Talk Talk (10 page)
MADISON WAS AWAY at the piano teacher's, Natalia was sunbathing on the deck and he was poised over the black granite top of the kitchen counter, mixing their second round of Sea Breezes. He stood there in a cocoon of silence (the CD needed to be punched up but he didn't feel like punching it), appreciating one of those moments when the whole world opens itself up to you, when everything you take for granted in the daily hassle to scratch and grab and assert a little dominance is suddenly right there in front of you and the planet poises on its axis, just balanced, just now. And he wasn't drunk, not yet--that wasn't it. He was just attuned to the little things: the taste of the salt air through the flung-open window, the feel of the delicate layer of ice on the neck of the Grey Goose bottle straight from the freezer, the perfume of the split lime, the sweetness of the cranberry juice and the acid pull of the fresh-squeezed grapefruit in the stone pitcher. He looked out over the salt marsh to the bay beyond, the light like something out of a painting--a thousand gradations of light, from the palest driest Arctic stripes at the wrought-iron rail of the deck to the rich tropical gold poured all over Natalia and the chaise longue to the distant white purity of the sails of the boats tacking against the breeze.
For dinner, he was going to make sea scallops braised with scallions and garlic, with a sauce he'd learned years ago while fooling around at the restaurant (a white wine reduction flavored with shallots and a splash of sherry, dollop of butter, fold in the cream at a galloping boil and reduce the whole thing again till it was a fifth of what you started with). He was thinking rice with it, flavored with bouillon, sherry and sesame oil, and maybe a salad and some sautéed broccolini on the side. Keep it simple. He could have done something more elaborate, because everything was fine and he had all the time in the world, and yet sometimes you just wanted to get back to basics and let the flavors speak for themselves. He could have made dinner rolls from scratch if he'd had the inclination, could have done up something for dessert too, but you couldn't beat fresh-picked raspberries in heavy cream with a sprinkle of sugar and a splash of brandy to burnish the taste. This was how life should be, no hassles and strains and worries, time on your hands, time to stroll through the farmers' market and the wine shop and have a cappuccino and croissant with your lady on a sunstruck morning, time to chop and dice and sear and lay out a nice meal for Natalia's friend Kaylee and what was her husband's name? Jonas, yeah, Jonas. Not a bad guy, really, for a loser. They had a chain of exercise studios--Pilates and the rest of that crap--and he supposed they did pretty well, and that was all right. At least the guy appreciated fine cuisine, a good bottle of wine--at least he wouldn't be wasting his time in the kitchen on a couple of zeroes. The light shifted. The world began to crank round again. His eyes went to Natalia, the sun on her legs, the sheen, the geometry of perfection, and then he came back to the business at hand: cutting two neat pale green wedges of lime to garnish their drinks.
By the time the doorbell rang, everything was ready to go--Madison back from the piano teacher, fed and in her pajamas, the videos selected, the pans laid out and the scallops prepped--and Natalia got up out of the chaise longue in her two-piece and chiffon robe and drifted through the open French doors like something floating on the breeze. She always moved like that--everything in its own sweet time, “Don't rush me, just look at me”--and he heard the greetings at the door and came out of the kitchen with two fresh cocktails in hand. The kid--the daughter, Lucinda--made a bolt for Madison's room and Kaylee, a bony blonde with pinched little shaded glasses and a frizz of hair twisted up in a bun, pulled him to her for an embrace. “Hey,” she was saying, “we just saw the most awesome thing out on the road on the way here, this white bird?--Jonas says it was an egret--just like perched there on the yellow line like it was in the middle of a river or something--”
Peck handed her a Sea Breeze, even as he gave the husband's right hand a squeeze and fitted the cold glass into the socket of his left. “Hey,” he said, and the husband--stubble-headed, goateed, going to fat around the ring in his earlobe--returned the greeting.
“Wasn't that an egret, Jonas?” Kaylee was saying.
“It is a white bird,” Natalia said, bending to levitate her hand two feet from the tiles as her breasts, on display, shifted in the bikini top, “about this high off the ground, yes? We are seeing them all the time,” she avowed, straightening up. “With the binoculars. Common, yes. Very common here.”
“Really?” Kaylee lifted her eyebrows, raised the cocktail to her lips. “It's like really beautiful, though,” she murmured over the rim of the glass. “Like magical, you know?”
