Talk Talk (8 page)

“Okay, okay.” He was watching Dana, her brow furrowed in concentration, the red pencil dancing--she was oblivious to the whole thing. On the screen, the monster was back, the camera gave a sudden jerk, and there was blood everywhere. “Listen, this is probably a mistake--she's just been the victim of identity theft--and if you would just send the bill so we can iron things out--”

“Who am I talking to?”

“This is her boyfriend.”

“Boyfriend? You're telling me you're not Dana Halter? Then why in Christ's name did you say you were?”

“But I didn't--”

“You put her on right this minute, you hear me? I mean “now!” You think this is some kind of joke here? You think I'm a clown? Put her on or I'll have your ass too--for, for--“obstruction!””

“I can't.”

“What do you mean 'you can't'?”

“She's deaf.”

There was a pause. Then the voice came back, harsher, louder, a theatrical bray of outrage and puffed-up sanctimony. “I thought I'd heard it all, but you got balls, you really do. What do you think, I'm stupid here? We're talking fraud, felonies, we are going to take legal action--”

“Wait, wait, wait”--an inchoate idea had begun to form in Bridger's head--“can you just tell me what the number is, the number on the account? I mean, the number of the phone itself?”

The voice was exhausted, exasperated, drenched with contempt. “You don't know your own phone number?”

“Just give it to me.”

Heavy irony, the world-weary sigh of disgust: “Four-one-five...”

As soon as he had the number, the instant the man on the other end of the line gave up the last digit, Bridger shouted “Check's in the mail!” and pulled the phone cable out of the wall. Then, his heart pounding with the audacity--the balls, yes--of what he was about to do, he glanced over his shoulder to make sure Dana was still at her desk, still bent over the papers with a red pencil and a wondering frown, before he pulled his cell from his pocket and dialed the number. There was the distant faintly echoing hum of the connection being made, of the satellite revolving in the sunstruck void, and then the click of the talk button and a man's voice saying, “Hello?”

“YEAH, HI. Is this Dana?”

They were announcing a special over the loudspeakers--“Attention, Smart-Mart shoppers, we're having a blue-light special in the housewares department, our superdeluxe model three-speed blender for only thirty-nine ninety-five while supplies last”--and the clamor distracted him. Plus, Madison was hanging on his left arm like a side of beef, totally sugared-out, her hair in her face, a smudge of chocolate on her chin, chanting “I want, I want, I want,” and where was Natalia? “Hold on,” he said into the phone, “I can't hear you.”

He gave the place a quick scan, the phone in one hand, Madison occupying the other, the usual chaos prevailing--kids running wild, fat people shoving carts piled high with crap up and down the aisles as if it were some sort of competition or exercise regimen, heads, backs, shoulders, bellies, buttocks, a stink of artificial butter flavoring and hot dogs grilled to jerky--and then he found a small oasis of calm in the lee of the menswear department and put the phone to his ear again. “Yeah? Hello?”

“Dana?”

“Yeah. Who's this?”

There was the briefest tic of hesitation, and then the voice on the other end of the line began to flow like verbal diarrhea: “It's Rick, I just wanted to hook up on that thing we were talking about the other day--”

He didn't recognize the voice. He didn't know any Rick. Madison pinched her tone to a sugar-fed falsetto: “I want Henrietta Horsie. Please. Please, Dana, please?”

“Rick who?”

“James, Rick James. You know, from the bar the other night? The one on, what was the name of that street?”

That was when everything went still, the loudspeakers muted, Madison moving her mouth and nothing coming out, the bare-legged kids charging silently up and down the aisles and even the babies with their purple-rage faces stalled right there in mid-shriek. He felt sick. Felt as if someone had taken a shank and opened him up. And he was trembling, actually trembling, when he clicked the off button and slid the phone down inside the Hanes display case.

His first thought was to find Natalia and get her out of there, to get in the car and make scarce, but he fought it down. It was nothing--or no, it was something, definitely something, something bad--but there was no need to panic. So they had the phone number--that was inevitable. He'd get another phone, no big deal, but then what if they could somehow trace it or get to the house? But no, he told himself, that was crazy. He was safe. He was fine. Everything was fine.

Madison, five years old tomorrow and with the shrunken hungry bewitching face of an elf out of some fairy tale, let go of his hand suddenly and allowed herself to come down hard on the hard shining floor. He looked down at her in that moment as if he'd never seen her before, her eyes contracting with calculated hurt or sullenness, ready for bed--past ready for bed--and then he jerked his head up and scanned the place for Natalia.

