Talk Talk

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “In case what?”

  “You need me. Again.”

  “When do you come back?”

  The voice on the radio flared and died. Dana hadn’t moved, even to blink her eyes, everything stationary except the shapes of the distant cars and trucks ever so gradually enlarging on the far side of the divider. “I don’t know. As soon as I can.”

  “You don’t know?” Radko paused for effect. “Then I don’t know too,” he said, and cut the connection.

  That was Utah. Then there was Wyoming, and after Wyoming, Nebraska and Iowa and the worn green underbelly of Illinois and on and on, the road a whip and the car clinging to it like a drop of sweat or blood or both. They alternated behind the wheel, one of them unconscious in back as the other fought the tedium, and he tried to take most of the burden on himself because it was especially hard on her with conversation a virtual impossibility and no radio to distract or absorb or infuriate her. She wasn’t a bad driver—the deaf, as she’d pointed out to him a hundred times, were more visually alert and spatially oriented than the hearing, hence better drivers, hands down—but he couldn’t help worrying she’d drift into a trance and do something regrettable, if not fatal. Exhaustion crept up on him, though. And the heat. It seemed as if they were following a heat wave all across the fat wide hips of the country, hardly a cloud in the sky and not a drop of rain.

  They stopped one night at a motel in a college town in western Pennsylvania, both of them so keen to escape the torture chamber of the car they no longer cared whether Frank Calabrese got to New York ahead of them or if he’d defrauded another half-dozen people in the interval or set himself up as President and CFO of Halter/Martin Investments. For his part, Bridger was ready to let it go, give it up, repair the damage and move on, but Dana was intractable. “You’re like Captain Ahab,” he said, clumsily finger-spelling it for her as they stood in line at a Subway crammed with students slouching under the weight of their backpacks.

  I am not, she signed.

  “You have to know when to cut your losses”—he tried to make a joke of it—“otherwise you wind up with a peg leg, or worse: you go down with the whale. You don’t want to go down with the whale, do you?”

  She didn’t laugh. Didn’t even crack a smile. For a moment he wondered if she’d understood him, and he was about to repeat himself, though nothing falls flatter than a joke reiterated, when her eyes went hard. Her shoulders were cocked toward him, her hair fanned out as if a sudden breeze had caught it, and when she spoke her words were stamped with the impress of her teeth: “It’s not funny. You’re not funny.”

  They’d come to the glassed-in counter now, Dana next in line, and the shrunken harried-looking woman in plastic cap and gloves, whose job it was to layer meat, cheese and vegetable matter on the customer’s roll of choice, was saying “Next” in vain. You’re not funny. Jesus, did she have to be so negative all the time? Couldn’t she lighten up? Even for five minutes?

  Of course, he wasn’t in the sunniest of moods himself (they were both wiped, both in need of food, a shower, a couple hours comatose on a king-size bed in front of a pulsating TV screen) and something in him, the first flicker of a cruel impulse he never knew he possessed, made him wait till the woman had raised her voice—“Next!” she cried in exasperation, “Next!”—and finally reached across the counter to poke Dana with her plastic-clad index finger. No one likes to be ignored, that was what he was thinking—that was what he was communicating here, a little lesson, tit for tat—even as Dana gave him a savage look, then turned to the woman and ordered, pointing out the items she wanted because pointing was the norm in this establishment, the whole process of shuffling down the line and creating the sandwich a cooperative pantomime between customer and worker punctuated by the odd verbal cue: Six-inch or twelve? Balsamic-cheddar whole-grain or regular Italian? To drink?

  He waited till they were back in the motel, shoes off, sunk into the bed under the tutelary eye of the TV and working on the sandwiches, before bringing up the subject again. “I don’t know,” he said, looking her in the face. “I just wonder what the plan is, that’s all.”

