The Night Listener : A Novel (4 page)

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 dump 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.”

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.