Tunnel of Love

by Hilma Wolitzer

  In Linda’s opinion, all men’s bodies were dear and comical, with their basic planes and showy baggage, and Manny’s was no exception. His midsection gave evidence of gravity’s pull, but his arms and shoulders were ropy with muscle, from so many years of lifting heavy crates and boxes. He had two significant scars, whose origin she would learn about afterward, a wrinkled pink splotch on his chest from a childhood collision with a boiling teakettle, and a smaller white depression on his shoulder, where a bullet had grazed it during a holdup at the store years before.

  If you can’t feel desire for every man who desires you, Linda thought, the very least you can feel is fondness, pity, kinship. She felt all of these things as she gathered Manny in. At one point, he groaned and said, “Linda, honey, I’m old enough to be your … And Linda put her fingers to his lips and finished the sentence for him. “Lover,” she said. “You’re old enough to be my lover.”

  It was much better and simpler, she told herself later, than rabid sexual heat, with all its crazy complications of obsession and jealousy. Back in Newark, when she was safely married, she used to listen in wonder as a couple of other instructors at Fred Astaire’s complained about men who cheated and bullied and lied, and with whom there was a constant furor of breakups and reconciliations. “That bastard,” one of the women once said. “I’ll cut it off him before we’re through.” But she came in the very next day with her eyes shining and her lips bruised from kissing.

  Manny assured Linda that his three daughters—who were all married and lived in various places around the country—would be crazy about her, which she couldn’t imagine, since she was two years younger than the youngest one. They’d probably think she was a gold digger, or worse. She had a clear memory of the icy reception Robin gave her when Wright brought her home for the first time, the way she’d refused to make eye contact or lower the music blaring from her stereo. Linda dreaded ever having to meet Manny’s daughters almost as much as she dreaded Robin’s reaction to this latest turn of events in her life. But to her surprise and relief Robin didn’t appear to mind at all. She seemed to take Manny’s being both boyfriend and boss right in stride. They hadn’t said anything to her about their physical relationship, and Manny never stayed overnight at their place, but there were still plenty of clues, especially a new playfulness between Linda and Manny, a habit of innocent touching that intimated something less innocent. And he was there more than ever, bringing silly and lavish gifts and the welcome bulk and noise of his presence. Linda wasn’t allowed to drink alcohol, so he chose sparkling nonalcoholic treats for their at-home dinners, and he always brought little bags of taco chips and peanuts from the store for Robin.

  One evening in early November he arrived at their apartment with a dusty, beribboned bottle of champagne. “My wine mavens tell me this is good stuff,” he said, holding the bottle up. “We’ll pop it open in January and drink to the little fishie.” For a few silent seconds they all gazed into the pleasant, blurry vista of the future, but in the meantime the bottle needed to be stored somewhere, lying on its side. Somewhere cool and dark where it wasn’t likely to be disturbed, Manny said. Robin volunteered her closet floor, and the champagne was laid to rest on a tangled nest of sneakers, blue jeans, and dirty socks. “Perfect,” Manny pronounced, as he peeked in. “I can see that nobody’s disturbed this place in years. What a photo op for The Wine Spectator!” Robin actually chuckled and punched him lightly on the arm.

  Linda would never have gotten away with teasing her like that, any more than she could get away with honest praise. If Manny said something flattering about Robin’s skin or hair, she might stick her tongue out at him, but she’d still flush with pride and toss her glorious white-blond mane around. If Linda offered her an identical compliment, Robin would bemoan her inability to tan “like every normal person in California,” and she’d threaten to shave her head. And if Robin ever happened to punch Linda, she was positive it would hurt. Manny had mellowed Robin, had civilized her; that was his special brand of white magic, and he had worked it on both of them. When Linda was convinced she was hideously huge, too grotesque to even be seen in public, he told her she looked radiant. Radiant. Spunky. He was reinventing her.

