The sun was behind them when they rolled across the George Washington Bridge and into Manhattan, a place he'd seen only in movies, and here it was, the whole city bristling like a medieval fortress with a thousand battlements, each of them saturated with the pink ooze of the declining day. Dana directed him through the narrow canyons cluttered with nosing cabs and double-parked trucks, the evening lifted up and sustained on a tidal wave of cooking, a million fans blowing mu shu and tandoori and kielbasa and double cheeseburger and John Dory and polpettone up off the stove and out into the street. There was a smell of dogshit underneath it, of vomit, rotting garbage, flowers in bloom, diesel. He cranked down the window to absorb it. “Turn here,” Dana said, using her hands for emphasis. “At the next light, turn left.” The parking garage (they were somewhere on the Upper East Side, and he knew that because she told him) cost as much overnight as an entire month's parking had cost him in college, but Dana was paying and it didn't seem to faze her all that much, and then it was twilight and the lights of the city came to life as if in welcome.
There was a negotiation with the doorman, a logbook in the lobby that had to be signed, and then they were stepping out of the elevator on the nineteenth floor, and Dana's mother was there to greet them. She was shorter than her daughter by two or three inches, her hair the color of those copper scrubbers you buy at the supermarket, insistently slim, twice divorced, with a face that had to reshape itself every time she smiled or grimaced, as if it hadn't yet discovered its final form (a reaction to her new dentures, as he was to learn within two minutes of stepping through the door of the apartment). As for the apartment, it was bigger than he'd expected, one door leading to another and then another like something out of Kafka. Or Fincher. It had that claustrophobic cluttered three-shades-too-dim hazy atmosphere Fincher liked for his interiors and Bridger wasn't especially happy with it. If it had been something he was playing with on his computer, that would be another thing, but as it was he was almost afraid to sit on the couch in the living room for fear of sticking to it. So what did he think? Like mother, like daughter-Dana wasn't exactly the most organized person he'd ever met.
“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Halter,” he said, standing awkwardly in the middle of the front room. The shades were drawn. There was a smell of cat litter-or, more properly, cat urine.
“Call me Vera,” Mrs. Halter said, pushing him down in an easy chair strewn with knitting projects in various stages of completion and fussing over a bottle of wine-she couldn't seem to get the cork out-and a can of mixed nuts that featured Mr. Peanut against a midnight-blue background, but she wasn't Mrs. Halter anymore, anyway. “Dana's father left me for an “older” woman, if you can believe it,” she told him, “but that was ten years ago.”
“Mom,” Dana said. “Don't start. We just got here.” She'd draped herself across the couch in the corner, her bare legs pale against the dark pool of cracked green leather.
“Somebody at work. He's a lawyer, I don't know if Dana told you that… Anyway, I took my second husband's name-Veit-not because I have anything against Rob-that's Dana's father-but because I got used to it. It's punchier too: Vera Veit. VV” She set the wine bottle down on the coffee table to mold a figure in the air with the white slips of her hands. “Kind of sexy, don't you think?”
“Mom,” Dana said, and it carried no inflection, a complaint that had hung in the air since she was a long-legged preternaturally beautiful teenager who could never hit the right key, never influence a discussion or argument or participate in the roundabout of family ritual without involving her hands and her face and her body. He noted that, noted the way she became a teenager all over again the minute they walked in the door and her mother embraced her and held her and swayed back and forth in perfect harmony with her internal rhythms. It was all right. Everything was all right. For the first time since they left Tahoe, he could relax.
For the next half hour the conversation bounced round the room like a beach ball they were all intent on keeping in motion-a few questions about Bridger, his profession, his income, his prospects, leading to Vera's expressing her outrage over “this identity theft thing” and implying that Dana must somehow have called it down on herself through her own carelessness, to which Dana responded in the angriest, most emphatic Sign he'd ever seen-and then the ball dropped and the three of them sat there staring at one another like strangers until Dana's mother stood up abruptly and said, “So you must be hungry. You didn't eat on the road, did you? Dinner, I mean?”
Until she mentioned it, he hadn't realized how hungry he was. They hadn't stopped, even for a Coke, since breakfast (technically lunch, and he had a queasy recollection of grilled cheese, fries and a side salad with a dollop of very old ranch dressing), pushing on through just to get it over with, as if the drive were a prizefight and they were punch-drunk and reeling and praying for the bell at the end of the fifteenth round to release them. He heard himself say, “Sure. Yeah. But don't go to any trouble-”
“Oh, it's no trouble,” she assured him, reaching for the telephone on the table beside her. “I'll just call Aldo's and have them send something up. You do eat meat, right?” she asked, looking to Bridger, and then, without waiting for an answer, she turned to Dana. “Is the osso buco okay with you? You always liked osso buco.”
Dana didn't respond-she wasn't even looking.
“And soup. Anybody want soup? They do a nice pavese-you want soup, Bridger? Salad? Anything to start-crostini? Calamari, maybe?”
After dinner, which they ate off of heavy china plates balanced on their knees while sipping what Dana's mother kept calling “a really nice Bardolino,” Dana made a show of taking the things out to the kitchen to wash up. Bridger had risen from his chair in a half-hearted attempt to intercede, signing “Let me do it,” but Dana ignored him even as her mother sang out, “No, no, you sit down, I want to talk to you.” She had a coquettish look on her face as she added, “So we can get acquainted. All right? You don't mind that, do you? Getting acquainted?” And then she rose and refilled his glass, murmuring, “And have some wine. It's good for you. Good for the heart.”
The first thing she did was inform him of the grim statistics-he knew, didn't he, that ninety percent of the deaf married their own kind and that of the ten percent who married into the hearing world, ninety percent of “them” wound up divorced?
“Yes,” he said, leaning back in the easy chair and taking a moment to wet his lips with the wine, “that was one of the first things Dana told me after we met. After we started dating, I mean.”
“Not a happy number.”
“No.” The Bardolino had gone to his legs-he'd already drunk too much-and he felt paralyzed from the waist down. Not that he was uncomfortable, not anymore. Or not especially. The place was growing on him-so was Dana's mother. The food had been good, great even, still hot when she artistically slipped one item after another from the sealed Styrofoam boxes onto the plates, and the wine was whispering its secrets to him in a way that made the tensions of the road fade away to nothing.
Dana's mother was leaning forward, both elbows braced on her knees. “So you're not the type that's easily daunted-and you love her. You love my daughter. Or am I wrong?”