  She was at a disadvantage, because it took both hands to compress a twelve-inch submarine sandwich and keep it from disintegrating into its constituent parts, but she was game. She paused to swallow, then leaned over to take a sip of the extra-large diet soft drink clenched between her legs. He saw that her face was relaxed now, the tension and fatigue beginning to loosen their grip. She came up smiling. “The plan,” she said carefully, “is to stay at my mother’s and let her spoil us for a few days.” She opened wide, took a foursquare bite of the sandwich, chewed, swallowed, both hands engaged. “Then,” she said, gazing from him to the TV screen and back, “we get in the car, go up the FDR Drive to the Deegan Expressway to I-87 to the Sprain Brook and take that to the Taconic. If memory serves, it’s 9A after that and then Route 9 right on into Peterskill.” She bent forward for another bite, a baffle of bread, Swiss cheese and smoked turkey blunting her diction. “It’s a scenic route,” she said, chewing, “beautiful trees, dogwood, wildflowers. You’re really going to love it.”

  It was past noon when they woke, the room frigid and dark, as remote from the world as a space capsule silently drifting across the universe, and they might have slept even later if Bridger hadn’t become aware of a muted sound, a rhythmic thumping insinuating itself in the space between the low groan and high wheeze of the air conditioner. At first, he didn’t know where he was, everything dim and robbed of color, a sensation of wheels sustaining him, of motion, but then he was fully awake and the noise—someone was knocking at the door, that was it—rousing him to action. He slipped into the pair of shorts he’d flung on the carpet the night before, the feel of them cold against his skin—cold, and faintly damp with yesterday’s sweat. The knocking seemed to intensify. He glanced at Dana. Her face was wrapped in sweet oblivion—nothing could wake her, and the thought made him feel tender and protective. What would have happened if he wasn’t there? The place could have been on fire and she’d never know. He fumbled his way to the door and pulled it open.

  A woman was poised there before him, her fist arrested in the act of knocking—a woman with indignant eyes and her black hair pulled back in a knot, and why did she look so familiar? For a moment, he was mystified, but then he took in her sandals and the tangerine-colored sari, and began to understand. “What?” he said, squinting against the assault of sunlight. “What is it?”

  “Checkout time is eleven a.m.,” the woman said.

  “Oh, yeah,” he muttered, “yeah, sorry.” The heat, gathered up off the pavement and filtered through every creek, pond and mosquito-infested puddle in the neighborhood, rose up to stab at him till he winced: humidity. He’d never really known what it meant except in the abstract. He was sweating already.

  “For your information, it is now twelve twenty-five in the afternoon.”

  “Sorry.”

  The look she gave him was drained of sympathy. “Don’t make me charge you an extra day, do you understand what I’m saying?” Her eyes flicked to the bed and the bundled form of Dana, then flew at his face. “Don’t make me do that.”

  Then they were in the car again, back on I-80, back in Purgatory, back on the road that never ends, and it wasn’t until they hit a truck stop outside Bloomsburg that they had a chance to comb their hair, brush their teeth, put something in their stomachs. It was a joyless meal, a mechanical refueling of the body little different from filling up the gas tank. He drove the final leg, trying to extract some entertainment value from the radio, one alternative channel after the other fading out till he gave up and tuned in the ubiquitous oldies. The sun was right there with them all the way, relentless, pounding down on the roof of the car through the long afternoon, the cranked-up DJs in their air-conditioned studios making jokes about the heat—“Triple digit!” one guy kept shouting between songs—and they must have heard “Summer in the City” three or four times rolling through N
ew Jersey. Or he must have heard it.

  Dana didn’t seem to mind the heat—or the silence either. She sat beside him, enfolded in her own world, tapping away at her laptop—this was her chance to work on her book, she told him, didn’t he see that? “Enforced solitude. Or not solitude,” she’d added with an apologetic smile, “that’s not what I mean.” He knew what she meant—and he wasn’t offended. Not particularly. She was trying to make the best of things, as if anything good could come of all this. He wished her well. Hoped she finished her book, sold it to the biggest publisher in New York and made a million dollars, if that would make her happy. Because there was no doubt that Frank Calabrese and the whole insane enterprise of running him down wasn’t making anybody happy, not her, not him, not Radko. Or the thief either.

