The Night Listener : A Novel

Pot-tery.
    There were, though, limits to my mother’s nonconformism, and I discovered them when I made friends with Rusty Ellis. Rusty, to my mind, was a perfectly prosaic kid from Minneapolis whose father had recently been transferred to an insurance company in Charleston. True, the Ellises were somewhat disrespectful of the South, and their living-room furniture was all Danish Modern, but I really like knowing someone who said davenport instead of sofa , and Rusty’s love of the movies was easily the equal of mine. Also like me, he had successfully made it to fourteen without learning the rules of a single sport. We spent our time together after school discussing the deeper meaning of Vertigo , or searching for the tomb of the real-life Annabel Lee, a local girl the young Edgar Allan Poe had once courted out on Sullivan’s Island.
    I was already jerking off at that point, but I felt nothing like lust for Rusty; I was just extremely comfortable around him. I had stumbled by chance upon a member of my own tribe, and Mummie must have realized this long before I did. She liked Rusty just fine—for the very reasons she liked me—but two fey little fantasists was one too many for her comfort. She pulled me aside one day and suggested gently that maybe I shouldn’t see so much of my friend.
    When I asked her why, she said that Rusty was a little effemin-ate—through no fault of his own, of course, but it might cause people to “think things.” And I realized then that my secret deficiency wasn’t just happening in my pants; it was part and parcel of my very being, a blazing scarlet H that could easily betray me at any moment.
    “So what did you do?” asked Pete.
    “About what?”
    “Rusty.”
    “Nothing, really. I mean, nothing dramatic. We were still friends for a while. I just didn’t talk about him at home. And then we just sort of…drifted apart naturally as we got older.”
    “Why?”
    “I don’t know exactly. I guess he started to strike me as…kind of corny and Midwestern.”
    “Hey!”
    I laughed. “Sorry. Wrong word.”
    “Are you gonna do that to me?”
    “Do what?”
    “Dump me when you’re tired of me.”
    “C’mon. I didn’t dump him. And you’re not at all like him, anyway.” I knew Pete was just teasing, but he had struck a nerve nonetheless. “Besides,” I added defensively, “we had a really nice reunion back in the eighties. He and his lover came here for the Castro Street Fair, and we all went out to dinner. They’d been following my show for years.”
    “Was he still corny and Midwestern?”
    “He was very nice,” I said firmly, but in truth I had felt superior to the one true soul mate of my adolescence. Rusty and his lover were both court reporters in Atlanta, pleasant guys with shiny faces and careful hair who seemed to have acquired their personal style from the Shocking Gray catalog. They wore freedom rings and rhinestone-studded AIDS ribbons, and Rusty, poor soul, had one of those Tshirts that said Surrender, Dorothy . I found them both so middle-class and predictable that I cut short our evening with an excuse about an imminent deadline. The irony of that wasn’t lost on me when I later learned that they had both died within a year of their pilgrimage to San Francisco. Deadline, indeed. And I had not remembered to send them the autographed books they’d requested.
    Pete was still miffed. “The Midwest isn’t so bad, you know.”
    “Thought you said it was a suckhole.”
    “Well, yeah, but… you’re not allowed to say it.”
    “There’s only one way to settle this, you know.”
    “What?”
    “If you invite me out to see for myself.” The silence that followed was not attributable to anything. It was merely a silence.
    “Pete?”
    “You don’t mean that, do you?”
    “Why would I say it, if I didn’t mean it?”
    “Would you come like…right away?”
    “Absolutely. In a couple of days, if you’ll let me. I can stay at your local Ramada and we’ll just hang.”
    More silence.
    “Pete?”
    “Yeah, Dad, I’m here.”
    “What d’you say, then?”
    “That would be the coolest thing in the world.”
    “Good, then. We’ll do it.”
    “I gotta check with Mom, though.”
    “Tell her I won’t be in the way, okay? I can make myself scarce whenever you need to be alone.”
    “I’m sure it’s no sweat. She’s pretty cool about things.”
    “I know, Pete. You’re lucky in that regard.” There was a brief pause as he apparently read