Talking Heads

by John Domini

  “That was the only power I had.” Tearing up, blinking, she nonetheless held head and shoulders strictly squared. “My sole advantage, don’t you know. I had to keep you in love with me.”

  “Bette, I am in love with you.”

  “If I kept you in love, I had a chance, you see. I had that much over you at least.”

  She pulled the other hand free, lifting a single fingertip to her wet cheek. Kit looked away. But what help was he going to find? What, in the rattling ceiling-high glass, in bleached and wounded walls going back to the American Empire?

  “Bette,” he tried, “we have to work out some better version of love. You and me.”

  She blinked but then—astonishing him—laughed. “Oh, indeed. A better version of love.”

  She laughed again, thickly, her sobs not quite past. “Oh Kit. Big ambitions, ra-ther. That’s my hero.”

  Bewildered, Kit nonetheless understood he could touch her again, take her hands again. He knew the woman: she loved to think. He persisted: love in their culture was a faulty model. “All based on dominance and subversion, authority and anti-authority. Everybody’s got to use whatever advantage they’ve got on everybody else.”

  “Oh, are you speaking of ‘free love,’ Kit? No hang-ups, man.” Her voice was sardonic, but her grip remained warm. “No secrets, dig it.”

  With that, another idea came to Kit, a missing connection—a notion so sudden and right that he wasn’t going to waste any time saying it out loud.

  “Speaking of secrets,” he said, “there’s Forbes Croftall.”

  She didn’t pull her hand away, another surprise. But she drew up into Academy-girl posture.

  “Forbes Croftall,” Kit repeated. “He’s been calling you, right? He’s the one.”

  Nor did Bette start crying again. She was no Louie-Louie Rebes, so unused to intimacy that once anything close to the heart got spoken, the floodgates burst.

  “He’s been getting in touch,” Kit said, “because a few years back, during the Rampage, he was one of them.”

  “He tells me he can’t live without me,” Bette said. “He tells me he has dreams about me.”

  Kit nodded, this morning’s aches and pains hot with the force of his idea. Bette’s face revealed nothing—the hamper was closed—but she began to undo her long coat.

  “The first call came, let me see.” She paused at a button. “It would have been about the time you and Mirini were working out the contract. Not long ago, really.”

  Kit nodded, hot, still a step ahead of her explanations.

  “A curious man, Forbes. Or in a curious marriage, perhaps. ‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ said Alice. At first he would only call in the mornings, when you wouldn’t be in.”

  At first. Kit remembered the two calls last night.

  “And last Thursday, well. While you were at Monsod, Kit? He came by the apartment.”

  *

  In time, the Sea Level office began to seem like a natural for this kind of talk. An open room, a natural. Whatever was brewing behind the halfwalls eventually foamed up into plain sight. Even now, every workspace revealed touches of visible madness. Here were Zia’s gaudy postcards, there Corinna’s bulky cosmetics case, and up on Kit’s glass walls stood the fabled Wyoming jackalope. Imaginary layout & pasteup, standing in plain sight, out where Croftall’s pursuit of Kit’s wife fit right in. A dirtball direct from the grubby little handful that motivation always comes down to. You put together a decaying marriage, a dark-lit Parker House memory—simple as that, you had the dirtball. The obsession. Only later, as the Senator’s better judgment had tried to play catchup, had Croftall seen as well the possibility of using Kit to provide political cover.

  The Senator needed to satisfy Leo too, Kit pointed out. A BBC inspection had to look legit, but also it couldn’t turn up anything that would cost Leo too much to fix.

  Bette pointed out that, as majority leader, Croftall lived behind a screen of public power. It had been years since he’d known what it was like to be exposed.

  There in Zia’s workspace, Kit and Bette could work out the whole shape of the man’s lovesickness. Now they bent together holding hands, now they eased back against the partitions. Bette explained that, last Thursday morning, the Senator never made it any further than the stairwell. “I threatened to start screaming, actually.”

  Kit shook his head, picking construction-site mud from one knee. “And he still didn’t get the message? He kept calling?”

  Bette heaved another of her sighs. But then she was studying Zia’s desktop again, color in her face.

  “I told you before,” she said to the postcards, “Kit, I’m not strong like you. I couldn’t make him stop.”

