T. Boyle - Talk Talk

“Some fun, huh?”

“Yeah,” he said, but he couldn't elaborate, not yet, still in thrall to the munificent and all-encompassing kingdom of information. He glanced to his right, where another library patron, a titanic black woman with a pretty face and a sweeping curtain of dreads, was maneuvering her mouse so delicately she might have been peeling a grape with one hand. She looked up then and smiled at him, a smile surfeited with sweetness and simple pleasure, and he smiled back.

“But it's okay, we got enough,” Sandman was saying, his voice dropping to a whisper. “Tomorrow we type some letters and then we move, get in and out quick before anybody knows what hit them, because you know they're going to pull the plug on this, they got to. I mean, I can't believe we're the only ones-”

“Yeah,” Peck said, his voice sounding unnatural in his ears as he turned back to him and logged off the computer. He was so charged up he could barely breathe. “I know what you mean.”

Then it was back down what had to be one of the most scenic highways in the world, the road sliced right out of the side of the mountain like a long abdominal suture holding the two pieces together, and the view had never seemed so exotic to him, sailboats on the river like clean white napkins on a big blue tablecloth, the light portioning out the sky in pillars of fire. Sandman had the radio cranked, the car-a new yellow T-Bird he'd nicknamed “the Canary”-was taking the turns as if it were riding on air and the two of them were as high as lords and they hadn't touched a drop of anything yet. It was glorious. It was golden. It was good to be back.

They pulled up the long gravel drive just after six, the sun shuddering through the trees, the air heavy, saturated, offering up a feast of odors he'd forgotten all about, from the faint perfume of the flowers along the path (and what were they, daffodils?) to the one-part-in-a-billion offering of a skunk's glands and the fresh wet unchlorinated scent of rainwater in the barrel under the drainpipe to the wafting glory of top-quality angus beef hitting the grill on somebody's hibachi two or three houses over. He felt new-made. Felt unconquerable. It didn't hurt that he and Sandman had shared two bottles of the best wine on a pretty poor list in a pretty poor restaurant with the best view in the universe, because the second bottle, a Sauvignon Blanc chilled to perfection so that it went down cold enough to refresh you but not so cold that you couldn't pick up on its body and the subtle buttery oakiness of the cask it had resided in, lifted his quietly buoyant mood and made it soar. Was he drunk? No, not at all. His senses were awakened, that was all. The world was putting out its vibes, and he was receptive to them.

He hadn't given a thought to Natalia all afternoon, except to consider, somewhere in the back of his mind, that they'd have to go out to dinner because he really hadn't had time to plan anything. She had the car, so she would have been out shopping and she would have picked up the kid and probably taken her for a sandwich someplace. He was thinking alfresco, if the mosquitoes weren't too bad-there was a place in Cold Spring, right on the water. Maybe they would try that.

The first thing he noticed was that the sprinkler was going on the side lawn-Madison had been dancing through the revolving sheets of water in her shorts and T-shirt and he must have told her ten times already to be sure to shut the water down when she was done because it pooled there and made a mess of the lawn-and then he saw that Natalia, in her haste to haul her loot into the house, had left all four doors of the car wide open. Or no, it was only three. She was improving. Definitely improving. When Sandman pulled up beside the Mercedes and cut the engine, the first thing Peck did was get out and slam all three doors before ducking round the corner of the house to shut off the water and retrieve the sprinkler. In the process of which, he got his Vans wet.

Sandman was standing there in the driveway grinning at him, his aviator shades throwing light up into the trees. “Good to be home, huh?” he said. “The comforts of the hearth and all that.”

“You mocking me?” Peck said, feinting as if to toss him the bright yellow disc of the sprinkler. “Because you set the record there, my friend. How many wives was it? I mean, I only knew Becky…”

“Yeah,” and he was already turning to the house, “but I'm a bachelor now. But hey, you got any of that French Champagne left? Because I think we ought to be celebrating here, don't you?”

They were in the kitchen, and Peck was removing the foil from the neck of the bottle when out of the corner of his eye he spotted something anomalous on the kitchen counter, something that might have been a dollop of raw meat or-“What the fuck is that?”

Sandman was slouching against the refrigerator. He clipped his shades with two fingers and dropped them in his shirt pocket. “That? I don't know, it looks like shit to me, some kind of animal shit. Raccoons? You're not keeping raccoons here, are you?”

At that moment, the mystery revealed itself. A cat he'd never seen before-spotted like a leopard, with outsized paws and unhurried eyes-slid into the room, followed by a second one just like it. The two of them came right up to him, lifted their heads and began to yowl disharmoniously for food.

That set him off-he couldn't help himself, cat shit on the counter where he prepared the meals, where he kept his knives and his cutting board and his infuser and his grapeseed oil and extra-virgin cold-pressed Ravenna olive oil in the cut-glass decanter-and before he knew what he was doing, right there in front of Sandman, he lost it. His first kick-a reflex really-caught the near cat and sent it spinning into the cabinet across the room; the second kick caught only air. “Natalia!” he shouted, and the cats were gone now, vanished like smoke. “God-damnit, “Natalia!””

Sandman seemed to find the whole thing pretty amusing, holding the Champagne flute to his lips as Natalia, utterly unconcerned, drifted into the room in her own good time and stood there watching him, hands on hips. “You are shouting,” she observed. “I do not like this shouting.”

He was trying to keep it in, trying to keep his cool, trying to remember what he'd learned inside, what he'd learned from Sandman, but he couldn't. “What is this?” he hissed, outraged, gone already, and he pointed to the lump of soft wet excrement on the counter. “What the fuck do you call this? Huh?”

Small, slim, dark-eyed, her feet bare and her breasts heavy in a stretch top-she'd always claimed they were natural, but now it suddenly occurred to him how gullible he'd been to believe her-she shrugged and crossed the room to tear a wad of paper towels from the dispenser. “It is called shit,” she said, bending to engulf the redolent little patty and drop it into the wastebasket beneath the sink. Then she extracted the disinfectant, sprayed the countertop and wiped it dry with another towel.

“The cats,” he said. “I didn't, you didn't-”

“They are my Bengals,” she said, sweeping his glass from the counter and emptying it in a gulp, Russian-style. “I have found them in an ad today, this morning, the male and the female. Don't worry,” she added, grinning at Sandman, “you will love them. I know you will love them. But that is not the issue-”

“Issue? What issue? What are you talking about?”

“I am hungry. Madison is hungry.” Another look for Sandman. “And you have been partying without me.”

There were gulfs here, whole gulfs of unreason and bitterness opening up between them, and he was sour now, no question about it, but he threw in a peace offering: “I thought we'd go out.”

She was at the refrigerator, her back to him, pouring herself a second glass. “I do not wish to go out. I wish to stay home. With my daughter.” She turned to him now, her eyes burning, and he could see this went deeper than he'd thought-his mother, if she mentioned his mother again, he didn't know what he would do.