Talk Talk

by T. C. Boyle

  “You again?” Natalia’s tone was peevish, hard. “I told you. I already told you.”

  “Frank Calabrese,” the man said. “Is Frank here?”

  “Who?”

  He repeated himself. His voice took on a pleading quality. “Look, we’ve been victims of a crime—or she has.” He pointed to the woman. “My fiancée. She—somebody stole her identity. We’re looking for Dana Halter. Or Frank Calabrese. You sure he’s not here? Frank?”

  From where he was hiding, crouched in the bushes, and he would not go down on one knee and stain a good pair of Hugo Boss twill trousers for nothing, he made sure to take a clean mental snapshot of these two, because they were going to pay for this—he was going to make them pay, both of them—and that was a promise.

  The light in the entryway shone weakly, casting a jaundiced glow over the little gathering on the doorstep. Natalia’s face hardened. She looked ready to do battle, and that was a good sign—she was on his side, at least, and he felt in that moment that she was going to stay there, no matter what he wound up telling her. “Listen,” she said, her voice gone higher now, pinched and querulous, “there is nobody of this name, no Da-na, no Frank, nobody. This is not the correct house, understand?” A car pulled into the lot—the cream-colored Lexus that belonged to the Atkinsons, in one-eleven—and for a moment he felt his pulse leap as the headlights swept the bushes and then died. “If you come here to this house again,” Natalia was saying, her face a sallow over-laid mask in the rinse of yellow light, “to, to discommode me and my daughter, I will call the policeman.”

  “Yeah, you do that,” the guy snarled, trying to tough it out, but this was the same voice that had come at him over the phone and it had nothing behind it, nothing at all, and the door slammed and the night went quiet but for the solitary receding footsteps of Rick Atkinson on the gravel walk.

  And then the strangest thing: the two figures stayed there on the doorstep a long moment, conferring, but without saying a word. Their hands—they were working their hands like ghostly shrouded puppets, and it took him a moment to understand. They were deaf. Or she was deaf. She was the one who hadn’t spoken and so here she was juggling her hands as if she were molding something out of the air and passing it to him and then he juggled it and passed it back. It was so unexpected, so private and intimate, that Peck lost all consciousness of the moment. He felt like a voyeur—he was a voyeur—and his rage at what had just taken place cooked down into a sort of wonder as he watched them walk down the steps and up the path to the parking area. He was going to leave it at that—they were going, that was enough, and by morning he’d be gone too and all this would be behind him—but he recovered his wits in time to slip out of the shadows and follow them. Just to see what they would do next.

  Somehow they’d traced him to the condo, but what did that mean? He wasn’t Dana Halter anymore, he wasn’t Frank Calabrese. Frank Calabrese—that gave him a chill. How in Christ’s name did they get hold of that? But still, even if they called the cops and the cops came—a remote possibility—nothing would happen, or at least not immediately. Where was the proof? He’d deny everything, act bewildered. And then, if he had to, incensed. The cops could see just by looking at him, by the way he was dressed, by the way he held his ground at the door of his three-quarters-of-a-million-dollar luxury condo, that they were out of their league. These two must have known that. But then what were they doing—playing amateur detective? Looking to run him down, confront him, settle this outside the law? For all he knew they could have a gun. Anybody could have a gun, the rangiest no-chin kid on the street, the old lady pushing a shopping cart, housewives, mothers—guns were the currency of society, and he, personally, wanted nothing to do with them, especially not on the receiving end.

  The shadows played to him. He stayed out of sight, following the scrape of their shoes on the gravel path, watching their silhouettes bob against the hard fixed umbrella of light opening out of the pole at the far end of the lot. He saw them juggle their hands again when they reached their car—a black Jetta, California plates—and then they were speaking aloud, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying, her voice blurred and thumping at the syllables as if she had a blanket over her head, his voice blending with hers in a way that made them both indistinct. After a while, they climbed into the car and the doors slammed with two soft detonations, one on the tail of the other.

