Talk Talk (23 page)

“Hey,” she murmured. “How is it going? Looks good. Squid, yes?” There was a saucepan on the stove, the heat up high--he was making a fish stock from the scraps of the monkfish, a little white wine, butter, garlic and green onions to flavor the squid--and his hands were full. Normally, he didn't like to be bothered when he was cooking--cooking required your full concentration or things were apt to go wrong--but he was feeling so good he just leaned back into her to enjoy the feel of her long-fingered hands on his abdomen, up under his rib cage and where he was especially sensitive, on his chest and nipples. “Feels nice,” he said, turning his head for a kiss. “You want a glass of Champagne?”

“Fine,” she said, moving away from him now, “yes, I would like that, but I am looking for the hammer I have just bought--have you seen this hammer?”

She'd found a set of musty-looking turn-of-the-century prints in one of the local antique shops, featuring two children, a boy and a girl, in various poses--swallowed up in a maelstrom of brooding vegetation, strolling hand in hand like lost waifs, kicking their bare feet in a snarling stream, gazing up into the heavens as if for guidance--and she'd spent the last hour trying to decide where to hang them. “No,” he said, “I haven't seen it, but would you mind--the Champagne's in the ice bucket there and my hands...” He held up both palms, wet and slimed with the exudate of the squid, in evidence. “And that saucepan on the stove there--would you turn the heat down? To low. All the way to low.”

She was wearing a pair of capris to show off the perfect swell of her calves and her beautiful ankles and feet, open-toed sandals and a white blouse hiked up and knotted under her breasts--and she'd put her hair up too, no nonsense here, a whole house to whip into order. He cross-hatched the flattened slabs of squid to tenderize them and watched her glide across the floor to the stove and then pour herself a glass of the wine. And what was he feeling--love? Lust? The quiet seep of fulfillment and domestic bliss?

“Toast?” he proposed, putting down the knife to wipe his hands on a towel and then taking up his own glass.

The sun had fingered its way through the clouds, suddenly illuminating a patch of woods beyond the window--up came the light as if wired to a rheostat--and then just as quickly it faded. A snapshot. With a very long exposure. She was watching him intently. Poised on one foot, the glass at her lips. “Toast to what?” she asked, her face changing. “To, to”--and here it came, the flush along the cheekbones, the sheets of moisture to armor her eyes--“to a man who will not even make the introduction to his mother? In his own hometown? Of his fiancée? Is that the toast you want? Is that it?”

He said her name, softly, in melioration.

“Because I cannot stand this shit, and that is what it is, “shit.” You hear me?”

“Please,” he said, “not now.”

“Yes, now,” she said, spreading her legs for balance and then throwing back her head to drain the flute in a single gulp as if she were back in Jaroslavl with a glass of no-name vodka. “I don't believe you. I don't believe anything you say. This money. Where do you get this money? Is it drugs, is that it?”

He just stared. He didn't want to get into this.

“Will I--am I to go to prison, then? Like Sandman? And you--you have been in prison too, I know it.”

“It's a long story,” he said.

“Yes. But you tell it to me. You tell me everything.” She poured a second glass for herself, and he could see her hand tremble at the neck of the bottle. “Because I swear, if you don't... You are ashamed of me? Why? Because of my accent? Ashamed of me so that I can meet only Sandman and not your own mother?”

“It's not that,” he said, and still he hadn't moved, the squid lying there on the counter neatly prepped, his flute empty, the pan simmering on the stove. “Okay, you're right,” he said, and he moved to cut the heat under the pan and pour himself another glass, “I guess it is time, because you're just acting crazy now--drugs? Me? Have you ever seen me do any kind of drug, even pot--even a single toke?”

“Cocaine.”

“That's nothing. A little toot now and again, just for fun. What, once a week--once every “two” weeks?” He spread his arms wide in expostulation. “You like it too.”

She gave him a tight smile. “Yes. Sometimes.”

“I'm no bad guy--you think I'm a bad guy? What happened to me is no different than what happened to you. I just hooked up with the wrong person, is all. My wife. My ex-wife. That was the beginning of it, just like you--just like you with what's his name, Madison's father?”

