Talking Heads (22 page)

But then you came down the Hill into an airport: monochrome, fortified, echoing. It was a wonder that anyone could walk from one neighborhood into the other without turning into a militant Marxist. Just coming off Beacon Hill and into the West End, you saw the capitalist machine breaking down. You saw the bourgeoisie hunkering into a defensive camp. All in all, it didn't seem like the place for Corinna's family counselor.

But here they were, Corinna and Kit going to see her Arturito's therapist, in a not-quite-articulated test of whether she could continue to work for him.

On the MTA, the woman avoided saying anything specific about what she had in mind. Back at the office, likewise, she'd set the trip up mostly by implication. “How about,” she'd said, “you come with me and meet Arturito? Meet the boy, meet our counselor—you got time for that?” The only suggestion that her resignation depended on Kit's answer had been a slow sideways glance at the letter in his hand. Very slow glance, her thick Latin lashes barely moving. And she'd said that today she could “use” him. In fact, now that Kit had agreed to coming, Corinna seemed concerned mostly about whether he didn't have anything more important to do.

“You sure you don't need to be seeing your lawyer now?” she asked. “You sure you can put that off?”

Kit nodded, folding his coat-collar up around his throat. They'd come out into the wind of the Government Center plaza. The brick flats like a firing range, the wind like a runway.

“When are you supposed to talk to that Grand Jury anyway?” Corinna asked. “Thursday?”

He nodded again.

“Hmm, Thursday. Deadline day, you know? Or I guess I should say, Thursday
would've
been our deadline day.”

Kit couldn't catch her eyes, the way this wind whipped up her thick career-girl hair. In fact Popkin hadn't liked being put off. It didn't help, either, that Kit couldn't explain with any clarity just what he found so much more important.

“Anyway you rescheduled, right?” She headed across the bricks. “You and the man, you set another time.”

Eleven o'clock, tomorrow; Popkin must've repeated it a dozen times. And the lawyer had told Kit to start drafting his testimony. He'd said he wanted to see something by tomorrow. Longhand, typewritten, index cards, the lawyer didn't care—so long as he had something he could
work
with. Tomorrow, eleven o'clock. Popkin said Kit could even give him a recorded statement, something on cassette.

“What about your Uncle Pete?” Corinna asked. She muscled through the cold, a hardheaded bundle. “You sure there's not some big emergency back in Minnesota?”

Again Kit shook his head. Whatever it was that had Pete so determined to talk with him, apparently it could wait. Mom was fine, Uncle Chris was fine. Then too, Kit hadn't exactly been baring his soul either. Ah, Bette and I, ah, we haven't been home much these last couple of days. At least Kit had arranged for the uncle to call him back at the office, that afternoon. At least he wouldn't have to be lying to his family while sitting in his own empty kitchen.

“Okay Kit,” Corinna said. “Okay if you say so. Anyway this won't take long, here.”

Her building was the ugliest bunker on the block. Nothing but shaded riot-proof glass at sidewalk level, and Kit couldn't have said where the door was. But as Corinna approached she picked up speed, almost breaking into a trot. Inside, at the far end of the lobby, stood Arturo.

The nine-year-old bore only a passing resemblance to the photo on his mother's desk. In the flesh, the boy kept showing Kit surprises, his hair especially, a carrot red curling at the tips. Irish hair. Also you couldn't see the kid's hands in the picture, quick-pecking dark-nailed hands; the boy was in the middle of some fantasy play when Corinna and Kit arrived. He packed a real sting when he slapped five hello.

“Not like that, Arturito,” Corinna said. “You shake hands with Mr. Viddich.”

In Kit's grip the boy's hand felt more ordinary, sticky with lunch and fragile. But Arturo held on several seconds longer than necessary, smirking, squint-eyed. If he'd been a few years older, and maybe eighty pounds heavier, Kit would've said the kid was sizing him up for a fight. Kit looked to Corinna, but she was speaking with the woman who'd brought the boy from school, a heavy old
nonna
with a growth on one eyelid. The two women used a shorthand neighborly Spanish, made still harder to follow by the difference in their accents. Corinna's friend had a back-of-the-throat sound, upcountry, like the Mexicans Kit had worked with in the Carolinas.

