Talk Talk

by T. C. Boyle

  “We have to get rational about this,” he was saying, or at least that was what she thought he was saying. Rational, wasn’t that it? Of course he might have been talking about Rashomon, the Kurosawa film, and for the tiniest sliver of a second she wondered just how the three of them—she, Bridger and the thief—fit into that scenario, with its shifting perspective and deconstructed narrative. She saw Toshiro Mifune, his mouth a rictus of fear and aggression, flailing his sword, and then she was back to Bridger, who was saying something else now, something she was too tired to process.

  They were in a nondescript restaurant, fake wood paneling, lights so dim you could barely make out the menu, tuna on rye with a sliver of dill pickle for $9.95 and three dollars for iced tea. It was late in the afternoon now, high summer but wintry for all that, a damp high-altitude gloom hanging over the town as if this weren’t California at all, but someplace perennially dreary. Like Tibet. Was Tibet dreary? Her mind was wandering. She was exhausted—and hungry—and here was the tuna sandwich she’d ordered herself in a voice that must have lost all control of the long vowels and those nearly impossible fricatives (a side of french fries) because the waitress had given her the interplanetary stare and she felt like some animal on a leash, but she didn’t care: this was her life and there was nothing she could do about it. Not in her present condition. Plus she had Bridger to deal with—she’d dragged him into this, and now he was a victim too (I don’t even have a Citibank card, he protested, and she imagined him whining, his voice reduced, plaintive, weak). Bridger was upset—she couldn’t blame him—but her eyes dropped to the sandwich and shut him out.

  He hadn’t stopped talking even to draw breath since she’d pulled that charge slip out of the jacket pocket, and what was the term for that? Logorrhea. Yes, another SAT word to drill her students with, but she didn’t have any students, not anymore. She was wandering, again she was wandering, and she was thinking, unaccountably, of the talk fests they used to have in the dorm at Gallaudet, in Sign mainly, but with people speaking aloud too in a way that was all but unintelligible to a hearie, a kind of sing-along moan that underscored the signs. Talk talk. That was what happened when the deaf got together, a direct translation into English—they talked a lot, talked all the time, talked the way Bridger was talking now, only with their hands. Index finger of the four hand at the mouth, tapping, tapping to show the words coming out. When deaf get together talk talk all the time. Communication, the universal need. Information. Access. Escape from the prison of silence. Talk, talk, talk.

  Bridger’s hand was on her wrist, the wrist of the hand that held the tuna sandwich as it moved to her lips. “You’re making those noises,” he said.

  She looked around her. People were watching. She tried to suppress the impulse, but it was almost unconscious, autonomic, a reaction to stress that most deaf people shared: she was emitting, had been emitting, a soft high-pitched keening sound, as if she were a dolphin washed ashore, and it embarrassed her. Her own throat produced these noises, her own larynx, and she had no control over them. “Sorry,” she said, and signed it too, right hand, palm facing in, the slow circle over her heart.

  “You’re not listening,” he said.

  “I am,” she lied.

  He looked away in exasperation, his features pinched, eyes rolling upward, and that made her angry, but she didn’t want to make a scene, or any more of a scene than she’d already made with her dolphin noises, so she wiped her face of expression and focused on him. What he was talking about, the gist of it anyway, was that they were both tired and incapable of making a decision at this point (“I’m not going back,” she interrupted him, “and that son of a bitch is not going to get away with this, I swear, even if I have to crawl on my belly—or my abdomen, my abdomen—from here to New York, I’m going to nail him, you hear me?”), and that they needed to check into a motel, get some rest and decide what to do in the morning, because they were just frustrating themselves driving around looking for nothing, for a car that was a hundred miles away by now.

  “I found him before,” she countered. “Didn’t I?”

