“See? You never wanted to know. You require mystery, babe. It’s like oxygen to you.”
“Forget about me,” I said irritably. “Tell me what you think.”
“Well…that it was probably a hoax of some sort, and once she knew you’d gotten wind of it, she killed him off.”
“But he called back.”
And he cried and said he missed me.
“So,” said Jess. “She’s not an evil person, and you’re not an easy person to hurt. She probably felt bad, and this was her way of making it easier on you. She went for the slow fade-out instead.” Like you, I thought. Leaving without ever saying it was over. You knew that was one more thing I don’t want an answer about.
“But why would she do that?” I asked. “If it made her look like a liar in the process?”
“Because,” said Jess, “she’s not the one you have to believe. Pete is.”
I brooded for a moment, then made a feeble stab: “I saw his room, remember. His bed.”
“You saw a bed. It could have been a prop. She must’ve expected that sooner or later someone would come looking for him. Or maybe it had been his bed—or someone’s bed—once upon a time.” Another silence betrayed my decision to surrender. Finally, I asked, “Has Findlay called again?”
“Not that I know of,” said Jess.
“He still thinks Pete is dead. He hasn’t even heard the latest.”
“Why don’t you just leave it that way?”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “What’s the point? It’s not gonna change his mind about publishing the book. It just makes the whole thing more suspect than ever. And Findlay will just think you’re—” He cut himself off.
“What? Being gullible again?”
“Something like that.”
He was right, of course.
“Besides,” said Jess. “You don’t want to give away your best material. You’re gonna use all this in your book.” I flashed him a dead-eyed look.
“You need to write, Gabriel. You’ll feel better when you do. You know that as well as I do.”
“I do, do I?”
“I bought you some paper.” Jess nodded toward the computer.
“And there’s several more reams in the closet.”
“I’ll be writing about you,” I said darkly.
“Fine,” he replied with a smile. “I trust you.” I holed up in the aerie for two weeks, extracting the first chapter of this book. During that time, Hugo kept me constant company, hardly leaving his shepherd-shaped dent on the sofa. His efforts to pee outside were rarely successful, and the tortuous descent to the garden only made him yelp with pain. There was no longer any valid excuse for postponement, so I made a few inquiries with friends, then called Jess.
“I can’t do this alone,” I said.
“I wouldn’t let you,” he said. “Where do we go?”
“This guy comes to the house, apparently.”
“Well, that’s civilized.”
“Yeah,” I said with a sigh. “Dr. Kerbarkian.” Jess laughed weakly, and the joke distracted us until the day of the deed, when I could no longer suppress the feeling, however irrational, that I was betraying Hugo. (A day earlier I’d been chiding myself for having held off too long.) To make it even harder, the dog was more active than usual that morning, shambling out to greet the gardener—his friend of more than fourteen years—who’d come to dig his grave beneath the tree ferns. I didn’t cry, though, until Jess arrived in his best leathers bearing a pretty Tibetan prayer cloth. “I thought we could wrap him in this,” he said solemnly, and the floodgates burst for both of us.
Were we mourning more than Hugo that day? I don’t recall ever feeling that kind of primal, scouring grief. Maybe our other losses were just too vast to articulate, so Hugo, in his sweet simplicity, became the safest repository for our pain. Or maybe it had more to do with our fading dream of coupledom; this dog, after all, had been the closest witness to our bliss.
Dr. Kerbarkian turned out to be a soft-eyed Chilean with a comically droopy mustache. There would be two shots, he explained, one to relax the dog, the other to do the job. So we spread the prayer cloth on the bed and lay on either side of Hugo, stroking him gently as the first shot was administered. Almost immediately his muscles relaxed and his face fell into what we chose to interpret as a smile.
This gave us a minute to say our goodbyes, to fill his deaf ears with endearments and let him soak up the smells of his family.
On the second shot, as we’d been warned, Hugo’s body stiffened in one brief, horrific spasm. When it was over, I glanced up at the doctor, who was holding the syringe in one hand and crossing himself with the other. Jess, thank God, missed this overt display of popery because his eyes were still fixed on Hugo. My own were lost in the gossamer web of tears dangling from Jess’s nose ring, the loveliest, silliest collision of tough and tender.
I continued to write into February, extruding the details of my breakup with Jess, the solace I’d received from those first playful exchanges with Pete. I still didn’t have a clue about the end, but I refused to lose faith. An ending could be forced, I believed, the way a bloom can be forced if you keep it out of the wind and shine enough light on it.
Then, on the day after Valentine’s Day, when the plum trees along the street were a volley of pale pink detonations, a letter appeared in my mailbox. Five words were written on a sheet of Days Inn stationery: “Roberta Blows. I love you.” The postmark said Tacoma, Washington. He was on this side of the continent now.
I told no one.
By April I had written five chapters. I asked Jess to read them and give me his thoughts, which he did with extraordinary detachment, considering the nature of the material. He spent a day with it, then called me in tears to say it was my best work yet and that we should start looking for an outlet. He pressed hard for his earlier scheme—a televised reading on the Curtain Call network—but I immediately rejected the idea.