  The thief. He’d almost forgotten about him, almost forgotten what they were doing here and why. The trees were dense along the road, traffic building, his eyes enforcing the distance between cars, and all he could think about was the power this single individual had over them, how he was the one who’d put them here, in this car, in the glare of New Jersey on a hot July afternoon. He saw him then, saw the guy’s face superimposed over the shifting reflection of the windshield, saw the way he walked, rolling his hips and shoulders like some pimp in a movie, like Harvey Keitel in Taxi Driver, and felt something clench inside him, a hard irreducible bolus of hatred that made him reverse himself all over again. He’d been tired the night before, that was all. Tired of the road, tired of the hassle, tired of Radko—tired even of Dana and the way she shut him out. But yes, they were going to find this guy. And yes, they were going to see him put behind bars. And no, it didn’t have all that much to do with Dana, not anymore.

  The sun was behind them when they rolled across the George Washington Bridge and into Manhattan, a place he’d seen only in movies, and here it was, the whole city bristling like a medieval fortress with a thousand battlements, each of them saturated with the pink ooze of the declining day. Dana directed him through the narrow canyons cluttered with nosing cabs and double-parked trucks, the evening lifted up and sustained on a tidal wave of cooking, a million fans blowing mu shu and tandoori and kielbasa and double cheeseburger and John Dory and polpettone up off the stove and out into the street. There was a smell of dogshit underneath it, of vomit, rotting garbage, flowers in bloom, diesel. He cranked down the window to absorb it. “Turn here,” Dana said, using her hands for emphasis. “At the next light, turn left.” The parking garage (they were somewhere on the Upper East Side, and he knew that because she told him) cost as much overnight as an entire month’s parking had cost him in college, but Dana was paying and it didn’t seem to faze her all that much, and then it was twilight and the lights of the city came to life as if in welcome.

  There was a negotiation with the doorman, a logbook in the lobby that had to be signed, and then they were stepping out of the elevator on the nineteenth floor, and Dana’s mother was there to greet them. She was shorter than her daughter by two or three inches, her hair the color of those copper scrubbers you buy at the supermarket, insistently slim, twice divorced, with a face that had to reshape itself every time she smiled or grimaced, as if it hadn’t yet discovered its final form (a reaction to her new dentures, as he was to learn within two minutes of stepping through the door of the apartment). As for the apartment, it was bigger than he’d expected, one door leading to another and then another like something out of Kafka. Or Fincher. It had that claustrophobic cluttered three-shades-too-dim hazy atmosphere Fincher liked for his interiors and Bridger wasn’t especially happy with it. If it had been something he was playing with on his computer, that would be another thing, but as it was he was almost afraid to sit on the couch in the living room for fear of sticking to it. So what did he think? Like mother, like daughter—Dana wasn’t exactly the most organized person he’d ever met.

  “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Halter,” he said, standing awkwardly in the middle of the front room. The shades were drawn. There was a smell of cat litter—or, more properly, cat urine.

  “Call me Vera,” Mrs. Halter said, pushing him down in an easy chair strewn with knitting projects in various stages of completion and fussing over a bottle of wine—she couldn’t seem to get the cork out—and a can of mixed nuts that featured Mr. Peanut against a midnight-blue background, but she wasn’t Mrs. Halter anymore, anyway. “Dana’s father left me for an older woman, if you can believe it,” she told him, “but that was ten years ago.”

  “Mom,” Dana said. “Don’t start. We just got here.” She’d draped herself across the couch in the corner, her bare legs pale against the dark pool of cracked green leather.

  “Somebody at work. He’s a lawyer, I don’t know if Dana told you that…Anyway, I took my second husband’s name—Veit—not because I have anything against Rob—that’s Dana’s father—but because I got used to it. It’s punchier too: Vera Veit. V.V.” She set the wine bottle down on the coffee table to mold a figure in the air with the white slips of her hands. “Kind of sexy, don’t you think?”

