Tunnel of Love

by Hilma Wolitzer

  “Get serious, amigo,” Nathan said. “I didn’t swim here yesterday, you know. We need brakes, we need springs, maybe we need a whole new car.”

  Linda had tried to read the salesman’s latest figure, but the transaction had been too rapid. Their dickering was getting on her nerves; she felt like a spectator at some sporting event whose rules she only vaguely understood. She didn’t even want that stupid car in the first place, and her mind kept wandering back to the children. Where could they be in this heat? She tapped Nathan’s arm. “I’ll be right back,” she said, and hurried away before he could respond.

  The torrid air slapped her as soon as she opened the door, and she had to shield her eyes with both hands to deflect the dazzling glare. The field of cars stretched and dissolved before her into a shimmering, multicolored lake. “Robin!” she called loudly across it, but there was no answering call. Linda’s belly clutched and cramped. The down side of having people to love, of course, was the ever-present possibility of loss, a sorry lesson she had learned and relearned.

  Sometimes, when Linda woke during the night in a state of dread, she got up to look at the two girls as they slept. Phoebe, spread-eagled in her crib, as if she’d landed safely there after falling from some great height, and Robin, disarmed by sleep, with a silvery web of drool in one corner of her open mouth. Both of them breathing, in and out. Linda would inscribe them once again on the credit side of her heart, and Wright and Manny on the debit side.

  Standing in the middle of the used-car lot, revolving slowly, like a lighthouse beam, she suddenly remembered that name Robin had once called her: the kiss of death. How could she have said such a thing! It certainly wasn’t true in a literal sense. She wasn’t anywhere near the liquor store when Manny was shot and killed in the holdup, an event so alien and horrific she still couldn’t fully imagine it. And although she’d been at Wright’s hospital bedside when he slipped from his life, and hers, in what seemed like a trick conjured by the doctor, she had never associated his death with her presence on the scene. The kiss of death. A spasm of shudders rode her spine as she thought of all those kisses freely given and taken in love, the fevered, wet, urgent, sucking pleasure of them. Could you draw out someone’s life force that way, leaving him vulnerable to speeding bullets or stray embolisms? But that was ridiculous. Superstitious. Completely crazy! Afterward, the doctor told her that Wright’s heart had probably been a ticking time bomb for years. And Manny had said only weeks before his murder how lucky he was to have found her.

  When the baby allowed Linda to vent her maternal passion in a feast of kisses up and down her luscious self, Linda understood that it was a privilege, and a finite one. But she had never dared to examine exactly what she meant by that. Robin, of course, refused to suffer any demonstration of Linda’s affection; she could barely stand her company. Yet Linda was sometimes compelled to kiss her, too, quickly and lightly on the forehead or cheek while she slept. If Robin ever found out, she’d have a fit. “Robin,” she quietly implored, “where are you?” She began to jog up and down the aisles between the rows of cars, the hysteria rising from her belly to her throat, which threatened to close around it. They couldn’t be in the sealed microwave of one of the cars all this time. Robin was headstrong and careless, but she wasn’t stupid.

  Then Linda remembered that odd-looking couple Robin had been shadowing when she and Phoebe disappeared. Some kind of perverts, maybe. Drugs, sadism, cults, sacrifices. There were so many maniacs out there waiting for a fatal connection with someone innocent. The papers were full of stories. But would Robin go off with strangers after all the lectures she had endured on the subject, all the milk cartons at all the breakfasts of her life, with the faces of other peoples missing children smiling their waxy, helpless smiles? And would she ever put Phoebe in real jeopardy?

  Oh, why had she ever kissed them!

  In Newark, once, just after she’d gotten her driver’s license, Linda drove alone to the Garden State Mall to buy Wright a birthday present. Delighted by her success at getting there in one piece, she resolved not to think about driving back until she had to. Instead, she succumbed to the pleasure of planning a little surprise party for Wright that evening. She would try to get Robin involved, too, although the girl still barely acknowledged her, almost four weeks after the wedding. Maybe doing something nice together for their mutual beloved would draw them closer.

