Chatter

by Perrin Ireland

Genres: Literary Fiction; Humor & Satire

Synopsis

Michael and Sarah's marriage is already in trouble. But the revelation that Michael has a daughter he's never mentioned—and only just met—pushes their relationship to the breaking point. His secrecy about the past, his compulsion to visit his ex-lover, and the sudden presence of his beautiful, grown daughter in their lives drives Sarah to search for the truth—a search that takes her from Washington, D.C., to Latin America.

Chatter is a snapshot of a marriage taken against the landscape of our frenetic culture, where invasive news reports, overheard conversations, and screaming headlines punctuate our days. Its dead-on dialogue captures the collapse of communication and the tension created when discussions go unfinished and questions go unanswered.

Balancing humor and terror, Ireland brilliantly depicts the elusiveness of security—globally and in our own homes—and the longing to find that safe place in a loved one's arms.

Release date: October 23, 2007

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 245

Sample

 



Sarah could see half of her face in the mirror. She got dizzy when she thought about when you’re looking at your right side in the mirror it’s your left side.

She pressed her toes onto the cool white plastic scale, which was in Michael’s bathroom.

On the shelf above the toilet, a scrap of paper stuck out from under shaving cream. Sarah moved the can of shaving cream and picked up the paper, which had been folded in half, and then half again. An odd hiding place.

Should she open it?

It was a message for Michael from one of those telephone answering pads. Camila Rodriguez had called, and the call was checked Urgent. Two days ago. Michael’s secretary must have asked for the purpose of the call. “He’ll know” was scrawled on the form.

This was not a name Sarah knew. She knew all of his business associates, all of his friends.

A Miami area code. Michael traveled frequently to Miami, often on his way to Latin America.

If Sarah mentioned the message to Michael, it would be considered evidence of snooping, a sin without equal. She tucked the note back under the can, which waited to eject its grinning white foam.

It was 6:30 p.m.

Al Qaeda had released a new video.

“IN THE SOAPS,” Sarah said, “the husbands never go to work, preferring to stay at home to discuss relationships.”

“I had to give a speech to the group from China,” Michael said.

“And the husbands in the soaps rent entire restaurants, with bands, to celebrate their anniversaries.”

“When I got back from the meeting, I had 243 e-mails.” He tossed his briefcase on the floor, his jacket on the chocolate-stained antique chair. “How’s Rachel?”

“I don’t understand why my friends have cancer and the leader of North Korea doesn’t.” Sarah rose from the sofa, jeans bunched at the knee, and he followed her into the kitchen, where a microwave flashed the wrong time and splashes of water surrounded the dog dish.

“Why don’t we get that thin pizza anymore?” he asked.

“There comes a point when you want a Dove Bar more than a roll in the hay.”

“When did you start calling it a roll in the hay?”

“Norma saw you at lunch with someone who looked like the saleswoman from the Harley dealership.”

“The new actuary.”

“Here,” she said. “Use my napkin. You spilled some on your shoe, too.”

THEY’D BEEN MARRIED eighteen years, following divorces, and he had a daughter, Lisa, who’d lived with Sarah and Michael when she was a teenager; Sarah had no children of her own.

He was great-looking and mischievous and charming, particularly with company, and when she was younger, Sarah looked at least as good as other young women.

Their wooden house was old on the outside and new on the inside. One realtor called it Colonial, another identified it as Greek Revival—Sarah went with that.

SHE WIPED CONDENSATION from the windshield as the car in front of theirs loomed larger. The bumper sticker referred to unions, but the lettering was old and weak.

Michael drummed his fingers on the steering wheel; they had an agreement that he wouldn’t drive more than fifteen miles an hour faster than the speed limit. He was in a hurry even though she was dragging him to the appointment.

Michael would be thinking about his numbers. Percentages, risk.

Sarah had a section in her closet for corporate wife clothes and another larger section for jeans and black. A jewelry box for demure earrings, another for dangling eccentrics.

The car accelerated, and suburban houses morphed into high rises. They passed a flag at half-mast, a crumpled mass of blankets. Yesterday Sarah had seen a program about children who’d lost limbs to land mines; the possibility of being a force for good in the world seemed remote.

In the backseat, Random, the beagle, ripped into a piece of Kleenex. A bottle of water—still, not sparkling—rolled across the floor, and candy wrappers filled the trash receptacle. Michael chewed gum, which he promised to dispense with before they met someone who mattered.

“I was thinking of writing a different kind of novel,” Sarah said. “About a married couple.”

“What’s the plot?”

“Someone’s a murderer.”

“Did you see that Ferrari back there? The red one? It’s the new model.”

They passed a newsstand. “Terrorist Chatter Up.”

