Talk Talk (27 page)
“All right,” Natalia was saying, and there she was, her shoulders squared and breasts outthrust, looking commanding and beautiful and throwing back her head so that her hair rose up in a fan of light and settled in perfect array on the perfect white skin of her bare shoulders. And the bones there. The exquisite bones. The scapulae, the muscles, the ligaments that flashed and moved under her skin. He had a moment of revelation that took him out of himself and he saw her as a sculptor might, some genius of line and form with a block of marble and a hammer ready to hand. “Well?” She was giving him a crucial look, a look that asked, “Am I beautiful? Am I ready? Do you want me?”
“Yeah,” he said, “yeah, yeah, you look great,” and she held out her arm for him and they turned to glide up the walk, the most natural thing in the world, everything in its place, and then he saw the arc described by the screen door as his mother leaned into it--his mother, with the nose he looked at in the mirror every morning and her hair gone silver and cut in a liquid fall at her jawbone so she looked like some stranger out of a silent movie--and the other figure there at her side, so small and delicate, with the unappeasable eyes and the blanched unforgiving face of the hanging judge.
TO EXPECT TRUTH, justice, the closure official victims were forever demanding on the little screen as the captioning played out dispassionately beneath their grim tight faces, to expect anything other than chaos and frustration, was delusory and she was foremost among the deluded. Life frustrates. Eternally frustrates. How could it be any different? That was what Dana was thinking as she stood in the rain on a stranger's lawn and watched Bridger poised at the top of the front steps, knocking at yet another door. When Frank Calabrese's fist had come down on the bartop with the pure uncontainable force of vengeance in all its shining potentiality, she was sure they'd come to the final turning at the final corner. He knew the thief. He named the thief. He knew where he lived. And ten minutes later they were at Peck Wilson's house--the house he'd grown up in, where his mother lived still--and she and Bridger had got out of the car in the rain, every individual blade of grass standing up stark and violently green, the twigs of the trees curled into claws and her heart about to explode, and then the knock at the door and the sky darkening and darkening till it was like night in the afternoon... and now, after all that? Nothing. Nobody home. No silent footsteps, no noiseless drop of the latch or presumptive squeal of the hinges, no face appearing behind the dark screen that was like the scrim of a confessional or the veil of maya. None of that. Nobody home.
She watched Bridger shift his weight from foot to foot. His face was drained of color, his upper lip and the flesh at the base of his nostrils drawn tight. He knocked again, waited, his head cocked and eyes lowered as if to concentrate his hearing. They exchanged looks, another moment elapsed, and then he signed, “I'm going to go around back,” and she felt strange all of a sudden, vulnerable, felt like a criminal herself, and darted a quick glance up and down the street. In the rain, and with nothing moving anywhere except the water in the gutters, she almost missed the figure on the porch next door. A faint rhythmic movement caught her eye and she looked up to see a woman there, a big-armed old woman in wire-frame glasses, tilting back and forth in a cane rocker and staring right at her. For an instant she was frozen--to shout out would be too obvious--and then, urgently, she was clapping her hands together to warn him. He swung round, his face blank. “There's somebody watching,” she signed.
Bridger looked in the wrong direction. He'd come down the steps now and was arrested there in the rain, his hair limp, the shirt she'd given him for his birthday--the retro look, broad vertical bands of gray and black with an outsized collar--hanging off him like a shower curtain. “Where?”
Her face was wet, water dripping from her nose. She felt ridiculous. The rain intensified, sweeping down the street in successive waves. “Over there,” on the porch, she signed, and then retreated for the car.
The interior of the car smelled as if it had been dredged up out of the ocean. There was mud on her shoes--a pair of Mary Janes in teal blue she'd picked up on sale two days ago--and her clothes clung wet to her skin. She felt a chill go through her and she slid into the driver's side and started the car to run the heater as Bridger, reduced by the rain and the layer of condensation frosting the windows, waved cheerily to the old woman and cut straight across the lawn, stepped over the line of low shrubs that divided the properties and stood just under the projecting roof of the porch to snap his jaws and wave his hands while the old woman snapped her jaws in return.
It took forever. Bridger was out there chattering away as if the skies were clear to the roof of the troposphere and the sun beaming down in all its glory, and the old lady, rocking in the shadow of her porch, chattered back. And what could they possibly find to talk about, the hearing? All this chattering. Peck Wilson: was he there or not? That was all that needed to be conveyed. She was frustrated, angry, shivering in her wet clothes as the heater, out of use since January, added its own furtive metallic reek to the mix. For a long while she stared out the window, first at Bridger, then at the house--an old place, two stories, with a mismatched addition and a stepped roof--where the man who'd invaded her life had played and worked and grown into the fullness of his thieving manhood.
