Tunnel of Love

by Hilma Wolitzer

  “Did you win?” Linda said, already knowing the answer.

  “Yeah,” Nathan admitted, “and it was a real high. Delila put off going home, indefinitely, and we started working together—developing routines, getting a few local gigs. Pretty soon we got close in other ways and … well, marriage seemed like the inevitable next step.”

  “You don’t have to make it sound as if you didn’t love her,” Linda said.

  “Did I do that?” Nathan said. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “What happened then?” Linda asked, trying to ignore the crowded sensation in her chest.

  “Life happened,” Nathan said. “You know, disappointments, jealousy, money problems. We had this big dream of making it professionally, but we stayed small-time. When we moved up to San Diego, I had to take a string of low-paying odd jobs—off the books—just to get by. But once I got my green card, I wanted to settle down and teach somewhere, maybe open our own studio, and start a family. But Delila wouldn’t let go of the dream.”

  They had been cruising in the middle lane on the freeway during this entire conversation, and now he cut sharply over into the fast lane, making Linda’s heart swerve with the car. “Then, later,” he said, “when things were completely bad between us, she wouldn’t let go of me, either. That’s what I was working on when I met you.”

  Why did it bother her so much that he’d had an amorous past? What did she expect—he was thirty-three years old. And she had her own considerable history in that department. She had been married, too; she might have been married twice, if Manny hadn’t died before it could happen. Her feelings were unreasonable, but love itself was unreasonable. “Did you still sleep together?” she made herself ask.

  He hesitated, and then he said, “Yes, before I met you. I guess we were breaking apart kind of slowly. But after I met you, we stopped. I stopped.” Linda felt her chest expand.

  In the restaurant, Phoebe squished rice between her fingers and threw it at the fish tank. “Nice fishies,” Linda said, patting the tank. “At my wedding,” she told Nathan, “somebody asked for rice, you know, to throw at Wright and me when we left the restaurant? The waiter brought steamed rice in one of those little takeout containers.”

  Nathan laughed. Then he described his own wedding, which sounded much more elaborate and romantic than hers. It took place in somebody’s courtyard, he said, with a lot of family and friends present. There was a fountain splashing. Strings of colored lights had been threaded through the trees, and a mariachi band played all night.

  “What did she wear?” Linda asked, and Nathan smiled with indulgence at what he obviously considered a “woman’s” question.

  “A traditional Mexican wedding dress,” he said. “Long and white, with embroidery all over.”

  Linda shut her eyes and envisioned someone named Delila, in a long white dress, whirling with her handsome new husband under colored lights. For the first time, she felt kinship with that bride, and sympathy; there were so many other ways to lose a man besides death.

  Linda was the one in mourning when she and Nathan came back from Glendale. She had never expected Robin to stay with her mother; all she’d ever heard from her about Miriam was sorrowing rage. And Linda was surprised that Miriam was so willing to take Robin in. That other time, she and Tony had seemed like a club no one else in the world was qualified to join. Maybe the biggest surprise of all, though, was Linda’s own acute feeling of loss. Robin had always been so difficult, and at the Beverly Body and elsewhere Linda had heard the real mothers of other adolescent girls wish they would just disappear. But the family she and the children had forged, had invented, was broken by Robin’s choice. And all the work of argument and willful affection seemed wasted.

  Linda wrote to Robin regularly, the way one might write to a child away at camp or boarding school, with lighthearted gossip of home, and every expectation the child would eventually return there. In the letter about Cynthia, Linda decided to maintain the same breezy, carefree tone, to just give the news of victory and not a rundown of the battle.

  On the day of the hearing, Nathan had dropped Linda and Phoebe in front of the courthouse before he parked the car. At that precise moment, Mitchell pulled up in the Porsche and helped Cynthia and a handsome, beefy man out of the backseat. Linda began running up the steps, as if she were being chased, as if she believed Cynthia or the man with her—her bodyguard?—would try to wrest the baby from her arms. She had to pause on the top step to compose herself, and Cynthia and her escort went past her into the building, without even a glance of acknowledgment. Linda had once seen a movie star go into a restaurant with the same inward focus, while the traffic of everyday life streamed by. She was tempted to run back down the steps and keep going, Robin-style. But she saw that Nathan was already coming up them, toward her.

