John Domini - Talking Heads - 77

“I heard, I heard.” Louie-Louie had a hand in his beard. “Some heavy shit there. I’m sorry, man.”

Kit shrugged. “I could’ve been more discreet myself. It’s not like I didn’t know you were here.”

“Yeah but, it’s not like I didn’t know it was family.”

With that — the word family —Kit had another idea.

“You know about my brother, right?” Louie-Louie was asking. “You know he was kind of that way too.”

Kit nodded vaguely, his eyes once more on the handwritten list beside the phone.

“ Kind of, huh. Tell you, man — one way I know my Mama’s in trouble is the way she won’t admit that Junior was a homo. Just fucking doesn’t want to see it.”

Kit pulled the list towards him, the words blurring as it moved. “Louie-Louie,” he asked, “you’re at Sears now, right?”

The brother let go of his beard. What did Sears & Roebuck have to do with anything?

“You came here for help, right?” Kit had to get out of the chair. He was such a cliché, in the grip of a new idea: he actually had to get up and pace. “You reduced your load at Sears, you did what you could, but it only made things worse. Even your paycheck’s worse.”

“My paycheck’s diddly, man.”

“And finally you came here. So, Louie-Louie — suppose you had a second income? Something more flexible than Sears?”

“Say what?”

Kit made an effort to come across as though he’d thought about this a long time. With both of them in the office he didn’t really have room to pace, so he set himself at a kind of parade rest in the center of the room, one hand on a knob at the top of his tall chair. Suppose, he asked, Louie-Louie had a job where he could learn a few new skills? More importantly, suppose he had something better to do with his spare time than wander around with a gun in his pocket?

“Say what?” But after a moment the brother’s tone relaxed. “You’re talking about here, ain’t you? Talking about, I could work for your paper here.”

“A temporary assignment, yeah.”

“Man.” Louie-Louie picked at his tight shirtfront. “You got some beans, Viddich. Some beans , you know?”

Kit changed his grip on the chair’s knob. He brought up Mrs. Rebes, the way she’d feel if the brother worked for Sea Level . “She might stop calling you a baby, Louie-Louie.” Then, waiting till the big adolescent met his look: “And you might stop thinking of doing something crazy to change her mind.”

“Hey.” The brother extended a warning finger. “Back off.”

“Back off? You came to me, Louie-Louie.”

Were they going to have a fight? A fight, here between the frail antique glass? For a chair-squeezing moment that’s what it felt like. Kit remembered his lousy social skills. More than that, he realized his new plan for the brother had come on so swiftly, so ringingly, that he’d never considered what might be — think about it — a whole range of possible bad outcomes. And Louie-Louie looked like a man at the end of his rope. He was still only halfway under the fluorescents of Kit’s office, his pointing finger in the light, his scowling face in shadow. He had Kit thinking of Uncle Pete again, Pete in his half-worlds, and the thousand half-baked ideas by which his family had kept him there. Yes, the worm was on Kit’s back now. Doubts were creeping up every side of his bright new idea.

But Louie-Louie drew in his finger, dropped his arm. Meekly he stepped into Kit’s space.

“You got that kind of money?” he asked.

Exhale, Viddich. “I’ve got it, Louie-Louie.”

“From what I see”—the brother was smiling, he wanted to make this work—“doesn’t look like you’ve got two nickels to rub together.”

“I’ve got it,” Kit said. “Cash.”

He glanced once more at the list on his desk. He needed to see the name. Mirinex, Inc .

My baby—

Mysteries, God knows there are mysteries, and, well. This is one of them: this sitting in front of the glass grid again, sitting gnawing at my Apple again — it’s a mystery; indeed. It’s not at all a sensible place for a girl in my position; I shouldn’t even be back in Cambridge yet; it’s only Monday and, well. Certainly I acted like I needed more time …

Yet I’ve made a decision, don’t you know. My baby, I’ve come round to something; I’ve come round and round and round.

Kit was reeling himself. His ears and face burned, but he had to blink away splatters of cold rain. The wet streamed out of his hair. As soon as he’d come in the kitchen he’d discovered the printout, unseparated pages with feeder-strips still attached, a neat white stack in the middle of the curling pink memos that still littered the breakfast table. He’d found it and stormed first around the apartment, then back out onto the sidewalks. He’d jogged for blocks in either direction, over frost-buckled brick under freezing rain.

In high school, you know (do you know about high school, wherever you are?), the sweet sixteens scribble in their diaries, scribble scribble about the season’s infatuations — and then they show off what they’ve scribbled; they reveal their heart’s secrets (o, sigh) to whoever they think might whisper them, eventually, to the person they actually want to know … So I’ve heard, at least, my baby; I never went in for that sort of thing, playing Telephone, all that silliness; in my case the stakes were much too serious for that, in high school, much too serious. What I mean to say is, well. You aren’t simply another infatuation, my dear lost baby, and my sitting here doing “input” isn’t simply an adolescent game, a make-believe-mystery, in which Little Miss Giddy comes home where she might get caught — because she wants to get caught …

My baby, I don’t believe this is that; I don’t believe I’ve fallen prey to such silliness: catch me if you can. The stakes are much too serious; and the “office in the home” is the only office I have — a room of one’s own, my baby. So if my prince should come, my prince your stepfather, if he should catch a whiff of my Cutty Sark out in the stairwell and come a-running … well. I do know the man, my baby, I know your stepfather; and he should read this, really; he needs to see whatever design I’m about to carve out on my Apple as much as I do.

Then too, “Delete” is always only a single swift touch of the key away.

Kit needed a towel. He needed a slug of scotch himself, something to take the chill off. His brand, Johnny Walker. In the liquor cabinet he found Bette’s half-finished pint of Cutty, the clipper ship on the label, the proud old vessel gone sketchy at the edges. Somehow seeing it knocked the wind out of him. It left Kit slumped on the long-unwashed linoleum, so the clip in his pocket pinched him again.

She’d known he wouldn’t be home: I do know the man . And after a slow moment sitting there, as he began working the towel over his sopping head, Kit understood that Bette’s letter (or “letter,” as she’d have put it) stung him all the worse because it was a reminder of the note he himself had left for Leo. He’d lacked the strength to face the old man. It’d been hard enough keeping up a good front for Louie-Louie, assuring the brother that he’d take care of everything — the gun and everything. After that the best Kit could manage was typing up a brief explanation for Corinna and then finally jotting a note for Leo. A memo. Black on pink, like the clutter on his kitchen table. Kit had slipped it into the Mirinex box on his way out.

He found his feet, found his drink, warmed his gullet. Now what did Bette mean, calling him a stepfather?