She began chanting to herself, a little Poe, which always seemed to calm her--“And neither the angels in Heaven above, / Nor the demons down under the sea, / Can ever dissever my soul from the soul / Of the beautiful Annabel Lee”--and then she felt the car rock and Bridger was sliding into the seat beside her. “Well?” she said.
“Her name's”--he finger-spelled it--“Alice.”
She was confused. “Whose? The old lady's?”
He swept both palms up over his face and into his hairline, then threw his head back and shook out the water like a diver emerging from a pool. “No,” he said, turning to face her. “Wilson's mother. Peck Wilson's mother. Her name's Alice.”
“Yes, but where is she?”
“The old lady--she was really nice, by the way--said she was away for the weekend, up at Saratoga or something. At the racetrack with her friend--not her son, her friend.”
“You didn't--”
“No,” he said. “I didn't tell her anything. I just wondered aloud, as a friendly neighbor, if she could tell me where Mrs. Wilson was because she was a friend of my mother's and my mother told me to look her up if I ever got to New York.” He shrugged, toweling his hair with a sweatshirt he snatched out of the tumble of dirty clothes on the backseat. “The usual bullshit. She was old, that's all.”
“And she believed you?”
Another shrug. “Does it really matter at this point?”
She gave him a long look, then dropped her eyes to put the car in gear. She was angry, frustrated, the whole thing boiling up in her--yes, it mattered, of course it mattered--and she accelerated too quickly, the back end shearing away from her on the slick roadway, everything out of kilter suddenly, and though she did manage to avoid the two parked cars on her right, the truck, the bright orange and white moving-truck with the U-Haul logo plastered along its gleaming steel midsection, was another story altogether.
Afterward, her most vivid recollection of the accident wasn't the way her car looked with its trunk radically compressed and jammed up under the belly of the truck as if some negligent giant had been at play with it, but standing there in the rain half a block from Peck Wilson's house--from the thief's house--while a joyless policewoman from the City of Peterskill Police Department tried to put her through the drunk test and Bridger waved his hands and flailed his lips at the bare-chested bodybuilder in shorts and flip-flops who'd rented the truck and left its front end projecting halfway across the street. “I'm not drunk,” she kept saying, “I'm deaf. Deaf. Don't you understand?” And the policewoman kept saying, “Spread your legs, hold out your arms, close your eyes, touch your nose.”
People had emerged from their houses up and down the block and gathered under umbrellas to savor the spectacle, barefooted little girls in shorts and summer dresses knotted behind the neck, their bulging mothers and smirking brothers, an old man in a straw hat. Dana wasn't hurt, nor was Bridger. Thankfully. But she'd been driving and she was the focus of attention, all those shallow shifting eyes judging her, the drunk--or no, worse than a drunk, a freak, a babbler, someone to instinctively shy away from. She knew what they were thinking, knew what they'd say over their hot dogs and coleslaw at dinner that night, a passing reference, the recollection of a little anomaly in an otherwise uniform day: “But she looked just like anybody else, pretty even--until she opened her mouth.”
The policewoman--she was of mid-height, Dana's age, with a rangy, asymmetric build, thick glasses in severe frames, eyes that could have been pretty with a little makeup--finally seemed to come round. Bridger had shifted his attention away from the man with the U-Haul and had stepped in to enlarge her understanding of what Dana was trying to communicate, while her partner, an older guy with fading eyes and hair the color of a lab rat's, hunched over his pad and began writing up the accident report. Dana watched them go back and forth, Bridger nearly as expressive as one of the deaf himself. “The truck isn't where it's supposed to be,” Bridger was saying. “They should never have parked it there in the first place.” The policewoman--Dana saw now that she had a nametag clipped above her breast pocket: “P. Runyon”--didn't seem particularly interested. To her it must have seemed an open-and-shut case, so routine it would have been a snooze but for the spice of the California plates and Dana herself--slick roads, excessive speed, the truck parked and locked and on the other side of the road nonetheless.
