T. Boyle - Talk Talk

“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.