Talking Heads

by John Domini

  “We all knew, sure. We ah, we knew you knew we knew.”

  Once more the aging cowboy may have laughed. “You should have heard Leslie trying to explain that one.”

  “Leslie, hoo boy. Lots of luck, Uncle Pete.” And how had Kit’s mother taken it? Composed again following her prayer session, she’d met Pete’s announcement with “that smile she has, you know.” Kit knew: an accepting smile, easeful, yet also neutral, at a remove. Afterwards, she’d said quietly that there was no point getting into the news from Kit’s wife, just now.

  “Still playing it close to the vest, our Sister Nina.”

  Again the mention of the call left Kit unfazed. “Well, we’ve all done it for years, Uncle Pete.”

  “Your Uncle Leslie, wellsir. He said he wouldn’t’ve had so many women around, if he hadn’t’ve known about me.”

  “Come on.”

  “That’s what he said. Told me he probably would’ve married one of them, if he hadn’t’ve known about me.”

  “Aw, he’s just flabbergasted. Just knocked for a loop, like I was. You’re not responsible for him wearing out half the women from there to Mankato.”

  “Wellsir. I mean to say, once secrets start coming out, they’re hard to stop.”

  “I hear you.” Though Kit had to wonder about his new equanimity. Tonight, after all, he might simply be too hammered to care.

  “Uncle Pete,” he said, “what Les said, that just shows what this took, for you. This took courage.”

  But that wasn’t what the uncle was getting at. “I mean to say, there’s evil in it.”

  Evil? The word didn’t fit the man’s conversational style. He knew it, too: “Your mother now, she’s the one who can tell you about evil. She can give you chapter and verse.

  “But I can see what’s the evil here,” Pete went on, more seriously. “I know this brand of evil, here. It’s too many secrets in one place.”

  Another silence, on both ends.

  “Too many secrets,” Pete said, “it makes people act up.”

  “I hear you,” Kit said.

  “That’s the evil. All these secrets packed in close. Makes people just about jump out of their skins.”

  Which felt like enough for one phone call. Kit changed his tone, murmuring the kind of encouragement he’d brought up earlier for Louie-Louie. Uncle Pete I think you’ve got something there. Uncle Pete that’s great you’re still learning from this. Honest encouragement, but they’d both had enough. The uncle declared, out of nowhere, that he hadn’t eaten lunch yet. Besides, in the outer office Louie-Louie looked like he was going to start climbing the walls. And yet, as Kit went his final congratulations, his promises to call (“Pete, you know I’m good about that”), he suffered less comfortable thoughts. He suffered memories.

  Impressions of sharing a house with this man had lain for years under a cover of dust. Tonight however—with this talk of evil and secrets—Pete had blasted pockets of sudden clarity. Kit recalled his uncle’s mysterious long weekends in Minneapolis-St. Paul, “meeting beef reps” way out of season. He remembered that once or twice as a teenager, he’d been alone with Pete, alone with his shirt off on a hot vacation day, and the uncle had startled him with a long, slow, full-hand stroke down his naked back to his belt line. And during the last rounds of labor trouble up in the Mesabi ore fields, the man had taken the family’s Leftie sympathies to extremes Kit had never seen. Pete had started screaming about what the miners were going through. He’d whaled against the fireplace wall with a heavy-headed poker, bending the’ thing almost at a right angle.

  It couldn’t have been easy for him. Naturally Kit had been more aware of his mom’s unhappiness, her lack of a place. Nonetheless ever since he’d begun to understand that there were different approaches to loving and its tagalong mysteries, ever since his earliest misunderstandings about “69” or “the Hershey highway,” Kit had glimpsed the miseries of this fussy, unspoken-for cattleman. Now and again he’d felt something of them, those miseries, as sharply and unforgettably as the once-in-a-blue-moon sweeps of the man’s hand down his naked spine. He’d known what Pete was going through even though, whenever Kit’s mom or Uncle Leslie went so far as to indicate they knew the same, they did it by means of sideways glances and words half-spoken. Confirmations that flashed and were gone.

