The Night Listener : A Novel

middle-aged and single, soft in the gut and long in the scrotum, keeping watch over my own little acre of stars.
    When I was a boy, my father swapped daylily bulbs with an English professor named Preston Stamey. I knew that Preston was gay, because I’d once heard Pap describe him to my mother as “a fairy nice fellow.” He had a tiny jewel box of a carriage house over on Tradd Street that he shared with a three-legged spaniel named Sumter. Preston was a bull-necked old nancy, jolly as a pirate, but while my father seemed to enjoy his company, privately my parents expressed pity for the professor. “How lonely he must be,” my mother would say. “No wife and no children to carry on.” Long after I’d discarded my own requirements for wife and children, I still bought that melancholy assessment of Preston’s life. I might be gay, but I would never be that kind of old queen: alone in my fifties, fussing over my flowers and my Williamsburg weather vane; I would find a lover to protect me against such emptiness. It had never occurred to me that Preston might have been more evolved than the rest of us, that he might have treasured his own company.
    And there could well have been students who idolized him, ex-lovers who still loved him, sailors he met on the Battery who followed him home and swung on his friendly old dick and called him Daddy.
    He could have been having a life, in other words—and a damn good one at that.
    All you have to do is believe and let go, and you’ll have all the proof you need …
    A ringing phone yanked me back into the moment. Remembering that I’d turned off the answering machine, I scrambled out of the hot tub and blotted myself hastily with my sweatpants.
    Hang on, son, I’m coming .
    Naked and dripping, I raced down the steps to the terrace, swung open the sliding door, barreled through the house and up the stairs to the office. On the last turn I whacked my knee sharply on the banister.
    “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” I did a little war dance of pain as the phone rang for the fifth time.
    I grabbed the receiver and dropped into a chair.
    “Hello!”
    “Well, damn,” my father said. “There you are. Thought you’d be out gettin’ drunk.”
    “Oh, hey, Pap.”
    “Listen, son. That was one helluva first chapter you read tonight.” It had been a while since I’d received such a call from the old man.
    “Well, thanks, Pap. That’s nice of you.”
    “No, it ain’t. It was just a damn good piece. Was that the little boy you told us about on our way to Tahiti?”
    “Yeah…pretty much.”
    “What do you mean? He either is or he ain’t.”
    “Well, I changed his name, of course, and a few identifying details.”
    “Like what?”
    “Oh, you know. Where he lives and what he looks like. Some of the things that happened to him.”
    “So the whole goddamn thing’s a lie.”
    I laughed. “That’s what fiction is for, Pap. To fix the things that have to be fixed.”
    “Well, you had me going there.”
    “Good. That was the idea.”
    “Then…all that stuff about you and Jess…you fellas are okay, aren’t you?”
    “Oh, sure. We’ll always be okay.”
    “So when are you gonna come see us? We ain’t seen you since you threw up on that bagpiper at my birthday party.” I laughed. “I’ve got some stuff to do, but I’ll come as soon as this series is done.”
    “How long is this one gonna be?”
    “I’m not sure yet. It’s not done.”
    “Jesus. You’re cuttin’ it close. How much you got left to do?” I began to feel a sort of low-grade anxiety. “I don’t know. A hundred pages or so. Don’t ask.”
    “Am I in it?”
    “Are you in what?”
    “You know what I’m talking about, you little son-of-a-bitch. What have you done to me this time?”
    I told him I hadn’t decided yet.
    GN
    San Francisco
     
    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

    MY SISTER, JANE YATES, lives in the nether reaches of New Zealand but inhabits many hectares of my heart. Likewise, Ian McKellen and James Lecesne make me feel loved and valued from afar. Pam Ling and Judd Winick provide family here in my own valley. Robert Jones is a gifted writer with a generous nature, which makes him the best of all possible editors. Patrick JansonSmith has championed my work longer than anyone. Binky Urban took me under her wing long before she became an agent, let alone mine. Steven Barclay is a master at providing what I love the most: a stage. The extraordinary Patrick Gale helped me to unravel my past before I