Talking Heads

by John Domini

  Talking Heads: 77

  John Domini

  Dzanc Books

  1334 Woodbourne Street

  Westland, MI 48186

  www.dzancbooks.org

  Copyright © 2003 Talking Heads: 77 by John Domini

  All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Published 2013 by Dzanc Books

  A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection

  A portion of this novel was originally published in Bridge

  eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-936873-59-3

  eBook Cover Designed by Steven Seighman

  Published in the United States of America

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Papa fix, Mama make.

  TALKING HEADS: 77

  What a job you’ve got…, nothing to do but run from one dizzy amusement to another and then write a piece about it.

  —Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider

  Chapter 1

  By Monday morning, Kit found it hard to believe the issue was nothing but paper. It was nothing but newsprint, finger-smudging and itch-inducing. The color of dead flesh. If he hadn’t scrolled it up into a stick, Kit wouldn’t even have known he had anything in his hand. Yet this weightless stuff, this imitation stick in his fist—this was his issue. This was Sea Level, Volume One, Number One. “A biweekly journal of politics & opinion.” Twenty pages staple-bound. Pub date January 6, 1978. Kit’s idea had become an office, and his talking to himself talking on the phone. Charter subscriptions were $15, and over the counter it cost 75 cents. It carried a trademarked title logo and his own name at the top of the masthead. Kit Viddich, Editor. Kit, not Christopher, another idea that had gone public. Another notion that seemed to need solidifying oomph.

  For Sea Level was also a troublemaker. Volume One, Number One had hit the Boston streets at the beginning of the weekend, and by Monday morning it had stirred up some ruckus. It had whipped powerful people into rush meetings at the Massachusetts State House; it had carved out a clear agenda for Number Two. Hard to believe the issue was only paper.

  Kit sat in his office, Sea Level scrolled in his hand, wondering. He was the only one there so far. The only one who’d heard the latest on the ruckus. And the first person he called was his wife.

  “I heard from the State House again,” he said.

  “Oh, not really. Already, Kit?”

  “First thing when I came in.”

  “And you mean to say it was the same sort of call? A call confirming what you heard Saturday?”

  Hearing the good news repeated back to him made Kit wonder again about this paper in his fist.

  “Bette,” he said, “it’s for real. There’s going to be an inspection.”

  “Well, my. Are we proud?”

  Kit touched his neck. He managed a laugh, a kind of laugh, a noise that went flat against the glass surrounding him. As Editor-in-Chief, Kit had wooden walls to hip level and glass the rest of the way.

  “Are we, Kit?” his wife repeated. “Proud of our muckraking?”

  He had a private booth, a saint’s reliquary. The others who worked for Sea Level—when they were in the office—had only the half-walls, in the old brownstone style. The ceilings were very high, American Empire, and Kit himself was built tall and elbowy, a ranch-bred Minnesotan. His laugh echoed a long way up. His wife went on waiting.

  “Bet-te.” He drew out both syllables. “Actually, I believe that’s hard-nosed muckraking. Hard-nosed, darling. That’s the word.”

  Winter static butterflied along the line.

  “A man gets down in that muck with a soft nose,” Kit said, “he’s going nowhere.”

  “Oh. Kit the wit.”

  Kit the hurt, more like. The static didn’t improve, but he heard her sigh. “Betts, don’t tell me. The Apple’s giving you trouble again.”

  “The Apple. Well, that plus a few of what I suppose you’d describe as crank calls.”

  “Crank calls? What, heavy breathers?”

  “Worse, I’m afraid. The sort who launch right into their erotic dreams.”

  “You’ve had a few of these?” Kit frowned over the phone. “More than a couple?”

  This time her sigh was exasperated. “Kit, didn’t you ask me about the Apple?”

  Patience, husband. She doesn’t need you to tell her what to do about crank calls.

  “Didn’t you ask me about that infernal contraption?”

  Once Kit’s first issue had gone to the printers and he and Bette knew they’d have no unforeseen expenses, she’d bought a computer. She’d gotten one of the new in-the-home models. Kit’s wife worked in writing herself, editing papers for a couple of professors at Harvard Medical.

