The Night Listener : A Novel

by Armistead Maupin

  Mummie may well have sensed all this, but she was helpless to prevent our collision. She watched her men do battle with a look of mounting horror, as if we were about to brandish pistols. She was used to my father raising his voice, but the sight of her eldest yelling back must have rattled her to the core. When Pap wasn’t looking, she would catch my eye tenderly and mouth the word don’t, as if to say that I alone had the power to stop this madness, that I was the one who knew how to be reasonable. But I didn’t want to be reasonable; I wanted to be the loose cannon for once, to bluster and bully like my old man. And I was doing this for her, I felt, for all the times she had bitten her lip to preserve the peace.

  It was no one’s victory, of course, but I knew it was over when Pap invoked his imminent death—his personal version of “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.” I cut short the trip after that, heading back to the city by way of the freeway. There was a fatal silence in the car that my mother tried valiantly to break by gushing about the scenery or reading aloud from billboards. Something collapsed that day, and I knew we’d never be the same again, though by the time we’d reached the bridge we were hungry enough to discuss dinner. I proposed a place on the waterfront, a sailing ship outfitted as a restaurant. The old man just grunted, but once we’d arrived and our gin-and-tonics were firmly in hand, we found it easy as always to retreat to our mutual amnesia. Pap looked out at the rusty freighters and the little red tugboats and the gulls making loops above the darkening bay and pronounced them the damnedest thing he’d ever seen.

  I didn’t tell them until three years later—and didn’t really tell them then; I had one of my characters do it. Will Devereaux wrote a letter to his parents that was plainly intended for mine. My radio stories weren’t broadcast nationally then, but I was mailing tapes to my folks every week, so even a blind man could read the semaphore.

  And Will was as forthcoming as I’d always wanted to be. He wrote of the relief he felt upon finally being himself. He wrote of his love for his parents and how he refused to dishonor it with secrets. He told them not to worry who had “made him this way” because it was what he was meant to be, and because, above all, he was happy.

  Such declarations weren’t commonplace on the radio a quarter of a century ago, so the letter attracted attention. Newsweek did its first piece on Noone at Night, identifying me as a “gay storyteller” in the process. Passive as ever, I waited for the mushroom cloud to appear over Charleston—or at least an anxious phone call from my mother when the old man was at work—but there was nothing for almost a month. Then a letter arrived, a single paragraph scribbled on a sheet of bank stationery:

  Dear Gabriel,

  As you know, your mother is very ill. Any additional stress can only cause her condition to deteriorate. Please try to remember that and act accordingly.

  Pap

  For all its stiffness, the message was clear enough: I was killing my mother with my selfish exhibitionism. I could only guess about the scene at home, the ranting and raving my mother must have endured, i.e., the “additional stress” for which I alone was responsible. Had I known then how long she had protected me I would have gone home and faced the consequences. I should have done that anyway, I know, but I just didn’t have the strength. And I told myself that my father, beneath all that sound and fury, wasn’t strong enough to handle it either.

  So I turned my attention elsewhere. It was fun, after all, to be young and randy with only a reputation for outrageousness to up-hold. I could swing from the radio station to the glory holes and back again on my lunch hour, sharing my exploits with flabbergasted co-workers—and feel righteously political in the process. There was nothing I wouldn’t tell the truth about; I am faggot, hear me roar. If my family didn’t want me, I would build a family of my friends and lovers, and to hell with anyone who couldn’t cope. I puffed myself up the way I’d seen my father do when railing against the communist menace or the scourge of integration. And though I meant every word of it, my zealotry served as a convenient distraction, a shield against the unthinkable loss that lay ahead.

  For a while it was easy to believe that Mummie would survive. I wasn’t there, after all, for most of it. I didn’t watch the slow draining of her spirit, the daily indignities that would add up to death. Even in catastrophe she was her usual selfless self, downplaying her pain for others, and turning sassy when her options dwindled. After her mastectomy, she granted an interview with the News and Courier in which she talked breezily about having “the Big C,” an homage to John Wayne that pleased my father no end. Privately she was fond of telling her lady friends (in her bravest impersonation of Auntie Mame) that the only adequate compensation for having a breast removed was having the other one tattooed.

