The Night Listener

by Armistead Maupin

  Anna was still looking chastised. “Jess thought there might be a message from your accountant.”

  My breathing must have come to a standstill. “You talked to him?”

  “Your accountant?”

  “No. Jess.”

  “Yeah,” she said cautiously.

  “When?”

  “This morning. That was okay, wasn’t it?”

  “Of course.”

  “He was worried about your quarterlies. They’re coming up next week.”

  My heart turned to goo at the thought that Jess was still looking out for me, even from a distance. Oh sweetie, I thought, you know this is forever, so just stop this bullshit and come home before we break something that can’t be fixed. I was tempted to grill Anna further, but I resisted on her behalf. “That would be a help,” I said finally. “If you’d talk to my accountant, I mean.” I started to leave and then stopped. “He’s thirteen, by the way.”

  “Your accountant?”

  I smiled. “The boy on the phone.”

  Her eyes widened. “Really?”

  “He lives in Milwaukee and he’s had a really shitty life and he writes like an angel.”

  “It didn’t depress you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You said it depresses you when other people are brilliant.” I’m sure I must have reddened a little. “This is different.”

  “Why?”

  I hesitated. “I don’t know exactly.” You do too, I told myself. Tell her at least part of the truth. It won’t queer things with Jess if you share this with somebody else. It won’t affect the outcome one way or the other.

  So I spilled a few of the beans: “I guess he sort of has a thing about me.”

  Her brow furrowed gravely. “A thing?”

  “Oh, God, no,” I said, catching her train of thought. “He’s one of my listeners.”

  “Oh.”

  “He thinks of me…kind of like a father.”

  “Why?”

  It was embarrassing to explain things in my own words, but I did my best. “He was laid up in the hospital during a bad time, when he was sort of shut off from the world. And the sound of my voice was like…you know, the father he never had. Well, he had one, actually, but he was a monster.” Anna, to my discomfort, was still frowning. “He told you all that?”

  “Not on the phone. In the book.”

  “Oh.” She weighed that for a moment. “That’s kind of intimidating.”

  “How so?”

  “I just mean…well, it’s a big compliment, Gabriel, but it’s really intense for somebody to lay that on you.”

  I resisted the notion that some worrisome new burden had been dumped in my lap. Pete himself had never come close to suggesting as much. “He didn’t lay anything on me,” I said calmly. “I know he sounds like some tragic waif, but he’s not. He’s really bright and funny, and he can hold his own with grownups. The father thing was just something he shared, that’s all. It didn’t come with any strings attached. Really.” Even to my own ears, this declaration sounded anxious and overstated, so I abandoned it immediately.

  “I’m done with the galleys,” I said, “if you’d like to look at them.”

  “Thanks,” said Anna, turning back to the computer. “I’ve got too much reading for school already.”

  That night I cooked myself a real meal—my first since Jess had left.

  Hugo smelled the chicken roasting and made his way stiffly down the stairs, obviously expecting to share in this bonanza. I could hardly refuse him; taste was his last surviving sense, the only cheap thrill he had left. I tossed a chunk of meat on the porch and watched as he tore into it like a T. rex, mumbling lasciviously under his breath.

  Then I collapsed on the sofa and lit my first joint in weeks.

  It wasn’t like me to have gone without grass that long. I’ve been a confirmed pothead half my life, finding release in my nightly joint the way the other Gabriel Noones have found it in their bourbon.

  But I also know that dope erases nothing, merely underscores that which is already there. Now that Jess was gone I was wary of facing my solitude stoned. Who knew what fresh terrors might emerge in the wide-screen version of my grief?

  But something had changed already. My one conversation with Pete had brought me the childish consolations of laughter and spontaneity. I wanted more of that, I guess, so I convinced myself—only moments before I called him—that a toke or two couldn’t hurt.

  He answered on the fourth ring, his voice small and tentative, like an engine that hadn’t yet warmed up. “Hello.”

  “It’s Gabriel, Pete.”

  A pause and then: “Oh, hi, Gabe.”

  “Make it Gabriel, okay?”

  “What?”

  “I’m not real big on that nickname.”

  “Well, ‘scuse the fuck outa me.”

  “Hey,” I said, “I wouldn’t tell you if I didn’t want us to be friends.” I explained to him that the people closest to me never call me Gabe, that the surest indicator of a complete stranger is anyone who flings that nickname around as if we’ve known each other forever.

  “But half the things I’ve ever read…”

  “I know. They’re wrong.”

  “What does Jess call you?”

  “Gabriel.”

  “No he doesn’t.”

  “Pete…”

  “He calls you Sweetie or Babe.” The boy’s tone was triumphant.

  “Am I right?”

  “Well…yeah. Sometimes.” Not lately, I thought. Not for this hellish eternity of a fortnight. And here we were on the subject I had desperately hoped to bury—at least for the evening. Already I regretted that joint.

  “Wanna know how I know?” asked Pete.

  “Know what?”

  “That he calls you that.”

  “How?”

  “Because Jamie calls Will that on Noone at Night.”

  “Clever.”

  “I thought so.”

