The Night Listener : A Novel

so as not to honor its message. They both lost a lot of weight. Jess had always been buxom—there is no better word—but now you could see the planes of his skull, the disturbing way his butt had begun to deflate (a fact I refused to confirm for him). And there were the usual ills: the fatigue and neuropathy, the night sweats and diarrhea. So we adjusted again; talked of plays we had yet to see, trips we had yet to take. Wayne even visited my sister, Josie, in Charleston, and walked the beach with her on Sullivan’s Island, since they had become friends over the years.
    Then a sort of edgy competition began. I thought of it at the time as a “sicker than thou” thing, with Wayne as the instigator. He would stack up his symptoms against Jess’s, matching him hardship for hardship, then do him one better with a look of flinty triumph. He seemed to be saying: “Stop pretending we’re equals; I’m going to die before you do.” And so help me, I remember regarding him as a troublemaker, a bad sport.
    As it happened, they both recovered from their pneumonia, but Wayne got KS and began to lose ground. He grew thinner and thinner, and during his third prolonged stay in the hospital they drove a shunt—this gleaming vampire stake—into his beautiful chest, as if intent upon proving him mortal. His parents came out from Florida several times, armed with false cheer and new editions of the toys Wayne had loved as a child. He seemed to glory in it, this last chance to be babied and fussed over, after so many years of brave bachelorhood. He would hold court in bed, encircled by his plastic trains and Lincoln Logs, beaming like some skeletal holy man.
    He wanted to go home after that, to refine his solitude again. But his frailty and that alpine stairway made shopping, or even leaving the house, a near-impossibility. Then one week he stopped returning my messages. Jess and I went to the Steps and found him in a stupor amid the fouled sheets of his sofa bed. When we rolled him over, he smiled at us with sheepish apology, as if we’d just stopped him from snoring, or woken him from a bad dream. The ambulance attendants didn’t know the Coit Tower approach, so they had to haul him down through the garden to Montgomery Street.
    Later, when Jess and I were on a book tour in Britain, Wayne collapsed in the bushes. Our friends Seneca and Vance discovered him by chance when they arrived with groceries, then took him back to their place on Potrero Hill, where they cared for him like a wounded robin until he was stronger.
    We looked into hospices, but Wayne resisted. This was just another bad patch, he said, and it would pass. But he had run out of money and was months behind in his rent, and there was no way a caregiver could operate in that cramped warren. Even after he agreed to a hospice (swayed by its vegetarian meals and the Zen Buddhist staff), he spoke of his return to the Steps. There was no need to give up his apartment, he argued; his landlady had agreed to charge him a nominal sum until he was better. This was a flat-out lie, one of his rare ones, but easy enough to fathom: to surrender that little room, however useless it had become, was to acknowledge the end.
    So we moved him to a hospice in the Castro called Maitri and made cheerful noises about its homey atmosphere. (I remembered doing the same when we moved my grandmother into the Live Oaks Convalescent Home.) There was greenery outside his window, after all, and they let us cover his walls with talismans from home, his Rocky and Bullwinkle cel, his etching of Telegraph Hill in the thirties, that Batman lithograph. It was there we held his fortieth birthday party. His parents were on hand for it, and Seneca and Vance brought lots of silly little presents, for the joy of the unwrapping. Jess and I had pulled strings with a friend in L.A. and scored an advance copy of Bette Midler’s latest movie, Hocus Pocus .
    Twenty minutes into it, Wayne issued his last review in a tone of wide-eyed disbelief. “This is really shitty,” he said.
    We made up for it the day before he died. Jess and I brought him our tape of Midler’s Art or Bust concert, Wayne’s favorite. He could no longer speak, but we propped him up in bed, and when the Divine appeared on-screen bouncing a giant inflatable boob over her head, a beatific smile bloomed on his face. Toward the end of the concert, Jess and I held each other and wept. “Here comes the flood,” Bette was singing, and