Talk Talk

by T. C. Boyle

  The surprise was Bridger. He was so wound up he actually snatched the bundle out of her hands and began pawing through it, impatiently tossing newsprint flyers and glossy brochures to the floor at his feet. There was an expression of willed triumph on his face, something hard there she’d never recognized before—from the look of him you would have thought he was the one whose identity had been stolen. He came up with the letters—three of them, addressed to the postbox—but it was she who slipped the bill emblazoned with the PG&E logo out of the pile and lifted it exultantly to the light. He might have said “Bingo!” or “Eureka!” but he didn’t have to. They both knew what it meant. They had him now. They had their man.

  “Open it,” he said.

  She could feel the smile aching on her lips. “It’s a federal offense.”

  “Horseshit,” he said, or something like it. “What about stealing somebody’s identity—what kind of offense is that? Open it.” He made a snatch at the envelope then, but she was too quick for him, shifting it to her left hand and secreting it in the space between door and seat cushion. She was afraid suddenly, frightened at the prospect of what was about to be revealed. They were so close. The face of the thief, his mocking eyes, the cocky thrust of his chin, came back to her. So close. Her stomach clenched around nothing, around the remains of the stale croissant and sour coffee they’d got at a gas station hours ago. Bridger said something, terse and urgent—she could feel the force of his expelled breath—but she dropped her eyes and shut him out. He tried to turn her face to him, his fingers at her throat, and she shook him off. Silently, deep in her mind, she counted to ten. Then she tore open the envelope.

  The address inside, the service address, stared out from the page, and it gave her a jolt that was almost physical, as if her auditory nerves had been suddenly restored and someone had screamed it in her ear:

  109 Shelter Bay Village

  Mill Valley, CA 94941

  Bridger slammed his hand down on the dash and raised his chin to howl in triumph, and then he pumped his fist twice in the air and pulled his lips back to emit what must have been a hiss of jubilation. Context told her what it was: “Yessss!”

  The other envelopes revealed little—the first two proved, respectively, to be ads for real estate and equity loans, addressed in a neat computer-generated script meant to mimic human agency and dupe the addressee into opening it. The third one, though, was more interesting. It was addressed to The Man, Box 2120, Mill Valley, California, and inside was a thrice-folded sheet of lined paper torn from a yellow legal pad. A cryptic message was scrawled across it at a forty-five-degree angle in a looping oversized longhand: Hey, that thing we talked about is on, no problema. See you soon. Ciao, Sandman.

  “‘See you soon,’” she read aloud, looking to Bridger.

  He had on his wondering look, his features floating across the pale globe of his face like drifting continents. His hair bristled. He ran a hand through it. “Is he going someplace? I mean, Dana, Frank, whatever his name is—is he planning a trip maybe?”

  “What’s the postmark?”

  Bridger turned the letter over. It had been postmarked in Garrison, New York, four days earlier. “Where’s Garrison?”

  “I think it’s near Poughkeepsie,” she said. “Or maybe Peterskill. Maybe that’s closer.”

  “So what’s that—an hour, hour and a half north of the city?”

  She shrugged. “I guess. Yeah.”

  The sun was on the car and though it was cool enough outside—in the low seventies, she guessed—she began to feel it and turned to crank down the window. When they’d come back to the car, she’d slid into the driver’s seat—it was hers, after all, though Bridger had done nearly all the driving to this point—and now she looked out on the quietly bustling street and felt a tickle of emotion in her throat. “What now?” she wondered aloud, and Bridger pulled her to him, awkwardly, across the wheel. They embraced a moment and then he leaned back so she could see his face and the answer there: “We go after him.”

  “Us?” Now she went cold, but it was a steadily blowing crystalline kind of cold, and her fear was gone. She made the argument for its own sake. “But what about the police? Shouldn’t we just give them the information?”

  He gave her a look of disgust. “The police? Right, yeah. And go through the same kind of crap we did back in San Roque? Plus, what if he is planning to light out for the”—it took her a minute to catch this—“territories? To”—he finger-spelled it—“Poughkeepsie or wherever? Or what if this isn’t even his house?” He didn’t blink. Just stared into her eyes, earnest, angry, fired up, all his frustration, his attitude, his love come boiling to the surface. But was it love? Or was it just some twitch of the male ego, the need to go mano a mano, the testosterone speaking?

