Talk Talk

by T. C. Boyle

  Bridger looked in the wrong direction. He’d come down the steps now and was arrested there in the rain, his hair limp, the shirt she’d given him for his birthday—the retro look, broad vertical bands of gray and black with an outsized collar—hanging off him like a shower curtain. Where?

  Her face was wet, water dripping from her nose. She felt ridiculous. The rain intensified, sweeping down the street in successive waves. Over there, on the porch, she signed, and then retreated for the car.

  The interior of the car smelled as if it had been dredged up out of the ocean. There was mud on her shoes—a pair of Mary Janes in teal blue she’d picked up on sale two days ago—and her clothes clung wet to her skin. She felt a chill go through her and she slid into the driver’s side and started the car to run the heater as Bridger, reduced by the rain and the layer of condensation frosting the windows, waved cheerily to the old woman and cut straight across the lawn, stepped over the line of low shrubs that divided the properties and stood just under the projecting roof of the porch to snap his jaws and wave his hands while the old woman snapped her jaws in return.

  It took forever. Bridger was out there chattering away as if the skies were clear to the roof of the troposphere and the sun beaming down in all its glory, and the old lady, rocking in the shadow of her porch, chattered back. And what could they possibly find to talk about, the hearing? All this chattering. Peck Wilson: was he there or not? That was all that needed to be conveyed. She was frustrated, angry, shivering in her wet clothes as the heater, out of use since January, added its own furtive metallic reek to the mix. For a long while she stared out the window, first at Bridger, then at the house—an old place, two stories, with a mismatched addition and a stepped roof—where the man who’d invaded her life had played and worked and grown into the fullness of his thieving manhood.

  She began chanting to herself, a little Poe, which always seemed to calm her—And neither the angels in Heaven above, / Nor the demons down under the sea, / Can ever dissever my soul from the soul / Of the beautiful Annabel Lee—and then she felt the car rock and Bridger was sliding into the seat beside her. “Well?” she said.

  “Her name’s”—he finger-spelled it—“Alice.”

  She was confused. “Whose? The old lady’s?”

  He swept both palms up over his face and into his hairline, then threw his head back and shook out the water like a diver emerging from a pool. “No,” he said, turning to face her. “Wilson’s mother. Peck Wilson’s mother. Her name’s Alice.”

  “Yes, but where is she?”

  “The old lady—she was really nice, by the way—said she was away for the weekend, up at Saratoga or something. At the racetrack with her friend—not her son, her friend.”

  “You didn’t—”

  “No,” he said. “I didn’t tell her anything. I just wondered aloud, as a friendly neighbor, if she could tell me where Mrs. Wilson was because she was a friend of my mother’s and my mother told me to look her up if I ever got to New York.” He shrugged, toweling his hair with a sweatshirt he snatched out of the tumble of dirty clothes on the backseat. “The usual bullshit. She was old, that’s all.”

  “And she believed you?”

  Another shrug. “Does it really matter at this point?”

  She gave him a long look, then dropped her eyes to put the car in gear. She was angry, frustrated, the whole thing boiling up in her—yes, it mattered, of course it mattered—and she accelerated too quickly, the back end shearing away from her on the slick roadway, everything out of kilter suddenly, and though she did manage to avoid the two parked cars on her right, the truck, the bright orange and white moving-truck with the U-Haul logo plastered along its gleaming steel midsection, was another story altogether.

  Afterward, her most vivid recollection of the accident wasn’t the way her car looked with its trunk radically compressed and jammed up under the belly of the truck as if some negligent giant had been at play with it, but standing there in the rain half a block from Peck Wilson’s house—from the thief’s house—while a joyless policewoman from the City of Peterskill Police Department tried to put her through the drunk test and Bridger waved his hands and flailed his lips at the bare-chested bodybuilder in shorts and flip-flops who’d rented the truck and left its front end projecting halfway across the street. “I’m not drunk,” she kept saying, “I’m deaf. Deaf. Don’t you understand?” And the policewoman kept saying, “Spread your legs, hold out your arms, close your eyes, touch your nose.”

  People had emerged from their houses up and down the block and gathered under umbrellas to savor the spectacle, barefooted little girls in shorts and summer dresses knotted behind the neck, their bulging mothers and smirking brothers, an old man in a straw hat. Dana wasn’t hurt, nor was Bridger. Thankfully. But she’d been driving and she was the focus of attention, all those shallow shifting eyes judging her, the drunk—or no, worse than a drunk, a freak, a babbler, someone to instinctively shy away from. She knew what they were thinking, knew what they’d say over their hot dogs and coleslaw at dinner that night, a passing reference, the recollection of a little anomaly in an otherwise uniform day: “But she looked just like anybody else, pretty even—until she opened her mouth.”

