Talk Talk

by T. C. Boyle

  But what to do next? Bridger wanted her to go right up to the counter and carry off an imposture, tell them she’d lost her key, show them some proof (if she wasn’t Dana Halter of #31 Pacific View Court, then who was?) and see what was in the box, a bill, correspondence, a bank statement, anything that might show the residential address. Then they’d turn the tables. Then they’d go to him. She knew he was right. That was the logical thing to do, because they could sit here watching the place forever and still the guy might not show up or if he did they could miss him—all they had was a photograph, after all, and photographs offer up one version only, the version of the moment, and what if he’d grown a beard, dyed his hair? Or he might send somebody else for his mail—his wife, his daughter, his gay partner for all she knew. He could be wearing a hat, sunglasses, he could come in with a bag over his head. No, Bridger was right, but she was the one who had to go in there and break the law, not he. All her life she’d had to struggle with social situations, struggle to make herself understood while people gave her that don’t-touch-me look, and what if the person behind the counter said, “What number?” What number? That would kill the whole thing—they’d probably call the police on her. A woman with a suspicious high bludgeoning voice trying to scam—that was the word, wasn’t it? Scam?—some innocent citizen’s mailbox key for what had to be a nefarious purpose. What could she say—that she’d forgotten the number of her own box? Another lie to layer it smooth: I’ve been out of town and it just slipped my mind, well, because this is my second home up here, my vacation place, actually, and I, well, I don’t—I just forgot…

  So they were sitting in the car, watching the door of the place—people coming, people going—hoping to get lucky. In the meanwhile, he’d asked her to read him what she’d been writing, because he was curious and wanted her to share it with him, and yes, he assured her, he could listen and keep his eyes on the door at the same time. And so she’d read to him and she watched his face when he told her it was good and maybe she’d flushed red, maybe she had.

  “You know,” he said, “the writing’s really” and she didn’t catch the rest.

  She leaned in close to him. “What? The writing is what?”

  “Cinematic,” he said, contorting his face, his mouth, his lips, and he finger-spelled it just to be sure.

  “Cinematic?” she repeated, secretly pleased. All at once, and she couldn’t help herself, she saw the book as a movie, a whole parade of scenes, not the least of which featured the premiere, the red carpet, she and Bridger in tuxedos—or no, he in a tuxedo and she in a black strapless dress, or no, white, definitely white…

  His face changed, his eyes sinking away from the smile. “There was a movie, you know. Like thirty years ago? By”—he finger-spelled it “François Truffaut. You know that, right?”

  “Yes,” she said, holding his eyes, “of course. I’ve seen it.”

  “It was called L’Enfant Sauvage. We saw it in film school.” He brought his hands up out of his lap, as if to use them, and then thought better of it. “And it was good, I remember. Truffaut himself played the teacher, what was his name?”

  “Itard.”

  “Right, Itard—but you haven’t got that far yet, right? What you gave me is as far as it goes—where they find the kid wandering naked in the woods and nobody knows who he is or how he’s managed to survive on his own?”

  She nodded. It was easy to read him because he was her intimate, her man, and she knew his speech patterns as well as she knew her father’s, her mother’s—what was hard was reading strangers, especially if they talked fast or with an impediment or an accent. That was why her stomach felt light and her blood raced as if she’d just climbed a dozen flights of stairs: there was a stranger behind the counter in Mail Boxes Etc. and she was going to have to go in there and pretend to be someone she wasn’t, pretend to be hearing, pretend to be entitled and maybe even cavalier. Yes, she signed, that’s as far as it goes. And then, aloud: “I want to get to that part, where Itard tries to teach him to talk, to name things, to speak through an acquired language, but first I’m interested in how the child is perceived by the society around him—and how he perceives the world himself. That’s the beginning. That’s the groundwork.”

  “He never did learn to talk, did he? I mean, after how many years of exercises like seven days a week and all that?”

  And all that. The struggle, that was what it was about, the fight to overcome the deficit, the impairment, the loss. Itard and Victor, the Wild Child, who could barely pronounce his own name. “Five years,” she said. And then, finally, her throat constricting, she added, “No, he never did learn to speak.”

  He ran a hand through his hair and it came away with a faint sheen of gel on his palm. She noticed because he raised both his hands, as if to speak in Sign—he tried for her sake, and it was more intimate, more giving, even than what they did in bed together; in that moment, she felt herself go out to him as if all her tethers had been cut. Are you going to go to—he paused, because he couldn’t find the Sign and had to spell it out: France? To see it. For research, I mean?

  She showed him: Country, foreign country. Europe, European. “Germany” is the double eagle, “for France you flick the wrist like this, like the flicking of a Frenchman’s handkerchief out of his cuff. See? It’s easy.”

  His hands were in his lap. His face fell into what she liked to call his “hangdog” look, and she loved the reference, the picture it made in her mind of a dog called out on the carpet—right, on the carpet?—and the way its body collapsed under the weight of all that undisguised doggy emotion. “What?” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  “You didn’t answer the question.”

  “You mean France?”