  No matter. She wasn’t going to think past the moment. She had an address and there was a thief hiding behind it. Even as she twisted the key to turn the engine over and grind the starter—and here Bridger provided the ears for her and the facial expression too—she knew she was going to chase this thing down till there was nowhere left to go.

  The fog on the hills had an apocalyptic look, as if it were composed of some fatal gas poised to descend over the trees and rob the breath of every living thing, and yet the sun was still high and vital and the breeze untainted. On another day, in another mood, she might have found the fog a palliative, the cornerstone of the Bay Area’s charm, but not today, not now. It was five o’clock. They’d gone to Noah’s Bagels for lunch, though she wasn’t hungry (or she was, but when the food arrived she found she couldn’t eat), and that had given them some time to decompress and think out their next move. Or at least consider it, because they both knew that nothing was going to stop them from driving over to Shelter Bay Village, a mere five minutes away. But then what? Would they confront him? Call 911? Knock him down and bind him up themselves?

  What they decided, finally, was to reconnoiter the place (scope it out, as Bridger would say, and she had to assume the phrase derived from “telescope” in some way, but then wouldn’t it have been more accurate to say “binoc it out”?), just to see what they could see. Now they were here, in front of a recessed bank of semi-detached redwood condominiums constructed to maximize the views, strolling hand in hand along the gravel path that edged the water in a gently sweeping arc beneath a promenade of palms. And yes, those were binoculars dangling from her neck, and if anyone were to ask, well, she was just another innocuous and slightly dotty birdwatcher, and wasn’t that a great blue heron out there? And look at the egrets!

  Bridger’s eyes were fixed on the deck of the near building, the one they’d identified from the front as #109. Was there movement there? He touched her arm and she lifted the binoculars to her eyes, trying to be discreet. At first she saw nothing, sheets of light glancing off the big flat opaque windows till they went from silver to black, and then she recalibrated and a figure materialized before her, the figure of a woman hovering over a glass-topped table. A young woman. Pretty features, dark hair wound up in a coil at the crown of her head, blue top, black capris. She was wiping down the table, that was it, and now—suddenly, heart pounding, Dana swung the binoculars away and pointed a finger out over the water, as if she’d been tracking the descent of a flock of mergansers—the woman was staring right at her.

  Dana felt Bridger’s hand go to the binoculars and she let go of them—he was playing the mime too, jerking the instrument back and forth as if following the imaginary birds, but what his lips said was, “Who is that? The wife, you think?”

  Still focused on the patch of water that lay just beyond the faded redwood deck of #109, she could only nod. “I guess,” she said. “If this is the right place.”

  Bridger’s eyes shot to the deck and then went back to the binoculars. “Did you see anyone else? A man? Is he there?”

  In the end, the tension was too much for her to bear. She gently extracted the binoculars from his grip, let her gaze rove over the surface of
the bay a moment, and then swung him round by one arm and led him off in the opposite direction, two bird lovers on the track of something elusive. When they’d gone fifty paces, she leaned into him and they both halted, looking out to the water. “What now?” she asked, and if she could have heard herself—if she were a character in a novel—she might have described her tone as forlorn. Certainly she felt that way. The woman had looked right at her—or had seemed to. There was a face to it now, another face, flesh and blood, dark eyes, dark hair, capris.

  Bridger loomed into her field of vision. “I say we ring the doorbell.”

  He was right. She knew he was. “Couldn’t we just…wait? To see, I mean. If he shows up, gets out of his car—we could see his car and get the license plate…”

  “And then what?” His mouth was drawn so thin it was like a paper cut. He was determined, she could see that. A breeze came up then, clean and sweet, and blew the hair across her face so that for a moment she was hidden and what he said next didn’t register. But his fingers were there, gently probing, and he brought her back with a sweep of his hand. “Come on,” he urged. “We’ll go together. Just ring the bell, that’s all. We’re visiting. Looking for the Goldsteins. Ask her do you know where the Goldsteins live and just see what happens, see if the son of a bitch is there—maybe he’ll answer the door himself, and that’s all we need. Just that.”

