Tunnel of Love

by Hilma Wolitzer

  When they got there, though, it seemed strangely big and empty. Robin went into her own room and shut the door. She put on the House of Pain tape she’d borrowed from Lucy and stretched out on her bed. But no matter which way she turned, her tightly braided head ached from its contact with the pillow. She supposed she’d get used to it eventually, but now she got up and shut off the stereo. The sudden quiet was startling. She went to the door and put her ear against it. All she could hear was Linda singing something—was that supposed to be the music from Star Trek?—her voice sounding wavery and far away. Robin wandered down the hall to the kitchen, where Linda was preparing supper and Phoebe was lying propped in her infant seat in the middle of the table, like some extravagant centerpiece. Robin let the baby grab her finger.

  “Did you have fun today?” Linda asked. “Your hair looks very … interesting,” she added. She hadn’t said anything about it before, although she did a double take when Robin came out of the Thompson house and got into the car.

  “You like it?” Robin said, trying to catch a glimpse of herself in the refrigerator-door handle. “I’ll get Carmel to do yours, too, if you want.” Then she plucked the baby from her seat and danced around the kitchen with her. “And you, too, Feeble,” she said, “as soon as you get some hair.”

  Linda drew her breath in sharply, as if she was getting ready to say something, but then she seemed to change her mind.

  9

  Sleeping Arrangements

  ROBIN HAD TAKEN AN instant dislike to Nathan, which Linda couldn’t understand. He treated her the way hardly anyone treats teenagers, with friendly respect. He never asked her any of those empty questions about school or friends or how she liked living in Los Angeles. When Linda introduced them, he simply shook her hand and said, “Hey, Robin, I’m glad to meet you. Linda’s told me so much about you.” She pulled her hand back as if she’d touched a hot oven, and gave Linda a dirty look.

  No matter how hard Nathan tried to win her over—with good-natured patience, and by driving the whole family to those places Robin had been dying to see, like the La Brea Tar Pits and Universal Studios—she didn’t budge in her bad opinion of him. They’d spent one especially pleasant afternoon at the Santa Monica Pier. They all rode the carousel, and Nathan won a stuffed bear for Phoebe by knocking down a pyramid of wooden bottles with a baseball. After he’d brought them home and lingered a while and then left, Robin dropped the bear carelessly in a corner of the living room. Linda picked it up and propped it against one of the sofa cushions. “Wasn’t today fun?” she said. “Isn’t Nathan nice?”

  “God, you are so lame,” Robin told her. “Can’t you see he’s only after you for sex and a green card?”

  “That is completely ridiculous, Robin,” Linda said. “Nathan is an American citizen!” That was true; he’d gotten his final papers right before she met him. She couldn’t bring herself to defend him about the sex part, though. He had said there was no rush, but he didn’t act that way. He’d managed to see her almost every day since they’d met. And he was always touching her, it seemed, and often came dizzyingly close to kissing her without actually doing it. She tried to dismiss her own ache of attraction by remembering what her mother had said about passion flying in and out of windows, but this time it wasn’t much help or consolation. She confided in Vicki, who said, “So what’s holding you back?”

  Linda explained that the swiftness and intensity of her feelings unsettled her. And Nathan wasn’t really her type, in temperament, at least. She needed someone less self-possessed and domineering, someone willing to encourage her independence, the way Wright, and then Manny, had. And how could she not have second thoughts about loving anyone at all?

  “Why don’t you stop thinking so much and just give in to it, Linda?” Vicki said. “Before you know it, it’s all over, anyway.”

  “What is?” Linda asked. “Life? Love?”

  “Everything,” Vicki said, snapping her fingers in Linda’s startled face. “Poof!”