She took a seat at the table they'd just bought the day before--oak, 1890s, six matching chairs, two with hairline cracks that had been glued and varnished over--and they finished the bottle and opened another one and he told her as much as he could, because he wanted to be honest with her; he loved her, and really did believe that people in a relationship needed to be straight with each other. What he didn't tell her was that his real name was Peck--Bridger was good, Bridger was fine for now, though he'd run the creep's credit into the ground because he couldn't resist putting it to him and before long he'd have to be somebody else--or that it wasn't the investment business he was planning on running out of the big paneled aboveground basement or that he couldn't bring her to see his mother not only because his mother was irrelevant to him but because she might call him Peck or even William and he just needed to take things step by step right now.

At some point, he'd got up and started chopping cilantro, green beans, garlic and chiles, and he deveined the shrimp and put on a pot for the rice. She didn't have much to say. She sat there running the tip of her index finger round the rim of the glass, wearing her brooding look. He was feeling a little light-headed from the wine. The pleasure of the hour, of being alone with his thoughts while things sizzled in the pan, was lost to him and the taste of the Champagne had gone sour in the back of his throat, but at least, he thought, he'd laid the issue to rest. He'd opened up. Been as forthcoming and honest as he could be, under the circumstances. And she seemed satisfied, or at least placated.

For a long while neither of them said anything. There were the faint sounds of life in the country--birdsong, crickets, the wet rush of a lone car's tires on the road out front. And what else? The rhythmic squeak and release of Madison's swings, a sound as regular as breathing. Everything seemed to cohere round that rhythm, slow and sure and peaceful, even as he moved back to the stove, busy there suddenly. When the wok was good and hot he dumped in the garlic, ginger, green onions and chiles and the instant release of the flavor scented the air in a sudden burst that made his salivary glands clench. Behind him, at the table, Natalia cleared her throat, poured herself another glass of wine. Then, in her smallest voice, she said, “I still do not see why I cannot meet your mother.”

Two days later, he was in a place across the river, in Newburgh, buying a high-end color copier with a credit card in somebody else's name, after which he intended to check out an authentic old-country German butcher shop Sandman had turned him on to--he thought he might make Wiener schnitzel, with pickled red cabbage, spätzle and butter beans, just for a change, though on second thought it was probably too heavy in this heat and he might just go with potato salad and bratwurst on the grill--when he decided on a whim to stop in at a bar down by the waterfront. He had a couple of hours to kill and that was nice. It was calming. As was the feel of the sun on his back as he loaded the copier into the trunk of the car, the underarms of his shirt already damp with sweat, the heat and humidity sustaining him in a way the refrigerated air of the Bay Area never could have. He felt like a tourist on his own home turf. A dilettante. A man of leisure taking the air before ensconcing himself on a barstool and having a cold beer or two in a conical glass beaded with moisture while the TV overhead nattered on about nothing and he spread a copy of the newspaper across the bar and mused over the little comings and goings of the Yankees and Mets.

Natalia was shopping. He'd dropped her off at a mall the size of Connecticut and she said she'd call him around two for lunch. They'd found a day camp for Madison, though she hadn't wanted to go, of course, and she'd clung to her mother's legs and shrieked till the snot ran down her nose and generally caused a monumental pain in the ass for everyone concerned, but at least they didn't have to worry about her till five--or was it five-thirty? He thought about Sukie then, couldn't help himself--it hurt to be so close and not see her, but he didn't dare risk it, not yet, anyway. Her face was there, rising luminous in his mind, and then just as quickly it was gone. He checked his watch--quarter past twelve--and stepped into the bar.

Or it wasn't a bar, actually, in the strictest sense of the word--it was a bar/restaurant, looking to go upscale, part of the interconnected complex the city fathers had built along the riverfront to attract tourists and the locals who had a little money in their pockets and thought they were getting something special because the waiters wore starched white aprons over dress shirts and ties and the Hudson was right outside the window. And he wasn't complaining--he loved to drift into places like this, the Varathane still fresh on the pine wainscoting, the owners young and uninitiated and looking to score big. It was like a busman's holiday for him, studying the menu, the wine list, seeing what they were getting for what they were putting out, but it was strictly for comparison. He'd never own a restaurant again. Too much shit. Too much heartache.