  “Yeah, I know—the deaf have some kind of ESP, right? And it was amazing, I admit it, but you don’t really believe in all that, do you?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Because if you do, maybe you can tell me what this jerk is going to do next, maybe you can visualize it, picture him cruising down the open road with our money in his pockets, free money, everything free—he doesn’t have to worry about looking for the cheapest motel in town, does he? No, he’s going to stay at the Ritz Carlton, he’s going to—”

  She set the sandwich down so she could use her hands. “He’s Frank Calabrese,” she said, finger-spelling it beneath the words, “and he’s going back to New York. And you know what?”

  He lifted his eyebrows, leaned in close on the twin props of his elbows so that his face was inches from hers. The waitress, probably nineteen or twenty but so petite and baby-faced she looked more like twelve, darted her eyes nervously at them, and Dana felt distracted. There was a TV mounted on the near wall, ghost figures going through their silent motions. She felt a wave of depression crash over her even as Bridger threw it back at her: “What?”

  “There’s nothing to discuss. I don’t care if I have a hundred nights’ sleep in a row, I’m not going to change my mind.” Then she closed her mouth, shot a withering glance round the restaurant, and used her hands exclusively: Whether you come along or not, I’m going after him.

  They checked into the Gold Country Motel with her credit card—neither of Bridger’s was good, both maxed out thanks to Frank Calabrese—and she showered and then stretched herself across the white slab of the queen-size bed and stared at the ceiling like a zombie while Bridger paced back and forth, one hand pinning the phone to his ear while the other swooped, plunged and snatched at the air to underline the specifics of his distress. First he dialed the credit card companies, and then the CRAs, and it seemed to take him forever. She couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t even close her eyes. Her head throbbed where she’d hit the windshield and she seemed to have irritated something in her left knee when she slammed her way into the car in the parking lot of the restaurant outside Sacramento. At Bridger’s insistence they’d stopped at a drugstore and picked up a tube of Neosporin and a package of Band-Aid sport strips, and she’d spent ten minutes dabbing at the wound—it was a purple blotch, like a birthmark, with a crusted gash in the center of it—but it was superficial and it was already healing and she didn’t really want to call even more attention to herself by walking around with a shining square flesh-colored patch stuck to her head, so she’d parted her hair and combed it over to at least partially hide the contusion.

  At some point, exhausted, she did manage to fall asleep, and when she woke some indeterminate time later, she found Bridger lying unconscious beside her. He was on his back, his mouth open wide, and he was breathing with the ponderous tranquillity of the heavy snorer, though it was nothing to her. She remembered his warning her that he snored when they’d first started sleeping together—other people had complained about it (i.e., girlfriends), but she wouldn’t complain, would she? He’d offered up the proposition with a smile and she’d given him the smile back and said that she was afraid she’d just have to tough it out.

  She’d pulled the blinds for privacy when they’d checked in, but the spaces between the slats still showed the same insubstantial light she’d fallen asleep to, so unless she’d slept through the night and this was dawn she was looking at, it must have been eight or nine or so. Well past dinnertime. She felt her stomach rumble—peristalsis, and there was another word—and realized with a sudden keen apprehension that she was hungry. Starved, actually. She’d been too keyed up to eat much of the ten-dollar tuna sandwich and the last time she’d eaten before that was the previous night when they went out for fast food and left Frank Calabrese his window of opportunity to slip back into his garage—or maybe he’d been there all along, lyin
g low. Plotting. Stealing. Working himself up for his big car-chase scene. The thought of him stuck in her mind like a dart—he was right there in her moment of waking, the last thing she thought about when she fell off to sleep and the first when she opened her eyes; before long she’d be dreaming about him.

  She pushed herself up to a sitting position. The motel was so cheap there was no clock radio, with its LED display, to orient her—they’d scouted three other places before settling on this one, which was twelve dollars less with her Triple-A discount—and she wondered what she’d done with her watch. She’d taken it off, hadn’t she, when she’d showered? That was the first thing she’d done, the minute the man behind the counter (bearded, with a turban and a nose ring clamped round a red stone, a garnet, or maybe it was just glass) had given them the key and she’d flung open the door and dumped her suitcase on the bed, because the whole business of the past two days had made her feel unclean, dirty right down to her bones, and at least the water had been hot. Now she let her feet find the floor and went into the bathroom to look for her watch, because the first rule of motels was that everything had to be put away at all times or you’d wind up leaving half of it behind. She was in her bra and panties, her clothes balled up on the wet linoleum of the bathroom floor, and there was her watch, on the cracked, vaguely white porcelain of the bathroom sink: eight forty-five. Her stomach stirred again, and as she strapped the watch round her wrist, she was already moving back into the room to wake Bridger.

