The Night Listener : A Novel by Armistead Maupin Page B

cottage in the Cotswolds, where we lived for six weeks without a car, so we could feel like a couple of loopy villagers out of E. F. Benson.
    As usual, my fear of hurting someone had made me overestimate my own importance. Jess and Wayne got along fine, and their bond grew even stronger when they both tested positive. As the decade came to a close the three of us were braced against the beast, intent upon collecting memories while we could. To that end, we rented a villa on Lesbos one fall. We wanted to feel like Coward and company lolling on the lawn at Goldenhurst, or maybe Auden on Ischia, ogling boys among the ruins. (We were already aspiring to the proud nobility of twentieth-century queers.) I can still see that old stone house: its tangle of dusty wisteria, the amber light that shot through its shutters during afternoon naps.
    We had brought along a compact disc player—this nifty new thing—and we would lie on our terrace above the Aegean, adrift in a musical we had just learned to call Les Miz . It never failed to break our hearts, since we had made it about us: loving comrades huddled at the barricades. One lyric in particular demolished me: “Oh, my friends, my friends, forgive me, that I live and you are gone. There’s a grief that can’t be spoken, there’s a pain goes on and on.” Jess and Wayne contracted pneumocystis at the same time. We saw this as the first of many trials, so we were frugal with our distress. I learned to take their coughing in stride, waiting calmly without comment for it to stop, so as not to honor its message. They both lost a lot of weight. Jess had always been buxom—there is no better word—but now you could see the planes of his skull, the disturbing way his butt had begun to deflate (a fact I refused to confirm for him). And there were the usual ills: the fatigue and neuropathy, the night sweats and diarrhea. So we adjusted again; talked of plays we had yet to see, trips we had yet to take. Wayne even visited my sister, Josie, in Charleston, and walked the beach with her on Sullivan’s Island, since they had become friends over the years.
    Then a sort of edgy competition began. I thought of it at the time as a “sicker than thou” thing, with Wayne as the instigator. He would stack up his symptoms against Jess’s, matching him hardship for hardship, then do him one better with a look of flinty triumph. He seemed to be saying: “Stop pretending we’re equals; I’m going to die before you do.” And so help me, I remember regarding him as a troublemaker, a bad sport.
    As it happened, they both recovered from their pneumonia, but Wayne got KS and began to lose ground. He grew thinner and thinner, and during his third prolonged stay in the hospital they drove a shunt—this gleaming vampire stake—into his beautiful chest, as if intent upon proving him mortal. His parents came out from Florida several times, armed with false cheer and new editions of the toys Wayne had loved as a child. He seemed to glory in it, this last chance to be babied and fussed over, after so many years of brave bachelorhood. He would hold court in bed, encircled by his plastic trains and Lincoln Logs, beaming like some skeletal holy man.
    He wanted to go home after that, to refine his solitude again. But his frailty and that alpine stairway made shopping, or even leaving the house, a near-impossibility. Then one week he stopped returning my messages. Jess and I went to the Steps and found him in a stupor amid the fouled sheets of his sofa bed. When we rolled him over, he smiled at us with sheepish apology, as if we’d just stopped him from snoring, or woken him from a bad dream. The ambulance attendants didn’t know the Coit Tower approach, so they had to haul him down through the garden to Montgomery Street.
    Later, when Jess and I were on a book tour in Britain, Wayne collapsed in the bushes. Our friends Seneca and Vance discovered him by chance when they arrived with groceries, then took