What We Talk About When We Talk About Talking

My girlfriend Maggie was talking. Maggie was a phlebotomist, so she was used to talking as a distraction, and she was just a talker anyway. That night, though, she was talking because something was eating at her. What it was, I couldn’t tell at first.

This was in the summer a long time ago. We were at the kitchen table drinking vodka tonics and smoking cigarettes. She had scented candles burning, and the light from the moon angled in through the window over the sink. Her apartment. There’d been talk of me moving in, but that night, it was still her place.

As she started her second drink, we got around to the weirdo we’d seen earlier.

“ ‘She’s got to be your sister,’ ” she said in a fake deep voice.

It’s what the weirdo had said when we were walking home from the movies. He was a bony, forgotten man on the steps of the synagogue, but he had sharp black eyes. And he’d said Maggie had to be my sister.

“What was he trying to accomplish?” she asked. “I mean, what’d he expect? We’d stop and explain it to him?”

“I think he was trying to provoke us,” I said. “His way of starting an argument.”

“Don’t know. Strange.” She dropped her knuckles to the table. “Just weird.” She tilted her head down. I’d taken my glasses off, so her face looked hazy and spooky in the moonlight—like a long patch of blue with two eye holes and a mouth hole that would grow and shrink as she spoke. She looked like she was made of powder. I imagined her vanishing, fleck by fleck, until just a Maggie-shaped cloud of dust was left and then nothing.

The thought gave me the willies. I got up to fill my glass. I talked about the weirdo. “Maybe, you know, maybe he was just trying to say we look—similar.” I grinned.

“Who knows,” she said, drinking. “It’s like he was speaking a foreign language or something. Like if we could understand him, he’d be saying something horrible.”

“Like what?”

“Like he was insinuating something.” She tapped her index finger on the table, lit a cigarette.

“He was crazy or drunk,” I said. But as I stood at the counter, I thought maybe there was something to it. Maybe he saw something I didn’t.

“Maybe he just wanted to talk,” I said.

“But that’s not talking,” she said. “That’s monologue.”

“That’s talking.”

“But not necessarily communication.”

“I wasn’t talking about communication. Talking. Just talking.”

“What good is talking without communication?” She took a sip and winced. “I mean what good would it do to just yammer on about whatever if there’s no connection with anyone?” She was getting fired up. More like herself.

“What about talking to get things off your chest?” I asked. “Talking to purge.”

“Yeah, but at some point, there has to be some feedback. If you just sit there and talk on and on without stopping, I mean, you’d drive the other person away and not connect and there’d be the opposite effect. And then later, when you’re alone because you talked so much, you’d really need to talk, but you couldn’t because you talked so much.”

The room was thick with smoke.

“I suppose,” she said. “It’s okay sometimes. Like the other day, I had to bleed this nervous guy, so I did what we do—talked to get his mind off it. And it worked. I stuck him pretty good and even had to go in twice and fish around for the vein, but we were talking, so it didn’t matter. But that’s a rare instance, I suppose. Talking just to talk, I mean.”

I was at the sink, looking for another ashtray. I flicked my ashes into the drain.

“So what do you do?” I asked. “If you don’t say anything, the other person thinks you don’t care and drifts away. If you speak, you drive them away. Drift or drive.”

“Sweetie,” she said. “There’s something in between. It’s called communication. Actual connection.”

“Huh,” I said. I inhaled to say something else but just said, “Huh.”

* * *

Maggie had been in the bathroom for a few minutes when I heard the far-off rumbling of the train and its whistle at the crossing. I moved to the open window and tried to find the tracks out there in the dark, just on the other side of a line of trees. Then the sound got loud, and I saw the train. As it passed, a streetlight flashed in the gaps between the cars. There was a terrific screeching and thundering that shook the walls and clinked the glasses in the cupboard. That sound, like shrieking, did something to me. I fell to the couch as it tapered off. I stared out the window even though there was nothing to see. I was on the verge of something. I almost understood something. Something sad or beautiful. Both maybe. But whatever it was, it vanished when I heard the toilet flush.

Maggie came out drying her hands on an old calendar towel. I wanted to tell her how the train made me feel, that I felt like I was on the edge of understanding something that was beautiful or sad or both.

I said, “What happened to all the towels?”

“They’re in the hamper.”

“What are they doing there?”

“Hampering.”

“We need towels, don’t we?” I stood up, dizzy, and went close to her.

“Yeah,” she said. “We need towels.”

“I mean, I feel strongly about this. Jesus, we need towels.”

Maggie picked something from her tongue.

“Let’s do laundry,” I said.

“Let’s not.”

“What else are we going to do?”

“I don’t—“

“We’ll just put a load in. Bring some drinks, make a party of it.”

“Jesus,” she said.

It was ten o’clock. We didn’t bring drinks, but we put towels and panties and jeans in a basket and walked across the parking lot to the deserted laundromat.

As Maggie stuffed the machine, I sat in a plastic molded seat. I felt like saying something.

“Hey,” I said. “Hey. Wouldn’t it be neat if we could record how long we’ve talked? I mean altogether. You know, like a transmitter implanted in our brains that could record each conversation somewhere so you could go back and tell how long you talked and what it was all about.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Neat.” She clattered coins in the machine.

“What’s the longest we ever talked? In one shot, I mean.”

“No idea.” She leaned against a machine and looked at me, crossing her arms under her breasts. I rubbed my eyes with my fingertips beneath my glasses.

I said, “You gotta be my sister.”

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “What a creepy thing.”

“Why creepy?”

“It just makes me wonder.” She sat next to me. “How do we look to other people? I mean we must seem like we can’t stand each other or something.” She stared at the floor.

“Doesn’t matter. What do other people care? That guy was drunk or crazy.”

She put her hand on the inside of my thigh. “Let’s leave this,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. And to be sure, I said it again: “Okay.”

In the parking lot, we walked holding hands. Some clouds moved in front of the moon, and the landscape darkened. I said, “Hey,” but I stopped when I heard something down near the chain-link fence at the edge of the lot. There was a stray cat pawing at it, and when I went up to him, he tensed like he was going to pounce on me. I headed a few feet down the fence and lifted the bottom. The cat ran under, into the gully on the other side.

When I let the fence go, it cut into my arm. It didn’t bleed at first, just a bubble, but then a streak went to my wrist and started dripping. Maggie swayed when she leaned over, but then she saw my arm and put her hand on the cut. Like that, we shuffled to the apartment.

I sat on the kitchen counter while she did the bandage. She finished and kissed it. “How’s it feel?”

“I can’t feel it.”

“You will.”

I stood down from the counter. “I don’t feel,” I said.

She poked my arm. “Like spiders? How do you feel about spiders?”

I got back on the counter. “Let’s talk about something else. What do you want to talk about, sis?”

“I don’t know, bro. Drift or drive maybe. That’s a good one. Or how about how long the connection can last? Is that what you wanted to talk about?”

This is what I said: “I wanted to say that I don’t think I could talk to anyone like I talk to you. In fact you’re the only one. You’re the only one I ever talk to. That’s what I wanted to say about talking.”

“Is that all?”

“What else is there?”

“We’re just talking about talking, then? Talking about talking about talking? Where does it end? What would we talk about if we talked about—”

“It’s bleeding,” I said. I looked at my arm.

“Hold on,” she said and got the first-aid kit. While she cleaned the cut and wrapped it again, I kissed her forehead.

“Thanks,” I said.

As she moved away, I held my arm. I could feel the pressure, the tightness of the bandage, and the blood beneath it, trying to get out.