Talk Talk

by T. C. Boyle

  From the kitchen, down the hall and two rooms away, there was the thump and clatter of things being shifted around, a sudden crash, a curse. “What?” he said, distracted. And drunk. Drunk for sure.

  “She can be stubborn. But you already know that.”

  He shrugged. This was neither the time nor place for a critique.

  Vera—could he call her Vera?—seemed deflated suddenly. Her own wineglass was empty and she rose to refill it and gestured toward him, but he laid his palm over the rim of the glass and shook his head. Her face composed itself. She sat heavily. For a long moment she said nothing and he was beginning to think the interview was over when she waved her glass and said, “Cochlear implants. For example. Take cochlear implants.”

  He’d never heard the term before he took his Sign language course. It was the first night, and one of the students wanted to know why the deaf didn’t just go out and get implants and dispense with Sign altogether. The teacher—she was married to a physicist who was prelingually deaf and used a combination of speech, lip-reading and Sign to communicate—pointed out that not everyone was a candidate for implants, for one thing, depending on the extent and pathology behind their hearing loss, and that among those who were, the results were often mixed. She went on to explain the procedure—the patient would have a receiver and electrodes surgically embedded in the mastoid bone and cochlea in order to pick up sounds from a tiny microphone located behind the ear. In the best-case scenario, these sounds would be transmitted to the auditory nerve and the patient would have some measure of hearing restored, perhaps enough to allow him to function almost normally in the hearing world, especially if he’d lost his hearing later in life. For the rest, it might be enough to improve lip-reading and enable them to talk on the telephone, hear alarms and car horns, that sort of thing. It wasn’t a magic bullet.

  “You know about cochlear implants?”

  He nodded.

  “Well, Dana…and this really frustrated me and her father too, and maybe frustrated is too mild a word because I was ready to scream”—she paused to give him a brittle smile—“but of course Dana wouldn’t have heard me no matter if I screamed all day and all night for the rest of my life. But the point is she refused to be evaluated. Wouldn’t even go to the otologist, not even to find out if she was physically capable of improvement—wouldn’t hear of it.” Another smile. “Listen to me. Just the way we talk, the expressions we use—”

  “I hear you,” he said, and for a moment she looked startled. Then her features rearranged themselves again and she slapped the arm of the chair and they were both laughing, the siren playing distantly beneath them, keening as if to split the night in two.

  Three

  ALL THE RIVER TOWNS looked the same, block after block of rambling top-heavy old houses in various states of disrepair, derelict factories sunk into their weed lots, the unemployed and unemployable slouching along the cracked sidewalks while the sumac took hold and the ceremonial parking meters glinted under the sun. Peterskill was no different. Unless maybe it was worse. She’d been here before, when she was a girl—her parents had rented a bungalow on Kitchawank Lake one summer and every Saturday they’d take the family out to a restaurant in the heart of downtown Peterskill, her father irrepressible, shouting “Cucina Italiana, the real deal,” mugging and rubbing his abdomen in broad strokes till she and her brothers would break up laughing—but that was twenty years ago and nothing looked even vaguely familiar to her now. The lake she remembered. She’d had a canoe to fool around in that summer—it had come with the house—and she remembered taking it into the little coves on the far shore whenever she could pry it away from her brothers, and she would just drift sometimes, reading, nibbling at a sandwich, feeling the breeze on her face and taking in the intoxicating scent of the lake, the scent of decay and renewal and the strangely sweet odor that lingered when the speedboats had gone.

  “I want to go out to the lake when this is over,” she said. “Or, I mean, when we’re done here.”

  They were sitting in the car beneath one of the big shade trees planted in some long-gone era of boosterism and hope, and Bridger had a map of the town spread across his lap. He looked up at her out of his too-broad face and ran a hand through his hair. “What lake? What are you talking about? You mean the river?”

  She watched for the words, but already the impulse was dying away. After a moment, after he’d turned back to the map, she said, “Never mind. It’s not important.”

  On the way up from the city she’d quizzed him about her mother and how they’d seemed to get along so famously. “What did you talk about?” she asked him.