She turned abruptly to Dana and said something. What was it? Insurance? Yes, she had insurance--she fumbled through the glove box, her hands trembling, and finally produced the papers--and no, she didn't need to go to the hospital, she was perfectly all right, thank you. P. Runyon didn't seem satisfied. She stalked around in the rain, the water beading on the polished uppers of her standard-issue shoes, alternately glaring at Dana and turning her back on her to sweep the onlookers as if to assure them that things were in hand here, despite appearances, and that they'd all better look out and take a step back or they'd wind up with their cars stuffed under a truck too.
Then it was the tow truck, the crowd dissipating and the patrol car slithering off down the street, a spate of small talk in the solid high cab of the truck and finally the garage with its ancient chemical smells and the once-white shepherd-mix curled up on the floor. The repair estimate? No way to tell yet, but it looked as if the rear axle stub was broken--“Do you see that,” the service manager asked, pointing to where her car crouched against a low wall covered with ivy, “the way the wheels are canted like that?”--and of course there was going to be some fairly extensive body work, both back fenders, trunk, bumper, replace the rear window. By the time it was over, by the time they took a cab to the train station and caught the next southbound train and she was pressed safely up against the window and looking out on the pocked gray hide of the river, it felt as if a week had passed in the course of a single day--and it would be a whole lot longer than that, two and a half weeks, to be exact, before she would get her car back. “And that's night and day,” the service manager told Bridger over the phone at her mother's while Bridger cupped the receiver and translated, “night and day. A real rush job. Because I know how anxious the little lady must be to get back to California.”
In the interval, she tried to relax. Here was an opportunity to spend some time with her mother, work on her book, think things out--and if she was going to teach again she'd better clean up her CV and start making some inquiries, too late at this juncture for a hearing position, and certainly not at the college level, but there were deaf schools in Riverside and Berkeley she might try. If she did want to stay on the coast. She wasn't so sure anymore, wasn't sure about anything. Two months ago she was in love, blissfully involved in her research and her book, secure in her job at the San Roque School and beginning to feel the pull of the environment--mojitos on an outdoor patio in January, a bugless summer, the incalculable gift of the vernal light as it glanced off the stucco walls and red tile roofs of the buildings on campus and rode out to sharpen over the waves. Now she didn't know. Now she was living with her mother, without a car or a job. It scared her how quickly everything had turned against her.
She was being paid through the end of the summer and she'd been issued new credit cards, so she was all right there, at least for a while. Her credit was still a mess, though--she couldn't begin to imagine the depth and breadth of the heap of threatening letters and demand-payment notices piling up in one of those heavy plastic mail carriers in the back room of the San Roque post office, each one of which would have to be addressed at some point. The onus was on her, whether that was her signature on the credit card slip or not--and what did they care? They wanted their money. Period. The victims' assistance woman had gone into dark mode when she talked about the greed of the banks and credit card companies--“Easy Credit, Instant Credit, No Refusamos Crédito”--and how pretty soon everybody would have to have some sort of implant, like the ones they inserted up under the napes of cats and dogs, to prove their identity. Bridger had said, “Just like “1984,”” and the woman gave them a blank look.
But the mail. The mail was a problem. They'd left San Roque in such a hurry she hadn't really planned beyond the moment and so she'd put a four-week vacation hold on her mail delivery. She supposed she should have it forwarded, but that would be a kind of defeat, a giving-in to her mother and the easy way out--and she really didn't want to deal with the mess of her finances. The mail was nothing but bad news, and right now--on a muggy Tuesday afternoon a week after the accident, as she sat at the desk in the spare room of her mother's overstuffed claustrophobe's nightmare of an apartment and fiddled with the knobs on the air conditioner, hoping for just a degree or two of refrigeration--she wanted to focus on other things. Like her book. The laptop was propped open before her, giving back the words she'd dredged up out of herself, the imposture they represented, the incremental silent means of recasting her own uncertain self in Victor's image, in Itard's, but they were old words that slipped and elided and clashed like mortal enemies till she couldn't look at them. ““Wild Child,”” she said aloud, just to feel the buzz of the words on her lips. ““Wild Child,” by Dana Halter,” she said, as if it were an incantation. She repeated herself over and over again, but it was no use. Because in her mind, a husky deep contrarian voice kept saying, “Peck Wilson, Peck Wilson, Peck Wilson.”
She felt the door open behind her, her old trick, and turned to see her mother and Bridger standing there in the doorway, looking apologetic. “Can we come in?” her mother signed clumsily.
“Yeah, sure,” she said, grandly waving them in. She felt a quick sharp stab of embarrassment. Had they stood there listening? Had they knocked? Had they heard her rehearsing the name of her book? And her own name? Had she said “Peck Wilson” aloud?