Talk Talk (15 page)

By the time he got round to cooking, it was past seven and Madison was distracted and whiny. She sat at the kitchen table, pounding her legs back and forth under the chair as if she were on a swing set at the playground, watching him poach the gnocchi while the cordon bleu began to send up signals from the oven and the white sauce thickened in the pan and the zucchini simmered in olive oil, red wine, garlic and chopped basil, the flame up high just before he cut it down nearly to nothing. There was an untouched glass of milk in front of her and the croque monsieur he'd made her from a heel of French bread and the leftover slices of prosciutto and Emmentaler browned in the pan. He could see the semicircular indentation her upper teeth had made in the sandwich when she'd lifted it to her mouth and then decided she wasn't going to eat it after all because she was cranky and tired and sugared-out in honor of Dunkin' Donuts Day at camp and because he wanted her to eat and her mother wanted her to eat and she didn't want to do what anybody wanted her to do, not in her present mood.

For his part, he was through coaxing her. She could kick away all she wanted and she could pout and mug and whine that the milk was too warm and the sandwich too cold or plead for him to read her a story or at least let her get up from the table and watch TV, but he was in a zone--he was enjoying himself, the meal coming to fruition, two sips left of the vodka martini on the counter and the Orvieto on ice. Natalia had set the table on the deck--it was an uncharacteristically mild evening, the fog held at bay, at least temporarily--and she was out there now, martini in one hand, magazine in the other. After the spa, she'd spent the afternoon shopping with Kaylee, and she'd come home in a delirium of shopping bags, the slick shining colors catching the light, her hair swept back, her smile quick and unambiguous and her mood elevated. Definitely elevated. She insisted on trying things on for him--“Did he like this one? Did he? Was he sure? It wasn't too, too... was it?”--and Madison was summoned to try on the three outfits she'd got for her (hence the mood and the lateness of the meal).

He hadn't told her a thing yet, just that he had a surprise for her. While she'd been out shopping, he'd been shopping too, and he'd traded the Z4 in on a Mercedes S500 sedan with charcoal leather seats, burl walnut trim, an in-dash GPS navigator system and Sirius satellite radio, in a sweet color they called Bordeaux Red. There was a price differential, of course--a considerable one, and he knew he was being taken, the salesman pulling some sort of phony accent on him and kissing his ass from the front door to the desk and back again--but that hardly mattered. The Beemer was his down (the pink slip signed over to him by none other than Dana Halter) and there were no payments for the first six months, by which time it really wasn't relevant. Now, as he dodged from one pan to the other, checking the cordon bleu, dipping the gnocchi out of the pot and slipping them onto a greased sheet for a three-minute browning in the oven, he was burning up with the need to show it to her, to show it off and see the look on her face. That was how he'd planned it out, the new car first, the thrill of it, maybe a ride round the block or over the bridge, and then he'd give her the news: Business. An opportunity on the East Coast. But it would be a vacation, a vacation too--see the sights. Didn't she want to live in New York? Hadn't she always said that? New York?

In the heat of the moment--pans sizzling, aromas rising--he didn't hear her come in the door. There was Madison, pouting at the table, there was the deck and the empty chaise, and here she was, Natalia, slipping her arms round his waist. “So what is this surprise?” she cooed, her lips at his ear. “Tell me. I can hardly stand to know.”

Flipping off the gas under the burners, he gave the zucchini pan a precautionary shake and then swiveled round in her embrace. Both his hands climbed to her shoulders and he took her to him for a lingering kiss while Madison looked on in mock disgust. “You'll see,” he murmured, and in that moment he was sure of her, sure of the feel and the taste and the smell of her, his partner, his lover, the dark venereal presence in his bed. “As soon as we eat.”

“Ohhh,” she said, drawing it out, “so long?” And then, to her daughter: “It is a surprise, Madison. For Mommy. Do you like a surprise?”

After dinner--Madison managed to get down two forkfuls of gnocchi and half a slice of the veal, though she just stared right through the vegetables--he took them down the front steps to the gravel walkway along the bay. They were holding hands, Natalia on his right, Madison on his left. Madison bunched her fingers in the way Sukie used to, not quite ready to interlock them with his because she was still in a mood and that would have been too conciliatory under the circumstances--the surprise wasn't for her, after all, or not primarily. “What is it, Dana?” she kept saying in a high taunting schoolyard voice. “Huh? Aren't you going to tell?”

