Chapter One
Jewelling the Elephant

I know how it sounds when I call him my son. There's something a
little precious about it, a little too wishful to be taken
seriously. I've noticed the looks on people's faces, those dim,
indulgent smiles that vanish in a heartbeat. It's easy enough to
see how they've pegged me: an unfulfilled man on the shady side of
fifty, making a last grasp at fatherhood with somebody else's
child.That's not the way it is. Frankly, I've never wanted a kid.
Never once believed that nature's whim had robbed me of my manly
destiny. Pete and I were an accident, pure and simple, a collision
of kindred spirits that had nothing to do with paternal urges,
latent or otherwise. That much I can tell you for sure.

Son isn't the right word, of course.

Just the only one big enough to describe what happened.

I'm a fabulist by trade, so be forewarned: I've spent years looting
my life for fiction. Like a magpie, I save the shiny stuff and
discard the rest; it's of no use to me if it doesn't serve the
geometry of the story. This makes me less than reliable when it
comes to the facts. Ask Jess Carmody, who lived with me for ten
years and observed this affliction firsthand. He even had a name
for it'The Jewelled Elephant Syndrome'after a story I once told him
about an old friend from college.

My friend, whose name was Boyd, joined the Peace Corps in the late
sixties. He was sent to a village in India where he fell in love
with a local girl and eventually proposed to her. But Boyd's
blue-blooded parents back in South Carolina were so aghast at the
prospect of dusky grandchildren that they refused to attend the
wedding in New Delhi.

So Boyd sent them photographs. The bride turned out to be an
aristocrat of the highest caste, better bred by far than any member
of Boyd's family. The couple had been wed in regal splendor,
perched atop a pair of jewelled elephants. Boyd's parents,
imprisoned in their middle-class snobbery, had managed to miss the
social event of a lifetime.

I had told that story so often that Jess knew it by heart. So when
Boyd came to town on business and met Jess for the first time, Jess
was sure he had the perfect opener. "Well," he said brightly,
"Gabriel tells me you got married on an elephant."Boyd just blinked
at him in confusion.

I could already feel myself reddening. "You weren't?"

"No," Boyd said with an uncomfortable laugh. "We were married in a
Presbyterian church."

Jess said nothing, but he gave me a heavy-lidded stare whose
meaning I had long before learned to decipher: You are never to be
trusted with the facts.

In my defense, the essence of the story had been true. Boyd had
indeed married an Indian girl he had met in the Peace Corps, and
she had proved to be quite rich. And Boyd's parents'who were, in
fact, exceptionally stuffy'had always regretted that they'd missed
the wedding.

I don't know what to say about those elephants, except that I
believed in them utterly. They certainly never felt like a lie.
More like a kind of shorthand for a larger, less satisfying truth.
Most stories have holes in them that cry out for jewelled
elephants. And my instinct, alas, is to supply them.

I don't want that to happen when I talk about Pete. I will try to
lay out the facts exactly as I remember them, one after the other,
as unbejewelled as possible. I owe that much to my son'to both of
us, really'and to the unscripted intrigues of everyday life.But,
most of all, I want you to believe this.And that will be hard
enough as it is.

I wasn't myself the afternoon that Pete appeared. Or maybe more
severely myself than I had ever been. Jess had left me two weeks
earlier, and I was raw with the realization of it. I have never
known sorrow to be such a physical thing, an actual presence that
weighed on my limbs like something wet and woolen. I couldn't
write'or wouldn't, at any rate'unable to face the grueling
self-scrutiny that fiction demands. I would feed the dog, walk him,
check the mail, feed myself, do the dishes, lie on the sofa for
hours watching television.

Everything seemed pertinent to my pain. The silliest coffee
commercial could plunge me into profound Chekhovian gloom. There
was no way around the self-doubt or the panic or the anger. My
marriage had exploded in midair, strewing itself across the
landscape, and all I could do was search the rubble for some sign
of a probable cause, some telltale black box.

The things I knew for sure had become a litany I recited to friends
on the telephone: Jess had taken an apartment on Buena Vista Park.
He wanted space, he said, a place to be alone. He had spent a
decade expecting to die, and now he planned to think about living.
(He could actually do that, he realized, without having to call it
denial.) He would meditate and read, and focus on himself for once.
He couldn't say for sure when he'd be back, or if he'd ever be
back, or if I'd even want him when it was over. I was not to take
this personally, he said; it had nothing to do with me.

Then, after stuffing his saddlebags full of protease inhibitors, he
pecked me solemnly on the lips and mounted the red motorcycle he
had taught himself to ride six months earlier. I'd never trusted
that machine. Now, as I watched it roar off down the hill, I
realized why: It had always seemed made for this moment.

Excerpted from THE NIGHT LISTENER © Copyright 2011 by
Armistead Maupin. Reprinted with permission by Harper Perennial, an
imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.