Talk Talk (21 page)

At some point, exhausted, she did manage to fall asleep, and when she woke some indeterminate time later, she found Bridger lying unconscious beside her. He was on his back, his mouth open wide, and he was breathing with the ponderous tranquillity of the heavy snorer, though it was nothing to her. She remembered his warning her that he snored when they'd first started sleeping together--other people had complained about it (i. e., girlfriends), but she wouldn't complain, would she? He'd offered up the proposition with a smile and she'd given him the smile back and said that she was afraid she'd just have to tough it out.

She'd pulled the blinds for privacy when they'd checked in, but the spaces between the slats still showed the same insubstantial light she'd fallen asleep to, so unless she'd slept through the night and this was dawn she was looking at, it must have been eight or nine or so. Well past dinnertime. She felt her stomach rumble--“peristalsis,” and there was another word--and realized with a sudden keen apprehension that she was hungry. Starved, actually. She'd been too keyed up to eat much of the ten-dollar tuna sandwich and the last time she'd eaten before that was the previous night when they went out for fast food and left Frank Calabrese his window of opportunity to slip back into his garage--or maybe he'd been there all along, lying low. Plotting. Stealing. Working himself up for his big car-chase scene. The thought of him stuck in her mind like a dart--he was right there in her moment of waking, the last thing she thought about when she fell off to sleep and the first when she opened her eyes; before long she'd be dreaming about him.

She pushed herself up to a sitting position. The motel was so cheap there was no clock radio, with its LED display, to orient her--they'd scouted three other places before settling on this one, which was twelve dollars less with her Triple-A discount--and she wondered what she'd done with her watch. She'd taken it off, hadn't she, when she'd showered? That was the first thing she'd done, the minute the man behind the counter (bearded, with a turban and a nose ring clamped round a red stone, a garnet, or maybe it was just glass) had given them the key and she'd flung open the door and dumped her suitcase on the bed, because the whole business of the past two days had made her feel unclean, dirty right down to her bones, and at least the water had been hot. Now she let her feet find the floor and went into the bathroom to look for her watch, because the first rule of motels was that everything had to be put away at all times or you'd wind up leaving half of it behind. She was in her bra and panties, her clothes balled up on the wet linoleum of the bathroom floor, and there was her watch, on the cracked, vaguely white porcelain of the bathroom sink: eight forty-five. Her stomach stirred again, and as she strapped the watch round her wrist, she was already moving back into the room to wake Bridger.

He hadn't moved. He was stretched out atop the covers, his limbs splayed, looking helpless and bereft, a faint quivering about his lips and nostrils as the expelled air shook through him. She felt bad for him. Felt bad for herself. But he was there for her, at least there was that--if ever anyone had passed the test, it was him. She spent a moment standing over the bed, gazing down at him, not thinking about love, not consciously, but stirred nonetheless by a rush of hormonal assertions, imperatives, desires. After a while, she bent forward and pressed her mouth to his and held it there, just held it, as if she were resuscitating him.

The restaurant they chose for dinner was a bit more upscale than the lunch place--softly lit, big Kentia palms in earthenware pots, linen-covered tables, clean plaster walls painted a shade of apricot--and when they'd paused outside before the recessed shrine that displayed the menu, she liked not only the prices but the vegetarian bill of fare. “Enough fast food,” she said, swinging round on Bridger as couples strolled by and the light began to fade over the mountains, “enough burgers and fries. Let's have something healthy for a change.”

He shrugged, in full passive mode. He'd canceled his cards, put a security alert on his credit reports, slept, showered and used the toilet, but he was still in shock. As they pushed through the door, her arm looped through his, he said something she didn't catch, and in the momentary distraction of addressing the hostess and following her to their table, he didn't repeat it.

Now, as they sat there over the menus--she'd ordered a glass of white wine; he was having a beer--she said, “I didn't catch what you said back there at the door.”

Another shrug. “Oh, it was nothing. I just--I don't think I have more than fifty bucks on me. Toto.”

“No problem. My treat.” Her hands unfolded to harmonize with her words. “It's all on me, everything--at least until you get your new cards. They can overnight them, right? And you can still use the cash machine--”

“Overnight them where?”