“Hey,” the boy said, “I get it. Mama ain't told you what the scene is yet.”

Corinna broke off her conversation, turning and taking the boy's chin in one swift hand.

“I told you,” she said in firm English, “in this family we don't say
ain't
.”

Aw, Viddich, what have you got yourself into now? For someone whose chosen work was supposed to be bringing the news back to sea level, Kit was spending a lot of time out at the hard-to-figure farther edges. He wondered if there weren't some quick fix he could offer Corrina.
We have to close or we're as bad as they are
.

At least the mother's conversation with her ugly old babysitter made one thing clear—she was glad he'd come. He was some sort of good luck, apparently. Maybe a last-minute substitution. Other than that, he understood only that Corinna would handle Arturito from here. After the “session” (did Kit have the expression right?), she'd take over. In his goodbyes to the sitter Kit tried warming things up with a brief display of his Spanish, and then in the elevator he floated a small trial balloon.

“Corinna,” he said, “it's no problem you taking the afternoon off. The way we set up your weekly schedule …”

Abruptly she squatted beside her boy, whispering. No indication she still gave a hoot about her “weekly schedule.”

The counselor's office, at first, set Kit in a more familiar world. One brown bookshelf held a dormitory-style tea setup, complete with a cheap immersion heater, and the mug read “Ver-I-Tas.” It smelled as if Dr. Halsey—finally Kit learned his name—preferred chamomile. Bifocal'd, at home behind a desk, the man wore a sweater vest in a bright scotch tartan. He looked so utterly unhip, un-streetwise, that Arturo stared wide-eyed. The first Kit had seen the boy look like his photo. The counselor knew the uses of keeping his distance, yes; he didn't waste time. No sooner had Corinna finished introductions than Halsey thanked Kit for volunteering.

“You don't know what it means to this child”—the doctor nodded towards Arturo—“to spend time alone with a grown man.”

The boy knew where to go, Halsey went on briskly. Just down the hall. There were toys, musical instruments, a book or two. Kit and Arturo could do whatever they liked.

“Whatever …” Kit said.

“You'll have thirty minutes,” Halsey said. “That's our standard stranger session.”

Kit touched his neck. He knew where Corinna was, in a corner chair, loosely embracing her boy. But he found himself unable to look at her. The doctor removed his bifocals, his longest conversational pause yet.

“You can't imagine how much it means,” he said.

Corinna at last caught Kit's eye, pulling her son to her till her broad head hung over his shoulder. Her look made Kit think of Bette on the beach, at the Cottage. Pleading, angry, at a loss and willing to try anything. And what had he told Bette, back in that freezing ocean wind?
There's one woman I'd like to keep if I can
.

*

Arturo started in as soon as they reached the session room. “You know what the scene is now, right? This kind of scene, you've heard of it, right?”

Kit had heard of it. Bette might even have done the editing on a paper by one of Halsey's mentors.

“You my father now, right?”

Experimental therapy for deprived youngsters, the approach seemed sensible. You put children together with whichever gender of adult they lacked around the home, and let them get a feel for what having a mommy or daddy might be like. Under supervision, of course. The room had a—what did you call those things? A one-way mirror?

“We play in here,” Arturo said, “and they watch in there.” One quick and dirty hand jabbed, all four fingers extended, towards the set-in mirror occupying most of one wall. “You better do good, Mister. They watch.”

Kit wasn't yet over his surprise. That, plus the thought of his runaway wife. He took stock of the room. They'd probably hooked up the microphone overhead, among the fluorescents. There were two smallish chairs and a table, a shelf with jigsaw puzzles and games, and elsewhere Raggedy Andy and Annie slouched together with stitched-on smiles. In a corner stood a toy box. A couple of boy things lay on top, a gun and a bat, and below that a welter of surreal and plasticized colors, Kryptonite green and Superman blue and red. A nice theater.

“Hi Mom!” Arturo was in front of the mirror, waving. “Hi there, Doc Halsey! We doing fine.”

Kit exhaled deliberately. “I didn't hear the doctor say anything about watching.”

“Yeah right.”

“We're supposed to give him a report afterwards, aren't we? Didn't he say that?”

“Aw, he's always saying that.” Arturo went on dancing before the mirror. “He won't never let on what he's got going here. But I figured it out right from the jump.”

