Talking Heads

by John Domini

  Corinna kept pressing. “What do they want from you? State of Massachusetts, Grand Jury. Big shots.”

  “Corinna, it’s not like I’m telling you the Grand Jury doesn’t scare me. It scares me, no question. You saw me in there.”

  “Yeah but that’s just what I’m saying, Kit. You sit in your office all shrunk up over the phone, shrunk up massaging your neck—and then you come out and lock the door and say to put the message on the phone. You say, ‘Guys, we need to talk.’ Kit, I mean, what’s that Grand Jury got on you?”

  “Aw, please. I’m not a criminal.”

  “Kit, listen—I know about things like this. I know a Grand Jury, sometimes it’s got a rule that says no one can talk. No one can say anything about what’s going on.”

  Kit hoped he looked as impressed as he felt. But once more he shook his head.

  “Kit, I mean. These people and their subpoena, aren’t they the same people who said you could go down there in the first place? Said you could go down to Monsod and get yourself all banged up.” Corinna ran her glossy fingernails down one side of her face. “It’s the same people, running this Grand Jury. Same big shots.”

  “Corinna. If you want to blame someone, blame me. This is my call. My decision.”

  “Kit. You really want to close the paper?”

  “I want to suspend publication. For the time being.”

  “Well what’s that mean? How long?”

  “Ah, till I’ve finished my testimony on Monsod.”

  Really, Viddich? Was there really some moment of clearance out there? A point at which all this outrageous fortune settled back down into manageable office ethics—back to sea level? Kit hadn’t thought it through, or not beyond what he’d just managed to put into words. And the woman could tell. Corinna kept on complaining, her accent thickening. As her body language picked up the shoulders of her dress slipped, exposing her bra straps. She swung round in her chair, facing Zia.

  “What about you, you got nothing to say? You on some drugs today, girl?”

  The writer sat sunk behind the bright patchwork of her desktop. Chin down, face soft, she didn’t answer. Zia had said next to nothing in fact since Kit had come out of his office, out of note-taking actual and imaginary, and turned the lock on the hallway door. Now inside the macho collar of her jacket, of course a black leather jacket, Zia’s pout appeared to have grown more fleshy, younger. Girl. Kit remembered her in the headscarf at the Sons of Columbus. Thursday night—ow. And yet, nutty as he’d been to run out there, at the Sons of Columbus he’d wound up accomplishing something. He’d won Zia’s trust, he’d seen her secrets. Running around out of his mind, he’d done some good. But now what about today, when he was trying to do good?

  “Zia,” Kit suggested, “give Rachel a call. Rachel at the Globe. She’ll be glad to hear you’re getting time off.”

  Her look might have lightened up, Kit couldn’t be sure. Corinna wouldn’t let him alone. “Kit,” she said, “I don’t think you thought this through. I mean, what am I supposed to tell people when they call?” Good question. The phone had rung twice during their conversation already, and the speaker on the message machine could only be turned down so far. Twice Kit had needed to raise his voice, working against the electronic rumble of puzzled callers. Worse, he’d told the women that they’d both remain on salary. Both of them, yes, though he knew the bank balance couldn’t support it. He’d be broke by Valentine’s Day. But how could he tell Corinna that he was going to keep sending her a paycheck and not do the same for Zia?

  Now came a knock on the door. A knock, something else he hadn’t considered. The way he’d been thinking—if you could call it that—the demands of carrying around the hottest story in Boston would be vaporized as soon as he closed the paper. Vaporized, poof, Star Wars. Kit thought of Junior’s father, run off to Hollywood.

  The knock sounded again, more loudly.

  “What about this guy, Kit?” Corinna asked. “Should I get this or not?”

  At the door was Rick DeMirris, frowning at Kit’s bruises as he unzipped a parka patched with duct tape. He’d brought a list of the Monsod contractors. “The list, you know. The bad guys.” Freelancer’s initiative—no wonder Rick was Kit’s favorite. And even now Kit couldn’t resist a look. There between the front room’s partitions, still on his feet, he searched Rick’s list till found the name he wanted. Joints, fittings, misc. plumbing: Mirinex, Inc. Kit had been on to a story, this time. He’d been on to something people deserved to know, and something for which other people deserved to get spanked. It looked like he was still learning about the power of that story. It had a life of its own, regardless of what Kit might do with his shoestring newspaper.

