Talking Heads (5 page)

This was Rick DeMirris, Kit's favorite freelancer. A thinker, an agitator, Rick had stopped by as Tuesday wound down. He'd perched on one the halfwalls surrounding Zia's workspace, talking shop while Zia pretzel'd this way and that behind her desk and Kit leaned against the facing partition. No top-of-the-masthead pretensions in this office.

“You'll survive,” Rick said. “Hey, you're back with the good guys now.”

Kit tried to think of a way to change the subject. Rick hadn't said much yet about his own story, a Mass Transit piece. The MTA had made an unexpected find during excavations for a waterfront station, turning up a Colonial shipworks down at what used to be the harbor. They'd even found native Shawmut stuff. A local archaeologist had declared the site “invaluable.”

But the freelancer preferred to talk about Zia's piece. “Oedipus?” he asked. “No shit? Is this a
nom de knob
?”

“The name of his show is even better.” Half a smile peeked from one side of Zia's cigarette. “Nocturnal Emissions.”

They made a strange pair, Rick and Zia. Worlds in collision. The freelancer let his hair billow well below the shoulder, whereas Zia cropped hers close, allowing no more than a trace of its natural curl. And Rick wore a sweater of deep hides-the-dirt brown, a fatigue jacket that hung on him like spaghetti gone cold. Mr. Natural and the punkette.

“How can a punk be a success,” Rick said. “Sexy.”

To Kit, Zia's Oedipus profile sounded like what he wanted in
Sea Level
. No puff, no fluff. Zia wasn't interested in anything so superficial as finding out the disc jockey's real name. She wanted to explore the meanings of his career.

“See, Oeddie began in the basement,” Zia explained. “Cellars by starlight. Like, the mattress is on the floor, and you have to share it with someone in a methadone program.”

Grinning, Rick hooked one arm under his sweater, scratching his narrow chest.

“That was Oeddie,” Zia said, “totally in the basement.”

“Suddenly he's made it,” Zia was saying. “An office, a telephone. He's really made it.” And this was in Boston, she repeated. “I mean, with the demographic this city has, the number of, like, young people …”

Rick was nodding.

“Boston radio, I mean, it's the cutting edge.”

“No shit,” Rick said. “Radio, electronics, that's where the action is these days. Us print types, we're way behind.”

Zia snorted. “So Oeddie now, he doesn't just get, like, a salary and benefits. He gets clout in the industry.”

“And how can a punk be a success?”

Pensive, she tugged at her top, a red thermal undershirt. Tough girl: when she tugged, you noticed her breasts.

“Sexy,” Rick said. “A real hook, there. It's loss of innocence, it's testing of values.”

“Well yeah, see it's
important,
” Zia said, suddenly loud. “It
matters
, what happens down in those basements.”

Rick's eyes flicked wide. Where was the woman's button, when had he pushed it? But Kit understood—Zia's heat was directed at him. At him, sure. Kit had never hidden his misgivings about Zia's subject matter, this cellars-by-starlight stuff. The first time he'd sat down with her he'd let her know that, originally, he'd never anticipated doing much “entertainment reporting” in
Sea Level
. Better she heard it from Kit himself, he'd figured, than from her father.

Hoo boy, had
that
been a dumb move. A glaring example of his defective social skills. No wonder he felt like he was walking on eggshells around here.

Rick knew an exposed nerve when he heard it crackle.

“Zia, tell me,” he said, “how'd you like working with old Kit here?” Rockin' Rick. “He's a wild man, you know.”

Then Kit, on eggshells, saw something new. He saw Zia's arm, the way she massaged her arm. If he hadn't been at such a bleary internal distance he'd never have noticed. Zia was a lefty, wouldn't you know it, and here on her workspace halfwall Kit observed that when she got worked up, she massaged her right forearm. She massaged the right only—unlike her friend Topsy, for instance, who massaged the left only.

“I mean, I love him,” someone was saying. “I mean, you think you're a punk?
This
man's a punk.”

Kit didn't think he'd ever seen Zia in short sleeves.

Kit didn't follow up on his suspicions. His lack of socializing was bearing down on him with brutal clarity—he'd only just now realized that Rick was flirting. The freelancer wasn't here to talk about a new T station, no. He was here to say “sexy” every chance he got. Rick had even come to the office with a newly pierced ear, a touch Zia might go for. Among guys, only the hard-core hip would risk an earring; the accessory was still mostly taken as a sign a man was gay.