William Wilson was thirty-four years old, a pizza genius and a clothes horse, and to his own mind at least, a ladies' man, though his last lady--the lady before Natalia--had given him a daughter of his own whom he loved till it hurt and then turned into a queen bitch and landed him in jail. He'd always hated the name his mother had imposed on him--William Jr. after his father, who was his own kind of trouble--and when he was in elementary school he felt a little grand about it and insisted that everybody call him William and not Bill or Billy, and then in junior high he saw how uncool that was and got a warm-up jacket with Will stitched across the breast in white piping, but that didn't seem to make it either. Will, William, Bill, Billy: it was all so ordinary, so pedestrian--or plebeian, one of his favorite words from history class, because if anybody was the opposite of plebeian, it was him, and Christ, how many William Wilsons were there in a country the size of the U. S.? Not to mention England. There must have been thousands of them there too. Hundreds of thousands. And what of all the Guillaumes and Wilhelms and Guillermos scattered round the world? By high school he'd adopted his mother's maiden name--Peck--and nobody dared call him anything else, because he was quick with his tongue and his hands and feet too, black belt at sixteen, and there was only one kid at school who even thought about fucking with him and that kid, Hanvy Richards, wound up with the bridge of his nose broken in three places. Peck Wilson, that was who he was, and he went to the community college and got his associate's degree and rose up the ladder from delivery boy to counterman to manager at Fiorentino's in his hometown of Peterskill, in northern Westchester, and he traveled too, to Maui and Stowe and Miami. He tried out women the way he tried out drinks and recipes, always eager, always exploring. By the time he was twenty-five he was flush.

Sure, then he met Gina, and it was all shit after that. Or no: to give her credit, because she had an awesome body and a pierced tongue that tasted of the clove cigarettes she smoked and could make him stand up straight just thinking about it, she took him on more of a shit-slide, a whole roller-coastering hold-your-breath-and-look-out plunge into a vast vat of shit and on shit-greased wheels too. But he didn't want to think about that now. He wanted to think about Natalia, the girl from Jaroslavl who never got enough of anything--the shopper extraordinaire, restaurant killer and bedroom champion--with the breathy bitten-off Russian accent that made him itch and itch again and her little daughter by the guy who brought her over and got her her papers, an older guy she never even liked let alone loved.

They were in the car now, the Z4 he'd bought her (black, convertible, with the 3.0-liter engine and six-speed manual transmission), and the trunk was full of Smart-Mart loot and Madison was squirming in her lap. “Why is it we must go so soon?” she said, giving him a look over her daughter's head. When he didn't answer right away because he was fumbling with the packaging of one of the CDs he'd picked up while she was shopping (the new Hives, a greatest hits compilation of Rage Against the Machine, a couple of reggae discs he'd been looking for), she lifted her voice out of the darkness and said, “Dana? Are you listening to me?”

He loved the way she said his name, or the name she knew him by, anyway--down on the first syllable, hang on to the “n” and then rise and hit the “ah” like a bell ringing--and he dropped the plastic CD case into his lap and reached for her hand. “I don't know, baby,” he said, “I just thought you might want to go someplace nice, like that seafood place maybe, you know? Aren't you getting hungry?”

Her voice floated back to him, coy, pleased with itself: “Maggio's? On Tiburon?”

“Yeah,” he said, and he had to release her hand to shift down. “I mean, if you're still up for it.” He gave her a glance. “And Madison. She could sleep in the car--I mean, she's really knocked out.”

She was silent a moment. The engine sang its sweet song as he accelerated into the turn. “I don't know,” she said, “too much tourists, no? Already, already the tourists! What about--?” And she named the priciest place in Sausalito.

“I hate that place. Phonier than shit. All the waiters have a stick up their ass.” He was remembering the last time, the look on the face of the little fag with the bleached hair when he mispronounced the name of the wine--it was a Meursault and he'd had it before, plenty of times, but he wasn't French, that was all.

“I like it.”

“Not me. I swear I'll never go there again. I say Maggio's. I'm driving, right?”

The car thrummed beneath him, everything--every bolt and buckle and whatever else they had under the hood--in perfect alignment. This was the real thing, German engineering, and it made him feel unbeatable. He fumbled a moment with one of the reggae CDs--an old Burning Spear his cellmate used to play all the time--and then passed it to her. “How about a hand here, huh?” he said, and Natalia's sweet smoky arrhythmic voice floated out again--“Sure,” she said, “sure, no problem, honey, and Maggio's is fine, really”--and the lights flashed in the windows and the fog came up off the bay and Madison, her hair shining in the draw of the approaching headlights, found her niche in her mother's arms. And there it was: the first light insuck of a child's snore, replete.

He was abstracted all through dinner, but Natalia hardly noticed. She was chattering away about some new appliance she needed for the house--a new microwave oven, that was it, because the old one, the one that came with the place, was outdated and it took her nearly five minutes to boil water for a cup of tea and she just didn't trust the Smart-Mart line since they were a such a “cheapie” place, didn't he think?--and he let her go on, her shopper's rhapsody a kind of music to him. If she was happy buying things, then he was happy paying for them. It was a feeling he liked, providing for her-especially in contrast to Marshall, the dud she'd been with before him and who wasn't the father of Madison and was so stingy and petty she couldn't even begin to talk about it, but of course she always did. She'd been out to the car twice to check up on the kid and sneak a smoke and she managed to tuck herself back into her seat just as the entrees arrived. He didn't say anything, just watched her as she unfolded the white linen napkin with a fillip of her wrist, her shoulders bare, eyes darting round the room--in her element, absolutely in her element. The steam rose from their plates. The waiter materialized over her shoulder--“Grated parmesan? Ground black pepper?”--and faded away. She spread the napkin across her lap, took a sip of wine. “You are the quiet one tonight, Da-na, yes?” she said, giving him a sidelong look as if better to examine him from the angle. “Something is wrong? You usually like this place, is it not so?”