  Meanwhile, she got her house in order. She called me one night to say that she wanted me to have Dodie’s bed, that big mahogany sleigh bed built by her grandfather’s slaves. Billy and Josie had already received family things as wedding presents, she said, so it was only fair that I get something nice, since I would never be married. That her blessing came in the shape of a bed wasn’t lost on me.

  I cried the day it arrived, seeing its familiar dents and the little sack of hand-wrought bolts that my father had labeled with a felt-tip pen.

  And I cried when I first shared that bed with someone else, lying against him in its curvy embrace, knowing that my mother, with her signal sense of theater, had imagined such a scene.

  When the time came, it was Josie who told me to come home. As the female nearest Mummie, she had been entrusted with the grunt work of dying, the messy specifics from which the men, myself included, had been unfailingly protected. Arriving at the hospital on a scented spring night, I found my father pacing the corridor in a state of hearty denial, assuring anyone who’d listen that Laura was going to be fine, that the doctors were just overreacting as usual.

  He looked so tired and terrified that I wanted to put my arms around him, but I knew it would be too much for us both.

  My mother’s ashen face surprised me in a way I hadn’t expected.

  Maybe because of the morphine—or maybe not—she wore an air of serene authority that made her seem like someone else. She held audiences with us all afternoon, individually at first, then with groups, though she asked me to repel several of our relatives; she had endured them for too long, she told me, and she felt no call to do so on this day that was completely hers.

  Her instructions were as precise as a shopping list. She wanted to look pretty, she said, so she asked my sister to paint her fingernails and specified which of the ladies at her beauty salon should do her hair for the big day. Josie was also to find “a nice travelling companion” for my father, though my mother was adamant that Sookie Newton, a local widow with a sharkish glint in her eye, be kept away at any cost. And she told Josie to stay closer to me than ever, since I would need her support in the years to come.

  When my turn came, Mummie greeted me with a parlor trick.

  Seeing me in the doorway, she poked a foot out from under the sheets and splayed her toes in a most unladylike fashion, wriggling them as freely as if they were fingers. She had always been able to do that, she claimed, with a note of pride in her voice. She had done it the day I was born, in fact, to the amusement of the nurses on the maternity ward. I’d never known about this talent, and it stunned me to think that she’d saved something for the very end that could draw us back to the very beginning, when we were first alone together in a hospital room. I laughed and grabbed her foot, ostensibly to stop her wiggling toes, but really to embrace her. And I held on to her foot the whole time we talked, feeling it curl naturally into my hand, as smooth and cool as a seashell.

  And her instructions? This is what I remember: She told me to write “a sweet book” someday, by which she meant one that wasn’t dirty, something like The Snow Goose, she said, that would lift people’s hearts. She told me to go easy on Pap, since, given time, he would see the light. Just as I was leaving and Bill
y and Susan were arriving she told me to come back early in the morning, because there was someone she wanted me to meet. She had a very nice orderly, she said, a man who liked Hitchcock movies and old houses, and she thought we might enjoy each other.

  Pap and I slept on her floor that night. At least I think we did. I’ve told this story so often that there may have been some bejewelling over the decades. Maybe I just meant it metaphorically back then—it’s hard to imagine what we would have used for bed-ding—but I do know that we stayed until dawn, camped out like Gypsies in defiance of the nurses’ orders. My mother wasn’t expected to die that night, so Billy and Josie had gone home to their kids, and the old man and I were left alone—on the floor or in chairs or somewhere—talking quietly while the patient slept.

