Talk Talk (9 page)

“Fuck it,” he was thinking, “let Natalia deal with it,” and he swung abruptly to his left, nearly colliding with a fish-faced woman in pearls and a black cocktail dress and half a mile of exposed bosom who was making her way back from the ladies'. “Oh,” she gasped as if he'd run her down on a football field and slammed the wind out of her, “oh, beg pardon,” and that was all it took--the movement, the distraction--because he heard Madison cry out behind him and then he turned and she was running to him, already sobbing.

The whole place stopped dead, every head raised to see what the commotion was, even the waiters looking over their shoulders as they levitated their trays and paused in mid-step. One of the lawyers might have said something: there was a laugh, a group laugh, at the bar behind him, but he blocked it out, Madison coming straight for him, her sobs brutal and explosive, the bare dirty feet slapping through a minefield of boots and loafers and heels till she was there clinging to his leg like a--what were those fish that fasten on to the sharks? “Dr. Halter, is everything all right?” one of the bartenders said, but he ignored him. And he must have lifted her too forcefully because she exploded all over again and he just tucked her, kicking, under one arm and brought her to Natalia like something he'd caught and trussed up in the jungle and they were laughing at him, he could feel it, everybody in the place, just laughing.

There was one white-haired old shit in the men's, meticulously drying his fat red hands as if he was afraid his skin was going to come off, and Peck gave him a look of such pure hate and burgeoning uncontainable violence that he backed out the door like a crab. The door eased shut on marble, fresh-cut flowers, a smell of new-minted money chopped up and vaporized. And what was that?--opera--playing through the speakers. For a long moment he just stared at himself in the mirror, his eyes vacant, and nothing registered, as if he didn't recognize himself or the place either. Then he realized the phone was still in his hand, Natalia's phone, the one that was stuck to the side of her head sixteen hours a day when she was running up the bill talking to her sister in Russia and her brother in Toronto and her best friend Kaylee whose kid was at the same pre-school as Madison. The phone. He studied it there in the palm of his hand as if he'd never seen it before, as if he hadn't signed on for a thousand free minutes and used it as an extension of himself whenever he had to check up on the ballgame or place a bet or score a little something to make the afternoons go easier with nothing to do but sit in the sun on the back deck and stare at Natalia's sweet brown midriff and tapering legs because how much sex can you have before you go blind and deaf and your tool falls off?

He heard somebody at the door--another white-hair--and he said, “Give me a minute here, will you? Is that too much to ask--a fucking minute's privacy?” And then he opened his hand and began to slam the cell against the marble tile of the wall in front of him, and he slammed it till there wasn't much left to hold, and after that he dropped it to the marble floor and worked it with his heel.

Later, after they'd got home and Natalia put Madison to bed and settled down in front of the tube (“Everything satisfactory? You want that doggie-bagged, Dr. Halter?”

“Nah, no point in it--give it to the homeless, will you?”), he took a bottle of beer into the spare bedroom he used as an office and booted up the computer. He went to the T-M site, typed in his password and brought up his account--OVERDUE AND PAYABLE/SERVICE INTERRUPTION WARNING--to see what he could find there. He'd gotten lazy or incautious or whatever you wanted to call it and now he'd put everything at risk and that was just stupid, stupid, stupid. For a year and more he'd been careful to pay up all his Dana Halter accounts just so something like this wouldn't happen, but he'd had a little cash-flow problem--the condo, the new car, Natalia on the phone and at the mall and the salon and Jack's and Emilio's and all the rest--and things had slipped. Now they were onto him. “Jesus,” the thought of it made him so furious, so rubbed raw and plain pissed off it was all he could do to stop himself from jerking the monitor off the desk and flinging it through the fucking window because the thing wasn't giving him what he wanted. He stared at the screen, at his account, calls out and calls in--incoming, incoming--but nothing more recent than the close of the last billing period. He wanted that number. The number of that fuckhead Dana Halter--or the cop or detective or whoever he was, “Rick Fucking James”--and he wasn't going to wait for the bill and he wasn't going down to the T-M office to pay off the account either. No, he was going to get a new phone in some other creep's name and no one would be the wiser except maybe Natalia (“Will you not give me back my cell, Dana?” she'd said the minute they got in the car; “No,” he said, “I need it because I'm expecting a call, okay? Can you just back off? Can you?”).

