Talk Talk

by T. C. Boyle

Yesterday?

  “At the station. When he—I was scared to death. Literally scared to death.” She saw his face then and caught herself. “You mean you don’t know? Didn’t she tell you?”

  He could feel his heart going. The side of his face throbbed. The walls were closing in on him, the floor giving way, special effects, very special effects. Tell me what?

  She started to say something—the words were right there on her lips—but she stopped herself. She was wearing a print dress in some shiny fabric, something she’d put on to impress his mother, and she was barefooted. He watched her shift her weight to her back foot as her toes flexed and rose on point for balance, and then she pushed a hand through her hair and gave him a sidelong look, a gesture he knew well, a Dana gesture. “Come on,” she said, and she held out her hand even as a look passed between her and his mother, “maybe you ought to talk to her yourself.”

  They paused at the door to the guest bedroom, the light dim, books and newspapers stacked up against the walls, a chair there, strewn with dresses and undergarments, and then, all in one motion, Vera shoved the door open and jerked it shut again. She gave him a soft smile. “That’s our knock at the door,” she murmured, already turning away. “You can go in now. I’ll sit with your mother—we have a lot to talk about.”

  As it turned out, Dana wasn’t asleep. She was sitting at the desk she’d shoved up against the window, working on her laptop. Her face was turned to him as he stepped into the room, her hair shoved up away from her forehead and the faint white crescent of the scar that had bloomed there where she’d hit the windshield. She was dressed in T-shirt and panties, one bare leg folded under her, a Diet Coke at her elbow. “Hi,” she mouthed, and she smiled, but didn’t get up.

  He crossed the room to her and leaned over to press his lips to hers, instant communication, then took two steps back and eased himself down on the bed.

  She was still smiling, though she was examining him as if she hadn’t seen him in a week. “You look”—she paused—“better. Much better. How do you feel?”

  There was something wrong here, something he didn’t like. He needed more than this—he needed elaboration, needed acknowledgment. He was hors de combat, her soldier, her man. He just shrugged. Looked away. Almost without thinking, his hands said: What happened yesterday?

  “I should have told you, but I didn’t want to upset you. You were sleeping. That’s what they said at the hospital—you were sleeping.”

  He just looked at her.

  “He was there. At the train station. Peck Wilson.”

  His hands were like bricks. What do you mean? How? Did they catch him?

  “He was just there—he must have followed me. He didn’t do anything. He just…bumped me, that’s all.”

  He wanted to repeat that, make a question of it, but he didn’t know the verb. The muscles fired in his face. What?

  “They didn’t catch him,” she said. “He just bumped me, to show he could do it, I guess—he could do anything—and then he just walked away and got on the train.” She brought her leg out from under her and set both feet on the floor and leaned forward, her hair falling loose round her shoulders. “I don’t know, it was strange, very strange, but I think he was saying it’s over, like as if he was calling a truce.”

  Calling a truce? He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. In a fury he pushed himself up from the bed and went to the desk, to the lined yellow pad there and the ballpoint—what was she doing, taking notes?—and started writing. Poorly. With his left hand. You mean you didn’t call the cops?

  She shook her head.

  Or your mother? On the cell? They could have been at the next station—we could have nailed him.

  She was still shaking her head, but more emphatically now. Her mouth was set, her eyes locked on his. “No,” she said, “it’s over. Let him go. It’s not worth it. I mean, look at you. Just look at you.”

  The logic eluded him. He tried to pull the threads of it together, tried to see the beating he’d taken, down there on the sidewalk choking for air while Peck Wilson cracked his ribs and ground his face into the cement, as a link to the phrase she’d used: Not worth it to whom? Who was being sacrificed here? It all came up in him then and he slammed his fist down on the desk, even as he tried to gasp out the words that wouldn’t come and she wouldn’t have heard anyway, the hurtful words, the curses and recriminations.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, and she snatched the pad away from him.

  Clumsily, spelling it out, left hand only: You never want to talk.