  A full minute must have gone by and neither of them had even glanced at the door across the street. His eyes were concentrated on her lips, as if he were the deaf one. “No,” she said, shaking her head slowly, back and forth, heavy as the pendulum at the bottom of the grandfather clock in her parents’ front hall, the one that announced the hour to everyone but her. “I’d love to, but—”

  “But you can’t afford it. Because you don’t have a job. Right?”

  She dropped her eyes. Used her hands: Right.

  Both of them looked up then and studied the façade of Mail Boxes Etc. They might have been architectural students—and she should have thought of that, should have brought two sketch pads and an assortment of pencils, charcoal, gum erasers, the ones that smelled like tuttifrutti. Or maybe they were building inspectors. Or town planners. She wouldn’t have put that ugly cookie-cutter thing there if she was on the board, no way in the world. In fact, she’d tear it down in a heartbeat and let the oaks creep back in, put in a fountain, a couple of benches. The frame collapsed and her eyes went to the movement inside, the vague bobbing of shapes screened by the reflection of the sun off the windows, people at work, packages being weighed, mail sent out and received, copies run, an amorphous huddle around the cash register. Her stomach sank. And then she felt his touch: two fingers at her chin, gently shifting her gaze back to him. “Have you thought about what you’re going to do?”

  “No, not with this hanging over me,” she said, gesturing toward the store. “I mean, I get paid through the end of August, but obviously I’ve got to start sending my résumé out.” She watched his face change—he didn’t want her to see what he was feeling, but he was a lousy actor. “I don’t want to leave, if that’s what you mean.”

  “That’s what I mean,” he said.

  She leaned in to kiss him, the familiar taste and scent of him, lips that spoke in a different way altogether, and then drew back again. “I’d love to go to Aveyron, to Lacaune and Saint-Sernin—are you kidding me?—but the airfare’s out of my range, I’m afraid, and with the dollar weak…Plus, they’d probably arrest me the minute they ran my passport through the computer.” She put on a face. “Dana Halter, batterer and assaulter—it even rhymes.”

  “But how can y
ou write about a place you’ve never seen?”

  This was easy. She pointed a finger to her head. “I see it here. And I’ve been there, to the south of France, anyway—to Toulouse, which isn’t that far from Aveyron. Didn’t I ever tell you that?” She’d been there as a girl, a few years after she became deaf. She must have been ten, eleven—the age of the wild child. Her parents were vacationing in Europe that year and they brought the whole family along—her and her two brothers—for the educational opportunity. Her parents were practical in that way. Her mother especially. And especially with her, full immersion in both Sign and speech right from the beginning—what the people who make their living off the deaf call “total communication”—because there was no way her daughter was going to be a cripple or even the tiniest bit dependent on anybody or anything. Her mother was pretty then, her hair trailing down her back beneath the brim of the suede cowgirl’s hat she’d bought on a trip to Mexico, her legs long and naked in a yellow sundress and two boy babies and a little deaf girl compressed in her arms—Dana didn’t know whether her memories of that time came from the photographs in the family album or what she’d seen and smelled and felt. When she closed her eyes she could see the fingers of palms etched against pale stucco, a river like an avenue of light, the new bridge (a regional joke: Napoléon had built it) humped over the water as if it were trying to swim.

  “You know,” she said, trying to hold on to the moment because in the next moment she was going to have to go into that store, “it’s easier to learn foreign Sign than a spoken language. Much easier. I picked up FSL right away because my mother thought I should meet deaf French kids.”

  “Iconicity,” Bridger said, surprising her. “Like when you sign ‘cup.’” He demonstrated, his left palm the saucer, his right cupped over it. “We learned it in the class I took. German, French, Chinese, whatever—a cup is a cup, right? What about Marcel Marceau—I bet he would have been good at it. Did he know Sign, you think?”

  Just then a movement on the far side of the street caught her eye, and she started. A man in a flowered shirt, baseball cap and wraparound sunglasses scrambled up to the door as if he were in a hurry—as if someone were chasing him, as if he were a fugitive—pulled back the door and disappeared inside. “Bridger!” she shouted (or might have shouted; she couldn’t tell, but it felt like a shout). “Bridger, it’s him!”

  She was out of the car before he was, a deaf woman in the middle of the street, cars coming both ways and she staring down a UPS man in a boxy brown UPS truck that was right there in front of her though she couldn’t hear his horn or the metallic keening of his brakes, and even as Bridger caught up to her and grabbed her arm she was telling herself to slow down, stay calm, focus. Then they were on the far side of the street, up on the sidewalk, and Bridger might have been saying something, but she wasn’t paying attention—her eyes were fixed on the door ahead of them. She saw her own reflection there, a shifting of shapes, the gleaming metal handle of the door, and she took a deep breath and stepped inside, Bridger right behind her.

  There were eight people in the place and she tried to take them all in simultaneously, including the heavyset woman behind the desk who looked up and gave her an expectant smile and the old man fumbling for change at one of the copy machines. Her heart slammed at her ribs. The overhead lights seemed to recede, painting a thin pale strip of illumination across the heads and shoulders of the eight figures in their various poses, bending, gesticulating, lips flapping on air—and where was he? Her eyes jumped from one to the other, and then suddenly there he was. There, at the back of the store, where the bank of mailboxes ran in a neat continuous file from waist-to shoulder-level: she saw the bright flash of the shirt first, then his profile under the bill of the cap as he stood over the wastebasket, discarding junk mail. Oblivious. Completely oblivious. As if he were the most innocent soul in the world. The son of a bitch. She couldn’t believe it.