  And what was he thinking? He was thinking he could just step out of the bushes and lay the guy out, break him up, and her too, some applied discouragement to end it right here. But no, that wasn’t the way. The way was just to cut his losses and move on. He still had Natalia, he still had money—and a new Mercedes S500 in Bordeaux Red. Peterskill wasn’t Mill Valley, maybe, but he’d missed the leaves changing in the fall, snow for Christmas, all of that, and it wouldn’t be so bad, not once he got settled. Plus there’d be Florida, Florida in the winter, and they had this whole trip ahead of them with nothing to do but see the country and kick back and enjoy themselves.

  For a long while he crouched there in the bushes, watching the back end of the car, letting his mind run—Natalia would be in a state, no doubt about it, and there’d be no rest at all, not till he got her in the Mercedes and pulled the door shut behind him. The story, as it was evolving in his head, the one he would refine at length as they rolled cross-country, had to do with his bankruptcy, the failed restaurants, a fictitious name to smooth things out so he could track his investments, and yes, of course they were going to keep the condo for a summer place, no need to pack the dishes, towels, cutlery, and did she really think he was going to leave his wine cellar behind? He put a fist down in the wet to ease the pressure on his knees. There was a smell of rankness, of knife-shaped leaves and eucalyptus buds going over to rot. Across the lawn, up against the buildings, a bank of sprinklers started up with a hiss of released air. And then, finally, the Jetta’s brake lights flashed and the engine turned over and he watched the car back out and glide across the lot to pass on into the black grip of the night.

  When he got out of prison he didn’t spend a whole lot of time dwelling on his hurts and sorrows, on what could have been and what Gina had done to him and all the wasted effort and sweat and blood he’d put into Pizza Napoli and Lugano or the fact that he was bankrupt and an ex-offender who didn’t even have his silver Mustang anymore because he’d sold it and everything else he owned to pay his fish-faced lawyer. No, he was too wise for that. His wisdom had been accumulated through the twelve-ton nights in his bunk and the zombie days doing food preparation and staying out of trouble—and he had to work hard at that. Had to work to rein himself in. Dwell deep. Control the rage that beat in him like a hammer every minute of every day. Because there were some very twisted people inside and the sole meaning and extent of their lives was to fuck with you, and to respond in kind was a lock on extending your sentence. He’d heard the stories. And he put his head down and counted the days off the calendar and when push came to shove he let his hands speak for him, hard and fast, so fast nobody saw it coming and if some dickhead had to go to the infirmary with a pair of sausage eyes and a broken nose, it was nothing to him. He wasn’t like the rest of them—of all the put-upon victims of circumstance in the place he was the single one who really truly didn’t belong because he hadn’t done anything anybody else wouldn’t have done in his place and there was no way he was going to complicate things by letting people get to him. That was the beginning of wisdom.

  And then there was Sandman. The College of Sandman.

  Sandman had been around. His most recent infraction had, regrettably, involved a certain degree of forcible persuasion, which was why he’d been locked up here amongst the violent offenders. As Peck had. The rest of the inmates, to a man, were losers, the kind of scumbuckets and degenerates who deserved what was coming to them—after a year inside Peck felt like a Republican: lock them up and throw away the key—but Sandman was different. He was educated. He believed in things—the envir
onment, clean air, clean water. The man could go on for hours about restoration ecology or the reintroduction of the wolf and how capitalism had sucked up all the resources of the world just to spit them back out as hair dryers—he had a real thing for hair dryers—and greenback dollars. Six-three, tattooed over most of his body, with a physique honed in the weight room, Sandman, who wasn’t much older than he was, showed him the way. “You know how they say, ‘Be all you can be’? In those Army recruiting ads? Well, I say, ‘Be anybody you can be.’”

  He was talking about the Internet. He was talking about the greed of the credit card companies, online auto loans, instant credit, social security numbers skimmed at the fast-food outlet and the gas station and up for sale on half a dozen sites for twenty-five dollars per. He was talking about Photoshop and color copiers, government seals, icons, base identifiers. The whole smorgasbord. Be anybody you can be.

