Talk Talk

by T. C. Boyle

  “Hey. ’Sup?”

  Dudley must have been around nineteen, twenty, hair corded in blond dreads, pincer eyes, big stoned grin, tattoos to the waist, which was as far down as he’d ever been exposed on the premises of the restaurant, but Peck could speculate about the rest. This was the kind of guy—dude—who probably had the head of a dragon staring out of his crotch.

  In answer, Peck told him “Not much,” and then went on to regale him with a laundry list of woes, not the least of which was his bitch of a wife, and then Caroline came back and they all three had a shot of Jäger and the band pounded away at a Nirvana tune and they just listened, nodding their heads to the beat. When the band took a break, Caroline went outside to have a smoke and Dudley leaned in, his elbows tented on the bar, and opined, “It sucks about the restaurant.”

  It did. Peck agreed. There was movement at the door, ingress and egress; somebody stuck some money in the jukebox and the noise came roaring back.

  “Yeah,” Dudley said, raising his voice to be heard above it, “and it sucks about Gina too.”

  A little fist began to beat inside Peck’s right temple. “What do you mean?”

  Dudley’s face receded, flying away down the length of the bar like a toy balloon with human features painted on it, and then it floated back again. “You mean you don’t know?”

  The next day, he didn’t go in to work. He felt the faintest sting of conscience—they’d be shorthanded, short on produce too, and the dishwasher would just sit around and listen to right-wing talk on the radio and Skip would be so drunk he’d burn the crust off the pies and squeeze the calzone till it looked like road kill on a plate—but the tatters of his work ethic were nothing in the face of the rage he felt. What was he working for, anyway? Who was he working for? At first he refused to believe what Dudley was telling him. That she was seeing anybody was enough to light all his fuses, but that she was going out with—sleeping with, fucking—Stuart Yan was beyond comprehension. That he was Asian, or half-Asian, had nothing to do with it, nothing at all (and yet he couldn’t help wondering just exactly how the Bullhead must have felt about that). The problem, the immediate problem that settled inside him with the weight of a stone, was how he was going to face people, anybody—Dudley, his friends, former customers, people at the bar—when his wife was fucking some slope and he was paying for it, paying for her to just lie around like a slut and get laid all day.

  By ten in the morning he was parked at a turnout just off the road to her parents’ house. The season was spring, late spring, and already the vegetation was twisted up like a knot, weeds crowding the front bumper, the branches of the trees in full leaf, but still he was afraid she’d notice the car—metal-flake silver wasn’t exactly an earth tone. Cars went by, three and four at a time, as if they were attached on a cable, then nothing, then three and four more. There were birds crowding the canopy of the tree that hung out over the car—tiny black-and-yellow things he’d never noticed before, popping in and out of the leaves like puppets—and he worried briefly that they’d spot the top of the car with the drooling white beads of their excrement, but eventually they faded out of his line of vision and he forgot all about them. He didn’t really know what he was doing there parked under a tree on a back road to nowhere, didn’t have a plan, and yet every time he heard the hiss of tires on the road his heart started slamming at his ribs. He watched pickups rattle by, cars of all makes and descriptions, a kid on a green Yamaha. There was the smell of the sun on the pavement. After a while he buzzed the window down all the way, let the radio whisper to him, the soft thump of a song he’d heard so many times he might have written it himself. An hour cranked by, two hours, three.

  Finally, and he might have dozed for a while, he couldn’t be sure, he came up fully alert, just as if someone had slapped him or doused him with a bucket of ice water: there she was. Her car. The metallic blue Honda her father had bought for her, and she was behind the wheel with her ugly black-framed glasses on, two little white fists like claws jerking back and forth though the road ran straight as a plumb line in front of her, and there was the kid’s seat in back—Sukie, strapped in and clutching a neon-orange teddy bear, her face a blur—and another face there too, on the passenger’s side in front. The car was coming toward him—he’d chosen this straightaway for its sight lines—and the whole thing was over in the space of ten seconds, come and gone, and yet still he recognized that face, round as a beachball, the sleepy eyes, the clamped dwindling afterthought of the mouth, and before he could think he’d turned the key in the ignition and slammed the car into gear.

