Talking Heads (35 page)

So here it came, three days' worth of hard feelings. Didn't Bette see his mud stains from the construction site? Couldn't she tell she wasn't the only one who was road-weary? And the first thing she wants to talk to him about is money. Kit got his hands busy, undoing his noisy coat. He stood and hoisted a chair over Zia's halfwall.

“Kit, I'm sorry,” his wife was saying.

“Don't be sorry.”

“You saw my—letter. You saw what I've been through.”

“And you saw mine.”

“Kit, I did chase them out. Your new man and Corinna, I chased them out, you see. So that you and I, well.”

They settled into facing chairs, their hands hanging over their knees, not quite touching.

“Kit, I knew you'd be here and I came here.”

“And I waited till you came. I gave you the space.”

“Oh, honestly.” Bette heaved a full-bore Aristocratic Sigh, lots of shoulder action. “You know Kit, loving you, well. It's almost better but not quite. Almost, but not quite.”

“Almost better?” Kit wasn't about to fall back into their stage business.

“Almost as good as, well. As good as the sort of new woman one sees in the magazines. I'm almost ‘liberated,' don't you know.” She'd gone lilting through that sentence, but the next was toneless, serious. “Almost unencumbered by history.”

She'd lowered her face, and seemed to study the glowing Catholic cards on Zia's desktop.

“Sometimes I understand,” Bette said. “Sometimes I realize that my husband isn't history. He isn't that bust on the cornice.”

“I'm not smart enough to be history, Betts. I make a lot of mistakes.”

“Yes, yes. I suppose these past two weeks prove that.”

Patience, husband.

“Well. Kit, you see, mistakes and all, well. How could I hope to compete with you? Honestly. How could I ever match you, mistakes and all?”

“Aw, Betts.” Kit took hold of her dangling hands. “You don't believe that.”

“Kit, how? How could I hope to come up to you? Could I outsmart you? Could I out-muscle you?”

“Come on, you're the best. I'm the one who's—”

“Honestly.” She wouldn't let herself be drawn into an embrace. “Could I out-write you or out-work you? Could I out-integrity you? Could I? Really?”

“Bette, your integrity, it's amazing. It's in every word you say, total integrity. And what's amazing is, at the same time, you're
playing.
”

“Certainly I could never out-dream you, Kit. Precious few people in this world dream so big as you.”

Kit fought an impulse to rise and pace. Insisting he was no hero, he mentioned again the past two weeks.

“These past two weeks, my husband, you've been a bigger hero than ever. A tragic hero, the best kind. One day Hamlet, the next Oedipus. And I could never hope to compete, Kit.” Her voice broke, a startling echo under the high ceilings. “I could never hope to come up to you. The only thing I could do was to keep you in love with me.”

Still she resisted an embrace, letting him hold no more than one hand. With the other she finger-combed her winter-roughened haystack.

“That was the only power I had.” Tearing up, blinking, she nonetheless held head and shoulders strictly squared. “My sole advantage, don't you know. I had to keep you in love with me.”

“Bette, I am in love with you.”

“If I kept you in love, I had a chance, you see. I had that much over you at least.”

She pulled the other hand free, lifting a single fingertip to her wet cheek. Kit looked away. But what help was he going to find? What, in the rattling ceiling-high glass, in bleached and wounded walls going back to the American Empire?

“Bette,” he tried, “we have to work out some better version of love. You and me.”

She blinked but then—astonishing him—laughed. “Oh, indeed. A better version of love.”

She laughed again, thickly, her sobs not quite past. “Oh Kit. Big ambitions, ra-ther. That's my hero.”

Bewildered, Kit nonetheless understood he could touch her again, take her hands again. He knew the woman: she loved to think. He persisted: love in their culture was a faulty model. “All based on dominance and subversion, authority and anti-authority. Everybody's got to use whatever advantage they've got on everybody else.”

“Oh, are you speaking of ‘free love,' Kit? No hang-ups, man.” Her voice was sardonic, but her grip remained warm. “No secrets, dig it.”

With that, another idea came to Kit, a missing connection—a notion so sudden and right that he wasn't going to waste any time saying it out loud.