  He was squinting against the glare of the road, his eyes jumping to the mirrors and back—traffic was heavy and it made him tentative. “You,” he said. “What else?”

  “Yes?” She laid a hand in his lap and he glanced at her before coming back to the road. It was muggy, overcast, threatening rain. “Tell me. What did she say?”

  She couldn’t read him in profile, but she saw his lips move.

  “I didn’t hear you,” she said. “What?”

  He swung his face to her, gave a little smile. “She said you were stubborn.”

  “Me? Don’t believe everything you hear, my friend, especially considering the source. Especially from your girlfriend’s mother—”

  “Girlfriend? I thought you were my fiancée?”

  “Your fiancée’s mother.” She glanced out the window on vegetation so dense they could have been in the Amazon—less than ten miles from the city and there was nothing visible but a fathomless vault of green. “So I’m stubborn, huh?” she said, turning back to him. “What brought that up?”

  A shrug. “I don’t know. That first night, when you did the dishes and went to bed right after we ate—?”

  His head was tilted forward, eyebrows cocked. Was he asking a question or making a statement? “I’m not following you,” she said.

  He glanced tensely at the rearview, then brought his face round so she could see the words: “When-you-were-in-bed.”

  “Yes?”

  “Cochlear implants. She said you wouldn’t even go in to get examined.”

  It took her a moment, the sweet smell of chlorophyll flowing at her through the vents, the sky closing in, darkening like a spread umbrella. She said, “She would think that. She was always pushing, pushing. But you don’t understand—she didn’t understand. It was my decision and nobody else’s.”

  “What about now? Would you do it now?”

  She let out a laugh, the kind of laugh that was meant to be bitter, mocking, but it might have sounded like a scream for all she knew. “No way,” she said, and she relished the brevity and finality of the phrase, so much intransigence packed into two little syllables.

  “Why not? Other people—”

  She signed it: You sound like my mother.

  He gave her a look and took both hands from the wheel. Other people do it, he signed. Why don’t you? Then—the car began to drift and he made a quick grab for the wheel—“then we could talk,” he said aloud, his eyes darting to the rearview mirror.

  “We are talking.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No,” she said. “No, I don’t. You mean I have to talk on your terms, in your language, is that what it is?”

  “It’s just that it could be better, that’s all I’m saying.”

  “Listen,” she said, “even if I wanted to let somebody open up my head, and I don’t—would you want somebody to open up yours? Even if I did, even if I could hear something, anything, the best things in the world—music, my own lover’s voice, your voice—I wouldn’t do it. This is me. If I could hear, even for an hour, a minute, I’d be somebody different. You understand what I’m saying?”

  He nodded, but his eyes had that vague look, as if she were speaking in some foreign language, and then he snatched them away and focused on the car ahead of him. Maybe he hadn’t heard her properly, maybe that was it. Wheneve
r she got passionate, whenever she got wound up, she tended to garble her words. She repeated herself, the whole speech, because her mother was wrong—she wasn’t stubborn, just determined. And decisive. Even as a child she’d known which world she wanted to live in—the world she’d created for herself, the one she’d built block by block around her till it was impenetrable—and there was no one, not her mother or father or the nimblest and most persuasive audiologist in the world, who could tell her different.

  Now, sitting in the car beneath the tree in the midday swelter while Bridger frowned over the map, she came back to the present and thought of what they were doing, what they were about to do, and felt her heartbeat quicken. There were two Calabreses listed in the Peterskill directory, an F.A. at 222 Maple Avenue and an F.R. at 599 Ringgold Street. “Which one do we do first?” Bridger asked, turning to her, his finger stabbing at the map. “This one”—she saw the diagonal slash of the road heading southeast, out of town—“is F.A., and this”—his finger slid across the map, indicating a street due south of where they were—“is F.R. Looks like F.A. is closest, but it doesn’t really matter because the town isn’t all that big…What do you think—you choose.”

  “I don’t know, it’s a toss-up,” she said, and the image of the flipped coin rose and settled in her mind. “F.A., I guess.”