  During a break between classes the next day, Linda stood outside the exercise room where Nathan was leading his salsa workout and watched as he put his students through their paces. They were like the dance troupe of an amateur show, moving in earnest, clumsy unison to Poncho Sanchez’s “El Mejor.” The best. If Nathan wasn’t the best dancer Linda had ever seen, he certainly came close—with his whole body undulating like that while his feet carried out a precise and complicated pattern of steps. His students breathlessly echoed his cries of “Ole!” and “Arriba! Arriba!” as they moved across the floor behind him. He spotted Linda in the mirror and wiggled one raised hand in greeting at her, and then the other. Anyone would think it was part of the routine, and sure enough all the women in the class dutifully wiggled their hands, too. “Linda! Linda!” Nathan cried, without breaking his stride, and the women repeated, “Linda! Linda!” as they labored to keep up with him.

  He made her laugh and feel sexy at the same time—nobody had ever done that before. When his class was over, and the students began drifting out, Linda was still standing at the entrance to the room, watching as he wiped his face and neck on a towel and took a long swig from his water bottle. At the club, he was usually in a cluster of women, even when he wasn’t working. She supposed they were attracted to his Latin good looks: that satiny sepia skin, those heavy-lidded eyes, and the voluptuously wavy dark hair. And then there was the way he moved, and the way he smiled … Why, he’s gorgeous, she realized with a jarring, below-the-belt thrill, although she must have known it, on some level at least, for some time. As soon as the last woman left, Nathan started the tape again and turned and held out his hands to her. They had never danced together before, had hardly been alone, except for a few minutes here and there at the Bod, between classes. He had asked her more than once to go out with him without the children tagging along, but she kept putting him off. And when she finally decided that she could handle the situation, and asked Robin to babysit for them, Robin refused, saying that she had her own life to live, and that she wasn’t Linda’s servant.

  Linda stepped into the exercise room and into Nathan’s arms. They waited in place while the introduction to “El Mejor” played itself out, one of his hands resting lightly at the curve of her waist and the other meeting hers, palm to palm, at the end of their outstretched arms. Linda held her breath, and neither of them moved; they were as still and poised as those plastic figures on top of a wedding cake, ready to waltz off into their newly connected lives. She remembered the dance with Manny that preceded their first time together. She remembered the hundreds of times she’d opened her arms to strangers at Fred Astaire’s. And then she forgot everything else as the melody crashed through the speakers and propelled them into motion. She didn’t follow Nathan’s lead exactly, or try to lead him. It was more as if they had become one four-legged person of exceptional agility and grace, one person who had done this particular dance so often it didn’t require conscious thought or memory. She believed that if the music suddenly stopped they would continue dancing, hearing something inside themselves that would keep the rhythm and the energy flowing. Each time she swung away from him, invisible threads drew her back again, and she could see their joined images in all the mirrors around the room, whirling and whirling. When the tape ended, he didn’t let her go, and she didn’t try to get away, at least not for several seconds. The music was still playing in her head, in her rapid blood. “Well …” she managed to say at last, to break the spell, and when they stepped away from one another, it was like a coda to the dance, a final movement that had been choreographed into its design. Linda had to hurry off to meet her next class, and she left him standing there without saying another word. But that evening, a couple of hours after she’d dropped Robin at a classmate’s house for a slumber party, and come back home again, Nathan rang the doorbell. They hadn’t prearranged this—not directly, anyway. Linda had only mentioned, earlier in the day, that she was getting some time off from Robin later, and that she
intended to use it to catch up on her ironing. But then, right after she put the baby into her crib for the night, she started preparing for Nathan’s arrival, pretty much the way Manny had prepared for hers that first night at his house. Tidying, vacuuming, looking at everything in the apartment with a freshly critical eye. She scrubbed the bathroom to surgical sterility, and dragged the rocking chair from her bedroom to cover a stain on the living-room rug where the baby had spit up. She even went into Robin’s room and shoved some of her debris under the bed. As if she were readying the place for prospective subletters. Then she took a lingering bath, hardly able to keep her weighted, dreaming eyes open. By the time Nathan showed up, she was in her fleecy yellow robe, drowsing in front of the TV, on which a hoarsely weeping preacher promised heaven and threatened hell.