  “Aw. Betts, the man was falling apart.”

  “It was history again, Kit. An old family friend, don’t you know. History. I didn’t have the strength.”

  Kit had her hand again, her hand and now the back of her head. He pulled her to him, repeating the old kindnesses: the best, sweetheart, always. Bette however returned no more than a conventional squeeze. With his face in her throat Kit could feel she was nowhere near tears. Enough, husband. No seconds on the sweet talk. Sitting back, firming up his tone, Kit pointed out that the real need for strength was still to come. He told her about the meeting with Popkin.

  “Asa Popkin?” Bette frowned. “Kit, I should think you’d have met with him already.”

  “Easier said than done, Betts.” Kit straightened his spine and told her what had happened with Louie-Louie, with Leo.

  “What?” Her frown was almost a replay from the Cottage beach. “You went to Mirini?”

  Yet the story came, if not easily, without any carrying on. Kit left his neck alone. He’d never have believed the sentence, “I pulled a gun on him,” could sound so mature. Never would have believed he could sound regretful, but no longer ashamed. Bette, watching close, lost her frown.

  When he was done she exhaled without theatrics. “Kit, didn’t I tell you you’d been carrying on like a tragic hero? Didn’t I?”

  “It was a mistake. I know.” Could this be the voice of his work ethic? His innate respect for what people were supposed to do at these desks?

  “A mistake, indeed. And I suppose it’s gotten a lot of play on your interior news. Your invisible layout and pasteup.”

  Kit dropped his eyes, but again it wasn’t quite shame that stung him. It was a lesser pang. Rue.

  “How’s that going, Kit? Still hard at it?”

  “Ah.” Kit even smiled. “I’d say the worst is over, there. This morning I reached some closure.”

  “Closure.” Bette sat back, but her stare had lost nothing. She pointed out that the mind’s fantasy function generally had nothing to do with the neat logic of introduction, development, and resolution. “It’s not a columnist up there, you know.”

  Heads up. “This wasn’t strictly fantasy, Betts. It wasn’t entirely unhealthy, either.”

  “Oh really? Tell that to Forbes Croftall.”

  “Aw, come on. Croftall’s just the opposite, he thought the fantasy was real. I always knew it was false, I worried about it. I told my wife.”

  She remained longfaced, skeptical.

  “I told my wife. Other than that, I let whatever was going on up there work itself out.”

  She nodded, a half-measure, her eyes shifting. Kit had a nettled moment—three days of hard feelings were going to take more than this—before unexpectedly she gripped his hand.

  “Good Lord,” she said, staring. “You don’t suppose Croftall told anyone?”

  Kit’s turn to back off, look away. He recalled Leo, by the lower site: Croftall never needed me to help him find trouble. And the old man was a smutmonger, no question. But by now Kit knew the way to beat the guy.

  “Betts,” he said, “so long as there’s nothing more buried between you and I, it doesn’t matter if anyone else knows.”

  She softened the hold on his hand, and her eyes came back to orchid blue. Yet she r
eturned to the confrontation with Leo. “What does Popkin say?”

  “Popkin, hoo boy. What’s lawyer language for ‘mistake’?”

  “A mistake, indeed. The mistake, I’d say.”

  “The mistake?”

  “Well, this sort of thing, Kit. Banging around this old city like a one-man army.”

  All Kit’s sore spots grew hot again. “The Lone Ranger.”

  Bette, relaxed enough to smile, was unaware of new thinking she’d set off. “I was thinking more of that movie about a Boston underground paper.”

  “I’ve been bound and determined, haven’t I?”

  Now Bette heard the difference. “I do wonder,” she said more carefully, “who you’ve been trying to impress.”

  “Bound and determined to put myself into events. To become the news, myself.” Kit had to stand, to move outside Zia’s workspace. “That’s what I wanted. That’s why this happened.”

  “Why this happened? Oh, Kit. You mean you’re only now—oh, Kit. All I’m saying is you’ve been a tad overeager.”

  He kept pacing. “I never saw it like this. Never without something in the way.”

  “Something in the way?”

  This didn’t stop him either. He began to thank her as he moved, to praise her. “Bette, if I’ve got you, I’m not worried about it. If I’ve got you—”

  “Oh Kit. You figured out all that business about Monsod and Croftall without me.”