  Bridger looked over his shoulder, put the car in drive and swung out onto the nearly deserted main street of Peterskill, and she asked herself why she was so keyed up, so nervous, why her hands had begun to tremble and she was having trouble catching her breath. They didn’t even know if the guy’s name was Frank Calabrese—it could have been just another one of his aliases—and whether or not he was headed for Peterskill, no one could say. That was just their best guess. There was the evidence of the police report Milos had given them (Frank Calabrese, born Peterskill, NY, 10/2/70), and the cryptic letter from somebody called Sandman postmarked just up the line in Garrison, and what had he said? See you soon. That could have meant anything—he could have been flying to California or they were going to meet someplace in between or go to some crooks’ convention together in Arkansas or Tierra del Fuego.

  She flipped open the file folder, just to see the words there on the page, as if staring at them long enough would reveal their hidden meaning: “Hey, that thing we talked about is on, no problema. See you soon.” Was that enough? No problema? See you soon? Did they really expect to find this guy waiting patiently behind the screen door on Maple Avenue or Ringgold Street? It was crazy. Everything that had happened in the last month was crazy. And where were the cops—wasn’t this their job?

  Bridger’s lips were moving. He was leaning into the windshield, counting off numbers: “Two-sixteen, two-twenty—there it is! Look, that place with the faded siding. Right there, see?”

  He’d pulled in at the curb across the street and her heart seized all over again. She was staring at the most ordinary-looking house in the world, a pale gray Cape Cod that had no doubt replaced one of the tumbledown Victorians in the fifties or sixties in some kind of misguided attempt at urban renewal. There were weathered streaks under the drainpipes, a lawn that seemed to recede beneath an even plane of dandelion puffs, a tumble of kids’ bicycles flung down on the blacktop drive beside a very ordinary car scaled with rust. Bridger took hold of her hand, and he was saying something, repeating it: “Do you want me to handle this? Because you can stay here if you want—it’s probably nothing anyway, right?”

  “I’m going.” She reached for the door handle, but he hadn’t let go of her hand.

  “But we need a plan here,” he said. His features were pinched, his eyes staring wide. He was trying to be cool, she could see that, but he was as agitated as she was. “If it is him in there, and chances are it’s not, I know—we have to just back away, I mean, run, and I’ll call the police on my cell. Okay? Don’t say a word, don’t talk to him, nothing. Just identify him and call the police.”

  “Yes,” she said, “yes, I know. He’s dangerous. I know that.”

  Bridger was saying something else, using his hands now to underscore the words. “‘Assault with a deadly weapon,’ remember? That’s in the police report. We do not mess with him like back there in that parking lot in where was it, Sacramento? That was insane. We’re not going to do anything like that, you understand? Just identify him and call for help. Period.”

  The sky had closed up, and as she slid out of the car and crossed the street with Bridger, feeling light-headed, the first few spatters of rain began to darken the pavement. At the last moment, when they’d already started up the walk, she wanted to hang back, reconnoiter the place—or the joint, case the joint: isn’t that what they said in the old movies?—but then they were on the porch and Bridger was knocking at the screen door and there was a dog there, a shih tzu, all done up in ribbons, and it was showing the dark cavern of its mouth, barking. A moment later a woman appeared behind the screen, not a pretty woman, not young and dark-eyed and stylish, but the sort of woman who’d live in a house like this and find the time to tie ribbons in her little dog’s hair.

  Bridger did the talking. Was this Frank Calabrese’s house, by any chance? No? Did she know—oh, the “F” stood for Frances, Frances Annie? Uh-huh, uh-huh. He was nodding. Frank, the woman thought—and she didn’t know him, they weren’t related—lived over on Union or Ringgold, one of those streets on the other side of the park.