The husband wasn't having it. He just held on to his grin and said, “Maybe we ought to get one and stuff it for the Corte Madera place.”
“Oh, Jonas,” the wife said, making a face. She looked to Peck for approval. They both did, the whole party arrested in the entryway, gulping vodka and making small talk about birds.
“Sure,” he said, “why not? And we can stuff the tourists while we're at it too.”
The conversation at dinner ran to a whole host of mainly numb-brained subjects, from Nautilus machines to stair-steppers, the stock market, the Giants, A's, farm-raised salmon and the new Kade movie to the “like super-expensive” European vacation Jonas was treating his wife to, a whole month and the kid at Grandma's, week in Paris, week in Venice, then the rest of the time on some jerkoff's sixty-thousand-foot-long boat off the Islas Baleares. They'd actually said that, actually given him the Spanish with the rolling r and the whole deal, as if they were a tag team of waiters in a Mexican restaurant, first him--“Islas Baleares”--and then her, like an echo. They'd praised the meal--and the wine, and they'd brought two bottles of Talley Chardonnay that wasn't half bad--but as the sun went to bed and the stereo got louder and they began to put a real appreciable dent in the bottle of Armagnac that had cost him sixty bucks at the discount place, Peck began to realize he could live without these people. He really could. Kaylee he'd approved of because she kept Natalia occupied and off his back, but the husband was full of shit to his ears--they both were--and he felt himself getting restless, getting edgy, and that wasn't good because it destroyed the mood of the day and made him think of other things, things that had a negative energy, things that brought him down. Like Dana Halter. Like “Bridger,” that asshole.
He'd called the number that morning and got a message--“Hello, you've reached Bridger's cell; leave a number”--and he felt as if he'd pulled the handle on a dollar machine and got two cherries instead of three. Bridger. What kind of name was that? And why was he playing the game instead of Dr. Dana Halter? If he was some kind of cop he wouldn't have been stupid enough to display his number... which meant he wasn't a cop. But then who was he?
“So, Dana,” the husband was saying, fat-faced, red-faced, leaning into the coffee table as if it were the municipal pool and he was about to plunge in, “anything new with you?”
He felt the smallest burr of irritation. He gave the guy a look to warn him off but he was too dense to catch it.
“I mean, with your practice--that office space in Larkspur? How'd that ever work out?”
It wasn't just a burr--it was a thorn, a spike. Who “was” this clown? And what had he told him? Shit, he couldn't even remember himself. He reached for the snifter and took a moment to study the way the brandy swirled and caught at the glass--it was the color of diet cola when the ice melts down in it, and how had he never noticed that before?--and then he realized that nobody was talking. The husband was staring at him, waiting in his gerbil-faced way for a response, wondering vaguely if he was being dissed, and if he was, what to do about it--and both girls had stopped jabbering away about so-and-so's boob job and were watching him too. “I don't know,” he said finally, trying to control the bubble that was swelling inside him like one of the bubbles that punch through the sauce after you fold the cream in, “with all the malpractice insurance, I don't know how anybody could say it's worth it. Really. Sometimes I think I'd be better off just staying out of it--”
Kaylee's mouth flapped open as if it were spring-operated: “But you're so young--”
The husband: “And your training. What about your training?”
They'd moved into the main room from the dining table--“No, no, don't bother,” Natalia had said when Kaylee tried to help her clear up, “leave it for the maid”--and he'd taken a certain satisfaction in going round the room and flicking on the lamps to create a feeling of intimacy and warmth, as if lamps were hearths and the twenty-five-watt bulbs miniature fires blazing against the night and the fog creeping in across the hills behind them. He studied the husband just the briefest fraction of a second--was the fat fuck mocking him? Was that it? But no: he could detect nothing but a kind of stubborn booze-inflected obtuseness in the man's dwindling stupid little eyes. He didn't answer.
“But all that work, medical school and all,” Kaylee said. She arched her back and did something meant to be furtive that tautened the thin black straps of her bra. “It seems such a shame.”
“Oh, no,” Natalia cut in, making a moue over the “o” sound and holding it a beat too long. “Dana's job is for looking after me and Madison,” and she reached out to caress his biceps. “Is that not so, baby?” She smiled her biggest smile. “A full-time job, no?”
The husband's snifter was empty and he was reaching out his claws to refill it. “Where did you say you went to medical school? Hopkins, wasn't it?”