  She didn’t argue. All at once they were strolling again, following the gravel path as it looped back across the gentle grassy undulations and neatly recessed flowerbeds the landscaper had thought to provide so the denizens of Shelter Bay Village could delight in the contrast as they gazed out over the property to the flat shining void of the water and the hills beyond. A woman in jeans and a windbreaker emerged from behind the bank of buildings and jogged toward them, a small black dog scrambling ahead of her on the tether of its leash. Someone was getting out of a car in the lot—another woman, dipping forward to retrieve her purse and a bag of groceries. Dana felt as if she were about to lose consciousness. Something flitted before her eyes, but it wasn’t palpable, and then they were on the doorstep—a deep-pile mat, two pots of begonias, brass knocker—and she was glad she couldn’t hear the sound the buzzer made in response to the weight of Bridger’s index finger.

  The door pulled abruptly open and the woman was there, prettier even than she’d looked at a distance, and there was a child there too, four or five years old, a girl, tugging with all her weight at her mother’s wrist—her mother, this was her mother, and anybody could have seen that. The woman gave them a blank look. “Yes?” she said. “Can I help you?”

  Bridger said something then and for a moment it seemed to immobilize her: “Is Dana here?”

  The child kept tugging, chanting “Mommy, Mommy,” and something else Dana couldn’t read, and the woman’s face changed in that instant, the eyes retreating, lips hardening round the bitter savor of the lie. “No,” she said, “you must have the wrong house.” She glanced away to shoot her daughter an admonitory look and then came back to them. “There is no one of that name here.”

  Two

  “WHAT DO YOU MEAN they asked for me? By name?”

  He’d just come through the front door, feeling harassed, his shirt soaked under the arms, and he hadn’t had a drink yet or anything to eat either and the first thing she said to him was that somebody had been there looking for him. That snapped him to attention, all right. That froze him. Right there in the front hall, the three white plastic bags of takeout Chinese dangling from his fingertips and the unread newspaper pinned to his chest. He’d spent the better part of the afternoon and well into the evening hassling over things, the little details that prick you like multiple beestings till your flesh is scored and bleeding and you barely have the energy or will to do what you have to do—like take three carloads of Natalia’s clothes and accessories to the storage unit in Larkspur she’d insisted on renting and FedEx six cardboard cartons of dresses, handbags, shoes and kiddie toys to Sandman’s place in Croton—and now she’d sprung this on him. He stood there, stupefied.

  She was wearing her martyred look, the look she’d put on two nights ago and hadn’t taken off since, the savage dark strokes of her eyeliner crushing the life out of her eyes, her mouth set in a permanent pout, her nostrils flaring with self-pity. “No,” she said, “not you,” throwing it over her shoulder as she turned away from the door, padded across the room on bare feet and flung herself down on the couch that was strewn with the chaos of her packing. “Not you,” she repeated in a withering voice. “Da-na. They want Da-na.”

  For two days and nights it had been going on like this, the aftermath of his confession a rain of ashes, the village gone and all the people in it, no-man’s-land, and he’d had it. Enough. Enough already. Before he knew what he was doing he’d dropped the bags to the floor—and he didn’t give a shit if the war wonton soup leaked into the Szechuan scallops and leached right on through to the carpet and if the carpet was ruined and the floorboards underneath and everything else all the way on down to the goddamn basement—and he was there and he had her by the arm, all the rage in him concentrated in the grip of the five fingers of his right hand. “Don’t fuck with me,” he said, low and hard, tuning his voice to the register of violence the way he’d learned to do when he was inside, when people were holding their breath and listening and the whole place went suddenly quiet. “You just tell me, you understand? No more of this shit.”

  She looked alarmed—scared—her eyes flaring up and then dwindling down to nothing, and that made him feel bad, but not enough to loosen his grip. He jerked her arm, shook her like one of the big fifty-pound sacks of flour stacked up on the shelves in the back room at Pizza Napoli. She didn’t cry out. Didn’t protest. She said, “A man and a woman. For you, they ask for you.”

