T. Boyle - Talk Talk

“But you can't afford it. Because you don't have a job. Right?”

She dropped her eyes. Used her hands: “Right”.

Both of them looked up then and studied the façade of Mail Boxes Etc. They might have been architectural students-and she should have thought of that, should have brought two sketch pads and an assortment of pencils, charcoal, gum erasers, the ones that smelled like tutti-frutti. Or maybe they were building inspectors. Or town planners. She wouldn't have put that ugly cookie-cutter thing there if she was on the board, no way in the world. In fact, she'd tear it down in a heartbeat and let the oaks creep back in, put in a fountain, a couple of benches. The frame collapsed and her eyes went to the movement inside, the vague bobbing of shapes screened by the reflection of the sun off the windows, people at work, packages being weighed, mail sent out and received, copies run, an amorphous huddle around the cash register. Her stomach sank. And then she felt his touch: two fingers at her chin, gently shifting her gaze back to him. “Have you thought about what you're going to do?”

“No, not with this hanging over me,” she said, gesturing toward the store. “I mean, I get paid through the end of August, but obviously I've got to start sending my resume out.” She watched his face change-he didn't want her to see what he was feeling, but he was a lousy actor. “I don't want to leave, if that's what you mean.”

“That's what I mean,” he said.

She leaned in to kiss him, the familiar taste and scent of him, lips that spoke in a different way altogether, and then drew back again. “I'd love to go to Aveyron, to Lacaune and Saint-Sernin-are you kidding me? — but the airfare's out of my range, I'm afraid, and with the dollar weak… Plus, they'd probably arrest me the minute they ran my passport through the computer.” She put on a face. “Dana Halter, batterer and assaulter-it even rhymes.”

“But how can you write about a place you've never seen?”

This was easy. She pointed a finger to her head. “I see it here. And I've been there, to the south of France, anyway-to Toulouse, which isn't that far from Aveyron. Didn't I ever tell you that?” She'd been there as a girl, a few years after she became deaf. She must have been ten, eleven-the age of the wild child. Her parents were vacationing in Europe that year and they brought the whole family along-her and her two brothers-for the educational opportunity. Her parents were practical in that way. Her mother especially. And especially with her, full immersion in both Sign and speech right from the beginning-what the people who make their living off the deaf call “total communication”-because there was no way her daughter was going to be a cripple or even the tiniest bit dependent on anybody or anything. Her mother was pretty then, her hair trailing down her back beneath the brim of the suede cowgirl's hat she'd bought on a trip to Mexico, her legs long and naked in a yellow sundress and two boy babies and a little deaf girl compressed in her arms-Dana didn't know whether her memories of that time came from the photographs in the family album or what she'd seen and smelled and felt. When she closed her eyes she could see the fingers of palms etched against pale stucco, a river like an avenue of light, the new bridge (a regional joke: Napoleon had built it) humped over the water as if it were trying to swim.

“You know,” she said, trying to hold on to the moment because in the next moment she was going to have to go into that store, “it's easier to learn foreign Sign than a spoken language. Much easier. I picked up FSL right away because my mother thought I should meet deaf French kids.”

“Iconicity,” Bridger said, surprising her. “Like when you sign 'cup.'” He demonstrated, his left palm the saucer, his right cupped over it. “We learned it in the class I took. German, French, Chinese, whatever-a cup is a cup, right? What about Marcel Marceau-I bet he would have been good at it. Did he know Sign, you think?”

Just then a movement on the far side of the street caught her eye, and she started. A man in a flowered shirt, baseball cap and wraparound sunglasses scrambled up to the door as if he were in a hurry-as if someone were chasing him, as if he were a fugitive-pulled back the door and disappeared inside. “Bridger!” she shouted (or might have shouted; she couldn't tell, but it felt like a shout). “Bridger, it's him!”

She was out of the car before he was, a deaf woman in the middle of the street, cars coming both ways and she staring down a UPS man in a boxy brown UPS truck that was right there in front of her though she couldn't hear his horn or the metallic keening of his brakes, and even as Bridger caught up to her and grabbed her arm she was telling herself to slow down, stay calm, focus. Then they were on the far side of the street, up on the sidewalk, and Bridger might have been saying something, but she wasn't paying attention-her eyes were fixed on the door ahead of them. She saw her own reflection there, a shifting of shapes, the gleaming metal handle of the door, and she took a deep breath and stepped inside, Bridger right behind her.

There were eight people in the place and she tried to take them all in simultaneously, including the heavyset woman behind the desk who looked up and gave her an expectant smile and the old man fumbling for change at one of the copy machines. Her heart slammed at her ribs. The overhead lights seemed to recede, painting a thin pale strip of illumination across the heads and shoulders of the eight figures in their various poses, bending, gesticulating, lips flapping on air-and where was he? Her eyes jumped from one to the other, and then suddenly there he was. There, at the back of the store, where the bank of mailboxes ran in a neat continuous file from waist- to shoulder-level: she saw the bright flash of the shirt first, then his profile under the bill of the cap as he stood over the wastebasket, discarding junk mail. Oblivious. Completely oblivious. As if he were the most innocent soul in the world. The son of a bitch. She couldn't believe it.

She felt Bridger wrap an arm round her waist, an admonitory tightness straining the ligaments of his wrist and fingers. “Calm,” he was telling her, “stay calm.” It took a moment-she was just staring, all the rage and disbelief she'd felt over the way she'd been violated rising in her till she was strung tight with it, ready for anything, the accusation, the physical assault, the spewing up of the deaf woman's shriek that was so caustic and inhuman it could set off all the alarms up and down the block-and then Bridger disengaged his arm and she felt his fingers on her chin, urgently tugging her face around. “That's not him,” he signed.

She looked harder. Small Sign, very quiet: “No, it is. It is.”

Bridger shook his head emphatically and her eyes went from him to the man in the cap and back again. “Not even close,” he said.

By this point the man had finished with his mail and abruptly pivoted on the ball of one foot to hurry up the aisle toward them, a sheaf of what looked to be bills and a manila envelope clutched to his chest, and she saw how wrong she'd been-even with the sunglasses and the bill of the cap pulled down low, this man was nothing like the one in the photograph. He was older, hair graying at the fringes of the cap, his nose splayed across his face as if it had been molded of clay, lips bunched round a look of eternal harassment. He wasn't the thief. He wasn't Frank Calabrese or whatever his name was. He was nobody. She watched him plunge impatiently through the door and scurry off down the street and still the blood pounded in her veins.

“All right,” Bridger said, swinging her round to face him, “we're going up to the counter now and you're going to be Dana Halter. Okay? You cool with that? Because I tell you, there's no other way.”