“Yes, Da-na,” Natalia chimed in. “I am in suspense. It is out here, outside? Something outside?”

He didn't answer right away. He was thinking of Sukie, the last time he'd seen her. It was the week he'd been released. They were at McDonald's, same place, same time, but she wasn't the girl he knew. It wasn't just the physical changes--a year older, a year taller, two teeth missing in front, her hair pinned up with a tortoiseshell barrette so that she seemed like an adult in miniature--but the way she looked at him. Her eyes, fawn-colored, round as quarters, eyes that had given themselves up to him without stint, were wary now, slit against the glare of the sun, against him. He could see the poison Gina had poured into them and see too that there was no antidote--there was nothing he could do to win her back, no amount of fudge on the sundae, not the desperation of his hug or the prattle of the old stories and routines. She was lost to him. He didn't even remember her birthday anymore. “No,” he said finally, bending low against the tug of Natalia's hand to bring his face level with her daughter's, “it's inside.”

All three of them had halted. Madison's nose twitched. “Then why are we out here?”

“Because this is an alternate way to our garage, isn't it? An acceptable way? A nice way, out here, breathing nice clean air after dinner?” He straightened up even as she let go of his hand and flew across the grass; just as she reached the garage door--unfinished wood gone gray with the sun and sea for the natural look--he clicked the remote and the door swung up as if by magic.

“It is a car?” Natalia said, catching the glint of chrome as they strode across the grass hand in hand.

When they were there, when he'd let Madison in to scramble over the seats and Natalia, her mouth slack, had pulled back the driver's side door to peer inside at the dash, he said, “Top of the line. Or nearly.” He paused, watching her run a hand over the upholstery. “I could have gone for the S600, but it's such a gas hog--four hundred ninety-three horses. I mean, think of the environment.”

Natalia was giving him a puzzled look. “But where,” she said, “is my car?”

“Mommy, Mommy!” Madison shouted, bouncing so high on the rear seat her head brushed the roof.

“I traded it on this,” he said, trying to keep his voice even. “For you. For Madison. You can't have her on your lap all the time, I mean, she's growing up--look at the size of her.”

“But I love my Z-car.” Natalia's lips were clenched. Her eyes hardened.

“I know, baby,” he said, “I know. When we get to New York I'll get you another one, I promise.”

Her head came up now, up out of the dark den of the interior, with its rich new smell and the shining screen of the GPS system. “New York? What are you talking about?”

Later, after they'd put Madison to bed, they had a talk. It was the kind of talk he hated, the kind where you were up against the wall, no place to hide, and everything was going to come out sooner or later. He felt vulnerable. Irritated. Felt as if he was standing before the judge all over again, the lawyer, his probation officer.

Natalia had made coffee and they sat across from each other in the living room, holding on to their mugs as if they were weighted against a hurricane wind. She was watching him closely, her eyebrows lifted, both hands clenched round the mug in her lap. “So, you are going now to tell me what this is all about? That I should have to leave my home and tear up--is that how you say it?--tear up my daughter when she is just to start in school?”

“You love me, right?” he countered, leaning forward to set his mug on the coffee table. “You've told me that a thousand times. Did you mean it?”

She didn't respond. Outside, a pair of blue lights drifted across the bay.

“Did you?”

In a reduced voice, she said that she did. One hand went to the throat of her silk blouse; she fingered the necklace there, pearls he'd given her. Or paid for, anyway.

“All right, good. You're just going to have to trust me, that's all”--he held up a hand to forestall her. “Haven't I given you everything you could possibly want? Well,” he said, without waiting for an answer to the obvious, “I'm going to continue to do that. No, I'm going to give you more. Much more. Private school for Madison, the best money can buy, and you know the best schools are on the East Coast. You know that, don't you?”

Her face was ironed sober, no trace of theatrics or antipathy. She was trying hard to comprehend. “But why?”

“It's complicated,” he said, and he glanced up at a movement beyond the window, a flash of white, the beat of wings, something settling there on the rail--an egret. Was that an egret?

“Yes?” she said, leaning into the table herself now, her eyes probing his.

“Okay,” he said. “You just have to--listen, my name isn't really Dana.”

“Not Dana? What do you mean? This is a joke?”

“No,” he said, slowly shaking his head, “no joke. I--I “adopted” the name. Because I was in trouble. It was--”

She cut him off. “Then you are not a doctor?”

