John Domini - Talking Heads - 77

“Aw, darling,” Kit said. Bette’s agonies unwound like a shell, in slow spirals, and yet they felt like too much too fast. He was still wondering who would groan on the phone. He stood to put in toast and set the kettle on a burner. What he was reading, Kit reminded himself, was the kind of life’s partner he’d asked for. A know-it-all with depth, with reach.

My baby, tiny and dead though you are, well. I’m sure you realize that I first searched out another clue or two, Teen Detective, in order to confirm my suspicions that dear old Fudds’ affair had indeed ended; you realize, I’m sure, that I couldn’t simply leave that laceration alone. I first made certain that my father no longer went traipsing off on his dubious overnight “presentations” (in Duxbury, mon pere?); and after that while I can’t recall, here before this gray grid, just when I moved into my angry little studio on Dana Street, nonetheless the answer is yes, I mean the answer to the question your mother was just asking …

Yes! I went directly to my Rampage! Yes, in that candid moment over my father’s gin-&-Journal I understood that the man was no longer a campeñero, that he was in fact just another tin-star dictator with blood on his hands and a happy banana …

Examples, God knows I have examples. I have irrefutable evidence that nine-tenths of what I said and did in those days was all about me and my father. Yes, the answer’s yes, and our mother could regale you with ugly evidence indeed, with incidents draped in transparent Freudian slips (o, games), incidents that go from backstage at a bar where Aerosmith had a gig to upstairs in the Parker House with a prominent State House Old Boy. This weekend, thanks to my little talk with Dee down in Providence, honest hindsight at last revealed that throughout this entire incident-packed period (interesting word!), I was after my father — whether after fucking him or killing him, or both … well. Hoo boy, as your stepfather would say (o, yoo hoo, my prince! yoo hoo! [but the truth is he won’t be home for hours, my baby; I’ve got plenty of time left to Delete])

The truth is, even at my most outrageous, my most Rampageous, I was just another rebel rich girl, wasn’t I? Even out on the astral plane you’ve come across the type, haven’t you? Bright but lacerated nucleii, aren’t we, grubby little handfuls struggling for greater mass against the fracturing effects of shame … My weekend journey to find you, and then my sitting here to put you into words, these are both mysteries, don’t you know — but I do wonder whether, in the end, there exist any mysteries about personality at all, these days. I do wonder if we haven’t had the mystery charted and graphed out of us, these days: nailed like Natasha into Tolstoyan immutability.

Kit followed her more with his spine than his head. He trusted his spine, and the soggy beehive hanging from it.

He trusted, as well, better sensations: the warmth of tea, full-bodied herbal stuff Bette bought in Central Square, and toast. With the sardines back at the office, it was better nourishment than he’d had in weeks. More than that, Kit thought he understood. He believed he’d figured out this “my baby” business. He wasn’t reading about adultery, or not his wife’s anyway. She hadn’t had an abortion over the weekend either.

When I at last caught up with Dee, don’t you know, she too seemed no mystery; rather she seemed the natural end result of a progression already sketched on the air at the time of our last conversation — sketched so plainly (o, history without mystery) that nothing had changed, for Dee, even though she’d rushed out of our last conversation in tears. I mean, here she was in hospital fatigues, working the Sunday shift in Emergency Trauma at Good Samaritan, in hospital fatigues and an unpretentious wedding diamond, with her hair in a sensible bob … She knew her likes and dislikes and their funding, my baby; she showed no trace of how hard I’d once tried to hurt her.

Myself on the other hand, God knows, I must have looked like rather a case, when dear old Dee first laid eyes on me… Indeed, the foremost victim of The Rampage, The Rampage! (after myself, myself!) didn’t recognize me, until I called her by her Cliffie nickname. Indeed, her first once-over — before I spoke her name — made it perfectly clear just what sort of a case she saw in me, with my Newbury Street curls and coat, my Sunday eyeliner: she saw another pampered and overcomplicated troublemaker: another rebel rich girl.

Then with her Cliffie nickname, I became three-dimensional, just like that, out of her file folder and into her heart — or more precisely, into her craw. She became angry, did Dee, frowny, and no one can frown quite like a startled woman in a gymnast’s haircut, a startled doctor at a busy station, demanding an explanation: Where are you hurt?

O, Dee, sticks and stones may break my bones, but it’s these old names that really hurt me. They ooze, they itch — for as you’ve no doubt figured out by now, my baby, I needed to ask this woman about, well. About the past, our mutual past; and naturellement, that’s what I began to see before me, right there in the Trauma Center: no sooner did some clumsy euphemism for The Rampage come from my mouth, “um, that time when I was um, more than usually sexually active”—no sooner did I mention it than I was back in it, in the worst and meanest moment of it: back the night I’d invited Dee over to the studio, back not long after too-tired Fudds had walled himself up behind his Wall (for good, I might add; he hasn’t come out since). I was back taking a night off from my Oedipal Rampaging (it’s all charted and graphed, isn’t it?) and instead steering my girl talk, my cheerful girl talk with my dear old chum Dee, well — steering our conversation towards intimate particulars.

I was cunning, in those days: little Miss Cunning Stunts … Dee brought herbal tea, she introduced me to herbal tea, and I made certain that she had a firm and thorough understanding of my situation before we’d finished our second cup. I can handle a word like “clitoris,” don’t you know, with a sang-froid that’s nothing short of clinical — though in that regard I’m hardly unique, am I, not when the Cambridge Adult Education Center is offering seminars like The Problem of Orgasm. My baby, you wouldn’t believe our ‘70s silliness: women actually refer to climax as “the big O”…

All this, you see, being just the sort of Kinsey-cold detail I offered Dee, that night over herbal tea: detail as cold as the windows on a seaside Cottage in mid-winter, and all intended to prove just how much the Steyes like to fuck.

I was a flirt, in my skirt … Delete. In my jean skirt I smile, legs Indian-style … Delete.

As I say, my baby, last night in the Trauma Center I re-experienced the entire heartless episode, the mean bitch that I was … And the present-day Doctor Dee, don’t you know, Dee on duty — she actually exhibited some of the same responses as her younger self: then (in the flowery scent of the tea) her sensible gaze had flickered because she’d been stung, and now (in the antiseptic flatness of the Center) her look clouded because she became concerned; then as my nasty-nasty unfolded, her knowing posture had faltered, on my apartment’s deeply dented hassock, and now as I tried to explain, her perch softened, on her wheeled stool; then she’d spoken from deeper in the throat with every new question, and now the same, the same … And both episodes ended in tears, o, naturellement.

Then — it had pleased me, don’t you know, it had pleased your bitch mother to send Dee out of her place crying, to break down this girl a year “ahead” (so I suppose I’ve provided an example of Dee’s unusual spirit after all: I’ve defined serene-a-Dee by its absence)… It had pleased me to see the proof that Dee had cared for old Fudds, that he’d broken her down, too.