“But it’s a done deal,” he argued. “They’re all set to go as soon as we give them the word.”
“I understand that,” I said, “but I’d rather do radio.”
“Why? You’re good with cameras.”
“I want this to be just my voice, Jess.”
“But you’ll reach a whole new audience.”
“I don’t want a new audience,” I told him. “I want my old one.” He knew what I was up to, but he didn’t give me a hard time. In a matter of days he was talking to my producers at NPR about a brand-new show with a brand-new name. They liked what they’d read so far, but were understandably nervous about starting a series that had yet to be completed. I reminded them that I work best under pressure and promised to deliver on time. So Jess contacted our local station—the site of my infamous meltdown—and set up a date for the first recording session.
When that day arrived, the two of us held court in the studio while a succession of engineers and secretaries made gracious remarks about my reemergence. “Jesus,” said Jess, when the last one had gone. “It’s like Norma Desmond returning to Paramount.”
“Thanks,” I said with a grin. “But that makes you Max, you realize.”
It felt good to be joking again, to feel the easy, immovable love beneath our jokes. And later, in the moment before we began to record, I relished the sight of him in the control room (his nose ring pushed into its cave for this professional moment), nodding his support through the glass.
The engineer signalled, so I took a sip of water and began to read:
“I know how it sounds when I call him my son. There’s something a little precious about it, a little too wishful to be taken seriously.
I’ve noticed the looks on people’s faces, those dim indulgent smiles that vanish in a heartbeat. It’s easy enough to see how they’ve pegged me: an unfulfilled man on the shady side of fifty, making a last grasp at fatherhood with somebody else’s child. That’s not the way it is…”
AFTERWORD
THE FIRST CH
APTER OF The Night Listener aired on NPR on May 16, 1999. An early broadcast this time—8 P.M.—to herald my return. I made a point of staying home that evening, but not to listen to the show. No, that’s not entirely true; I always listen to the show; my work doesn’t seem real to me until I hear it the way the public does, properly announced and placed in the context of “legitimate” programming. But mostly I stayed home to wait for the phone call I was almost certain would come later that night.
I wasn’t obsessive about it. I went about my usual rituals after the reading was over, washing dishes and sorting laundry and tidying up. And a few thoughtful friends did call to say that they’d heard the broadcast and couldn’t wait to find out where this new plotline was heading. But an hour passed and that hoped-for call never came, so I smoked a joint and went out to the hot tub for a moonlight soak.
A spring’s worth of bamboo shoots, some as fat as broomsticks, had made a benign jail cell of the big redwood barrel. As I floated there in its amniotic warmth, watching a Japanese woodblock moon dawdle in the new leaves, I savored the thought that my story was finally out there in the ether, a self-sufficient organism beyond my control, changing shape in every new mind that absorbed it. And I was so much less afraid about everything, even my solitary state. It felt fine to be there, middle-aged and single, soft in the gut and long in the scrotum, keeping watch over my own little acre of stars.
When I was a boy, my father swapped daylily bulbs with an English professor named Preston Stamey. I knew that Preston was gay, because I’d once heard Pap describe him to my mother as “a fairy nice fellow.” He had a tiny jewel box of a carriage house over on Tradd Street that he shared with a three-legged spaniel named Sumter. Preston was a bull-necked old nancy, jolly as a pirate, but while my father seemed to enjoy his company, privately my parents expressed pity for the professor. “How lonely he must be,” my mother would say. “No wife and no children to carry on.” Long after I’d discarded my own requirements for wife and children, I still bought that melancholy assessment of Preston’s life. I might be gay, but I would never be that kind of old queen: alone in my fifties, fussing over my flowers and my Williamsburg weather vane; I would find a lover to protect me against such emptiness. It had never occurred to me that Preston might have been more evolved than the rest of us, that he might have treasured his own company.
And there could well have been students who idolized him, ex-lovers who still loved him, sailors he met on the Battery who followed him home and swung on his friendly old dick and called him Daddy.
He could have been having a life, in other words—and a damn good one at that.
All you have to do is believe and let go, and you’ll have all the proof you need…
A ringing phone yanked me back into the moment. Remembering that I’d turned off the answering machine, I scrambled out of the hot tub and blotted myself hastily with my sweatpants.
Hang on, son, I’m coming.
Naked and dripping, I raced down the steps to the terrace, swung open the sliding door, barreled through the house and up the stairs to the office. On the last turn I whacked my knee sharply on the banister.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck.” I did a little war dance of pain as the phone rang for the fifth time.
I grabbed the receiver and dropped into a chair.
“Hello!”
“Well, damn,” my father said. “There you are. Thought you’d be out gettin’ drunk.”
“Oh, hey, Pap.”
“Listen, son. That was one helluva first chapter you read tonight.” It had been a while since I’d received such a call from the old man.
“Well, thanks, Pap. That’s nice of you.”
“No, it ain’t. It was just a damn good piece. Was that the little boy you told us about on our way to Tahiti?”
“Yeah…pretty much.”
“What do you mean? He either is or he ain’t.”
“Well, I changed his name, of course, and a few identifying details.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, you know. Where he lives and what he looks like. Some of the things that happened to him.”
