T. Boyle - Talk Talk

Peck handed her a Sea Breeze, even as he gave the husband's right hand a squeeze and fitted the cold glass into the socket of his left. “Hey,” he said, and the husband-stubble-headed, goateed, going to fat around the ring in his earlobe-returned the greeting.

“Wasn't that an egret, Jonas?” Kaylee was saying.

“It is a white bird,” Natalia said, bending to levitate her hand two feet from the tiles as her breasts, on display, shifted in the bikini top, “about this high off the ground, yes? We are seeing them all the time,” she avowed, straightening up. “With the binoculars. Common, yes. Very common here.”

“Really?” Kaylee lifted her eyebrows, raised the cocktail to her lips. “It's like really beautiful, though,” she murmured over the rim of the glass. “Like magical, you know?”

The husband wasn't having it. He just held on to his grin and said, “Maybe we ought to get one and stuff it for the Corte Madera place.”

“Oh, Jonas,” the wife said, making a face. She looked to Peck for approval. They both did, the whole party arrested in the entryway, gulping vodka and making small talk about birds.

“Sure,” he said, “why not? And we can stuff the tourists while we're at it too.”

The conversation at dinner ran to a whole host of mainly numb-brained subjects, from Nautilus machines to stair-steppers, the stock market, the Giants, A's, farm-raised salmon and the new Kade movie to the “like super-expensive” European vacation Jonas was treating his wife to, a whole month and the kid at Grandma's, week in Paris, week in Venice, then the rest of the time on some jerkoff's sixty-thousand-foot-long boat off the Islas Baleares. They'd actually said that, actually given him the Spanish with the rolling r and the whole deal, as if they were a tag team of waiters in a Mexican restaurant, first him-“Islas Baleares”-and then her, like an echo. They'd praised the meal-and the wine, and they'd brought two bottles of Talley Chardonnay that wasn't half bad-but as the sun went to bed and the stereo got louder and they began to put a real appreciable dent in the bottle of Armagnac that had cost him sixty bucks at the discount place, Peck began to realize he could live without these people. He really could. Kaylee he'd approved of because she kept Natalia occupied and off his back, but the husband was full of shit to his ears-they both were-and he felt himself getting restless, getting edgy, and that wasn't good because it destroyed the mood of the day and made him think of other things, things that had a negative energy, things that brought him down. Like Dana Halter. Like “Bridger,” that asshole.

He'd called the number that morning and got a message-“Hello, you've reached Bridger's cell; leave a number”-and he felt as if he'd pulled the handle on a dollar machine and got two cherries instead of three. Bridger. What kind of name was that? And why was he playing the game instead of Dr. Dana Halter? If he was some kind of cop he wouldn't have been stupid enough to display his number… which meant he wasn't a cop. But then who was he?

“So, Dana,” the husband was saying, fat-faced, red-faced, leaning into the coffee table as if it were the municipal pool and he was about to plunge in, “anything new with you?”

He felt the smallest burr of irritation. He gave the guy a look to warn him off but he was too dense to catch it.

“I mean, with your practice-that office space in Larkspur? How'd that ever work out?”

It wasn't just a burr-it was a thorn, a spike. Who “was” this clown? And what had he told him? Shit, he couldn't even remember himself. He reached for the snifter and took a moment to study the way the brandy swirled and caught at the glass-it was the color of diet cola when the ice melts down in it, and how had he never noticed that before? — and then he realized that nobody was talking. The husband was staring at him, waiting in his gerbil-faced way for a response, wondering vaguely if he was being dissed, and if he was, what to do about it-and both girls had stopped jabbering away about so-and-so's boob job and were watching him too. “I don't know,” he said finally, trying to control the bubble that was swelling inside him like one of the bubbles that punch through the sauce after you fold the cream in, “with all the malpractice insurance, I don't know how anybody could say it's worth it. Really. Sometimes I think I'd be better off just staying out of it-”

Kaylee's mouth flapped open as if it were spring-operated: “But you're so young-”

The husband: “And your training. What about your training?”

They'd moved into the main room from the dining table-“No, no, don't bother,” Natalia had said when Kaylee tried to help her clear up, “leave it for the maid”-and he'd taken a certain satisfaction in going round the room and flicking on the lamps to create a feeling of intimacy and warmth, as if lamps were hearths and the twenty-five-watt bulbs miniature fires blazing against the night and the fog creeping in across the hills behind them. He studied the husband just the briefest fraction of a second-was the fat fuck mocking him? Was that it? But no: he could detect nothing but a kind of stubborn booze-inflected obtuseness in the man's dwindling stupid little eyes. He didn't answer.

“But all that work, medical school and all,” Kaylee said. She arched her back and did something meant to be furtive that tautened the thin black straps of her bra. “It seems such a shame.”

“Oh, no,” Natalia cut in, making a moue over the “o” sound and holding it a beat too long. “Dana's job is for looking after me and Madison,” and she reached out to caress his biceps. “Is that not so, baby?” She smiled her biggest smile. “A full-time job, no?”

The husband's snifter was empty and he was reaching out his claws to refill it. “Where did you say you went to medical school? Hopkins, wasn't it?”

“Yeah,” Peck said. “But I was thinking it might be cool, really cool, to do something with Doctors Without Borders. You know, go to Sudan or someplace. Help people. Refugees and that sort of thing. Cholera. Plague.”

“Médecins sans Frontières,” the husband said, as if he were licking fudge from between his teeth.

From the back room came the sound of the kids' video, some Disney thing with the seahorses and talking starfish and all the rest, music swelling, the sound of artificial waves. He was agitated, and he didn't know why. The day had been perfect, the sort of day he could have lived through forever, the day-the days-he'd promised himself when he was inside, when everything was gray and the sun never seemed to shine and there was always some self-important officious asshole there to make you toe the line, lights out, everybody up, and the bonehead cons with their pathetic attempts to join the human race, “427, factory, I swear; Nobody changes this channel, motherfucker;” and “How would you like your Jell-O cooked, sir?” But no, he did know why. Everything he had was balanced on the head of a pin, like the collapsible two-story brick house with the three-car garage and the bird in the cage and the yapping dog all folded up in a carpet in one of Madison's videos, swept away in a windstorm that raked the lot where it had stood just a heartbeat before. It was people like this, like “Jonas,” like “Kaylee,” that were the problem. What was he thinking? That he could just waltz in and set himself up and think these people were his friends or something? No. That wasn't the way it was. That wasn't the way it would ever be.

So what did he do? He pushed himself back from the coffee table and raised one foot in his shining new ultra-cool Vans with the checkerboard pattern and set it down right beside Jonas' drink. “Yeah,” he said, leaning back into the cushions and giving both arms a good sinew-cracking stretch, “that's right. That's who I'm talking about.”