  The hearing was held in something like a high-school classroom, with a blackboard and a flag and a large desk up front. The judge was a cranky woman in a slightly soiled robe; it looked as if a baby had spit up on her shoulder. She kept muttering to the clerk sitting alongside her, as she flipped through the pile of pages on her desk so quickly they crackled. Cynthia was sitting with that man, who seemed to be her lawyer, at one of two tables facing the judge. Teacher’s pet, Linda thought. She and Nathan sat down in the last of three rows of chairs set up behind a brass railing. Cynthia and her lawyer leaned together, whispering and smiling, while Linda tried not to stare at the stain on the judge’s robe. She turned to look at the open door behind her, wondering where her own lawyer was. Then she wriggled lower into her seat. She noticed that Nathan was slumped in his, too; they were like a couple of unprepared schoolchildren who don’t want to attract the teacher’s attention. Not that Linda was completely unprepared. Her lawyer, Mr. Freed, had met with her once at his office, and he decided, within minutes, that his legal strategy was for Linda to state the truth, in her own words, in her own way. Vicki and Lee and Jewelle had all volunteered to stand up for her in court, as character witnesses, but Mr. Freed insisted that wouldn’t be necessary. He didn’t even tell her what to wear, the way lawyers in the movies always did. Still, she’d tried on four outfits before she decided on the freshly ironed white blouse and navy pleated skirt. The blouse was rumpled now, after the car ride and Phoebe’s gymnastics in her arms, but that didn’t matter. The problem was that Mr. Freed wasn’t here yet, and the hearing was about to begin without him. The clerk stood with his hands folded and cleared his throat. A court stenographer took her place at one side of the judge’s desk, with her hands poised over the keys of her machine, like a pianist’s. Linda looked behind her one last time and saw a uniformed officer close the courtroom door, as the clerk began to speak in a strong monotone: “Sterling versus Reismann, Case 1734 of ’92. Judge Margaret Place presiding.” Phoebe babbled in response and the judge glared at her.

  “Shush, poopsie,” Linda said. She hoped the baby wouldn’t start crying or head-banging, a habit she’d picked up recently, which made her seem retarded or disturbed.

  The clerk continued. “Lawyer for the respondent has submitted a motion to dismiss the petitioner’s claim for custody of female infant, Phoebe Ann Reismann.”

  “I’ve read the papers submitted by both parties,” the judge said. “Is there anything further to be added before I rule on the motion?” Phoebe bounced on the trampoline of Linda’s lap and hollered. Everyone but Cynthia looked at her. She hadn’t looked at her, or at Linda, once.

  Cynthia’s lawyer raised his hand. “If your Honor please,” he said, “surely it’s premature to rule on the—”

  The judge interrupted. “I’ll decide whether or not it’s premature to rule on a motion in my court,” she said.

  Linda realized she’d had a history teacher very much like her, in the eleventh or twelfth grade. Miss Chute, her name was, although behind her back she was alternately called Miss Shit and Miss Cootie. The main thing about her was that she had no pets among her students; she seemed to hate everyone equally,
and she did a great deal of name-calling herself, right to people’s faces. If you didn’t know the answer—or worse, if you didn’t care about the answer—you were a “Neanderthal,” a “cretin,” or a “microcephalic.” Whenever Linda was called on to recite in Miss Chute’s class, her voice thinned out to a barely audible thread before it disappeared altogether.

  Cynthia’s lawyer stood. “But, your Honor,” he said, “in her answering papers the petitioner requested that certain hearings be held in order to determine what merit, if any, is contained in the respondent’s motion. Pending these hearings, and in the child’s best interests, the petitioner also asks that present custody be transferred to her.”

  “I can read, Counselor,” the judge said dryly. “Sit down.” Then she pointed her finger at Nathan. “You!” she said. “Are you representing the respondent?”

