The Night Listener

  I remember a night, not long after that, when my father and I were watching Playhouse 90 together. The show, I realized to my horror, was about a man coping with his father’s suicide. (Forty years later, I can still invoke the title: The Return of Ansel Gibbs.)

  Too mortified to leave the room or change channels or even glance in my father’s direction, I held my breath for an hour and a half.

  When I finally dared look, his face told me nothing. The man who always talked back to the bad guys on Gunsmoke sat as mute and unblinking as a corpse.

  I began to wonder if suicide, like everything else in the family, was hereditary. Pap kept a captured Japanese pistol in his desk that I regarded with mounting dread. It was there, he said, in case he had to “stop some crazy nigger from breaking in,” but it was his craziness that worried me. Whenever he stormed off to his study after one of his tantrums I would listen for gunfire. I think he knew this, too. “Don’t worry about me,” he was fond of saying. “I won’t be around much longer.” This could have been a reference to his famously high cholesterol, or just the onset of middle age, but I took it to mean he would someday become his father’s son.

  I guess he felt outnumbered. The four of us—my mother and brother and sister and I—had united in the face of his helpless fury.

  And the thing we could never mention had dredged a gulf so wide that none of us could bridge it. Pap tried, in his own way. He surprised us with pet ducks one Christmas. He drove us to Quebec in the Country Squire, belting out the same two sea shanties all the way. But he was always the outsider, the Caliban we fled when things got scary. My mother was our harbor. She was all we needed to divine—and forgive—my father’s mysteries. He loved us, of course, but in a growly, jokey, ceremonial way, since real feelings had already been proven to hurt too much. And this got worse as time went on. I remember being held by him when I was six or so, but not much later. When he and my mother met me at the airport after my first semester at Sewanee, I tried to hug him, but his arm shot out instead for a blustery handshake, as if to say, Please, son, no closer, no closer.

  After that, I stopped trying.

  “You have reached the Noones. At the tone, you have sixty seconds to leave a message.”

  Pap’s new machine threw me. It was weird to hear his antebellum voice in such a postmodern context. And weirder yet to think that

  “the Noones” meant him and Darlie Giesen, a classmate of mine in high school, circa 1962. December had met and courted May several years after my mother died of breast cancer in 1979. Now they owned a condo on the Battery in Charleston, the very spot where the first shots of the Civil War were fired. The very spot, I might add with no small degree of irony, where the third Gabriel Noone first discovered the pleasures of sucking cock.

  “Hey,” I told the machine, “it’s Gabriel. Anna says you’re heading west. That’s great. It’s a real busy time for me, but maybe we can have dinner or something. I’m here most of the time, writing away, so…call when you can.” When I put the receiver down, Anna was smirking at me.

  “Not a word out of you,” I said.

  “They don’t know about Jess, do they?”

  “No.”

  “Are you gonna tell ‘em?”

  I shrugged. “What’s to tell? I don’t know myself.”

  “Won’t they wonder, if he’s not here?”

  I told her they might not be coming to the house, that we might just meet somewhere for dinner. But what I was thinking was: Jess could be home in two weeks, and everything could be fine.

  Back then, when the pain was new, I let myself believe that.

  THREE

  LIFE ISN’T RADIO

  TWO DAYS AFTER his twelfth birthday, a fortnight before his father was jailed for debt, Charles Dickens was sent to work in a blacking factory. There, in a rat-infested room by the docks, he sat for twelve hours a day, labelling boot polish and learning the pain of abandon-ment. While he never spoke publicly of this ordeal, it would always be with him: in his social conscience and burning ambition, in the hordes of innocent children who languished and died in his fiction.

  Pete thinks we all have a blacking factory: some awful moment, early on, when we surrender our childish hearts as surely as we lose our baby teeth. And the outcome can’t be called. Some of us end up like Dickens, others like Jeffrey Dahmer. It’s not a question of good or evil, Pete believes. Just the random brutality of the universe and our native ability to withstand it.

  Is that true? I couldn’t say. I do know it was Dickens who sprang to mind when I first heard Pete’s voice on the phone. It was more childlike than I’d imagined, but scrappy as all get-out, like some latter-day urchin pickpocket. The Artful Dodger by way of Bart Simpson.

  “This is Pete Lomax. The guy who wrote that book? My mom said I should call you.”

  Thrown by his voice, and unsure of the tone I should take, I poured out my praise for The Blacking Factory. I was probably stiffer than usual—I’m sure I was, in fact—but I did my best to be specific, citing themes and passages, the rhythm of his language: the sorts of things I like to hear. I wanted him to feel the impact of what he had done, the enormity of it.

  But there was no response at all.

  “Pete?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Did I lose you?”

  More empty air, and then: “You swear it’s you?” I chuckled. “It ain’t Tallulah Bankhead.”

  “Who?”

  “Just…somebody. Why would it not be me?”

  “I dunno. You don’t sound like yourself.” How odd to think that radio had already given Pete some concept of how I should sound, some feel for what “myself” should be. And odder still that he might have noticed the same hollow note that had sabotaged my last recording session. I wasn’t at all prepared for such scrutiny.

