Talking Heads

by John Domini

  “But then I realized like,” Zia said, “it doesn’t matter what I wear in the photograph. I could come in without any clothes at all; I could come in stark, fucking naked. And I’d still be the reporter, Kit. The Humans, they’ll be the sickos. This afternoon like, for the first time in my life I had work. I wasn’t one of the Humans; I wasn’t just another cellar-dweller. I had, my own chosen work. I stood in front of my clothes closet and I knew it.”

  Zia’s pale headscarf made it appear that she’d gotten a G.I. haircut, a buzz cut. Under these imitation gas lamps she called to mind that last photo of Kit’s father. She had that sureness, natural, powerful.

  “Kit, it’s incredible what’s been happening, since you took me on. It’s like—you’re incredible. Kit, totally. You don’t even hold my father against me.”

  Her father, his father. Kit was stumbling over every kind of junk there was.

  “And today you did this like, heroic thing, this incredibly brave and noble deed. And still you’re on the job. You’re on the job, you’re letting me know. Even if it means coming all the way out here. You’re thinking about me, you’re making sure I’m part of it. The next issue.”

  That roused him. “Aw, Zia.” Kit reached for his coffee. “I don’t know about the next issue.”

  “Oh, it’s going to be a killer. A motherfucker.”

  “I don’t know, Z.” The drink was an unlikely mix by now, bitter but sugary. “I’m not sure what to do, about the next issue.”

  “Oh, hey Kit. He-ey.” Zia laid a hand inside his elbow, her fingers light. “You must be tired.”

  “Zia, I’m not sure. I’m in bad shape.”

  So I left our blue boy, our pseudo S&Mie. With an itch in my arm, I went looking for a darker dive. And the Cue & Ayy I laid out above, my day with the dilettante—well as you’ve probably guessed, that isn’t exactly what took place. Not exactly, no. It’s what those of us in the news business call a “made-up quote,” or a “total fabrication.” Every now and then we have to do that sort of thing in order to get our point across. But my point, remember, is that this guy had missed the point.

  This guy was lost. Way out of his depth. His friend Garrison might’ve had some ghostly substance, yeah, okay. Garrison kept fooling me, yeah, a stubborn bit of bad news, buoying up into view no matter how jaundiced an eye I cast over the scene.

  But Our Subject, Our Scandie Ayy—he was lost. He didn’t get it.

  And I’ll have more to say about that, me basement boys and girls. Lots more on how we tell the true hearts from the clueless, in this day and age. Watch this space.

  Meanwhile—Z my name is Zia, I’m going to live in Zanzibar.

  Chapter 5

  He liked the wind off the channel, the way it reshaped his bruises. The wind itself came in battered shapes in the Woods Hole crossing. Here in the Hole, along the ferry lanes between Cape Cod and the islands, two ocean currents collided—the Gulf Stream and the Buzzards Bay. The thick sea broke apart into whirlpools, into patches of white-flecked chop, and above the water the airflow wrestled through rough-edged directional shifts. North, east, west, south—in January the wrestling was worst. Yet Kit took the brunt of it. He stood at the forward rail of the Nantucket ferry, a lone outdoor voyager on a boat three-quarters empty to begin with. He liked the wet scrub in each new blast of air.

  The wind even whistled through his stitches, faint, faint. Kit started tipping his head, trying to create the whistle. He savored the tickle at his sutures.

  Not that this wasn’t a strange place to find himself, Friday afternoon. Hardly a day had passed since he’d gotten these sutures. Hardly a day and a night since the phone call that had set up his bruising. And here Kit stood, playing sickbed games with the Atlantic Ocean. Strange, no question. His farthest yet from the things that needed doing.

  North, east, west, south, Kit saw nothing but storm and twilight. The mainland had disappeared as soon as he and Bette were out of the dock. Martha’s Vineyard didn’t show till the ferry was in the harbor. Now between the Vineyard and Nantucket they moved without landmark, without bearing. A ghost adrift. When Kit first stepped out of the ferry cabin, the churning, misted vertigo forced up a shout—wordless, raw-throated.

  Yet Kit liked the taste of the air, too, rich and natural as a rained-on heap of leaves. It freed him from the odors of his coat. Bette had sponged off the fabric before he’d woken, but the stink of Monsod had lingered. During the ride down from Boston Kit had dozed off again, and the smell had triggered headachy stabs of nightmare. Eventually he’d needed his Percodan. Now, however, even Kit’s painkillers couldn’t dull the kick of this whipsaw gray, this chaos of touch and whistle right in his face.

