Tunnel of Love

by Hilma Wolitzer

  “Don’t do it, don’t go!” Carmel pleaded, inches from the screen, while Lady Audrey bit her lip and pondered the invitation.

  “What is wrong with you, girl?” Lucy said. “This show is taped, remember? She went out with him already! Robin was sitting right next to them, remember?”

  But Robin was more tolerant of Carmel’s confusion. The show she was on today wouldn’t be aired for two more weeks, and even in real life, the order of events could get all jumbled up inside your head. Love ebbed and flowed in every direction. People died or disappeared—like that! Robin could hardly keep track of things—they happened so crazily and so fast—much less understand why they were happening. Maybe that was why they had soaps, where one thing slowly and carefully followed another, where dreams were born and hopes were shattered in neat and comforting succession.

  23

  Love in the Afternoon

  NEITHER LINDA NOR CYNTHIA spoke about their awful encounter again, and Linda didn’t tell Nathan, or anyone else, the whole story. That Friday night, when she called him as she’d promised to do, all she mentioned was William Sterling’s surprise visit, the various items he’d taken from the house. She was afraid Nathan wouldn’t buy Cynthia’s defense of temporary insanity, or her own catalogue of excuses for staying on: The casts would be coming off in a couple of weeks. The baby was used to everyone here. Where else could they go? And Cynthia had said she was sorry. They were all reasonable excuses, but Linda suffered a lingering anxiety she barely managed to dull by watching television or listening to the top-forty tunes on her bedside radio. The only useful thing she did during the long hours of the day was to practice her word processing. She would be walking again way before she’d be able to dance, and Cynthia had promised to help her find an office job if she mastered some clerical skills. Still another favor—Linda’s debt kept growing and growing. Only a few days ago, Cynthia dropped an envelope in her lap, saying, “Here you go, sweetie, Paradise regained!” There was a check inside, a rebate of Linda’s security deposit on the Paradise apartment—plus interest. She tried to hand it right back, to defray a small portion of her expenses here, but Cynthia wouldn’t even consider it.

  As Linda pecked out the business letter in her workbook with one hand—“In re last week’s shipment of six thousand barrels of crude oil”—she couldn’t help thinking of Cynthia’s bitter words: “Is this the way you repay me for all I’ve done for you?” But she did seem genuinely sorry for losing control like that, for saying all those terrible things. The very next morning, Linda had awakened from a restless sleep to find Phoebe in bed with her, investigating her eyelids. Cynthia was sitting on the edge of the bed, watching them with a sad little smile on her face.

  She became less strict in her monitoring of Linda’s activities after that, and more attentive in other ways. She brought glorious gifts home from a shopping spree: an Hermés scarf as a sling for Linda’s arm, a beautiful French bisque doll for the baby’s toy shelf. And she’d kept her promise to get Robin on her favorite TV show. The episode would be aired next week; Linda could hardly wait to see it, even if Robin had already told her every plot turn. And she was looking forward to her visit with Nathan and Robin today, hoping they could all spend some pleasant time together, for once.

  But from the moment they arrived, Nathan began contriving to be alone in the house with Linda. “Why don’t you take the kid for a little walk?” he said to Robin when she came downstairs, with Phoebe riding piggyback. He assured Linda they’d have lots of time to be together later. “In fact, take her for a big walk,” he amended, as Robin put the baby into her stroller. He gave Robin some money and suggested she pick up a treat for everybody at the gourmet shop they’d passed on their way here, less than a mile down the road from the house. “I’ll buzz you out at the gate,” he said. “And take your time getting back, okay?” Then he went into the kitchen, where he held a brief but lively discussion in Spanish with Lupe and Maria, soon after which they left, too, carrying their purses and string shopping bags. Linda heard the slamming of car doors and the muffled roar of the Jeep’s engine.

  “Where are they going?” she asked Nathan when he came back into the room and began to lower the blinds.

  “Who knows?” he said, shrugging.

  “Well, what did you say to them?” Linda persisted.

