Talk Talk

by T. C. Boyle

  Another sound. So distant and muted he couldn’t be sure he was hearing it. He froze. Strained his eyes to see across the moon-dappled lawn and into the dark clot of shadow that was the driveway, the shape there, a deeper shadow, denser, the blackest hole of the universe. What was it—a car? A car pulled up under the trees where nobody could see it? And then that sound again, faint but distinct, the further protest of pea stone compacted underfoot, one stealthy sole down and then the next, and the flaring itch of a zipper worked and finally the sound of water hitting the gravel in a fine directed stream. That told him all he wanted to know. That hardened him. The alcohol burned through his system and evaporated as if it had never been there, replaced in that instant by the adrenal discharge that fueled him to fight, kill, run, and there was no creature of the night, no opossum or coon or copperhead snake, that faded as silently away.

  When he reached the car, he slipped into the driver’s side without a sound, turned over the engine and made his way up the neighbor’s drive to the highway. He waited there a moment with his lights off till he saw the headlights of a single car approaching, and then he flicked on his lights and eased out onto the road in its wake, heading south.

  What he dreamed that night, if he dreamed at all, he couldn’t remember. There was a void, and he arose out of it to the sharp sudden stab of a column of sunlight that had worked its way up the rear panel of the car, through the back window and onto his face. For a moment, he didn’t know where he was, and then it all locked in, the gray carpet and leather seats, the still life of the dash and the arc of the steering wheel, an intense, almost painfully articulated world of sharp-edged leaves pressed against the rolled-up windows. He was sprawled out in the back of a rental car—an SUV, gas hog, four-wheel drive—his throat dry, bladder full, a six-hundred-dollar Italian silk suit filthy in the knees and elbows and clinging damply to him as if it were made of Saran Wrap. There was a bad taste in his mouth. He had no toothbrush, no clothes, no house or fiancée or daughter. For a long while he just lay there, the sun on his face, considering his options, but then he heard voices, a dog barking, and sat up.

  Outside the window, on the near side of the car, was vegetation, dense and Amazonian, and on the far side, just beyond a little white house set in the exact center of a square of lawn, was the river, right there, not a hundred feet away, driving down against the tide. The sun gave a shout. A bird shot past the window, folded its wings and plunged into the green. There were two people, a couple, the man in a sun-bleached shirt and the woman in an ankle-length hippie dress with bare shoulders, walking a black Lab down the dirt road and lifting their eyes periodically to throw a shy curious look at the car and then dropping them again to pat the dog and fling something over the charging wedge of its head and four scrambling paws—a stick, sailing out and coming back to them again in the wet grip of the animal’s jaws.

  He hadn’t gone back to Beacon to hide himself along the back roads and he hadn’t gone into Peterskill either, to cruise past his mother’s house and snatch a quick glimpse of the place, just to see what it looked like, to see if the lights were on, to hope against reason that the sight of it would turn a key in the tumbler inside his head and let him know what was coming next. He hadn’t done any of that, because when he left that driveway in the dark the full weight of the day suddenly hit him, a crushing glacial forbidding weight he couldn’t begin to lift, and he’d gone no more than three or four miles and found himself winding through a dark turning that took him across the railroad tracks with a slow grinding bump and down this one-lane dirt road laid flat against the river and then on up the shoulder of it and into the bushes. Which was where he was now, dry-mouthed, needing to piss, watching these people and their dog watching him.

  It took him a moment to come to his senses—he didn’t need them calling the police on him, Officer, I don’t know, there’s a drunk or something in a dirty suit crashed in his car out front of the house—and then he was in the driver’s seat and wheeling the SUV across the road in a broad pitching humping U-turn that took a bite out of the lawn and the people looked up at him out of unsmiling faces and he didn’t wave. There was fast food in Peterskill, crap in a bag and crap in a waxed cup with a plastic top and flexible straw. He pulled into the drive-up lane because he really didn’t want to show himself in public if he didn’t have to, and he ate mechanically, without tasting it. Afterward he drove around without purpose, just to feel the wheels roll under him, and he worked his way to the outskirts of town and ducked into the bushes along Croton Reservoir to release the pressure on his bladder and move his bowels. Squatting there in the woods, with the mosquitoes at him, and using the paper napkins from the fast-food place in lieu of toilet paper, he couldn’t stop punishing himself. The shit smell rose to his nostrils. There were burrs or seedpods flung like drift across both sleeves of his jacket. Mud on his shoes. The crystal of his watch was cracked. What was wrong with him? What had he come to? He gave himself a quick once-over in the rearview—the reddened ear, the thin crust of the scab, the black stubble coming in so that he looked like a cartoon bum—and before he could think the car was moving and he had the cell phone out, dialing information for Peterskill Hospital.