  It allowed no mind games either. No layout & pasteup.

  *

  Bette joined him at the rail without a word. She wore a long coat without a waist, an undertaker’s coat. Her hat was fur, with earflaps.

  “The air,” Kit said. “It’s good for me.”

  Still watching the sea, she adjusted her hat. Kit thought of Zia last night, tugging at her headscarf.

  “The air’s good for my head. Bette, I’ll tell you one thing, I’ll tell you this for starters.” He’d told Zia nothing, finally. “Lately Betts, I’ve been—overfantasizing.”

  That brought her around. Frowning, lips moving, Bette seemed to be trying out his last word.

  “Bette, I’ve got to tell you. If I’m going to tell anyone I’m going to tell you. For starters, anyway.” Here they came, yes, the things that needed doing. Unhinged as the windcurrents over the Hole. “I’m overfantasizing. If that’s the, if that’s… Betts, listen. I’m inventing newspapers in my mind.”

  “Oh, come.” She had a way of straightening her head, making a T-square with neck and shoulders.

  “In my mind, Betts. It’s got me worried.”

  “You’re not inventing papers in your mind, Kit. You’re actually bringing them into print and making them available to the public.”

  “No, no. Also in my mind, Bette. I’m running double-columns up there. I’m composing whole, weird….” And though sometimes he had to stop and massage his neck, sometimes he couldn’t believe the words he came up with—nonetheless just letting Bette in on this much of his trouble left Kit feeling relieved. This much was the easy part, sure. It was the least of his reasons for calling Corinna, over at the office, and telling her she’d have to go on taking messages till Monday. Yet as Kit talked with his bundled-up wife he enjoyed a renewed sense that their getaway might work after all. He and Bette were taking the weekend at “the Cottage,” her family place on Nantucket.

  “It’s strange, Betts,” he was saying. “The columns might start with something in my life, they might comment on something there. But next thing you know, they begin to comment on each other.”

  Her eyes, enlarged, held an obvious question.

  “I’m not crazy, Bette. I’m—I think this might be a way of not being crazy. My invisible layout and pasteup. It might be what I have instead of crazy. But, hoo boy. The flashes I get up in there.” He jerked a gloved finger at his head. “Sometimes they’re not even newspapers, exactly.”

  “Bette,” he asked, “you remember when I called you about Cousin Cal? I called about Cousin Cal, and all I could think about was making love with you. You remember that conversation?”

  “I do.” She seemed to be fighting a smile. “It was Monday. Monday, yes.”

  “Monday. Back when this whole mess was just starting.”

  To Kit, his runaway imaginings during that phone call looked to be part and parcel of the head games that had since come on worse. “I told you, then. About what was going on with me. And even then, I knew it wasn’t right.” But that same morning he’d also felt this sopping beehive in his chest, this heart not yet dried out and eggless. The humming bulk remained, stirring in the channel winds.

  “Kitty Chris.” Her look showed some of its old open-endedness. “And to think I’ve always wanted to drive men w
ild.”

  “Aw, Betts.”

  “Well. Invisible layout and pasteup, what am I to say?”

  Good question. Kit couldn’t be sure of his smile.

  “Perhaps it’s a symptom of stress. Over the Med School don’t you know, they talk a lot about stress.” She’d spoken to the Med School before they left, needing a deadline extended.

  “Though, Kit, it hardly seems as if the stress is going to get any better. You saw our kitchen table.”

  Kit couldn’t be sure of his whole face, over the yawning gap of everything that remained to be said. When at last he’d gotten out of the bedroom, this morning, he’d found his kitchen table littered with phone-memos. He’d squinted through a lateriser’s thickness. Thurs 2PM: Rachel Veutri, talk Globe/Monsod? Thurs 2:20PM: Carl Niedermeyer, talk Herald/Monsod? Thurs 3:25: Sylvia Briskin, GBH, Monsod. Th 4:10: Rachel again. Corrina had checked in too, naturally: Lot of calls/office. The memos ran on into a long second row, and included a query from the Associated Press.