  He hadn’t moved. He was stretched out atop the covers, his limbs splayed, looking helpless and bereft, a faint quivering about his lips and nostrils as the expelled air shook through him. She felt bad for him. Felt bad for herself. But he was there for her, at least there was that—if ever anyone had passed the test, it was him. She spent a moment standing over the bed, gazing down at him, not thinking about love, not consciously, but stirred nonetheless by a rush of hormonal assertions, imperatives, desires. After a while, she bent forward and pressed her mouth to his and held it there, just held it, as if she were resuscitating him.

  The restaurant they chose for dinner was a bit more upscale than the lunch place—softly lit, big Kentia palms in earthenware pots, linen-covered tables, clean plaster walls painted a shade of apricot—and when they’d paused outside before the recessed shrine that displayed the menu, she liked not only the prices but the vegetarian bill of fare. “Enough fast food,” she said, swinging round on Bridger as couples strolled by and the light began to fade over the mountains, “enough burgers and fries. Let’s have something healthy for a change.”

  He shrugged, in full passive mode. He’d canceled his cards, put a security alert on his credit reports, slept, showered and used the toilet, but he was still in shock. As they pushed through the door, her arm looped through his, he said something she didn’t catch, and in the momentary distraction of addressing the hostess and following her to their table, he didn’t repeat it.

  Now, as they sat there over the menus—she’d ordered a glass of white wine; he was having a beer—she said, “I didn’t catch what you said back there at the door.”

  Another shrug. “Oh, it was nothing. I just—I don’t think I have more than fifty bucks on me. Toto.”

  “No problem. My treat.” Her hands unfolded to harmonize with her words. “It’s all on me, everything—at least until you get your new cards. They can overnight them, right? And you can still use the cash machine—”

  “Overnight them where?”

  That was when the waitress returned with their drinks, and on her face the look Dana knew so intimately. It was a look borne out of the drink order and maybe some long-distance reconnaissance from the waitress’ station, the probing look, the ready judgment. “Who had the white wine?” the waitress asked, just to hear Dana say, “That’s me,” though with a party of two—one man, one woman—even a mental defective on her first day on the job would have divined that the wine was for the lady and the beer for the gentleman. Not to mention the fact that she was the one who’d taken the order in the first place.

  “Are you ready to order?” she asked, and that was easy to read, because what else would she be asking, poised as she was over her little notation pad, one hip cocked forward, a look of spurious interest on her face. And the next thing she would say, once they’d made their selections, would be “Oh, excellent choice” or “That’s the best thing on the menu.” Hearing people. Sometimes she couldn’t help thinking the world would be a better place if everybody were deaf.

  But yes, they were hungry. And yes, they were ready to order—the veggie shish kebab on basmati rice for Bridger, the hummus/couscous/ baba ghanoush pita platter for her—and the conversation died while Dana fought with the pronunciation and finally resorted to using her finger to point out the item on the menu. Every six months or so she went back to the speech therapist for a couple of weeks just to keep herself sharp—and she tried to practice regularly before the mirror, but with the insane pace of her life, teaching, writing and now this, the practice was the first thing to go. Really, though, baba ghanoush? Even the speech therapist had to have problems with that one.

  She looked back to Bridger as the waitress drifted away. He was saying something, and he stopped, seeing she hadn’t understood him, and began again. “I was saying, yeah, I do have, maybe, I don’t know, a couple thousand bucks in my account—unless this creep has got to it—and I will try the cash machine, just to see. Because I don’t—”

  “Don’t?” she echoed. “Don’t what?”