  And there, against the sound track of my mother’s labored breathing, my father said something unexpected: that he’d known I was gay—or sensed it, at least—since I was a child, and that he was sorry he hadn’t brought it up earlier and made life easier for me. I didn’t know what to say except to thank him. Pap had never even used the word gay before, and this was closer than he’d ever come to addressing my needs. This must be how it feels, I thought, to be close to your father, to receive his love without the burden of conditions. It didn’t occur to me until later, when the funeral was over and I was back in San Francisco, that this sweetest of paternal moments may have been orchestrated by the woman sleeping next to us. And sometimes I wonder if she was even asleep.

  All this was on my mind that snowy night in Wysong, not because I had some prescient sense of what was already happening in Charleston—I didn’t—but because I was thinking about the bond between mothers and sons. Some mothers would do anything for their boys; mine would have, certainly, and did. And had I confessed that I was a serial killer, say, instead of a run-of-the-mill homosexual, Laura Noone would have dealt with that too, sooner or later. She would have found a way in her boundless heart to make me the sweetest, most misunderstood serial killer in the world.

  Donna and Pete had a bond like that, I knew, a love so strong that it lay well beyond the strictures of ordinary morality. And that scared me a little as I set off into the night, following a star to a child I’d never met.

  TWENTY-TWO

  SNOW BLINDNESS

  A WISE MAN would have waited until morning. It was pitch-black outside, and I already knew how hard it was to find my way around town in the snow. But I remembered Pete’s description of that derelict water tank, and how you couldn’t see the star from his bedroom, and how the light spilled over to accentuate the graffiti, and I knew that most of those things would be difficult—if not impossible—to determine in daylight.

  No one could argue that I was acting rationally that night. Somehow I’d lost my perennial sense of authorship. What had begun as a simple mind game, a troubling diversion, had become the only universe I knew, as if I’d been reduced to a mere character in the story.

  As if someone else was controlling the plot.

  Finding the water tank was the easy part. The desk clerk’s directions—and the star itself—led me there in a matter of minutes. A gross brown onion on rusty legs, it was just as lethal-looking as Pete had described, with a Cyclone fence and an ugly coil of concertina wire to keep off the inmates of the junior high school. The neighborhood itself was residential and early twentieth century—close to what I’d imagined—though my heart sank when I realized how many of these little houses commanded at least a partial view of the water tank. I climbed from the car and turned up my collar against the snow. Then, gazing up at the pulsing blue ember of the star, I circumnavigated the tank until only the faintest haze could be seen creeping around its side. All the while I murmured this mantra under my breath: Roberta Blows, Roberta Blows, Roberta Blows.

  I could make out a few indefinite scribblings, the sort of fat-lettered tagging you find all over the world. Seeing them I pictured Pete in his oxygen tent, peering up dolefully at the terrible proof that other kids could fly. I sighed at the thought, even as I realized that Roberta was nowhere to be seen. Maybe, then, I’d find her on the other side; the light, after all, had to spill in both directions. So I walked back to the star and kept walking until it was once again eclipsed by the tank. There was much more graffiti on this side, the side that could be seen from the school. I saw WOODSMEN RULE and BRENT AND MEGAN and, largest of all, a boldly lettered CLASS OF 2001. That number seemed downright jarring in such a traditional setting, like the climax of an old Twilight Zone episode in which the hero discovers that his time machine has landed in the wrong century. That will be me, I thought, all too soon: adrift and alone in a new millennium when I hadn’t yet found my footing in the old one.

  Abandoning Roberta, I turned my attention to the neighbor hood itself, concentrating on the houses on the dark side of the tank.

  The street was deserted, the cars all tucked into their driveways, having long since morphed into giant white tortoises. It was past ten o’clock, and most of the houses were already dark, though here and there, through filmy curtains, I could see figures bathed in the blue aquarium glow of television. I couldn’t tell you now what I’d hoped to find on this haphazard prowl: a mailbox labeled LOMAX, perhaps, or a quick glint of steel from Pete’s bed, or Pete himself, green-eyed and haunted, peering out into the dense albino darkness.