The kid was a disco monkey with curly red hair, an animal Kit had never seen. Considerably more of a handful than Cecilia's two Rucky-rats. He began undoing the complicated belt on his overcoat, saying aloud that, anyway, they were here. Here for the next half-hour. Might as well make the most…

Arturo turned around, arms dropping. “Don't you want to say hello to my Mom, over there?”

Now why hadn't Kit taken his coat off in the office?

“You're my Mom's boss, ain't you?”

And once more he was thinking of Bette, of how she'd left him feeling naked.

“Well ain't you?”

Kit was nodding, tongue-tied again. “Yes,” he said finally. “Yes, I'm her boss.” He worked up a frown. “And your Mom doesn't want you saying ain't.”

Arturo took off around the room, circling Kit in great, leaping skips. “Well I know,” skip, “there's something weird,” skip, “going on here, Mister.” Skip. “My Mom bringing her boss, that's weird.” He skidded to a stop at the toy box and began pulling things out in handfuls. “Right.”

“Why does it have to be weird?” Kit asked. “Why does there have to be somebody watching, or me and your Mom pulling …”

“Hey, think fast!” Arturo spun up from the box and heaved a vivid yellow ball. If Kit hadn't gotten a hand up—if he'd still had his head back in the Woods Hole crossing—he'd have been hit in the face.

“Stop that,” he said. “Why does it have to be weird? I don't see that there's any tricky business going …”

“Think fast!”

This time it was a miniature Frisbee. Arturo wasn't so good with a backhand; the thing sailed wide.

“Cut it out! I'm telling you it's no setup here, Arturo. Yeah, I'm your Mom's boss, but …”

“
Yo, fast
!”

Kit actually caught this one, a fad toy called Stretch Armstrong. A rubbery thing, an impact like a beanbag's; the doctor had thought ahead.

“Suppose it is a setup?” he asked then. “Hey, Arturo, suppose it is. So what?”

He lobbed the Stretch Armstrong as the boy straightened back up out of the box—straightened up looking at Kit differently. The toy caught the kid in the chest.

“Suppose we say you're right?” Kit asked. “The doctor and your Mom are watching, and myself I owe your Mom a favor.”

Grinning, Arturo grabbed up the Stretch Armstrong and put his back into a grunting return throw.

“Suppose you're right?” Kit went on, snatching the toy in midair. “So what, my man? So what? They're there, and we're here. We can still have fun.”

With that they were into a game of catch with the cartoon strongman. Corinna's boy still put everything he had into each throw, his red curls flaring and shivering (Kit imagined the doctor's note:
signs of aggression
), but he was laughing along with what Kit was saying. He was yelping, agreeing in his kid's way: yes they could still have fun, still play and tussle and talk, even if the big mirror on the wall made it look like a sham.

“Yeah, I
am
right!” Arturo shouted, his tongue poking through his grin.

“Yeah, and so what?” Kit made another toss.

“So what, right! Right, Mister!”

“I'm not a mister!” Kit shouted. Quickly he pulled his suit-jacket up over his head, hooking it against his hairline as he tucked his chin into his shirt collar. He adjusted the set of his sleeves and locked his elbows against his sides, so his arms poked up shrunken and misshapen.

“I'mm the
Monn
-sterr!” he said.

Hadn't Kit known he'd be harder to handle than the Rucky-rats? The nine-year-old proved no easy prey, impossible to corner, and with the red plastic bat in his hands Arturo gave as good as he got. The chairs went over. One of the jigsaw puzzles spilled off the shelf. Yet as Kit galumphed around after the boy, as he enjoyed the blood rush of his first exercise in days, he knew what he was doing. After moment or two he thought of Monsod, of Junior's sleepy glare across the stinking seepage. But even that didn't faze him. Kit knew what he was doing, and what he wasn't. When Arturo at last landed a blow on Kit's bruised temple—when that singing pulsing pain in the shape of his stitches shot through him—all Kit had to do was fall on his butt, let the suit-coat slip off his head, and say, “Ouch.” Only that, and Arturo dropped his bat and looked terrified.

“I'm afraid that's it, Arturo,” Kit said, wincing. “The Monster's got to quit for today.”