T. Boyle - Talk Talk

She watched with a puzzled smile-or bemused, a bemused smile. “Bear hug,” she was thinking distractedly, and where had that come from? Who had actually seen bears hugging? “Did” bears hug? Or did they do it doggie style-or bearie style?

The man's name-Bridger was lit up, beaming, trembling with the information-was Matt Kralik, and he finger-spelled it for her while Matt Kralik and his girlfriend, Patricia, stood there gaping at her. Matt, he said, looking from Matt to her and back again, had been his roommate and best bud at SC, and what was he doing here? His parents had a place on the lake. But what a coincidence! Awesome! No, no, no, they had to join them for dinner. Bridger insisted.

There was the usual clumsy shuffle of place settings and chairs, the waitress looking on while a darting dark quick-blooded busboy studiously set them up and then they were all seated and Matt Kralik and Patricia had matching martinis in front of them, except that Matt's was officially a Gibson because he had a cocktail onion in his and Patricia preferred the traditional olive. For a moment no one spoke-this was what hearing people referred to as an “awkward silence,” but then no silence was awkward for Dana and her gaze quietly passed from Matt Kralik, seated on her left, to Bridger, across the table from her, and finally to Patricia, on her right. Patricia had an eager, almost ribald expression, her features too heavy for the taut athletic body that supported them-she looked cartoonish, all the weight above her shoulders, nothing below. “So,” she said, pursing her lips, “Dana-it's Dana, isn't it? I mean, I'm terrible with names-”

“Yes, that's right.”

“What do you, ah-do? For a living, I mean.”

All three of them were watching her as if she were one of the seals from Sea World propped up in a chair and about to balance a cane on her nose in expectation of the slippery reward of a fresh sardine from the trainer's hand, even Bridger, who was wearing his blunted look where a moment before he'd been transported, giddier than she'd seen him in a week, a month. She said, enunciating as clearly as she could, “I'm deaf. I teach in a deaf school. Or at least I used to.”

“Oh, deaf,” Patricia said. “That's interesting. That's really interesting.”

Matt Kralik was saying something. He'd once known a deaf kid, in high school, and the kid had been a super baseball player, center fielder, ran like the wind-and something, and something-and he made triple-A ball, but not the majors. “Like that guy that was on the Angels last year, what was his name?”

Bridger supplied the name. And he thought to finger-spell it for her: “Pride,” that was his last name, but he couldn't remember the guy's first name.

“Not Charlie Pride,” Matt Kralik said, and she would have missed it-everyone burst out laughing-if Bridger hadn't finger-spelled it too.

“No,” Patricia said, gulping back her laugh and steadying herself with a delicate sip of the martini. “He was that black country-and-western singer. My father used to have his records, I remember.”

“But this guy on the Angels, they could heckle him all they wanted and it was nothing to him. Can you imagine that? They could be cursing his mother and he wouldn't know it.”

Bridger shrugged. “Yeah, but what about when they cheered?”

And then Matt Kralik said something and Bridger said something back and Patricia joined in, the conversation wheeling off in unforeseen directions even as the food came and Bridger's hands got busy with his shish kebab and Dana lost track of what they were saying. Eventually, she just lowered her eyes and concentrated on the plate before her.

After dinner, there was chai sweetened with honey and condensed milk and more talk and then they all insisted on going out to a bar-Matt Kralik knew this place with the best music in town-and she went along though her head had begun to throb until the term “concussion” rose up in her mind as if written in big looping letters on the blackboard in her classroom, a medical term: “jarring of the brain, spinal cord, etc., from a blow, fall, etc., derived from the Latin” concussio, “meaning shock.” But no. She was just tired. And defeated. And angry. And the bar-it was like any other bar anywhere else in the world-was a place she didn't want to be. It was loud and raucous, she supposed, and Matt Kralik, Patricia and Bridger responded to it by jigging their heads to the beat of the music that was most likely pounding through the big speakers hung in the corners and opening their mouths wide to (presumably) shout at one another. She took her shoes off and danced twice with Bridger and once with Matt Kralik, but some clod stepped on her right foot with one of his engineer's boots and the liberation of movement, which usually made her experience a kind of boundless high, did nothing for her. She just couldn't shake loose of the image of Frank Calabrese. Bridger could, though-he was having a time, she could see that, and she didn't begrudge him. Or maybe she did. At any rate, after half an hour of watching everybody's mouths chew air, she told him she wanted to go back to the motel and he gave her a look she didn't like and she walked the six blocks alone and let herself into the sterile little box of a room, got under the covers and turned on the TV.

She was awake still when he came in two hours later, drunk, with his sweatshirt misaligned and wearing a stifled little grin caught somewhere between repentance and defiance. She watched with cold indifference as he fumbled into the bathroom and peed, not bothering to shut the door, and she didn't say anything when he stepped back into the room, watching his feet as if he were walking a tightrope, and stood just to the side of the TV, mesmerized by the movement there. A slasher flick was playing, the only thing she could find at this hour aside from the late-night talk shows that seemed to define their own vacuum of irrelevance, and she was no fan of the genre and wouldn't have given it a second glance if she weren't stuck here, bored and agitated and unable to sleep. “We need to get up early,” she said, trying to control her voice. “We need to leave this place. We need to get on the road. Get out of here.”

She watched him scratch the back of his head, reach down to hike up his oversized jeans. He said something to the TV, mumbling no doubt, then swung round so she could read him. “I don't know,” he said, making a half-hearted attempt to sign under his words. “I don't know, I hate this.”

“You hate it? How do you think I feel?”

“I've got to get back. Got to call Radko.”

She gave it a minute. “You don't have to do anything,” she said finally, and she was angry suddenly. Her voice might have risen, she couldn't say. “You claim you love me, you'll stand by me, but it's just words, because if you do-if you did-you wouldn't hesitate.”

And now his face flared with his own anger, a deep gouge slicing into the furrow between his eyes, his lips pulling back from his teeth, the scene brightening to an orangey yellow on the TV and imparting the color to his skin so that he looked jaundiced. “Yeah?” he said. “If it wasn't for you,” he said, but she dropped her eyes to the screen and shut him out.

The yellow there darkened to gold, to honey, to a deep hungering sepia as the killer in his mask flailed the too-white blade at his victim, the heroine in her midnight-blue teddy, who could only run and crouch and hide, bare-legged, her painted toenails gathering in every particle of light as if to shut the camera down. “Dog barking,” the caption read.

“Glass breaking.”

A quick close-up of the victim, her makeup smeared, eyes dilated with terror.

“Sobbing continues.”