It took a minute for his eyes to adjust, and then he nodded at the hostess (eighteen, natural blonde, with a butterfly tattooed on the wing of her left shoulder, and he hated that, hated tattoos on women, especially when they wore them in intimate places--it just suggested traffic to him, that was all), removed his shades, swept a hand over the crown of his head to settle his hair and pulled up a stool at the bar. The place was fairly well crowded and that surprised him. The bar was full of business types in lightweight summer suits, plus a couple of secretaries and three or four of the local lowlifes--you could pick them out at a glance, despite their bright-colored shirts and the watch-me-behave-myself looks on their faces--and maybe two-thirds of the tables were filled, mostly with women, mostly drinking iced tea and picking at the crab salad served on half an avocado. What was the word he was looking for? Déclassé. It wasn't Sausalito, that was for sure.

He'd just ordered his beer and half a dozen cherrystones, just spread out the paper on the bar and glanced up at the TV screen to see somebody somewhere hitting a home run on yesterday's highlight reel, when he felt a hand on his shoulder and swung round on the stool as if he'd been burned, jumpy--crazed, freaked--despite himself. For a moment he didn't know whose eyes he was staring into, some stranger's, some jerk who wanted to just have a glance at the sports page or politely ask if he might not mind shifting down a stool so he could-- “Peck, man--don't you recognize me?”

It was Dudley, Dudley with his hair cut short and his earring banished, dressed in a white apron over a long-sleeved shirt and tie. He didn't know what to say. Tried to stare right through him, hello, goodbye, “You talkin' to me?” But it wasn't working, wasn't going to work. He was William Peck Wilson, and though he hadn't been anywhere near Peterskill in three years, he'd already been sniffed out. “Newburgh.” Jesus Christ. It was twenty-five miles away and on the other side of the river. Who would have thought anybody would know him here?

Dudley was standing there grinning as if they'd just gone in together on a winning Lotto ticket. His eyes were like grappling hooks. His lips were drying out. “Yeah,” Peck said, ducking his head, “yeah. Good to see you.”

“Oh, man, I can't believe it. So you're back, huh?” And then, before Peck could answer, he was calling down to the bartender, “Hey, Rick--Rick, give this man anything he wants. What do you want? A little nip of that single-malt scotch--what did you used to drink?”

The name stuck in his throat like a wad of phlegm. “Laphroaig.”

“Yeah, right: Laphroaig.” He stole a glance over his shoulder. “I'm not supposed to drink while I'm working, but hey, this is special, a special occasion.” He shifted on his feet, took a step back to widen his view, then reached out a balled-up fist to rap Peck on the shoulder. “Shit!” he barked. “Shit, Peck, it's great to see you. Balls up, man. Balls up!”

He couldn't help himself--something just snapped at that point--but suddenly he seemed to have Dudley by the arm and he was gripping that arm in his right hand as if he wanted to crush it and he was pulling Dudley to him so that he could drop his voice to that Greenhaven register: “Don't call me that,” he said. “Don't call me by name. Not ever.”

The light banked in Dudley's eyes, then came back in a soft glimmer of recognition. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I can dig it.”

Then they had the Laphroaig. Then they made some very quiet, very general conversation until Dudley had to excuse himself to go back to work. There was that moment of farewell and goodbye and see you next time, but Dudley just wasn't ready to let it go yet. “So,” he said, already leaning toward the kitchen, “am I going to see you around, or what? Are you back?”

Peck watched two women get up from their table by the window and fuss around over their purses and shopping bags and whatever else they'd dragged into lunch with them, their backsides tight in their skirts as they bent down and came up again. Beyond them, out on the river, a lone high gull coasted on the streaming currents of the air. He stood, tucked the paper under his arm. “No,” he said, “just passing through.”

