The Night Listener

by Armistead Maupin

  I ended up telling her I was “kind of a labor negotiator,” though I preferred not to discuss it, since I was travelling incognito. I was horrified at my ready-made mendacity and how quickly it had gotten out of hand. I imagined that any moment the flight attendant would come scurrying back with one of my paperback editions, earnestly requesting an autograph, and I’d be compelled to tell Vera that I sometimes wrote when I wasn’t busy negotiating, and that Gabriel Noone was just a convenient pseudonym. But the flight attendant kept a respectful distance for most of the flight, approaching only for official duties and a brief, furtive offer of extra ice cream, an event which wasn’t lost on the ever-more-fascinated Vera. Her sweet conspiratorial smile seemed to be saying: “Don’t worry, Mr. Lomax.

  Your secret mission is safe with me.”

  This pointless little charade was closer than I’d come in years to impersonating a heterosexual, though I assured myself it had nothing to do with some lingering fear of public exposure. I had already proven that on an airplane, in fact, on a painfully long flight to Europe six or seven years earlier. Determined to beat jet lag, Jess and I had been following a program that required us to eat a carbo-heavy dinner at our normal time, then dress comfortably for bed and go immediately to sleep, regardless of what the rest of the plane was doing. So we repaired to the head and reemerged minutes later in our black satin eyeshades and long cotton nightshirts—blue for him, pink for me—to be greeted by waves of laughter and a respectable smattering of applause. When someone shouted across the plane to ask admiringly where we’d bought the nightshirts, Jess yelled “San Francisco” back at him, and the place cracked up all over again.

  I had basked in that moment, the joyful recklessness of it, the way all those strangers could see for themselves that we were a couple and didn’t give a damn who knew it. When Jess conked out before I did, and his fuzzy blond head sank onto my shoulder, I wore it there for ages like an epaulet of honor, proud as a man could be as I waved off the flight attendant who had come to bring us supper. It was wonderful to have witnesses.

  The Milwaukee airport was chaos itself: a slushy pileup of flatulent buses and angry people scrambling for home. I had packed lightly enough for a carry-on, so there hadn’t been the usual delay at the carousel, but my rental car took almost an hour, thanks to a computer breakdown. While I waited, I had a cup of coffee in a snack bar, surrounded by more apple-cheeked white people than I’d seen in ages. Once removed from the mindless purgatory of the plane I felt slightly overwhelmed by the logistics of what lay ahead. Wysong was much farther north, and it was already late afternoon and getting dark. Should I crash here and get a fresh start in the morning or press on into the night?

  I decided to press on. A map I’d been given at the rental counter made my route clear enough: north along the limp dick of Lake Michigan past Sheboygan and Green Bay, then west on Highway 29 toward Wausau. I probably wouldn’t make it to Wysong that night, but I could stop anywhere I wanted: and anywhere would surely be preferable to the great bland nowhere of the airport. Besides, the longer I sat still, the more I began to question the wisdom of this pilgrimage. I was fearful of losing my nerve.

  So I trudged across a snow-scabbed lot to the white Taurus I’d selected. (I’d decided against anything fancy, since I wanted to remain as neutral and invisible as possible.) The air was numbingly cold—a cold I’d all but forgotten—and the sky was the dingy off-white of an old T-shirt. My fingers felt brittle as I wiggled the key into the car door, and, once inside, I was greeted by the icy kiss of blue vinyl. I started the engine immediately and fidgeted with the heater controls, muttering “fuck, fuck fuck” as I waited for the blast of air to feel anything close to warm.

  Moments later, I looked up to see a face that already seemed to belong to another world entirely. It was Vera, my fellow traveller, bundled up in a huge Christmas-red coat, crossing the lot with two other adults, presumably her daughter and disgruntled son-in-law.

  I was sure she wouldn’t see me, but somehow she did, turning to twiddle her fingers merrily and mouth the words Mr. Lomax before disappearing behind a row of cars.

  Vera is my welcoming committee, I thought with an odd little shiver, my very own white rabbit.

  And now that she’s led me down the hole I’m strictly on my own.

