Sweet Talk (14 page)

Vera pauses on the walk near a cascade of bougainvillea. Her eyes in the warm light are deep violet, dilated, beautiful. She looks at the walk and when she looks back up she has that nervous face Megan has seen so often that says nothing is safe—tuna fish can give you brain damage, bacon can give you cancer, hair dryers shoot asbestos filaments into your lungs and nose. “I’m the one who needs advice,” she says. “I’m two weeks late.”

“Why?” Megan says. What she means is why you? A year ago Megan had an ectopic pregnancy, a child growing in the wrong place. Now she has only one tube and an erratic ovary—automatic birth control. Twice she has driven Vera to a clinic and sat in the waiting room while Vera lay on an operating table and a fetus was torn from the walls of her womb, sucked through a transparent tube, and dropped into a stainless-steel pan.

“I can’t help it,” Vera says. “I’m always lonely.”

“I don’t want to hear about it.”

“I can’t use the pill or the IUD and I always forget my diaphragm.”

“I really don’t want to hear about it.”

“It isn’t what you think.”

“I don’t care.”

They walk in silence until they find the empty lot, and Megan sits on the curb as Vera takes pictures with
her Polaroid. Vera is an architectural renderer. She has vision. She can look at a few geometric shapes disposed around a scored sheet, and she can see an entire apartment complex, complete with trees, flowers, shrubs, people talking animatedly on the sidewalks, beach towels slung over their shoulders, tennis racquets in their hands, romance, marriage, and happy childhoods in their smiles. Vera’s pictures look nothing like the Vista View complex, where the unshaded asphalt soaks up the heat, and people merely nod to each other as they take out the trash.

“Someone paid a lot of money to get this nice neighborhood rezoned for apartment buildings,” Megan says as they walk back to the car.

“It’s not that nice,” Vera says. “Look at these stucco places, the architecture of the middle class.” The architectural details, she says, are borrowed and phony and pretending to be too many things at once. There is a pointed arch taken from a Gothic cathedral and trivialized into a small front door. Here are some red Spanish tiles sitting on top of some fake half-timbering. There are two Greek columns attached to a Pueblo-style façade. What a joke, she says, what a laugh—buildings constructed out of fantasy and misinformation.

“They don’t look so bad to me,” Megan says and has a momentary vision of herself and George living in one of these places with a red wagon and plastic balls cluttering the front walk.

Vera drives badly as they return to the Vista View complex, braking at the on-ramp, then accelerating just as a truck bears down upon them. “You know how many men I’ve slept with in the last six weeks?” she says.

“I don’t want to know.”

“Six.”

They ride in silence until they arrive at Megan’s apartment, when Vera says, “I was thinking that maybe I should have this one. I was thinking that maybe I should give it to someone who would like it.”

“That sounds like a dumb idea to me.”

Seven o’clock on Monday morning and Megan drives George to the airport as small lies fly out of his mouth like hummingbirds.

“I wish I didn’t have to go,” he says. “I’d rather stay here.”

George is afraid of planes. The prospect of falling wingless to the earth always makes him sentimental.

“I wish you didn’t have to go, too. Sometimes I think thieves will break into the apartment.” This is not true—she is just keeping the conversation circuits open, and now George reaches across the front seat and puts a hand on her thigh.

“It happens every day. They could tie you up and load everything into a truck. People would just think we were moving,” he says. Megan nods. The Vista
View complex is not a community but merely a collection of people who incidentally happen to share the geography of a parking lot and three identical buildings. “Los Angeles makes me tired,” he says. “The smog makes me tired. I never get any exercise and I eat lousy food.”

“It’s only two days.” George works for a computer company that is developing a new traffic-light system for a suburb of Los Angeles, one that will measure the flow of traffic every fifteen minutes, at four thousand intersections, and alter the rhythm of the signals accordingly. He makes these trips every two months and is buoyant when he returns—a man of intellect and power who manipulates an entire town.

“You’ll probably be glad to have me out of the apartment for a while.”

“No, I won’t.”

“You’ll probably go out and eat tacos and smoke cigarettes.”

“No, I won’t.” She smiles. “I’ll wait until you get back.”

“You know, I never actually said you had to eat what I eat.”

“George, I was just joking.”

“If you want to eat empty calories, that’s fine with me. If you want to smoke and drink and sprinkle carcinogens on your breakfast cereal, okay.”

“For heaven’s sake. It was a joke.”

The traffic is moving fast and easily—six lanes of commuters who know where they’re going and drive to work on automatic pilot. George settles against his seat as if he’s relaxing but says, “I have a knot in my stomach. There hasn’t been a crash in a long time.”

She wonders whether he’s just computing odds with his engineer’s mind and concluding that somewhere there is a plane with its number coming up, or whether he’s afraid there’s such a thing as a vengeful fury. She decides to launch a small weather balloon. “Vera,” she says—using the word to test the air—“Vera,” she says again, “wants to come over and cook us supper when you get back.”

For a living Megan writes sentences. She works at a place called Comp Currics, Inc., which sells computerized educational programs to large school systems. The sentences she writes do not add up to little communities of paragraphs. They are fed randomly into a computer, which, through telephone hookups, feeds them to terminals in New York, St. Louis, Dallas, and Detroit, where students with low grades practice reading the English language. It is hard to write thousands of sentences that have nothing to do with each other and that must be very short, use a limited vocabulary, and make no references to forests, farms, streams, wildflowers, nuclear families, or anything else associated with country life or middle-class values. Megan is good at her job.
The old man
sat
down on the park bench. The milk
sat
on the table too long. The woman
sat
up in bed.

