Talk Talk

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  That was a hard thought. And she was a bitch, never forget that. But there was something in the way she exposed herself so unconsciously—the way all women did—looking for beauty in a compact or a tube of lipstick, needing it, needing to be beautiful and admired for it and reaching always for grace, that hit him with the force of revelation and he let the car idle beneath him till she put the Jetta in gear and pulled out into the street and he had to duck down out of her line of sight as she wheeled past with her shining eyes and the drawn bow of her composed and glistening mouth. When she got to the end of the block, he swung a U-turn and followed in her wake.

  It wasn’t hard to catch up to her. She drove like somebody twice her age, utterly oblivious, crowding the middle of the street one minute and weaving toward the curb the next. Riding the brake. Going too fast round the curves and too slow on the straightaways. He put the sun visor down and kept four or five car lengths between them—he wouldn’t want her to recognize him, not yet—but he could have been right on her bumper and she wouldn’t have known the difference. She never glanced in the rearview, not once, except to adjust her makeup and watch herself compress her lips and run the tip of a finger along the fringe of her eyelashes. But where was she going? Back to the hospital?

  The light was red up ahead and she drifted to a stop and flicked on her left-turn signal. He slowed, then pulled over to let the car behind him pass, and all the while he could feel that wire dangling loose inside him, that slow fade to nothing. The second car nosed in behind her at the light, father, mother, three kids in the back, the mother’s hair wet and hanging thin as tinsel round her collar. There was a rumble of thunder. The sky closed in. Both his hands were on the wheel, but he couldn’t feel a thing. When the light changed, he let the car carry him back out into traffic and he hit the left-turn signal and followed her down the hill toward the train station, wondering if that was where she was going and if it was, where he could trap her.

  He was trying to visualize the place—café, depot, northbound platform and the overhead walkway to the southbound tracks, rails and crossties stapling the ground, the river, everything out in the open—when suddenly she veered left again, no signal, just a jerk of the wheel, and he had no choice but to keep going straight. Had she seen him, was that it? The thought made his blood surge and he was jerking at the wheel himself, cursing, the big hurtling front end of the SUV thumping so violently into the first driveway he spotted it nearly left the ground and for the briefest fraction of a moment he was staring into the eyes of a numb-faced little kid on a tricycle who was that close to being meat and then he was lurching back, jamming the thing into gear and whipping round the corner, down the street she’d taken.

  It was a dead end. And that was perfect, or would have been, except that there were kids everywhere, shouting in Spanish and chasing a ball that ran from one foot to another so fast you couldn’t follow it, and there she was, coming toward him, her eyes locked straight ahead, signaling left, left again. He could have run into her, could have slammed the SUV into the grille of that tinny little shitbox of a car and put an end to it right there, but he didn’t, he couldn’t, all the power leaching out of him and the world shifting in front of his eyes till he didn’t know where he was or what he was doing or why. Da-na, that was what Natalia called him, and he heard her voice echoing in his ears, Da-na, Da-na. He cursed aloud and the curse brought him back. And as soon as the Jetta was past him he spun the wheel and veered for the opposite curb, abbreviating the soccer game even as the ball thumped against the back fender and skittered across the street as if all the air had gone out of it. “Hey, motherfucker!” some kid shouted. “Pendejo!” and he didn’t give a shit if he ran them all down, every one of them and they had eyes, didn’t they? And ears? He hit the horn. Wrestled the wheel. Up on the curb, back across the street— “Puta! Puta!”—and she was at the end of the block now, swinging out onto the main road and heading down the hill, for the station.

  He watched her park. Watched her make a final appraisal of herself in the mirror and then slide out of the car and lift her face to gaze up at the sky and the bunched bruised clouds squeezing down the light. Very slowly, as if he weren’t driving at all but floating up off the ground on some untappable current, he drove past her and swung into a parking spot two cars down and just sat there a moment, watching her shoulders and the way her hips rotated over the tight unhurried muscles of her legs and buttocks as she walked toward the station. She didn’t have a clue. The bitch. The bitch didn’t have a clue and he did, he had the whole puzzle worked out, the final piece in place, and he shut down the ignition and left the car where it was. He didn’t bother to lock it. Didn’t bother with the keys. And the meter—the meter was a joke.

  The air seemed to boil around him suddenly, the heat exploding in his face, and then the breeze and the deadfall of the thunder and here was the train, punishing steel and crowding the scene, and when the rain hit he didn’t try to duck it or quicken his pace, because he was focused now—focused on her, on her back and shoulders and the flash of color caught in her hair—and he was walking. With purpose. Up the steps and onto the platform, his face wet, his hair wet, the structure gone out of his jacket with the sudden assault of the rain, and he crowded in with the others, smelling the ferment of their bodies, colliding, shifting, touching. The thunder rolled out and shook the platform. Lightning broke the sky.

  That was when he hit her. That was when he lowered his shoulder and struck her from behind, not hard enough to knock her down, not hard enough to do anything other than communicate the one inescapable truth that tore her face out of the crowd and gave it to him as if he were its maker and shaper. He had her. She was in his power. The two of them were face to face, occupying the same square foot of the universe, united, wedded, and he was the one, the only one, who could break the connection.