  “Half the time,” she said, “well, you’ve heard of the worm in the Apple?”

  Ah, Bette—like the actress. Like Bette Davis, another Concord Academy girl. By now Kit had some sense of how much star poses and stage business meant to them—how central it was to why they’d fallen for each other. Stage business had become, by now, their natural give and take. An arch intimacy. Freely they risked one-liners that would’ve had the other person groaning if they’d been spoken a second slower. It was a strange way to succeed as a couple, Kit understood, and it had more than a little to do with how his wife and he came to the marriage from such different directions. He was the hard-driving Minnesota investigator, and she the weary Brahman know-it-all. Kit understood; he could get his mind around all of this, more or less, even here in his office on a Monday morning. And even here, it had his heart growing baggy. In the center of his chest hung a big, gray beehive soaked with rain, sagging and heavy.

  He could see her, too. Among the wisps of reflection in the glass wall before him, he could actually see his wife. At her new plastic keyboard, at the Cambridge end of the conversation, Bette had left her hair undone. Haystack hair. There were half-lit moments when she looked like another late-’70s California girl, another clone of Farrah Fawcett-Majors. To see her that way however was to overlook her mouth, her smile. Bette’s mouth contained more working parts than most. Sometimes when she smiled Kit thought of an antique wicker picnic hamper, all shelves and handles and drawers and flaps. That was her face, over her keyboard: a hamper in a haystack.

  “Frankly,” she was saying, “I can see why you newsies stick to typewriters.”

  Kit knew when to play the straight man. He pointed out that she’d taken a leap, getting the Apple. He couldn’t think of anyone else who had their own personal computer.

  “Oh, come on. I’m not so much the brave pioneer as all that.” Bette mentioned a cousin who’d purchased one of the new machines, a man who did tax work and accounting. “At this rate,” she said, “the entire extended Steyes family should be online—isn’t that the word? The whole sick crew should be online by 1980.”

  With that, at last, his wife congratulated him on today’s call. “You say this morning confirms it? A full-bore inspection? Well, my. Hard-nosed muckraking, indeed.”

  “The Boston Building Commission.” With his free hand Kit stood his scrolled copy of Sea Level on his desktop, an exclamation point. “They had some kind of conference call Friday night, some kind of executive session. Quick and dirty, you know. And it’s on. They’re going to the penitentiary.”

  Once more he jabbed the paper into the desktop. The lead article in Number One had been an examination of building decay in a state penitentiary, a prison named Monsod. The report had taken up more than half the book, its final columns unwinding on page 17. Kit had written the stor
y himself. While Sea Level was getting underway he’d have to do a lot of that, writing the stories himself (ten o’clock on a Monday morning, and he still had the office to himself). On the penitentiary piece, Kit had done good work. He’d turned up more first-hand material than he’d have thought possible. He’d sent advance copies to State House committee people, and Saturday afternoon the first call had come. A contact at the Building Commission.

  “My, yes,” Bette said. “The first story in the first issue of a shoestring venture, and the entire Massachusetts government springs into action.”

  “Aw, Betts. A shoestring venture? Is that what I’ve got?”

  But Kit’s laughter, once again, didn’t go far. He let his scrolled first issue flop across the desk. “Bette,” he said, “I’ve got to get in on that visit.”

  “The visit?” She needed a moment. “You mean to Monsod?”

  “Monsod State Penitentiary. The inspection’s set for Thursday.”

  “Oh, Kit. Oh, honestly.” It never took her more than a minute. “Must the media be everywhere?”

  “The first issue’s just a building block, Bette. Deadline for the next’s only ten days away.”

  “But Kit. Surely you don’t need to go inside? You don’t need to go and, I don’t know, take samples? That despicable closet, for instance—”

  “The closet especially, Betts. The closet’s the most incredible thing in the story. I’ve got to see it.”

  “Oh, hell. Honestly.”