  Corinna bent over the phone’s answering machine, Zia pulled out a messed-up legal pad. Kit took DeMirris back to his private office, hoping that in there the bad news might go over more quietly.

  No such luck. “Christ, Kit, you locked the door on me,” the freelancer erupted. “Can’t you at least tell me why?”

  Kit gestured at the legal paper on his desk … you are hereby commanded … “There are larger issues.”

  “Larger issues?” Rick yanked on his sweater. “Kit—the next issue of Sea Level, now that’s a larger issue.”

  You had to admire the guy. A card-carrying member of Agitators Anonymous. He’d come in with his list, terrific initiative, and he wanted his byline. It didn’t help any when Kit reminded Rick that he still had the piece on the new MBTA station. They’ve unearthed some interesting stuff down there, Rick … it didn’t help. A few old bones under the city floor were nothing compared to what had turned up out at Monsod. Rick strode round the office arms akimbo, very Greek, and one of his quick, angry connections gave Kit an idea. Like Corinna, the freelancer pointed out that the subpoena made no mention of a gag order. “Man, you can publish,” he said. “You’re clean.” With that, Kit began thinking of Forbes Croftall.

  Croftall too could come out clean, in an open Grand Jury. Not that the Senator was holding the strings, here—the investigation came under a different jurisdiction—and not that Kit knew just what the Senator was up to, yet. But doing without a gag order seemed to serve the man’s purposes. It seemed of a piece with sending Kit out to the penitentiary in the first place. It fit with CYA, looking good for the papers.

  Struggling to make sense of it, struggling with working-world speed, Kit shepherded Rick out of his office. Sighing, he repeated that his mind was made up. Finally the freelancer played to the two women. “Kit,” he said loudly, “I’ve got a feeling I’m saying goodbye for the last time.” Aw, Rick. For the remainder of the morning Kit set himself up at an empty desk out front. No gag order at Sea Level: he was out where everyone could take their best shot. He would have made his callbacks from Corinna’s phone if the switching from line to line hadn’t proved so clumsy. Ma Bell was such a stick-in-the-mud monopoly, slow to make changes. Kit returned to his office but left the door open, as he worked through one no-comment after another.

  He’d been putting this off for days, he hadn’t touched the memos on his kitchen table—yet compared to what he’d faced already this morning, making the calls came easy. What little he could say felt routine. Even the tone of voice was a painless charade, apologetic but businesslike. These weren’t people who knew him, or knew him more than a handshake’s worth, and didn’t he have injuries? Didn’t he have a lawyer? Soon Kit’s eyes wandered back to the list of prison contractors, lying across the subpoena on his desk.

  Mirinex, Inc. If the paper had exposed its own publisher, the next issue really would have been its last. It would’ve gone out in a blaze of glory.

  Topsy Otaka came by, with fresh Monsod sketches. Kit particularly liked an M.C. Escher parody—these days you saw the man’s stuff everywhere—a manipulation of perspective in which tattooed cons and suit-and-tie politicians chased each other in circles within thick prison walls. He showed the piece to Zia, propping it on the halfwall before her desk. This got s
omething out of her at least. It got her to laugh, though darkly, full of smoke. She’d been puffing away, bent close over her legal pad, scribbling hard. As Kit stood before her he got a taste of her Marlboro, and he could pick out a word or two of her bird-like scrawl. “Oedipus,” “basement.” But when Zia spoke, she spoke to Topsy. Abruptly she told her friend about Kit’s decision for the next issue.

  Topsy, open-mouthed, blinking, reached for her forearm. Kit wound up writing her a check on the spot, a kill fee.

  The one person he didn’t seem to have hurt was Tad Close. The Circulation Manager came in looking happier than any of them, fashionable even, in matching beige turtleneck and mud-brown corduroys. The first issue, he announced, had already sold out both at the kiosks on Arlington Street and over in Harvard Square. “We’re big!” Tad said. “M-tellin-ya!” At least that gave Kit an opening: Yeah Tad now people want to read about Monsod but I’m afraid … Yet Kit’s news had the Circulation Manager looking, if anything, even happier. He took the chair opposite Kit, in the middle of the front room; grinning, he finger-combed his mustache.

  “Kit,” he said after a bewildering moment, “you know I realize who I’m working for.”

  “Really.” Kit managed a grin of his own.

  “I realize, Kit, you’re a true believer. You’re a martyr, man, you’re beautiful. Look at you.”