  The policewoman—she was of mid-height, Dana’s age, with a rangy, asymmetric build, thick glasses in severe frames, eyes that could have been pretty with a little makeup—finally seemed to come round. Bridger had shifted his attention away from the man with the U-Haul and had stepped in to enlarge her understanding of what Dana was trying to communicate, while her partner, an older guy with fading eyes and hair the color of a lab rat’s, hunched over his pad and began writing up the accident report. Dana watched them go back and forth, Bridger nearly as expressive as one of the deaf himself. “The truck isn’t where it’s supposed to be,” Bridger was saying. “They should never have parked it there in the first place.” The policewoman—Dana saw now that she had a nametag clipped above her breast pocket: P. Runyon—didn’t seem particularly interested. To her it must have seemed an open-and-shut case, so routine it would have been a snooze but for the spice of the California plates and Dana herself—slick roads, excessive speed, the truck parked and locked and on the other side of the road nonetheless.

  She turned abruptly to Dana and said something. What was it? Insurance? Yes, she had insurance—she fumbled through the glove box, her hands trembling, and finally produced the papers—and no, she didn’t need to go to the hospital, she was perfectly all right, thank you. P. Runyon didn’t seem satisfied. She stalked around in the rain, the water beading on the polished uppers of her standard-issue shoes, alternately glaring at Dana and turning her back on her to sweep the onlookers as if to assure them that things were in hand here, despite appearances, and that they’d all better look out and take a step back or they’d wind up with their cars stuffed under a truck too.

  Then it was the tow truck, the crowd dissipating and the patrol car slithering off down the street, a spate of small talk in the solid high cab of the truck and finally the garage with its ancient chemical smells and the once-white shepherd-mix curled up on the floor. The repair estimate? No way to tell yet, but it looked as if the rear axle stub was broken—“Do you see that,” the service manager asked, pointing to where her car crouched against a low wall covered with ivy, “the way the wheels are canted like that?”—and of course there was going to be some fairly extensive body work, both back fenders, trunk, bumper, replace the rear window. By the time it was over, by the time they took a cab to the train station and caught the next southbound train and she was pressed safely up against the window and looking out on the pocked gray hide of the river, it felt as if a week had passed in the course of a single day—and it would be a whole lot longer than that, two and a half weeks, to be exact, before she would get her car back. “And that’s night and day,” the service manager told Bridger over the phone at her mother’s while Bridger cupped the receiver and translated, “night and day. A real rush job
. Because I know how anxious the little lady must be to get back to California.”

  In the interval, she tried to relax. Here was an opportunity to spend some time with her mother, work on her book, think things out—and if she was going to teach again she’d better clean up her CV and start making some inquiries, too late at this juncture for a hearing position, and certainly not at the college level, but there were deaf schools in Riverside and Berkeley she might try. If she did want to stay on the coast. She wasn’t so sure anymore, wasn’t sure about anything. Two months ago she was in love, blissfully involved in her research and her book, secure in her job at the San Roque School and beginning to feel the pull of the environment—mojitos on an outdoor patio in January, a bugless summer, the incalculable gift of the vernal light as it glanced off the stucco walls and red tile roofs of the buildings on campus and rode out to sharpen over the waves. Now she didn’t know. Now she was living with her mother, without a car or a job. It scared her how quickly everything had turned against her.

  She was being paid through the end of the summer and she’d been issued new credit cards, so she was all right there, at least for a while. Her credit was still a mess, though—she couldn’t begin to imagine the depth and breadth of the heap of threatening letters and demand-payment notices piling up in one of those heavy plastic mail carriers in the back room of the San Roque post office, each one of which would have to be addressed at some point. The onus was on her, whether that was her signature on the credit card slip or not—and what did they care? They wanted their money. Period. The victims’ assistance woman had gone into dark mode when she talked about the greed of the banks and credit card companies—Easy Credit, Instant Credit, No Refusamos Crédito—and how pretty soon everybody would have to have some sort of implant, like the ones they inserted up under the napes of cats and dogs, to prove their identity. Bridger had said, “Just like 1984,” and the woman gave them a blank look.

  But the mail. The mail was a problem. They’d left San Roque in such a hurry she hadn’t really planned beyond the moment and so she’d put a four-week vacation hold on her mail delivery. She supposed she should have it forwarded, but that would be a kind of defeat, a giving-in to her mother and the easy way out—and she really didn’t want to deal with the mess of her finances. The mail was nothing but bad news, and right now—on a muggy Tuesday afternoon a week after the accident, as she sat at the desk in the spare room of her mother’s overstuffed claustrophobe’s nightmare of an apartment and fiddled with the knobs on the air conditioner, hoping for just a degree or two of refrigeration—she wanted to focus on other things. Like her book. The laptop was propped open before her, giving back the words she’d dredged up out of herself, the imposture they represented, the incremental silent means of recasting her own uncertain self in Victor’s image, in Itard’s, but they were old words that slipped and elided and clashed like mortal enemies till she couldn’t look at them. “Wild Child,” she said aloud, just to feel the buzz of the words on her lips. “Wild Child, by Dana Halter,” she said, as if it were an incantation. She repeated herself over and over again, but it was no use. Because in her mind, a husky deep contrarian voice kept saying, Peck Wilson, Peck Wilson, Peck Wilson.

  She felt the door open behind her, her old trick, and turned to see her mother and Bridger standing there in the doorway, looking apologetic. Can we come in? her mother signed clumsily.