  “But not this, Betts. Not my own head, not without you.”

  “Oh, honestly. This hardly qualifies as a blinding insight.”

  “I was trying to be the news. That’s it. Not the media—the news.”

  In the office, walking was easier on him than it had been out in the cold. The marriage was easier on him; it felt like an extraordinary piece of luck. That he and Bette should even have met, in this disorganized city, that alone was great luck. And then that over the past couple of days they’d had time and grace to write each other the sort of long, strange messages that were all the more powerful for being so roundabout—sweet luck. Kit thanked her again. He praised her some more, putting the exclamation point with thumps of his boot heel. “Betts, I’ll tell you, the last thing you need to worry about is whether you’re strong.” Thump! “If you can stick it out through this, Betts, you’re strong.” Thump!

  At that Bette thumped along. They set off a fresh rattle in Kit’s glass walls.

  Kit found her face. “Bette, anyway, it was stupid. Running around trying to prove I’m a hero.”

  There was his smart girl, her eyes lifting. “That’s good, Kit. And I’d add that it’s a natural hazard for someone like you, besides. Someone who believes in heroes.”

  Still a believer, check. “Plus Betts, there’s something else. Something else, while I’m telling you what you mean to me. We’ve got to start having kids.”

  Surprised, she showed traces of her old tatterdemalion. A few hay-hairs came loose from under her collar.

  “Darling,” he said, “we’ve got to.”

  He’d quit pacing, and the odors of his hard morning had caught up with him. “Next time, Betts, no more maybe, maybe not. Next time we’re in bed. Whatever we do there, it’s not going to be an accident.”

  Bette allowed herself a small smile. “You want a son and heir?”

  “Aw, you need this as much as I do. The woman I saw out on that Cottage beach, you know, when she needed something she wasn’t shy about saying so.”

  “All right, Kitty Chris. All right, yes. Kids.”

  “Thataway. I mean, out on that beach, Betts? I’ll tell you. I thought you were the movie.”

  “Oh. I was frightened, you know.”

  “You were incredible. You were the hit movie and the underground paper all rolled into one. It was like, ‘Arise, Arise—’”

  Bette cut him off, singing the rest.

  *

  Singing, a rare move. Bette’s voice wasn’t bad, or not for a listener raised on the white-girl divas of acoustic guitar, early Carolyn Hester through middle Joan Baez. Arise, arise, Mary Hamilton. Arise, and come with me. Such serious material these women went in for. Full of the grave and its admonishments, full of noble gesture in the face of death. Bette quit her recital when the room’s echo made her self-conscious. She broke off giggling. Nonetheless for a moment there Kit could hear it, his wife’s root seriousness. He could hear a potent and bell-like willingness to work, determination enough perhaps even to throw off a few centuries burdened by absent fathers and the likes of Cousin Cal. And singing so open-throated and hymn-like was something else he and Bette could have together.

  Recovered from her giggles, meantime, she was suggesting food. She had bread and chowder from Sage’s back at the apartment. Perhaps a little wine.

  A decent meal sounded like heaven. Kit couldn’t remember when he’d been so hungry. But he knew what he’d heard, in his wife’s singing, and what part of her he needed to reach. The two of them had to start sharing more than stage business and sexy dinners. Before they left the office, Kit found the card from Croftall’s aide and the list of Monsod contractors. He showed her them both, explaining. And he told her more: “Before Thursday,” Kit said, “I needed to find a way to let Louie-Louie and his mother know the truth.”

  Bette was brought up short. Wordless, she stared.

  “Betts, I can’t just be a tourist. Another lame ofay who blunders into their lives and then walks away.”

  She’d caught him by the arm, beside Corinna’s desk. She studied him, fingering the redone button at her neck. “But you say … you have to find a way.”

  “Find a way, yeah. It wouldn’t be right if they found out by reading it in the papers. But it’d be even worse if I made the same mistake all over again.”

  “A neutral setting, perhaps. Popkin’s office.”

  “Somebody else has got to be there when I tell them, that’s for sure. It can’t just be Kit the Hit.”