  If she hadn’t seen him there at the side of the road, she saw him now. He watched her eyes go to the rearview and then her head bobbed toward Yan’s and Yan looked over his shoulder and that was all it took to put him over the line, that unconscious gesture of complicity, of intimacy—putting their heads together—and he came up on the bumper of the Honda so fast he had to hit the brakes to keep from tearing right through them. And he might have—might have run them off the road, because he was acting on impulse only, inimical to everything that walked or drew breath on the planet—if it wasn’t for Sukie. His daughter. His daughter was there, strapped in with her bear, and he was the one out of line here, he was the one endangering her. He dropped back half a car length—safety, safety first, because Gina was as uncoordinated and ungifted a driver as he’d ever seen—but he stayed there, raw and hurt and put-upon, stayed there, right on their tail, till a gas station rolled up on the right and Gina hit the blinker and pulled in.

  As if that could help her.

  He was out of the car in a heartbeat, screaming something, he didn’t know what—curses, just curses, maybe accusations too—and he had his hand on the driver’s side door of the Honda even as Stuart Yan was puffing himself out the other side and some bald suit at pump number 3 shouted, “Hey, what’s going on here?” If he recalled anything with clarity from those diced and scrambled moments excised from his life, it was the look on Gina’s face behind the rolled-up window and the locked door—pale, distant, afraid, terrified of what was about to unfold—and the look of his daughter. Her face was like a big open wound, hurt and puzzled and caught dead-center in a tornado of emotions. That look—Sukie’s look—almost stopped him. Almost. But he was running on fumes at this point, the high-octane stuff, fully combustible, and he lit into Stuart Yan with a kick to the windpipe and then he took hold of the suit—some real estate drone with an inflated opinion of himself—and flung him across the hood of the car. What did it take? The trash can, the first thing that came to hand, metal anyway. He raised it above his head, shit flying everywhere, cups and paper wipes and soda cans, and brought it down against that window, again and again and again.

  He lifted his eyes from the computer screen and looked out over the bay to where a string of pelicans blew like leaves across the belly of the water. In the foreground was a gently curving row of palms, just like in Florida or Hawaii, better even; sun glinted off the hoods of the Jags, Mercedeses and BMWs in the reserved parking; sailboats crept by like moving statues. If Gina could only see him now. He was sitting on a condo worth three-quarters of a million dollars, he had a new BMW, money in the bank, a girlfriend any man would kill for, and he was leaning over his antique desk under the light of his antique lamp, doing research, manipulating things, the kind of work that always had a calming influence on him, but then he wasn’t calm. And he wasn’t happy. Not today. In fact, the more he thought about it, the angrier he got, filled right up to the neck with the bitter concentrate of the very same rage that had come over him the day he’d put Stuart Yan in the hospital. And why? Because he’d been careless, because he’d let himself get sucked in, because Natalia was the one thing he couldn’t let go of. And Dana Halter wasn’t the problem, he saw that now. Bridger was. Bridger Martin.

  Once he had the cell number, the rest had been easy. He went online to a reverse phone directory to get the carrier, then called customer service, claiming to be
Sergeant Calabrese of the Fraud Division of the SFPD. The woman on the other end of the line, whether she was in India or Indiana, never asked for verification, though he had a legitimate police code he could have used, and she matched the cell to the account number and brought up the name and address on the account. For twenty-five dollars an online information broker gave him the header information on the credit reports—full name, address, social security number, d.o.b.—and he faxed all three credit reporting agencies on the stationery of one of his ersatz businesses, Marin Realty, asserting that Bridger Thomas Martin, of #37, 196 Manzanita, San Roque, was applying for rental property and ordering up a copy of the credit reports. A little research, that was all. Just watching his back.