  “Life isn’t radio,” I said, condescending shamelessly even as I evaded him. “I’m slightly less dramatic in person.”

  “Oh.”

  “I sound…different to you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like…how?”

  “Like hammered shit.”

  I laughed uneasily. “That pins it down pretty well.”

  “No offense.”

  “’Course not.”

  “I just…I can’t fucking believe it’s you.”

  “Well,” I said, after a moment, “you’ll just fucking have to.” Pete released a torrent of childish giggles that belied all the grownup language that had come before. “Sorry,” he said eventually.

  “My mom says I got a trashy mouth.”

  “She’s fucking right.”

  He giggled even harder, then pleaded with me to stop.

  “Why?” I said. “Gimme one fucking reason.” I was enjoying myself immensely.

  Then I heard a muffled clunk, which I took to be the phone dropping. And movement of some sort. And the sound of labored breathing.

  “Pete?”

  Nothing.

  “Pete?”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Stupid tubes.”

  An image came instantly into my head: a small, ruined body strung up like a marionette, struggling desperately to breathe while I was busy being clever. “God, Pete, I’m sorry.”

  “No. It’s cool.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  I listened for his breathing. It seemed to be regular again. “What happened?”

  “I just knocked the damn thing, that’s all. They’re draining my lungs.”

  “I see.”

  “Sounds worse than it is.”

  “What is it? Pneumocystis?”

  “Yeah. As usual.”

  “What about a prophylaxis? Septra or something?”

  “Not for somebody my age.”

  “Oh.”

  “That shit’s so boring, anyway. Let’s talk about something else.

  Do you have an E-mail address?”

  “I don’t, actually.”

  “But you’ve got your own
Web site.”

  “Yeah, but Jess does that. I don’t even know how to find it. I use my computer as a word processor.”

  “But E-mail is so easy, man.”

  “I know, and I plan to learn very soon. Just not right now. There’s not enough room in my head.”

  “I could teach you,” Pete offered eagerly. “I taught Warren, and he’s pretty out of it, too.”

  “Thank you,” I said dryly. “Who’s Warren?”

  “My AIDS counselor.”

  “Oh, sure.” Pete had written at length about this man, a social worker in his forties—gay and HIV positive—who had helped to ease him back into the land of the living.

  “Warren’s a big fan of yours, too. We listened to Noone at Night together all the time.”

  “At the hospital, you mean?”

  “No. Later. When I was home. The first time I heard you I was…you know…alone.” His voice quavered on the last word, speaking volumes in the silence that followed.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “I can’t believe it, that’s all.”

  “What?”

  “That I’m talking to you, man.”

  His worshipful tone unsettled me, so I tried to depersonalize the moment. “That’s what books do, you know. They put you out there to the world. You never know who you’re reaching. Wait’ll your book’s published. You’ll see. You’ll be hearing from everybody.”

  “Right.”

  “I mean it. Who would you like to hear from?”

  “I dunno.”

  “C’mon. There must be somebody you’ve always wanted to meet.” I was talking down to him, I realized, but I couldn’t help it. It was safer somehow to deal with a child than to address the wise and battered old soul I had met in The Blacking Factory.

  “I wouldn’t mind hearing from Cal Ripken,” he said.

  “Awriight.”

  “You know who that is?”

  “Well, yeah. Sure. Sort of.”

  “Who, then?”

  “He’s a…sports guy.”

  Pete snorted. “You big homo.”

  “Excuse me?”

  That schoolroom giggle erupted again. “What sport?”

  “Jeez,” I said. “Get picky on me now.”

  “Don’t you even look at the sports section?”

  “No,” I said. “I throw it out first thing, along with the business section.”

  “Man.”

  “I tell you what else. I would order a paper without a sports section if they had one.”

  “Well, ‘scuse the fuck outa me.”

  Now I was laughing.

  “Warren’s the same way,” he said.

  “Is he?”

  “I told him: ‘Just ‘cause you’re a dicksmoker don’t mean you can’t watch a ball game sometimes.’”

  “A what?” I asked.

  “A ball game.”

  “No. Before that.”

  “What? Dicksmoker? You never heard that?”

  “No,” I said, chuckling.

  “Shit, man. Where you been?”

  “I dunno. Smokin’ dicks, I guess.”

  He giggled again. “I got lots of stuff like that. Really cool stuff.

  Expressions and all.”

  “I bet you do.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said, and for a moment I thought he was still talking to me, but then came another wheezy interlude and the cold squeal of metal, and I realized some sort of adjustment was being made, either to him or his bed or the apparatus draining his lungs.

  I asked if this was a bad time to talk.

  “My mom is here,” he explained. “Bein’ a big pain.”

  “Hey,” came a woman’s voice softly scolding him.

  “This is him,” he told her. “Say something.” Whereupon Donna came on the line. “Hello, Him,” she said. Her voice was honeyed oak, as sturdy as it was warm. Odd as it seems now, I felt instantly at ease with her, as if we’d been gabbing on the phone for years, sharing everything.

