T. Boyle - Talk Talk

“So jazz-you dig jazz at all?” Jonas was saying, and Peck had been away for a moment there, and at first, for the smallest sliver of a second, couldn't quite place him. “The new Diana Krall-did you know she married Elvis Costello? — it's pretty awesome.” The man was fumbling in his jacket, the big hand moving like an animal caught in a bag, and then he flashed the CD and handed it across the table. “You might want to put this on. It's pretty awesome. Believe me.”

Somehow, Peck's mood had soured. The pans were dirty, the meal stewing down in their guts, the Armagnac evaporated-was the guy using a straw, or what? Plus there was this asshole Bridger, threatening everything, and the first chink in the wall: the credit card he'd laid out on the counter at the Wine Nook was invalid, or so the pencil-neck behind the counter informed him. Natalia-half-playful, half-serious-had accused him of brooding and he'd defended himself, lamely, as in “I'm not brooding-I'm just thinking, that's all.” Now he took the CD from Jonas in its compact plastic case and stared at it absently.

“I think you're going to like it,” Jonas said, leaning in over the table. He was drunk, sloppy, fat-faced. Peck suppressed an urge to punch him. “Isn't that right, honey?” Jonas said, turning to his wife.

“Oh, yeah,” Kaylee crooned, “yeah, I think you'll really like it.” She shrugged, a long shiver that ran up one side of her torso to her shoulders and back down again; she was drunk too, and why couldn't anybody sit down and eat a nice dinner without getting shit-faced? She gave him a wide wet-lipped smile. “Knowing you. Your soulful side, I mean-”

Natalia was nestled into the sofa like a cat, her legs drawn up, shoes off, the snifter cradled in the v of her crotch. She let her eyes rest on Jonas. “It is what, standards-is that how you say? Standards? Such a funny term.”

No one answered her. After a moment, the CD still balanced in his hand, Peck said that he'd once been to the Five Spot with a girl he was dating ten years ago or more and that the band that night-female vocalist, flute, piano, percussion, bass-was like somebody taking their clothes off in the dark because they're ashamed of the way they look, and then he laid the disc back down on the coffee table and rose to his feet. “Listen,” he said, “I just remembered something-if you'll all excuse me a minute. I've got to-got to go out. Just for a minute.”

Natalia said, “But, Da-na, it is near to one in the a. m. Where? Where do you go?”

She was laying into him in front of the guests and that rubbed him the wrong way. He wanted to say something hurtful and violent, but he held back. He was all bottled up. He was wrong, he knew it, and so he said something in melioration, something he shouldn't have said: “I need to make a phone call.”

And now a whole shitstorm of protest and sympathy rose up, Natalia complaining in a little voice that he'd smashed her cell phone and wondering why he couldn't use the landline and both Jonas and Kaylee whipping out their cells as if the cells were six-shooters and this was the OK Corral. What could he say? Nothing. He just waved them off and backed across the room as if he were afraid they'd chase him down, tug at his sleeves, force their phones into his hand, and he snapped a mental picture of their faces-drunken faces, puzzled faces, a little indignant even-as he slipped out the door.

Outside, the fog had grown thick, obscuring everything. It was cold suddenly, the damp reach of it getting down inside his shirt, and he wished he'd thought to bring a jacket, but no matter. He slid into Natalia's car-“Natalia's car:” the registration was in his name and he was the one making payments on it-turned over the engine and worked the button on the temperature gauge till it read 80 degrees. There weren't many pay phones around anymore-they were a vestige of a bygone era, Frank's era, Jocko's, his own dead father's, and they'd be gone entirely in a decade, he would have put money on it-but there were a couple in the lobby of the Holiday Inn, and that was where he headed.

He stopped at the bar for a cognac and five bucks' worth of change. He had no idea what it cost to call San Roque, and he probably shouldn't have been doing it, anyway-there were easier ways to get what he wanted-but he couldn't resist, not tonight, not the way he was feeling, so sour and disconnected and twisted up inside. The lobby was over-lit, blazing like some meeting hall, but it was deserted at this hour. He listened to the coins fall and the operator's voice and then the ringing on the other end of the line.

“Hello?”

“Bridger?”

“Yeah?”

“I just wanted to confirm that your listing in our guide is correct-can you give me a spelling on your complete name?”

“Listen, if you're selling something, I don't want it-this is my private cell and you better, please, just remove it from your records.”

“Oh, I'm not selling anything, not that you want, anyway.” He gave it a heartbeat, just to let everything settle. “It's me, Dana. You know, the Rick James fan.”

There was a silence, festering, the scab picked, the bandage torn from the wound. It made his heart swell to listen to it, to listen to the shithead dangle on the other end of the line, caught out at his own game. “Yeah, uh, hi.”

“Hi yourself, asshole. You think you can dick with me?”

“You're the asshole. You're the criminal. You think you can steal my girlfriend's identity and get away with it? Huh? We're going to track you down, brother, and that is a promise.”

“Girl”friend? The quickest calculation. So he was a she and the fish was on the line. Keep it going, he told himself, keep it going. “I guess we'll see about that, won't we.”

“So you got my cell, big deal. I know where you live. I know where you're calling from right now.”

“Really?”

“Really. You might be calling from anywhere in the 415, but you live in Marin, don't you?”

That froze him a minute-till he realized that was the old cell number, the dead cell number, and what did it matter? A whole lot of people lived in Marin County. Yeah. Sure. But how many Dana Halters? He saw Natalia's face then, her lips, the dark eternally disappointed pits of her eyes, heard her in his head questioning why, why, why do we have to move and what do you mean your name is not Dana? “What do you mean?”

The voice came back at him, a loser's voice, but hard now, hard with the righteous authority of the new kid called out on the playground: “Don't you?”

“Right,” he heard himself say, and he looked up to follow a woman in heels and a tight blue dress picking her slow careful way from the bar to the elevators, “and you live in San Roque.” And then, though he wanted to tear the thing out of the wall, all of it, the black box with the shiny silver panel, the wires and cords that pinned his voice to this place and this time, he very gently put the receiver back in its cradle and walked out the door and into the fog.

WORK HAD JUST BEGUN on the next project Radko had lined up-a time-travel thing in which a group of twenty-first-century scientists, including one ingenue with inflated breasts, a sexy gap between her front teeth and a coruscating pimple dead center in the middle of her nose that had to be painted out in every frame, discover a portal to Pompeii the day before Vesuvius erupts and have to go around frantically trying to communicate the imminence of the danger in a language no one understands-when Bridger felt someone hovering over his shoulder and looked up to see Radko himself standing there on the scuffed concrete with a pained expression. It was just past ten in the morning. Bridger had spent the night at Dana's and so he'd had a relatively nutritious breakfast (Cheerios with a spoonful of brewer's yeast and half a diced nectarine, plus toast and coffee) and he'd left her hunched over her computer, tapping away at the dimensions of the wild boy's fate. He was feeling relaxed and benevolent, the new project-which no doubt would become as dull and deadening and soul-destroying as the last-engaging him simply because it was new, the computer-generated temples and sunblasted domiciles of Pompeii in diametrical contrast to the burnt sienna gloom of Drex III. He'd been bent over Sibyl Nachmann's face, his mind on autopilot as he painstakingly removed the blemish, a procedure Deet-Deet had already christened a “zitectomy,” when he became aware of Radko.