  “Except that those guys aren’t us.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says the guy who wrote it.”

  “But you met him on a tour of Alcatraz, right? With all those little Catholic girls?”

  “Not really.”

  “That didn’t happen?”

  “Well…it happened, yes…but after the fact.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I thought it would be a fun way for Jamie and Will to meet. So Jess and I took the tour and got locked up in solitary together. And we were in there with all these schoolgirls in their silly little plaid skirts, which I thought was perfect, so I used it. I just let it be what happened.”

  “Well, fuck.”

  “Hey, it’s a story, Pete.”

  “How did you meet, then?”

  “Up at his college.” A formidable sheepshank was tightening in my chest. “Why?”

  “No reason. I just like real stuff, that’s all.” I thought I detected a whiff of reprimand, but I let it pass. “He was running a gay group,” I said, “and he invited me up to speak to them.”

  “Up where?”

  “Oregon. Eugene.”

  “He’s younger than you, right?”

  “About fifteen years.”

  “No shit.”

  “It’s not that big a difference.” Oh, really now? I thought. How would you know, you deluded old thing? You didn’t even see this coming.

  “Oh, yeah,” said Pete. “I remember now. It doesn’t matter because you guys are the same gay age.”

  This was really something, I thought. And it bordered on intimidating. The kid knew my life so well he could toss my own tired catchphrases back at me. “Where’d you hear that?”

  “I read it. In the Journal last fall. Warren showed it to me. It’s kind of a cool theory.”

  The “theory” had been around for years, a well-worn chestnut in my media repertoire. It went like this: Jess and I were technically fifteen years apart, but we had come out at roughly t
he same time.

  (Jess had been sixteen; I’d been thirty.) This meant we’d reached the same level in our personal growth—that is, the same “gay age”—which was far more pertinent to our compatibility than our chronological difference. It was Jess, I think, who invented this little spiel, but I had embraced it completely. We would trot it out for reporters on a moment’s notice, locking eyes in the process with a tenderness that seduced everyone, ourselves most of all.

  “What don’t you know about me?” I asked Pete.

  “Fuck if I know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you make up so much shit.”

  “Right,” I replied. “And there’s a warning about it in the front of all my books. It says, ‘This is a work of fiction.’”

  “Don’t you ever wanna write about your own life?”

  “Sometimes,” I said. “Then I get over it.”

  “Why?”

  I thought about this for a moment. “Too many responsibilities, I guess.”

  “To what?”

  “To telling the truth…to not hurting people.”

  “Who would you hurt?”

  “The truth always hurts somebody.”

  “But it’s your life.”

  “So?”

  “Well, that means you have the right to claim it. If it happened to you, then it belongs to you. No matter what it is. That’s what Mom said.”

  We had moved onto dangerous ground, I realized. The boy must have clung to this adage as he hammered out the details of his own torment. I didn’t want to undermine his fragile new belief system.

  “Your mom was right,” I said. “It does belong to you. But it takes courage to own it in public. Maybe more than I have. That’s why I admire what you did, Pete.”

  “You could do it, too.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Your life was worse?”

  “God, no. Not even close.”

  “Why not, then?”

  “Because I’m always too aware of the effect I’m making. I’m afraid people will lose interest if I don’t keep tap-dancing. My whole mechanism is about charming people. And fixing things that can’t be fixed. That’s why I tell stories: it helps me create order where none exists. So I jiggle stuff around until it makes sense to me and I can see a pattern. Then I split myself up into a dozen different people and let them tell the truth. It’s not very brave, Pete. In fact, it’s pretty cowardly.”

  “You wrote about being gay. That wasn’t cowardly.”

  “And what a perfect little fag I was, too. With the perfect witticisms and the perfect relationship.”

  “You weren’t so perfect to me.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “No…you were like…really insecure. You thought everything was about you, even when it wasn’t. And you treated Jamie…or Jess or whoever the fuck it was…like he was already dead or something.” This hit me like a two-by-four across the face. “You don’t say.”

  “Yeah. And that shit gets old, man.”

  “I guess so.”

  “But it felt like the truth. It felt like I knew you.” There was barely a breath left in me. “Maybe you knew somebody I didn’t know.”

  “C’mon.”

  “I mean it. I don’t see myself very clearly.”

  “Then look at the people who love you. That’s what Mom says when I get…you know, confused and shit. Look into their eyes and see what they’re seeing; that’s all you need to know about yourself.” By now there were tears scalding my cheeks, and there was nothing I could do but let it happen. I had arrived without ceremony at the place I had feared the most. Holding the phone away, I took broad angry swipes at my eyes and tried to collect myself.

  “Gabriel?”

  “Yeah, I’m here.”

  “You okay, man?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “If I said something that—”

  “No, Pete, no. It wasn’t you.”

  “Then why…”

  “Jess moved out last week. He wants to be by himself for a while.

  I’m not really sure if…” I couldn’t finish, as well as I knew this speech. My grievances seemed so paltry and self-indulgent when recited to a thirteen-year-old who’d been fucked by his father and sold into prostitution. There he lay, scaffolded in chrome and entangled in tubes, while a melodramatic old queen whimpered away about losing his warm-and-fuzzy. It wasn’t the way it was supposed to be.