  In the glass before him, Kit rediscovered her face. And if he turned away, there was more glass. His office fit in bowed streetfront of a waterfront brownstone. A second-story space, American Empire, it had windows facing in three directions. Even in January the sun made the place hot.

  “Well, what am I to say?” Bette went on. “Be careful, lover. If you’re allowed to go, be careful.”

  “I was wondering,” Kit said, “about Cousin Cal.”

  “Cousin Cal.”

  No, it never took her long. Cal was Harding Calvin Steyes, of Halterstock & Steyes. A Boston holding company, in trusts and real estate mostly, Halterstock & Steyes had ties to the State House that went back more than a century.

  “You want to go to my cousin once removed,” Bette said. Elizabeth Steyes Viddich. “You believe he could help you get into Monsod.”

  “Aw, Betts. It’s possible. Maybe one of the guys on the Building Commission likes to hunt duck.”

  “Kit, don’t joke. Please, don’t. Cal and his shotgun, that’s the stuff of nightmares to me.”

  Aw, Betts. It wasn’t as if Kit himself didn’t suffer the awkwardness of this, calling his wife for a favor. Especially when, not more than an hour earlier, the two of them had been snuggled together crotch to crotch. They’d been fucking hard, hump against ripple. An odd first-of-the-week greediness. Odder still, Bette had told him to do without the Trojan. She’d told him she was past the “worrisome” part of her cycle.

  Oddest of all, suddenly Kit’s thinking was full of their morning ferocity. After his wife’s first peak, he recalled, they’d separated so she could take him another way. She’d rolled over deliciously, all haunchful in anticipation. The image flared before his mind’s eye; it may even have appeared among the reflections before him. This as, over the phone, Bette grew chillier by the word.

  “You know Kit, Cousin Cal may well be the last person on earth I’d want to feel indebted to.”

  “Darling, I’m calling to ask. I’m calling you first.”

  He called her darling and his heart remained baggy. In the phone’s earpiece his tone sounded sensitive. Yet Kit sat there flashing on his wife’s last climax, when she’d thrown her head back to let him watch.

  “And Kit,” Bette was saying, “you must realize that my Cousin Cal, well. He’s what’s delicately known as ‘a family hire,’ Cousin Cal. I suspect the only phone number he could give you would be L.L. Bean’s.”

  Kit didn’t laugh. In the phone’s electronic pathways every sound he made seemed like a lie. The black instrument in his hand was itself a lie, not a phone at all but rather his wife’s elongated cowgirl hips, thrusting up between his spread hands. Well Betts, Cousin Cal see State House call Monsod—

  “Bette,” Kit said, “this is wrong. I have to say, I did wrong. Asking you like this. You remember this morning, the way we made love? That’s all I’m thinking about right now. I’m asking you about Cousin Cal and I’m thinking about us this morning. Fucking our brains out.”

  Bette made a noise, a release in the throat. Kit remembered a similar sound, part groan part exhale, while her neck and chin had arched up and up across a ruined pillow.

  “It’s my unconscious taking revenge,” he went on. “That’s what it’s got to be. My unconscious punishing me for calling you. Aw, Betts, forget I ever asked about Cousin Cal.”

  “Kitty Chris. Honestly.”

  “I’m sorry. Darling, forget it, forgive me.”

  “Goodness. It’s just one crank call after another today.”

  “This morning was so incredible, Betts. You were like something out of Joan Baez.”

  She made the noise again, but this time he could see her in the present. On rare occasions—undone occasions like this—Bette took on a look to match that haystack head of hers. A tatterdemalion look: a broken blue openness. A weakness.

  “You were so deep,” he went on. “You were like, ‘Arise, Arise, Mary Hamilton.’”

  “I thought you’d given up on folk music,” she said. “I thought you couldn’t believe in the voices any more.”

  Ah Bette, making distinctions. Putting that distance between herself and how she’d been touched. It didn’t fool Kit. Didn’t fool the man who could see her over the phone.

  “Actually,” she said, “this morning ran a bit deep for me as well, don’t you know. Yes. Possibly too much so.”