  Two hundred dollars. That was the gate money they gave you when you walked out the door after eleven and a half months of chopping cabbage, dicing onions and sucking up the reek of the grill, burgers, dogs, sloppy Joe on a bun, strip steak that was like jerky softened in water and then jerked all over again. Most of the morons blew the whole two hundred the first day on women and drugs and then they were out on the street trying on one scam or another and the probation officer just begging for a chance to send them back up. But not Peck, not William Peck Wilson.

  He went straight back to Peterskill—to the office park on Route 6 where the orthopedists and urologists and pediatricians had their offices. Out back were the Dumpsters. It took him maybe an hour, slinking around like an immigrant bagging cans for redemption, and he had what he wanted: a sheaf of discarded medical forms, replete with names, addresses, birth dates and social security numbers. Then he sat in a bar over a scotch and made a phone call to Dudley, the busboy, because he needed two things: a ride and a connection. Dudley, he reasoned, was the very man to hook him up with a false ID because Dudley had been clubbing since he was sixteen in a state where the drinking age was twenty-one, and he wasn’t disappointed. For less than half his gate money, Peck was able to get himself a social security card and driver’s license, with color photo, in the name of one of the patients at A&O Medical, and after that it was easy. He opened a checking account with the remaining hundred dollars and started writing checks for merchandise, which he turned around and sold for cash, installed himself in a hotel and applied for Visa and American Express cards. Once the cards arrived he took a cab out to the local Harley dealer. He’d always wanted a Harley, ever since he’d seen Easy Rider on TV as a kid, and Sandman had stoked him on the idea during their late-night fantasy excursions, a whole vista opening up in the shadows, blooming like a radiant perfect flower, the vision so intense he could feel the wind in his hair and see the sun spread like liquid gold across the road in front of him.

  The dealer was a fat-faced longhair with what they called a hitch in his git-along, wearing a leather Harley jacket over an embroidered white shirt and some sort of racing medallion dangling on a cord from his throat. He was clueless, absolutely clueless. And Peck Wilson sat down with him and neatly signed all the paperwork in his new name, the credit references sterling, the bike—an Electra Glide in black with the Harley logo a sweet blaze of red on the swell of the fuel tank—being prepped even as they ran each other a line of bullshit about unholy speeds and wrecks and wild men they’d known, and then he swung a leg over the thing, fired it up with an annunciatory roar and blew on down the road and out of town. For good.

  It wasn’t quite dawn yet, the stars gone a shade paler in the eastern sky and Mount Tam to the west still an absence in the deep slough of dark and fog. Nothing had been moving fifteen minutes earlier when he’d backed out of the garage for a run to the coffee shop, and now, as the heavy wooden door slapped shut behind him, he eased himself out of the car with the cardboard tray—the same stuff they made egg cartons out of, and how was it he’d never noticed that before? Balanced there, in the molded slots, were two large double lattes and a hot chocolate with extra whipped cream and a white paper bag of assorted croissants and half a dozen éclairs to glut Madison into a sugary road-enhanced daze. She didn’t travel well, and that was going to be a problem, but Natalia had spent a couple hundred bucks on coloring books and a miniature farm set and videos for the TV monitor built into the back of the seat.

  The coffee was hot, the croissants still warm, but instead of going right upstairs with them, he set the cardboard tray on the hood of the car and eased open the side door next to the garage. For a long moment he stood there, watching, listening, taking in the cold rich damp scent of the sea for the last time. And then, just to satisfy himself, he took a quick stroll through the lot, checking the cars that sat inert under the thin skin of the dew. He was calm, breathing easily, feeling optimistic about what lay ahead, though he hated having to leave—hated being forced out, hated the miserable interfering sons of bitches who’d come after him and turned everything upside down—and when he’d gone through the lot, he walked the gravel path all the way round the perimeter, the mist (what was it Madison called it?—the breath of the bay) rising up to envelop him and let him go again.

  Natalia was perched on the edge of the couch, in a green velvet suit jacket, skirt, stockings, heels, waiting for him. She was applying her makeup—she never went anywhere, not even down to the corner store for a box of crackers, without her makeup—when he came through the door. She didn’t smile. Didn’t even look up from her compact. “Madison is still sleeping,” she said.