  Uncle Pete, unlike Kit’s mom, couldn’t get what he needed from a “church family.” Every day he must have asked himself what he was doing there. Didn’t he belong in a boho downtown studio? But then what about the pleasure he took in the outdoor life, in the clatter of a Coleman stove strapped to the back of a horse? Ever since Kit had known the man was different, he’d heard him asking these questions, or overheard. He couldn’t make out the words, but he’d gotten the point. Still he’d said nothing about it, not even on the expeditions to root for Killebrew and the Twins or the hunting trips up to Leech Lake. He’d observed the same restraint as the others in the house until he was away among the smirking city boys at Exeter and Harvard and the Globe.

  As he said his goodbyes tonight, Kit kept bucking up the man, voicing new approvals. “Uncle Pete, it’s for the best.” He understood that this wasn’t about him and the not-so-bad tensions he’d endured growing up. This was about the man on the other end of the line, and about what Bette had called the bright lights of history. A person had every right to cast the kind of shadow he wanted, before those lights. Nonetheless, within his uncle’s new projected shape Kit could see others, less proud. He saw shapes that had him switching the phone’s receiver from ear to ear. Kit’s uncle was old, pushing sixty. How many years had he wasted with talking to himself, whispering questions at the medicine-cabinet mirror? And how many of the people Kit loved had helped keep him there? “Sister Nina,” Uncle Leslie, the growing Kit himself—they’d all kept Pete in there babbling at the medicine cabinet. And in so doing they’d chained themselves in place too, chained themselves to silence and lies and what they believed was good for the boy. That was the home and family Kit saw now, in the bright lights of history, with the receiver sweating in his hand. A prison.

  *

  Diorama #22—St. Peter in the Hole

  The scening depicts blesséd apissle Peter, cornverting by erection both Snigr. Hardnose (see the privys diorama) and San Luigi-Luigi of the Gorillas (who is without diorama, in this museo—donuts of all size are much appenetrated! ).

  The enormity of this appissle is here indispootable. Blesséd Peter made cornverts all over the Hell-Clown world. Hardnose and Luigi-Luigi have in their case erected to receive his touch, but this makes Peter’s piece no less a hero.

  His two cornverts, we see in their exstasy, have never been entered this way. Their lice have changed places forever.

  Kit, kid.

  Angry with himself, Kit deliberately called up Leo’s phrase. Stop this, kid. And there was Leo’s name on Kit’s desk, as well, or Leo’s company’s name. The list of Monsod contractors still sat beside the phone where Kit had left it this morning. He studied the page a moment. Once or twice he shook his head, trying to clear away the sensation of something dirty in his ears.

  Louie-Louie stood at the door, half in shadow. He tapped the nearest glass wall with a fingertip.

  Kit, this isn’t a museo. “That was my uncle,” he said. “He called to tell me he’s gay.”

  “I heard, I heard.” Louie-Louie had a hand in his beard. “Some heavy shit there. I’m sorry, man.”

  Kit shrugged. “I could’ve been more discreet myself. It’s not like I didn’t know you were here.”

  “Yeah but, it’s not like I didn’t know it was family.”

  With that—the word family—Kit had another idea.

  “You know about my brother, right?” Louie-Louie was asking. “You know he was kind of that way too.”

  Kit nodded vaguely, his eyes once more on the handwritten list beside the phone.

  “Kind of, huh. Tell you, man—one way I know my Mama’s in trouble is the way she won’t admi
t that Junior was a homo. Just fucking doesn’t want to see it.”

  Kit pulled the list towards him, the words blurring as it moved. “Louie-Louie,” he asked, “you’re at Sears now, right?”

  The brother let go of his beard. What did Sears & Roebuck have to do with anything?

  “You came here for help, right?” Kit had to get out of the chair. He was such a cliché, in the grip of a new idea: he actually had to get up and pace. “You reduced your load at Sears, you did what you could, but it only made things worse. Even your paycheck’s worse.”

  “My paycheck’s diddly, man.”

  “And finally you came here. So, Louie-Louie—suppose you had a second income? Something more flexible than Sears?”

  “Say what?”