  But Pete was already on the case. “Do you know why he left?”

  “No,” I said. “Not completely.”

  “What do you know?”

  I couldn’t let him take me there. “Pete, look…this is sweet, but—”

  “Fuck you, I’m not sweet! Talk to me, man.” I hesitated a moment. “I’m just not comfortable with that, Pete.”

  “Why?”

  “I just…”

  “Because I’m not a dicksmoker?”

  I startled myself with a noise that resembled laughter. “No. It’s just that it’s kind of personal and…you know, sexual. I don’t think it’s really appropriate, considering.”

  “Considering what?”

  I didn’t have an answer ready.

  “Are you calling me a kid or something?”

  “No. Well, yeah, I guess I am.”

  “You think I don’t know about that shit?”

  “Pete…”

  “I bet I know more than you do.”

  This was more than boyish bluster, of course. I’d read Pete’s book, after all. My sex life was a mere skirmish compared to the world war he had endured for the past six years. Why was I trying to protect him? And from what? My feeble little French-vanilla existence?

  “Anyway,” said Pete, “I might as well be gay. My ward was nothing but gay guys. And half those other jackoffs thought I was gay.”

  “Who?”

  “At the hospital. The pediatric AIDS people. They got all these shrinks and social workers, and they ask you all this shit, but all they wanna know is if you liked it.”

  “Liked what?”

  “Takin’ it up the butt.”

  “Jesus, Pete.”

  “I’m just tellin’ ya.”

  “They didn’t ask you that, did they?”

  “Not like that, no. But that’s what they wanna know.”

  “But why on earth would it—”

  “Get a clue, man. They want their little AIDS babies to be pure and innocent. Transfusion cases and IV mothers, shit like that. It makes ‘em nervous when you get it the way I did. They gotta make sure you weren’t havin’ a good time. Put you in the right fuckin’

  room.”

  As medieval as this sounded, I could believe it. “What did your mom say?”

  “She said I was twelve, and I didn’t have to be anything, or tell

  ‘em anything. Except to give me my fuckin’ meds and fuck off.”

  “Good answer.”

  Pete laughed. “Except she didn’t say fuck.”

  “I figured.”

  “So they put me in the fag ward with six other guys. And I was next to this big queen named Chico who thought he was Mariah Carey or somethin’ and made bras and shit out of his pillowcases.”

  “I think I know him.”

  “No way!”

  “I’m joking, Pete.”

  “Jesus, man. Don’t do that to me.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I hated that dude. He stole my chocolate pudding.”

  “I see what you mean.”

  “He didn’t like you either.”

  “Me? ”

  “On the radio. He hated your show. He always wanted me to turn it off. He thought you sounded like Colonel Kangaroo.”

  “Captain.”

  “What?”

  “It was Captain Kangaroo. He said that, huh? That I sounded like him?”

  “Yep.”

  “What an asshole.”

  Pete giggled. “I’m tellin’ ya, man. He was bad news. So w
hy did he leave?”

  “Who?”

  “Jess.”

  I hesitated, then told him there were a number of reasons.

  “Name one.”

  I drew a breath wearily, then took the plunge. “He wanted rougher sex.”

  “S and M, you mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He wanted you to hurt him?”

  “No. Just make-believe. It’s not at all like…Look, Pete, I just don’t think…”

  “But you’re good at make-believe.”

  “Not that kind…all those props and poses. I don’t disapprove or anything; grownups can do what they want. I just can’t take it very seriously. It’s not what I’m after in the long run.”

  A silence followed, then Pete asked: “You cryin’ again?”

  “No.”

  “What else?”

  “With Jess, you mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh…it’s just me, I guess. The truth is, I’m not that versatile in the sack.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Let’s just leave it…”

  “Gabriel!”

  “I’m not into fucking, all right?”

  That stopped him cold for a moment. “What do you do, then?” I found myself turning defensive on the spot, since even this abused child seemed baffled by my sexual deficiencies. “Lots of things,” I replied. “Well, not lots, but…Pete, I’m not ready to…”

  “Dicksmoking, huh?”

  “Yeah. Absolutely.”

  “What else?”

  “Jerking off and touching. And lots of kissing. I love kissing.”

  “Kissing? ”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “During sex?”

  It made terrible sense that this would seem odd to Pete. He’d been nothing more than an object in all those pedophile games. A living sex toy.

  And no one kisses a toy.

  It was kissing I’d missed the most. His lips were so full and sculpted, and they could fine-tune every part of me until I was goofy with pleasure and gasping in his arms. Sometimes, to my amazement, I’d end up jerking off with my toes in his mouth, those faded-denim eyes gazing up at me with slavish devotion. Or he’d work my nipples like a ravenous baby, murmuring, “Sir, yessir, yessir,” until I came with a fury, feeling the rough hemp of his chest across my belly, that silken cock against my leg, or in my astonished hand. It was leisurely, custom-made lust, the kind that can happen after years of knowing someone. But my fulfillment was so important to Jess that I found it all too easy to mistake it for his own.