THEY WERE SOMEWHERE in Utah, staring out at the salt flats that were so blanched and bleak and unrelieved he might have created them himself for the backdrop to some post-apocalyptic thriller, but he was too tired, sweat-slicked, dehydrated and vaguely feverish even to guess at the storyline or get beyond the long-distance shimmer of the (hackneyed) opening shot. Dana was driving. She'd been gazing into her laptop all day as if it were the crystal ball in “The Wizard of Oz,” and then they'd stopped to gas up and use the restroom and she'd taken over the wheel. For the last couple hundred miles he'd been steeling himself to call Radko, just to see how things stood, though he knew in his heart that by now somebody else would be occupying his cubicle and plying his mouse. It was hot, the car's air conditioner barely functioning, the sun glancing off the hood, the dashboard, the buttons of the radio. His underarms were clammy and abraded and his T-shirt was stuck to his back and he kept playing with the vents to maximize the minimal airflow, without much success. He took a moment to glance at Dana, her jaw set and hands rigid on the wheel, then pulled out his phone, punched in the number and raised his eyes to the white vacancy of the horizon.

The phone picked up on the second ring. “Rad,” Radko announced, delivering his standard telephonic greeting, as if pronouncing the two syllables of “hello” were a waste of time.

“Rad?” Bridger repeated stupidly. He'd been listening to talk radio out of boredom, some reactionary demagogue of the airwaves spewing about communists and liberals and Mexicans in a high inflammatory voice, and though he'd turned down the volume, the noise was still there. The term “eco-Nazis” rose up out of the chatter and fell away.

“Who is this? Bridger? Bridger, is that you?”

“Yeah, uh--hi.”

“Where are you?”

“That was what I wanted to talk about, what I wanted to tell you--”

“You tell me nothing. You are at airport, you are in your house, you are standing in lobby of this building where I am running a business and paying the rent, and it does not matter, does not”--he paused to snatch at the word--“register. And you know why?”

“I'm in Utah.”

“Utah.” There was an infinite sadness in the way he pronounced it, as if Utah were a prison or a leper colony.

“That's what I wanted to tell you, I'm sorry, but Dana, I mean, Milos--”

“No, do not bring my cousin's name into this.”

“We have to go to New York, because this thief--”

“Thiff, thiff, always this “thiff”--give it up why don't you? Already, enough.”

“He's got “me” now--somehow he managed to get hold of my identity, taking out credit cards in my name and I don't know what else, and if anybody comes there looking for me, creditors or collection agencies or whatever, I want you to know it's not my fault. I'm not guilty. Don't blame me.”

“Blame? Who is blaming? I want to tell you something, that there is a woman, very young woman, sitting in your workstation right now, a quick worker, bedder, I think, than you--if you are even here, is what I mean.” Bridger tried to cut in, but Radko had raised his voice now, hooking the words on the caps of his teeth and spitting them into the receiver. “But you are not here, are you?”

“I understand. I know where you're coming from. I just want to say that this is all way beyond my control, and, well, I guess when I get back I'll give you a call. Just in case--”

“In case what?”

“You need me. Again.”

“When “do” you come back?”

The voice on the radio flared and died. Dana hadn't moved, even to blink her eyes, everything stationary except the shapes of the distant cars and trucks ever so gradually enlarging on the far side of the divider. “I don't know. As soon as I can.”

“You don't know?” Radko paused for effect. “Then I don't know too,” he said, and cut the connection.

That was Utah. Then there was Wyoming, and after Wyoming, Nebraska and Iowa and the worn green underbelly of Illinois and on and on, the road a whip and the car clinging to it like a drop of sweat or blood or both. They alternated behind the wheel, one of them unconscious in back as the other fought the tedium, and he tried to take most of the burden on himself because it was especially hard on her with conversation a virtual impossibility and no radio to distract or absorb or infuriate her. She wasn't a bad driver--the deaf, as she'd pointed out to him a hundred times, were more visually alert and spatially oriented than the hearing, hence better drivers, hands down--but he couldn't help worrying she'd drift into a trance and do something regrettable, if not fatal. Exhaustion crept up on him, though. And the heat. It seemed as if they were following a heat wave all across the fat wide hips of the country, hardly a cloud in the sky and not a drop of rain.