  The job was working out well, too. Men buying their whiskey by the bottle didn’t seem to mind the bloated sight of her as much as the ones who’d bought it by the glass at Lucky’s. And Troy and William, the two stock clerks at the Liquor Barn, and Rosalia, the other cashier, were all helpful and friendly. Their lively banter, the jangling of the sleigh bells on the door when a customer came in, Manny’s hearty greeting, and the computer beeps of the cash registers had become the gratifying sounds of Linda’s daily life. Manny insisted that she take a maternity leave, with pay, beginning a month before her due date. And whenever she decided to come back to work, she could keep the baby with her behind the counter, in a basket. He hinted at marriage, without actually proposing it, and she deflected that possibility without completely discouraging it. It was something that couldn’t really be properly addressed until after the baby was born. Each day, Linda’s attention was drawn more and more toward that event, the way she imagined the terrified and exhilarated passengers of a space shuttle narrowed their concentration as they counted down toward liftoff. She had packed her overnight bag and shopped for baby furniture and nursing bras and a layette. Manny instructed Robin to call him when Linda’s time came, so he could drive her to the hospital, and Linda’s friend, Vicki, had volunteered to be the backup driver.

  Vicki told Linda she was a lucky dog to have someone like Manny waiting in the wings for her. “He may seem a little on the ripe side to someone your age,” she said, “but then your average chick doesn’t come equipped with a teenage kid and one in the oven.” Vicki, who wouldn’t divulge her own age, except to say that her parts warranty hadn’t run out yet, had been a showgirl in Vegas, and then a blackjack dealer, before coming to L.A., and Fred Astaire’s and Lucky’s. She’d been married three times, but, as she put it, “none of them ever took,” as if she were referring to organ transplants from donors who weren’t the right genetic match. “I can never seem to love the guys I pick half as much as they love themselves,” she said, sighing. Lately, she’d been seeing a married man, at his convenience, an arrangement that troubled Linda. She saw it as both a transgression and a dead end. Her father, she suspected, had cheated on her mother, another source of anger and sadness in their household.

  Vicki said, “But all the single guys I meet are either gruesome or gay. And I’ve used up my own husbands. If I don’t sleep with someone else’s, I’d have to sleep alone forever. Wouldn’t that be sad?”

  “Yes,” Linda said, “but this is sad, too.”

  Vicki told her not to worry—she could take care of herself. She worried about Linda, though, bopping from job to job like that while her bills piled up and her belly grew. Manny was what Vicki’s mother, back in Akron, would call a real good catch. If Linda’s mother were alive, she’d probably have said the same thing. “If you don’t want him, honey,” Vicki said, only half joking, “I’d be happy to take him off your hands.”

  But Linda did want Manny. There were plenty of other saving graces in this world besides passion, weren’t there? Manny was the perfect antidote to Robin’s bitterness, and the only rational solution to Linda’s irrational wish to have Wright restored to their lives. He was the second chance hardly anyone ever gets, and she’d be a fool to pass him up.

  5

  The Good News and the Bad News

  WHEN LINDA WENT INTO labor, Robin didn’t call either Manny or Vicki, as she had promised to do. It started at about two o’clock in the morning on December 28, almost a week before the baby’s official due date. Robin woke from a crazy dream in which she was swimming frantically across the Pacific Ocean, dodging sharks and submarines, when she heard Linda shuffling down the hallway to the bathroom. For the past couple of weeks, the baby seemed to be dancing a jig on Linda’s bladder, and she’d been going
back and forth to the bathroom all night, finding her way there with her eyes still shut, like a single-minded sleepwalker. Robin, who used to sleep through everything, from Linda’s restlessness to random screaming in the streets, was alerted somehow lately, and would jerk awake at the slightest noise in the apartment. Then she would lie there in a semi-doze until she heard the toilet flush and Linda’s bare feet padding back to her own bedroom. This time, though, Robin realized that several minutes had passed and Linda had never left the bathroom. “Linda?” she called. “You okay?” There was no answer, so she went to the bathroom to investigate. She found Linda sitting on the toilet, with her head resting against the tiled wall. Her face was greenish and sweaty and she didn’t look up when Robin appeared in the doorway. “You okay?” Robin asked again.