  “That immigration is on the way. That I’d planted a time bomb in their kitchen. That I didn’t want them to hear your moans of happiness.”

  “You didn’t!” Linda exclaimed, and felt an agreeable little swoop in her belly. Mitchell was probably driving Lupe and Maria to the Farmer’s Market. The women could spend hours there, pinching the produce, assessing the baked goods, and haggling over the prices, while Mitchell read Variety or practiced his method-breathing in the car. Three birds with one stone, Linda thought. And Monday was Hester’s day off, she suddenly remembered, the day she stayed home and worked on her screenplay.

  “What time does Vampira get in?” Nathan asked.

  “Do you mean Cynthia? She said she had meetings today right through dinner.”

  “Well then, alone at last,” Nathan said, with a villainous smile.

  “Oh, you,” Linda said, and her belly took another roller-coaster dip. Of course they couldn’t do very much with all that plaster in the way, but it would be fun just to neck, to let herself become aroused, to have a mini preview of the coming attractions.

  Nathan found a continuous-music station on the portable radio. They were in the middle of a golden-oldies program—Artie Shaw was playing “Stardust” when he tuned in. She could hear the dogs start to yelp in the laundry room as Nathan closed and locked the guest-room door. He might have let them out until Robin got back, although they did tend to growl at him whenever he got too close to Linda.

  Soon he was very close to her, kneeling next to the recliner where she lay placing sweet, slow kisses up her good leg, starting at the sole of her foot. “What are you doing?” she asked, when he reached her knee, which jerked under his lips as if the doctor had hit it with that little rubber mallet.

  “You’re like Sleeping Beauty, niña,” he said. “Maybe I can wake you up this way.” He rose to his feet and wedged himself next to her on the recliner. He began kissing her mouth, while he slid his hands under her flowered kimono, like someone searching blindly under furniture for a lost button. Linda hadn’t meant to get this aroused. She tried to push him away murmuring, “Stop, Nathan, come on, don’t, oh, please …” the last words melting into those moans of happiness he’d joked about before. What was he thinking of? What was she? She was in no condition, it was physically impossible. The dogs were howling in their prison. Robin could come back any minute. Lupe and Maria. There could be a fire, a flood, an earthquake …

  It was like their first time together—the hair-raising friction of his touch, the rush of blood to her head and then away from it, that delirious struggle to be joined. Except he couldn’t seem to lie on top of her without crushing her good arm. It was already prickling with pins and needles. And when he pulled her over on top of him, with a great, grunting effort, her casts immobilized him. They tried lying on their sides facing each other, and then with her back to him, but none of these arrangements worked, either; it was much too awkward, or painful, or both. Nathan kept sliding off his side of the recliner, and Linda felt in danger of falling, too. If only she had broken the same arm and leg!

  “Come on, sweetheart,” he whispered, getting up and holding out his arms. “We’ll have more room on the bed.” That was true, but lack of space wasn’t the main problem, and the sight of the hospital bed, with its chrome side rails and starchy white sheets, was discouraging. Linda allowed him to help her up, anyway, the least romantic of maneuvers, with her saying, “Hold it a minute, I need my shoe. Let me get my balance, let me get my walker,” and him lurching around under her dead weight. Violins poured like syrup from the radio as she dragged herself toward the bed, leaning on the walker, with Nathan right behind
her. “This isn’t going to work,” she told him breathlessly, when they were less than halfway there.

  “Okay, rest a minute,” he said, nuzzling her hair, and then lifting it to kiss the back of her neck. “God, you smell so wonderful.”

  “But I’m not wearing any perfume,” she said.

  “I know,” he said into her neck, “it’s you.” He pressed himself against her—it was like having a gun at her back—and all the bones of her spine seemed to liquefy. Nathan supported her with one hand and lifted the kimono with the other.

  “Oh, Nathan, not here,” she said, and realized as she was saying it that the radio was playing that haunting old love song, “Where or When.” Her left knee forgot its confinement and tried to buckle along with her right one. “We can’t,” she said, but she was already cooperating as best as she could, bending and shifting precariously.

