The Night Listener

by Armistead Maupin

  Darlie settled into her chair with a chipper smile. “I just love a clean bathroom. Makes my whole day.”

  What a trouper she was, I thought, to have navigated the minefield of this family for so long.

  “We ordered you a crème brûlée,” Pap told her, then gave me a matey wink. “If it’s on the menu, it’s what she wants.”

  “You make me sound so boring,” said Darlie.

  “I’m that way about bread pudding,” I told her.

  “Foxtrot,” said my father.

  “What?”

  “The one on the left.”

  I peered out at the flags on the Embarcadero. “I think you’re right.”

  “I know I’m right. How ‘bout the one next to it?”

  “Alfa.”

  “Well…you got the letter right, but it’s Able.”

  “Maybe in your navy. They changed it.”

  “Nah. When did they do that?”

  “I dunno. After the French and Indian War?”

  “Oh, go to hell,” said my father, chuckling.

  And so it went for the rest of the evening. Semaphore was just right for us, I thought, the perfect metaphor for how we’d managed to coexist all these years. Histrionic but mute, we had signalled our deepest feelings through broad strokes of pantomime, and always from a distance.

  I dropped them off at the Huntington around eleven. We exchanged brisk, ritual hugs, and they promised to phone on their way back from Tahiti. Driving home in the fog, I had to ask myself why I’d chosen that night of all nights to tangle with the old man.

  After all, he’d mellowed a great deal in recent years, and I had long before stopped needing his approval, thanks largely to Jess. There was finally someone else to be proud of me, someone whose opinion mattered even more than Pap’s. Was that the reason for my outburst, then? Was I just angry at Jess for making the ground shaky again?

  And there was something else: Pap’s curiosity about Pete had made it clear how much the boy already mattered to me. He was no longer just an interesting story; he was a habit. Our visits on the phone had become almost nightly now, which spoke far less to my charity than to my need. He was the perfect listener, the only confid-ant with whom I felt utterly secure. That I had chosen someone so young and far away, someone I might never meet who could well be near death, only made it easier to tell him the truth.

  SIX

  WAYNE

  “WHO’S THAT?” I asked. “Anybody you know?” There was a dog barking in the background. A large one, from the sound of it.

  “That’s Janus,” Pete said. Then I heard him call out into the room,

  “Leave it, Janus! Leave it!”

  “What’s he got? A cat?”

  “No, the vacuum hose. Janus, leave it!” I laughed. “Ours used to do that. It’s something to do with the sound. It makes them crazy.”

  “But it’s not even on. He thinks it’s an anaconda or something.

  Janus, you fuckhead!”

  The dog barked once, for symbolism’s sake, then stopped.

  “He only listens to Mom,” Pete said. “He totally behaves around her. She’s had him for like a hundred years.” Unruly or not, the dog reassured me. I hadn’t forgotten my last talk with Donna, and the people who might still hold a grudge against Pete.

  “What is he?” I asked.

  “A Lab.”

  “What color?”

  “Yellow.”

  “Oh, they’re the best. So loyal. We have an old mutt named Hugo.

  Part Australian shepherd and part jackal.” The dog was curled up next to me, in fact, and his ear flicked in recognition of his name. I had detected a brand-new odor about him, sickly and disturbing, and wondered how much life he had left. Would he even last until Jess got home? I could remember a time, not that long ago, when I’d endured the certainty that Hugo would survive Jess. I’d written a poignant little essay about it, in fact.

  “Hugo,” Pete repeated. “As in Les Misérables.”

  “Close. He was named after Victor Hugo, but another one. A fashion designer in New York.”

  Pete grunted. “You like that fashion shit?”

  “Not even slightly. That’s one queer gene I missed completely.”

  “Then why did you…?”

  “A friend of mine named him.” And where are you now, Wayne?

  Why aren’t you here to get me through this? Almost nobody’s dying these days. If you’d hung around a little longer you would have made the cut.

  “He liked fashion, huh?”

  “Not really. Just the designer. He thought he was sexy.” Said sexy designer, if memory served, hadn’t survived nearly as long as Wayne had.