  “I don’t want you to have to pay for me, because if we, if we’re—”

  “We’re going to.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m going to have to phone Radko—and you can bet I’ll be out of a job when we get back.” He grimaced, then lifted the bottle of beer to his lips, ignoring the frosted mug that had come with it.

  “How long does it take to drive cross-country—a week?” She took a sip of the wine—it was bitter, tannic. She was watching him intently.

  “I don’t know. Four and a half, five days if you drive straight through.”

  “Could you stand that?”

  “No. Could you?”

  She thought about that a moment, one person asleep while the other drives, the shell of the car so fragile against the night, the eternal silence and nothing to distract her, and what if she nodded off? What was the name of that band, years back—Asleep at the Wheel? Bridger had his music, the radio, books on tape, and she had her laptop, but not at night, not when she was driving. And what if the car breaks down? What if it overheats in the desert or—what was the term—throws a rod? She was about to ask him that, about the car, about the rods, whatever they were, but she didn’t get the chance because there were two other people hovering over them suddenly, a man and a woman in their twenties, dressed nearly identically in big jeans and big jackets over T-shirts trumpeting some band, and Bridger was up out of his seat as if he’d been launched, clasping the man to him in a bear hug.

  She watched with a puzzled smile—or bemused, a bemused smile. Bear hug, she was thinking distractedly, and where had that come from? Who had actually seen bears hugging? Did bears hug? Or did they do it doggie style—or bearie style?

  The man’s name—Bridger was lit up, beaming, trembling with the information—was Matt Kralik, and he finger-spelled it for her while Matt Kralik and his girlfriend, Patricia, stood there gaping at her. Matt, he said, looking from Matt to her and back again, had been his roommate and best bud at SC, and what was he doing here? His parents had a place on the lake. But what a coincidence! Awesome! No, no, no, they had to join them for dinner. Bridger insisted.

  There was the usual clumsy shuffle of place settings and chairs, the waitress looking on while a darting dark quick-blooded busboy studiously set them up and then they were all seated and Matt Kralik and Patricia had matching martinis in front of them, except that Matt’s was officially a Gibson because he had a cocktail onion in his and Patricia preferred the traditional ol
ive. For a moment no one spoke—this was what hearing people referred to as an “awkward silence,” but then no silence was awkward for Dana and her gaze quietly passed from Matt Kralik, seated on her left, to Bridger, across the table from her, and finally to Patricia, on her right. Patricia had an eager, almost ribald expression, her features too heavy for the taut athletic body that supported them—she looked cartoonish, all the weight above her shoulders, nothing below. “So,” she said, pursing her lips, “Dana—it’s Dana, isn’t it? I mean, I’m terrible with names—”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “What do you, ah—do? For a living, I mean.”

  All three of them were watching her as if she were one of the seals from Sea World propped up in a chair and about to balance a cane on her nose in expectation of the slippery reward of a fresh sardine from the trainer’s hand, even Bridger, who was wearing his blunted look where a moment before he’d been transported, giddier than she’d seen him in a week, a month. She said, enunciating as clearly as she could, “I’m deaf. I teach in a deaf school. Or at least I used to.”

  “Oh, deaf,” Patricia said. “That’s interesting. That’s really interesting.”

  Matt Kralik was saying something. He’d once known a deaf kid, in high school, and the kid had been a super baseball player, center fielder, ran like the wind—and something, and something—and he made triple-A ball, but not the majors. “Like that guy that was on the Angels last year, what was his name?”

  Bridger supplied the name. And he thought to finger-spell it for her: Pride, that was his last name, but he couldn’t remember the guy’s first name.

  “Not Charlie Pride,” Matt Kralik said, and she would have missed it—everyone burst out laughing—if Bridger hadn’t finger-spelled it too.

  “No,” Patricia said, gulping back her laugh and steadying herself with a delicate sip of the martini. “He was that black country-and-western singer. My father used to have his records, I remember.”