  The call that must have gotten Bette up had come from the State House, at half-past seven. Kit didn’t recognize the name, but it had to be one of Croftall’s people. Making sure the old man’s ass was still protected.

  “I kept wondering,” Bette said now, “why the phone didn’t wake you.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Betts.”

  She moved her mouth, its intricate working parts, and framed a word or two. But once more, white shreds of condensed air gathered between them. An argument made visible: miniature cumulonimbus, gathering. And this would be a bad one. If Kit couldn’t keep the better talk flowing, this weekend would be the first real knockdown drag-out of the marriage. He hadn’t heard the phone this morning because last night he’d come home in Zia’s arms. In her arms, in a classic drunk’s carry, she’d hauled him up the stairs. He’d never noticed the memos.

  “I’m sorry,” he repeated. “Betts, out at the Cottage we’ll get this all—”

  “Oh, the Cottage. Kit, you know Cousin Cal is there.”

  It was duck season on Nantucket. Harding Calvin always spent the week at the estate, with three or four cronies. “Darling,” Kit said, “I told you. These guys are hunters. They’re not going to hang around the house.”

  She frowned, behind more cumulonimbus.

  “Betts, back in Minnesota we broke camp before dawn and we didn’t get back till supper.”

  “Well, and then there’s you. You, Kit. The entire drive down to the Hole you hardly uttered two words. You slept.”

  He wrapped his hands around the railing, blinking, teary. The channel was chaos, dirty whitecaps in one patch and a green hole in another.

  “Tell me about Cousin Cal,” Kit said. “Tell me about that time in Milton with him and the gardener.”

  “What? The gardener?”

  “In Milton, when you were a kid. How did that go?”

  “Kit, really. What’s that got to do with—”

  “Tell me, Betts. You were, what? Nine, ten? And Cousin Cal, he really hurt you. You and that gardener.”

  The wind had pulled blonde strands from under her hat. These played back and forth across her furred earflaps, a brighter element between them.

  “The man you’re thinking of,” Bette said slowly, “was more than a gardener.”

  “Oh sure,” Kit said. “This was a caretaker. He did the whole Milton place.”

  “Jean-Paul Rebec.”

  “Jappy, right? You called him Jappy.”

  “Oh Kit, you remember perfectly well.”

  “Tell me. Please. Didn’t he make toys?”

  “Yes. Yes.” Bette lifted her chin, indicating some far-off attic toy box. “Jappy could whittle a toy and tell me a story all at the same time. For the scary stories he’d whistle sound effects. The stories about the loup-garou don’t you know, those came complete with sound effects.”

  “He made you a loup-garou, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. Yes. A wolfman with fangs and a corduroy tongue, quite a piece of work really. Though I think that may have been a, what shall I say—an act of rebellion? It may have been the raised fist of rebellion, Kit, in the form of folk art. That Jappy should give me a monster like that. After all, I was the boss’s daughter.”

  Kit laughed, surprising himself. He would’ve thought he was much too cold for that.

  “Taking me back to Jappy, oh Kit.” Bette pulled the hair from her eyes. “Honestly.”

  “Betts, I love it. You love it, you love to think.”

  “Well. I don’t know whether this is a dirty trick or the nicest thing you’ve ever done.”

  “But then the blacks started moving down from Roxbury, right? Your family began to worry about property values?”

  Her smile shrank.

  “It must have been hard, Betts. Saying goodbye—”

  “It was a lot harder for Jappy. I was a girl when we sold, Kit. I was a girl and I lost a playmate. But Jappy, that man lost everything. He didn’t have children. He didn’t have a career, God knows. He had Milton.”

  “And Cousin Cal,” Kit said, “he made a scene, right? He ordered the man off the place.”

  “He came right into the stables and ordered Jappy out. The poor man kept stopping by for weeks after he’d been let go.”

  “Couldn’t stay away.”

  “He kept telling me goodbye. He’d drop in at the stables, stooped and murmuring, don’t you know.” She shook her head. “And then one time—there’s Cousin Cal. Loud with booze, naturellement. To hear him talk, Jappy was a trespasser. A criminal. A criminal.”

  “But you got your revenge. You tore up the stone walls.”

  Bette’s hair twisted around her lowered face.

  “Betts? You wrecked the gardens?”

  “You’re the only one who knows that, Kit. To this day, my family thinks it was the blacks.”

