The Night Listener : A Novel

fourth ring, his voice small and tentative, like an engine that hadn’t yet warmed up. “Hello.”
    “It’s Gabriel, Pete.”
    A pause and then: “Oh, hi, Gabe.”
    “Make it Gabriel, okay?”
    “What?”
    “I’m not real big on that nickname.”
    “Well, ‘scuse the fuck outa me.”
    “Hey,” I said, “I wouldn’t tell you if I didn’t want us to be friends.” I explained to him that the people closest to me never call me Gabe, that the surest indicator of a complete stranger is anyone who flings that nickname around as if we’ve known each other forever.
    “But half the things I’ve ever read…”
    “I know. They’re wrong.”
    “What does Jess call you?”
    “Gabriel.”
    “No he doesn’t.”
    “Pete…”
    “He calls you Sweetie or Babe.” The boy’s tone was triumphant.
    “Am I right?”
    “Well…yeah. Sometimes.” Not lately, I thought. Not for this hellish eternity of a fortnight. And here we were on the subject I had desperately hoped to bury—at least for the evening. Already I regretted that joint.
    “Wanna know how I know?” asked Pete.
    “Know what?”
    “That he calls you that.”
    “How?”
    “Because Jamie calls Will that on Noone at Night .”
    “Clever.”
    “I thought so.”
    “Except that those guys aren’t us.”
    “Says who?”
    “Says the guy who wrote it.”
    “But you met him on a tour of Alcatraz, right? With all those little Catholic girls?”
    “Not really.”
    “That didn’t happen?”
    “Well…it happened, yes…but after the fact.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I thought it would be a fun way for Jamie and Will to meet. So Jess and I took the tour and got locked up in solitary together. And we were in there with all these schoolgirls in their silly little plaid skirts, which I thought was perfect, so I used it. I just let it be what happened.”
     “Well, fuck.”
    “Hey, it’s a story , Pete.”
    “How did you meet, then?”
    “Up at his college.” A formidable sheepshank was tightening in my chest. “Why?”
    “No reason. I just like real stuff, that’s all.” I thought I detected a whiff of reprimand, but I let it pass. “He was running a gay group,” I said, “and he invited me up to speak to them.”
    “Up where?”
    “Oregon. Eugene.”
    “He’s younger than you, right?”
    “About fifteen years.”
    “No shit.”
    “It’s not that big a difference.” Oh, really now? I thought. How would you know, you deluded old thing? You didn’t even see this coming.
    “Oh, yeah,” said Pete. “I remember now. It doesn’t matter because you guys are the same gay age.”
    This was really something, I thought. And it bordered on intimidating. The kid knew my life so well he could toss my own tired catchphrases back at me. “Where’d you hear that?”
    “I read it. In the Journal last fall. Warren showed it to me. It’s kind of a cool theory.”
    The “theory” had been around for years, a well-worn chestnut in my media repertoire. It went like this: Jess and I were technically fifteen years apart, but we had come out at roughly the same time.
    (Jess had been sixteen; I’d been thirty.) This meant we’d reached the same level in our personal growth—that is, the same “gay age”—which was far more pertinent to our compatibility than our chronological difference. It was Jess, I think, who invented this little spiel, but I had embraced it completely. We would trot it out for reporters on a moment’s notice, locking eyes in the process with a tenderness that seduced everyone, ourselves most of all.
    “What don’t you know about me?” I asked Pete.
    “Fuck if I know.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Well, you make up so much shit.”
    “Right,” I replied. “And there’s a warning about it in the front of all my books. It says, ‘This is a work of fiction.’”
    “Don’t you ever wanna write about your own life?”
    “Sometimes,” I said. “Then I get over it.”
    “Why?”
    I thought about this for a moment. “Too many responsibilities, I guess.”
    “To what?”
    “To telling the truth…to not hurting people.”
    “Who would you hurt?”
    “The truth always hurts somebody.”
    “But it’s your life.”
    “So?”
    “Well, that means you have the right to claim it. If it happened to you, then it belongs to you. No matter what it is. That’s what Mom said.”
    We had moved onto dangerous ground, I realized. The boy must have clung to this adage as he hammered out the details of his