  The road was narrow here, climbing now, and he was so focused on the phone he nearly ran a little Japanese car into the bushes, but then he had the number and for an extra charge they connected him and he was talking to the receptionist.

  “Peterskill Hospital. How may I assist you?”

  “You have visiting hours today?”

  “All day till nine p.m., for all patients except intensive care.”

  “And can you tell me if someone’s been admitted—if he’s there. Or still there, I mean?”

  “One moment, please.” A pause, the sound of keys tapping. “And what was the name?”

  “Martin,” he said. “Bridger Martin.”

  He picked up a newspaper on the way and a cheap bouquet of flowers, the stems wrapped in tinfoil under a cone of plastic, just in case anybody should wonder what he was doing there parked in the lot amongst the sunstruck chassis and glinting windshields of a hundred other vehicles. It was hot, eternally hot. The radio gave him nothing, classical, talk, a garble of Sunday devotion, hallelujah and amen. Very slowly, with infinite patience, he read through the paper, section by section, keeping one eye cocked on the front entrance. And when he saw her there, finally, at half past two in the afternoon, her features working and her hands jumping in the face of the woman beside her as she came out the double doors and into the sun, it was no less than he’d expected. And when she ducked into a rust-streaked yellow Volvo with New York plates, the other woman at the wheel, there was nothing he could do but crank up his rented SUV, with all its ominous high-riding authority, and follow her out of the lot.

  Four

  SHE STOOD AT THE DOOR of Terri’s car, the smell of the exhaust running at her in the humid breeze that had come up suddenly to agitate the branches of the trees and lift a scrap of paper from the gutter and fling it down the street. There was rain coming, yet more rain, one of the late-afternoon thundershowers that blew up this time of year to douse the streets for half an hour before the sheen of water evaporated and the air grew dense and hot all over again. “Thanks again, thanks for everything,” she was saying for the second or third time, leaning into the window frame as Terri, her hair bound up in a black scrunchie to keep the weight of it off her shoulders, said it was her pleasure and that she hoped they’d keep in touch.

  “Oh, definitely,” Dana said. “I’ve got your phone and e-mail, and you’ve got my cell—we want to have you down for the day. I’ll treat you to dinner. We can go shopping or something.”

  “Or something?” Terri said, showing her teeth in a smile that radiated up to her eyes and pulled the skin tight along her cheekbones. This was a genuine smile, real and spontaneous, not like the pained contortion of the lips most people gave her. And the term came to her then out of her storehouse of odd bits of vocabular
y—this was what physiologists called a Duchenne smile, in which two different facial muscles fired simultaneously, a smile that couldn’t be faked.

  Dana glanced up the street and back again. She was smiling too, feeling good, feeling liberated, the whole thing over now, out of her hands. “Shopping,” she said. “Definitely shopping.”

  Okay then, Terri signed.

  Yeah, okay.

  She was turning away to cross the street to her own car, when she felt a tug at the back of her T-shirt and turned round again. “Here,” Terri was saying, and she was holding something out to her—a scrunchie, lime green, with crimson polka dots. “So you can put your hair up for the ride home,” pointing to the side of her own head in illustration. “For the heat.”

  “Are you trying to tell me something?” Dana said, and she felt so good suddenly she was clowning, making a show of raising her arms to sniff at the armpits of her T-shirt and then dropping them to smooth out the fabric as if she were trying on an evening gown. “I’m not reeking that much, am I?”

  Terri laughed—the flash of her teeth, her head rocking and chin dipping, and here came the breeze again, an ice cream wrapper spinning out from under the car and cartwheeling down the street. “Not yet,” she said, “but you’re pushing it.”

