LOS ANGELES - You hear Gore Vidal long before you see him, the steady tap-swish-tap of foot and cane on an upstairs landing in his sunny Spanish Colonial house in the Hollywood Hills; then there's the slow whir of a mechanical chairlift carrying the novelist-essayist-playwright-screenwriter downward. Vidal is 80, with an artificial knee, and in 2003 he left his Mediterranean aerie in southern Italy overlooking the Amalfi Coast - not far from where the sirens sang, and Odysseus sailed on - and returned to his sometime home in Los Angeles to live out the rest of his life.

In a 1985 essay for Architectural Digest magazine, Vidal contrasted his home in the “unfashionable Hollywood Hills,” with his idyllic Roman penthouse: “In Los Angeles we live in our cars,” he wrote, “or en route to houses where a pool is a pool is a pool and there are only three caterers and you shall have no other. A car trip to Chalet Gourmet on the Sunset Strip is a chore not an adventure. But a trip down our street (in Rome) is a trip indeed.”

So why not Rome? Or London?

“Come to my funeral and ask,” Vidal answers, and pauses for a long time. The only sound is the rattling of ice as Vidal sways his tumbler of whiskey. “One hospital could kill you just as easy as another.”

Why not settle in Washington, then? The Malaysian ambassador has moved into the old Rock Creek house, sure, but there are other estates nearby.

“God, no,” Vidal says. “Unless you hold office, there's no point in being there.” That was the plan, in the beginning. To live in Washington and hold office. Vidal knew this as he wrapped his arm around his grandfather and his grandfather leaned proudly upon his cane and the flashbulbs popped. But now Vidal is a year older than his grandfather ever was, and he's a long way from the capital.

A clue to this mystery of place sits on the brown rattan table, here in the Hollywood Hills. A pile of books, titles like “Extreme Islam,” “Did George W. Bush Steal America's 2004 Election?,” “Worst Pills, Best Pills.” Among them, Vidal's own novel, “The City and the Pillar,” the first serious literary work by an American author to deal openly with homosexual themes. It was a death knell for a politician at the time (although Vidal ran for Senate in 1982, coming in second to Jerry Brown in the California primary) and it forced a change of course. Vidal knew the consequences, he says now; it was a calculated decision, the right decision. “It's probably the only worthwhile thing I ever did in public life,” he says. “Assuming that publishing is public life. Which is a great leap.”

Vidal was just 23 when he published “The City and the Pillar,” but it was his third novel and he was already a literary star. He dedicated the book “For the memory of J.T.,” initials that remained mysterious for years. Today, Vidal speaks openly of Jimmie Trimble, a fellow pupil at St. Albans School in D.C., and Vidal's first love. “He was an athlete,” Vidal says. “Now we think of athletes as just dumb-dumb boys, they're all muscle and no brain. But our athletes, at least of the class we came from, the political class, from Kentucky -he was from Kentucky - they were not only body boys, they were brain boys.”

Trimble and Vidal were inseparable for a while, sexually and otherwise, and then fate intervened in the guise of Vidal's shrill and beautiful mother, Nina, who, concerned about her son's mediocre grades, transferred Vidal from St. Albans into yet another boarding school, Exeter, near Boston. Vidal saw Trimble one last time, at a dance in 1942, and they fled the hall together briefly, doing what teenagers in love are apt to do, leaving behind Vidal's fiancee, a young woman named Rosalind. Of course, Vidal never married Rosalind. And Trimble joined the Marines at the height of World War II and was killed in the Battle of Iwo Jima.

Vidal has written that he never again felt unity with another sexual partner - at least, he hasn't yet. “It's not something you look for,” he says sharply. “Things happen or they don't.” His relationship with Auster was platonic; which is exactly why it endured, says Vidal.

He must feel Auster's absence? “It was only 55 years,” he says. “I don't know. It's. ... Everyone handles it in their own way.” He stares into a distance beyond the room. “I'm at the age where I'm asked to dinner parties with numerous widows and widowers, and they're all kind of cheery in a macabre kind of way. One illustrious lady said to me, don't you hate it when people tell you that time will heal all wounds? Of course I hate it. Time just reminds you of what is lost and not coming back again.”

Vidal shares the house with his Filipino cook, Norberto Nierras, while his 23-year-old assistant, Daren Simkin, lives in an apartment above the garage. He goes out very occasionally. Work remains the constant throughout his days, as it always has been. He reads and writes in an upstairs study, where three windows look out onto swaying palm fronds. He rarely writes letters, because “practically everyone I know is dead.” What friends remain do come calling fairly often. He abhors the telephone.

It seems hopeless, really, and yet, at 80 years old, Vidal continues the fight. “I have no choice,” he says. “I have no selfish interests. All of my selfish interests are public interests.” Under the weight of the world, at the apex of his frustration, Vidal is wont to smile. There is satisfaction in the muck, somewhere. “I'll never forget the joy,” he says, and trails off, and pauses, and sips. “The four greatest words on Earth are ‘I told you so,' ” he says. “I have seen to it that I'm able to say that at period intervals, like a cuckoo clock.”

One of the few people Vidal speaks with regularly on the telephone is Barbara Epstein, his longtime friend and editor at the New York Review of Books. “Like many people in Los Angeles, he's in exile,” she says of Vidal. “Los Angeles is a place of exile. In a way, I think the one fits in the other very nicely.”

Perhaps home, for Vidal, is exactly that - exile - a home that is not a home, from which he spies, somewhere in the nowhere of the distance, a better world.

But Vidal is not sentimental. The closest he comes is in his dreams. On good nights, as he sleeps in a second-floor bedroom down the landing from his study, he dreams of his father. “I'm always happy to see him again,” Vidal says. “He starts climbing up a hill, and I follow him up, and it gets more and more full of bushes and so on. And then he vanishes.” The landscape is not Los Angeles and not Ravello. “It's placeless,” he says. “It's just a hill. It's wild country. When you dream of your father after a certain age, you're having a death dream. Any more of these doctors, and it won't be a dream.”