  He’d been busy since he’d got that phone call at the Smart-Mart, very busy, but it wasn’t as if he hadn’t known it was coming. The same Realtor who’d sold him the condo would be handling the resale, and though he’d probably get screwed out of a couple thousand here or there, it didn’t really matter—he’d already set up an account in New York to handle the transfer of the funds once it sold. And it would sell fast, prime property right on the water, people lining up to get in. The hard part was Natalia. She didn’t know a thing about it, not yet. The real estate woman wouldn’t be showing the place till they were gone, and he was ready to just walk and leave everything behind, the desk and the lamp and the bedroom suite and all the rest of it, but Natalia was going to put up a fight, he knew it. And that was what made him angry. The thought of it. The thought of losing her. And for what? For Bridger Martin?

  A week, that was all he needed. The reports would be in his hands by then and the new credit cards too, though Bridger Thomas Martin, whoever he was, wasn’t exactly a tycoon and the credit limits were lower than he would have liked ideally, but that wasn’t a worry—he had plenty of cards, cards were nothing. No, he had something else in mind for this clown, something else altogether. A week. A week to wrap things up, and then they’d be gone, and he saw it already, the new car—he was going to look at a Mercedes this afternoon, on the way back from his workout—with plenty of room in back for Madison and her toys and pillows and blankets, he and Natalia sitting up front in style, stopping wherever they liked, first class all the way, a nice little vacation and educational too, good for the kid. See the country. The sights. Pike’s Peak. The Great Lakes. Gettysburg. And Vegas, definitely Vegas. Natalia could hardly object to that.

  When he’d got what he wanted he shut down the computer, went out to the kitchen and made himself a sandwich. For a long while he stood at the counter, his jaws working mechanically, gazing at the Mexican tile, the pottery and baskets and whatnot Natalia had picked up to give the place a little charm, the new microwave, the Navajo rugs. The light played through the windows and rode up the walls. It was exclusive light, the light of the sun reflected up off Shelter Bay, rippling and fluid, and there were times when he could just sit for hours with a cocktail and watch it move and transform like an image on a screen. He was going to miss it. Miss the fog too, the way it wrapped itself around everything in the visible world, like snow in suspension, making and remaking itself all over again. All the anger he’d felt earlier was gone now—if he felt anything, he felt drained.

  But he wasn’t going to let it get to him. He had things to do. He rinsed the plate, stuck it in the dishwasher, then dug his gym bag out of the closet. Working out always cleared his head, the endorphins flowing, the reps on the weight machine his own kind of zen, almost unconscious, counting off, counting off again, his breathing deep and steady. When it went well, when he got into the rhythm of it, he almost felt as if he were rooted to the bench—or no, as if he were the bench itself, no more aware than a slab of steel. And after he worked out, he was going to look at that car, and then he had to stop at the market. Tonight it was veal cordon bleu, and he had to pick up the boneless chops, the prosciutto and the Emmentaler he liked to use (pound the veal, bread it, lay on two wafer-thin slices of the ham and two of the cheese, wrap it up, pin it with a toothpick and bake at 350), and he was thinking maybe he’d do gnocchi with a white sauce and a quick sauté of baby zucchini on the side. Or maybe fava beans in tomato and basil. And he’d pick up two bottles of that Orvieto Natalia liked, and if he was in the mood, and if he had the time, he might whip up a couple of almond tortes. That would please her. And some spumoni for the kid.

  He went out the door, bag in hand, and didn’t look back.

  For what he wound up paying for the attorney he could have spent a month in the best hotel in Manhattan, no expense spared, room service, show tickets and bar tab included, but the man got him a shrink to testify before the judge that what Peck had done to Stuart Yan (and the ancillary damage to his wife’s car and to the not-so-innocent bystander) was an aberration, the result of temporary insanity, and that it would be ridiculous to say he was a threat to society when in fact he was no threat at all. The attorney talked of mitigating circumstances—the defendant was only trying to protect his family from this interloper, this stranger, Yan, whom he saw, rightly or wrongly, as threatening his wife and child, and he’d over-reacted in the heat of the moment. He accepted his culpability. He was contrite. Willing to make full restitution. Further, he had a clean record and he was a successful small business owner whose incarceration would deprive the community of his services and put at least seven people out of work. But the assistant DA came right back at him, claiming that this was a case of attempted murder or at the very least assault with a deadly weapon likely to produce great bodily harm—the defendant was a black belt in karate, after all, and knew perfectly well what he was doing in attacking Mr. Yan, who, incidentally, had temporarily lost the use of his voice due to damage to his larynx and could very well suffer permanent incapacitation.