  And then she was waving goodbye and working her hands through the thick mass of her hair to pin it back in a ponytail, the sweat cooling already on her neck and around the collar of her shirt. She stood there a moment, watching Terri’s car—the hand-me-down Volvo she’d got from her parents after her teenage brother had put it through some rough use—as it moved off down the street, shedding light. Then she looked both ways, crossed the street to her car, unlocked the door and slid into the driver’s seat.

  The station was no more than five minutes away, and though she got turned around and went down the wrong street—a dead end—she still got there with fifteen minutes to spare. As she pulled into the parking lot, the sun dimmed suddenly and she glanced up through the bug-flecked skin of the windshield to see a torn patch of cloud trailing past; beyond it, across the river, the thunderheads rose up out of the mountains in a dark unbroken band. There were flashes of lightning—no streaks or tendrils, just random swellings of light as if there were a bombardment going on in the next county over. The air through the open window smelled fecund and rich, as if it had been pumped up out of a deep well. Or a cavern. “Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea,” she chanted to herself, just to feel the words on her tongue, the small solace of the beat. Then she eased into a parking spot, shut down the car and began to sift through her purse for change for the meter.

  She didn’t know what she was going to do with her mother. She’d thought of treating her to lunch at the café at the depot, sitting outside under one of the umbrellas, off in a corner by themselves with the view and two glasses of chilled white wine and a grilled ahi sandwich or a salad, something to pick at—but the storm would ruin that. Her mother was going to want to go see Bridger before they drove back down to the city, but there was some part of her—a large and growing part—that resisted the notion. She didn’t want to go back there. Not yet. She really didn’t think she could take it, the whole symphony of her guilt building to a crescendo all over again, the look on the face of Bridger’s mother, the smells, the nurses, the man with the feet, Bridger. Bridger lying there in his plaster and gauze, settling into his bruises, having trouble breathing, and who’d given him the trouble?

  For a moment the picture of the two mothers squaring off rose up before her, but almost as soon as it came to her, she changed the channel. She wasn’t ready for that. She wanted to be selfish now, purely selfish. She wanted to hook her arm through her mother’s the minute she stepped off the train, lead her to the car and drive directly back to the city, the trees dwindling behind her and the road narrowing in the rearview mirror. She wanted to be in the cluttered room with the door shut behind her, her hair washed and wrapped up in a towel, the air conditioner breathing its mechanical breath as she settled into a corner of the bed and pulled the shades and let this new feeling bloom inside of her, the feeling of release, of letting go absolutely and completely and without regret, as if she were standing on the ledge outside the window on the nineteenth floor and letting go of every hand held out to her till she just floated up and away or dropped hurtling into the vacuum.

  She got out of her car. Shut the door, clicked the remote to lock it. She was thinking she might walk a bit, stroll along the platform as far as it would take her in either direction and feel the wind on her face. There weren’t many people around, Sunday afternoon, midsummer, the deep charcoal bank of clouds crowding closer and the boats on the river changing color as the light failed overhead. She walked past the café, the ticket office and waiting room, mounting the steps to the platform, and only then did she feel the seismic shift through the soles of her feet, the furious contained irruption of power, and there it was, her mother’s train, pounding into the station five minutes early.

  Looking back on it, what remained most vivid in her mind wasn’t the way the storm broke almost at the instant the train lurched to a stop, as if the weather were adhering to a timetable too, or how many people appeared out of nowhere with their tennis rackets and backpacks and fishing rods to swarm the platform, but the expression on her mother’s face. At first, what with the sudden press of people, Dana didn’t see her there in the crowd and wondered if she’d got the right train. The initial random drops of rain had surprised her, spattering her shoulders and running two cold fingers along the base of her neck where she’d put her hair up, and she’d moved in under the long narrow metal canopy that ran the length of the platform and everyone else moved in too. Then she felt the air concuss and glanced up to see the water falling in metallic sheets from both sides of the canopy. She felt something else too, a sudden chill, the sixth sense of the deaf, and she was about to turn around, to look over her shoulder and confront whatever it was, real or imaginary, when she spotted her mother. There she was, squeezing between two men with suitcases, coming toward her, overdressed in slacks and heels and a turquoise blouse cinched at the waist with a trailing scarf. And she had that expression on her face.