They stopped one night at a motel in a college town in western Pennsylvania, both of them so keen to escape the torture chamber of the car they no longer cared whether Frank Calabrese got to New York ahead of them or if he'd defrauded another half-dozen people in the interval or set himself up as President and CFO of Halter/Martin Investments. For his part, Bridger was ready to let it go, give it up, repair the damage and move on, but Dana was intractable. “You're like Captain Ahab,” he said, clumsily finger-spelling it for her as they stood in line at a Subway crammed with students slouching under the weight of their backpacks.

“I am not”, she signed.

“You have to know when to cut your losses”--he tried to make a joke of it--“otherwise you wind up with a peg leg, or worse: you go down with the whale. You don't want to go down with the whale, do you?”

She didn't laugh. Didn't even crack a smile. For a moment he wondered if she'd understood him, and he was about to repeat himself, though nothing falls flatter than a joke reiterated, when her eyes went hard. Her shoulders were cocked toward him, her hair fanned out as if a sudden breeze had caught it, and when she spoke her words were stamped with the impress of her teeth: “It's not funny. You're not funny.”

They'd come to the glassed-in counter now, Dana next in line, and the shrunken harried-looking woman in plastic cap and gloves, whose job it was to layer meat, cheese and vegetable matter on the customer's roll of choice, was saying “Next” in vain. “You're not funny.” Jesus, did she have to be so negative all the time? Couldn't she lighten up? Even for five minutes?

Of course, he wasn't in the sunniest of moods himself (they were both wiped, both in need of food, a shower, a couple hours comatose on a king-size bed in front of a pulsating TV screen) and something in him, the first flicker of a cruel impulse he never knew he possessed, made him wait till the woman had raised her voice--“Next!” she cried in exasperation, “Next!”--and finally reached across the counter to poke Dana with her plastic-clad index finger. No one likes to be ignored, that was what he was thinking--that was what he was communicating here, a little lesson, tit for tat--even as Dana gave him a savage look, then turned to the woman and ordered, pointing out the items she wanted because pointing was the norm in this establishment, the whole process of shuffling down the line and creating the sandwich a cooperative pantomime between customer and worker punctuated by the odd verbal cue: “Six-inch or twelve? Balsamic-cheddar whole-grain or regular Italian? To drink?”

He waited till they were back in the motel, shoes off, sunk into the bed under the tutelary eye of the TV and working on the sandwiches, before bringing up the subject again. “I don't know,” he said, looking her in the face. “I just wonder what the plan is, that's all.”

She was at a disadvantage, because it took both hands to compress a twelve-inch submarine sandwich and keep it from disintegrating into its constituent parts, but she was game. She paused to swallow, then leaned over to take a sip of the extra-large diet soft drink clenched between her legs. He saw that her face was relaxed now, the tension and fatigue beginning to loosen their grip. She came up smiling. “The plan,” she said carefully, “is to stay at my mother's and let her spoil us for a few days.” She opened wide, took a foursquare bite of the sandwich, chewed, swallowed, both hands engaged. “Then,” she said, gazing from him to the TV screen and back, “we get in the car, go up the FDR Drive to the Deegan Expressway to I-87 to the Sprain Brook and take that to the Taconic. If memory serves, it's 9A after that and then Route 9 right on into Peterskill.” She bent forward for another bite, a baffle of bread, Swiss cheese and smoked turkey blunting her diction. “It's a scenic route,” she said, chewing, “beautiful trees, dogwood, wildflowers. You're really going to love it.”

It was past noon when they woke, the room frigid and dark, as remote from the world as a space capsule silently drifting across the universe, and they might have slept even later if Bridger hadn't become aware of a muted sound, a rhythmic thumping insinuating itself in the space between the low groan and high wheeze of the air conditioner. At first, he didn't know where he was, everything dim and robbed of color, a sensation of wheels sustaining him, of motion, but then he was fully awake and the noise--someone was knocking at the door, that was it--rousing him to action. He slipped into the pair of shorts he'd flung on the carpet the night before, the feel of them cold against his skin--cold, and faintly damp with yesterday's sweat. The knocking seemed to intensify. He glanced at Dana. Her face was wrapped in sweet oblivion--nothing could wake her, and the thought made him feel tender and protective. What would have happened if he wasn't there? The place could have been on fire and she'd never know. He fumbled his way to the door and pulled it open.

