Talk Talk

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “I hate that place. Phonier than shit. All the waiters have a stick up their ass.” He was remembering the last time, the look on the face of the little fag with the bleached hair when he mispronounced the name of the wine—it was a Meursault and he’d had it before, plenty of times, but he wasn’t French, that was all.

  “I like it.”

  “Not me. I swear I’ll never go there again. I say Maggio’s. I’m driving, right?”

  The car thrummed beneath him, everything—every bolt and buckle and whatever else they had under the hood—in perfect alignment. This was the real thing, German engineering, and it made him feel unbeatable. He fumbled a moment with one of the reggae CDs—an old Burning Spear his cellmate used to play all the time—and then passed it to her. “How about a hand here, huh?” he said, and Natalia’s sweet smoky arrhythmic voice floated out again—“Sure,” she said, “sure, no problem, honey, and Maggio’s is fine, really”—and the lights flashed in the windows and the fog came up off the bay and Madison, her hair shining in the draw of the approaching headlights, found her niche in her mother’s arms. And there it was: the first light insuck of a child’s snore, replete.

  He was abstracted all through dinner, but Natalia hardly noticed. She was chattering away about some new appliance she needed for the house—a new microwave oven, that was it, because the old one, the one that came with the place, was outdated and it took her nearly five minutes to boil water for a cup of tea and she just didn’t trust the Smart-Mart line since they were a such a cheapie place, didn’t he think?—and he let her go on, her shopper’s rhapsody a kind of music to him. If she was happy buying things, then he was happy paying for them. It was a feeling he liked, providing for her—especially in contrast to Marshall, the dud she’d been with before him and who wasn’t the father of Madison and was so stingy and petty she couldn’t even begin to talk about it, but of course she always did. She’d been out to the car twice to check up on the kid and sneak a smoke and she managed to tuck herself back into her seat just as the entrées arrived. He didn’t say anything, just watched her as she unfolded the white linen napkin with a fillip of her wrist, her shoulders bare, eyes darting round the room—in her element, absolutely in her element. The steam rose from their plates. The waiter materialized over her shoulder—“Grated parmesan? Ground black pepper?”—and faded away. She spread the napkin across her lap, took a sip of wine. “You are the quiet one tonight, Da-na, yes?” she said, giving him a sidelong look as if better to examine him from the angle. “Something is wrong? You usually like this place, is it not so?”

  He did like the place. It wasn’t in the league of the Sausalito restaurant maybe, but the menu was pretty eclectic and they knew him here—everybody knew him—and if there was a line of tourists or whoever, they always seated him the minute he walked in the door. Which was the way it should be. His money was good, he tipped large, he always dressed in a nice Armani jacket when he came in for dinner and his girlfriend was a knockout—they should have paid him just to sit at the bar. He was having the seared ahi, to his mind the best thing on the menu, and it came teepeed atop a swirl of garlic mashed potatoes and translucent onion rings with a garnish of grilled baby vegetables; she was having the seafood medley. The ahi looked good, top-flight, but he didn’t pick up his fork. Instead he reached for the wine, their second bottle, a Piesporter he’d always wanted to try, and it was good, light and crisp on the palate, very cold and faintly sweet the way a Riesling should be. “Yeah,” he said, “the place is great.”

  She was neatly slicing a medallion of lobster in two. Her earrings caught the light as she bent her head forward, and he saw her framed there as if on the screen in a movie theater, the selective eye of the camera enriching the scene till the grain of the wood paneling shone behind her and the crystal glittered and her eye lifted to meet his. He’d bought them for her, the earrings, fourteen-karat white gold chandeliers with a constellation of diamonds, to make things up with her after their first fight—she wore them to bed that night and she didn’t wear anything else. “You look not so great—like a man who is, I don’t know, not so great right now. Are you not hungry? You are feeling discomfited?”

  He had to smile. Inside he was still seething at that fuckhead on the other end of the phone—Rick James, yeah, sure, the superfreak himself—but he had to hand it to her: she could make him smile anytime. Discomfited. Where in Christ’s name had she come up with that one? “It’s nothing, baby,” he murmured, reaching across the table for her hand, a hand almost as big as his own, the long predatory fingers, the pampered nails in two shades of lacquer, as if a cobalt moon were setting over a maraschino planet in ten fleeting phases. She took his hand in a fierce clasp and brought his knuckles to her lips.

