The Night Listener : A Novel by Armistead Maupin Page A

Wayne knew no one (including the three official “widows” in attendance), so he took the seat next to me. “You’re Gabriel Noone,” he said, and I held his hand for the next hour. A week later, when I ran into him in North Beach, I felt as if I’d always known him.
    Wayne was blond and twenty-five then, with the face of a happy rabbit and a sleek superhero chest that startled you when his shirt came off. He was very bright in an obsessive adolescent sort of way.
    He filled composition books with annotated lists of his favorite things, which invariably included what he called the Four B’s: Batman, Bette Davis, Busby Berkeley, and Bette Midler. I know how that sounds, but Wayne was no dreary queen doing bad Baby Jane impersonations. He had a serious gift for criticism, and he could analyze in depth the very essence of the artists he admired. Including, I should add, me.
    We were lovers in the beginning, but it never took. Wayne wanted The Great Dark Man, and I, typically, wasn’t up to it. We lived together for a while in a flat below Coit Tower—”in its pubic hair,” as Wayne put it—and even after the sex had died we indulged in sentimental gestures. I would wake late, long after Wayne had left for one of his clerical jobs downtown, to find an index card propped on the kitchen table bearing some fragment of a thirties song and a line of X’s and O’s. It was Wayne’s way of honoring the big romantic love that neither of us had ever achieved. And it was I who ended this gentle charade, suggesting cautiously one night that we might both find what we wanted if Wayne took a recently vacated studio across the Filbert Steps.
    I worried that I’d destroyed something precious, but we grew even closer. Wayne became my best friend and disciple, my randy little brother. We would hang out all night, smoking doobies and excoriating the celebrity closet cases we could spot on television. Or we’d head off to our separate hunting grounds (Wayne to a leather bar, I to the glory holes), knowing that later we would offer each other our exploits—if I may quote myself here—”like a small dog who drags a dead thing home and lays it on the doorstep of someone he loves.” Wayne’s new digs across the garden were a study in monastic simplicity. He adhered, he said, to the Andy Warhol dictum that all you needed for happiness was one of everything: one bed, one chair, one spoon, one mug. Wayne’s one book-of-the-moment (Wilkie Collins, say, or Isherwood or sometimes Nancy Mitford) was always placed symmetrically on his coffee table, often in the company of a lone comic book. I felt peaceful when I sat in that musty little room with its treasured Batman lithograph and its pristine row of tea boxes above the electric kettle. Wayne lived hand-to-mouth, bouncing checks until they finally landed, but he had learned to revere the ordinary. He was almost English in that regard; he had distilled the dailiness of life until it was pure as a sacrament.
    And he was such a sunny guy. He could find the humor in catastrophe, thereby romanticizing it and robbing its power. I could do that myself, but Wayne was the acknowledged master. I knew he had his dark moments, but he played them offstage, until the worst had passed. His instinct was to connect with others, to make them characters in his lifelong comic book, to find some comfortable common ground, however tenuous, and inhabit it completely. A lot of people—Jess among them—would call that conflict avoidance, but I never understood what was wrong with that.
    I worried about hurting Wayne’s feelings when Jess and I became a couple. Wayne, after all, had been my companion for seven years.
    He had been my steady date for the movies, my confessor when a romance hit the rocks. He had joined me on a cruise ship to Alaska and later on my first British book tour, a laughably down-market affair we conducted out of a gay boardinghouse in Earl’s Court. And still later we had rented a