• • •

SARAH STRAIGHTENED THE frame of the terrible poem on the waiting room wall. Her relationship to poetry was tenuous but deeply felt. She planned to read ten poems a day, to stay smart, but didn’t.

Michael flipped through Psychology Today, bouncing his leg until the chair shook, and paused at an article about runner’s high.

A tree with bright purple blossoms startled at the window.

An elderly woman entered, tugging a small girl. A warm grandmother could save a girl’s life, Sarah had learned that from a psychologist friend. All it takes is one good person. Sarah had known none of her grandparents. Michael’s grandfather, head of the household during the frequent occasions when Michael’s father was overseas, had been alcoholic.

Michael held the magazine in front of his face.

“Hello,” Sarah said.

SHE PRECEDED MICHAEL into the counselor’s office, where they’d been coming for two months, and sat in her chair. “We’ve been getting along fairly well since last time.”

Michael scratched his left calf. He had runner’s calves and slender ankles.

“More positive,” Sarah said. “He’s less likely to fly off the handle.” She brushed a hair off her jeans, and wondered where the expression came from, fly off the handle. Her hard chair was the low, scooped-out plastic kind that used to look space-agey and now looked dated. The white noise machine hummed happily outside the door, and the rug, which was geometric rather than floral, smelled of wet wool.

The things she wanted to say she couldn’t.

Sometimes she was hard on Michael, she was learning, which was a shock to her. What he was learning was a mystery.

A photograph of two men with their arms linked sat on the desk.

“A few days ago he told me I looked good,” Sarah said. “It felt a little like handsome, but still …”

Michael wore a maroon tie; most of his ties were maroon, because they go with white shirts and suits that are blue, black, gray, or brown. Today was gray.

“We’re not the sort of married people who don’t talk to each other at restaurants,” Michael said.

“He writes wonderful letters when we’re apart,” Sarah said. “I don’t understand the discrepancy between what he says to me and what he writes to me.” She glanced at the shelves; all the books were about diving. “Michael refuses to discuss parts of his past.”

An anxious-looking window washer peered in from scaffolding.

“WILL YOU BE TURNING out the light soon?” Michael slid Bikers’ World to the floor by the bed and turned on the television. Sarah hadn’t told him that middle-aged men look silly on motorcycles, sirens screaming MIDLIFE CRISIS!

“Soon,” Sarah said, scribbling notes on the last page of the paperback she was reading, Why Did I Ever.

Michael flipped to the weather. The TV sat on an airy, Plexiglas stand, and wasn’t hidden the way their neighbors’ sets were.

“I don’t know when I’ve felt so hopeless,” Sarah said, wearing a wrinkled Formaggio T-shirt.

“Partly sunny tomorrow,” Michael said.

“I was thinking of calling the husband Cooper, and the wife’s name is Susannah, or Whitney.”

“What are you titling it?”

“Susannah and Cooper.”

“You usually have more interesting titles.”

“I’m hoping someone will think it’s a romance and buy it by mistake.” Sarah’s dwindling interest in romance concerned her, although she did like sentimental television movies about princesses and movie stars.

“Did you like Ed’s jacket?” Michael asked, turning the clock to face the wall. “I like the old aviator jackets.” His hair whirled in the back from slouching in his chair.

“I once loved a man for the cracks in his leather jacket,” Sarah said. “Do you think they should have a dog? Maybe a small one.” She scratched out a sentence. “I got tickets for the Soweto Gospel Choir tomorrow night.” Politics, God, and art were three of her favorite things, and music was king of the arts, although she couldn’t make it herself. Sometimes when musicians played together it was sexier than sex.

“I go to New York tomorrow,” Michael said.

“The husband’s having an affair,” Sarah said.

IF HE IS HAVING an affair, I’m cutting out the crotches of his suits, unless that’s a cliché, and I believe it is. Sarah slipped her feet into the steel stirrups.

“Don’t worry,” the gynecologist said. “I didn’t have time to shave my legs either. Scoot closer.” Her blonde curls drizzled over black eyes.

A rack of pamphlets about battered women and sexual abuse hung next to the door beside a notice announcing that you should ask your doctor if she’s washed her hands. Sticks with cotton at the end stuck out of a glass jar on the counter.

Sarah wanted to feel safe. She got physically ill when Michael was out of town—fever, nausea, fatigue, trembling, breathlessness. She felt faint. And got well the second he returned. The doctor’s window faced the parking lot. Were there men with binoculars?

“Relax,” the doctor said.

The smudge on the ceiling looked like Mount Fuji.

“Now you’ll feel the speculum.”

She got Fuji and Kilimanjaro mixed up.

“The clamp.”

“How’s your baby?” Sarah asked. The woman’s breasts, near to overflowing, pushed against her blouse.

