Outside, as Linda perched on the edge of a chaise to remove her sandals, at a distance from the clustered sunbathers, a bearded man rose like a god or a devil from the Jacuzzi’s steaming foam and stood before her in a bikini brief that appeared to be laminated to his genitals. He was handsome, in a horrible sort of way, with too much curly body hair and too many large, perfect teeth bared in a relentless smile. “Hi, there. You’re new,” he said, and expertly flicked a few drops of water from his shoulder onto hers.
It might have been some kinky benediction or baptismal rite. Or maybe that moment of water play was considered an entire courtship around here. Not being with anyone for so long must have defused Linda’s desire, or maybe it was only another side effect of her pregnancy. Lately aside from her body’s general loneliness, she’d only experienced an occasional, mild carnal itch, which she could, so to speak, scratch herself. But now she was both aroused and repelled, which made her glance shyly away, and then stare back at him, glance away and stare again.
All that time he waited, looking amused and using up all of the highly charged air around them. Finally, he reached down and ran one puckered finger slowly across her collarbone, making her shudder and clench her teeth, as if he’d dragged a screeching piece of chalk across a blackboard. “So? Wanna get wetter?” he said, and Linda picked up her sandals and scurried back to her tomb.
Robin came awake when Linda fell into bed beside her. There was a tantalizing odor of sunshine emanating from Linda’s hair and skin—even, it seemed, from her breath. Why should she get to go out and have a good time while Robin had to stay locked up alone in this stupid place? There was nothing on television she wanted to see anymore and nothing else to do. The minute she shut the set off, unbidden images of her father rushed into her head: the way he’d been when he was alive, with his tender, oppressive love for her—his Roblet, his Redbird—and the way he was now, strewn among the pine needles and beer cans at that rest stop off the highway in Arizona. She’d have to turn the TV back on or escape into sleep, without any guarantee that her dreams wouldn’t be worse than her waking thoughts. Linda had fallen asleep almost immediately, and her monotonous breathing, the simple, solid fact of her being there, was getting on Robin’s nerves. She crept out of bed to the window, lifted one of the slats, and looked out at the pool. This was siesta time at Paradise, and there wasn’t anyone out there now. They were probably all in their rooms boinking their brains out. Nobody would know or care if she took a fast dip, if she jump-started her tan.
She ransacked the bureau drawers Linda had so neatly arranged until she found her blue bikini. The apartment keys were on top of the bureau, where Linda had dropped them, right next to the painting Robin’s dad had done last year of that park in Rahway. A bunch of fake-looking trees next to a fake-looking stream, and a couple of cartoony rabbits chasing each other in the foreground. Was that the flat way he saw things? Was that the way he saw her, like something Disney might have dreamed up? She wriggled into the bikini and stared at her three-dimensional face in the mirror. It was too round and babyish, and it was still that sickly white color, just like the rest of her, whiter than the Jersey snow she’d probably never see again. Well, she thought, grabbing the keys, she’d soon take care of that.
She swam several furious laps. Then she floated on her back with her hair streaming around her like seaweed and her face tilted up in sun worship. She’d found a bottle of baby oil on one of the abandoned chaises and had basted herself with it until she slid right off the chaise. Now, floating near the deep end, she felt a shadow pass over her, as if the sun had suddenly gone behind a cloud in that cloudless blue sky, and she opened her eyes. A fat woman in a flowered dress and high heels was standing there with her hands on her hips, huffing and puffing like a dragon. The flash of her gold bracelets and rings and neck chains was blinding. “What are you doing here?” she demanded, and Robin thrashed around and went under in an effort to right herself. When she came up again, flailing and sputtering, the woman was still standing there, blocking the sun. Robin hoisted herself out of the pool, not even bothering to swim to the ladder first. She grabbed her flip-flops and the keys and ran in the direction of Building C, without looking back. She thought she heard the jangle of jewelry, though, and the clatter of heels on the concrete path behind her. When she let herself into the apartment, Linda was still asleep. She looked dead lying there like that with her hands folded across her chest. Robin peeked out through the blind; the woman was nowhere to be seen.