  NINETEEN

  MAN’S COUNTRY

  AFTER AN HOUR on the interstate, the snow began. It seemed to fall in all directions at once, gusting in sideways from the lake or spewing up like gravel from the wheels of hell-bent tractor-trailers. In this blinding blur even the signs on the overpasses became hopelessly hieroglyphic, blobs of green ectoplasm that lunged out of nowhere to set my nerves on edge.

  I found a pop music station on the radio that calmed me for a while, but I was forced to abandon it when its bouncy songs proved to be invoking Jesus with disturbing regularity. I eventually settled on an all-polka station—just the right sound track for the territory, I thought—though it faded out after half an hour, casting me back into Top 40 hell. Then I remembered my proximity to Pete and searched in vain for Wisconsin Public Radio, combing the left end of the dial for the spot where the boy had first discovered me.

  It was odd to think that my voice had preceded me here, a place so frozen and desolate that a shopping mall at a cloverleaf could believably pass for an arctic weather station. There were folks here who knew me already—or thought they did—somewhere out there in the warmth of those stoic little houses. I had listeners here, for God’s sake, so why should I feel like such an intruder, someone who had come to upset the natural order of things? If this story was happening to me, I had just as much right to live it as to tell it.

  Even if I didn’t have an ending.

  Dinner happened at a truck stop outside Wausau. It was a mammoth warehouse of a restaurant: a sort of Hofbrauhaus on steroids, with Christmas lights twined around the rafters and huge suspended panels of colored Plexiglas meant to evoke stained-glass windows.

  I took a seat near the front and was promptly handed a menu—plastic-sheathed and profusely illustrated—by a tired red-head with a blinking snowman on her lapel. I was somehow seduced by all this. I couldn’t remember the last time a uniformed waitress had served me, and there was something about this Teutonic shelter from the cold that compelled me to order a bacon double cheesebur-ger and get pleasantly shitfaced on old-fashioneds.

  From where I sat I could see the parking lot and the trucks that idled there, snorting shafts of white breath like bulls in an icy corral.

  Across the highway in the distance, there was some sort of power plant, a Plutonian cityscape of domes and towers and cylinders, that stained the snow around it with a poisonous green light.

  The restaurant itself harbored a number of teenage boys that night, huddling in packs and full of scattershot menace. I avoided their eyes as usual, and it struck me that I’d been wary of these creatures all my life. As a small child I’d seen them as towering bullies, but even in my own adolescence I’d felt utterly removed from their stupid strutting ways, as if I was something less than them and better than them all at once. Forty years later I still felt that way, so that every time I passed a ball game or a clot of baggy-pantsed hip-hoppers waiting for a bus, I would brace myself instinctively for their casual abuse.

  Pete, of course, had been the exception, my only ambassador to that alien world. It helped that he was an outsider himself, that he was largely a mixture of childlike need and grownup kindness. The two of us had filled in the blanks for each other, meeting in a place of our own invention to enjoy something rare for males of the species.

  Unless, of course…

  Suddenly I was on my feet looking for a telephone. I knew this was an impulsive act—and probably fuelled by alcohol—but I didn’t care. If that disconnected phone had just been temporary, it was only fair to let Pete know that I was on the way, that I would be there soon, tomorrow at the latest, asking his forgiveness and understanding. And he would understand, surely, i
f I kept my heart open and told him the unvarnished truth. No good could possibly come from creeping around like a spy.

  I found a bank of phones next to the rest rooms and dialled his number. It was a local call now, thrillingly enough—or at least the same area code—but my hopes were dashed by the same recording:

  “We’re sorry. The number you have called has been disconnected or is no longer in service…”

  Back at my table, I ordered another drink and slid into a much darker place. What if the Lomaxes had moved away for good? That was possible, I realized. Pete might have been so depressed by the cancellation of his book that Donna had decided on a permanent change of scenery. On the other hand, what would I do if they were still on Henzke Street? Walk up and ring the doorbell? Leave a note?

