The Night Listener : A Novel

it felt like a dirge for our friend, the saddest song we had ever heard. But Wayne’s death was easier to take because Jess was there, and because, in the depths of my calculating heart, it was only a rehearsal for something much worse to come.
    I had been so angry at Wayne those last few weeks. Anger was the easier emotion, and Wayne had left a snarl of unfinished business and petty debts that intruded bluntly upon our grief. And when we cleaned out his apartment, his life of Spartan simplicity had proven a fraud. In a basement storeroom beneath his monk’s cell lay every scrap of paper Wayne had ever received: every dinner bill, every playbill and postcard, every thought he’d ever scribbled on a cocktail napkin. There were thousands of comics, too— Batman mostly—stored in decapitated cereal boxes. I’d always assumed he’d traded one comic for another, but they were all there, every last one of them, there and in a rented space downtown, where Jess and I spent days sifting through the litter that Wayne had left as an auto-biography. We ended up saving the comic books and anything that resembled a journal, then dumped the rest.
    I felt as if I’d finished him off with a pillow to the face.
    “Did you ever like comics?” Pete asked.
    “Not really. Not the kind my friend liked.”
    “What kind was that?”
    “Oh…guns and explosions and big butch guys in tights.” Pete laughed.
    “Little Lulu was more my speed. She operated by her wits, and she wanted no part of the boys and their stupid games. Even when they put up a sign on the playhouse that said ‘No Girls Allowed.’”
    “You didn’t like boys?”
    “Not many of them, no.”
    “Why not?”
    “I don’t know. We just weren’t wired the same way.” For the rest of the day I thought about Wayne, the grownup boy who had brought me childhood again, minus the usual terrors. At dusk I drove to Telegraph Hill and parked in the lot at Coit Tower.
    The sky was conch-shell pink over the Golden Gate, and there were surprisingly few tourists around to spoil it. (I remembered how cross Wayne would get whenever the line of cars stretched down as far as his place.) I followed the rock-walled path to the Steps and stood watching the sunset as it winked off the windows in the East Bay, like a thousand little wildfires. Beneath that lay Treasure Island, a source of wonder to Wayne, since it had been built for a world’s fair in 1939, and that particular year, in his opinion, had been the high point of the century. Deco had been in bloom then, he said, and it was the best year ever for movies: Gone With the Wind, Dark Victory, Rebecca, The Wizard of Oz .
    I opened the gate to his garden. There were several purple petals on the Princess tree, but the rose we had planted over his ashes (in homage to the Midler ballad) was looking less than divine. I hadn’t been here in at least two years, this sacred spot that had once been central to my life. I had always been on the move, a serial renter leaping from hilltop to hilltop in search of home. Now the Steps were another realm completely, which was odd, considering how little they had changed. I was the one who had changed, growing grayer and sadder in the midst of this immutable beauty. But I was alive and well. Shouldn’t that be enough?
    I turned on my heels and walked down to Montgomery, then descended to the neon hubbub of Broadway. Night was falling, but the sky was briefly on hold at purple. There were tourists streaming down to the strip joints from the cafés on Columbus, so I wove my way through them with mounting irritation, intent upon my mission.
    At the first newsstand I could find I approached a clerk and asked a question so unlike me that it seemed to be coming from somewhere else:
    “Where do you keep your Playboys? ”
     
    SEVEN

    A GUY THING

    LOOKING FRETFUL, Anna took the parcel from me with unnatural delicacy, as if it might contain a letter bomb.
    “You sure you want to?”
    I thought she’d see my gift to Pete as something harmless and fun, a generous hands-across-the-sea gesture from old to young, gay to straight. She was not someone I’d expect to be prissy about a skin magazine, especially one as tame and mainstream as Playboy . Then I remembered her lesbian parents and wondered about their sexual politics—if they were followers, for instance, of Andrea Dworkin.
    “You think it’s degrading to women?”
    She looked down at the padded envelope as if the women in 90 /