The Night Listener : A Novel

in a flat below Coit Tower—”in its pubic hair,” as Wayne put it—and even after the sex had died we indulged in sentimental gestures. I would wake late, long after Wayne had left for one of his clerical jobs downtown, to find an index card propped on the kitchen table bearing some fragment of a thirties song and a line of X’s and O’s. It was Wayne’s way of honoring the big romantic love that neither of us had ever achieved. And it was I who ended this gentle charade, suggesting cautiously one night that we might both find what we wanted if Wayne took a recently vacated studio across the Filbert Steps.
    I worried that I’d destroyed something precious, but we grew even closer. Wayne became my best friend and disciple, my randy little brother. We would hang out all night, smoking doobies and excoriating the celebrity closet cases we could spot on television. Or we’d head off to our separate hunting grounds (Wayne to a leather bar, I to the glory holes), knowing that later we would offer each other our exploits—if I may quote myself here—”like a small dog who drags a dead thing home and lays it on the doorstep of someone he loves.” Wayne’s new digs across the garden were a study in monastic simplicity. He adhered, he said, to the Andy Warhol dictum that all you needed for happiness was one of everything: one bed, one chair, one spoon, one mug. Wayne’s one book-of-the-moment (Wilkie Collins, say, or Isherwood or sometimes Nancy Mitford) was always placed symmetrically on his coffee table, often in the company of a lone comic book. I felt peaceful when I sat in that musty little room with its treasured Batman lithograph and its pristine row of tea boxes above the electric kettle. Wayne lived hand-to-mouth, bouncing checks until they finally landed, but he had learned to revere the ordinary. He was almost English in that regard; he had distilled the dailiness of life until it was pure as a sacrament.
    And he was such a sunny guy. He could find the humor in catastrophe, thereby romanticizing it and robbing its power. I could do that myself, but Wayne was the acknowledged master. I knew he had his dark moments, but he played them offstage, until the worst had passed. His instinct was to connect with others, to make them characters in his lifelong comic book, to find some comfortable common ground, however tenuous, and inhabit it completely. A lot of people—Jess among them—would call that conflict avoidance, but I never understood what was wrong with that.
    I worried about hurting Wayne’s feelings when Jess and I became a couple. Wayne, after all, had been my companion for seven years.
    He had been my steady date for the movies, my confessor when a romance hit the rocks. He had joined me on a cruise ship to Alaska and later on my first British book tour, a laughably down-market affair we conducted out of a gay boardinghouse in Earl’s Court. And still later we had rented a cottage in the Cotswolds, where we lived for six weeks without a car, so we could feel like a couple of loopy villagers out of E. F. Benson.
    As usual, my fear of hurting someone had made me overestimate my own importance. Jess and Wayne got along fine, and their bond grew even stronger when they both tested positive. As the decade came to a close the three of us were braced against the beast, intent upon collecting memories while we could. To that end, we rented a villa on Lesbos one fall. We wanted to feel like Coward and company lolling on the lawn at Goldenhurst, or maybe Auden on Ischia, ogling boys among the ruins. (We were already aspiring to the proud nobility of twentieth-century queers.) I can still see that old stone house: its tangle of dusty wisteria, the amber light that shot through its shutters during afternoon naps.
    We had brought along a compact disc player—this nifty new thing—and we would lie on our terrace above the Aegean, adrift in a musical we had just learned to call Les Miz . It never failed to break our hearts, since we had made it about us: loving comrades huddled at the barricades. One lyric in particular demolished me: “Oh, my friends, my friends, forgive me, that I live and you are gone. There’s a grief that can’t be spoken, there’s a pain goes on and on.” Jess and Wayne contracted pneumocystis at the same time. We saw this as the first of many trials, so we were frugal with our distress. I learned to take their coughing in stride, waiting calmly without comment for it to stop,