Before he did that, though, he had a little task to perform, the smallest pain in the ass maybe, but not risky, not at all. What he had to do, first thing in the morning, even before he opened a new account and got his five hundred free minutes and no-charge weekends, was go down to Smart-Mart and amble into the menswear department. He'd been hasty, impulsive. He hadn't been thinking. But he could picture it already, some career drudge stocking shelves or pushing a broom and “Hey, bro, can you help me out here--I had my cell balanced right here on top of this display because my arms were loaded down with all this high-quality Hanes underwear and I think it went down there, yeah, there, behind the partition. Hey, thanks, man, thanks beaucoup.” Yeah, and then he'd toss it away again, but not before he hit “Calls Received” and got that clown's number. Because who was to blame here, who was the wise guy, who was fucking with whom?

“WHAT DID HE SOUND LIKE?”

Bridger shrugged. She watched his lips. “I don't know--like anybody else, I guess.”

It was early evening, she was feeling frayed and beaten and so exhausted her internal meter was barely registering, but her papers were finished and back in the hands of her students and her grades were in. They were at a restaurant, Bridger's treat, the silent careening of the waitresses and the tidal heave of people swelling and receding at the bar a kind of visual massage for her, and as she poured out her second glass of beer she felt herself coming back to life. She'd always liked this place--it featured old sofas and low tables, loud rock music (very loud: she could feel the vibrations in the beer bottle, in the cushions, the table, almost picture the air fracturing around her) and a mostly young clientele from the local college. It was dark, there were dashed-off-looking abstracts on the walls, and it was cheap and good. She'd ordered risotto, about the only thing she could get down without chewing; Bridger was having pizza, the all-sustaining nutriment and foundation of his diet.

“You're hearing,” she said, leaning into the table, “and you can't do better than that? What was his voice like?”

He leaned in too, but he wore an odd expression--he hadn't heard her. Because of the music. “What?” he said, predictably.

She gave him a smile. “Just like the night we met.”

“What?”

So she signed it for him and he signed back: “What do you mean?”

“You're deaf too.”

He had an outsized head, castellated with the turrets and battlements of his gelled hair, and sometimes, when she saw him in a certain light, his features seemed compacted in contrast, like a child's. That was how it was now. He had the look of a child, puzzled, unaware, but slowly allowing her gesture to make the words in his mind and bring the meaning back through the circuitry to his eyes. “Oh, yeah,” he said aloud. “Yeah.”

“But what did he sound like?”

A shrug. “Cool”.

“Cool? The jerk who stole my identity is cool?”

Another shrug. He lifted his beer to his lips to give him time with the response, then he set it down carefully and said something she didn't catch.

“What?”

His clumsy Sign, loose and sloppy, but endearing because it was his: “Suspicious.”

“He sounded suspicious? Cool and suspicious?”

People were watching them--the girl at the next table over, trying not to stare but nudging the boy with her, college students both, with tiny matching Mickey Mouse tattoos on the underside of their left wrists. People always stared at her, overtly or furtively, when she talked in Sign, and when she was younger-especially in the crucible of adolescence--it used to affect her. Or no: it mortified her. She was different, and she didn't want to be. Not then. Not when the slightest variation in dress or hairstyle reverberated through the whole classroom. Now it was nothing to her. She was deaf and they weren't. They would never know what that meant.

Bridger gave one last shrug, more elaborate this time: “Yes.”

She finger-spelled his name and it was both an intimate and formal gesture, intimate because it was personal, because it named him instead of pointing the right hand and index finger at him to say “you” and formal because it had the effect of a parent or teacher announcing displeasure by reverting to the full and proper name. Charles instead of Charlie. William instead of Billy. “Bridger,” she signed, “you're not communicating.”

She watched his mouth open in a laugh, enjoyed the glint of the crepuscular bar lights off the gold in his molars.