Linda woke up to find Robin lying next to her, watching a game show. “I must have dozed off,” Linda said, yawning and stretching luxuriously, and Robin smirked. “You look a little flushed,” Linda told her. “I hope you’re not coming down with something.” She reached out to touch Robin’s forehead, but the girl shrugged her off.
“Leave me alone,” she said. “It’s just hot in here.”
The room was actually freezing, but there was no sense in arguing with Robin when she was like this. Instead, Linda went in to take a shower, thinking that the shower curtain or something in the bathroom smelled strangely of chlorine. It was probably only her imagination, or a sensory memory from that unpleasant moment near the pool.
That night, Linda kept her word to Robin; they had a good seafood dinner and went to see City Slickers afterward, a movie so hopelessly silly they laughed at it together, a rare and relaxing occurrence. But in the car going back to Paradise, while Robin kept spotting movie stars through the dark windows of passing limousines, Linda felt compelled to focus on more practical matters. The dinner and movie had been a big extravagance, and although an evening of such harmony was worth every penny, she knew that her days of idleness were numbered.
When they got back to the apartment, Linda found an envelope under the door. She hoped it wasn’t from that man at the pool; an unwanted suitor was the last thing she needed right now. She picked the envelope up before Robin noticed it, and tucked it into her pocket. Later, she locked herself in the bathroom and took it out and opened it. There was a typewritten note inside, with the apartment-complex logo and motto—“Pleasure, Privacy, Paradise!”—on top. The note itself was brief and impersonal. “Come to the office without fail at 9 a.m. tomorrow,” it said, and it was signed, “The Management.” No “Dear Tenant” or “Please,” or “Sincerely yours,” or anything polite and friendly like that. Linda wondered what they wanted, but it hardly mattered. She’d intended to go there first thing in the morning, anyway, to check herself out of this prison and back into real life.
The next day Robin’s good mood continued, and she helped Linda gather and pack up their things. Then Linda instructed her to lay low in the apartment while she walked over to the rental office to cancel their lease. “Don’t get lost now,” Robin teased, and she even wiggled her fingers at Linda in farewell.
Robin had hardly been at the pool at all yesterday when that fat witch showed up, but she still had a pretty impressive sunburn. If you squinted at it in the right light, it looked more tannish than pink. After Linda left, Robin knocked the ice cubes out of a freezer tray and ran a handful of them up and down her exposed skin, where they quickly melted, making her shiver and moan with pleasure.
Marlene was sitting at her desk, just as she had been that first night, but she looked up at Linda as if she’d never seen her before, nor hoped to ever again. “Yes?” she said.
“I’m Linda Reismann? Apartment 2, Building C?” She wished she could drop the questioning tone from her speech. “I got this note? But I really came in to say goodbye, anyway. You know, to check out?”
Marlene began clicking her nails on her computer pad. She stared at the monitor’s screen. “You’ve only been here nine days,” she said finally.
“I know,” Linda agreed. “But I think we need to move on now, to get something more … permanent.”
“Who’s we?” Marlene asked.
“Pardon?” Linda said. “Oh … I guess it’s just a habit I have. I was married for a whil
e.”
“Paradise has a two-week minimum, you know,” Marlene said.
“It does?” Linda said in dismay. She had hoped to work out a pro-rated fee.
“Didn’t you read your lease?” Marlene asked.
Linda shook her head. She remembered scribbling her initials and her name in several places, each time Marlene pointed with a blood-red fingernail and said, “Here,” and “Here,” and “Here.” And she remembered carrying a copy of the lease into the apartment that first night, but she didn’t read it then, and she hadn’t seen it since.
Marlene walked herself in her swivel chair to a file cabinet at the side of her desk, opened the top drawer, and pulled out a stapled sheaf of papers. “Here,” she said. “If you’ll look at page 4, clause 3, part F, you’ll see that underage occupants are strictly forbidden.”
“She’s only my sister visiting from the East—” Linda began weakly.