  “Man, is that all you guys think about?”

  “Don’t you think about girls all day?”

  “Well…yeah.”

  “Well, there you go.”

  “That’s all I can do, man. Think about ‘em.” I pictured Pete on his endless loop between Henzke Street and the hospital, frail and barely able to breathe, stealing glimpses of pretty girls along the way, girls who would find him pitiable, or never even notice him at all. He had reached the age of crushes and budding lust, but he’d been robbed of all that. Having been denied it myself—or at least the license to act upon it—I felt my heart rush out to him.

  “What about magazines?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You must have a Playboy under your mattress.”

  “Are you nuts, man?”

  “You do, don’t you?” I chuckled knowingly.

  “My mom would skin my ass.”

  No way, I thought. Donna Lomax was a thoroughly modern woman, unflappable as she was kind, and anything but a prude. If she disapproved of skin magazines—which I doubted—she would still greet such a discovery with worldly amusement, not alarm or disgust.

  “Well,” I said mischievously, “it’s not the sort of thing moms have to be told, is it?”

  “Right. I’ll remember that the next time a magazine salesman comes by my oxygen tent.”

  I bowed to his grim humor. “Don’t get out much, huh?” Pete growled.

  “Tell me about your room, then.”

  “My room?”

  “What does it look like? I wanna picture it.”

  “Well, there’s a cocktail lounge…and a mud-wrestling pit…and a trapeze over the Jacuzzi, which is where the strippers usually—”

  “A straight answer, please.”

  “Then gimme a straight question.”

  “I’m serious. You’re a writer. Describe it.”

  “Well…” He paused, seemingly to survey the room. “There’s a bookshelf on the wall next to the window…”

  “What sort of bookshelf?”

  “I dunno. Chrome or some shit.”

  “What’s on it?”

  “My X-Files tapes, the Encyclopedia Americana, some old National Geographics, your books, Tom Clancy…”

  “He’s a big right-winger, you know.”

  “That’s what Mom said, but I like him. So tough shit.”

  “Your mother is an exceedingly wise woman. Tell me what you see from the window.”

  “Not much. Just a bunch of trees. The house across the street. And an old water tank above the trees. It’s completely rusted and dangerous as all fuck, but they leave it up so they can hang a star on it at Christmas. It’s like a tradition or something.”

  “Sounds nice, actually.”

  “Except the star faces the wrong way. All we get is some of the light on the side of the tank…you know, like spillover. It just makes the graffiti easier to read.”

  I chuckled. “Festive.”

  “Yeah. The rest of the town gets Bethlehem. We get ‘Roberta Blows.’”

  “C’mon.”

  “I swear. They painted it out last year, but it came right back.”

  “She must really blow,” I said.

  Pete exploded with laughter, which delighted me until it led to a bout of coughing that I
thought would never stop. “Fuck, man,” he said, gasping for breath. “You gotta give me warning.”

  “Sorry.” I waited for him to compose himself. “You okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I think you should go with it, you know. Start your own tradition.”

  “What?”

  “‘Roberta Blows.’ Just say that instead of ‘Merry Christmas.’”

  “Right.”

  “Really. Think about it. It’s got a great sound to it. Euphonious.

  It’s like something out of Poe. And it would put some meaning back in the season: ‘Roberta Blows and a Happy New Year!’”

  “Man, you are weird.”

  “What else?”

  “What else what?”

  “Is in your room?”

  “Oh…lotsa nasty medical shit.”

  “Okay. Go on.”

  “That’s it, except some lamps and stuff. And some comic books in plastic milk crates.”

  “You like comics?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Grew out of it, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I had a friend who loved comics, and he was forty.” For two weeks, Wayne, remember? You were forty for two crummy little weeks, and that was all the middle age you could take.

  I met Wayne Stevens at Harvey Milk’s memorial service. Wayne had slept with Harvey three times in the last month of Harvey’s life.