  “Ohhh,” Linda moaned. “I guess so. I just keep feeling as if I have to go, you know, move my bowels, but then I can’t.”

  “Could it be the baby?” Robin asked, feeling a slight push in her own bowels.

  “Oh, I doubt that,” Linda said, as if her due date was still months away, or as if she was thinking: what baby is that? But after sitting there for a while longer without feeling relieved of that peculiar pressure, she asked Robin to call the doctor. By the time the doctor called back, Linda had discharged a little bloody plug of mucus and her contractions had begun. She was advised to wait at home until they became regular and were ten minutes apart.

  That took almost three hours, during which Linda and Robin played numerous hands of War, Spit, and Stealing the Old Man’s Bundle on Linda’s bed. The few times Robin had deigned to play cards with Linda before, when Robin was the one in bed, with a bad cold or her monthly cramps, Linda had contrived to let her win most of the hands, a practice that Robin quickly recognized and resented. Did Linda think she was playing with some stupid little crybaby sore loser? Robin, who held her cards close to her chest and played with genuine strategy and a killer instinct, would have won fair and square, anyway. And the few times she couldn’t win, because of incredibly bad luck, she cheated, which was cinchy to do, with Linda exposing her own cards like that, and thinking over every move for about a year. Now, though, with Linda propped against two pillows like a fat, invalid child, Robin felt grudgingly inclined to let her win a couple of times.

  When the contractions were fifteen minutes apart, Linda showered and shampooed her hair, while Robin sat on the closed toilet seat, timing her progress with the big, noisily ticking alarm clock. The pains couldn’t be too bad, Robin figured, because Linda was singing over the water’s gush, as usual, loudly and off-key. She sang lively, upbeat numbers, “Finally” and “Something to Talk About,” really belting them out, and occasionally hitting high notes beyond her normal range. It was a wonder none of their neighbors called to complain, the way they did whenever Robin turned up the volume on her stereo. When Linda emerged from the shower, though, she grew strangely quiet, as if she were listening for something far away. The contractions were coming closer now, about eleven or twelve minutes apart, and they were also deeper and more urgent. “You’d better call Manny,” she finally told Robin. “This doesn’t feel very good.”

  Robin went to the telephone, but instead of calling Manny, she called for a taxi. She liked Manny a lot, but they hardly knew him, he was just a stranger, when you really thought about it. This business of the baby had nothing to do with him; it was between her and Linda. When Robin told the taxi dispatcher their destination and that he’d better hurry up, he said, in a suspicious voice, “You’re not having a baby, are you?” The asshole was probably worried they’d mess up his cab. “No,” Robin told him. “I’m having a heart attack.”

  In the taxi, Linda’s labor accelerated rapidly, and she was sure that she and the baby would both die. She couldn’t help thinking that Robin would be her last link to this mortal life, and in the midst of a particularly fierce contraction, she gripped the girl’s equally icy hand and gasped, “Robin, honey always remember … you’re my … bridge!”

  “Huh?” Robin said, bug-eyed and pasty-white. “I’m your fridge? What do you mean by that? Linda?” But the taxi had arrived at the hospital, and Linda had passed onto a higher plane, beyond ordinary communication.

  After they took Linda away, a nurse directed Robin to the maternity waiting room. Two men were already sitting there, smoking, when she came in, both of them needing shaves and a comb. One of them wore what looked like a pajama top over his trousers. The other one, in a leather jacket, had a motorcycle helmet on his lap. Robin wondered if he’d brought his wife there on his Harley. They both glanced at her and nodded, but didn’t say anything. She curled up on a couch and closed her eyes. After a minute or two, one of the men said to the other, “Did you hear about the guy who goes to his doctor and the doctor says, T got good news and bad news—which do you want first?’ The guy says, ‘Give me the good news,’ and the doctor says, ‘Okay, you got twenty-four hours to live,’ and the guy says, ‘That’s the good news? What the hell’s the bad news?’ and the doctor says, T was supposed to tell you yesterday.’”