  Shopping malls tended to be a natural backdrop for Linda’s anxiety—all that space and all those people were so confusing and intimidating. And this one featured a parrot jungle and an artificial waterfall that would make anyone nervous. But that day Linda was propelled by her joyful errand and felt perfectly relaxed. She went from store to store, buying gifts and balloons and funny paper hats and birthday candles you couldn’t blow out. She chose a handsome blue sweater for Wright, and a pair of silk pajamas she would present him with privately. On an extravagant but inspired impulse she bought something for Robin, too, a little tree-shaped lamp, with spaghetti-like branches that quivered with red liquid light when you plugged it in. Linda would have loved something like that at Robin’s age.

  Burdened with her bulky purchases, but feeling lavishly happy, she made her way back to the mammoth parking field, where she soon realized she had no memory of where she had parked the car. She walked up and down a couple of aisles, and then began to zigzag around like a cornered animal, murmuring, “Where? Where?” It started to rain about ten minutes into her panic-ridden search, and by the time she found the Mustang, crouched in a row of similar cars, she was soaking wet and sobbing uncontrollably.

  Later, Wright laughed fondly at her—why, you couldn’t lose that one-ton pile of metal and rubber if you tried! All she had to do was get one of the mall’s security guards to drive her around on his scooter until she found it. And everything was fine, now—why was she still so upset? He stuck a party hat on her head and locked his arms around her. Linda submitted to his embrace, but she couldn’t explain herself or completely shake that feeling of doom. As if to give her nameless anxiety meaning and substance, Wright died a couple of weeks later. And a few weeks after that, when she and Robin were cleaning out the apartment in preparation for their trip West, Linda watched sadly as Robin tossed the little tree lamp into the trash.

  That day at the mall was just a dress rehearsal for this day at Madman Moe’s. Here she was, running again, with the stench of her own fear rising in a mist around her. But all her other losses were nothing now; she was cured of them, completely relieved of them, as in a revival tent-show miracle. There was only this in the world, only this new, raw, impossible absence. “Robin!” she bleated. “My Phoebe!”

  It was getting late. There wasn’t anybody else out on the lot. The latest jet that thundered over, drowning out her voice with its own, and casting her in its long shadow, had visible lights, like rubies and emeralds. It was carrying people home in time for supper with their families, for blessed sleep in their own beds. Without meaning to, Linda thought of all those lonesome nights when Robin had segregated her with spiteful silence, and the baby had screamed non-stop, because of colic or teething or some other wordless baby misery, until Linda was driven to fling herself facedown on her bed and whisper into the white darkness of the pillow, “Stop it, go away, why don’t you both just go away and leave me alone!” And she remembered looking forward to leaving Robin in Glendale, and the brief but grave consideration she’d given to ending her pregnancy when she first learned about it.

  Now she wished that she could turn off her restless thoughts, that she could simply pray instead. But she’d given up on God after Wright’s death, as both saviour and scapegoat of her puny, scattered life. He was only a makeshift, pickup God, anyway, the kind invented by children without religious training, a white-bearded cross between Santa Claus and Charlton Heston playing Moses. But maybe she should try praying, even without the license of faith, just in case. Before she could carry that thought any further, she glimpsed a distant figure thro
ugh the blurred vision of her despair. “Robin!” she cried again, but she saw in a moment that it was only Nathan, running toward her and calling her name. By the time he got to her, she couldn’t speak at all, only gesture at him in a jerky pantomime.

  Nathan grasped her arms and shouted, “Linda! Calm down! Is it Robin? You still can’t find her? Dios mio!” Then, quietly, “Listen, it’s okay. She’s only playing a little trick on you, hiding out someplace. Come on, we’ll find them.”

  He took long, athletic strides, pulling her along with him, so that she hardly had to move her feet, like Ginger Rogers being carried by Fred Astaire through an intricate dance routine. Linda felt as if she were flying, as if she were unraveling. Nathan had put a terrifying new idea into her head. Maybe Robin had just taken off with the baby so they could live somewhere else without her. It was something she had casually threatened to do. Sometimes when she spoke to Phoebe as though Linda wasn’t there, she said things like “Maybe you and me should split, Feeble, before we get wimpy like her.” Linda remembered now that Robin had grabbed the diaper bag from her shoulder before. There was a bottle of apple juice in there, a few toys, and a stack of diapers. And Linda’s wallet.