  The day the supervisor was assassinated at City Hall Wayne heard the news at work and stumbled home in disbelief to find a flirty message from Harvey that Wayne’s roommate had taken that morning. At the memorial service, Wayne knew no one (including the three official “widows” in attendance), so he took the seat next to me. “You’re Gabriel Noone,” he said, and I held his hand for the next hour. A week later, when I ran into him in North Beach, I felt as if I’d always known him.

  Wayne was blond and twenty-five then, with the face of a happy rabbit and a sleek superhero chest that startled you when his shirt came off. He was very bright in an obsessive adolescent sort of way.

  He filled composition books with annotated lists of his favorite things, which invariably included what he called the Four B’s: Batman, Bette Davis, Busby Berkeley, and Bette Midler. I know how that sounds, but Wayne was no dreary queen doing bad Baby Jane impersonations. He had a serious gift for criticism, and he could analyze in depth the very essence of the artists he admired. Including, I should add, me.

  We were lovers in the beginning, but it never took. Wayne wanted The Great Dark Man, and I, typically, wasn’t up to it. We lived together for a while in a flat below Coit Tower—”in its pubic hair,” as Wayne put it—and even after the sex had died we indulged in sentimental gestures. I would wake late, long after Wayne had left for one of his clerical jobs downtown, to find an index card propped on the kitchen table bearing some fragment of a thirties song and a line of X’s and O’s. It was Wayne’s way of honoring the big romantic love that neither of us had ever achieved. And it was I who ended this gentle charade, suggesting cautiously one night that we might both find what we wanted if Wayne took a recently vacated studio across the Filbert Steps.

  I worried that I’d destroyed something precious, but we grew even closer. Wayne became my best friend and disciple, my randy little brother. We would hang out all night, smoking doobies and excoriating the celebrity closet cases we could spot on television. Or we’d head off to our separate hunting grounds (Wayne to a leather bar, I to the glory holes), knowing that later we would offer each other our exploits—if I may quote myself here—”like a small dog who drags a dead thing home and lays it on the doorstep of someone he loves.” Wayne’s new digs across the garden were a study in monastic simplicity. He adhered, he said, to the Andy Warhol dictum that all you needed for happiness was one of everything: one bed, one chair, one spoon, one mug. Wayne’s one book-of-the-moment (Wilkie Collins, say, or Isherwood or sometimes Nancy Mitford) was always placed symmetrically on his coffee table, often in the company of a lone comic book. I felt peaceful when I sat in that musty little room with its treasured Batman lithograph and its pristine row of tea boxes above the electric kettle. Wayne lived hand-to-mouth, bouncing checks until they finally landed, but he had learned to revere the ordinary. He was almost English in that regard; he had distilled the dailiness of life until it was pure as a sacrament.

  And he was such a sunny guy. He could find the humor in catastrophe, thereby romanticizing it and robbing its power. I could do that myself, but Wayne was the acknowledged master. I knew he had his dark moments, but he played them offstage, until the worst had passed. His instinct was to connect with others, to make them characters in his lifelong comic book, to find some comfortable common ground, however tenuous, and inhabit it completely. A lot of people—Jess among them—would call that conflict avoidance, but I never understood what was wrong with that.

  I worried about hurting Wayne’s feelings when Jess and I became a couple. Wayne, after all, had been my companion for seven years.

  He had been my steady date for the movies, my confessor when a romance hit the rocks. He had joined me on a cruise ship to Alaska and later on my first British book tour, a laughably down-market affair we conducted out of a gay boardinghouse in Earl’s Court. And still later we had rented a cottage in the Cotswolds, where we lived for six weeks without a car, so we could feel like a couple of loopy villagers out of E. F. Benson.

  As usual, my fear of hurting someone had made me overestimate my own importance. Jess and Wayne got along fine, and their bond grew even stronger when they both tested positive. As the decade came to a close the three of us were braced against the beast, intent upon collecting memories while we could. To that end, we rented a villa on Lesbos one fall. We wanted to feel like Coward and company lolling on the lawn at Goldenhurst, or maybe Auden on Ischia, ogling boys among the ruins. (We were already aspiring to the proud nobility of twentieth-century queers.) I can still see that old stone house: its tangle of dusty wisteria, the amber light that shot through its shutters during afternoon naps.