  It was raining heavily by the time they got to Ringgold Street, dark panels of water scrolling across the windshield, the pavement glistening, the gutters already running full. The house Bridger pulled up in front of wasn’t appreciably different from the one they’d just left, except there were no bicycles out front and the car parked in the drive was a newer, more expensive model (but not a Mercedes and not wine red). And what had she expected, to see the thing sitting there sparkling in the rain with its California dealer’s logo framed neatly in the license-plate holder? She felt deflated. Felt depressed. This time she stayed in the car while Bridger hustled up the walk, his shirt soaked through and a newspaper fanned out over his head. She saw him at the door, saw a figure there behind the screen—a shadow, nothing more—and she was frightened all over again. It was him, she was sure it was…but no, they were talking, some sort of negotiation going on, and now she could see the faint pale oval of the man’s face suspended against the matte darkness of the interior, a naked forearm floating beneath it, gesturing, and in the next moment the door was shutting and Bridger was dodging his way back down the walk. She reached over to fling the car door open for him.

  The rain came with him, the scent of it, his hair flattened across the top and hanging in loose wet strands around his ears. “Well?” she said. “Not him, right?”

  “He’s at the restaurant. That”—he turned the engine over, put the car in gear—“was his cousin, I think he said.”

  “Restaurant? What restaurant?”

  “Fiorentino’s. On South Street—we passed it earlier, don’t you remember? I guess he must work there or something…the guy that answered the door was maybe, I don’t know, forty, forty-five, totally overweight—he had this huge belly. In a wife-beater, no less. Could you see him from here? No? Anyway, he just looked at his watch and said, ‘You’ll catch him over at the restaurant at this hour.’ I asked him what restaurant and he said Fiorentino’s before he thought to ask me what I wanted with Frank—and that was when he started to give me the suspicious look.”

  “What? What did you tell him?”

  “That I was a friend. From the coast. From California.”

  She could feel her heart going again. “But what if he calls and warns him?”

  “Shit,” Bridger said, and they were out on the street now, water planing away from the tires, “if he does, he does. We don’t even know if it’s him—and it’s probably not, because you’re telling me he already has a house and a job? I mean, how likely is that?”

  Fiorentino’s was on the far side of a broad street a few
blocks down, and as Bridger hung a U-turn and pulled up at the curb in front, she had the feeling she’d been here before, déjà vu. Could this be the place, the one her parents had taken her to? The thought made her feel queasy. If this was it, then the whole thing got stranger and stranger. She imagined the thief, the guy with the sideburns and the cocky walk, shrunk down to the dimensions of a child, watching her from the kitchen, watching her eat and sign and roughhouse with her brothers, pizza on a shining silver platter, and memory like the taste of it.

  She climbed out of the car, fumbling with her umbrella, and looked up at the façade. The restaurant occupied a pair of storefronts somebody had tried to unify with lateral strips of varnished wood that set off the windows like a big picture frame and the sign over the main entrance had been hand-painted in a flowing script. Each of the tables, dimly visible through the screen of rain, featured artificial flowers and a Chianti bottle with a red candle worked into the neck, but it was all so generic. Once she stepped inside, though—a long L-shaped bar to the left, an alcove and then the dining room to the right—she knew. And as if her visual memory weren’t enough, there was an olfactory signature here too—some peculiarity of the pizza oven, the imported pomodoro and homemade sausage, the spices, the spilled beer, the mold in the back of the refrigerator in the farthest corner of the kitchen—who could say? But this was it. This was definitely it. She took hold of Bridger’s hand and squeezed it. She wanted to say No more, stop right here, but her throat thickened and her fingers felt as if they’d been carved of wood.

  What she saw was a typical neighborhood bar, half a dozen men in short-sleeved shirts, the white-haired bartender with his flaming ears and red-rimmed eyes, the cocktail waitress in a little skirt and net stockings, bored, her elbows propped on her tray. The TV was going—baseball—and nobody was eating. Too early yet. Too hot. Too rainy.

  She stood beside Bridger, her hand locked in his, as he leaned in at the end of the bar and waited for the bartender to acknowledge him. There was a suspended moment, people giving them furtive glances, the quick assessment, her blood racing with fear and hate even as she felt crushed by a kind of trivial nostalgia for the place, for the way she was then, as a girl, when her parents were still married and her brothers were contained by these very walls, and then the bartender made his slow way down the skid-resistant mat and she saw his lips shape the obvious question: “What’ll it be?”