T. Boyle - Talk Talk

She was wearing her martyred look, the look she'd put on two nights ago and hadn't taken off since, the savage dark strokes of her eyeliner crushing the life out of her eyes, her mouth set in a permanent pout, her nostrils flaring with self-pity. “No,” she said, “not you,” throwing it over her shoulder as she turned away from the door, padded across the room on bare feet and flung herself down on the couch that was strewn with the chaos of her packing. “Not you,” she repeated in a withering voice. “Da-na. They want Da-na.”

For two days and nights it had been going on like this, the aftermath of his confession a rain of ashes, the village gone and all the people in it, no-man's-land, and he'd had it. Enough. Enough already. Before he knew what he was doing he'd dropped the bags to the floor-and he didn't give a shit if the war wonton soup leaked into the Szechuan scallops and leached right on through to the carpet and if the carpet was ruined and the floorboards underneath and everything else all the way on down to the goddamn basement-and he was there and he had her by the arm, all the rage in him concentrated in the grip of the five fingers of his right hand. “Don't fuck with me,” he said, low and hard, tuning his voice to the register of violence the way he'd learned to do when he was inside, when people were holding their breath and listening and the whole place went suddenly quiet. “You just tell me, you understand? No more of this shit.”

She looked alarmed-scared-her eyes flaring up and then dwindling down to nothing, and that made him feel bad, but not enough to loosen his grip. He jerked her arm, shook her like one of the big fifty-pound sacks of flour stacked up on the shelves in the back room at Pizza Napoli. She didn't cry out. Didn't protest. She said, “A man and a woman. For you, they ask for you.”

Still he held her and he could feel the pressure beating at the sclera of his eyes as if it was too much to contain, as if it would all blow out of him like spew. “How old?” And when she tightened her mouth, a second's hesitation, he jerked at her arm again. “I said, how old?”

“You are leaving a mark.” Her voice was cold, distant, as if she were alluding to an arm that was attached to someone else in another apartment altogether. He became aware then of the constricted burst of cartoon voices emanating from Madison's room, a sudden crazed drawn-out cackle of a laugh, crepitating music. He let go. Natalia gave him a look of resentment, as if he were the one at fault. She wouldn't rub at her arm-she wouldn't give him the satisfaction. She was going to suffer. She was a martyr. “The man maybe twenty-five, I don't know,” she said finally. “The woman thirty. Tall, pretty. Blue jeans she was wearing and a tan jacket from bebe, one hundred and thirty-nine dollars on special sale. Okay?”

“They weren't selling anything? You're sure, right? They asked for me by name, not 'Mr. Halter' or 'the man of the house' or anything like that?”

In one swift sure movement she snaked away from him, sliding over the arm of the couch and spinning to her feet like an acrobat. Her eyes lashed at him. She clenched her fists at her sides. “What do you tell me-for months, what do you tell me? You want me to be Mrs. Halter. Mrs. Halter! And who am I to be now? Mrs. Nobody? Yes?”

He took a step toward her and she backed up against the double doors that gave onto the deck. “Shut it,” he said. “Just shut it. We leave in the morning, first thing. So get this shit”-and here he snatched an armful of clothes from the couch-“in your fucking suitcase and get your fucking suitcase in the fucking car, you hear me?”

“Oh, I hear you,” and she was rubbing her arm now, ““Mister” Martin. If that is even your name. Is that your name? Huh, “Bridger?” Is that your name?”

He had no time for this. “A man and a woman,” two nouns that beat in his head with the force of revelation. They knew what he looked like, knew where he lived. They could be out there now, watching him. He looked past her, through the windows and out beyond the deck where the colors were neutering down toward night and the water had blackened along the gray fading shore. Something released in him then-“he had no time”-just as Madison appeared in the doorway calling “Ma-ma” in a piteous attenuated voice and both of them turned to her. “It's all right,” he heard himself say. “I got the food. It's right here. Right here in the hallway.”

They were sitting at the kitchen table, an interval of peace, lingering, the candles lit, wine poured, the chopsticks at their lips, and Madison, revitalized, telling them the plot of a movie she'd seen about a dog and a cat on a cross-country trek, when the doorbell rang. If he'd allowed his internal motor to idle over dinner-and he didn't care how crazy things got, dinner was sacrosanct, because if you didn't sit down over dinner you weren't even civilized-now it revved suddenly, so suddenly he didn't even know how he'd got through the double doors and out onto the deck, ready to drop down a story into the flower bed below. “I'm not here,” he called to Natalia, slipping a leg over the rail, “you never even heard of me.” And he eased himself down till he was dangling by his arms, then dropped to the ground.

It took all of sixty seconds, legs and arms pumping, and he was around front, letting the fronds and tendrils of the vegetation conceal him. There were two figures on the doorstep-a man and a woman-and Natalia was just opening the door. The man-he was in his twenties, soft-looking, with spiked hair, a two-tone jacket and the oversized black jeans the street punks and club aficionados affected-was the one who spoke up, because the woman (and here it hit him: “Dana Halter,” she was “Dana Halter,” in the flesh) just stood there as if she'd been molded out of wax. And she “was” something to look at. She had Natalia's hair, thick and dark, though it twisted out and away from her scalp and hung loose over the collar of her tan jacket and she was taller, slumping her shoulders awkwardly because this was no fun for her. Somebody had assumed her identity, fucked with her life, and she was slumping her shoulders because she was embarrassed by the whole thing. But not so embarrassed she was about to just give it up and let the credit card companies and the insurance people sort it out. That gave him pause. Who was she? Why was she doing this to him? Was it payback, was that what she wanted? And the guy, Bridger-what was it to him?

“You again?” Natalia's tone was peevish, hard. “I told you. I already told you.”

“Frank Calabrese,” the man said. “Is Frank here?”

“Who?”

He repeated himself. His voice took on a pleading quality. “Look, we've been victims of a crime-or she has.” He pointed to the woman. “My fiancée. She-somebody stole her identity. We're looking for Dana Halter. Or Frank Calabrese. You sure he's not here? Frank?”

From where he was hiding, crouched in the bushes, and he would not go down on one knee and stain a good pair of Hugo Boss twill trousers for nothing, he made sure to take a clean mental snapshot of these two, because they were going to pay for this-he was going to make them pay, both of them-and that was a promise.

The light in the entryway shone weakly, casting a jaundiced glow over the little gathering on the doorstep. Natalia's face hardened. She looked ready to do battle, and that was a good sign-she was on his side, at least, and he felt in that moment that she was going to stay there, no matter what he wound up telling her. “Listen,” she said, her voice gone higher now, pinched and querulous, “there is nobody of this name, no Da-na, no Frank, nobody. This is not the correct house, understand?” A car pulled into the lot-the cream-colored Lexus that belonged to the Atkinsons, in one-eleven-and for a moment he felt his pulse leap as the headlights swept the bushes and then died. “If you come here to this house again,” Natalia was saying, her face a sallow over-laid mask in the rinse of yellow light, “to, to “discommode” me and my daughter, I will call the policeman.”