“Nor are outside overnight guests who are not registered with the office in advance,” Marlene said. “Next clause, part B.”
Linda went through the pages of the lease now, belatedly, mesmerized by the wordy clauses Marlene had mentioned, and by a multitude of others, about floods and firearms and willful destruction, all endorsed by her own careless signature.
“You realize you’ve forfeited your security deposit by not complying with the terms of the lease,” Marlene said.
Linda labored to clear her constricted throat. “Oh, but listen, Marlene,” she said, leaning earnestly over the desk. “I really was married, but he died, I mean he just dropped dead—his heart. We didn’t even get to use some of our wedding presents. And now I have his child to take care of, and there’s another one on the way!”
“We all have our troubles,” Marlene said. She rolled the lease up and slapped it against her palm, like someone slapping a rolled-up newspaper in warning to a bad dog. Linda stepped back. “And in case you were wondering, this lease is airtight,” Marlene went on. “Our attorney goes over everything himself, personally, with a fine-tooth comb.”
Why did that word “attorney” have a much more terrifying authority than “lawyer”? “But can’t you make an exception?” Linda pleaded. “Just this once? For human error?”
“This is a business, Ms. …” She paused and unfurled the lease. “Ms. Reismann. If we started making exceptions we’d soon be out of business, wouldn’t we?”
When Linda went past the humming maintenance building on her way back to Building C, the noise seemed louder than ever, as if it were following her, and she put her hands over her ears and began to run. By the time she got to the apartment, everything had fallen into place: her own selfish, abbreviated outing yesterday; Robin’s telltale sunburned face; that smell of chlorine in the bathroom.
Robin came to the door of the apartment carrying Wright’s painting of the park. “So are we sprung yet?” she said.
Linda glared at her. “You deliberately disobeyed me, didn’t you?”
“What? What did I do?” Robin asked.
“You know what you did. And she saw you, didn’t she?”
Robin’s eyes widened and then narrowed again, registering her understanding of what Linda had said. Still, she doggedly held out. “Who?” she said.
“Marlene, that’s who! And it cost us almost a thousand dollars!”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I lost my security deposit. Four weeks’ rent! I told you you couldn’t be seen outside. I told you there were rules here against children. There ought to be rules against having them in the first place!” Linda shouted.
“What are you yelling at me for? I didn’t ask to come here. And I didn’t ask to be born, either!”
“I didn’t mean that part,” Linda said. “Oh, God. I’m just upset.”
“I bet you are,” Robin said. “You threw away a thousand dollars of my dead father’s money! And you drag me across this whole stupid country so I can hide out in this dump and watch TV until I go blind!”
“Okay,” Linda said wearily. “I’m sorry. Let’s just drop it, okay? It’s over and done with.”
But Robin couldn’t let it go. All those accumulated days and nights of silence seemed to have led directly to this moment of release. “It’s not over,” she said. “Why can’t we just live somewhere, like normal people? I hate this place,” she continued, gesturing wildly with Wright’s painting, “and I don’t want to keep moving around like a bunch of gypsies. I want to have somebody to talk to, and I’d like to stay still long enough to get a tan. I’m sick and tired of this!”
“Me, too,” Linda said quietly, taking the painting from her, and all the air went out of their argument.
Later, after they found the place in Hollywood, and had put most of their things away, and sat down in the kitchen to eat supper, Robin said, “I should have drowned that fat bitch when I had the chance. Like her jewelry alone probably would have sunk her.”
“Let’s try and forget about it, Robin,” Linda said.
“She deserves to die.”
Linda had a vision of Robin’s mother, standing in her bathrobe in the doorway of her house in Glendale, with her bathrobed husband in the background, waving goodbye and telling them to keep in touch. “Right,” Linda said. “Fine. Now, do you want any more milk before I put it away?”
“If I had a gun, I’d go back there and shoot her,” Robin said. She pointed her trigger finger at the carton of milk Linda was carrying back to the refrigerator, and sighted it down the length of her bright pink arm. “Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!”
Linda flinched at each sharp explosion of sound, as if Robin held an actual gun and she was the intended target of her rage.