  When she opened the door, Linda suppressed her immediate impulse to say something moronic, like “Nathan, What a surprise!” or “How nice to see you.” In fact, she didn’t say anything, for once in her life, only stepped back a little to let him inside. But he began kissing her right there in the doorway, holding her face with both of his hands. She kept moving backward in tiny, faltering steps as he kissed her lips, her hairline, her eyelids, her ears, her chin, her throat. He must have kicked the door shut behind him, because she heard it close and he had not let go of her face. Her own hands were in the thick of his hair, and then her arms blindly found their way around his neck, as his hands slid downward, slowly taking the measure of her body, which seemed to mold itself to suit his grasp and desire. All that time, they kept kissing without a pause, and Linda sucked in his sweet, hurried breath to restore her own, and tasted the rough silk of his mouth and tongue. His hands were on her breasts, on her hips, pulling her toward him, and then opening her robe as she began to struggle with the buttons on his shirt. Oh, oh, she thought, in an avalanche of sensation, so this is it, and fought a swooning, losing battle to stay on her feet.

  The slumber party was being given by a girl named Stephanie Kraus, in honor of her own fifteenth birthday. Back in July, when Robin turned fourteen, Linda insisted they go out for dinner to celebrate. Robin almost died when the waiter brought in a birthday cake with sparklers stuck in it and everybody in the whole stupid place started singing “Happy Birthday.” Fat guys in lobster bibs and old ladies waving their forks in the air. What kind of idiot threw a party for herself?

  Robin had hardly ever spoken to Stephanie, who was only in typing class with her, and she wasn’t sure why she’d been invited, at least until she got to Stephanie’s house. There she discovered that the other guests were four of the most unpopular girls at Northside. Two of them—Heidi and Michelle—were grossly overweight, and another had recently come from Hungary and could only speak about three words of English. The fourth was a brainy nerd named Marybeth Nixon. Robin wouldn’t have accepted the invitation if it wasn’t for Linda, who ran right out after Stephanie called and bought a present for Robin to bring her, and then said all this stuff about “expanding your horizons” and “giving friendship a chance.” When Robin resisted, saying, “I don’t even know that nimrod,” Linda said, “Well, stay home then, Robin. You can help me with the ironing, and then maybe you can clean up your room, before it’s condemned.”

  Robin couldn’t even escape to Lucy’s; the whole Thompson family was at a wedding that night, so here she was, sitting on top of a smelly sleeping bag on a smelly living-room rug in a strange house, eating fried chicken from a big bucket with people she didn’t know or like. Marybeth was trying to teach Halinka, the Hungarian girl, a few choice phrases in English. She held up a piece of white meat and said “breast,” and when Halinka repeated it, the other girls howled with laughter. Stephanie’s mother, who was divorced, and who’d told them all to call her “Pal,” the way Stephanie did, kept peeking into the room and asking if everything was “okey-dokey.” Pal sounded like a dog’s name, and she was like an older version of Linda, talking too much and trying to be everybody’s best friend. Stephanie acted as if she didn’t even mind, as if she hoped her mother would get another sleeping bag and join the party. If things were going to continue like this, Robin would just as soon go home, and she began trying to figure out how to do that with the least amount of fuss.

  Marybeth clapped her hands for order. It was time to open the presents. Heidi had a pad and a pencil; she was going to write down everything Stephanie said about the presents, and then read it back to them later. That was the dumbest idea Robin had ever heard. Who wanted to hear that retarded stuff twice? She wished Lucy was there, so they could talk about everybody else, and she idly wondered what Linda had bought for her to give to Stephanie. It had never occurred to her to ask when she shoved the heavy, fancily wrapped package into the shopping bag with her pajamas. If it was up to Robin, she’d have given her that black bra she’d lifted from The Broadway.

  Stephanie got tapes and socks and stuffed animals from the other girls. She squealed and exclaimed over everything, while Pal kept taking pictures, urging them to “say Brie!” and making the flash go off right in their faces. By the time Stephanie got around to opening Robin’s gift, which was last, Robin could hardly see. “It’s so big!” Stephanie said, shaking the package. “And hard,” she added, as she squeezed and poked it. Everyone but Robin and Halinka was screaming with laughter. But there was a huge, collective gasp after Stephanie tore the wrappings off. “Oh, my God, it’s the most beautiful thing I ever saw!” she cried. Robin blinked away the black spots in front of her eyes and saw that Linda had gotten Stephanie a metal sculpture of two children with big, sad eyes, sitting on a park bench, each of them holding a balloon. It was pretty ugly, but it must have cost a bundle.