  “There,” she said, everything about her sparkling, the earrings, the sheer fabric of her dress, her eyes, her lips, “you see? I make it better.”

  But it wasn’t better. He felt sulky, sullen, felt like lashing out at somebody. He freed his hand, picked up his fork and scattered the seared slabs of pink flesh round the plate. “You got your phone?” he said suddenly.

  She was sipping wine, the pedestal of the glass hovering like a hummingbird over the bud of her mouth. She liked wine. Liked it even more than he did. She liked vodka too. “Why? Did you lose yours?”

  He shook his head, held out his hand. “I left it on the dresser.”

  “But no—you have it when we are at The Bridge, for cocktails. Before the Smart-Mart. Remember? You are calling for canceling Madison’s piano lesson—remember?”

  “Maybe I left it in the car.”

  A theatrical sigh, the bemused frown giving way to a lingering look of chastisement, of maternal tsk-tsking—yes, and wasn’t it motherhood that ruined them all, that elevated them to the status of the all-knowing and all-powerful, and reduced everybody else, even grandfathers, dictators and mercenary killers, to the level of feckless children? Even as she dug into her purse for the cell a quick flare of anger burst in his brain, streamers everywhere. Did he snatch it from her? Maybe. Maybe he did. “I’ve got to make a call,” he said, barely able to suppress the rage in his voice. “Be right back.”

  He was on his way to the men’s, shouldering his way past a group of lawyer types at the bar—thirty to sixty, pinned-back ears, faces that glowed like jack-o’-lanterns with their own self-importance, Glenfiddich in their tumblers and bitches on their arms, Berkeley bitches, Stanford bitches, maybe even Vassar bitches—when he shot a glance to the doorway and saw the cutout figure of a little girl with a tragic face poised right there on the carpet in the shadow of the hostess’ stand. Madison was barefoot, her sundress askew, Henrietta Horsie dangling by the rope of its tail from the clench of one tiny fist. There was the smell of the sea knifing in through the open door, a smell of cold storage and rot, and it reminded him of where he was, of what it cost to live where you could get that smell anytime you wanted it, day and night. She was crying. Or no, whining. He could hear the faint singsong whimper, and it was like some stringed instrument—cello, violin—playing the same dismal figure over and over. Two couples suddenly entered the picture, looming up behind her looking puzzled and annoyed, as if they’d just stepped in something, and the hostess—Carmela, eighteen years old and as tall and lean and honey-breasted as a fashion model’s little sister—was bent at the waist, clearly disconcerted but trying her best to coo something reassuring.

  Fuck it, he was thinking, let Natalia deal with it, and he swung abruptly to his left, nearly colliding with a fish-faced woman in pearls and a black cocktail dress and half a mile of exposed bosom who was making her way back from the ladies’. “Oh,” she gasped as if he’d run her down on a football field and slammed the wind out of her, “oh, beg pardon,” and that was all it took—the movement, the distraction—because he heard Madison cry out behind him and then he turned and she was running to him, already sobbing.

  The whole place stopped dead, every head raised to see what the commotion was,
even the waiters looking over their shoulders as they levitated their trays and paused in mid-step. One of the lawyers might have said something: there was a laugh, a group laugh, at the bar behind him, but he blocked it out, Madison coming straight for him, her sobs brutal and explosive, the bare dirty feet slapping through a minefield of boots and loafers and heels till she was there clinging to his leg like a—what were those fish that fasten on to the sharks? “Dr. Halter, is everything all right?” one of the bartenders said, but he ignored him. And he must have lifted her too forcefully because she exploded all over again and he just tucked her, kicking, under one arm and brought her to Natalia like something he’d caught and trussed up in the jungle and they were laughing at him, he could feel it, everybody in the place, just laughing.