That was when the waitress returned with their drinks, and on her face the look Dana knew so intimately. It was a look borne out of the drink order and maybe some long-distance reconnaissance from the waitress' station, the probing look, the ready judgment. “Who had the white wine?” the waitress asked, just to hear Dana say, “That's me,” though with a party of two--one man, one woman--even a mental defective on her first day on the job would have divined that the wine was for the lady and the beer for the gentleman. Not to mention the fact that she was the one who'd taken the order in the first place.

“Are you ready to order?” she asked, and that was easy to read, because what else would she be asking, poised as she was over her little notation pad, one hip cocked forward, a look of spurious interest on her face. And the next thing she would say, once they'd made their selections, would be “Oh, excellent choice” or “That's the best thing on the menu.” “Hearing people.” Sometimes she couldn't help thinking the world would be a better place if everybody were deaf.

But yes, they were hungry. And yes, they were ready to order--the veggie shish kebab on basmati rice for Bridger, the hummus/couscous/ baba ghanoush pita platter for her--and the conversation died while Dana fought with the pronunciation and finally resorted to using her finger to point out the item on the menu. Every six months or so she went back to the speech therapist for a couple of weeks just to keep herself sharp--and she tried to practice regularly before the mirror, but with the insane pace of her life, teaching, writing and now this, the practice was the first thing to go. Really, though, “baba ghanoush?” Even the speech therapist had to have problems with that one.

She looked back to Bridger as the waitress drifted away. He was saying something, and he stopped, seeing she hadn't understood him, and began again. “I was saying, yeah, I do have, maybe, I don't know, a couple thousand bucks in my account--unless this creep has got to it--and I will try the cash machine, just to see. Because I don't--”

“Don't?” she echoed. “Don't what?”

“I don't want you to have to pay for me, because if we, if we're--”

“We're going to.”

“Yeah, well, I'm going to have to phone Radko--and you can bet I'll be out of a job when we get back.” He grimaced, then lifted the bottle of beer to his lips, ignoring the frosted mug that had come with it.

“How long does it take to drive cross-country--a week?” She took a sip of the wine--it was bitter, tannic. She was watching him intently.

“I don't know. Four and a half, five days if you drive straight through.”

“Could you stand that?”

“No. Could you?”

She thought about that a moment, one person asleep while the other drives, the shell of the car so fragile against the night, the eternal silence and nothing to distract her, and what if she nodded off? What was the name of that band, years back--Asleep at the Wheel? Bridger had his music, the radio, books on tape, and she had her laptop, but not at night, not when she was driving. And what if the car breaks down? What if it overheats in the desert or--what was the term--throws a rod? She was about to ask him that, about the car, about the rods, whatever they were, but she didn't get the chance because there were two other people hovering over them suddenly, a man and a woman in their twenties, dressed nearly identically in big jeans and big jackets over T-shirts trumpeting some band, and Bridger was up out of his seat as if he'd been launched, clasping the man to him in a bear hug.

She watched with a puzzled smile--or bemused, a bemused smile. “Bear hug,” she was thinking distractedly, and where had that come from? Who had actually seen bears hugging? “Did” bears hug? Or did they do it doggie style--or bearie style?

The man's name--Bridger was lit up, beaming, trembling with the information--was Matt Kralik, and he finger-spelled it for her while Matt Kralik and his girlfriend, Patricia, stood there gaping at her. Matt, he said, looking from Matt to her and back again, had been his roommate and best bud at SC, and what was he doing here? His parents had a place on the lake. But what a coincidence! Awesome! No, no, no, they had to join them for dinner. Bridger insisted.

There was the usual clumsy shuffle of place settings and chairs, the waitress looking on while a darting dark quick-blooded busboy studiously set them up and then they were all seated and Matt Kralik and Patricia had matching martinis in front of them, except that Matt's was officially a Gibson because he had a cocktail onion in his and Patricia preferred the traditional olive. For a moment no one spoke--this was what hearing people referred to as an “awkward silence,” but then no silence was awkward for Dana and her gaze quietly passed from Matt Kralik, seated on her left, to Bridger, across the table from her, and finally to Patricia, on her right. Patricia had an eager, almost ribald expression, her features too heavy for the taut athletic body that supported them--she looked cartoonish, all the weight above her shoulders, nothing below. “So,” she said, pursing her lips, “Dana--it's Dana, isn't it? I mean, I'm terrible with names--”

“Yes, that's right.”