Sometimes to keep herself awake she allows the sentences to follow a story line on her legal tablet, but for two days the stories have been going out of control.

Megan has just crumpled up three sheets of sentences and is now writing a letter to the owner of Le Max: Dear Unhappy Lost-Cat Owner, I regret to inform you that I have reason to believe that your valuable and beloved pet has been squashed by a passing car in front of the Vista View apartment complex. If you are the sort of person who always likes to know what’s what, I imagine you will be grateful for this letter. If you are the sort of person who likes to be in doubt, I am sorry. Yours sincerely, A Resident.

Each of them knows Vera is pregnant, but no one mentions it. Vera and George drink Perrier water and
Megan drinks wine, as the sauce simmers on the stove. They talk about Vera’s apartment building, George’s traffic system, and Megan’s language arts project. Everyone agrees that everyone else is working hard. Megan and Vera return to the kitchen to wash the lettuce, and George watches the news. Megan starts on the salad dressing, and Vera goes back to the living room. She and George stand at the window and discuss the prospects for an earthquake. They sound as if they are discussing the stock market.

“The San Andreas fault looks bad. The Calaveras looks bad, too.”

Megan steps out of the kitchen for a moment and observes the way they are standing, George’s elbow just brushing Vera’s blouse, their hair holding the red light of the sun. Vera calculates the projected angle of the telephone pole’s fall. “Look at those guy wires,” she says. “They’re already pulling it toward the living room.”

Megan steps back into the kitchen. George says, “If we’re in the living room when it comes, we’ll stand under that door frame.”

Megan sighs into the steam of vegetarian tomato sauce and takes shelter under a door frame in her head. George and Vera: for them life is full of definable problems with definable solutions. Don’t eat candy, don’t smoke cigarettes, don’t stand near the window when the earth is quaking.

Vera returns to the kitchen and asks Megan for flour to make the pasta. Vera is not making lasagna, which anybody can make. She is making manicotti stuffed with spinach and cheese, and she is doing it from scratch. George stays in the living room while Megan sits at the kitchen table and watches Vera rub eggs into the flour and roll the dough on the counter into paper-thin sheets. She works vigorously without getting flour on her blue silk blouse. Then she beats four eggs into a bowl of fresh ricotta cheese.

Megan begins to swing her leg and tap her foot. Megan is nervous and Vera is not, but then Vera is on Valium.

George comes into the kitchen, and Vera begins to drop the delicate sheets of pasta into boiling water.

George says, “It sure smells good,” and Megan says, “Vera wants to give us the kid, which I think is a crummy idea, what do you think?”

No one says anything.

George moves across the kitchen and leans against the counter and says, finally, “Well, I didn’t think we were going to be testy about this whole thing.”

Vera says, “We don’t have to talk. I thought we’d just eat, and after supper we can talk or not talk.”

Megan says, “George, why didn’t you think we’d get testy?”

George shakes his head and looks at the linoleum, as if everything is going over his head. Vera looks into the
bubbling pot and begins to cry. She dips a slotted spoon into the pot and withdraws a piece of pasta. “Look at it,” she says. “It’s ruined.” The noodle slithers off the spoon and falls to the floor. In the water it has developed large fissures and bursting bubbles. “You gave me self-rising flour, you didn’t give me regular,” she says. She withdraws another puffed and exploded noodle, which also falls to the floor.

“Think of it as an accident,” Megan says. “I couldn’t help myself.”

Vera continues to cry and spoon noodles out of the pot until the floor looks as though it is piled with glistening rags. Megan watches George and George watches the noodles. Then he kneels and tries to scoop them up and put them back in the pot. “Don’t cry,” he says. He touches Vera’s beautiful blouse with a wet hand. “Don’t cry.”

Megan stands up, feeling a deep rage in her bones, as if her bones might hurl themselves across the kitchen and fall upon the two of them like clubs. “What about me?” she says. She waits for the rage to pass, and when it doesn’t, she sees that handfuls of ricotta cheese are flying across the kitchen. When she sits back down at the table, she says, “All I wanted was not to know.”

George has gone to Los Angeles again and Vera is no longer pregnant. Megan drove her to the clinic, waited in the waiting room, smoked cigarettes, sucked lemon
drops, bought a ham (nitrite) sandwich from the machine, ate half, threw it away, thought about the transparent tube, the contents dropping into the basin, the basin emptied into the hospital garbage disposal, the copper pipes whooshing it toward the sea. Megan knows where those things go, because she asked about them after her fallopian tube was removed. Aborted fetuses, amputated limbs, benign tumors, everything goes back to the sea, rises into the air again as rain, and falls back to the earth. Not a bad ending if you can think of it that way.

Now as she lies in bed with a book in her lap, the springs begin to jiggle, the pictures on the wall move against their nails. The apartment groans like a sailing ship. This must be it: the big one. She leaps from the bed and considers the closet, the kitchen table, the door frame near the stairwell. She moves in a circle. She thinks of the gas main. She goes into the living room, and it is over.

Midnight and the local news has covered the quake, a minor tremor, only 5.0 on the scale, worse in high buildings than in low ones, but of no danger to human life. She lies in bed in the dark, feeling safe, feeling giddy, and thinks about the old woman who lives apart from her son on the twelfth floor of the Sunset Tower Senior Home, how she must have stiffened in her bed as the water glasses trembled on the tables, how she
must have called out to her roommate, the thief, as the bed moved on its metal wheels, one hundred and twenty feet above the ground. Then Megan slides into sleep, where she may say something strange or terrible, which no one will hear, a message spoken to herself but kept forever secret.