  “You snuck out the bedroom window.”

  “I snuck out the window. Jappy never worked on the gardens, you see. The flowers were my mother’s job, my aunt’s job. Women’s work. And on the other side of the gardens, the side along the road, there were the stone walls. Well. Wild horses couldn’t have stopped me.”

  But when she lifted her head Kit found her look less proud than he’d expected.

  “Once a snake was under a stone, Kit. A snake, honestly. Glittering in the moonlight. It didn’t stop me. No. No. When the thorns on the rosebushes cut me, I pulled off my nightgown and bundled it round my hands.”

  “And that’s when you decided to call yourself Bette.”

  “Bette like Bette Davis.” With a boot heel, she scuffed the deck’s all-weather roughage. “Oh, I became an actress that night. The next morning I wore dark tights and long sleeves. I concocted some shaggy-dog story about the cuts on my hands.”

  She kept kicking at the deck. Chop, chuff, scuff. Kit thought of his phlegm-full conversation with Corinna, that morning. That’s it? the woman had asked. That’s all I can tell these people—you’ve left the city?

  “I, I wanted to hear it again,” he told his wife. “Before the Cottage.”

  And here it was, the look Kit had fallen for. The hamper in the haystack, the unabashed tatterdemalion. Blue, blonde, white. Whenever Bette showed him this face Kit could once more sense their first hot point of contact—she the know-it-all and him mad to find out—while at the same time he spotted glimmers of a more durable connection. Glimmers of equivalent core elements. Kit couldn’t name these elements. Most words felt too broad (“curiosity”), and whenever he came across something more precise it turned out to be an impossible antique (“pluck”). Kit knew only that words were part of it, part of their shared, staged business: an instinct for words, a fussing over words. He could even see the pleasure they took in the fussing, another glimmer. Enough for a believer to go on.

  *

  Then after half a day steeling themselves for a depressed and cold Cottage—another Monsod, to hear Bette describe it—Kit and his wife pulled up at a very differe
nt place.

  Every light was blazing. Kit recalled the downtown record stores, their radium-bright checkerboard. Now what kind of winters had these New England Brahmins expected, building their seaside houses with so many windows? Kit circled round the Duster to the trunk, ticking off windows as he went. Front parlor, back parlor. Dining room, sitting room. The library and Uncle Walt’s study, the large and small guestrooms.

  Even up in the widow’s walk, an uncovered bulb was burning. A dab of yellow against the evening glower. Monsod, no way. From where Kit stood, the Cottage looked like a funhouse. Twists, turrets, crazy lighting. And now, naturally, two little heads popped up at the nearest downstairs window. Two little ticket holders.

  Did Bette have the wrong weekend? Should they have tried calling a second time?

  Two children banged through the Cottage’s front door. Two boys, calling “Unca Kit!” Calling “Aunt Beddy!”

  Hans and Rutger, sure. Bette’s sister’s boys.

  “My guys! My tough guys!” Kit shouted.

  Their huffing and puffing was flavored with hot chocolate. Within their hoods their faces nestled like eggs. And the boys had to show Kit how’d they’d learned to slap five: “Gimme some skin, Unca Kit. Gimme some skin!”

  Kit took a couple of hits, murder on his cold hands. “My two ratso fave terrorist tough guys!”

  Bette’s sister was eighteen months younger, but she’d had her first child more than five years ago. She met the group at the Cottage doorway, surprised, in slippers. Cecelia, Ceci. Her bones had Bette’s length and strictness, but tomatoes had grown through the fences. Lots of cheek, lots of top and thigh. Ceci framed her features with boxy suburban-Mom glasses. In tee shirt and work shirt, she might still have been breastfeeding.

  “Well,” Ceci said. “We’re going to have a full house.”

  “Hey, Bette—can’t you at least say hello?” In the front hall, in the speckled shadow of the unwashed chandelier, Cecelia filled the silence with quick bedroom arrangements. Cousin Cal and the duck hunters, she began, had longstanding reservations on the first-floor rooms. “You know,” Cecelia said, “cooks’ quarters.” But Bette didn’t appear to be following. Pulling off her furred hat, she blinked at the crackles of static electricity. She backed away onto the front stairway’s elongated bottom step, steadying herself with a hand on the banister’s final curve. Bette might have been a mannequin in a museum tableau. Days of the Empire.