  The two men laughed a little while Robin just lay there, pretending to sleep, and after another minute the same man said, “Then there’s this other guy goes to his doctor and the doctor says, I got good news and bad news—which do you want first?’ The guy says, ‘Give me the bad news,’ and the doctor says, ‘You got twenty-four hours to live,’ and the guy says, ‘What’s the good news?’ and the doctor says, ‘See that cute nurse at the desk? Well, I screwed her last night.’”

  This time the men really cracked up. Robin opened one eye and stared at them. She didn’t get it. They must have gone nuts, she thought, from waiting there so long.

  Meanwhile, upstairs in a four-bedded labor room, when another woman screamed her husband’s name in sworn vengeance, Linda screamed Wright’s name, too, but mostly to conjure him up, to bring him back where he belonged. After many hours of hard labor and escalating regret, she was taken to the delivery room, where a healthy eight-and-a-half-pound baby girl was born, like everyone, in unfair proportions of agony and joy.

  Robin called Manny at work to tell him, and he rushed right over to the hospital. When he asked why she hadn’t called him much earlier, at home, as she was supposed to, she said that she’d tried, but his line was busy. “In the middle of the night?” he said, but Robin merely shrugged.

  Soon they were summoned together to the nursery window to see the baby. A nurse scooped her from one of the bassinets, unwound her receiving blanket, and held her up for their inspection. Her eyes were open, all inky iris, and she was frowning, as if she was inspecting them, too, and found them lacking. She was as long and garishly pink as a skinned rabbit Robin had once seen in a butcher-shop window, and her head was bald and bullet-shaped. But when Manny said, “Look at that, she’s the spitting image of you, Robin,” she felt an uncommon surge of happiness.

  That night Robin slept at Vicki’s apartment, as prearranged, although she wanted to stay home alone. “It’s nice and peaceful there for a change, and I don’t need a babysitter,” she’d told Linda when she and Manny were allowed, at last, into her semi-private room. But Linda, lying there pale and spent from her labor, insisted that she go to Vicki’s, and Manny squeezed Robin’s arm as a signal not to argue about it. “I have to go back to the store tonight, but I’ll buy you a great dinner first,” he said. “Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, the Colonel—you name it—price is no object.”

  They ended up at a small Chinese restaurant near the hospital, where Robin discovered that Manny liked exactly the same things she did: chicken chow mein, egg roll, barbecued spareribs, pork fried rice. It was easy to share dishes with him, which was impossible to do with Linda, who always scanned the menu for way-out items like thousand-year-old eggs and bird’s-nest soup. “If we don’t try new things,” she’d say, “how can we tell that we don’t like them?” Robin could tell by the very sound of them, and was invariably proven right by the sight and smell. Linda usually wound
up picking around the edges of those repulsive dishes and eating all of Robin’s leftovers, but she’d insist it had been worth taking the risk, that life was an endless series of exciting and instructive risks. That really killed Robin, who’d seen Linda sniff her glass of milk suspiciously before drinking it, and watched her drive across the country like a nervous snail, honking at every intersection, and using her turn signals even when there wasn’t another car in sight. Robin couldn’t wait to drive, to show Linda what risk-taking was all about. That was the other great thing about California, besides the climate and the beaches—you could get your learner’s permit here at fifteen, two whole years earlier than you could back in Jersey. Robin had only six more months to go. Now she let a sparerib droop from her greasy fingers as she thought dreamily again about the baby, how it had seemed to look back at her in solemn recognition through the nursery window.

  Manny said, “I remember when Deanna, my first girl, was born. She had this little capelet of brownish fur around her shoulders, like a baby bat.”

  “Get out,” Robin said. “She did not.”

  “No, she really did. And it’s not that uncommon, they said. It’s called lanugo hair, and it’s all supposed to fall out way before the baby starts dating. But, boy, I was worried stiff. I kept thinking, what if it doesn’t? This poor kid’s going to need piano lessons.”

  “And dresses with sleeves,” Robin said.