The Night Listener : A Novel

I loved him: he saw sex as everybody’s blessing.
    “Do you think he’s hiding it?” he asked.
    “I would imagine. It’s required by the laws of puberty, isn’t it?” Jess couldn’t let that one slip by. “Don’t tell me you ever hid Playboys .”
    “No. But I saw them sometimes. And I was turned on.”
    “‘Sex in the Cinema,’ right?”
    I laughed. “Some of those guys were hot. Not to mention naked.
    You didn’t get a lot of that back then.”
    “So you’ve told me.” The teasing look he gave me spoke to our age difference, and how long we’d been together, and how well he knew the particulars of my shopworn stories.
    “Are you gonna talk to him again?” I asked.
    “Pete?”
    “Yeah. I’m not sure he’s getting the best advice about treatment.
    And the doctors at that hospital act like he’s dead already.”
    “I know. He told me.”
    “It’s really unbelievable.”
    “Yeah…it is…as a matter of fact.” There was a deepening crease in his forehead that disturbed me.
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean…some of it really is unbelievable.”
    “In what way?”
    “No doctors are that insensitive, you know. Not to a kid with AIDS. Not nowadays.”
    “Well…maybe not here…but he’s in Milwaukee. It’s probably a lot different back there. What are you getting at?”
    “Just that he might be…revving it up a little. Telling you what you want to hear.”
    “What are you talking about? Why would I want to hear that he’s being treated like a piece of meat?”
    Jess remained calm. “It just makes for a better story. And it makes it that much easier to care about him.”
    “ A better story? ”
    “He’s a writer, isn’t he? A pretty good one, you said.”
    “So he’s making all of this up, just to give me a—”
    “I didn’t say he was making anything up. Don’t put words in my mouth, Gabriel. You do that way too much.” We had stumbled upon a larger issue—and a much more threatening one—so I softened my tone. “Then what are you saying?”
    “Think about it. Doesn’t it strike you as a little too gothic? This poor little kid who’s always being mistreated. By his evil parents and the evil pederasts and the evil doctors. People have shitty lives, but they’re not shitty all the time. This is like The Perils of Pauline .
    Don’t you think it’s possible he’s exaggerating a little?”
    “Jewelling the elephant,” I said, nailing him with my gaze.
    “Okay. Whatever.” He smiled back at me carefully. “It’s been known to happen.”
    “You know, I’ve enjoyed that joke as much as you have. But there’s a lot more than elephants involved here. This kid is probably dying.
    If you toned down his life by half it would still be horrendous. And he’s also somebody I happen to love.” This just tumbled out heed-lessly, like a deathbed revelation. My face grew blotchy with embarrassment.
    Jess was gentle about it. “C’mon, sweetie. Love? After four phone calls?”
    “It’s more like ten. But yes.”
    “Well, that’s what makes you who you are.” I knew he was trying to be nice, but I felt trivialized, dismissed as a sentimental fool.
    “Are you mad at me?” he asked.
    “Just a little disappointed,” I said. “You know how this works.”
    “How what works?”
    “What they always say about child abuse: the hardest part is getting adults to believe that it actually happened. People don’t want to believe something that barbarous, so they find ways to deny it.
    That’s exactly what you’re doing, Jess. This kid has somehow screwed up the courage to lay it all on the line, to blow the whistle on his own parents…and all you can do is accuse him of exaggera-tion.”
    “I haven’t accused him of anything. I just explained a feeling I had. If I can’t do that with you…”
    “I thought you guys would hit it off.”
    “We did. I like him a lot. He’s a bright kid.”
    “You’re one of his heroes, you know. He sees you as a much bigger hell-raiser than I am.”
    “Well…he’s perceptive, too.”
    That made me smile.
    “And politically he’s right there with us. I was impressed by that.”
    “That’s Donna’s influence,” I said, beginning to calm down. “And all that time in the AIDS wards. He knows what it’s like to be an outsider. He’s practically an honorary queer.” Jess locked eyes with me. “I see why you like him. I just brought it up because—”
    “It’s okay. I know what you meant. Maybe he is a