“And if you're not communicating, how are we ever going to track down the had guy?”

They both laughed, and her laugh might have been wild and out of control--most deaf people's laughs were described as bizarre, whinnying, crazed--but she had no way of knowing, and she couldn't have cared less. The place was warm. The place was loud. A guy at the bar turned round to stare at her. “But seriously,” she said aloud. “The area code was 415?”

“What?”

“Four-one-five?”

He nodded. The music might have been supersonic, the plates rattling on the shelves, people running for cover and whole mountains tumbling into the sea, but a nod always did the trick.

“Bay Area,” she said.

“That's right,” he said, and he leaned in so close she could feel his breath on her lips, “and it's a 235 prefix.”

Another number. She took it from him and repeated it: “Two-three-five?”

“Same as Andy's, my friend Andy? From college?”

“Marin?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Marin.”

On Friday morning she met with her last class of the semester and felt nothing but relief. They were juniors, so there was none of the tug she'd felt with the seniors on Thursday, the ones who were going out into the world to make a life without her--these kids she'd see next year, and they'd be taller, stronger, wiser, and she'd give them words, words on the page and in the mind and in the residual silent beat of the iamb that was as natural as breathing, “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why I have forgotten.” As she packed up her things, sorting through books, papers, videotapes, she couldn't suppress a sudden rush of elation, the kind a runner must feel at the tape, her first year behind her, the long break ahead and the sting of what had happened over the past weekend gradually beginning to fade.

The other teachers were going out to lunch at a place down by the ocean to celebrate the end of the term with steamer clams, fish and chips and a judicious and strictly medicinal intake of alcohol, but she was going to the dentist. Or rather the endodontist. “Root canal.” Simple dactyl. There wasn't much metaphoric mystery there: the root of the tooth branched down into her jaw like the root of a tree, where the living nerve relayed pain to the thalamus; the canal was to be excavated through the tender offices of Dr. Stroud's instruments, and though she'd be spared the noise that so intimidated the hearing, the stink of incineration would ride up her nostrils all the same even as the bony structure of her cranium vibrated with the seismic grinding of the drill. And the pain--there was no aural component for that. She would feel it as much as anyone, maybe more. She could see it like an aura, taste it. Pain. Of course, Bridger had a different take on it altogether--and he could afford to, since he wasn't the one undergoing the ordeal. The night before, just to reassure her, he'd told her that the last time he'd been to the dentist he'd named names and given up all his secrets in the first three minutes and still the fiend kept drilling. She'd signed back to him, right hand open, palm in, fingers pointing up, then the fingertips to the mouth and the hand moving out and down, ending with the palm up: “Thank you.” And then aloud: “For sharing that.”

She'd avoided Koch since their confrontation on Tuesday, but as she was hurrying down the hall, running late, two cardboard boxes of books and papers clutched to her chest, her briefcase slapping at her right thigh and skewing awkwardly away from her, he emerged from the main office. They made eye contact--he saw her; she saw him; there was no avoiding it--and his mouth began to move. The only thing was, she didn't know whether he was chewing gum or delivering a soliloquy out of “Richard III,” whether he was offering up the apology he owed her or even a threat or insult, because she dropped her eyes and went right on by him as if he were a figure out of a dream.

Because she was late, Dr. Stroud dispensed with the usual ten minutes of banter, gossip and news of the world, and settled her into the chair as expeditiously as possible. Still, he was running at the mouth all the while, filling her in on his wife's fender bender (Dana loved the term, loved the rhyme and the function and the way it snapped on the lips to reveal the grimace of the teeth) at the farmers' market the previous week--she was there for the cut flowers, she was mad for cut flowers, and for beets and broccolini and did he ever tell her about the time she ran out of gas in the middle of the Fourth of July parade?, and some overanxious boutique baby-vegetable purveyor backed into her in his seven-thousand-pound Suburban. Or at least that was the drift of it, broccolini a bit problematic, and that put her back a phrase or two. Before he inserted the rubber dam and the crank device that jammed her jaws open, she was able to respond by averring that broccolini was her single favorite vegetable, sautéed in olive oil with chopped garlic, shallots and a splash of Dijon mustard, and that she hoped the damage to the car wasn't too severe, but by that time he was already onto some other subject, something dental--or endodontal--she gathered, something serious in any case, because his eyebrows suddenly collided and his pupils narrowed. A moment later he and the nurse both snapped on their surgical masks and she felt the sting of the needle as it slid into her gums and after that all communication ceased.