  Bette’s rare tatterdemalion. It was another bit of herself she and Kit kept between the two of them. The rest of the world, so far as he could tell, knew only Bette with her hair done. Bette in strict equestrienne posture.

  “Kitty Chris, I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  “Betts, tell me.” The stupidity of his original reason for calling rocked him, an undertow. “What’s the matter?”

  “I’m not so sure about my cycle, Kit. My time of the month, as they used to say.”

  God, the stupidity. Lunging after career help in all the wrong places. Kit bent over the phone, his head dipping below his desktop shelving, below his “Ve-Ri-Tas” mug and attaboy memorabilia. “Bette,” he said. “The Trojan, not using the Trojan—that was as much my call as yours.”

  “Oh, now.”

  “Betts, the responsibility’s as much mine as yours.”

  “Kit, oh. You told me the truth just now, the whole truth, as the bailiffs say. And, well. I should tell you the same. Kit, this morning I didn’t have a clue.”

  “Darling.” He recalled her testiness when she’d picked up the phone. “Have you been worrying about this?”

  “Well, yes. It’s frightening, Kit. I’m nearly thirty, don’t you know. I’m an adult. Yet when I told you to skip the precautions like that I must’ve been talking to myself, don’t you know. I must’ve been telling myself something. And I’ve no idea what it is.”

  “You’re frightened.”

  “I’m frightened, Kit. Honestly.”

  Then there were women at Kit’s door. Two women, peering through the glass. For a moment, blinking, startled upright, Kit thought they’d heard everything. He couldn’t recall if one of them had knocked.

  “My family must have some part in it,” Bette was saying. “Some part in this, this test of who I’m to be or whatever. I mean becoming a family, joining my own family. Well.”

  “Ah.” Kit said. The two women were no surprise, really. They were the only other people who approached full-time for Sea Level. One, shorter, darker, was his Administrative Assistant Corinna Nummold. The other, prettier, more strange, was his so
le staff writer, Zia Mirini.

  “With my family,” his wife went on, “well. One wouldn’t say I’m filled with joy at the prospect of joining the grand pageant down the generations.”

  Aw, Kit. Bad first move, bad last move. He hated to cut his wife off when she got like this, exploring, examining. He knew how much she loved to think.

  *

  He was familiar with the doubt, a worm on his back. A natural corollary to the itching in his hands every time he paged through the first issue. But, what was to doubt? Sillier rags than Sea Level hit the streets all the time. Since the computer money had started to arrive in the mid-’70s, it’d seemed like Boston had a new journal on the stands every other week. The first to prove it could be done were the Cambridge Phoenix and Boston After Dark, now the Boston Phoenix and the Cambridge Real Paper. “Underground” papers in ‘67 and ‘68, they’d become the establishment. There was even a movie about it. A movie about some radical Boston rag making the mid-’70s crossover to mainstream money. Loss of innocence, testing of values—not a bad movie.

  Under the Line? Was that the name?

  Kit paused in the corridor outside the Sea Level offices, trying to recall. He only had to go up one flight. Leo was right upstairs.

  Washington D.C., after all, had the Washington Monthly. Their first issue, who knows, it could have been smaller than Kit’s. Austin, Texas, for God’s sake, served as a base for the Texas Observer. Why shouldn’t Boston have room for a paper like that? A writer’s paper, non-slick. “Think” stuff, “issues” stuff. Kit saw his journal as a kind of biweekly Op Ed publication—biweekly rather than monthly, to set it apart from the Observer and the others. Each piece would begin with the news. There’d be room for the occasional semi-scoop, like the Monsod story. That was the news, the outbreak above the horizon. But then a non-slick paper would tow the reader back to more elemental questions. Closer to Sea Level.

  Plus Kit hadn’t come to it naked. Hadn’t spent his whole life behind those glass walls, a saint in his own reliquary. At the Harvard Crimson he’d made editor. After that, he’d put in five years at the Globe. The last three years, he’d been the paper’s man in agriculture.