  “Yeah, sure,” she said, grandly waving them in. She felt a quick sharp stab of embarrassment. Had they stood there listening? Had they knocked? Had they heard her rehearsing the name of her book? And her own name? Had she said “Peck Wilson” aloud?

  Almost done? Bridger signed. His face was soft, open, and she could have read his expression as loving and supportive, but he wasn’t fooling her. This was a guilty look, edged with alarm, a look complicit with her mother’s—they had heard. An irrational anger started up in her: her own lover, her own mother.

  “Yes,” she said. “Or no, not really. I’m just getting nowhere, that’s all. Spinning my wheels, right?” And what was that, a racing term? Or was it when you were stuck in the snow or the mud? “Why, what’s the plan?”

  Her mother had taken to Bridger in a way Dana would have found gratifying under other circumstances, making it her sworn duty to show him every tourist site in the city, from the Statue of Liberty to MoMA to the American Indian Museum, Ground Zero and Grant’s Tomb. She’d even taken him on the Circle Line tour around the Battery and up the East River, through the lively corrugations of Spuyten Duyvil and back down the Hudson on the West Side while Dana was—ostensibly—working. Her mother’s smile strained till it blew up in her face. “I don’t know,” she said, “we were just thinking we might go to a matinee, something light—a musical, maybe. Bridger’s never been to a show and it would be a shame if he—”

  “We don’t have to go,” he said, slumping his shoulders and fixing his smile, and of course what he meant was that they did have to go or he would never get over it. “Can you handle it?”

  “What do you mean ‘can I handle it’? It’s not a revival of Children of a Lesser God, is it?”

  They both laughed. But these were strained laughs—she could tell by the way their eyes flashed at each other like those kissing fish in an aquarium. “We were thinking maybe The Lion King,” he said. “Or Rent, if we can get into it.”

  “Equus,” she said. “What about Equus?” She was being cruel, but she couldn’t help herself. She was remembering the first time she’d ever seen the National Theater of the Deaf, when she was a freshman at Gallaudet, the year Deaf Power came into its own and swept the university. For the first time in Gallaudet’s history, all the way back to its founding in 1864, a deaf president was installed after the entire student body took to the streets to protest the naming of yet another hearing chief executive. They marched in the streets for a week, chanting “Down with Paternalism!” and “We Are Not Children!” “No More Daddies,” they shouted, “No More Mommies!” The wind stung her eyes. The cops came on their silent shuddering horses. She’d never felt more caught up and passionate in her life. And when the curtain opened on the play on that final night, the night of their triumph, the house was full to the rafters and she had to find a seat on the floor, everyone holding their breath in anticipation. It took her a moment to understand: this was no parade of mimes, no revival of Death of a Salesman or The Glass Menagerie in dumb show, but a new play, commissioned and written in their own language, the language of their new president. She exchanged a look with the girl sitting next to her, her roommate, Sarah, whose eyes flew back to the stage while her hands lay motionless in her lap, and she began to breathe again.

  And now they wanted her to sit through The Lion King?

  “No,” she said, “I think I’ll just stay here and kill myself instead.”

  “Come on,” Bridger said, and when he put a hand on her shoulder and ran it up the back of her neck, she pulled away from him. “It’ll be fun.”

  “You go,” she said.

  Her mother’s face hovered over her. “Lunch?” she offered. “Why don’t we all just go to lunch then? What do you say?”

  “No, really,” she said. “You go.”

  On the day they picked up the car, the day she planned to sign over the insurance check to the man in the garage, retrieve her keys and then, no matter what Bridger or her mother or anyone else might have to say about it, go directly to Peck Wilson’s house in the hope of spotting the Mercedes there in the driveway, the sun seemed to rise right up out of the front room of her mother’s apartment, already riding high and scorching the earth by the time she and Bridger arrived, on foot and sweating, at Grand Central. Bridger had talked her into walking—for the exercise, of course, but there was no reason to be wasting money on cabfare when neither of them had a job and their credit was mutually shot. She bought three plastic bottles of water in the one-liter size while Bridger saw to the bagels in the brown paper bag and picked up the Times and the Daily New
s and then they settled into the Metro North car like reverse commuters. The other passengers looked bored and enervated, nobody talking, and that pleased her in an odd way, their silence layered over hers. She was imagining the other sounds—the rattling of the undercarriage, the hiss of the automatic doors—when Bridger tapped her on the arm and asked for one of the bottles of water.

  She watched him unscrew the plastic cap and hold the bottle to his lips until he had to come up for air. The sweat stood out on his upper lip and his hair had thickened with it. “It’s hot,” he mouthed. “Wow, it’s hot.” He handed her half a bagel, neatly sliced in two. Outside, beyond the moving windows, the river looked as if it had just been refilled with pure clean tap water instead of the usual gray-green bilge. “You know those pictures of—?” he said, but she didn’t catch the end of it. A place name, long word.

  “What?”

  “Afghanistan,” he said, spelling it out. “From the war, like, when was it—couple of years ago? Did you notice that every mujahedin carried three things into battle with him—a Kalashnikov rifle, a rocket launcher and a liter bottle of Evian, just like this?”