3
Homesick
LINDA HATED TO ADMIT it, even to herself, but sometimes she was as miserable as E.T. longing for his lost planet, or as wistful as Dorothy wanting Kansas again. In her own, more perverse case, it was New Jersey she missed. People back home used to tell her she’d miss the changing seasons out here, but that wasn’t it, exactly. When September came, she didn’t give that much thought to autumn leaves, or crisply cool air, or the way the pyracantha would always seem to catch fire about now. The steady heat in Los Angeles was sort of soothing, like being perpetually submerged in a warm tub, and the palm trees she could see from her living-room window had a certain tropical glamour. The Hollywood apartment was pretty similar to the garden apartment they’d left behind in Newark, with its pleasant, well-equipped kitchen and modern bathroom. And they had two small bedrooms, so she and Robin were able to get away from each other when they needed to, like fighters going to their separate corners until the bell rang for the next round.
Linda did wish she didn’t have to drive everywhere, that there was more public transportation, especially for Robin, who got so stir-crazy, but that wasn’t the principal problem, either. Of course she missed her old friends in Newark, but she was making some new ones here, which was more than Robin seemed to be doing. She’d started high school, though, and for several hours a day, at least, Linda knew where she was and that she was safely, if not happily, occupied.
Linda wasn’t that happily occupied herself. She had known that the job at the Whittier branch of Fred Astaire’s would only be temporary, under the circumstances. All she’d hoped for was to earn enough to see them through the worst of it. And of course she intended to go back to work again after the baby was born. She was a nervous wreck when she went for her interview, bearing Simonetti’s letter. She was badly out of practice, unfamiliar with the latest steps, and about eight pounds over her usual weight. But dancing was the one thing her body knew by heart, and when the manager put a Tito Puente tape on and held out his arms, she cha-cha-chaed right into them.
As she’d expected, the job wasn’t that great. Aside from their splashy sport shirts, California men who sought distraction and companionship in the arms of strangers weren’t very different from the ones back in Jersey. Their breath was just as hot and anxious, their hands a
s cold and slippery in hers, and their inner rhythm every bit as out of sync with the rhythm of the music. Before she started working, Linda had visited a low-cost maternity clinic at a nearby hospital, where she was pronounced perfectly healthy and given special prenatal vitamins. But her fatigue seemed to grow along with her pregnancy, and being whirled around the room several times a day in some dumb new dance craze called the Whiplash left her reeling with vertigo. So when Vicki Wheeler, another instructor, told her about an opening as a cocktail waitress in the Western bar where she moonlighted, Linda switched jobs.
She didn’t like leaving Robin alone until all hours of the night, but she kept in touch by phone whenever she could. Robin would growl about being checked up on, like a baby, but Linda was sure she detected relief in her voice as well. She was probably spooked by every little thing—the play of shadows on the wall, and real and imagined noises—the way Linda was at that age, when her mother was off somewhere taking care of someone else’s child. It was a time when tree limbs grew fingertips to scratch at the windows, and the closets became breeding places for murderous creatures.
Linda’s pregnancy was beginning to be burdensome, although that general sickish feeling had passed. She was into her fifth month and going to the clinic now for regular visits. In a booklet she’d found in the waiting room, she read that a pregnant woman sitting in a chair expended more energy than a man climbing a mountain. If that was true, Linda figured that standing in high-heeled cowgirl boots in the smoke and noise at Lucky’s Last Roundup, with bombed men trying to hit on her, was like scaling Mt. Everest on a nightly basis. She always longed to fall into bed afterward and sleep for about a hundred years. Still, if Robin happened to be awake when she came in, Linda forced herself to stay awake, too, and use that time to foster some closeness between them. To begin with, she wouldn’t mention the overpowering smell of pot in the apartment, or the incense burned to mask the smell of pot. “What kind of evening did you have, honey?” she would say, or “I didn’t even ask you about school yet today, did I?” Although questions about school always sounded insincere, even to her own ears, and Robin gave them short shrift.
Tunnel of Love Page 2