He shook his head. There was the shadow of the bird there, faintly luminous, and he couldn't help wondering if it was a sign, and if it was, whether it was a good sign or bad.

“And all this”--her gesture was sudden, a wild unhinged sweep of her hand--“is a lie? This condo, this coffee table and the dining set? A lie? All a lie?”

“I don't know. Not a lie. Everything's real--the new car, the earrings, the way I feel about you and Madison.” He glanced away and saw that the bird was gone, chased by her gesture, by the violence of her voice. “It's just a name.”

There was a long moment of silence during which he became aware of the distant murmur of the neighbor's TV, a sound that could have been the wash of the surf or the music of the whales. But it wasn't. It was only the sound of a TV. Then she said, “So, if you are not Da-na, then who are you?”

He never hesitated. He looked right at her. “Bridger,” he said. “Bridger Martin.”

“IT'S GOOD,” Bridger said, using his hands for emphasis. “I like it.” He nodded his head vigorously, chin up, chin down. His smile widened. “Really good.”

“Really?” she said, and felt the color rise to her face. “You're not just telling me that, are you?”

They were sitting in her car across from Mail Boxes Etc. in the town of Mill Valley, California, just over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. She'd never been here before, had never in fact done anything more than attach the name to a place she knew vaguely to be somewhere north of the city. It was a pleasant-enough town, she supposed, with its oaks and pines and the mountain that loomed over it, the streets that managed to seem urban and rural at the same time and the carefully cultivated small-town feel--just the sort of place a thief might want to live. Trees to hide behind. Money that spoke quietly. Anonymity.

They'd been here, in the parked car, for two hours now. The day before, they'd checked into a motel in Monterey--Bridger had insisted on taking her to the aquarium there, which she loved despite herself, sharks tapping some hidden energy source with the flick of a fin, fish floating like butterflies in the big two-story tank as if this were the Disneyland of the sea--and they'd got up early that morning and driven straight through to Mill Valley. Bridger's map, downloaded from Map-Quest, with a red star indicating the Mail Boxes franchise they were looking for, took them right to the place without fret or deviation, and if she'd expected it to look sinister, expected the criminal himself to be grinning at her from behind the copy machines, she was disappointed. The store looked no different from any other Mail Boxes Etc. There it was. People going in, people coming out.

But what to do next? Bridger wanted her to go right up to the counter and carry off an imposture, tell them she'd lost her key, show them some proof (if she wasn't Dana Halter of #31 Pacific View Court, then who was?) and see what was in the box, a bill, correspondence, a bank statement, anything that might show the residential address. Then they'd turn the tables. Then “they'd” go to “him.” She knew he was right. That was the logical thing to do, because they could sit here watching the place forever and still the guy might not show up or if he did they could miss him--all they had was a photograph, after all, and photographs offer up one version only, the version of the moment, and what if he'd grown a beard, dyed his hair? Or he might send somebody else for his mail--his wife, his daughter, his gay partner for all she knew. He could be wearing a hat, sunglasses, he could come in with a bag over his head. No, Bridger was right, but she was the one who had to go in there and break the law, not he. All her life she'd had to struggle with social situations, struggle to make herself understood while people gave her that don't-touch-me look, and what if the person behind the counter said, “What number?” “What number?” That would kill the whole thing--they'd probably call the police on her. A woman with a suspicious high bludgeoning voice trying to scam--that was the word, wasn't it? Scam?--some innocent citizen's mailbox key for what had to be a nefarious purpose. What could she say--that she'd forgotten the number of her own box? Another lie to layer it smooth: “I've been out of town and it just slipped my mind, well, because this is my second home up here, my vacation place, actually, and I, well, I don't”--“I just forgot...”

So they were sitting in the car, watching the door of the place--people coming, people going--hoping to get lucky. In the meanwhile, he'd asked her to read him what she'd been writing, because he was curious and wanted her to share it with him, and yes, he assured her, he could listen and keep his eyes on the door at the same time. And so she'd read to him and she watched his face when he told her it was good and maybe she'd flushed red, maybe she had.

“You know,” he said, “the writing's really” and she didn't catch the rest.

She leaned in close to him. “What? The writing is what?”

“Cinematic,” he said, contorting his face, his mouth, his lips, and he finger-spelled it just to be sure.

“Cinematic?” she repeated, secretly pleased. All at once, and she couldn't help herself, she saw the book as a movie, a whole parade of scenes, not the least of which featured the premiere, the red carpet, she and Bridger in tuxedos--or no, he in a tuxedo and she in a black strapless dress, or no, white, definitely white...