So Kit let his suspicions lie, putting out of mind the low thought that he might stay and rifle Zia's desk. What was he supposed to find? Works? Anyway he already knew old Leo had a private agenda for
Sea Level
. Three or four private agenda, more than likely. And he'd spent too much time alone with his low thoughts, his strange thoughts. Kit quit the office when the other two did but then, back home in Cambridge, he found himself alone once more. Bette had left a letter on the kitchen table.

Kit could see it from the apartment doorway, a full sheet of print squared against the edge of the table. From the doorway, he knew she was leaving him. His wife was leaving. The believer had lost what he believed in most. Silly fumblethumbs believer. All that remained to him was nothing but one echoey room after another, worm-eaten rooms with walls of peeling dreams like the decaying fiber of his moan as he crossed the kitchen on long rancher's legs.

No. No, this was another sort of letter. An ordinary see-you-soon letter, ticking off the evening schedule.

Bette wouldn't even have written the thing, or she wouldn't have written so much, except that she'd wanted to see what a computer printout looked like. “I tell you frankly,” Kit's wife had written, “there are moments when I believe that I'll never pull anything from this Apple except worms.” Aw, Betts. Kit recalled her smile, its intricate works, and then, lifting the fanfold sheet from the table, he discovered she'd clipped a second message to the back. A message that required no reading—a wrinkly blue Trojan. She'd been careful about the paper clip, making sure it wouldn't poke through the packaging.

He hadn't yet come entirely out of his wooze. As he unclipped the condom, Kit lost his bearings again, tumbling back to yesterday's before-breakfast uproar. To exhale meeting exhale in the half-light while he and Bette snuggled and he lingered inside her. The wrinkles succulent, UnTrojan'd.

Even after Kit cleared his head—a couple fingers of Johnny Walker helped—Bette's printout still read to him like something in another language. The dot matrix suggested Braille.

His wife explained that she'd taken her latest editing over to Professor Glenza at the Medical School. She had no appointment, no deadline, but she wanted to know what he thought of what she'd done so far. “I suspect that Glenza is to me rather what you are to your Ms. Mirini,” she'd written. “(Yes
Mzzzzzzz:
she's a bee in my bonnet).” Aw, Betts. “I suspect, you've now got two women who need mentors, saviors, knights on white chargers.”

What language was this? Kit knew most of his wife's stage business, but tonight's printout careened from pose to pose in free-fall. Bette hadn't entered another word about Zia. Instead, she'd started a fresh paragraph, saying that after the Med School she was “heading to Rowley to give Hepburn a good lunging.” Hepburn was Bette's Morgan, a stallion, three years old. One of those odd accoutrements of family wealth that exist outside the month-by-month cash flow. Kit's wife kept her mount stabled at a farm belonging to one of her aunts. “Tuesday's a good day for it,” Kit read. “Aunt Georgie goes into Haymarket Tuesdays.” And after that, Bette planned to visit a psychic.

A psychic. “She speaks with ghosts, this woman.”

Bette had gotten the psychic's name from a man she'd known years ago. A man Kit wouldn't have met, a holdover from a time in her life she called “The Rampage.” “Ivan,” Kit read. “One of a very few I've kept in touch with from out of that, well. Out of that era.” And if she was reaching back to The Rampage, Bette concluded, well. Then she must need whatever she was reaching for. She must need it badly, this seance. “Of course I've already told you so in words,” Bette had written. “Words, words, words. But I believe I also let you know by means of, what shall we call it, symbolic language.
See attached.
”

Bette had used underlining too: “God knows I hope to avoid
living
Aunt Georgie, but I'd love to hear from
dead
Aunt Winnie.”

Kit finished his reading, his rereading, in their bedroom. He sat on the crumpled covers, his heart once more a soaked beehive. He had a notion of finding the psychic's address and running over there.
Darling
, he'd begin,
I've been chasing some ghosts myself
. He'd ask if there'd been more crank calls. And he'd say something about Zia, something to put both his and Bette's minds to rest.

Eventually his eyes shifted to the photo of his father.

The photo stood on Kit's bureau in a formal wooden frame, a Midwestern, mid-century frame. It had come with one of the last letters from Korea. Chris Viddich Senior, Nordic and full of bones, stood on the wing of his Marine Corps Sabre jet. The baggy flight suit couldn't conceal his fitness, his muscularity. The helmet was off. His grin seemed like the fleshy outermost spill of an eruption (was this just because the photo's black and white recalled ‘40s war flicks?), like some all-natural prehistoric sureness had proved too powerful for the suit and helmet.