  Ask the neighbors if a single woman lived there with her sick little boy? Wouldn’t they find me suspicious? See me as one of Pete’s former tormentors, come there to do him harm?

  “There you go!”

  My waitress was back with my drink, smiling down at me with tarty goodwill. I thanked her absently, barely forcing the words out.

  “Can I get you some dessert? Some nice mincemeat pie?”

  “No thanks…but…I was wondering…”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you know a place called Wysong?”

  “Sure. Up north a few hours.”

  “How many’s a few?”

  “Oh…two maybe…three. With the roads like this.”

  “Should I try to make it tonight?”

  The waitress regarded me for a moment. “After three drinks, you mean?”

  I hadn’t meant that at all, in fact, so I wondered if I seemed more fucked up than I actually felt. She had a point, at any rate; bourbon didn’t mix with a blizzard, especially after a draining day of travel.

  I asked her if there was a motel nearby.

  “Oh, sure. Just around back there.” She gestured out the window past the trucks. “It’s not fancy, but it’s clean. You better hurry and register, though. A lot of these guys are sleeping over tonight.” I won’t pretend this didn’t conjure up a certain image. It sounded, in fact, like the opening line of an old-fashioned porn novel, a less-than-subtle suggestion of orgies to come. And by the time I was crunching through the snow to the motel office, wishing I’d brought a scarf or a much more substantial coat, my mind had been so loosened by fatigue and whiskey that it was already making plans to move south.

  The last sensible thing I did that night was call Wysong and reserve a room at the Lake-Vue Motor Lodge for the following day. I had hoped to reach the person I’d dealt with ten days earlier, the woman who had arranged, then unarranged, my first reservation. (Somehow it would have made me feel more welcome to hear her jolly voice.) But the desk clerk was young and male this time and deeply disinterested in my history with the motel. He took my credit card number and told me flatly that checkin time was twelve noon. That was fine with me; I could sleep late and take my time getting there, mapping out my strategy along the way.

  My room at the truck stop was as basic as advertised but perfectly adequate: a second-floor niche off a common walkway that commanded a view of the whole complex. Once I’d brought in my bag and brushed my teeth, I put a sweater on under my coat and went outside to survey my surroundings. The snow had stopped, so the Oz-like minarets of the power plant had come into sharp relief against the horizon. I could smell the grease belching from the kitchen below and hear the frigid thunder of truck doors being slammed. Out toward the highway at the edge of a thicket I saw what had to be a public toilet: a small, square building with milky windows, toward which men were trudging, pilgrimlike, through the snow.

  I was drawn there without a moment’s thought. It was as if some younger, more reckless version of myself had taken over, em-boldened by my solitude and the raw anonymity of the situation. I headed down the steps, then followed a newly beaten path across the parking lot, threading my way through the maze of trucks. Here and there I saw men stamping the snow off their boots or sprawled in the cabs of their rigs, their faces aglow in the phantom flare of a match. For all their big-buckled bravado, they seemed less threatening to me than those free-range teenagers back at the restaurant. The air was rife with the certainly of ritual and something else—a feeling I couldn’t quite identify—a sort of gruff, unspoken understanding.

  The toilet was nearly as cold as the parking lot and had the unmistakable ferny smell of fresh semen. As I entered, there was already action in one of the stalls. I stood at the urinal for a while, pretending to pee, wondering if I had spoiled the game for someone else, but there was only a brief shuffling sound before the sounds began again.

  Then a man came in and stood at the trough next to me. He was thirty-five probably, burly and balding and unremarkable, except for a fat candy apple of a cock that he shook one too many times after peeing. Returning his semaphore, I shook back at him—two or three longs and a short—as I clocked his reaction from the corner of my eye. When it seemed we were speaking the same language, I sidled closer and reached for him.

  I’d done nothing like this since the early eighties, but even then I hadn’t done it for the danger, the threat of exposure that some men find so thrilling. For me, the thrilling part—beyond the sex, of course—was the tacit implication of brotherhood, the stripped-down humanity of connecting with a stranger and banking everything on his decency as he banked everything on mine. But I’d always wanted privacy once that leap of faith had been made.

