all those videotapes, right?”

That stopped me cold for a moment. “Well, yeah, but…this isn’t remotely like that. That was hardcore and violent, and it was kids, and they were doing it against their will. This is just glossy fantasy stuff. It’s not that much racier than the swimsuit issue of
Sports Illustrated
or…hell, he could download a lot worse off the Internet.”

“I just thought the
idea
of it might…you know, bother her.”

“Donna?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s not like that. She knows what the difference is. She’s a shrink, you know…and sort of an old hippie, I think.”

“Does she open his mail?”

“I can’t imagine that she would. The first thing she promised him was his privacy.”

“But if she’s trying to protect him…”

“Oh, okay, fine.” I reached for the package, but she pulled it away.

“No,” she said. “I’ll mail it. I was just asking.”

“It’s just sort of a guy thing. I thought it would make him feel like he had…you know…a big brother.” I had almost said father, until I remembered Anna’s misgivings about such a responsibility.

Anna turned the package over in her hands, squeezing it once or twice. “Why is it squishy?”

I explained—with some embarrassment—that I’d wrapped the
Playboy
in a
Noone at Night
T-shirt.

She didn’t remark on that. She just stuffed the package into her shoulder bag, thereby closing the discussion, then removed another bundle and handed it to me. “I brought up the mail.”

“Oh, thanks.” I perused the usual oddball array of correspondence: a bank statement, a flyer from the Seattle gay chorus, an announce-ment of a PEN meeting at a Guatemalan poet’s house in Berkeley, a catalog from my publisher in Sweden, and a hand-delivered notice informing me that Juanita and Gail of the Church of the Savior’s Suffering had stopped by briefly, without invitation, to pray for my house. I handed the latter to Anna, who received the news of our benediction with a beguiling smirk.

“Gee,” she said dryly, “that’s good to know.”

“Isn’t it?”

“There’s letter there for Jess, too.”

I shuffled the mail again and found it. The return address was 312 Ebenezer Church Road, Leesville, Alabama. It was apparently from Jess’s father—not exactly an everyday occurrence.

“I could take it to him,” said Anna, “if you want.” I mulled that over, then amazed myself with my reply: “That’s okay. I’m gonna see him myself.”

This had been coming for a while. Jess and I had been separated for almost a month, and I knew it was time to connect again. Some of my friends (the straight women mostly) had warned against it. Cold turkey was the only way to go, they said, if I really wanted him back.

How else could he feel the full weight of what he might be giving up? If I hung around like some love-starved puppy, he’d only have his cake and eat it too. For wasn’t that what men wanted anyway: total freedom
and
total security?

I wasn’t as sure as they were. For one thing, it’s impossible to generalize about what men want if you’re a man yourself. Men
know
what a conflicted species we are, how many emotions can war in our heads at any given moment. So even in the depths of my pain I could imagine Jess’s pain, and every part of me wanted to soothe it.

He was alone and confused; this was no time to cut him off. He needed to know I was still on his side, still his comrade, even in the midst of chaos. And I guess I needed to know that from him, whatever the outcome might be. I could part with our romantic life—for the time being, at least—but not the balm of our friendship.

And there was something else: I wanted to share Pete with Jess.

I was certain the two of them would get along beautifully, given their scrappy temperaments and their common HIV status. They could discuss drug protocols and gripe about insurance companies and swap tales of their shitty childhoods. Pete’s unshakable faith in Jess and me might somehow rub off on Jess, or at least give him a fresh perspective. Pete could be our go-between, our facilitator, our guardian angel.

For there was something magic about this boy.

And nothing less than magic was required.

“Hi.”

“Oh…hey.”

“Is this a bad time?”

“No. It’s fine. How are you?”

“Not great, actually.”

“Yeah. Know what you mean.”

Do you? I thought. Then why the fuck are we doing this? If you’re hurting as much as I am, you could fix us both in the blink of an eye.

“Just thought I’d check in,” I said.

“Good.”

“There’s a letter here for you,” I said. “From your father, I think.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Miracle of miracles, huh?”

“Not really. He just wants to have his hand held.” Jess’s mother had died eight months earlier in a car wreck in Alabama, a trauma that had driven Jess’s father to finally seek connection with his children. Jess deeply resented this latter-day conversion. Here was the man who had beaten him routinely as a child, who had thrown him out of the house at sixteen, who had all but ignored Jess’s medical death sentence. He had no right to expect intimacy on demand, in Jess’s reckoning of things.

“I thought I might bring it over,” I said.

“Bring what?”

“The letter.”

“Over here?”

“Yeah.” His apparent hesitation went straight to the pit of my stomach. “Unless, it’s not…”

“No. That’d be great.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. I’d like you to see the place. It’s a mess right now, but…”

“God, Jess, I don’t care about that.”

What I cared about, in truth, was not the state of his apartment but the fact that he already had enough pride in it to make apologies. This place was supposed to be an interim measure at best, a neutral space in which he could read and think and be alone.

It made me crazy to hear him talk about it as if it were home.

His lobby was one of those gilt-and-green caverns from the twenties, somewhere between Mandarin and Mesopotamian, with a dinosaur of an elevator at the far end. Next to the elevator stood the mailboxes, where a man was wriggling his key out of its lock. The guy was as stubby and well built as a Shetland pony, and completely up-holstered in leather. I couldn’t help wondering if he’d met Jess yet, if they lived on the same floor, or even if they had fucked each other.

To make matters worse, he dismissed me with the briefest of glances as I crossed the lobby.

