The Night Listener : A Novel

You were so sad and lost that I thought: here’s somebody I can really take care of…”
    “Jesus, Jess, how can you say that? All I ever wanted was to take care of you. You wouldn’t even let me half the time. You hated to be fussed over when you had the slightest little cold. You’d get all moody and withdrawn because you weren’t in control anymore. I used to worry what it would be like, in fact, when you really got sick, if all the tenderness would just disappear and…goddammit, Jess, I took care of you all the time. In every way. I loved you. I made it so you didn’t have to work in an office. I shared my income with you.” Jess gave me a pointed look. “ Your income.”
    “All right, ours. Whatever.”
    “No, that means something, Gabriel. It’s always been your income.
    That’s the way you see it, isn’t it?”
    At that moment I couldn’t see anything but the “really great sex” with Frank that Jess had felt so driven to remark upon. “Well, I’m sorry,” I told him, “but I did write the goddamned books.”
    “And I did nothing? Somebody else set up your IRA and organized your tours and your fucking publicity and held your hand at every taping and brainstormed with you every time you had something new to write? You established credit because of me, Gabriel. You bought this house. It’s even in your name, because I wanted to make things easier for you when I died. I spent a quarter of my life getting your life in order, and I’ve got nothing to show for it.”
    “You had everything,” I told him bleakly. (And you threw it away, I thought, for the nearest swarthy man who would tie you to a cross and let you call him sir, someone, in other words, who would impersonate the father who had terrorized you.) “Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?” I asked. “You’re the one who’s leaving me, Jess. This has been your choice all the way. I was completely blindsided.”
    “That is such bullshit.”
    “Don’t tell me how I feel, please.”
    “If you were blindsided, Gabriel, it’s because you chose to be. You don’t confront things at all. You live in your own little fantasy world.
    You act like the tough stuff will just go away if you don’t acknowledge it. I dropped lots of hints about our sex life over the years, but you refused to pick up on them. So I avoided anything that made you uncomfortable. You think of me as a bull in a china shop, but I’m not—not all the time. I learned to be very careful about the stuff that you can’t handle.” Like what? I wondered, my guts twisting with the fear that he might actually tell me. What intrinsic flaw in my being had made me so impossible to live with? Was I just too old for him now, or too self-absorbed to be in a real partnership? My fame had once been a consolation in times of distress, but now it just made me feel worse.
    For if Jess could walk out on the myth he’d helped create, the real me must be someone truly unlovable.
    “This isn’t just about S/M,” he added with his customary clairvoy-ance. “There are things I have to figure out on my own.” He had omitted the ampersand, I noted, thereby reminding me that they call it S/M these days, not S & M.
    I couldn’t even say it the right way.
    I don’t remember how that conversation ended, only that I wanted out of it as quickly as possible. I do recall that Jess broached the subject of money and that I wrote him a check to cover his expenses for the next two months. It was agonizing for both of us. We had vowed in the past never to make an issue of money, which had always been easy enough for me, since Jess had been so conscientious in that regard; I was the one inclined toward overspending. Money, however, was the monster that loomed over us that afternoon, because I’d started to believe that Jess was as desperate as I was, but in a different way. Would he even be here at all, I wondered, trying to be civil with me, if he had any other means of staying alive?
    That night, as I lay on the sofa hoping that Pete would call, I remembered the time Jess first came down from Oregon to visit me.
    I had a tiny cottage on Noe Hill then, and it was riddled with mice, since I didn’t have the heart (or the stomach) to set traps. As we cuddled in bed that first night Jess was aghast at the chorus of squeaks that greeted us as soon as the lights went out. The next morning he went down to Cliff’s Hardware and bought several dozen mousetraps, all of which did their job