  Nathan kept on talking. “When we find her, you can break her neck, okay? That brat. I give you permission. I’ll even help you, okay?” He pulled her skimming body through the lot and across the wide road, between moving cars, to the ice-cream parlor, but it was closed and shuttered for the day. She didn’t even remember going back across the road, but now they were running up and down the aisles of the lot, peering into car windows and knocking on roofs and hoods. My life should be passing in front of me, Linda thought, but all she saw were those endless flanks of cars, flaunting their coyly false, seductive signs. Take Me Home! Creampuff! One Owner! Easy Payments! And high above them the looming, leering gaze of Madman Moe, still bound and imprisoned on his billboard. Linda found herself praying silently to him as if he were the demented but all-powerful god of this automotive kingdom. Oh, merciful Prince of Pontiacs! she prayed. Stop me before I kill again! Finder of lost Mustangs! Help me now to find my children!

  Near the end of her pregnancy, when she was so frightened, Manny had said how spunky she was to go through with a thing like that alone. As if she had a choice! One man put the baby inside her and another one pulled it out. But of course that wasn’t exactly true, either. It was just that she’d made her choices from limited experience and a dumb trust in ordinary luck. It wasn’t spunky, it was irresponsible to give someone the terrible twin gifts of life and death. This was the finite condition of human love, the thought she’d refused to think when she was planting those delicious kisses along the baby’s silky flesh. She looked across the aisle at Nathan, another mortal she had recently kissed—only last night!—and with such reckless rapture. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it, she wanted to say, but only her shallow, panting breath came out.

  They found them a few minutes later, lying curled together across the seat of a shiny, red classic Thunderbird. Dreamboat! proclaimed the Thunderbird’s sign, and Mad Moe cackled from his heavenly perch. The windows of the Thunderbird had been sensibly lowered, but Robin and Phoebe were pasted to the white leather. Their platinum hair was darkened by sweat and their natural pallor painted with an unnatural flush. They slept deeply and earnestly, like the good, artless children they were. The baby had her thumb jammed down her throat and the empty juice bottle clutched in her other hand. Robin was heat-drugged and bewildered and it was difficult for Nathan to wake her. “What?” she said groggily. “What?” She didn’t recognize either of them for a moment.

  The baby was so limp Linda’s blood staggered and slowed. But when she lifted her, there was a fresh puddle of pee on the white upholstery, a thrilling circular stain of life. At any other time, Linda would have tried to mop it up with shredding Kleenex, and then hurried inside to confess the damage and make amends. Now she kicked the door of the Thunderbird shut and stood there unbuttoning her blouse. She lowered the flap of her nursing bra, and prodded and coaxed the baby until she fastened herself and began to weakly suck.

  Robin slumped against Nathan in a way she never would if she were wholly conscious. She was reduced to pure animal need for once, without the usual, maddening argument of reason. Nathan lifted her as if she were an infant, too, and carried her, unresisting, back to the trailer, where he bathed her hot face with wet paper towels while the tough-looking saleswoman fed her sips of 7-Up from her own personal mug. “World’s Greatest Mom,” it said in bold black letters.

  Linda sank into one of the chairs near their salesman’s desk. The men tried to avert their eyes as she continued to nurse the baby, whose sucking had become loud and vigorous. Linda kissed and kissed her heavy, fragrant head, then lifted one tiny, drooping hand and kissed that, too.

  “About the car, we’ll come back another time …” Nathan began, but Linda said, “No, I want to get it today.” She had never been this assertive before, and he looked at her with a cautious mixture of admiration and alarm. “Write it up,” she instructed the salesman. “But we need the best possible price. I have these two children to support.”

  Not that Linda was kidding herself. A used-car salesman might be moved by her story, but only, she knew, within his particular limits. And no matter what price they settled on, the car would reveal its own hard-luck story before too long. All the things that could go wrong with it would start to go wrong, one after the other. There would be daily wear and tear, accidents, the mysterious machinery of fate. Who was to say how anything really happened, or why?

  Robin, who’d recovered her sullen, controlled demeanor, scowled at Linda. “So what kind of faggy car did you pick out anyway?” she demanded.

  I’d like to kill you, Linda thought, I really would. Even her teeth ached with restrained rage. She reached across the baby and grabbed that unpleasant pink face and glared at it.