His face changed, his eyes sinking away from the smile. “There “was” a movie, you know. Like thirty years ago? By”--he finger-spelled it “François Truffaut. You know that, right?”

“Yes,” she said, holding his eyes, “of course. I've seen it.”

“It was called “L'Enfant Sauvage.” We saw it in film school.” He brought his hands up out of his lap, as if to use them, and then thought better of it. “And it was good, I remember. Truffaut himself played the teacher, what was his name?”

“Itard.”

“Right, Itard--but you haven't got that far yet, right? What you gave me is as far as it goes--where they find the kid wandering naked in the woods and nobody knows who he is or how he's managed to survive on his own?”

She nodded. It was easy to read him because he was her intimate, her man, and she knew his speech patterns as well as she knew her father's, her mother's--what was hard was reading strangers, especially if they talked fast or with an impediment or an accent. That was why her stomach felt light and her blood raced as if she'd just climbed a dozen flights of stairs: there was a stranger behind the counter in Mail Boxes Etc. and she was going to have to go in there and pretend to be someone she wasn't, pretend to be hearing, pretend to be entitled and maybe even cavalier. “Yes,” she signed, “that's as far as it goes.” And then, aloud: “I want to get to that part, where Itard tries to teach him to talk, to name things, to speak through an acquired language, but first I'm interested in how the child is perceived by the society around him--and how he perceives the world himself. That's the beginning. That's the groundwork.”

“He never did learn to talk, did he? I mean, after how many years of exercises like seven days a week and all that?”

“And all that.” The struggle, that was what it was about, the fight to overcome the deficit, the impairment, the loss. Itard and Victor, the Wild Child, who could barely pronounce his own name. “Five years,” she said. And then, finally, her throat constricting, she added, “No, he never did learn to speak.”

He ran a hand through his hair and it came away with a faint sheen of gel on his palm. She noticed because he raised both his hands, as if to speak in Sign--he tried for her sake, and it was more intimate, more giving, even than what they did in bed together; in that moment, she felt herself go out to him as if all her tethers had been cut. “Are you going to go to”--he paused, because he couldn't find the Sign and had to spell it out: “France? To see it. For research, I mean?”

She showed him: “Country, foreign country. Europe, European.” “Germany” “is the double eagle,” “for France you flick the wrist like this, like the flicking of a Frenchman's handkerchief out of his cuff. See? It's easy.”

His hands were in his lap. His face fell into what she liked to call his “hangdog” look, and she loved the reference, the picture it made in her mind of a dog called out on the carpet--right, on the carpet?--and the way its body collapsed under the weight of all that undisguised doggy emotion. “What?” she said. “What's wrong?”

“You didn't answer the question.”

“You mean France?”

A full minute must have gone by and neither of them had even glanced at the door across the street. His eyes were concentrated on her lips, as if he were the deaf one. “No,” she said, shaking her head slowly, back and forth, heavy as the pendulum at the bottom of the grandfather clock in her parents' front hall, the one that announced the hour to everyone but her. “I'd love to, but--”

“But you can't afford it. Because you don't have a job. Right?”

She dropped her eyes. Used her hands: “Right”.

Both of them looked up then and studied the façade of Mail Boxes Etc. They might have been architectural students--and she should have thought of that, should have brought two sketch pads and an assortment of pencils, charcoal, gum erasers, the ones that smelled like tutti-frutti. Or maybe they were building inspectors. Or town planners. She wouldn't have put that ugly cookie-cutter thing there if she was on the board, no way in the world. In fact, she'd tear it down in a heartbeat and let the oaks creep back in, put in a fountain, a couple of benches. The frame collapsed and her eyes went to the movement inside, the vague bobbing of shapes screened by the reflection of the sun off the windows, people at work, packages being weighed, mail sent out and received, copies run, an amorphous huddle around the cash register. Her stomach sank. And then she felt his touch: two fingers at her chin, gently shifting her gaze back to him. “Have you thought about what you're going to do?”

“No, not with this hanging over me,” she said, gesturing toward the store. “I mean, I get paid through the end of August, but obviously I've got to start sending my resume out.” She watched his face change--he didn't want her to see what he was feeling, but he was a lousy actor. “I don't want to leave, if that's what you mean.”

“That's what I mean,” he said.