Two hours in the chair. The drilling, the gouging, the fitting of the post and the grinding down of the temporary cap: two hours anyone else would have written off. But not Dana. She was, as Bridger was quick to point out--pejoratively--an A-type personality, as if that were something to be ashamed of, as if civilization hadn't been built on the backs of the A-types, as if armies hadn't been led by them, advances made in the laboratory, in the concert hall, the universities and hospitals and everywhere else. Slow down, people told her--“Bridger” told her--relax and live in the moment, but they were B-types, they were slackers. Like Bridger. And were there only two types then? No, she thought, there must be a third type, type C, for Criminal. That man in the photo staring out at her from the fax in the police station, that was what he was: no need to make and build or lie back and smell the roses when you could just simply steal it all.

So she was an A-type. And she had two hours. She understood that it would be somewhat difficult to focus under the circumstances, what with the dentist's fingers in her mouth and the nurse's face hovering in her field of vision like the moon to his sun--no hearing person could have done it--but she was good at shutting out the world, a champion, in fact, and she'd brought the thin sheaf of “Wild Child” along with her. It had been over a week since she'd had a chance even to think about it in any fruitful way, and that nagged at her. She couldn't hope to write under the circumstances--there was no realistic way and she had no expectations--but what Bridger didn't understand was how vital it was to review and revise, to re-enter that world she'd created and find her way to a destination she couldn't even guess at.

The drill bit, the dam held. Dr. Stroud probed. The nurse loomed. And Dana lifted the manuscript in one hand and banished them both, drifting, drifting now into another place altogether, a place where she wasn't Dana Halter of the San Roque School for the Deaf, but a child of eleven, a boy child, nameless, naked, dwelling in his senses. There was a scar at his throat, a raised ragged island of flesh he fingered because it was there, a scar that preceded all the others and took him back to the moment when he found himself waking for the first time to the swaying of the trees and the rhythmic clangor of the birds and insects, attuned to the fierceness of the wind in the branches and the pitch of every note the branches sang. He lived in France, in the untamed forest of La Bassine, but he didn't know it. Lived eighteen hundred years after the death of Christ, but he didn't know that either. All he knew was to dig in the earth for grubs and tubers, to gorge on berries, grasshoppers, frogs and snails, to crouch over his haunches in a nest of leaves and listen to that symphony of the air and the melody the brooks played and the insects of the day and the insects of the night, the earth spinning for him alone and no human voice, no words, to intrude on it...

But Dr. Stroud was there, leaning away from her now, the surgical mask removed, and he was smiling at her--preening himself on a job well done. The nurse was smiling too. “That wasn't so bad, was it?” he said, careful with his lips and teeth and tongue so that she could understand.

“No,” she said, her own lips cumbersome and without sensation, “not bad at all.”

“Good,” he said, “good. Well, you're a model patient, let me tell you.” His eyebrows tented. Both his hands were clenched above his shoulders and rocking back and forth in celebration of their mutual triumph. “If you have any pain, Advil should do it. And nothing too strenuous”--yes, that was it: strenuous--“for the rest of the day. Take some time off. Put your feet up. Relax.”

She nodded, her mouth frozen in a Xylocaine-induced grimace. And then he went on to tell her an elaborate story about one of his other patients, whom he wouldn't name out of professional discretion, but she was something of a hypochondriac--his mouth gaped over the word--and that was the last thing she caught because he forgot himself and began talking so fast even a hearing person would have had trouble understanding him. A term came to her--“motormouth”--and she had to smile, whether he misinterpreted it or not. She was on her feet now, at the door, and he was still talking away, but for all she got of it he might as well have been chewing gum.