Jess’s apartment was on the sixth floor, the top one. The corridor had new carpeting and sturdy industrial light globes that were a little too late-eighties for their deco setting. Despite this recent attention, a palpable shabbiness remained: too many ancient paint jobs clotting the corners, a frenzy of rust on the fire escape, the stinging smell of disinfectant. The place wasn’t nearly as fancy as I’d imagined, which both depressed and relieved me.

Jess was waiting at his door, his head recently shaved to a high shine. He was wearing an old mint-green sport shirt he had bought for our cruise to Cozumel. It seemed in conflict with his Mr. Clean-from-Hell look, but it was nice to see this remnant of his earlier, softer self. I couldn’t help wondering if he knew that, if he’d consciously chosen the shirt to put me at ease.

“Hey,” he said quietly, and gave me a hug.

I held him longer than I should have, hoping that our touch still had a language of its own, embarrassing myself in the process.

So I shifted our focus to the apartment. “Well, this is nice.”

“Yeah,” he said, “the view’s good.”

The huge iron window was the room’s best feature, lending it the air of a Parisian garret. But it was on the wrong side of the building to form a sight line with my house; the view was toward the south-east: SOMA and China Basin and the dull pewter plain of the bay.

The window I’d imagined as his was somewhere else around the corner.

“Can I get you anything?” he asked. “Juice or tea?”

“Juice would be nice,” I said.

I followed him through a stucco archway to his tiny galley of a kitchen, where I saw to my distress that he’d already begun to arrange snapshots on his refrigerator door. I spotted Hugo first, standing alone in our garden, his blind old eyes looking especially supernatural in the camera’s flash. (“Mongrel of the Corn,” Jess had dubbed that shot.) Then there was Seneca and Vance in a studio photo they’d had done as a Christmas present. And our godson, Jared, up in Inverness. And the silhouette of a man standing on a bluff at Big Sur. That had to be Frank, I realized, Jess’s so-called “motorcycle buddy.”

There was nothing of me.

“Orange, okay?”

“What?…Oh, yeah, fine.”

Why would he leave that photo there if he knew I was coming?

Wouldn’t it be common decency to take it down? Or did he want me to see it? Was this his way of making something official?

“I was at Barb’s yesterday,” he said, handing me the glass of juice.

“Oh, yeah?” Barb was his doctor, a gentle, dapper dyke who wore men’s suits and retro wire-rimmed glasses. Jess adored her.

“My viral load is zero.”

He said this so quietly, so tentatively, that I wasn’t sure at first how much weight to give it. “You mean it’s…?” He nodded. “It seems to be inactive. I’m actually growing T cells.” I’d like to believe there was a moment when I received this news with unalloyed joy. Here, after all, was the miracle I’d never dared permit myself. But if that moment occurred, it was swept away in a flood of bitter irony. For the great love I’d longed for all my life had been a certainty only while Jess was dying. Now that he had a future again—or the hope of one, at least—all deals were off. How loudly was I expected to rejoice?

“God, babe,” I said. “That is so wonderful.”

“Isn’t it?”

I gave him a clumsy hug, still holding the glass of juice.

“Barb says I’m a poster boy for the cocktail.”

“Jesus, that is just great.” I should have elaborated, I know, or asked a few pertinent questions or hugged him again or
something
, but I couldn’t pull it off. Not in my current state. Not with Frank staring at me from the refrigerator.

Jess seemed to study me for a moment, then headed into the living room. “I got a call from Passavoy. He says it’s a go.” Passavoy was an executive at Curtain Call, the cable network that wanted to film me reading my stuff. Or
had
wanted to, once upon a time. Despite what I’d told my father—that brazen invocation of Alistair Cooke—the project had been stalled for over a year. Money was tight, and producers had moved on, and dozens of encouraging phone calls had come to nothing. We had all but given up several times.

“You think he’s for real?” I asked.

“Who the hell knows?” Jess dropped to a secondhand sofa I didn’t recognize. Had he bought it himself? Or borrowed it from one of his HIV/leather buddies? “I’ll believe it,” he said, “when I see the contract.”

I sat next to him, but not too close to presume anything.

“I wondered what I should do,” he said.

“What do you mean? It’s what we want, isn’t it?”

“No…I mean…do you still want me to handle things?” He was looking directly into my eyes.

“God, babe, sure…of course.”

He shrugged. “I wasn’t sure what you wanted to do.”

“Sweetie…” I hesitated for a moment, then risked a hand on his knee. “I can’t imagine any of this without you. We did it all together.

It wouldn’t be any fun anymore.”

“I liked it, too.”

“Good.” I squeezed his knee. “Then don’t make it past tense.” His face was unreadable, but he eventually gave me a small, tentative smile. “I’ve got an idea for the set.” Already I felt such a flood of relief. “What?”

“Well…sort of a
Nicholas Nickleby
thing that rotates around you.

Your chair could be in the middle and remain…you know, fixed.

But the rest of the set could change slightly as the chapters change.

You know, different rooms on different levels. Or trees for the out-door stuff. It could be really beautiful, if we get the lighting right.” It was so calming to hear him say “we” again, to know he’d been thinking about this, planning our future. I thought how lucky I was to have found him, this man who cared about my vision of things, who wanted to make it grander and richer, more accessible to the world. I felt such tenderness toward him. “I love that,” I said, meaning “I love you.”

“It would work, wouldn’t it?”

“Oh, yeah. Absolutely.”

“But not too gimmicky. Like that Spalding Gray movie with those ugly psychedelic gels.”