“Yeah,” Peck said. “But I was thinking it might be cool, really cool, to do something with Doctors Without Borders. You know, go to Sudan or someplace. Help people. Refugees and that sort of thing. Cholera. Plague.”
“Médecins sans Frontières,” the husband said, as if he were licking fudge from between his teeth.
From the back room came the sound of the kids' video, some Disney thing with the seahorses and talking starfish and all the rest, music swelling, the sound of artificial waves. He was agitated, and he didn't know why. The day had been perfect, the sort of day he could have lived through forever, the day--the days--he'd promised himself when he was inside, when everything was gray and the sun never seemed to shine and there was always some self-important officious asshole there to make you toe the line, lights out, everybody up, and the bonehead cons with their pathetic attempts to join the human race, “427, factory, I swear; Nobody changes this channel, motherfucker;” and “How would you like your Jell-O cooked, sir?” But no, he did know why. Everything he had was balanced on the head of a pin, like the collapsible two-story brick house with the three-car garage and the bird in the cage and the yapping dog all folded up in a carpet in one of Madison's videos, swept away in a windstorm that raked the lot where it had stood just a heartbeat before. It was people like this, like “Jonas,” like “Kaylee,” that were the problem. What was he thinking? That he could just waltz in and set himself up and think these people were his friends or something? No. That wasn't the way it was. That wasn't the way it would ever be.
So what did he do? He pushed himself back from the coffee table and raised one foot in his shining new ultra-cool Vans with the checkerboard pattern and set it down right beside Jonas' drink. “Yeah,” he said, leaning back into the cushions and giving both arms a good sinew-cracking stretch, “that's right. That's who I'm talking about.”
When he first met Gina, things were different. He was twenty-five years old, with two years of community college behind him and stints at restaurants in Maui and Stowe, no record of any kind except for traffic infractions (tickets he tossed in the trash, because really, they were just a scam anyway, a means for local municipalities to raise cash so they could buy more cruisers and more radar guns so they could rob more people in the name of law and order), and he'd just been promoted to manager at Fiorentino's, the youngest manager they'd ever had. Or at least that was what Jocko, the basset-faced old bartender who'd been there since the Civil War, told him. Then Gina showed up. He'd been sitting at the bar, his day off--noon--with Jocko and Frank Calabrese, the owner, and a mini-parade of girls slipped in and out applying for the cocktail waitress job advertised that morning in the local paper. They had the faintly tarnished look of cocktail waitresses, every one of them, and some had experience, some didn't. He wasn't looking for experience. He was focusing on one attribute only--how hot they were, on a descending scale of one to ten. None of the others even came close to Gina--facially, maybe, but her body was right out of “Playboy;” or better yet, “Penthouse.” Jocko and Frank, who could be brutal, didn't give him any argument.
Gina-Louise Marchetti.
She'd gone to Lakeland High School, just outside Peterskill, she was twenty years old, between boyfriends, and living--temporarily, she insisted--back at her parents' place on a twisting black road in the rural tree-hung precincts of Putnam Valley, where absolutely nothing was happening, not then or now or ever. Within a week he was sleeping with her and within the month she'd moved into his apartment. Most nights after work they'd cruise the local bars and then sleep in till noon and on their days off they took the train into Manhattan and hit the clubs. They did drugs together, but not in an excessive way, and only speed and once in a while E, and they began to enjoy some decent wines and experiment with recipes out of a cookbook when they had a night at home. For Christmas she bought him a cherrywood wine rack--“For the cellar you're going to have”--and he gave her a case of red the liquor salesman got him wholesale; they cooked a paella for Christmas dinner, just to be different, and spent most of the night admiring the way the twelve symmetrical bottles of Valpolicella looked in the new wine rack.
That was nice. Very domestic, very tranquil. He was in love, really in love, for the first time in his life and he was making good money--and so was she--and there wasn't a bump in the road. They moved into a bigger apartment, with a view of the Hudson from the nuclear power plant all the way up the river to where it snaked into the crotch of the mountains. He got himself a new car, a silver five-speed Mustang with some real pop to it. Nights--alone, in bed, just the two of them--were special. “You're an awesome lover,” that was what she told him, “awesome,” and he believed her then--believed her now, for that matter. But everything in this life turns to shit, as his father used to say (until he died in his Barcalounger of an aneurysm in the brain, the cocktail glass still clutched in his hand), and Frank, the owner, proved it by getting divorced.