  She dropped her eyes to shut him out, and then, as if they’d been discussing the price of gasoline or where they were going for dinner or a movie neither of them wanted to see, she said, “But I do. I want to talk because I’ve got some good news, really good news—”

  And as she told him, as he listened to her untethered voice ride the currents of her emotion, now cored-out and hollow, now muffled as if she were speaking through a gag, it became clear that the news was good for one of them only, for her. She’d e-mailed her former mentor at Gallaudet, Dr. Hauser—he remembered him, didn’t he? The one who’d first introduced her to the Romantic poets and served as chair of her Ph.D. committee?—just to touch base and let him know what had happened at the San Roque School, and he’d e-mailed back to say that he might have something for her, two core classes in freshman writing—if she was interested, that is.

  “So what I’m saying is maybe we should drive down to Washington, just to see?” She gave an elaborate shrug, and her face, the face that always told him so much, transformative, articulate, sad and beautiful and wrenchingly alive, told him nothing now. “I mean,” she said, “we’ve come this far, anyway—”

  Someone nailed a wall up in front of him. Bang, bang, bang, the hammer blows echoed in his head. And what was this wall made of? It wasn’t stone, it wasn’t brick—some temporary material, plywood, fiberboard, something you could construct and tear down in a day. The left hand, the awkward one, spoke for him, the index finger to the breast, then the jump, up and down: I can’t.

  It was past ten by the time he got up from the desk to shuffle back to the kitchenette by the soda machine, lift down the can of soup and peel back the easy-opening top to expose the contents. He licked the glutinous saffron-colored paste from the inside of the curled recyclable top before dropping it in the wastebasket, then upended the can over the coffee mug with Sharper stenciled along the rim, gave it a tap to facilitate the action of gravity and then shoved the mug in the microwave. It was quiet, preternaturally quiet, the long bare room held in equipoise between the absence of sound and the sudden startling mechanical beep of the microwave and the muted roar that succeeded it, cuisine in the making. And how would he have described the sound to someone who had never heard it? Like holding a seashell to your ear. For three minutes and thirty seconds. White noise. Static. And then there was the culminating beep, sharp as a gunshot.

  He was back at his desk, working on a double head replacement—The Kade and Lara Sikorsky, suspended in mid-air on their motorcycles against a vibrant enhanced sky, a perfect crossing pattern, his face and hers, aloft—and spooning up soup when he heard the sound of a key in the lock at the front door. Radko, he was thinking, coming to check up, and he was thinking too that he wouldn’t have heard him at all if he hadn’t removed his earphones when he went up to fix the soup. Not that it mattered. He was hard at work, totally focused, and even if the boss had crept up on him he would have seen that. But now Radko was there, dropping his shoulders as he leaned back into the door and blinking as he came down the hall and peered into Bridger’s cubicle.

  “What, you are here?” he said, his face going through its permutations, running from surprise to suspicion—was Bridger in fact working or screwing around on company time?—to a kind of muted pleasure in the dawning awareness of his errant employee’s dedication.

  “Yeah,” Bridger heard himself saying, “I was thinking I’d put in some ex
tra time tonight just to push that deadline a little,” and in the silence of the room he became aware of the faint lingering rasp in his voice. “Deet-Deet was here till seven. And Plum stayed late too.”

  Radko was silent a moment, squinting into the screen where The Kade’s digital features were superimposed over the white helmet of the stuntman and Lara Sikorsky remained an opaque blur. “All right,” he said finally. “But no overtime, only regular hour. Yes? You know that.”

  “Yeah,” Bridger said, and he didn’t want to tell him he had nothing better to do, “yeah, I know.”

  At some point Radko took his material presence and retreated back down the hall, footsteps echoing, to reverse the sequence of events that had brought him there in the first place, and the studio fell into a silence that seemed even deeper than before. Bridger was so intent on the screen he forgot about his iPod and before long it was so quiet he could hear the faint click of the mouse, and the keys—the keys rattled like thunder over a miniature world. He finished the frame he was working on and brought up the next, the figures frozen in position, the white nullity of their faces, his and hers. But then, instead of bringing up The Kade’s head, he clicked on his own and implanted it there on The Kade’s shoulders, and it took him a moment before he came up with the right expression, a smile, rueful and yet playful too, with all the promise of joy and fulfillment. And then, and he knew he was going to do it before his fingers crept to the mouse, he brought up Dana’s face. He gave her a smile too and he put her there, right next to him, ascendant, with all the blue sky in the universe crowding in behind her.