  Her smile wasn’t much, but her grip on his arm relaxed. At the door, they were playful-formal, after you. Yet Kit kept up the high-mindedness. The real work, he pointed out, would start after the Grand Jury was over. The real challenge was finding out if there was anybody left who would put their money behind Sea Level and, at the same time, allow Kit his conscience. “I guess,” he said, “I’ll finally find out whether this is city of my dreams.” But then part of his problem, Kit went on, was that nowadays the media itself seemed to have lost its conscience. New technology was throwing off old definitions. One moment, contemporary media looked chilly and distant and controlling (“like talking heads Uber Alles,” he said), and the next, it looked frivolous, fragmented and prying. The Fourth Estate had to reexamine every value, test every assumption. The alternative press especially. The alternative, nowadays, looked as far from the whole truth as .

  “Kit,” Bette cut in, “who’s this across the hall?”

  Kit had noticed it too. There was noise from inside the women’s counseling setup, unhappy noise. A moaning—surprised, grim. This with no lights on, inside. Then came a shuffling, a stumbling, then what might have been the sound of breaking glass. Not much glass—a vial, a test tube—but loud in the suddenly silent hallway.

  “Hello?” Kit called.

  “Is everything all right?” Bette called.

  Wannabe heroes, Kit thought, the pair of them. But the next sound was a gasp or splutter, someone struggling to breathe. By the time the chair fell over, the loudest noise yet, Kit and Bette were in the door. They saw the chair at a farther desk fall, and Zia Mirini in it. Zia with no leather jacket, with one sleeve of her shirt up.

  “Oh, hell,” Bette said.

  Zia with foam at her mouth, a smear of blood on her exposed inner arm.

  “Call 911,” Kit said.

  But the phone for the women’s group had been disconnected. Bette had to take Kit’s key and run back across the hall. Meanwhile he was squatting over Zia, in the sweat-smell of her smack rush. He thumbed foam off her mouth,
that Brando mouth she’d gotten from her father. The foam was the father’s too. I don’t give a shit about you or your faggot friends, Leo had said, and then he’d handed her the cash. But now Zia’s mouth was something likewise stony. Rictus lips. Kit clenched his jaw, his stomach; he forced his fingers between her teeth and swabbed what gunk he could out of her mouth. Gunk, pulp—winy. Zia’s half-shut eyelids fluttered, she jerked in a gag reflex, and for a moment Kit had a hope she would come to.

  No. Her looks went still again, pale and still around his fingers. She was wearing eyeliner, sweet Jesus.

  Without gagging himself, Kit cleared the breathing passages. He knew that much about overdose cases. He kept at bay the bad thoughts triggered by the pulp in her mouth, the images of another young face disappearing under vomit. He scooted down to her nerveless legs, setting them straight. Street slush clung to the hems of Zia’s jeans, and he used the cold muck to clean his fingers. Across the hall, Bette was shouting into the phone. That helped, to hear her working too. Kit hefted Zia’s thin arm over his head. When he hoisted her up, out of one eye he spotted the broken fallen syringe. Glittery antiseptic glass, dirty with blood.

  “Move,” he said. “Walk.”

  He knew that much about overdose cases. You had to keep the heart working.

  “Move,” he said. “Live.”

  At least this office had less in the way than his. Someone had knocked out the partitions, as well as the reliquary in the back. If there’d been such a martyr’s space available, no doubt Zia would have tucked herself into it. No doubt she had some nasty spectacle of self-destruction in mind, coming here, in easy reach of both Kit and her father. Coming here was a slap in the face and a cry for help at once. The poor damaged daughter might even have been thinking of Esquire.

  The ideas flickered, dim, but mostly Kit didn’t have the time. He didn’t have the breath. He found a clear stretch between the desks, and while he hauled Zia up and back he used his free hand to try and get her legs moving. Bent and twisted and grunting, he lifted one knee, he nudged the other. She wasn’t responding. The toes of her biker boots dragged over the floorboards, noisy but slack. Hard work, after a hard morning. Kit stank as badly as Zia, and the knee he’d landed on at the T site was killing him. He’d been in these offices forever, midway between the money guy and the street. And whatever motives Zia might’ve had hardly mattered—they flickered, nothing more—like his own reasons for needing to save her. If Sea Level were worth anything, she had to live. If he’d done any good by letting all these secrets out of their closets, she had to live. If it meant anything to have worked out better with Bette …