T. Boyle - Talk Talk

“What's wrong?” Bridger asked, his mouth crammed with beans and rice. “Not hungry?”

Very slowly, with the tip of one reluctant finger, she pushed the plate away, and it wasn't worth the explanation. She let her hands talk for her: “No,” she signed, “not anymore.”

“You want to drive?” he asked her. They were standing in the street outside the restaurant, the car glazed with the sun. It was hotter than she'd expected, hotter inland than she was used to on the coast. The heat drugged her and she didn't see the woman watching her from behind the window of the “taqueria” or the pair of lizards chasing one after the other through the dust or the drift of yellowed claw-like oak leaves at her feet. She didn't want to drive. She wanted to stare into the screen and shut out all the rest and she let her hands tell him so. A moment later, the town was behind them and only the vibration of the steel-belted radials, riding on air, told her they were moving.

There were two bona fide bedrooms in the condo, one for Madison and one for Natalia and him, as well as an extra half-bedroom, what the real estate lady wanted to call a sewing room. Or a nursery. “Or”-with a look to him, coy and calculating-“a home office, an office away from the office. For when you get tired of all those patients.” It wasn't much, not a whole lot bigger than the cell he'd shared with Sandman at Greenhaven Prison, but it had a view of the bay and the big stippled pyramid of Mount Tam, and Natalia had found him an oak desk, a pair of matching file cabinets and a Tiffany desk lamp on one of her far-flung antiquing forays. So it was an office. He hooked up his computer and his printer and did business here, reserving the computers at the public library for highly sensitive transactions, the things he didn't want to risk having traced. Madison wasn't allowed in this room, for obvious reasons, and he frowned on Natalia coming in to appropriate a pen or a pair of scissors, though once, when he'd forgotten to lock the door, she'd slipped in naked and put her hands over his eyes. She didn't have to whisper, “Guess who?”

He was in the office now, at his computer, Natalia treating herself to a morning at the spa and Madison off at day camp, and he was doing a little research. It was the kind of thing he was good at, better than good-he'd made a nice quiet living at it for the past three years now, and if there was the occasional glitch, like that time in Stateline when he'd been up all night at the blackjack tables and he was wired and burned-out and maybe a little drunker than he thought, he had it covered. Post bail and walk and let them come after somebody else, Dana Halter or Frank Calabrese or whoever. It was nothing to him, not anymore, and if he hadn't fallen for Natalia he could have lived in Marin for the duration, a doctor in a tailored suit and the calfskin duster he'd picked up last winter, “money for nothing and the chicks for free,” wasn't that how it went?

The first time, though, when he was Peck Wilson and in love with his four-year-old daughter-Sukie, Silky Sukie, he used to call her-the law was a clamp, a harness, a choke hold that cut off all the air to his lungs and the blood to his heart. Gina moved out on him and took his daughter with her, right back to the big Bullhead's house, and why? Because he was a son of a bitch, a rat, a scumbag, because he was cheating on her and no fit father and she never wanted to see him again, never. And if he ever dared to lay a hand on her again, if he ever even thought about it- What she didn't mention, what the lawyer didn't mention, was the way she'd come to treat him, as if he'd been hired for stud purposes only, to broaden the gene pool so the Marchetti dynasty could wind up with a granddaughter and heiress prettier than a queen and smarter by half than anything they could ever have hoped to produce. That, and to go on fattening the bank account by pushing himself day and night till his brain began to bleed out his ears. Without her, and with the unflagging bullheaded enmity of her father, Lugano went down the tubes within six months-the state came and closed the place up for non-payment of sales tax, which he had to hold out just to cover the suppliers-and the pizza place was reeling. But the divorce order, which he hadn't agreed with but was too tired to fight, specified the amount he had to pay for alimony and child support and laid out the hours-minutes, seconds-he could spend with his daughter. Okay, fine. He moved to a smaller apartment, ran the wheels off the car. There was Caroline, there was Melanie, and what was her name, that girl from the bookstore in the mall? On Sundays, he took Sukie to feed the ducks at Depew Park or to the zoo at Bear Mountain or they hopped the train into the city to catch the opening of the newest kids' flick or to see the Christmas display at FAO Schwarz.

Even now, sitting at his desk, watching the information come to him like a gift from the gods, he could remember the way it felt when he found out Gina was seeing somebody. He'd let himself slip-if he was working out more than every second or third day, that was a lot-and he was drinking too much, spending more than he wanted to on women who did nothing for him, letting work eat him up. He was at a club one night after locking up, a local place that featured a live band on weekends, standing at the bar waiting for Caroline to come back from the ladies', thinking nothing, when somebody threw an arm round his shoulder-Dudley, one of the busboys from Lugano, the one who was always in the cooler, smoking out. “Hey,” Peck said.

“Hey. 'Sup?”

Dudley must have been around nineteen, twenty, hair corded in blond dreads, pincer eyes, big stoned grin, tattoos to the waist, which was as far down as he'd ever been exposed on the premises of the restaurant, but Peck could speculate about the rest. This was the kind of guy-“dude”-who probably had the head of a dragon staring out of his crotch.

In answer, Peck told him “Not much,” and then went on to regale him with a laundry list of woes, not the least of which was his bitch of a wife, and then Caroline came back and they all three had a shot of Jäger and the band pounded away at a Nirvana tune and they just listened, nodding their heads to the beat. When the band took a break, Caroline went outside to have a smoke and Dudley leaned in, his elbows tented on the bar, and opined, “It sucks about the restaurant.”

It did. Peck agreed. There was movement at the door, ingress and egress; somebody stuck some money in the jukebox and the noise came roaring back.

“Yeah,” Dudley said, raising his voice to be heard above it, “and it sucks about Gina too.”

A little fist began to beat inside Peck's right temple. “What do you mean?”

Dudley's face receded, flying away down the length of the bar like a toy balloon with human features painted on it, and then it floated back again. “You mean you don't know?”

The next day, he didn't go in to work. He felt the faintest sting of conscience-they'd be shorthanded, short on produce too, and the dishwasher would just sit around and listen to right-wing talk on the radio and Skip would be so drunk he'd burn the crust off the pies and squeeze the calzone till it looked like road kill on a plate-but the tatters of his work ethic were nothing in the face of the rage he felt. What was he working for, anyway? “Who” was he working for? At first he refused to believe what Dudley was telling him. That she was seeing anybody was enough to light all his fuses, but that she was going out with-sleeping with, “fucking”-Stuart Yan was beyond comprehension. That he was Asian, or half-Asian, had nothing to do with it, nothing at all (and yet he couldn't help wondering just exactly how the Bullhead must have felt about that). The problem, the immediate problem that settled inside him with the weight of a stone, was how he was going to face people, anybody-Dudley, his friends, former customers, people at the bar-when his wife was fucking some slope and he was paying for it, paying for her to just lie around like a slut and get laid all day.