  “I have a room,” I told the man. His cock was plumping in my hand, miraculously warm and silken.

  He cast an anxious glance at the door, then back at the stalls, then reached down and weighed my balls soberly in his palm, as if they might help to make up his mind. “Where?” he asked finally.

  “Here.” I jerked my head toward the motel.

  He stuffed his cock back into his trousers, which I realized (somewhat to my chagrin) were beltless and polyester. Taking his cue, I buttoned up my jeans and led the way out of that rank little room, grateful for the bite of fresh air in my nostrils. As we tramped down the path together without a word, I caught him gazing sideways at me. He’s wondering if I’m a cop, I thought. Or a serial killer.

  “I’m visiting,” I offered. “From California.” He didn’t react, just kept walking.

  When we reached the parking lot, he stopped and turned. “I wanna go to my place, okay?”

  “You mean…you live around here?”

  “Up there.” He cast his eyes skyward, as if I were about to be ab-ducted on a UFO.

  I looked up and saw the cab of a truck, a metallic red cubicle with someone’s name—his, presumably—painted primly on the door in tiny silver letters. My first reaction was to smile, remembering a long-gone bathhouse in New York called Man’s Country where—somehow—the management had installed the cab of an actual big rig on an upper floor, so that horny chorus boys and ribbon clerks from Bloomingdale’s could enjoy in relative safety the vivid archetypal experience of being fucked in a truck.

  “You’re kidding,” I murmured.

  He looked right and left, checking for witnesses, then scrambled up and unlocked the door. “C’mon,” he whispered, and I obeyed without a word, curiously flattered but sane enough to feel anxious.

  A headline formed in my head—GABRIEL NOONE FOUNDDISMEMBERED IN WISCONSIN WOODS—as I reminded myself that this was the state that had given us Jeffrey Dahmer. Not to mention Ed Gein, the real-life inspiration for Norman Bates.

  But once inside the cab I found comfort in the prosaic: a cardboard air freshener shaped like Santa Claus, a dog-eared copy of Field and Stream, a photo of a woman and several children tucked into the visor. It was almost cozy up there, pristine and well padded and lofty enough to be private. Behind the seat lay a rectangle of foam rubber onto which we spilled in a ridiculous jumble of limbs.

  We kissed longer than I’d expected, sparring with our tongues as we lapped the warmth from each other. I rev
eled in everything: his flat little nipples (as inexpressive as his dick was eloquent), the musty pucker of his butt, the satiny slap of his meat against my face. We ended up side by side, jerking off together, and I found myself laughing out loud as I came, a guttural volley from the back of my throat that shoved out my last ounce of breath. He smiled at me sleepily, then swiped at my come with his forefinger. “Daddy,” he murmured, and slid the finger into his mouth.

  I lost track of time. I was already in that place where just the heat of someone’s leg across your own seems to contain everything extraordinary that came before. I was struck by the sense of relief I felt, the feeling of having come home again to my own body. I’d been sleeping alone for less than two months and would never have guessed how deeply I’d missed the sound of another heartbeat so near, this warm, entangled, animal reassurance. What I had here wasn’t a disembodied voice on the phone or a distant building winking in the fog; this was the real goods, however casual or anonymous. Everything seemed possible again—or at least redeemable.

  “Should I be going?” I asked.

  “That’s okay.”

  “To go or to stay?”

  He chuckled quietly, lumbering to his knees, his tackle dangling clumsily between his legs. Then he pulled a paper bag from the corner and began—rather earnestly—to search for something. For one blood-chilling moment those headlines started up again, predict-ing a grisly end for our visitor from California. Then Mr. Dahmer-Gein exhumed a couple of family-sized Snickers bars and handed one to me.

  “Hey,” I said. “Dinner and a movie.”

  “No…sorry. I don’t have a VCR.”

  I didn’t bother to explain my flimsy metaphor, just tore into the candy bar as he slid in next to me, warming my side again.

  “Is that your family?” I asked, nodding toward the photo on the visor.

  “Yeah.”

  “Nice-looking.”