  Peck had to sit there and take it, but he was seething. Under other circumstances—outside in the street, a bar, anyplace—he would have taken the man apart because he’d never felt such hatred for anybody in his life, not even Yan or Gina. Who was this guy? What had he ever done to him? As it turned out, though, it was just posturing on the assistant DA’s part: neither side wanted to take the case to trial. The outcome—and it could have been foreordained given what it was costing—was a plea bargain.

  The judge, a skeletal little dark-skinned man in his forties—his name started with a V and went on for six unpronounceable syllables—gave him a five-minute lecture, rife with sarcasm, as Peck stood there trying to hold his gaze. Yan was in the back of the courtroom, wearing a neck brace, and Gina and her parents were there beside him, looking like Puritans ranged round the ducking stool. About the only thing Peck could be thankful for was that Sukie was at a friend’s house, because as unforgiving and vituperative as Gina might have been, even she realized there was no point in having her witness her father’s public humiliation, not after what had happened to the window of the car and the rain of those splinters of safety glass and the way her father had fired up the Mustang and scorched the pavement till the tires smoked and all the birds blew out of the trees. The judge gave him three years probation and imposed a restraining order enjoining him from coming within five hundred feet of his wife. The order further prohibited him from having any contact whatever with her, not by telephone, e-mail, the postal service or through a third party, except as arranged by the court according to family law and visitation rights for his daughter. At the end of it, the judge leaned forward, and in his high clipped Indian accent, asked him if he understood.

  “Yes,” Peck said, though it was wrong, all wrong, and he was sick with the aftertaste of it. “I understand.”

  “Good,” the judge said, “because I sincerely hope you do. If you obey the directives of this court and keep out of trouble—any trouble whatsoever—this felony charge will be reduced to a misdemeanor upon completion of probation and payment in full of restitution to the victims.” He paused. The courtroom was silent but for the faint distant moan of the air conditioner. “But if I see you here before me again,
no matter what the charge, you’d better have your toothbrush with you because I will remand you directly to jail. Do I make myself clear?”

  Peck remembered feeling like something scraped off the bottom of somebody’s shoe, even though the attorney seemed pretty pleased with himself and to everyone’s mind the incident was closed. His mother was there, with one of her sack-like friends, both of them probably drunk already though it wasn’t yet noon, and two of his own drinking buddies, Walter Franz and Chip Selzer, from the ex-bar at the ex-restaurant, had turned up to show support. Lunch, people wanted lunch and a celebratory drink or two, his mother grinning, Walter and Chip crowding in on him, but he wasn’t having it. “Hey, congratulations, man,” Walter crowed, throwing an arm round his shoulder. “It’s over, huh? Finally over.”

  They were out in the hallway, a crush of people coming and going. Fat people. Stupid people. The dregs. And then he saw Gina and her parents pushing through the swinging door at the end of the corridor, Yan trailing behind them like a retainer, and he couldn’t help himself—he shoved Walter away, a shrug of the shoulder that knocked him up against the wall, and when Chip moved in, his palm spread wide for the high-five, he just turned his back and stalked out the door.

  For the next few weeks he put his head down and tried to forget about it. Focus on the business, that was what he told himself, shake it off, straighten things out. Though he’d never let it show, the legal convolutions—the endless meetings with the shrink and the lawyer, the postponements, the general level of harassment and pure unadulterated crap—had really got to him, and Pizza Napoli wasn’t what it was or what it should have been. Sales were flat, people cooking out and going to the beach, and they just didn’t think pizza as much in the summer as when school was on and the kids were sitting there at the kitchen table every night screaming to be fed. For the first time ever, and against his better judgment because in his eyes it reduced the place to the level of Pizza Hut or Domino’s, he gave in to Skip and offered a two-for-one coupon in the local paper.