“What do you, ah--do? For a living, I mean.”

All three of them were watching her as if she were one of the seals from Sea World propped up in a chair and about to balance a cane on her nose in expectation of the slippery reward of a fresh sardine from the trainer's hand, even Bridger, who was wearing his blunted look where a moment before he'd been transported, giddier than she'd seen him in a week, a month. She said, enunciating as clearly as she could, “I'm deaf. I teach in a deaf school. Or at least I used to.”

“Oh, deaf,” Patricia said. “That's interesting. That's really interesting.”

Matt Kralik was saying something. He'd once known a deaf kid, in high school, and the kid had been a super baseball player, center fielder, ran like the wind--and something, and something--and he made triple-A ball, but not the majors. “Like that guy that was on the Angels last year, what was his name?”

Bridger supplied the name. And he thought to finger-spell it for her: “Pride,” that was his last name, but he couldn't remember the guy's first name.

“Not Charlie Pride,” Matt Kralik said, and she would have missed it--everyone burst out laughing--if Bridger hadn't finger-spelled it too.

“No,” Patricia said, gulping back her laugh and steadying herself with a delicate sip of the martini. “He was that black country-and-western singer. My father used to have his records, I remember.”

“But this guy on the Angels, they could heckle him all they wanted and it was nothing to him. Can you imagine that? They could be cursing his mother and he wouldn't know it.”

Bridger shrugged. “Yeah, but what about when they cheered?”

And then Matt Kralik said something and Bridger said something back and Patricia joined in, the conversation wheeling off in unforeseen directions even as the food came and Bridger's hands got busy with his shish kebab and Dana lost track of what they were saying. Eventually, she just lowered her eyes and concentrated on the plate before her.

After dinner, there was chai sweetened with honey and condensed milk and more talk and then they all insisted on going out to a bar--Matt Kralik knew this place with the best music in town--and she went along though her head had begun to throb until the term “concussion” rose up in her mind as if written in big looping letters on the blackboard in her classroom, a medical term: “jarring of the brain, spinal cord, etc., from a blow, fall, etc., derived from the Latin” concussio, “meaning shock.” But no. She was just tired. And defeated. And angry. And the bar--it was like any other bar anywhere else in the world--was a place she didn't want to be. It was loud and raucous, she supposed, and Matt Kralik, Patricia and Bridger responded to it by jigging their heads to the beat of the music that was most likely pounding through the big speakers hung in the corners and opening their mouths wide to (presumably) shout at one another. She took her shoes off and danced twice with Bridger and once with Matt Kralik, but some clod stepped on her right foot with one of his engineer's boots and the liberation of movement, which usually made her experience a kind of boundless high, did nothing for her. She just couldn't shake loose of the image of Frank Calabrese. Bridger could, though--he was having a time, she could see that, and she didn't begrudge him. Or maybe she did. At any rate, after half an hour of watching everybody's mouths chew air, she told him she wanted to go back to the motel and he gave her a look she didn't like and she walked the six blocks alone and let herself into the sterile little box of a room, got under the covers and turned on the TV.

She was awake still when he came in two hours later, drunk, with his sweatshirt misaligned and wearing a stifled little grin caught somewhere between repentance and defiance. She watched with cold indifference as he fumbled into the bathroom and peed, not bothering to shut the door, and she didn't say anything when he stepped back into the room, watching his feet as if he were walking a tightrope, and stood just to the side of the TV, mesmerized by the movement there. A slasher flick was playing, the only thing she could find at this hour aside from the late-night talk shows that seemed to define their own vacuum of irrelevance, and she was no fan of the genre and wouldn't have given it a second glance if she weren't stuck here, bored and agitated and unable to sleep. “We need to get up early,” she said, trying to control her voice. “We need to leave this place. We need to get on the road. Get out of here.”