  He set the tray down before her like the offering it was. “Good. Maybe I can just carry her out to the car and she won’t wake up till we get to Tahoe, what do you think?”

  She didn’t answer. He’d packed everything the night before—early into the morning, actually, and he was exhausted, looking forward to the hotel, the fresh sheets, room service, the blissful anonymity—and he noticed with a tick of satisfaction that the new matching overnight bags, Natalia’s and Madison’s, had been set by the door. The hassling was over, the pouting, the arguments, the tears, the pleading and the demands, and the new phase was about to begin. They were minutes from being out of here, turn the key and never look back.

  “I got her hot chocolate,” he said, “the kind she likes, from the bakery? And éclairs. For a special treat.”

  Natalia was not the sort of mother to buzz over a child’s sugar intake. To her mind, whatever you could squeeze out of a glutted overblown capitalistic society was a good in itself, and éclairs were the smallest expression of it. A look for him now, above the mirror. “Yes,” she said, faintly amused, conciliatory, “that is very nice. You are a very nice man”—and he could see she wanted to speak his name, wanted to say “Da-na,” but checked herself. She bent forward to remove the plastic lid of the takeout cup. “This is the double latte?”

  “They both are.”

  She brought the cup to her lips, the white foam clinging like drift to the waxen sheen of her lipstick before her tongue melted it away. The simple animal satisfactions, sugar, cream, caffeine. He reached for his own cup. The smell of coffee, reminiscent and forward-looking at the same time, filled the room. “Very nice,” she concluded, the fingers of one hand probing at the neck of the confectioner’s bag even as she sipped at the latte and gave him a glossy uncomplicated smile.

  They were complicit. He felt gratitude for that, for what she was giving up for him, for her trust and faith, and he swore to himself in that moment that he’d do everything in his power to live up to it. Easing himself down on the back of the sofa, he ran a hand over the side of her face, caressing an ear, letting her hair sift through his fingers. “I am,” he said. “I am a nice guy.” And he meant it.

  The coffee was still warm in the pit of his stomach when he lifted Madison out of her bed and carried her down to the car. She’d folded herself up in the fetal position, her thumb in her mouth, hair fallen across her face in a silken swirl, and he took the blankets a
nd bedding with her, one big bundle, the warmth rising from the furnace of her, her pupils roaming beneath the lids in dreamtime, and how could he not think of Sukie, of his own daughter, back in Peterskill and as remote from him as an alien on another planet? As he laid Madison across the backseat and folded the blankets over her bare feet, he had a fleeting picture of the two of them together, the two girls, at the park—at Depew Park, in Peterskill—running hand in hand through the dandelions and the long amber grass, white legs flashing in concert.

  It was a mistake to go back to Peterskill, he knew it—he’d known it all along. But it sang to him in his blood—it was what he knew—and his daughter was there. And Sandman. There was a house in Garrison, up in the woods and with a view of the Hudson, late nineteenth century, stone, with hand-hewn beams, remodeled in what Sandman called the prevailing bourgeois fashion and dernier cri of consumer convenience, and it was his for the taking, fifty-five hundred a month with an option to buy, Sandman contributing the deposit and talking up the owners, who were retiring to Florida but not yet entirely sure they wanted to give up the house for good, the credit check done and the papers just waiting there for Bridger Martin to blow into town and affix his signature. That was all to the good, and after vagabonding around the country on a nice extended vacation, it would be a relief to get there and start over—the schools were good and Natalia could shop till she dropped in Manhattan. He wouldn’t want to hit any of the old haunts, though, wouldn’t want to run into anybody, even his mother—especially her. Or Gina. It wouldn’t do to have people calling him Peck, not anymore. But Garrison was the next town up the line and he figured he’d be spending most of his time in the City, anyway, and with Sukie it was just a matter of hooking back up with the lawyer and getting those Sunday visits quietly arranged again. He was just Dad to her, not Peck or Dana or Frank or Bridger, just Dad, and no one the wiser. Or maybe that was a dream. Maybe the cops would be waiting for him at McDonald’s, because why wouldn’t Gina sell him out, why wouldn’t her mother?