  There was one white-haired old shit in the men’s, meticulously drying his fat red hands as if he was afraid his skin was going to come off, and Peck gave him a look of such pure hate and burgeoning uncontainable violence that he backed out the door like a crab. The door eased shut on marble, fresh-cut flowers, a smell of new-minted money chopped up and vaporized. And what was that?—opera—playing through the speakers. For a long moment he just stared at himself in the mirror, his eyes vacant, and nothing registered, as if he didn’t recognize himself or the place either. Then he realized the phone was still in his hand, Natalia’s phone, the one that was stuck to the side of her head sixteen hours a day when she was running up the bill talking to her sister in Russia and her brother in Toronto and her best friend Kaylee whose kid was at the same pre-school as Madison. The phone. He studied it there in the palm of his hand as if he’d never seen it before, as if he hadn’t signed on for a thousand free minutes and used it as an extension of himself whenever he had to check up on the ballgame or place a bet or score a little something to make the afternoons go easier with nothing to do but sit in the sun on the back deck and stare at Natalia’s sweet brown midriff and tapering legs because how much sex can you have before you go blind and deaf and your tool falls off?

  He heard somebody at the door—another white-hair—and he said, “Give me a minute here, will you? Is that too much to ask—a fucking minute’s privacy?” And then he opened his hand and began to slam the cell against the marble tile of the wall in front of him, and he slammed it till there wasn’t much left to hold, and after that he dropped it to the marble floor and worked it with his heel.

  Later, after they’d got home and Natalia put Madison to bed and settled down in front of the tube (“Everything satisfactory? You want that doggie-bagged, Dr. Halter?” “Nah, no point in it—give it to the homeless, will you?”), he took a bottle of beer into the spare bedroom he used as an office and booted up the computer. He went to the T-M site, typed in his password and brought up his account—OVERDUE AND PAYABLE?SERVICE INTERRUPTION WARNING—to see what he could find there. He’d gotten lazy or incautious or whatever you wanted to call it and now he’d put everything at risk and that was just stupid, stupid, stupid. For a year and more he’d been careful to pay up all his Dana Halter accounts just so something like this wouldn’t happen, but he’d had a little cash-flow problem—the condo, the new car, Natalia on the phone and at the mall and the salon and Jack’s and Emilio’s and all the rest—and things had slipped. Now they were onto him. Jesus, the thought of it made him so furious, so rubbed raw and plain pissed off it was all he could do to stop himself from jerking the monitor off the desk and flinging it through the fucking window because the thing wasn’t giving him what he wanted. He stared at the screen, at his account, calls out and calls in—incoming, incoming—but nothing more recent than the close of the last billing period. He wanted that number. The number of that fuckhead Dana Halter—or the cop or detective or whoever he was, Rick Fucking James—and he wasn’t going to wait for the bill and he wasn’t going down to the T-M office to pay off the account either. No, he was going to get a new phone in some other creep’s name and no one would be the wiser except maybe Natalia (“Will you not give me back my cell, Dana?” she’d said the minute they got in the car; “No,” he said, “I need it because I’m expecting a call, okay? Can you just back off? Can you?”).

  Before he did that, though, he had a little task to perform, the smallest pain in the ass maybe, but not risky, not at all. What he had to do, first thing in the morning, even before he opened a new account and got his five hundred free minutes and no-charge weekends, was go down to Smart-Mart and amble into the menswear department. He’d been hasty, impulsive. He hadn’t been thinking. But he could picture it already, some career drudge stocking shelves or pushing a broom and “Hey, bro, can you help me out here—I had my cell balanced right here on top of this display because my arms were loaded down with all this high-quality Hanes underwear and I think it went down there, yeah, there, behind the partition. Hey, thanks, man, thanks beaucoup.” Yeah, and then he’d toss it away again, but not before he hit Calls Received and got that clown’s number. Because who was to blame here, who was the wise guy, who was fucking with whom?

  Two

  “WHAT DID HE SOUND LIKE?”

  Bridger shrugged. She watched his lips. “I don’t know—like anybody else, I guess.”