He did like the place. It wasn't in the league of the Sausalito restaurant maybe, but the menu was pretty eclectic and they knew him here--everybody knew him--and if there was a line of tourists or whoever, they always seated him the minute he walked in the door. Which was the way it should be. His money was good, he tipped large, he always dressed in a nice Armani jacket when he came in for dinner and his girlfriend was a knockout--they should have paid “him” just to sit at the bar. He was having the seared ahi, to his mind the best thing on the menu, and it came teepeed atop a swirl of garlic mashed potatoes and translucent onion rings with a garnish of grilled baby vegetables; she was having the seafood medley. The ahi looked good, top-flight, but he didn't pick up his fork. Instead he reached for the wine, their second bottle, a Piesporter he'd always wanted to try, and it was good, light and crisp on the palate, very cold and faintly sweet the way a Riesling should be. “Yeah,” he said, “the place is great.”

She was neatly slicing a medallion of lobster in two. Her earrings caught the light as she bent her head forward, and he saw her framed there as if on the screen in a movie theater, the selective eye of the camera enriching the scene till the grain of the wood paneling shone behind her and the crystal glittered and her eye lifted to meet his. He'd bought them for her, the earrings, fourteen-karat white gold chandeliers with a constellation of diamonds, to make things up with her after their first fight--she wore them to bed that night and she didn't wear anything else. “You look not so great--like a man who is, I don't know, not so great right now. Are you not hungry? You are feeling discomfited?”

He had to smile. Inside he was still seething at that fuckhead on the other end of the phone--Rick James, yeah, sure, the superfreak himself--but he had to hand it to her: she could make him smile anytime. “Discomfited.” Where in Christ's name had she come up with that one? “It's nothing, baby,” he murmured, reaching across the table for her hand, a hand almost as big as his own, the long predatory fingers, the pampered nails in two shades of lacquer, as if a cobalt moon were setting over a maraschino planet in ten fleeting phases. She took his hand in a fierce clasp and brought his knuckles to her lips.

“There,” she said, everything about her sparkling, the earrings, the sheer fabric of her dress, her eyes, her lips, “you see? I make it better.”

But it wasn't better. He felt sulky, sullen, felt like lashing out at somebody. He freed his hand, picked up his fork and scattered the seared slabs of pink flesh round the plate. “You got your phone?” he said suddenly.

She was sipping wine, the pedestal of the glass hovering like a hummingbird over the bud of her mouth. She liked wine. Liked it even more than he did. She liked vodka too. “Why? Did you lose yours?”

He shook his head, held out his hand. “I left it on the dresser.”

“But no--you have it when we are at The Bridge, for cocktails. Before the Smart-Mart. Remember? You are calling for canceling Madison's piano lesson--remember?”

“Maybe I left it in the car.”

A theatrical sigh, the bemused frown giving way to a lingering look of chastisement, of maternal tsk-tsking--yes, and wasn't it motherhood that ruined them all, that elevated them to the status of the all-knowing and all-powerful, and reduced everybody else, even grandfathers, dictators and mercenary killers, to the level of feckless children? Even as she dug into her purse for the cell a quick flare of anger burst in his brain, streamers everywhere. Did he snatch it from her? Maybe. Maybe he did. “I've got to make a call,” he said, barely able to suppress the rage in his voice. “Be right back.”

He was on his way to the men's, shouldering his way past a group of lawyer types at the bar--thirty to sixty, pinned-back ears, faces that glowed like jack-o'-lanterns with their own self-importance, Glenfiddich in their tumblers and bitches on their arms, Berkeley bitches, Stanford bitches, maybe even Vassar bitches--when he shot a glance to the doorway and saw the cutout figure of a little girl with a tragic face poised right there on the carpet in the shadow of the hostess' stand. Madison was barefoot, her sundress askew, Henrietta Horsie dangling by the rope of its tail from the clench of one tiny fist. There was the smell of the sea knifing in through the open door, a smell of cold storage and rot, and it reminded him of where he was, of what it cost to live where you could get that smell anytime you wanted it, day and night. She was crying. Or no, whining. He could hear the faint singsong whimper, and it was like some stringed instrument--cello, violin--playing the same dismal figure over and over. Two couples suddenly entered the picture, looming up behind her looking puzzled and annoyed, as if they'd just stepped in something, and the hostess--Carmela, eighteen years old and as tall and lean and honey-breasted as a fashion model's little sister--was bent at the waist, clearly disconcerted but trying her best to coo something reassuring.