T. Boyle - Talk Talk

“For your information, it is now twelve twenty-five in the afternoon.” Sorry.

The look she gave him was drained of sympathy. “Don't make me charge you an extra day, do you understand what I'm saying?” Her eyes flicked to the bed and the bundled form of Dana, then flew at his face. “Don't make me do that.”

Then they were in the car again, back on I-80, back in Purgatory, back on the road that never ends, and it wasn't until they hit a truck stop outside Bloomsburg that they had a chance to comb their hair, brush their teeth, put something in their stomachs. It was a joyless meal, a mechanical refueling of the body little different from filling up the gas tank. He drove the final leg, trying to extract some entertainment value from the radio, one alternative channel after the other fading out till he gave up and tuned in the ubiquitous oldies. The sun was right there with them all the way, relentless, pounding down on the roof of the car through the long afternoon, the cranked-up DJs in their air-conditioned studios making jokes about the heat-“Triple digit!” one guy kept shouting between songs-and they must have heard “Summer in the City” three or four times rolling through New Jersey. Or he must have heard it.

Dana didn't seem to mind the heat-or the silence either. She sat beside him, enfolded in her own world, tapping away at her laptop-this was her chance to work on her book, she told him, didn't he see that? “Enforced solitude. Or not solitude,” she'd added with an apologetic smile, “that's not what I mean.” He knew what she meant-and he wasn't offended. Not particularly. She was trying to make the best of things, as if anything good could come of all this. He wished her well. Hoped she finished her book, sold it to the biggest publisher in New York and made a million dollars, if that would make her happy. Because there was no doubt that Frank Calabrese and the whole insane enterprise of running him down wasn't making anybody happy, not her, not him, not Radko. Or the thief either.

The thief. He'd almost forgotten about him, almost forgotten what they were doing here and why. The trees were dense along the road, traffic building, his eyes enforcing the distance between cars, and all he could think about was the power this single individual had over them, how he was the one who'd put them here, in this car, in the glare of New Jersey on a hot July afternoon. He saw him then, saw the guy's face superimposed over the shifting reflection of the windshield, saw the way he walked, rolling his hips and shoulders like some pimp in a movie, like Harvey Keitel in “Taxi Driver,” and felt something clench inside him, a hard irreducible bolus of hatred that made him reverse himself all over again. He'd been tired the night before, that was all. Tired of the road, tired of the hassle, tired of Radko-tired even of Dana and the way she shut him out. But yes, they were going to find this guy. And yes, they were going to see him put behind bars. And no, it didn't have all that much to do with Dana, not anymore.

The sun was behind them when they rolled across the George Washington Bridge and into Manhattan, a place he'd seen only in movies, and here it was, the whole city bristling like a medieval fortress with a thousand battlements, each of them saturated with the pink ooze of the declining day. Dana directed him through the narrow canyons cluttered with nosing cabs and double-parked trucks, the evening lifted up and sustained on a tidal wave of cooking, a million fans blowing mu shu and tandoori and kielbasa and double cheeseburger and John Dory and polpettone up off the stove and out into the street. There was a smell of dogshit underneath it, of vomit, rotting garbage, flowers in bloom, diesel. He cranked down the window to absorb it. “Turn here,” Dana said, using her hands for emphasis. “At the next light, turn left.” The parking garage (they were somewhere on the Upper East Side, and he knew that because she told him) cost as much overnight as an entire month's parking had cost him in college, but Dana was paying and it didn't seem to faze her all that much, and then it was twilight and the lights of the city came to life as if in welcome.

There was a negotiation with the doorman, a logbook in the lobby that had to be signed, and then they were stepping out of the elevator on the nineteenth floor, and Dana's mother was there to greet them. She was shorter than her daughter by two or three inches, her hair the color of those copper scrubbers you buy at the supermarket, insistently slim, twice divorced, with a face that had to reshape itself every time she smiled or grimaced, as if it hadn't yet discovered its final form (a reaction to her new dentures, as he was to learn within two minutes of stepping through the door of the apartment). As for the apartment, it was bigger than he'd expected, one door leading to another and then another like something out of Kafka. Or Fincher. It had that claustrophobic cluttered three-shades-too-dim hazy atmosphere Fincher liked for his interiors and Bridger wasn't especially happy with it. If it had been something he was playing with on his computer, that would be another thing, but as it was he was almost afraid to sit on the couch in the living room for fear of sticking to it. So what did he think? Like mother, like daughter-Dana wasn't exactly the most organized person he'd ever met.

“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Halter,” he said, standing awkwardly in the middle of the front room. The shades were drawn. There was a smell of cat litter-or, more properly, cat urine.

“Call me Vera,” Mrs. Halter said, pushing him down in an easy chair strewn with knitting projects in various stages of completion and fussing over a bottle of wine-she couldn't seem to get the cork out-and a can of mixed nuts that featured Mr. Peanut against a midnight-blue background, but she wasn't Mrs. Halter anymore, anyway. “Dana's father left me for an “older” woman, if you can believe it,” she told him, “but that was ten years ago.”

“Mom,” Dana said. “Don't start. We just got here.” She'd draped herself across the couch in the corner, her bare legs pale against the dark pool of cracked green leather.

“Somebody at work. He's a lawyer, I don't know if Dana told you that… Anyway, I took my second husband's name-Veit-not because I have anything against Rob-that's Dana's father-but because I got used to it. It's punchier too: Vera Veit. VV” She set the wine bottle down on the coffee table to mold a figure in the air with the white slips of her hands. “Kind of sexy, don't you think?”

“Mom,” Dana said, and it carried no inflection, a complaint that had hung in the air since she was a long-legged preternaturally beautiful teenager who could never hit the right key, never influence a discussion or argument or participate in the roundabout of family ritual without involving her hands and her face and her body. He noted that, noted the way she became a teenager all over again the minute they walked in the door and her mother embraced her and held her and swayed back and forth in perfect harmony with her internal rhythms. It was all right. Everything was all right. For the first time since they left Tahoe, he could relax.

For the next half hour the conversation bounced round the room like a beach ball they were all intent on keeping in motion-a few questions about Bridger, his profession, his income, his prospects, leading to Vera's expressing her outrage over “this identity theft thing” and implying that Dana must somehow have called it down on herself through her own carelessness, to which Dana responded in the angriest, most emphatic Sign he'd ever seen-and then the ball dropped and the three of them sat there staring at one another like strangers until Dana's mother stood up abruptly and said, “So you must be hungry. You didn't eat on the road, did you? Dinner, I mean?”