Four
THAT NIGHT, the night they met, Bridger had stood beside Deet-Deet at the bar and ordered a beer he never tasted. He was trying to look casual, his back to the shining mahogany surface and his weight supported on the props of his elbows, cultivating an air of unconcern, what he liked to call “terminal cool,” the beat dragging everyone down as if sound were heavier than air, as if it were some other medium altogether, glue, lead, volcanic ash, but he wasn't succeeding. In fact, as anyone observing him would have seen in an instant, he was locked in on Dana as if he'd been hypnotized. Certainly he looked casual, in his not-hardly-ever-washed jeans, mostly destroyed Nikes and the Digital Dynasty T-shirt with its flaming orange extraterrestrial grinning lickerishly over one shoulder, not to mention his hair, which was growing back in to the point at which random spikes of it projected toothily from his crown, but casual was the last thing he was feeling. What he was feeling, even before Deet-Deet reached out almost blindly for the hand of a doll-sized girl in a yellow tank top and found himself sucked out onto the dance floor, was a peculiar kind of tension-call it anxiety, fear of rejection, the punishment of attraction-he hadn't felt in a very long time.
He waited through three anonymous dance tunes till he was reasonably sure she wasn't with anybody, except maybe a girlfriend with a white-blond ponytail tied up in a high knot on the crown of her head, and then he began to move his shoulders and let the beat infest him as he worked his way through the crowd on the dance floor. He danced opposite her through an entire interminable number, generating a real sweat and working the dregs of the sake back up from his legs to his head, before she noticed him, and when she did notice him it was with a look of surprise tailed by an unguarded smile. Which he took to be a good sign. After the next tune he shouted a few things at her and she shouted back-“Love the way you move; Hot tune, huh?; What'd you say your name was?”-and the wonderful thing, the amazing and insuperable thing, the thing that echoed in his brain even now was that he had no idea she was deaf. Because he was deaf too-everybody was deaf, at least until the lights went up and the DJ took away the thunder.
Deet-Deet was gone and he was standing there in the dissipating crowd and he had Dana by the hand, feeling the gentle pressure of her palm in his while she introduced the girl-woman-with the ponytail and another woman he hadn't registered, Mindy and Sarah, friends of hers from the apartments, and he was lucky, very lucky, because she never would have been out on a Monday except that it was her birthday. Yes, she was thirty-two-she made a face-and wasn't that ancient? Thirty-two? No, he protested, not at all. It was nothing. “Oh, yeah,” she said, her whole face opening up to him, the most expressive face he'd ever seen, the most sensual, the prettiest, and he noticed her accent, he did, but thought it was Scandinavian or maybe Eastern European, “then how old are you?” Well, he was twenty-eight. She was still grinning, her eyes crawling all over his face, “You see?” she crowed, and looked to Mindy and Sarah before coming back to him. “You're just a baby.”
They didn't get around to exchanging phone numbers, but despite the residual effects of the sake he did manage to commit her name to memory, and when he got home he looked her up in the phone book (D. “Halter, #31 Pacific View Court).” He called the next morning to ask her to dinner but there was no answer and the message on her machine, delivered in her hollow monotone, instructed him not to leave a message but to e-mail her, and gave a Hotmail address. As soon as he got to work he shot off an e-mail, relieved in a way to duck the uncertainty and potential embarrassment of direct contact-he barely knew her and she could turn him down, she could be married, engaged, actively uninterested or so pathologically dedicated to her career she excluded all else-and after typing in a witty line or two about the previous night he made his pitch. To his surprise, she answered within seconds-“Yes, it's just what I want, Italian, but only if you promise not to make me dance off all that pasta afterward,” and gave him directions to her apartment.
The complex was nice, nicer than his, and it sprawled over a hillside with mature plantings-birds-of-paradise, plantains, palms of every size and variety-but the numbers seemed to run in random patterns and he couldn't for the life of him find number 31, which, as far as he could tell, bore no relation to numbers 29 and 30, in front of which he'd already washed up twice. After he'd made three circuits of the place without luck, he stopped a woman about Dana's age who was just going down the steps with a cat on a leash. “Excuse me,” he said, “but do you know which apartment is Dana Halter's?”
She gave him a blank look.
“You know,” he said, ““Dana?” She's early thirties, about your height, dark hair, really pretty?”
He watched the light come into her face. “Oh, sure, yeah-sorry, sorry. You mean the deaf woman, right?”
It hit him with the force of epiphany. Suddenly it all made sense: her atonal voice, the non sequiturs, the fluidity of her face when she spoke, as if every muscle under the skin were a separate organ of communication. When he pushed the buzzer at her door it produced a persistent mechanical hum like any other buzzer, but at the same time a light began to flash in the apartment. And suddenly there she was, looking beautiful, her hands fluttering, her voice too loud as she greeted him, and she never took her eyes from his face, a kind of unwavering eye contact that made him feel either irresistible or self-conscious, he couldn't tell which. Then there was the CD he'd agonized over in the car (Would she judge him by it? Did she know the band? Did she like them?) but which she never mentioned, and there were the specials she didn't order, the dinner conversation that drifted from autobiography to mutual interests to politics and the environment and bogged down when he got excited and tried to talk too fast or with food in his mouth, but still he couldn't bring himself to broach the subject of her deafness. No one asked the blind kid at school how he'd lost his sight-he'd tell you in his own time (basement, pipe bomb)-and it would have been unthinkable to quiz the swimmer with the prosthetic leg at the health club. It just wasn't done. It was rude, a way of calling attention to their difference.
For her part, Dana waited till the meal was finished, till the waiter had cleared away their plates and they were both frowning over the dessert menu, before she lifted her head and said, “You know, I don't know if you noticed, but I have to tell you something”-she paused, holding him with her eyes, and then her voice boomed out so that the people two tables over turned to stare-“I'm deaf. Profoundly deaf. They put my hearing loss at close to a hundred decibels. You know what that means?”
He shook his head. The whole restaurant was listening.
“I can't hear a thing.”
He fumbled with the response-what could he say: “I'm sorry; It doesn't matter; The tiramisù looks good?”-and she thought it was hilarious. Her shoulders twitched, her eyes caught fire. She was beaming at him across the table, as triumphant as the grand prize winner on a quiz show. “I really put one over on you, didn't I?” she gasped, and laughed till he joined her and they both had to pound the table to keep from floating away.
Things moved slowly from there-she was busy; he was busy-but they graduated from dating (sushi, Thai, the art museum, movies, the beach) to a less formal arrangement, and before either of them realized it they'd come to depend on each other. San Roque was a small coastal city-89,000, if you could believe the population estimate posted at the city limits; perhaps twice that at the height of tourist season-and his apartment was ten minutes from hers on the quiet, uncongested streets. It was nothing to drop by, leave a message, meet for coffee or an impromptu concert (and yes, she loved concerts, classical, jazz, rock, fixated on the body language of the musicians as if she were watching a silent ballet). Rarely did a day go by when they didn't either see each other or at least communicate through e-mail and instant messaging. She was there suddenly, and she filled a hole in his life. He was in love. And so was she, because he could read the signs-her eyes, her hands, the expression on her face when he stepped into the room-and the signs were favorable, they made him feel god-like, as if he were The Kade himself. She'd watch his lips across the table in a coffeehouse and laugh out of all proportion to what he was saying. “Oh, yeah,” she'd say in her curious uninflected tones, her voice wavering and tossing till it smoothed out all the bumps, “you're a funny guy. You know that, don't you?” And then she'd quote some statistic she'd found in “Dear Abby” about how the majority of single women above all prized a sense of humor in their prospective mates.