  Robin glared back. “Hey!” she said.

  But before she could squirm away or say anything else, Linda leaned forward and kissed her fully and ruthlessly on the mouth.

  16

  Brunch

  THE FOLLOWING WEEK, CYNTHIA Sterling invited Linda and Robin to Sunday brunch at her house. Linda accepted gratefully; Nathan was going down to Baja for the weekend, to visit his mother, and the Sunday gloom she’d suffered since childhood would be intensified by his absence. But Robin tried to get out of it, using every excuse in the book, none of which Linda bought for a minute. “You do not have cramps, Robin,” she said, as the girl lay languidly on the sofa Sunday morning, pressing one hand to her stomach and working the remote control with the other. Sermon, tennis, something in Spanish, something in Korean, sermon, Spanish, golf. “You had your period last week, remember?”

  Robin pushed the off button in disgust, and said, “Yeah, well, but I told some kids I might meet them later at the arcade.”

  “If you’d made any other plans, miss, you would have mentioned them earlier. And don’t try to tell me you forgot about Cynthia’s, either. I reminded you last night before you went to bed.”

  “Why do I have to go?” Robin said. “I don’t even like her.”

  “How can you possibly not like someone you’ve never met?” Linda reasoned. And especially someone so terrific, she thought. Of all the people she’d ever known, only Cynthia seemed to have an understanding of Linda’s offbeat fix on things. During their ritual meals together after the training sessions, Linda found herself opening up in ways she hadn’t to anyone since she’d left New Jersey, and her close female friends, behind. Cynthia was so easy to talk to—she listened ardently and didn’t ever seem to pass judgment. And she was an amazing source of unconventional wisdom, about everything from removing difficult stains to facing your emotional needs. When Linda confessed her dislike of driving, Cynthia said that driving was only a metaphor for living, and to think of entering a freeway as merging with the moving stream of life. While Linda was trying to absorb that idea, Cynthia continu
ed, “Hey, I ought to know something after fifteen years on the couch, shouldn’t I? Now tell me all about how you got to California, and in God’s name why.” She spoke a little too fast, and jumped from one subject to another. Linda wished she was jotting things down, especially words like “metaphor” that she intended to look up later in the dictionary. Cynthia wanted to know if she’d come out here to be discovered. When Linda looked blank for a moment, Cynthia laughed and said, “How refreshing!” Everybody else, she assured Linda, was trying to break into the industry, on one level or another. Waiters, parking attendants, supermarket clerks. Her own houseman took method-acting classes, and her secretary wrote screenplays in her spare time. Cynthia said she half expected her dentist to break into song and dance during a root canal.

  Linda told her about her experiences at Paradise, and how she had to forfeit all that money to the rental agent for sneaking Robin in. “Why, that crooked bitch!” Cynthia exclaimed, sounding remarkably like Robin. “That smells like a swindle to me.” She grabbed a notepad and a pen. “Give me her name and address, and I’ll have our legal department look into it.” She scribbled down the information and sighed. “I’m afraid you’re actually too nice for this world, Linda,” she said. “Sort of the way the saints are cracked up to be.” But it was an innocence spoiling to be spoiled, she quickly added. “I think it’s time for a makeover.” Linda moved her hand self-consciously from her rubber-banded ponytail to her flushed cheek, but Cynthia said, “No, no, I mean an intellectual makeover. We can work on the body some other time. Right now lets attend to the mind and the spirit.” She plied Linda with more books: novels, biographies, collections of poetry. Linda had started The Catcher in the Rye obediently the day Cynthia gave it to her, and then finished it in two more days, reading in bed and while she nursed Phoebe and between classes at the Bod, still wondering what Cynthia’s promised questions would be. She thought it was a terribly sad book. Holden Caulfield reminded her of Robin, especially his cynicism about everything and everybody, except his little sister, Phoebe. Linda wished the story was more upbeat, but she thought it might be good for Robin to read about someone like herself, that it would help her to feel less alone, less different. She left the book on Robin’s night table, without saying anything about it, the way her own mother had once left a booklet on menstruation for her, but a week later The Catcher in the Rye was still in exactly the same place, with a couple of empty Coke cans and a bottle of black nail polish resting on its cover.