  Her mother wasn’t there to comfort her, not with that face, or at least not until she’d let her disapproval and disappointment and heartbreak be felt and acknowledged, because here was her daughter, her highly educated deaf daughter whom she’d taught to be responsible and independent, in trouble again, her clothes dirty, her knees bandaged like a child’s and her fiancé—if he still was her fiancé—in the hospital. Beaten up—or no, beaten down—because of her. Because she wouldn’t listen. That was the expression on her mother’s face, that was what she saw in that sliver of a moment as her mother compacted her shoulders to move between the two men jockeying for position with their suitcases and the rain fell in sheets and the earth gave off its immemorial saturate smell. But then it all changed—her mother’s mouth dropped open and her eyes leapt out at her—and Dana was hit from behind, hard, a shoulder digging into hers as if someone had stumbled into her, and she caught her balance and swung round and there he was.

  For an instant, the rain sheeting down, her mother on the periphery, everyone on the platform arrested in mid-stride, she stared into his face, so close she could smell the raw ammoniac charge of his breath and the sweat bleeding through a lingering taint of aftershave. He was right there, right in her face, and there was nowhere to run now. A tremor coursed through her. She tried to swallow but couldn’t. She saw the thin whip of the slash on his cheek, the unshaved stubble, the thrust of his chin and the two strips of muscle wadded in his clenched jaws. He didn’t say a word. Didn’t move. Just breathed his ammoniac breath and let his eyes burn into her.

  He didn’t know what he was doing, he really didn’t. It was as if he’d been disconnected, as if someone had pulled the plug on him and the laptop of his brain was running on auxiliary power, the battery getting weaker an
d the connections ever harder to make. He hadn’t been to prison, hadn’t lived underground for the past three years, hadn’t been tutored by Sandman or developed his street smarts or learned anything at all. She moved, he moved: that was all he knew. And when the yellow Volvo turned right out of the hospital lot and rolled down Route 202 into the heart of town and bore left on Division and headed for his mother’s house, he followed.

  They were two blocks away when the Volvo, without signaling, suddenly nosed in at the curb up ahead. He saw the black Jetta then, parked across the street in a line of cars, and he let the forward momentum of the SUV carry him on past to the corner and then back around the block. “No hurry,” he told himself, and he realized he was talking aloud—and how pathetic was that? But he repeated himself, as if his voice were coming from the radio, as if everything he was thinking was being broadcast to the world and people were crowding into rooms and standing in doorways to hear him, “No hurry at all.” When he came down the street a minute later she was standing there on the pavement, leaning into the driver’s side window, her T-shirt hiked up in back so that he could see the smooth run of her lower back and the flare of her hips, and he flicked his signal and slid in behind a panel truck. He was blocking somebody’s driveway, but that wouldn’t matter because any minute now she was going to get in that Jetta—alone—and everything would fall into place. He backed up five feet and eased out just enough to be able to see round the truck. He left the car running, in gear.

  They were talking, the two of them, back and forth, and now she was using her hands, parting words, goodbye, and he saw the other woman tug at her shirt and pull her back to slip her something. What was it: drugs? A cigarette? Some deaf thing? Maybe it was a hearing aid, maybe that was it. But no, she was putting her hair up in one of those flexible bands, snaring the mass of it in both hands and flicking back her head the way Natalia did, the way Natalia used to, the characteristic gesture, the dip and fall. And then another goodbye and she crossed the street and got into her car as the other woman pulled away. What he’d thought was that she’d be trapped there, that it would be nothing to pull up beside her and block her in and do what he had to do, but he didn’t move. She was studying herself in the mirror, both her arms V-ed above her head, doing something with her hair, smoothing and adjusting it beneath the tight clench of the band, and he watched, transfixed, thinking of Natalia, of Gina, her slim pale arms moving in unison as the car gently rocked and she dug out her lipstick and her eyeliner and made herself up as if she were going out on a date. Which, in a way, she was.