John Domini - Talking Heads - 77

And I’ll have more to say about that, me basement boys and girls. Lots more on how we tell the true hearts from the clueless, in this day and age. Watch this space.

Meanwhile — Z my name is Zia, I’m going to live in Zanzibar.

He liked the wind off the channel, the way it reshaped his bruises. The wind itself came in battered shapes in the Woods Hole crossing. Here in the Hole, along the ferry lanes between Cape Cod and the islands, two ocean currents collided — the Gulf Stream and the Buzzards Bay. The thick sea broke apart into whirlpools, into patches of white-flecked chop, and above the water the airflow wrestled through rough-edged directional shifts. North, east, west, south — in January the wrestling was worst. Yet Kit took the brunt of it. He stood at the forward rail of the Nantucket ferry, a lone outdoor voyager on a boat three-quarters empty to begin with. He liked the wet scrub in each new blast of air.

The wind even whistled through his stitches, faint, faint. Kit started tipping his head, trying to create the whistle. He savored the tickle at his sutures.

Not that this wasn’t a strange place to find himself, Friday afternoon. Hardly a day had passed since he’d gotten these sutures. Hardly a day and a night since the phone call that had set up his bruising. And here Kit stood, playing sickbed games with the Atlantic Ocean. Strange, no question. His farthest yet from the things that needed doing.

North, east, west, south, Kit saw nothing but storm and twilight. The mainland had disappeared as soon as he and Bette were out of the dock. Martha’s Vineyard didn’t show till the ferry was in the harbor. Now between the Vineyard and Nantucket they moved without landmark, without bearing. A ghost adrift. When Kit first stepped out of the ferry cabin, the churning, misted vertigo forced up a shout — wordless, raw-throated.

Yet Kit liked the taste of the air, too, rich and natural as a rained-on heap of leaves. It freed him from the odors of his coat. Bette had sponged off the fabric before he’d woken, but the stink of Monsod had lingered. During the ride down from Boston Kit had dozed off again, and the smell had triggered headachy stabs of nightmare. Eventually he’d needed his Percodan. Now, however, even Kit’s painkillers couldn’t dull the kick of this whipsaw gray, this chaos of touch and whistle right in his face.

It allowed no mind games either. No layout & pasteup.

*

Bette joined him at the rail without a word. She wore a long coat without a waist, an undertaker’s coat. Her hat was fur, with earflaps.

“The air,” Kit said. “It’s good for me.”

Still watching the sea, she adjusted her hat. Kit thought of Zia last night, tugging at her headscarf.

“The air’s good for my head. Bette, I’ll tell you one thing, I’ll tell you this for starters.” He’d told Zia nothing, finally. “Lately Betts, I’ve been — overfantasizing.”

That brought her around. Frowning, lips moving, Bette seemed to be trying out his last word.

“Bette, I’ve got to tell you. If I’m going to tell anyone I’m going to tell you. For starters, anyway.” Here they came, yes, the things that needed doing. Unhinged as the windcurrents over the Hole. “I’m overfantasizing. If that’s the, if that’s… Betts, listen. I’m inventing newspapers in my mind.”

“Oh, come.” She had a way of straightening her head, making a T-square with neck and shoulders.

“In my mind, Betts. It’s got me worried.”

“You’re not inventing papers in your mind , Kit. You’re actually bringing them into print and making them available to the public.”

“No, no. Also in my mind, Bette. I’m running double-columns up there. I’m composing whole, weird….” And though sometimes he had to stop and massage his neck, sometimes he couldn’t believe the words he came up with — nonetheless just letting Bette in on this much of his trouble left Kit feeling relieved. This much was the easy part, sure. It was the least of his reasons for calling Corinna, over at the office, and telling her she’d have to go on taking messages till Monday. Yet as Kit talked with his bundled-up wife he enjoyed a renewed sense that their getaway might work after all. He and Bette were taking the weekend at “the Cottage,” her family place on Nantucket.

“It’s strange, Betts,” he was saying. “The columns might start with something in my life, they might comment on something there. But next thing you know, they begin to comment on each other.”

Her eyes, enlarged, held an obvious question.

“I’m not crazy, Bette. I’m — I think this might be a way of not being crazy. My invisible layout and pasteup. It might be what I have instead of crazy. But, hoo boy. The flashes I get up in there.” He jerked a gloved finger at his head. “Sometimes they’re not even newspapers, exactly.”

“Bette,” he asked, “you remember when I called you about Cousin Cal? I called about Cousin Cal, and all I could think about was making love with you. You remember that conversation?”

“I do.” She seemed to be fighting a smile. “It was Monday. Monday, yes.”

“Monday. Back when this whole mess was just starting.”

To Kit, his runaway imaginings during that phone call looked to be part and parcel of the head games that had since come on worse. “I told you, then. About what was going on with me. And even then, I knew it wasn’t right.” But that same morning he’d also felt this sopping beehive in his chest, this heart not yet dried out and eggless. The humming bulk remained, stirring in the channel winds.

“Kitty Chris.” Her look showed some of its old open-endedness. “And to think I’ve always wanted to drive men wild.”

“Aw, Betts.”

“Well. Invisible layout and pasteup, what am I to say?”

Good question. Kit couldn’t be sure of his smile.

“Perhaps it’s a symptom of stress. Over the Med School don’t you know, they talk a lot about stress.” She’d spoken to the Med School before they left, needing a deadline extended.

“Though, Kit, it hardly seems as if the stress is going to get any better. You saw our kitchen table.”

Kit couldn’t be sure of his whole face, over the yawning gap of everything that remained to be said. When at last he’d gotten out of the bedroom, this morning, he’d found his kitchen table littered with phone-memos. He’d squinted through a lateriser’s thickness. Thurs 2PM: Rachel Veutri, talk Globe/Monsod? Thurs 2:20PM: Carl Niedermeyer, talk Herald/Monsod? Thurs 3:25: Sylvia Briskin, GBH, Monsod. Th 4:10: Rachel again . Corrina had checked in too, naturally: Lot of calls/office . The memos ran on into a long second row, and included a query from the Associated Press.

The call that must have gotten Bette up had come from the State House, at half-past seven. Kit didn’t recognize the name, but it had to be one of Croftall’s people. Making sure the old man’s ass was still protected.

“I kept wondering,” Bette said now, “why the phone didn’t wake you.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Betts.”

She moved her mouth, its intricate working parts, and framed a word or two. But once more, white shreds of condensed air gathered between them. An argument made visible: miniature cumulonimbus, gathering. And this would be a bad one. If Kit couldn’t keep the better talk flowing, this weekend would be the first real knockdown drag-out of the marriage. He hadn’t heard the phone this morning because last night he’d come home in Zia’s arms. In her arms, in a classic drunk’s carry, she’d hauled him up the stairs. He’d never noticed the memos.