  It was early evening, she was feeling frayed and beaten and so exhausted her internal meter was barely registering, but her papers were finished and back in the hands of her students and her grades were in. They were at a restaurant, Bridger’s treat, the silent careening of the waitresses and the tidal heave of people swelling and receding at the bar a kind of visual massage for her, and as she poured out her second glass of beer she felt herself coming back to life. She’d always liked this place—it featured old sofas and low tables, loud rock music (very loud: she could feel the vibrations in the beer bottle, in the cushions, the table, almost picture the air fracturing around her) and a mostly young clientele from the local college. It was dark, there were dashed-off-looking abstracts on the walls, and it was cheap and good. She’d ordered risotto, about the only thing she could get down without chewing; Bridger was having pizza, the all-sustaining nutriment and foundation of his diet.

  “You’re hearing,” she said, leaning into the table, “and you can’t do better than that? What was his voice like?”

  He leaned in too, but he wore an odd expression—he hadn’t heard her. Because of the music. “What?” he said, predictably.

  She gave him a smile. “Just like the night we met.”

  “What?”

  So she signed it for him and he signed back: What do you mean?

  You’re deaf too.

  He had an outsized head, castellated with the turrets and battlements of his gelled hair, and sometimes, when she saw him in a certain light, his features seemed compacted in contrast, like a child’s. That was how it was now. He had the look of a child, puzzled, unaware, but slowly allowing her gesture to make the words in his mind and bring the meaning back through the circuitry to his eyes. “Oh, yeah,” he said aloud. “Yeah.”

  But what did he sound like?

  A shrug. Cool.

  Cool? The jerk who stole my identity is cool?

  Another shrug. He lifted his beer to his lips to give him time with the response, then he set it down carefully and said something she didn’t catch.

  What?

  His clumsy Sign, loose and sloppy, but endearing because it was his: Suspicious.

  He sounded suspicious? Cool and suspicious?

  People were watching them—the girl at the next table over, trying not to stare but nudging the boy with her, college students both, with tiny matching Mickey Mouse tattoos on the underside of their left wrists. People always stared at her, overtly or furtively, when she talked in Sign, and when she was younger—especially in the crucible of adolescence—it used to affect her. Or no: it mortified her. She was different, and she didn’t want to be. Not then. Not when the slightest variation in dress or hairstyle reverberated through the whole classroom. Now it was nothing to her. She was deaf and they weren’t. They would never k
now what that meant.

  Bridger gave one last shrug, more elaborate this time: Yes.

  She finger-spelled his name and it was both an intimate and formal gesture, intimate because it was personal, because it named him instead of pointing the right hand and index finger at him to say you and formal because it had the effect of a parent or teacher announcing displeasure by reverting to the full and proper name. Charles instead of Charlie. William instead of Billy. Bridger, she signed, you’re not communicating.

  She watched his mouth open in a laugh, enjoyed the glint of the crepuscular bar lights off the gold in his molars.

  And if you’re not communicating, how are we ever going to track down the bad guy?

  They both laughed, and her laugh might have been wild and out of control—most deaf people’s laughs were described as bizarre, whinnying, crazed—but she had no way of knowing, and she couldn’t have cared less. The place was warm. The place was loud. A guy at the bar turned round to stare at her. “But seriously,” she said aloud. “The area code was 415?”

  “What?”

  “Four-one-five?”

  He nodded. The music might have been supersonic, the plates rattling on the shelves, people running for cover and whole mountains tumbling into the sea, but a nod always did the trick.

  “Bay Area,” she said.

  “That’s right,” he said, and he leaned in so close she could feel his breath on her lips, “and it’s a 235 prefix.”

  Another number. She took it from him and repeated it: “Two-three-five?”

  “Same as Andy’s, my friend Andy? From college?”

  “Marin?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Marin.”

  On Friday morning she met with her last class of the semester and felt nothing but relief. They were juniors, so there was none of the tug she’d felt with the seniors on Thursday, the ones who were going out into the world to make a life without her—these kids she’d see next year, and they’d be taller, stronger, wiser, and she’d give them words, words on the page and in the mind and in the residual silent beat of the iamb that was as natural as breathing, What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why / I have forgotten. As she packed up her things, sorting through books, papers, videotapes, she couldn’t suppress a sudden rush of elation, the kind a runner must feel at the tape, her first year behind her, the long break ahead and the sting of what had happened over the past weekend gradually beginning to fade.