She leaned in to kiss him, the familiar taste and scent of him, lips that spoke in a different way altogether, and then drew back again. “I'd love to go to Aveyron, to Lacaune and Saint-Sernin--are you kidding me?--but the airfare's out of my range, I'm afraid, and with the dollar weak... Plus, they'd probably arrest me the minute they ran my passport through the computer.” She put on a face. “Dana Halter, batterer and assaulter--it even rhymes.”

“But how can you write about a place you've never seen?”

This was easy. She pointed a finger to her head. “I see it here. And I've been there, to the south of France, anyway--to Toulouse, which isn't that far from Aveyron. Didn't I ever tell you that?” She'd been there as a girl, a few years after she became deaf. She must have been ten, eleven--the age of the wild child. Her parents were vacationing in Europe that year and they brought the whole family along--her and her two brothers--for the educational opportunity. Her parents were practical in that way. Her mother especially. And especially with her, full immersion in both Sign and speech right from the beginning--what the people who make their living off the deaf call “total communication”--because there was no way her daughter was going to be a cripple or even the tiniest bit dependent on anybody or anything. Her mother was pretty then, her hair trailing down her back beneath the brim of the suede cowgirl's hat she'd bought on a trip to Mexico, her legs long and naked in a yellow sundress and two boy babies and a little deaf girl compressed in her arms--Dana didn't know whether her memories of that time came from the photographs in the family album or what she'd seen and smelled and felt. When she closed her eyes she could see the fingers of palms etched against pale stucco, a river like an avenue of light, the new bridge (a regional joke: Napoleon had built it) humped over the water as if it were trying to swim.

“You know,” she said, trying to hold on to the moment because in the next moment she was going to have to go into that store, “it's easier to learn foreign Sign than a spoken language. Much easier. I picked up FSL right away because my mother thought I should meet deaf French kids.”

“Iconicity,” Bridger said, surprising her. “Like when you sign 'cup.'” He demonstrated, his left palm the saucer, his right cupped over it. “We learned it in the class I took. German, French, Chinese, whatever--a cup is a cup, right? What about Marcel Marceau--I bet he would have been good at it. Did he know Sign, you think?”

Just then a movement on the far side of the street caught her eye, and she started. A man in a flowered shirt, baseball cap and wraparound sunglasses scrambled up to the door as if he were in a hurry--as if someone were chasing him, as if he were a fugitive--pulled back the door and disappeared inside. “Bridger!” she shouted (or might have shouted; she couldn't tell, but it felt like a shout). “Bridger, it's him!”

She was out of the car before he was, a deaf woman in the middle of the street, cars coming both ways and she staring down a UPS man in a boxy brown UPS truck that was right there in front of her though she couldn't hear his horn or the metallic keening of his brakes, and even as Bridger caught up to her and grabbed her arm she was telling herself to slow down, stay calm, focus. Then they were on the far side of the street, up on the sidewalk, and Bridger might have been saying something, but she wasn't paying attention--her eyes were fixed on the door ahead of them. She saw her own reflection there, a shifting of shapes, the gleaming metal handle of the door, and she took a deep breath and stepped inside, Bridger right behind her.

There were eight people in the place and she tried to take them all in simultaneously, including the heavyset woman behind the desk who looked up and gave her an expectant smile and the old man fumbling for change at one of the copy machines. Her heart slammed at her ribs. The overhead lights seemed to recede, painting a thin pale strip of illumination across the heads and shoulders of the eight figures in their various poses, bending, gesticulating, lips flapping on air--and where was he? Her eyes jumped from one to the other, and then suddenly there he was. There, at the back of the store, where the bank of mailboxes ran in a neat continuous file from waist- to shoulder-level: she saw the bright flash of the shirt first, then his profile under the bill of the cap as he stood over the wastebasket, discarding junk mail. Oblivious. Completely oblivious. As if he were the most innocent soul in the world. The son of a bitch. She couldn't believe it.

She felt Bridger wrap an arm round her waist, an admonitory tightness straining the ligaments of his wrist and fingers. “Calm,” he was telling her, “stay calm.” It took a moment--she was just staring, all the rage and disbelief she'd felt over the way she'd been violated rising in her till she was strung tight with it, ready for anything, the accusation, the physical assault, the spewing up of the deaf woman's shriek that was so caustic and inhuman it could set off all the alarms up and down the block--and then Bridger disengaged his arm and she felt his fingers on her chin, urgently tugging her face around. “That's not him,” he signed.