  There was movement behind her, some woman crying out. Another peal of thunder. He watched her eyes, watched her lips, heard the flat toneless echo of her voice, no fear in her, not anymore. “What do you want?”

  Everything beat down to that instant, to that question, to her lips moving and the scent of her breath, the heat of it in his face, the actual and the real: What do you want? The question took him by surprise. It froze him. Stopped him dead. Because he hadn’t really thought beyond the moment and it was weakness and weakness only that had brought him here. He saw that now. Saw it clearly, as truth, the new truth of his life. And he saw that she wasn’t afraid and that none of this mattered, not anymore. Da-na, Natalia had called him. He thought of Mill Valley, the condo there, the house in Garrison, the face of his daughter stranded on the porch. Da-na. Da-na. Da-na. People were jostling, staring at him, at the two of them, and he had the smallest fraction of a second to contemplate the question before the answer came to his lips, and the answer didn’t involve her at all—it had nothing to do with her, but with him, Peck Wilson, a jerk, a clown, an imposter in a torn silk suit, worth nothing, worth less than nothing.

  He shook his head. Dropped his eyes. “Nothing,” he said, and he didn’t know whether she could read that or not and he didn’t care. Then he was moving, squaring his shoulders and tugging at the wet lapels of his jacket, pushing through the crowd, striding across the platform and up onto the train. He didn’t bother to look back.

  EPILOGUE

  IT WAS LATE, past nine by now, but Bridger wasn’t going anywhere. He wasn’t even hungry, though somewhere in the back of his mind the icon of the Campbell’s Chunky Soup can glowed like the figure in a shrine. Soup that eats like a meal was the promo line the company had come up with, and he and Deet-Deet had bounced that one around, creating a digital can with stick limbs surmounted by Radko’s squared-off head and glowering face—The producer that eats like a special effect—and how does a meal eat, anyway? Does it use utensils? Is it autophagic? Does it have a mouth? He was working late because he didn’t have a whole lot else to do and he wanted to get on Radko’s good side and stay there since Ra
dko, against his better judgment, had brought him back on board. The young woman—girl—who’d replaced him hadn’t worked out. Her name was Kate and she was just a tad bit self-obsessed, or so it went in Deet-Deet’s recounting, coming in one Monday with a breast augmentation that took her from borderline flat to Graf Zeppelin overnight. She was a prima donna—or a diva, as she liked to call herself—but around Digital Dynasty she was known as Phisher because she was always phishing for compliments. At any rate, she was gone, and he was back. And he planned to keep his head down and make the most of it.

  The only light in the long sweep of the burnished concrete room descended from the EMERGENCY EXIT sign Radko had put up over the back door to mollify the building inspector when he put in the carrels and computer hookups and transformed what had been San Roque’s last machine shop into a special effects studio. It was all right with Bridger. He had his iPod to keep him entertained and the soup was on the shelf by the coffeepot, awaiting the microwave. In the meanwhile, the screen gave him its solace, the solace of the proportionate world, edited, reduced, with the colors enhanced and the blemishes removed. At the moment he was working on a picture to be released for the Thanksgiving weekend, a remake of The Wild One starring The Kade in the Marlon Brando role and Lara Sikorsky as the sheriff’s daughter, though the role of the daughter had been expanded and modified to reflect the post-feminist realities of the twenty-first century—she was now a motorcycle enthusiast herself, and there were any number of spectacular jumps and mid-air pas de deux that featured Lara and The Kade thumbing their noses at the clueless townsfolk and the smirking models and steroid freaks who’d been tricked up to represent the rival motorcyle club. It was all in good fun. Nothing more than a little reinvention of film history and an attempt to cash in on The Kade while the going was good. Bridger had no problem with that, no problem at all—he was just happy to be working again.

  The cast had come off a week ago, but even with it on he’d been able to manipulate the mouse and run his programs pretty effectively—in fact, he’d got so used to propping the thing up on the edge of his desk he felt strange without it, as if his arm were levitating all on its own. There was no pain, though when he took a deep breath he could still feel a premonitory prickling in the place where the two ribs had sustained their hairline fractures, and his voice was huskier now. He hadn’t noticed the change himself—you don’t really listen to yourself unless you’re singing, and he hadn’t felt much like bursting into song lately—but when he’d first got back and called Deet-Deet to suss things out and then Radko to offer his services in the absence of the girl with the breast implants, neither of them had recognized his voice, and that told him something.