  Tad’s bullshit was a sight for sore eyes. An act of great delicacy. He had only the smallest improvisational space, a sliver between confidence and self-mockery.

  “And this is a beautiful thing, closing down awhile. It’s like Carlos Castañeda out in the desert. Not doing, you know? The Yaqui way of knowledge.”

  Tad went on a moment about the rightness of Kit’s decision. “But Kit,” he said then, “let me ask you something.”

  And the Circulation Manager was utterly unfazed about working in public. He lay both hands palm-up on the desk between them, nothing to hide.

  “Let me ask you. What do you think makes people read about the scum of the earth down in Monsod?”

  “Tad. Scum of the Earth was what I was going to call the paper. Until I thought of Sea Level, Scum of the Earth was it.”

  Corinna gave a startled laugh, behind Tad’s back.

  “Yeah, yeah,” the Manager said. “But m’tellin’ya Kit. Ninety-nine people out of a hundred out there, they don’t want to hear about the scum in Monsod. Junkies, killers—they don’t care about those losers. The only way they’ll read about it, is if they think it’s hip.”

  “Hip,” Kit said.

  “Hip. They need to think it’s part of the scene.”

  Zia’s laughter, behind Kit, was refreshingly acid.

  “I see,” Kit said. “And what I’m doing now, this beautiful Yaqui thing, it’s also very hip.”

  “Well, no offense, Kit. I realize how you feel about it.”

  “It’s going to sell papers.”

  “When we start up again, Kit—it’s going to be so big, the newsstands’ll have to pay us in elephant dollars. Hey, to be hip, m’tellin’ya, it’s important. It’s a dream to people. The dream business, that’s our business. Unless you’re putting out a paper for sociology professors.”

  Kit didn’t take offense. In fact it was a relief bashing away like this, not having to apologize for once. After a moment he asked Tad if he’d read Hamlet.

  “Oh great,” Tad said. “We’re expanding our readership base now. We’re reaching out to English professors.”

  “Hamlet, Tad. You’ve read Hamlet. You know what Hamlet says he’s reading, in there?”

  Tad stroked his mustache, his grin holding steady.

  “Words, words, words,” Zia said.

  Kit turned sideways in his chair, eyeing the writer. “Words, words, words,” he repeated, smiling. He turned back to his Circulation Manager. “I’d like to think, Tad, that we can do better than that.”

  It was a relief to bash away, a relief to hear that at least one person who worked for Sea Level believed the paper would be back on the stands some day. But after the Circulation Manager had finished going over his figures and left—maybe the bank balance would stretch through Valentine’s after all—Zia noisily began to pack up. She was taking the rest of the day off. “In fact,” she said, gathering her bright blue pens, “let’s make it the rest of the week.” And there was her glare again, the equals signs on either side of her nose. Kit went to her, to the half-wall before her.

  “I thought,” she said, “like, I’m a writer now, I should write. I thought, okay, this is how I deal with depression now. This is what I do instead.”

  Kit checked Corinna. She glared back with eyes very different from Zia’s, very round, two zeros. Some tough arithmetic in the office today.

  “I thought like, okay, it’s just a delay. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you, young lady. But I’m like, non-functional.”

  Kit made a few stabs at calming her: reassurances, reminders. The woman kept shaking her head, slowly zipping up her black leather. “The coming and going, Kit, all this coming and going. It’s too much for me. I mean, when the whole enterprise seems so shaky to begin with.” Kit knew better than to touch her, to give her any provocation. Also he was finding it hard to disagree. He could feel the relief his office had given him that morning, feel its therapy in his neck and his bruises—yet nonetheless Zia was right. Sea Level had to rank among the most ill assorted menageries ever. On the one hand Kit had a fire-eater like Rick Dimirris, storming in with the names of the bad guys, and on the other hand he had a happy-face like Tad Close. And these two women couldn’t have been more at cross-purposes. One was upwardly mobile, the other downwardly. One was full-hipped in full makeup, the other all eyeliner and anorexia. They had the generational difference too: Corinna a Movement woman like Mrs. Rebes, eyes on the prize, and Zia whatever had come since.

  Gently now Kit asked Zia to think about it, to check in tomorrow morning at least. But his eyes kept shifting back and forth between her and Corinna. Zia was packing away the last of her writing, smoothing her chicken-scratched legal pages before she slipped them into her satchel. Corinna was ratcheting a fresh sheet of letterhead into her typewriter and beginning to tap out a note.