“I’m not getting any sleep,” the doctor said.

“I tried Benadryl,” Sarah said.

“Now the pap smear.”

Melatonin never worked.

“I’ll do the manual exam. You’ll feel pressure.”

Pressure. Michael had had affairs in his previous marriage, although his wife went first, he said. Sarah’s mother had had an affair. Was it, or was it not, justifiable?

Pressure. And Sarah’s first husband had had affairs. Before that, she had a fiancé killed in Vietnam, but this was not the sort of list you could put in a novel, for example, to indicate why a character had certain fears. Overkill.

SARAH PICKED UP the phone and listened for a dial tone, but it seemed to be working. Michael had usually called by now. Eight hours since he left for New York. She couldn’t find the slip of paper with the name of his hotel.

If she had a real job, she wouldn’t be obsessing about Michael, and she wouldn’t be obsessing about Michael if he hadn’t been unusually evasive. He was always evasive when there was something important that he didn’t want her to know, something she wouldn’t be happy knowing, but he’d never been this secretive, this nervous. She replaced the receiver and reached for the frayed red leash. Random ran in circles.

The door slammed behind them, and Sarah marched purposefully toward the park, past pale spring leaves like Baby Bibb lettuce, past a flag at half-mast. She crossed the street to avoid the large boxer, and Random circled her and lunged forward before Sarah turned and unwound herself. A pedestrian approached, and Sarah moved to the right of the sidewalk, but the man continued to hug the same side, so Sarah stepped to the left just as he moved in the same direction. She stopped, and let him pass.

At the traffic light she pivoted, blocks short of the park, and returned to the house; she picked up the phone and listened for a dial tone.

THE GAP SELLS BRAS—who knew. Sarah followed twenty-four-year-old Lisa, Michael’s daughter, on her serpentine trek through counters and racks, as bright overhead lights illuminated the size-two students who populate Harvard Square. Forget buying a bathing suit here.

Lisa checked the size of a black T-shirt, the trace of a sesame noodle shiny on her lime green spaghetti-strap blouse. Her black lace-up boots opened untied at the top, and a short, sprightly ponytail sprang from the crown of her head, the kind five-year-olds wore in Sarah’s day. Last Christmas Sarah had given Lisa clothes that Sarah considered appropriate; it was one of the few times Lisa had become enraged with her.

“Have you heard from your father since he left on his trip?” Sarah asked, ten hours after his departure. Michael called while waiting for planes and room service.

“Where is he this time?” Lisa asked.

Multicolored tank tops hung next to striped and dotted bikini underpants (high cut), and mittens and scarves decorated a far wall. The sales clerks were also young and thin.

Women holding clothes lined up for fitting rooms. “She said all the adulterers in the room should stand up,” one said to another.

“My mother’s having a hard time again,” Lisa said. “One crying jag after another.”

“Sorry …” Sarah said, bumping into another shopper.

“Cries and cries …” Lisa said. “She says if I went back to live with her, that would help.”

Racks of jeans stood at attention like armies.

THE BABY BLUE Virgin Mary watched as Sarah hurried, late, across the lawn to Michael’s boyhood home, just twenty minutes from Boston. It was uphill, across freshly cut grass, the sweet smell of it reaching the porch of the small, steep-roofed wooden house. When Michael was out of town, Sarah filled her days with appointments, this time with overdue visits to relatives.

Paul, Michael’s father, opened the door, as Marie, Michael’s mother, craned her neck to see from the living room; Sarah hugged Paul, lingering on the navy blue velour shirt. He was bald in front, with a mustache that was whiter than the hair on his head.

“Where is he this time?” he asked. “Why don’t you go with him?”

On a shelf, a photograph of seven-year-old Michael wearing an Indian headdress. An only child is a lonely child—was that true? A picture of Lisa with her mother and a younger Michael on a sailboat.

“Come sit by me, hon.” Marie patted the flowered sofa. Her henna hair looked mistaken.

A Dean’s Auto Parts pen rolled across the coffee table; Paul had worked in the auto repair business after retiring as a sergeant in the army. A ragged recipe had been torn out of a magazine.

“Hungry?” Marie asked, as Sarah sat down.

“I had several tablespoons of peanut butter before I came.”

Marie reached over to pinch Sarah’s cheek. “Like a bird.” She leaned back against the sofa. “Lisa’s mother is having a hard time again. Cries and cries … She thinks we should spend Christmas together.”

Paul punched a CD into a player, and Frank Sinatra began to sing. Paul bowed and extended a dancing hand to Sarah, his tummy pouring over his belt.

“I don’t remember how,” she said, sliding her feet under the sofa.

“I do.”

“Was Sinatra mafia?” she asked.

“We have eggplant parmesan,” Marie said. She was thin, w. . .