“Speaking of secrets,” he said, “there's Forbes Croftall.”

She didn't pull her hand away, another surprise. But she drew up into Academy-girl posture.

“Forbes Croftall,” Kit repeated. “He's been calling you, right? He's the one.”

Nor did Bette start crying again. She was no Louie-Louie Rebes, so unused to intimacy that once anything close to the heart got spoken, the floodgates burst.

“He's been getting in touch,” Kit said, “because a few years back, during the Rampage, he was one of them.”

“He tells me he can't live without me,” Bette said. “He tells me he has dreams about me.”

Kit nodded, this morning's aches and pains hot with the force of his idea. Bette's face revealed nothing—the hamper was closed—but she began to undo her long coat.

“The first call came, let me see.” She paused at a button. “It would have been about the time you and Mirini were working out the contract. Not long ago, really.”

Kit nodded, hot, still a step ahead of her explanations.

“A curious man, Forbes. Or in a curious marriage, perhaps. ‘Curiouser and curiouser,' said Alice. At first he would only call in the mornings, when you wouldn't be in.”

At first. Kit remembered the two calls last night.

“And last Thursday, well. While you were at Monsod, Kit? He came by the apartment.”

*

In time, the
Sea Level
office began to seem like a natural for this kind of talk. An open room, a natural. Whatever was brewing behind the halfwalls eventually foamed up into plain sight. Even now, every workspace revealed touches of visible madness. Here were Zia's gaudy postcards, there Corinna's bulky cosmetics case, and up on Kit's glass walls stood the fabled Wyoming jackalope. Imaginary layout & pasteup, standing in plain sight, out where Croftall's pursuit of Kit's wife fit right in. A dirtball direct from the grubby little handful that motivation always comes down to. You put together a decaying marriage, a dark-lit Parker House memory—simple as that, you had the dirtball. The obsession. Only later, as the Senator's better judgment had tried to play catchup, had Croftall seen as well the possibility of using Kit to provide political cover.

The Senator needed to satisfy Leo too, Kit pointed out. A BBC inspection had to look legit, but also it couldn't turn up anything that would cost Leo too much to fix.

Bette pointed out that, as majority leader, Croftall lived behind a screen of public power. It had been years since he'd known what it was like to be exposed.

There in Zia's workspace, Kit and Bette could work out the whole shape of the man's lovesickness. Now they bent together holding hands, now they eased back against the partitions. Bette explained that, last Thursday morning, the Senator never made it any further than the stairwell. “I threatened to start screaming, actually.”

Kit shook his head, picking construction-site mud from one knee. “And he still didn't get the message? He kept calling?”

Bette heaved another of her sighs. But then she was studying Zia's desktop again, color in her face.

“I told you before,” she said to the postcards, “Kit, I'm not strong like you. I couldn't make him stop.”

“Aw. Betts, the man was falling apart.”

“It was history again, Kit. An old family friend, don't you know. History. I didn't have the strength.”

Kit had her hand again, her hand and now the back of her head. He pulled her to him, repeating the old kindnesses:
the best, sweetheart, always
. Bette however returned no more than a conventional squeeze. With his face in her throat Kit could feel she was nowhere near tears. Enough, husband. No seconds on the sweet talk. Sitting back, firming up his tone, Kit pointed out that the real need for strength was still to come. He told her about the meeting with Popkin.

“Asa Popkin?” Bette frowned. “Kit, I should think you'd have met with him already.”

“Easier said than done, Betts.” Kit straightened his spine and told her what had happened with Louie-Louie, with Leo.

“What?” Her frown was almost a replay from the Cottage beach. “You went to Mirini?”

Yet the story came, if not easily, without any carrying on. Kit left his neck alone. He'd never have believed the sentence, “I pulled a gun on him,” could sound so mature. Never would have believed he could sound regretful, but no longer ashamed. Bette, watching close, lost her frown.

When he was done she exhaled without theatrics. “Kit, didn't I tell you you'd been carrying on like a tragic hero? Didn't I?”