  “I won’t let you fall,” Nathan said huskily, as he moved against her, and he said it again as he entered her, all his years of dancing paying off in an amazing display of agility and strength. This was something like dancing, like a bolero, Linda thought, in its slow sensuous movement, its precise tempo. The walker continued to creep forward toward the bed, Linda’s left hand holding on with the determined, trembling grip of a weight lifter pressing more than his limit. The kimono slipped off one shoulder and then the other, and slid down until its silky fabric was all gathered loosely at her waist. “Oh, love,” Nathan moaned against her neck, the wings of her naked back. She could hardly hear him over her own raucous breathing, her answering cries, and the baying of the banished dogs. Neither of them heard the sounds of a car’s tires scattering the gravel in the driveway.

  Robin did take her time walking to the gourmet shop. It was hot out, for one thing, and it was so great being alone with Feeb for a change, away from that dungeon. This was something like her old daydream of the two of them living on their own somewhere. She had never worked out the details—what might have happened to Linda, for instance, or where they would live, or how Robin would support them. It was enough just to vaguely picture them together, two sisters against the world.

  This whole stupid separation would be over soon. On the phone last night, Linda had said that her casts would be coming off in a couple of weeks. She’d be going back home as soon as she could get around on her own, and Robin and Phoebe would go with her. Robin had mixed feelings about leaving the Thompsons’. What she mostly felt at their house was a sense of safety, as if she’d fallen from a circus high wire into a net, a net filled with family. She didn’t belong there—any idiot could see that—and there was hardly enough room for the people who did. They were so nice to her, though, except for Garvey, and even he’d been easier to take lately. Not that they were friends or anything, but with Lucy and Carmel on her side, he’d become a more tolerable enemy. And everybody else in the family closed ranks around Robin, like the walls of a fortress. She had come to them out of the blue and they’d taken her in, no questions asked. The cot had been dragged up from the basement, dusted off, and unfolded. Aunt Ez set a place for her at the table each day, Ga shoveled food onto her plate. To Robin’s surprise, she was starting to get used to all the activity and noise of the household. She especially loved the give-and-take of Mr. and Mrs. Thompson’s voices, and the slap of cards as they played two-handed gin rummy at night in the kitchen. Routine card-playing conversation, like “I’m knocking with five,” and “That’s it, sugar, you got me on the schneid again,” took on as much mystery and power as that sexy stuff Duke and Jake were always whispering into Lady Audrey’s ear. Robin could fall asleep to the sounds from the kitchen. When Mr. and Mrs. Thompson argued, you knew they would make up again. They had troubles—really bad ones—but they kept on living through them.

  By the time Robin reached The Sensual Gourmet, she was overheated and dying of thirst. Nathan had given her twenty bucks to get them all a snack. She could buy plenty with that, starting with a couple of Cokes and a big bag of barbecue chips for herself. It was nice and cool inside the shop, and pleasantly dark after the glare of the street. When Robin s eyes adjusted to the change, she saw that the only chips in the store were made of vegetables, and they cost eight dollars for a tiny bag! Were they kidding? And they had all these designer drinks in the refrigerated case, like seltzer mixed with mango or passion-fruit juice, but there wasn’t a plain Coke in sight. Robin stared into the deli case, with its disgusting fish salads and greasy olives, looking for something edible, while the sales clerk stared suspiciously back at her. Like there was really something here she’d want to steal. She ended up buying a bag of those chips and a bottle of fruit-flavored seltzer for herself, and she bought a small container of something pink and fluffy, called salmon mousse, for Nathan and Linda. That killed almost the whole twenty. She poured half the seltzer into the baby’s bottle—her apple juice was practically gone—and they went out into the brilliant day again.

  Robin decided to take a different, shadier route back to Cynthia’s. There was a street she’d passed before that looked interesting, sort of twisty and with lots of those tall palm trees tilting toward one another, and she headed in that direction, eating and drinking as she went along. It took her quite a while to get the foil bag of vegetable chips open. They tasted a lot like regular potato chips, and the seltzer wasn’t bad, either. But what a rip-off.