  But I soon began to notice the cold. My toes were turning brittle in my soft-sided California shoes, and every breath I took felt more glacial and invasive than the last. I was on the verge of making some decisive move—ringing a doorbell, maybe—when I realized I had company. Someone in a bungalow across the street was watching me from the shadows of her living room. My first thought, of course, was Donna, though I ruled that out as soon as I saw the woman duck behind a curtain. Her body language suggested someone in her seventies at least, possibly even older, nothing like the person Pete had described. This was just a nervous old lady, I reckoned, understandably wary of a stranger stalking her street after dark.

  Then again, I knew so little about Donna. After all, I had never even seen a picture of her. And voices could be deceptive on the phone, especially when it came to determining age. If I doubted any part of Pete’s story, why not the part about Donna being young and vigorous? For that matter, where was the proof that she existed at all? I’d been worrying for weeks that Donna had invented Pete, but I’d never once considered the reverse. Maybe Pete was the real one, in fact, and he’d created this loving, compassionate, perfect mother to aid in his search for a father, to give a man he’d never met permission to love a thirteen-year-old boy.

  If, after all, their voices were uncannily similar, who could say who was impersonating whom? It could just as easily have been Pete who mailed me that photo from Henzke Street, Pete who told me that Pete was near death and needed my love more than ever, Pete who invited me here for Donna’s chili, only to back out when he realized he could never pull it off. And—perhaps most disturbing of all—it could have been Pete who flew into that terrible rage when The Blacking Factory was cancelled.

  All right, could have. Could have. Even supposing that was true, where the hell would he live? And with whom? A kid that age didn’t occupy a house on his own, didn’t occupy anything on his own.

  Unless he was homeless, of course, operating out of soup kitchens and private post offices, escaping his tormentors the only way he could. But how would he survive in this unrelenting cold? In Man-hattan he could have slept in an abandoned subway tunnel; in San Francisco, in a cardboard box in the park. Here the options for shelter would be severely limited. Abandoned structures wouldn’t stay that way for long.

  Unless…

  I jerked around suddenly and stared at the water tank. Pete had told me that it was no longer in use, so there had to be an empty chamber inside. It wouldn’t be warm in there, of course, but it would probably be dry enough—and private as anyone could want. A clever kid like Pete could have slipped through that fence the way those taggers had.
He could have found his way around with a flashlight and built a nest with a pile of rags, a hideout that no one could find. And he could have brought along a portable radio to keep himself company…

  Right, dipshit. Could have, could have.

  Feeling slightly hysterical, I turned back to the bungalow again.

  The old lady had moved from the window and was standing in an alcove near the back, reaching for a telephone on the wall. It didn’t take me long to decide she was calling the police. I’d been there for over a minute, after all, staring at nothing and everything, the very model of a rapist or a madman, and there was no easy way to alter that impression. So I walked away—slowly at first, casually—trying to suggest that I was just a harmless neighbor out on an evening ramble. Once past the old lady’s window I thought about the police again and broke into a run. I ran for at least three blocks, leaping and stumbling and gulping the icy air, then resumed my studied stroll, in case someone else was watching.

  Where had all this guilt come from? I wondered. Why had I spent so much of my life feeling intrinsically culpable? I couldn’t see a cop car in my rearview mirror without twisting my guts into a knot—or walk into a store without worrying that a clerk would suspect me of shoplifting. Even my dreams were populated with storm troopers, righteous protectors of decency who broke down my door in the dead of night and dragged me off to justice.

  A coffee shop materialized, a place on a corner that marked the edge of a commercial district. It was open, amazingly enough, so I ducked inside, grateful for its aromatic warmth and the comforting drone of other humans. It was a coffee shop of the old school, the kind that still serves one kind of coffee from a Pyrex pot along with the chicken salad sandwiches. To one side lay a hive of red plastic booths, so I took a seat there and ordered a cup of tea and a cherry cobbler while my shoes puddled extravagantly on the floor.