  Kit made an effort to come across as though he’d thought about this a long time. With both of them in the office he didn’t really have room to pace, so he set himself at a kind of parade rest in the center of the room, one hand on a knob at the top of his tall chair. Suppose, he asked, Louie-Louie had a job where he could learn a few new skills? More importantly, suppose he had something better to do with his spare time than wander around with a gun in his pocket?

  “Say what?” But after a moment the brother’s tone relaxed. “You’re talking about here, ain’t you? Talking about, I could work for your paper here.”

  “A temporary assignment, yeah.”

  “Man.” Louie-Louie picked at his tight shirtfront. “You got some beans, Viddich. Some beans, you know?”

  Kit changed his grip on the chair’s knob. He brought up Mrs. Rebes, the way she’d feel if the brother worked for Sea Level. “She might stop calling you a baby, Louie-Louie.” Then, waiting till the big adolescent met his look: “And you might stop thinking of doing something crazy to change her mind.”

  “Hey.” The brother extended a warning finger. “Back off.”

  “Back off? You came to me, Louie-Louie.”

  Were they going to have a fight? A fight, here between the frail antique glass? For a chair-squeezing moment that’s what it felt like. Kit remembered his lousy social skills. More than that, he realized his new plan for the brother had come on so swiftly, so ringingly, that he’d never considered what might be—think about it—a whole range of possible bad outcomes. And Louie-Louie looked like a man at the end of his rope. He was still only halfway under the fluorescents of Kit’s office, his pointing finger in the light, his scowling face in shadow. He had Kit thinking of Uncle Pete again, Pete in his half-worlds, and the thousand half-baked ideas by which his family had kept him there. Yes, the worm was on Kit’s back now. Doubts were creeping up every side of his bright new idea.

  But Louie-Louie drew in his finger, dropped his arm. Meekly he stepped into Kit’s space.

  “You got that kind of money?” he asked.

  Exhale, Viddich. “I’ve got it, Louie-Louie.”

  “From what I see”—the brother was smiling, he wanted to make this work—“doesn’t look like you’ve got two nickels to rub together.”

  “I’ve got it,” Kit said. “Cash.”

  He glanced once more at the list on his desk. He needed to see the name. Mirinex, Inc.

  Chapter 9

  My baby—

  Mysteries, God knows there are mysteries, and, well. This is one of them: this sitting in front of the glass grid again, sitting gnawing at my Apple again—it’s a mystery; indeed. It’s not at all a sensible place for a girl in my position; I shouldn’t even be back in Cambridge yet; it’s only Monday and, well. Certainly I acted like I needed more time …

  Yet I’ve made a decision, don’t you know. My baby, I’ve come round to something; I’ve come round and round and round .

  Kit was reeling himself. His ears and face burned, but he had to blink away splatters of cold rain. The wet streamed out of his hair. As soon as he’d come in the kitchen he’d discovered the printout, unseparated pages with feeder-strips still attached, a neat white stack in the middle of the curling pink memos that still littered the breakfast table. He’d found it and stormed first around the apartment, then back out onto the sidewalks. He’d jogged for blocks in either direction, over frost-buckled brick under freezing rain.

  In high school, you know (do you know about high school, wherever you are?), the sweet sixteens scribble in their diaries, scribble scribble about the season’s infatuations—and then they show off what they’ve scribbled; they reveal their heart’s secrets (o, sigh) to whoever they think might whisper them, eventually, to the person they actually want to know … So I’ve heard, at least, my baby; I never went in for that sort of thing, playing Telephone, all that silliness; in my case the stakes were much too serious for that, in high school, much too serious. What I mean to say is, well. You aren’t simply another infatuation, my dear lost baby, and my sitting here doing “input” isn’t simply an adolescent game, a make-believe-mystery, in which Little Miss Giddy comes home where she might get caught—because she wants to get caught …

  My baby, I don’t believe this is that; I don’t believe I’ve fallen prey to such silliness: catch me if you can. The stakes are much too serious; and the “office in the home” is the only office I have—a room of one’s own, my baby. So if my prince should come, my prince your stepfather, if he should catch a whiff of my Cutty Sark out in the stairwell and come a-running … well. I do know the man, my baby, I know your stepfather; and he should read this, really; he needs to see whatever design I’m about to carve out on my Apple as much as I do.