  “Thanks for arranging this,” I said.

  “Oh, please. You did me the favor. I’ll be hearing about this for months, believe me.”

  “Well…glad to be of service.”

  “We’re doing the yucky stuff now. If I’d known he was gonna call you I would’ve told him to hold off a tad longer.” I said I understood completely.

  “You’re his favorite writer, you know.”

  “Well, he’s mine,” I said. “From now on.”

  “C’mon.”

  “I mean it. Ashe didn’t exaggerate a bit.”

  “Oh, God, really? That’s so great.”

  She was clearly pleased, but she sounded distracted. In light of

  “the yucky stuff” at hand and the complications I’d already caused, I thought it wise to sign off. “Look,” I told her, “I’ll call back later.”

  “You don’t have to. You’ve done plenty.”

  “I’d like to. If it’s okay.”

  “Of course. If you’re sure it isn’t…”

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  Donna gave me their phone number. I read it back to her twice, slowly, as if it were a private line to Camp David, or, back in the old days, the unlisted number of some really hot guy I’d met at the baths.

  There are moments, I think, when you actually feel your life changing, when you can all but hear the clumsy clank and bang of fate’s machinery.

  FOUR

  ROUGHHOUSING

  “GUESS I WAS RIGHT, HUH?”

  My bookkeeper was up in the window, calling down to the hot tub, where I floated naked and bereft, feeling sorry for myself in the least pitiable of places. It was four o’clock and foggy; the shampooey spice of the eucalyptus trees was drifting down from the woods.

  “About what?” I asked.

  “That book.”

  “Oh, yeah. You were, actually.” I didn’t have a clue as to how she’d deduced this.

  “There’s a message on your machine,” Anna explained, “from somebody who’s gotta be the author. Except that he sounds about ten.”

  My sodden heart stirred like some half-dead creature on a beach.

  “What did he say?”

  “Want me to play it for you?”

  “Yeah. If you would.”

  Anna left the window and returned moments later with the answering machine, which she set on the sill. I noticed something flicker in her dark hair: a streak of electric magenta that hadn’t been there on her last visit. It seemed out of character somehow, even for someone so certifiably young; Anna was such a no-nonsense sort of person.

  Then Pete’s voice settled on me like the song of a small, gray bird:

  “Hey, dude. I just wanted to thank you for reading my book. I hope you’re doin’ okay. You sounded kind of weird on the phone. No offense or anything. You don’t have to call back, unless you want to, but you better want to, you big dicksmoker. You know where to find me, unless I’m out Rollerblading with the Spice Girls. Yeah right, Lomax, dream on. Okay, that’s all, take it easy, man.” Silence consumed the garden again. Anna just stood there, gazing down at me expectantly.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  She blinked at me a moment longer, then left the window. I knew I owed her an explanation, but I just couldn’t do it. Even now, it seemed patently disloyal to launch a new story with anyone other than Jess. I needed him here to make it real for me, to trim its ragged edges and file it on the proper shelf, before I could offer it for general consumption.

  I sank into the velvety curve of the wood and let the warm water hold me. The little beige bromine floater drifted by, then nudged my shoulder like a puppy wanting attention. I pushed it away, lost in a sudden flashback. We had been here together, a year or so earlier, soaking under an out-of-focus moon, when Jess turned and studied the slope behind us. “This is where I want my ashes to go,” he said. His tone had been casual and informative, the one he would use in bookstores, say, when pointing out some other author’s enviable new d
ump bin. So I looked into those buried blue eyes and tried to divine their message. Don’t make a fuss over this, they seemed to be saying, and I understood immediately. For he had given me something so huge and enduring that nothing less than silence could ever contain it.

  “You got it,” I said, and we left it at that.

  As I passed the office in my bathrobe I complimented Anna on her snappy new hair color. She turned from the computer with a crooked smile, as if to accept my subterranean apology. “It’s the same as Pam’s,” she said.

  “A friend?”

  “No. On The Real World.”

  I still didn’t get it.

  “You know. Pedro Zamora’s housemate? MTV?”

  “Oh, yeah. Of course.”

  “It’s D’ or’s idea mostly.”

  I drew another blank.

  “My other mother. My mom’s partner? She was a model back in the seventies, and she’s always giving me fashion tips. Whether I want ‘em or not. She makes me feel like Eurasian Barbie.” I shrugged. “You could say no.”

  “Oh, I don’t care. It’s no big deal. It’s just hair and stuff. And she just started doing it. I wasn’t, like, you know, JonBenet Ramsey or anything.”

  Her breezy gothicism made me smile, then sent my thoughts 38 / ARMISTEAD MAUPIN

  hurtling back to Pete. Amazingly, it seemed to do the same for Anna.

  She paused, apparently weighing her words, then cast me a look of sweet contrition. “I guess I shouldn’t have checked your machine?” I felt like such a bully. My ham-handed effort at saving the story for Jess had apparently come off like an accusation of eavesdropping.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “Check anything you want. It would help, really.

  I’m not on the planet right now. There aren’t any state secrets on that thing. Trust me.”