The Night Listener : A Novel

mauve with white plaster tables and curly white plaster floor lamps, the Reagan era’s take on deco. And there was a Christmas tree in one corner—white, naturally, with blue ornaments.
    I identified myself to the desk clerk, who was female but far too young to have been that folksy woman on the phone. She gave me a key—or rather my card—after consulting her computer, then pointed out the hallway that led to my room. I took off immediately, relieved that I didn’t have an escort, didn’t have to comment on the room or hear another spiel about a minibar.
    The room was more of the same. I dumped my suitcase on a blue-and-mauve bedspread and sank into a chair with a sigh. What on earth was I doing here? How could I possibly not be disappointed by what I would find? Nothing had ever met my expectations, since nothing could compete with my doctoring imagination, my pathetic compulsion to make the world quainter, funnier, kinder, and more mysterious than it actually was.
    I remembered a time before I’d met Jess when I’d tried anonymous phone sex. One of my partners had been so aurally appealing that I’d insisted upon meeting him and found myself—that very night—trekking across town to an apartment in the Mission. The guy wasn’t a troll by any means, and he hadn’t misadvertised himself, but he wasn’t what I’d pictured, and I just couldn’t complete the wiring, couldn’t make the voice on the phone hook up with the actual person. It was like a Japanese monster movie where the dubbing was so bad that you couldn’t believe it at all.
    It will be like that with Pete, I thought. You’ll find a child, all right, in the house on Henzke Street, a flesh-and-blood boy who is small and frail and close to death. But he won’t be the Pete of your imagination. He’ll be slightly off somehow, slightly out of sync with the son you’ve so painstakingly constructed. It won’t be the euphoric moment of bonding you’ve dreamed about. It will be awkward and disruptive, maybe even disturbing, and certainly rife with embarrassment. You’ll have to start over again, build a new relationship from the ground up.
    If that’s even possible.
    If he even wants you, after he learns what you’ve done.
    My spirits improved after a shower and a fresh change of clothes. I stood at the window, assembling my courage, placing myself in context before I ventured out. There wasn’t a single Lake in Vue, at least not from this direction. I could see a piece of the snowy parking lot and a piece of the highway snaking into the trees and a corrugated-iron building that could only be the famous Neilson’s Antique Auto Barn. And across the highway a clot of slushy gas stations and burger joints that probably led into Wysong itself.
    There were clouds in the sky again, gray flannel bolsters that promised more snow and plenty of it, so I headed down to the lobby without further idling. The watch had apparently changed, for this time there was an Asian woman behind the desk. She was middle-aged and slender, pleasant-looking, with a hairdo that hugged her head like a scalloped bathing cap.
    “I wonder if you could help me,” I asked.
    “Sure thing, hon. What is it?”
    I recognized the voice immediately. This was the woman on the phone, the one who had taken my first reservation. The one I had already pictured in a knotty pine office: plump and rosy-cheeked and, yes, Caucasian. I smiled as another assumption collapsed on itself. I thought of Anna and how she would have teased me for regarding the world as white until proven otherwise. Well, Gabriel, you can take the boy out of Charleston …
    “Is there lipstick on my teeth or something?” The lady had obviously noticed my reaction.
    “No.” I laughed. “I just realized…we’ve already met. I was the guy who called from San Francisco a few weeks back.”
    “The one who cancelled on me.”
    “Exactly.”
    “Jeez, what happened to your hand?”
    “Oh…” I glanced down at my scabbing stigmata. “I fell off a truck.”
    “Ouch. Hope it wasn’t a potato truck.”
    “What?”
    “Nothing. Bad joke. That’s what they used to say in Missouri. ‘He looks like he just fell off a potato truck.’ Don’t ask me what it means.
    You want a Band-Aid for that? I’ve got some in the office.”
    “Thanks, but…I think it’s better in the open air.”
    “Did you hitch here or something?”
    “No. Why?”
    “Well…if you fell off a truck…”
    “Oh, no…it wasn’t