  Then Heidi said, “Okay, quiet, everybody! And listen! Here’s what Steph’s going to say on her wedding night.” After the giggling and chatter died down, she began to read back all the things Stephanie had said while she was opening her gifts. Things like “Ooh, it’s so cute, I’m gonna sleep with it every night!” and “Oh, pink, my favorite color!” The girls couldn’t stop laughing. Even Halinka, who probably didn’t understand a word, got into the spirit of things. Of course, the worst part was when Heidi repeated what Stephanie had said about Robin’s gift, about how big and hard and beautiful it was. Robin wished Linda was there so she could murder her.

  Before she knew it, they were all changing into their pajamas, wriggling out of their clothes inside their sleeping bags. Pal came back into the room, wearing the same Snoopy nightshirt as Stephanie. Maybe after everyone was asleep, Robin could grab her clothes and sneak out a window.

  Linda woke in the dark, under the double-wedding-ring quilt. Nathan was asleep beside her. Carefully, she raised herself on one elbow and looked at him for a long time, before she lay down again. Sharing a bed with someone you cared for was the best of all sleeping arrangements. Why did she feel so restless, though? Nathan had come there prepared to practice safe sex, so there were no regrets on that account. But it occurred to her that she knew nothing about him, really. Right after they’d first met, in the rain in Culver City, he said, mysteriously, that he knew her. Is this what he meant? Did he imagine this entire extraordinary night just from looking into her eyes that day? She didn’t want her heart to be that visible to him, not unless his was open for her to read, too.

  How was she ever going to fall asleep, with everybody in the world breathing around her like this? Heidi and Michelle had whispered and giggled until Robin was getting ready to throw something at them, maybe that heavy sculpture Linda had bought, but when they stopped, the silence was worse. The other girls were asleep, too, and even Pal had disappeared, after a series of blown kisses and a lecture about not setting the burglar alarm off by opening any windows or doors. Great. Now Robin would never get out of here. She remembered that there was no burglar alarm back in her own apartment, no protection there against thieves and kidnappers. And if lamebrain Linda left the iron on when she went to sleep, their apartment would burn down, and Robin wouldn’t be th
ere to save Phoebe.

  She tried to find a comfortable position on the floor, in the lumpy sleeping bag. Every once in a while, Halinka sobbed in her sleep and mumbled something, probably in Hungarian. It was awful to be the only one still up; everything bad you could think of always crept into your mind at night. Sure enough, as if they’d come all this way to tuck her in, here were Robin’s father and mother, back from the dead and from the living dead. They were both in their nightclothes, which was the way she’d last seen each of them. Her father in his blue-and-white-striped pajamas, as he was on the final morning of his life, calling after her as she left for school to remember to take her lunch. Her mother in the green satin bathrobe she was wearing when Linda and Robin burst in on her and her asshole husband that Sunday afternoon in Arizona. What had they interrupted? Robin shut her eyes and covered her ears. Still, her mother clearly said, “Don’t forget to keep in touch,” the way she had that Sunday, and her father whispered, “Roblet, my little birdie” in his sweet, distant voice. Robin moaned and thrashed around on the floor until they were both gone. She didn’t intend to get married herself, but if she ever did, it would only be to someone who always let her fall asleep first.

  Linda woke once again and looked at the digital clock on her night table, just as the time changed. 3:05 a.m. Phoebe would be up squalling for attention in a couple of hours. And Linda and Nathan both had to go to work soon after that. She told herself to hurry up and go back to sleep. But instead she took off her wedding band and touched it to her lips before slipping it into her night-table drawer. Then she reached out to lightly stroke Nathan’s shoulder, and he turned to her.