“So the whole goddamn thing’s a lie.”
I laughed. “That’s what fiction is for, Pap. To fix the things that have to be fixed.”
“Well, you had me going there.”
“Good. That was the idea.”
“Then…all that stuff about you and Jess…you fellas are okay, aren’t you?”
“Oh, sure. We’ll always be okay.”
“So when are you gonna come see us? We ain’t seen you since you threw up on that bagpiper at my birthday party.” I laughed. “I’ve got some stuff to do, but I’ll come as soon as this series is done.”
“How long is this one gonna be?”
“I’m not sure yet. It’s not done.”
“Jesus. You’re cuttin’ it close. How much you got left to do?” I began to feel a sort of low-grade anxiety. “I don’t know. A hundred pages or so. Don’t ask.”
“Am I in it?”
“Are you in what?”
“You know what I’m talking about, you little son-of-a-bitch. What have you done to me this time?”
I told him I hadn’t decided yet.
GN
San Francisco
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MY SISTER, JANE YATES, lives in the nether reaches of New Zealand but inhabits many hectares of my heart. Likewise, Ian McKellen and James Lecesne make me feel loved and valued from afar. Pam Ling and Judd Winick provide family here in my own valley. Robert Jones is a gifted writer with a generous nature, which makes him the best of all possible editors. Patrick JansonSmith has championed my work longer than anyone. Binky Urban took me under her wing long before she became an agent, let alone mine. Steven Barclay is a master at providing what I love the most: a stage. The extraordinary Patrick Gale helped me to unravel my past before I twisted it back into fiction. Tony Maupin and I have just learned what it means to be brothers, which fills me with joy. Tim McIntosh makes me laugh and listens beautifully. Cheryl Maupin has my admiration and affection more than ever. Don Bachardy continues to inspire me by his remarkable self-discipline. David Hockney and Barry Humphries help me to remember to play while I’m working. My friends Stephen McCauley, David Sheff, Karen Barbour, Darryl Vance, Louise Vance, Peggy Knickerbocker, Anne Lamott, Thomas Gibson, Cristina Gibson, Buddy Rhodes, Susan Andrews, Jake Heggie, Steven Lippman, and Davia Nelson read an early draft of this novel and offered invaluable insight and support. Maggie Hamilton brought me light when I needed it. Nic-olas Sheff makes me dote like an old gay godfather. Gary Lebow felt like family far sooner than I expected. Nick Hongola is my swell new friend. David Wong has the gentlest of hearts. Barry Jones, Liz McKereghan, and Lawrence Jenkins remind me to live in my body.
Ben Shaw, Todd Hargis, and Jose Landes have brought me all the comforts of home. Alan Poul’s dedication and good taste have kept Tales of the City on television. The incandescent Laura Linney is both the woman I would want and the woman I would want to be.
Olympia Dukakis has always been a goddess-send. Terry Anderson, who keeps our cottage industry on course, gave me his unequivocal blessing, then cajoled, encouraged, and tolerated me until this novel was finished. When all is said and done, he’s still the one.
AM
San Francisco
About the Author
ARMISTEAD MAUPIN is the author of Tales of the City, More Tales of the City, Further Tales of the City, Babycakes, Significant Others, Sure of You, and Maybe the Moon. Film versions of Tales of the City, More Tales of the City, and Further Tales of the City have been broadcast to great acclaim on PBS and Showtime. He lives in San Francisco.
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Praise for
The Night Listener
—A New York Times Notable Book
“After an eight-year wait, Armistead Maupin rewards his fans and accomplishes the unthinkable
: He surpasses the excellence of his Tales of the City series. Filled with twists and turns that rival The Sixth Sense and The Crying Game, Maupin’s new novel is a deceptively simple page-turner…. Maupin presents his tale with such polished, effortless elegance that his talent can be underestimated because the sweat behind it is invisible.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“With rare authority, humor, and stunning grace, Maupin explores the risks and consolations of intimacy while illuminating the mysteries of the storytelling impulse.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Heartbreaking, affirming, and hilarious…absolute, unadulterated, page-turning pleasure.”
—Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“An excellent psychological drama…. The Night Listener asks why we tell stories, and to whom, and why we listen to them.”
—The Guardian (London)
“A roller coaster…. A meticulously plotted midlife coming-of-age novel…storytelling at its best.”
—Houston Chronicle
“A powerful and moving suspense story, and an examination of the power of belief, of a writer’s ability to induce it in his readers…. A rich and intriguing book about the obligations and liberations of dependency, and the lies we tell ourselves in the name of love.” —The Observer (London)
“Maupin’s best book to date…. [ The Night Listener] contains complex characterizations and is meticulously constructed…so much so that when you reach the end you want to go back and read it all over again to see whether you can spot the clues scattered on the way.” —Time Out
Also by Armistead Maupin
Novels
Tales of the City
More Tales of the City
Further Tales of the City
Babycakes
Significant Others
Sure of You
Maybe the Moon
Collections
Credits
Cover design by Chip Kidd
Author photograph © 2000 by Annie Leibovitz