  Still he held her and he could feel the pressure beating at the sclera of his eyes as if it was too much to contain, as if it would all blow out of him like spew. “How old?” And when she tightened her mouth, a second’s hesitation, he jerked at her arm again. “I said, how old?”

  “You are leaving a mark.” Her voice was cold, distant, as if she were alluding to an arm that was attached to someone else in another apartment altogether. He became aware then of the constricted burst of cartoon voices emanating from Madison’s room, a sudden crazed drawn-out cackle of a laugh, crepitating music. He let go. Natalia gave him a look of resentment, as if he were the one at fault. She wouldn’t rub at her arm—she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. She was going to suffer. She was a martyr. “The man maybe twenty-five, I don’t know,” she said finally. “The woman thirty. Tall, pretty. Blue jeans she was wearing and a tan jacket from bebe, one hundred and thirty-nine dollars on special sale. Okay?”

  “They weren’t selling anything? You’re sure, right? They asked for me by name, not ‘Mr. Halter’ or ‘the man of the house’ or anything like that?”

  In one swift sure movement she snaked away from him, sliding over the arm of the couch and spinning to her feet like an acrobat. Her eyes lashed at him. She clenched her fists at her sides. “What do you tell me—for months, what do you tell me? You want me to be Mrs. Halter. Mrs. Halter! And who am I to be now? Mrs. Nobody? Yes?”

  He took a step toward her and she backed up against the double doors that gave onto the deck. “Shut it,” he said. “Just shut it. We leave in the morning, first thing. So get this shit”—and here he snatched an armful of clothes from the couch—“in your fucking suitcase and get your fucking suitcase in the fucking car, you hear me?”

  “Oh, I hear you,” and she was rubbing her arm now, “Mister Martin. If that is even your name. Is that your name? Huh, Bridger? Is that your name?”

  He had no time for this. A man and a woman, two nouns that beat in his head with the force of revelation. They knew what he looked like, knew where he lived. They could be out there now, watching him. He looked past her, through the windows and out beyond the deck where the colors were neutering d
own toward night and the water had blackened along the gray fading shore. Something released in him then—he had no time—just as Madison appeared in the doorway calling “Ma-ma” in a piteous attenuated voice and both of them turned to her. “It’s all right,” he heard himself say. “I got the food. It’s right here. Right here in the hallway.”

  They were sitting at the kitchen table, an interval of peace, lingering, the candles lit, wine poured, the chopsticks at their lips, and Madison, revitalized, telling them the plot of a movie she’d seen about a dog and a cat on a cross-country trek, when the doorbell rang. If he’d allowed his internal motor to idle over dinner—and he didn’t care how crazy things got, dinner was sacrosanct, because if you didn’t sit down over dinner you weren’t even civilized—now it revved suddenly, so suddenly he didn’t even know how he’d got through the double doors and out onto the deck, ready to drop down a story into the flower bed below. “I’m not here,” he called to Natalia, slipping a leg over the rail, “you never even heard of me.” And he eased himself down till he was dangling by his arms, then dropped to the ground.

  It took all of sixty seconds, legs and arms pumping, and he was around front, letting the fronds and tendrils of the vegetation conceal him. There were two figures on the doorstep—a man and a woman—and Natalia was just opening the door. The man—he was in his twenties, soft-looking, with spiked hair, a two-tone jacket and the oversized black jeans the street punks and club aficionados affected—was the one who spoke up, because the woman (and here it hit him: Dana Halter, she was Dana Halter, in the flesh) just stood there as if she’d been molded out of wax. And she was something to look at. She had Natalia’s hair, thick and dark, though it twisted out and away from her scalp and hung loose over the collar of her tan jacket and she was taller, slumping her shoulders awkwardly because this was no fun for her. Somebody had assumed her identity, fucked with her life, and she was slumping her shoulders because she was embarrassed by the whole thing. But not so embarrassed she was about to just give it up and let the credit card companies and the insurance people sort it out. That gave him pause. Who was she? Why was she doing this to him? Was it payback, was that what she wanted? And the guy, Bridger—what was it to him?