  She felt Bridger wrap an arm round her waist, an admonitory tightness straining the ligaments of his wrist and fingers. Calm, he was telling her, stay calm. It took a moment—she was just staring, all the rage and disbelief she’d felt over the way she’d been violated rising in her till she was strung tight with it, ready for anything, the accusation, the physical assault, the spewing up of the deaf woman’s shriek that was so caustic and inhuman it could set off all the alarms up and down the block—and then Bridger disengaged his arm and she felt his fingers on her chin, urgently tugging her face around. That’s not him, he signed.

  She looked harder. Small Sign, very quiet: No, it is. It is.

  Bridger shook his head emphatically and her eyes went from him to the man in the cap and back again. “Not even close,” he said.

  By this point the man had finished with his mail and abruptly pivoted on the ball of one foot to hurry up the aisle toward them, a sheaf of what looked to be bills and a manila envelope clutched to his chest, and she saw how wrong she’d been—even with the sunglasses and the bill of the cap pulled down low, this man was nothing like the one in the photograph. He was older, hair graying at the fringes of the cap, his nose splayed across his face as if it had been molded of clay, lips bunched round a look of eternal harassment. He wasn’t the thief. He wasn’t Frank Calabrese or whatever his name was. He was nobody. She watched him plunge impatiently through the door and scurry off down the street and still the blood pounded in her veins.

  “All right,” Bridger said, swinging her round to face him, “we’re going up to the counter now and you’re going to be Dana Halter. Okay? You cool with that? Because I tell you, there’s no other way.”

  She wasn’t cool with it. Wasn’t down with the program or hip to it or copacetic or even just basically willing, but she let him guide her up to the counter and tried on a smile for the heavyset woman, who gave it right back to her. “Can I help you?” the woman said, and that was easy to read—context, context was all.

  “Yes, please,” Dana said, and dropped her eyes a moment while she extracted her driver’s license from her purse and laid it on the counter. “I’m Dana Halter?” she said, looking up again. “I just—I don’t know, I guess I misplaced my mailbox key…”

  The woman was younger than she’d first appeared. She was wearing a pink cable-knit sweater that gave an unfortunate emphasis to her shoulders and upper arms, her skin was pale to the point of anemia and she wore a pair of clunky-looking glasses with clear plastic frames. But her eyes were what mattered, and her eyes were nonjudgmental. She barely glanced at the license and then slid it back across the counter. “No problem,” she said, and her smile brightened, and then she said something else.

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  Dana saw the woman flick her eyes to Bridger and then Bridger said something.

  “She said,” he repeated, speaking slowly so that she could read his lips, “that there is a twenty-five-dollar fee for replacement keys and I said that was okay. Right, honey?”

  “Yes,” she said, nodding vigorously and holding the woman’s eyes, “sure. That’s only fair, and I’m sorry—it was my fault, not my fiancé’s.” She was elaborating now—lies always required elaboration. “So stupid of me.” She turned to Bridger, playing the airhead, the doll-face, the bimbette. “My bad, honey,” she said. She was beginning to enjoy this, especially the aftershock of the term “fiancé” on Bridger’s face. But then the woman said something else and she had to ask “What?” again.

  “Number?” the woman was saying. “What number?”

  This was what she’d been afraid of—any honest person, any normal person, would have had the number on the tip of her tongue, but Dana didn’t have it because she was an imposter—she wasn’t Dana Halter at all. Or not this Dana Halter. She felt her lips tighten. For a split second she looked away, averting her eyes like a criminal, a liar, a scam artist, and she struggled to control her voice as she repeated the version of the story she’d rehearsed about this being their second home and how they’d been away and how to her embar
rassment—Can you believe it?—she’d forgotten the number. But here was her ID—she thrust the driver’s license across the counter again, and dug out her social security card and a major credit card too—and she wondered sweetly if the woman could just look it up in her records?

  The smile was gone now and the woman’s eyes had lost their sympathy. She didn’t look suspicious so much as uneasy—an understanding was awakening inside her and Dana recognized it and for the first time in her life played to it. She stood absolutely still, poised at the counter in the silence that was eternal, and let her eyes do the talking for her. Yes, her eyes said, I’m different, and it hardly hurt at all to see that this time it was the woman who had to look away.

  Aside from the usual glut of flyers and one-time-only offers addressed hopefully to “Occupant,” there appeared to be three or four legitimate pieces of mail in the box. Dana caught the briefest glimpse of a commercial logo on one of the envelopes—was that a bill?—before bundling the whole business up in two trembling hands and willing herself to walk in a measured way to the exit, even turning to look over her shoulder and wave two appreciative fingers at the woman behind the counter. Bridger was waiting for her outside. Together, they crossed the street, careful to look both ways and present an air of calm to anybody who might be watching, and then they were in the car and the mail—Dana Halter’s mail—was theirs.