The Night Listener : A Novel

had a bona fide adventure.
    Oh, Jess, I wanted to say, you would be so proud of me. I’ve braved the undiluted world of men again, where dicks are king and sex is everything and nothing. If you were here tonight, I’d tell you all about Mr. Wide Load. I’d lie in your arms and laugh about the postures of the closet and the sad, silly demands of my own unwieldy ego. I’d give you every last juicy moment, then tell you how little it had meant, how little it would always mean when weighed against the age-old certainty of Us.
    But I didn’t call him; I’d had enough of telephones.
     
    TWENTY

    THE SHOCK OF RECOGNITION

    I SLEPT SOLIDLY but not as long as usual. I awoke just after six and hauled my bag down to the car, noticing how radically the configur-ation of the parking lot had changed. Mr. Wide Load’s love machine was gone, and the maze of trucks I had followed the night before was no longer the bustling village lane of memory. The gypsies had all but vanished, leaving only black rectangles on a white plain as proof of their encampment. Even that distant men’s room seemed different now: lustless and one-dimensional, hammered flat by the sharp halogen light of dawn.
    I ate some eggs and sausage at the restaurant and bought a local map from the cashier. It proved too cartoonish to be useful, but I found a certain comfort in the smiling cows and dancing cheeses, the legions of happy hunters and bikinied water-skiers that would lead me north to 511 Henzke Street and the apple of my eye. I felt good, despite my banged-up hand, so I plunged into the blazing blue day, already a gypsy myself.
    Once on the road, I was filled with the kind of tingly anticipation I’d felt as a child on our summer drives to Canada, when there was breakfast in my stomach and the prospect of a thrilling roadside attraction just ahead. I’d loved the spooky ones most of all, the ones that asked the questions that were never answered: a place in New Brunswick called Magnetic Hill, where drivers could watch their cars roll inexplicably uphill; or any of those specially constructed Mystery Houses, where the proportions were so out-of-whack that plumb lines seemed to fall at an angle and little boys like me looked twice as tall as any grownup.
    Once beyond the roiling vapors of that power plant, I found the landscape more to my liking. North of Wausau there were pleasant farmsteads and dark green forests and countless ponds winking through the birches like pocket mirrors. I was so close to a state of enchantment that I stopped impetuously at a pseudo-rustic convenience store because a sign out front promised hot chocolate. What I found was hot all right, and a distant cousin of chocolate, but it shot from a machine in a vile diarrheal blast that tasted as bad as it looked.
    I bought a soda instead, then considered the notion of calling Pete again; no, I decided, I didn’t need the sucker punch of hearing that message one more time.
    The towns on the way to Wysong were too basic to be as pretty as their setting: grungy little grids of auto-repair shops and video stores and pizza parlors with their windows steamed gray against the cold. The houses that straggled into the outskirts were small and shabby, their drafty places plastered with those asphalt shingles that are meant to look like bricks but never do. Everywhere there were satellite dishes aimed hungrily at the heavens, though they seemed so sad and junky in the snow, so unfuturistic, like a broken-down car on blocks or a bedspring left to rust in the woods.
    Wysong announced itself with billboards. Or rather its main attraction did. SEE THE GODFATHER’S DEATHMOBILE was the first indicator, followed by ELVIS’S FAVORITE CADDIE! and HISTORIC FUN FOR
    THE WHOLE FAMILY. Americans are pathetic, I thought, always suckers for a sideshow and so easily seduced by engines and icons.
    But the billboards proved useful, since they led me in a matter of minutes—sooner than I’d expected and maybe even sooner than I’d wanted—past the entrance of the Lake-Vue Motor Lodge.
    It wasn’t what I’d expected. I’d envisioned something from the fifties, from the hand-tinted memory bank of my own childhood.
    One of those plain white trains of a building with a painted iron swing set on its manicured lawn. I’d banked everything on the cutesy spelling of Vue , but here stood a pink brick monstrosity from the eighties, as bland and soulless as any industrial park. The lobby was blue and