A woman was poised there before him, her fist arrested in the act of knocking--a woman with indignant eyes and her black hair pulled back in a knot, and why did she look so familiar? For a moment, he was mystified, but then he took in her sandals and the tangerine-colored sari, and began to understand. “What?” he said, squinting against the assault of sunlight. “What is it?”

“Checkout time is eleven a. m.,” the woman said.

“Oh, yeah,” he muttered, “yeah, sorry.” The heat, gathered up off the pavement and filtered through every creek, pond and mosquito-infested puddle in the neighborhood, rose up to stab at him till he winced: “humidity.” He'd never really known what it meant except in the abstract. He was sweating already.

“For your information, it is now twelve twenty-five in the afternoon.” Sorry.

The look she gave him was drained of sympathy. “Don't make me charge you an extra day, do you understand what I'm saying?” Her eyes flicked to the bed and the bundled form of Dana, then flew at his face. “Don't make me do that.”

Then they were in the car again, back on I-80, back in Purgatory, back on the road that never ends, and it wasn't until they hit a truck stop outside Bloomsburg that they had a chance to comb their hair, brush their teeth, put something in their stomachs. It was a joyless meal, a mechanical refueling of the body little different from filling up the gas tank. He drove the final leg, trying to extract some entertainment value from the radio, one alternative channel after the other fading out till he gave up and tuned in the ubiquitous oldies. The sun was right there with them all the way, relentless, pounding down on the roof of the car through the long afternoon, the cranked-up DJs in their air-conditioned studios making jokes about the heat--“Triple digit!” one guy kept shouting between songs--and they must have heard “Summer in the City” three or four times rolling through New Jersey. Or he must have heard it.

Dana didn't seem to mind the heat--or the silence either. She sat beside him, enfolded in her own world, tapping away at her laptop--this was her chance to work on her book, she told him, didn't he see that? “Enforced solitude. Or not solitude,” she'd added with an apologetic smile, “that's not what I mean.” He knew what she meant--and he wasn't offended. Not particularly. She was trying to make the best of things, as if anything good could come of all this. He wished her well. Hoped she finished her book, sold it to the biggest publisher in New York and made a million dollars, if that would make her happy. Because there was no doubt that Frank Calabrese and the whole insane enterprise of running him down wasn't making anybody happy, not her, not him, not Radko. Or the thief either.

The thief. He'd almost forgotten about him, almost forgotten what they were doing here and why. The trees were dense along the road, traffic building, his eyes enforcing the distance between cars, and all he could think about was the power this single individual had over them, how he was the one who'd put them here, in this car, in the glare of New Jersey on a hot July afternoon. He saw him then, saw the guy's face superimposed over the shifting reflection of the windshield, saw the way he walked, rolling his hips and shoulders like some pimp in a movie, like Harvey Keitel in “Taxi Driver,” and felt something clench inside him, a hard irreducible bolus of hatred that made him reverse himself all over again. He'd been tired the night before, that was all. Tired of the road, tired of the hassle, tired of Radko--tired even of Dana and the way she shut him out. But yes, they were going to find this guy. And yes, they were going to see him put behind bars. And no, it didn't have all that much to do with Dana, not anymore.

The sun was behind them when they rolled across the George Washington Bridge and into Manhattan, a place he'd seen only in movies, and here it was, the whole city bristling like a medieval fortress with a thousand battlements, each of them saturated with the pink ooze of the declining day. Dana directed him through the narrow canyons cluttered with nosing cabs and double-parked trucks, the evening lifted up and sustained on a tidal wave of cooking, a million fans blowing mu shu and tandoori and kielbasa and double cheeseburger and John Dory and polpettone up off the stove and out into the street. There was a smell of dogshit underneath it, of vomit, rotting garbage, flowers in bloom, diesel. He cranked down the window to absorb it. “Turn here,” Dana said, using her hands for emphasis. “At the next light, turn left.” The parking garage (they were somewhere on the Upper East Side, and he knew that because she told him) cost as much overnight as an entire month's parking had cost him in college, but Dana was paying and it didn't seem to faze her all that much, and then it was twilight and the lights of the city came to life as if in welcome.