  The checks and balances of the working world, Viddich. And there could be no denying that it was his preferred world, no denying the relief it afforded him or the way it cleared his head of imaginary layout & pasteup. Knocking this hole in his schedule of deadlines and press days, in fact, might well have been the most difficult penance he could set himself. Kit couldn’t dissuade Zia, no. He agreed with her. When the phone rang again, he felt another distinct pick-me-up.

  He couldn’t believe who was calling, though. “My uncle?” he asked Corinna.

  “Uncle Pete, that’s what he says.”

  Zia, her satchel over her shoulder, was coming through the halfwall doorway beside him. “Kit, the best I can tell you is, I’ll try to check in.”

  “Zia, please, wait. Uncle Pete, really? Calling here?

  “You want me to tell him it’s not a good time?”

  “I’ll try, Kit. But I mean, a letdown like this, a disappointment like you laid on me today …”

  “No no, I’ll, ah, I’ll take it in a minute.”

  “You want this phone?”

  “ … I’m not too big on handling that kind of disappointment.”

  Zia was out the door by the time Kit and his uncle had finished their hellos. Maybe she caught Kit’s last look, uncertain, showing her—Zia, do you know the best way to test the worth of your work?—maybe she saw it, maybe not. Anyway Uncle Pete was a bad tangle, himself. A demanding tangle. Uncle Pete was the gay one, in the closet but no secret.

  To begin with there was the problem of the man’s voice. “Mnhm, Kit. How’re you doing?” No way Kit could assimilate that voice. No way, not here; it made no difference even when he switched the receiver so he could no longer hear Zia’s diminishing footsteps. To properly appreciate Pete’s voice, packed
in the cotton of long cattleman silences, a person had to be just finishing up a long night’s difficult calving. A person had to be standing in the flashlight’s sepia, in the placental stink. Then you had room for that voice, you were weary and pliant enough for its good sense and its capacity for hope: astonishing stuff at such an ungodly hour.

  “How am I doing?” Kit said finally. “Think of how Rod Carew stands at the plate.”

  Even his uncle’s laugh sounded barn-like. “.388 last year.”

  “And he does it looking like a pretzel.”

  “Mnhm. Are you going to get back here this summer, Kit? Are you and I going to take in a ballgame?”

  “Aw, Uncle Pete. You know I’m an Easterner now.”

  Then the silence. In Pete’s case, there was always more to it, more than cowboy ways or the Minnesota Shys. Kit too suffered a long tongue-tied moment, thinking how often lately he’d brought up this man’s secrets. Again and again he’d brought it up: I have an uncle who’s … He’d become a city boy, a talker.

  But the hardest thing to deal with was Corinna’s note. As Kit leaned against her desk trying to think of the next icebreaker—trying to imagine why Pete had called—his Administrative Assistant yanked what she’d been writing out of her typewriter. A rackety yank. Bette’s Apple had nothing to match the loud finality of pulling a sheet out of a typewriter carriage. Then she handed it to him: a resignation letter.

  It ran three lines, under the letterhead. Formal business English: I therefore give you my notice to resign, as of the end of this pay period.

  “You know, Kit,” Uncle Pete said in his ear, “I’ve tried to reach you at home.”

  Hard to assimilate. The distance seemed suddenly a matter of light years—and the likelihood of getting anywhere seemed far less than with this wide-faced young mother beside him. Corinna hadn’t moved, after she’d handed him the note. She hadn’t taken those round eyes from him. She was still giving him a chance.

  *

  The worst of the Boston’s new construction was in the old West End. Just below Beacon Hill between the expressways and the Charles, you got a series of Cold War bunkers, a chain-mail cityscape: Massachusetts General Hospital, Government Center, and one steel-and-glass cereal box after another, packed with offices and condominiums. Even the plaza spaces wore on the soul. Flat swaths of brick or concrete, they suggested a firing range. The area was one big shrine to brute force, a Fascist temple cluster, and Kit always felt particularly disheartened to find it at the foot of Beacon Hill. The Hill of course showed you the city of the previous century and earlier, the stoops and cobblestones. Kit loved its quirks of layout, architects on foot thinking of people on foot. No building stood taller than four stories and every block presented a stipple of differently colored house fronts: not exactly a rainbow, but variations on brick red and stone-gray at least, with occasional flashes of yellow or even blue.