  “Mom,” Dana said, and it carried no inflection, a complaint that had hung in the air since she was a long-legged preternaturally beautiful teenager who could never hit the right key, never influence a discussion or argument or participate in the roundabout of family ritual without involving her hands and her face and her body. He noted that, noted the way she became a teenager all over again the minute they walked in the door and her mother embraced her and held her and swayed back and forth in perfect harmony with her internal rhythms. It was all right. Everything was all right. For the first time since they left Tahoe, he could relax.

  For the next half hour the conversation bounced round the room like a beach ball they were all intent on keeping in motion—a few questions about Bridger, his profession, his income, his prospects, leading to Vera’s expressing her outrage over “this identity theft thing” and implying that Dana must somehow have called it down on herself through her own carelessness, to which Dana responded in the angriest, most emphatic Sign he’d ever seen—and then the ball dropped and the three of them sat there staring at one another like strangers until Dana’s mother stood up abruptly and said, “So you must be hungry. You didn’t eat on the road, did you? Dinner, I mean?”

  Until she mentioned it, he hadn’t realized how hungry he was. They hadn’t stopped, even for a Coke, since breakfast (technically lunch, and he had a queasy recollection of grilled cheese, fries and a side salad with a dollop of very old ranch dressing), pushing on through just to get it over with, as if the drive were a prizefight and they were punch-drunk and reeling and praying for the bell at the end of the fifteenth round to release them. He heard himself say, “Sure. Yeah. But don’t go to any trouble—”

  “Oh, it’s no trouble,” she assured him, reaching for the telephone on the table beside her. “I’ll just call Aldo’s and have them send something up. You do eat meat, right?” she asked, looking to Bridger, and then, without waiting for an answer, she turned to Dana. “Is the osso buco okay with you? You always liked osso buco.”

  Dana didn’t respond—she wasn’t even looking.

  “And soup. Anybody want soup? They do a nice pavese—you want soup, Bridger? Salad? Anything to start—crostini? Calamari, maybe?”

  After dinner, which they ate off of heavy china plates balanced on their knees while sipping what Dana’s mother kept calling “a really nice Bardolino,” Dana made a show of taking the things out to the kitchen to wash up. Bridger had risen from his chair in a half-hearted attempt to intercede, signing Let me do it, but Dana ignored him even as her mother sang out, “No, no, you sit down, I want to talk to you.” She had a coquettish look on her face as she added, “So we can get acquainted. All right? You don’t mind that, do you? Getting acquainted?” And then she rose and refilled his glass, murmuring, “And have some wine. It’s good for you. Good for the heart.”

  The first thing she did was inform him of the grim statistics—he knew, didn’t
he, that ninety percent of the deaf married their own kind and that of the ten percent who married into the hearing world, ninety percent of them wound up divorced?

  “Yes,” he said, leaning back in the easy chair and taking a moment to wet his lips with the wine, “that was one of the first things Dana told me after we met. After we started dating, I mean.”

  “Not a happy number.”

  “No.” The Bardolino had gone to his legs—he’d already drunk too much—and he felt paralyzed from the waist down. Not that he was uncomfortable, not anymore. Or not especially. The place was growing on him—so was Dana’s mother. The food had been good, great even, still hot when she artistically slipped one item after another from the sealed Styrofoam boxes onto the plates, and the wine was whispering its secrets to him in a way that made the tensions of the road fade away to nothing.

  Dana’s mother was leaning forward, both elbows braced on her knees. “So you’re not the type that’s easily daunted—and you love her. You love my daughter. Or am I wrong?”

  He could feel the wine rising now all the way up through his torso to his face, which was hot, and his forehead, which was on fire. “Yes,” he said, “or no, I mean—you’re not wrong,” and he tipped back the glass and drained it.

  “Because,” she went on as if she hadn’t heard him, “as beautiful and independent and smart as she is—and she is brilliant, I hope you realize that—there are problems, little frustrations that add up, you know what I mean?” Her eyes were shaped like Dana’s, closer to round than oval, and they were the same deep rich color suspended somewhere between brown and gold; when he held her gaze, when he looked into them, he saw Dana just as surely as if he were re-creating her on his computer screen. From somewhere below them, distantly, there was the sound of a siren. “She can be stubborn,” she said.