  Then too, “Delete” is always only a single swift touch of the key away.

  Kit needed a towel. He needed a slug of scotch himself, something to take the chill off. His brand, Johnny Walker. In the liquor cabinet he found Bette’s half-finished pint of Cutty, the clipper ship on the label, the proud old vessel gone sketchy at the edges. Somehow seeing it knocked the wind out of him. It left Kit slumped on the long-unwashed linoleum, so the clip in his pocket pinched him again.

  She’d known he wouldn’t be home: I do know the man. And after a slow moment sitting there, as he began working the towel over his sopping head, Kit understood that Bette’s letter (or “letter,” as she’d have put it) stung him all the worse because it was a reminder of the note he himself had left for Leo. He’d lacked the strength to face the old man. It’d been hard enough keeping up a good front for Louie-Louie, assuring the brother that he’d take care of everything—the gun and everything. After that the best Kit could manage was typing up a brief explanation for Corinna and then finally jotting a note for Leo. A memo. Black on pink, like the clutter on his kitchen table. Kit had slipped it into the Mirinex box on his way out.

  He found his feet, found his drink, warmed his gullet. Now what did Bette mean, calling him a stepfather?

  But as for the weekend, my baby, my weekend of decision, well. Consider this mystery: I haven’t gone far, but I’ve visited an entirely different culture. Such are the demographics, in our packed and painful corner of the continent: in half a day’s drive you can move through three or four distinct cultures, each one in place for a good hundred and fifty years now at the least. Northward it’s Boston, Chelsea, Lynn, and Salem, which I would chart as first Brahmin, then blue-collar, then immigrant, and then finally history: the witches. Southward it’s Boston, Quincy, Brockton, New Bedford, which I would chart as first the ghettos, then the estates, then the factories, and then finally history: the whale ships. Westward it’s … well. Suffice to say that to my way of thinking, wherever you go it comes to history: there’s no stretch of the map I couldn’t chart—until I traveled all the way out to, for instance, Blue Earth County, Minnesota. Suffice to say that Sunday evening I headed west, more or less, to Providence, Rhode Island.

  … honestly, was it only yesterday evening? not even twenty-four hours ago?

  My baby, I bolted my oceanside hideaway—a Cottage, little ghost, a packed and painful corner indeed, though I must say I’m grateful for their Cutty Sark (do you know about blue laws, wh
ere you are? our Commonwealth’s Sunday laws?)—and I flew over scotch-brightened thruways to Providence, Rhode Island. In a hospital there I found someone who I think loved me once, or loved my family at least … and in that same Providence hospital I at last settled my business regarding, well—you.

  A hospital? She settled her business? Kit had to fight off starkly imagined headlines, tabloids flashing ABORTION and ADULTERY. He took up the towel again. Clumsily he massaged his head, moaning now and then into the fuzzy gloom of the cloth. After a while, he recalled Asa Popkin. Come tomorrow morning, would he be talking to the lawyer about a divorce?

  Though that last bit should be redone, don’t you know, that “someone who loved me”—that bit should give me a chance to exercise my Delete (maybe); because this was someone who loved someone else in my family, not me .

  Indeed, Providence itself presented rather a mystery. God knows there are mysteries, and this was another, finding what I wanted in Providence, RI; I had to do rather some digging, some research. You might say that I lifted a page from your stepfather’s book. The person I was after, the person who I think used to love me—oh God, why can’t I simply say it: the one she loved was my father—at any event I’d heard she’d remained single, this person in Providence. And so I’d come to town believing the next step would be a simple one, my business with you would be over in a trice; but I at first I found myself calling strangers. In an entirely different culture …

  O, I tapped my feet, on the unknown street—Delete; back in my seat, I cranked up the heat—Delete.

  In this corner of the continent, don’t you know, every culture has its Women’s Crisis Center; it’s rather a new development on the local charts, and a good one too, I’d say: every culture its own Crisis Center, each with its own Service Directory, a book of one’s own. And, well, I am a woman, and I am having a crisis … “am,” yes am, present tense, my baby; the lacerations itch, they ooze (sometimes I believe I’ll never pull anything from this Apple except worms) …