“It was a mistake. I know.” Could this be the voice of his work ethic? His innate respect for what people were supposed to do at these desks?

“A mistake, indeed. And I suppose it's gotten a lot of play on your interior news. Your invisible layout and pasteup.”

Kit dropped his eyes, but again it wasn't quite shame that stung him. It was a lesser pang. Rue.

“How's that going, Kit? Still hard at it?”

“Ah.” Kit even smiled. “I'd say the worst is over, there. This morning I reached some closure.”

“Closure.” Bette sat back, but her stare had lost nothing. She pointed out that the mind's fantasy function generally had nothing to do with the neat logic of introduction, development, and resolution. “It's not a columnist up there, you know.”

Heads up. “This wasn't strictly fantasy, Betts. It wasn't entirely unhealthy, either.”

“Oh really? Tell that to Forbes Croftall.”

“Aw, come on. Croftall's just the opposite, he thought the fantasy was real. I always knew it was false, I worried about it. I told my wife.”

She remained longfaced, skeptical.

“I told my wife. Other than that, I let whatever was going on up there work itself out.”

She nodded, a half-measure, her eyes shifting. Kit had a nettled moment—three days of hard feelings were going to take more than this—before unexpectedly she gripped his hand.

“Good Lord,” she said, staring. “You don't suppose Croftall told anyone?”

Kit's turn to back off, look away. He recalled Leo, by the lower site:
Croftall never needed me to help him find trouble
. And the old man was a smutmonger, no question. But by now Kit knew the way to beat the guy.

“Betts,” he said, “so long as there's nothing more buried between you and I, it doesn't matter if anyone else knows.”

She softened the hold on his hand, and her eyes came back to orchid blue. Yet she returned to the confrontation with Leo. “What does Popkin say?”

“Popkin, hoo boy. What's lawyer language for ‘mistake'?”

“A mistake, indeed.
The
mistake, I'd say.”

“The mistake?”

“Well, this sort of thing, Kit. Banging around this old city like a one-man army.”

All Kit's sore spots grew hot again. “The Lone Ranger.”

Bette, relaxed enough to smile, was unaware of new thinking she'd set off. “I was thinking more of that movie about a Boston underground paper.”

“I've been bound and determined, haven't I?”

Now Bette heard the difference. “I do wonder,” she said more carefully, “who you've been trying to impress.”

“Bound and determined to put myself into events. To become the news, myself.” Kit had to stand, to move outside Zia's workspace. “That's what I wanted. That's why this happened.”

“Why this happened? Oh, Kit. You mean you're only now—oh, Kit. All I'm saying is you've been a tad overeager.”

He kept pacing. “I never saw it like this. Never without something in the way.”

“Something in the way?”

This didn't stop him either. He began to thank her as he moved, to praise her. “Bette, if I've got you, I'm not worried about it. If I've got you—”

“Oh Kit. You figured out all that business about Monsod and Croftall without me.”

“But not this, Betts. Not my own head, not without you.”

“Oh, honestly. This hardly qualifies as a blinding insight.”

“I was trying to be the news. That's it. Not the media—the news.”

In the office, walking was easier on him than it had been out in the cold. The marriage was easier on him; it felt like an extraordinary piece of luck. That he and Bette should even have met, in this disorganized city, that alone was great luck. And then that over the past couple of days they'd had time and grace to write each other the sort of long, strange messages that were all the more powerful for being so roundabout—sweet luck. Kit thanked her again. He praised her some more, putting the exclamation point with thumps of his boot heel. “Betts, I'll tell you, the last thing you need to worry about is whether you're strong.” Thump! “If you can stick it out through this, Betts, you're strong.” Thump!

At that Bette thumped along. They set off a fresh rattle in Kit's glass walls.

Kit found her face. “Bette, anyway, it was stupid. Running around trying to prove I'm a hero.”

There was his smart girl, her eyes lifting. “That's good, Kit. And I'd add that it's a natural hazard for someone like you, besides. Someone who believes in heroes.”

Still a believer, check. “Plus Betts, there's something else. Something else, while I'm telling you what you mean to me. We've got to start having kids.”