  And his mother. Right from the outset his mother had wanted to know when and how and to what extent he would regain his voice, demanding facts, statistics, terminology, chasing nurses down the hallway and dialing every specialist in the phone book, starting with Ahmad and running down to Zierkofski. She’d swept into the hospital in a cyclone of flowers, putting on her adversarial face and grilling the doctor who’d operated on him (a soft-spoken Taiwanese woman with peeled-back eyes who looked as if she were awaiting the gun at the start of the hundred-meter dash) till the doctor had thrown up her hands and said, Look, maybe what you need is an outside specialist, and his mother had tightened her voice till it was like strung wire and said, That’s exactly what we need. He hadn’t known what to do. He was unfocused and tentative, adrift on a sea of medication. He was having trouble swallowing and it felt as if there were something stuck in his throat, some balled-up wad of cardboard that kept him on the verge of gagging all the time, and that concerned him. It scared him. It made him susceptible to his mother and her reductive fears in a way that brought him back to his childhood—she was his mother, and she was there for him, and he was glad of it—and when she told him she’d made an appointment for Thursday back in San Diego with the best otolaryngologist in Southern California, all he could do was nod. It wasn’t his fault. He wasn’t thinking beyond the moment. And he wasn’t—forgive him, because he was the one who’d been hurt here, he was the one in the hospital—thinking of Dana.

  She’d driven back down to New York, that was all he knew, and he messaged her on his cell that night, the second night in the hospital, but he couldn’t find a way to say what he wanted to say, not without seeing her face to face.

  Hi.

  How you feeling?

  Okay. Can’t swallow too well.

  What did the doctor say?

  Not much.

  When do you get out?

  Tomorrow.

  What time?

  You don’t need to come.

  I do. I want to.

  My mother’s here.

  So?

  They released him the next morning, early, and he called from the train to tell her he was on his way, hoping to catch her before she left the apartment. It was awkward—the cast was on his forearm but they wanted him to wear a sling for the first two weeks, just to keep it stationary—yet he was already adapting, flashing on the summer he’d spent under the hoop out back of the house when he was in high school and trying, with mixed results, to train himself to take the three-point shot from either side. His mother sat beside him with the newspaper and a cardboard cup of coffee, making one-way conversation—his father was going to be happy to see him, and the dog too, and he was welcome to stay as long as he liked because nobody had been in the guest room since Junie and Al had been there in the spring and did he know they’d sold their business and had all the figures worked out for early retirement? Could he believe that? Junie and Al retired? As he listened to the phone ring he couldn’t help picturing Dana in motion, sliding out of the cab at Grand Central with the light exploding round her and the pigeons blasting up off the sidewalk in living color or tapping her foot and doing the crossword as the northbound train hurtled past them at Tarrytown or Dobbs Ferry or some such place, the numb staring faces passing in instant review and hers shuffled in with all the rest. There was no answer. His mother, in high spirits, leaned in to read him choice bits from the newspaper and she sipped her coffee and worked one shoe off and on again with the toe of the other, and when he needed to respond, when she put a question to him—“So what’s she like, Dana? Are you two serious? It must be, I don’t know, difficult to communicate?”—he wrote out the reply in an awkward scrawl on one of the paper towels from the restroom (Awesome; Yes; Not too bad).

  Then they were in the cab, the streets crushed by the weight of the light, monuments of light cut and formed and shaped by the buildings, everything held in stasis till the cab turned one corner and then the next and the weight came down all over again and he couldn’t swallow and he had to have the driver pull over so he could scramble out and get a bright red super-sized container full to the plastic brim with Coke and ice and the straw to deliver it sip by soothing sip. And then they were at the apartment and the doorman was phoning up and he watched his mother’s face as the elevator rose toward the meeting of the mothers, his mother and hers, and what that meant or could mean. Vera was waiting for them at the door. She’d combed her hair and put on lipstick. “You poor thing,” she said, or something to that effect, and stepped forward to embrace him before he had a chance to introduce his mother, which he did a moment later with a shrug of the shoulders and a broad grimacing gesture that made the side of his face—the side that had hit the pavement—ache all over again.

  He could see that his mother was tense, her smile automatic and her eyes panning away from Dana’s mother to the open door and the dim interior beyond. She didn’t know what to expect—she’d had no experience of the deaf and this was uncharted territory—but to her credit she held out her hand and Vera took it and then they were emerging from the hall into the living room in a scatter of small talk. “Would you like something to drink?” Vera wanted to know and he saw that she’d made an effort to push back the clutter so that the couch and easy chair presented their surfaces unencumb
ered and a good square foot of the coffee table was ready to receive the drinks and the blue can of Planters nuts. He watched his mother take it all in and he wanted to smooth things over, to make the off-hand comment that would put them at ease, but all he could do was hold out the Coke container and rattle the ice in response. His mother, looking doubtfully at the easy chair, momentarily lost her smile. “Water,” she said. “Thank you.”

  Just as Dana’s mother was about to turn away, thankful to have this little ritual of welcoming and graciousness to occupy her, he jerked his left arm into her line of vision, a sudden spastic gesture that must have made it seem as if he were fighting for balance, but it had the desired effect: he caught her attention. There was a suspended moment, both women staring at him, and then he signed, as best he could under the conditions, Where is Dana?

  Vera looked to his mother and then turned back to him. “Sleeping,” she said. “I let her sleep in. I mean, after all she’s been through—yesterday, yesterday especially.” She paused to draw in her breath. “Yesterday was a nightmare.”