  We had brought along a compact disc player—this nifty new thing—and we would lie on our terrace above the Aegean, adrift in a musical we had just learned to call Les Miz. It never failed to break our hearts, since we had made it about us: loving comrades huddled at the barricades. One lyric in particular demolished me: “Oh, my friends, my friends, forgive me, that I live and you are gone. There’s a grief that can’t be spoken, there’s a pain goes on and on.” Jess and Wayne contracted pneumocystis at the same time. We saw this as the first of many trials, so we were frugal with our distress. I learned to take their coughing in stride, waiting calmly without comment for it to stop, so as not to honor its message. They both lost a lot of weight. Jess had always been buxom—there is no better word—but now you could see the planes of his skull, the disturbing way his butt had begun to deflate (a fact I refused to confirm for him). And there were the usual ills: the fatigue and neuropathy, the night sweats and diarrhea. So we adjusted again; talked of plays we had yet to see, trips we had yet to take. Wayne even visited my sister, Josie, in Charleston, and walked the beach with her on Sullivan’s Island, since they had become friends over the years.

  Then a sort of edgy competition began. I thought of it at the time as a “sicker than thou” thing, with Wayne as the instigator. He would stack up his symptoms against Jess’s, matching him hardship for hardship, then do him one better with a look of flinty triumph. He seemed to be saying: “Stop pretending we’re equals; I’m going to die before you do.” And so help me, I remember regarding him as a troublemaker, a bad sport.

  As it happened, they both recovered from their pneumonia, but Wayne got KS and began to lose ground. He grew thinner and thinner, and during his third prolonged stay in the hospital they drove a shunt—this gleaming vampire stake—into his beautiful chest, as if intent upon proving him mortal. His parents came out from Florida several times, armed with false cheer and new editions of the toys Wayne h
ad loved as a child. He seemed to glory in it, this last chance to be babied and fussed over, after so many years of brave bachelorhood. He would hold court in bed, encircled by his plastic trains and Lincoln Logs, beaming like some skeletal holy man.

  He wanted to go home after that, to refine his solitude again. But his frailty and that alpine stairway made shopping, or even leaving the house, a near-impossibility. Then one week he stopped returning my messages. Jess and I went to the Steps and found him in a stupor amid the fouled sheets of his sofa bed. When we rolled him over, he smiled at us with sheepish apology, as if we’d just stopped him from snoring, or woken him from a bad dream. The ambulance attendants didn’t know the Coit Tower approach, so they had to haul him down through the garden to Montgomery Street.

  Later, when Jess and I were on a book tour in Britain, Wayne collapsed in the bushes. Our friends Seneca and Vance discovered him by chance when they arrived with groceries, then took him back to their place on Potrero Hill, where they cared for him like a wounded robin until he was stronger.

  We looked into hospices, but Wayne resisted. This was just another bad patch, he said, and it would pass. But he had run out of money and was months behind in his rent, and there was no way a caregiver could operate in that cramped warren. Even after he agreed to a hospice (swayed by its vegetarian meals and the Zen Buddhist staff), he spoke of his return to the Steps. There was no need to give up his apartment, he argued; his landlady had agreed to charge him a nominal sum until he was better. This was a flat-out lie, one of his rare ones, but easy enough to fathom: to surrender that little room, however useless it had become, was to acknowledge the end.

  So we moved him to a hospice in the Castro called Maitri and made cheerful noises about its homey atmosphere. (I remembered doing the same when we moved my grandmother into the Live Oaks Convalescent Home.) There was greenery outside his window, after all, and they let us cover his walls with talismans from home, his Rocky and Bullwinkle cel, his etching of Telegraph Hill in the thirties, that Batman lithograph. It was there we held his fortieth birthday party. His parents were on hand for it, and Seneca and Vance brought lots of silly little presents, for the joy of the unwrapping. Jess and I had pulled strings with a friend in L.A. and scored an advance copy of Bette Midler’s latest movie, Hocus Pocus.