Talking Heads by John Domini Read Free Book Online

sounded more enthusiastic.
    â€œI’m wicked psyched to see the next issue,” he said.
    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.
    â€œThat next issue,” said Attaputz, shooting up, “that’s got to be a motherfucker.”
    Really, one wonders what Miss Marryme sees in this person. Why, he’s hardly a person at all — just a voice on the air.
    â€œIt’s got to come from the basement,” the “deejay” was saying. “A lot of pressure on that next issue.”
    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