  Nathan and Linda both heard the front door close. She almost pitched forward over the top of the walker; he caught her just in time. “Christ,” he whispered. “Who’s that?”

  “I don’t know,” she whispered back. “Oh, God, I hope it’s not him again.”

  “Him? You mean her husband?” Nathan asked, fumbling with his clothes. “Why would he come back?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe he forgot something.” She glanced down at the kimono—more bounty from Cynthia’s closet—tangled around her waist and the walker. “Never mind, just help me put this on, okay? And get me back to the chair—no, wait, we’re closer to the bed. Nathan, hurry up!”

  Cynthia called out, “Hello, I’m home! Lupe? Maria?”

  Linda and Nathan froze in place as they listened to her footsteps—going toward the kitchen and then up the stairs—before resuming their slow, frantic progress to the bed.

  Nathan was propping Linda’s foot up, and she was fussing with the ties of the kimono and trying to calm her hectic heart, when Cynthia knocked on the door. “Linda? Are you in there? What’s going on? Where is everybody?” she said, rattling the knob.

  “Just a minute!” Linda trilled, patting Nathan’s curls, and then her own disheveled hair. At least the bedsheets were still pristinely smooth. “How do I look?” she asked. “Am I completely wrecked?”

  Nathan laughed. “Hey, I’m not that good,” he said. “You look beautiful,” he added, gazing at her with serious eyes.

  “Quit that,” Linda ordered. “And go open the door.”

  Cynthia took stock of things as soon as she walked in. You could see it in her face, in her rigid posture. Linda was as mortified as a teenager caught on the living-room couch by her parents. “You’re home early,” she said, in a high, cracked voice.

  “So I see,” Cynthia said. She opened the blinds to let the sun gush in, and Linda and Nathan both had to shield their eyes.

  “Where’s everybody else?” Cynthia asked.

  “Mitchell took Lupe and Maria shopping,” Linda said. “I guess they were running low on a few things. And Robin took the baby for a walk.”

  “A walk?” Cynthia said. “Where?”

  “Just in the neighborhood. Right, Nathan?”

  “She was going to that little shop down the road,” Nathan said.

  “Who gave her permission to do that?” Cynthia asked. “It’s hot as blazes out there.”

  “She had the parasol on the stroller,” Linda said. “And I’m sure she took some apple juice along. Robin is really sensible about the baby.” But she was thinking of that day at Madman Moe’s, of running aro
und in the sizzling heat, cold with fear, searching for them.

  “Wait a minute,” Nathan said to Linda. “They’re your kids. Why are you letting her grill you like this?”

  “I don’t remember speaking to you,” Cynthia said.

  “No, you didn’t,” he said. “I’d probably remember that myself.”

  “This is my house,” Cynthia told him, “and I’ll thank you to leave right now.”

  “That’s it, Linda,” Nathan said. “I’m out of here. Are you coming with me?”

  “How can I?” she said, wishing at that moment he would simply pick her up and carry her out. But the casts, the weight of her situation, had never seemed heavier. She might have been a mobster’s victim, set in cement and sent to the bottom of the sea.

  Nathan headed for the door.

  “Don’t, Nathan, wait a minute. Please” Linda said. He paused in the doorway, and Linda turned to Cynthia, hoping she’d say something to smooth things over, the way she did on that terrible Friday, but she just stood there with her arms folded and a resolute expression on her face.

  “But what about Robin?” Linda asked Nathan.

  “I’ll wait for her in the car,” he said, and was gone.

  “I know you’re upset, Linda,” Cynthia said, after a moment. “I am, too, so we’ll talk about it later, when we both feel calmer and more reasonable. Right now, I’m going out to look for those children.”

  As she was about to leave, though, Robin announced herself at the gate and Cynthia buzzed her back in. A few minutes later, Linda heard Cynthia and Robin talking in the vestibule but couldn’t make out what they were saying. Then Robin came into the guest room, carrying a small shopping bag. “What’s going on?” she asked Linda. “How come Nathan’s in the car already? And what’s the matter with her?”