  Nathan untangled his feet from the rung under his chair and sprang to a standing position, almost crashing sideways into Linda and Phoebe. “No, ma’am, I’m not. I’m her …” Linda watched as he scrounged helplessly for a word that would sound respectable in court. “We’re going to get married,” he said at last.

  That information didn’t seem to interest the judge, one way or the other, but Cynthia’s lawyer said, “For the record, your Honor, this … this consort of Ms. Reismann’s is already married.”

  “I’ve filed for a divorce,” Nathan shot back.

  “This is absolutely fascinating,” the judge said, “but I don’t have all day. Where is the respondent’s counsel?”

  Linda raised her hand timidly and then stood, with Phoebe in her arms. “Maybe he’s stuck in traffic,” she suggested. As soon as she said it, she knew it was exactly the sort of obvious and useless answer that would have brought Miss Chute’s wrath down on her like a storm of hailstones.

  Sure enough, Judge Place said, “Thank you so much,” with searing sarcasm.

  Cynthia’s lawyer rose again. “Perhaps, your Honor, respondent’s counsel has chosen to simply submit his papers rather than expose himself to the court’s probing questions on the matter.”

  Linda, still standing, said, “That’s not true! He definitely said he’d be here.”

  “Are you the child’s mother?” the judge asked her.

  “Yes!” Linda said, in a voice that carried to every corner of the room. “Yes, I am!” It was the only absolute truth she knew.

  Cynthia’s lawyer jumped up. “Your Honor, she may be the mother in name—” he began.

  “I’m her mother in every way!” Linda shouted. “I gave birth to her and I nursed her and I … Oh, what do you know about it anyway!”

  “Objection!” Cynthia’s lawyer proclaimed. “This hysterical outburst—”

  “No, I object,” Linda said, turning to look hard at Cynthia, who finally looked back at her with glinting, gun-metal eyes. “I object to all of this, to anyone thinking, just because they have money, that my baby is up for grabs … for sale!”

  “Ha!” Phoebe yelled and flung herself hard against Linda, head-first. Linda cupped Phoebe’s head while the baby commenced to bang it, with the persistence of a butting goat, against Linda’s breast.

  “She’s tired,” Linda explained, still cupping Phoebe’s thrusting head.

  “So am I,” the judge said. “Motion granted. Petition dismissed.”

  There was a hiss of whispering at Cynthia’s table, and then her lawyer said, in a weary voice, “Your Honor, would you entertain an oral application for reargument?”

  “I wouldn’t entertain it if you made it in tongues,” the judge told him. “There is nothing left here for argument, Counselor, and you know it. If any further frivolous applications are made before this court, I will seriously consider sanctions.”

  The last Linda saw of Cynthia was her furious white profile going by in a blur of motion. If only Robin had been there.

  At Linda and Wright’s wedding dinner, the dessert was a platter of sliced oranges, honeyed walnuts, and fortune cookies. Somewhere, Linda still had the little paper slip from the fortune cookie Wright had chosen for her and placed in her hand. “Lucky life,” it said. She’d had it laminated a couple of weeks later at a stationery shop. Now she no longer believed in simple, blind luck. The story of her life so far had persuaded her that, despite certain unavoidable events, you still had to make your own luck, good and bad. Yet at Yum Luck’s she rotated the little dish with its two folded fortune cookies until she had an intuitive sense that the one meant for her was closest at hand. She picked it up and snapped it in half and pulled out her fate: “The struggle is its own reward.” She handed the slip to Nathan. “What do you think this means?” she asked him.

  He read it and shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “But it sounds like something my mother would say.”

  “Mine, too,” Linda said.

  When they got back to the apartment, lugging the baby, the diaper bag, and a doggie bag of leftover lo mein and kung po chicken—in a perfect impersonation of an average American family—they found Robin crouched on the front step. “Where have you been?” she asked.

  36

  The Disappearing Act

  NATHAN’S ACTUAL NAME, THE name on his voter registration card, as well as his birth certificate, driver’s license, and naturalization papers, was Natalicio Julio Diaz, the same as his father’s and his grandfather’s. On the way to the polls on Election Day, he told Linda that his mother had almost died when her labor with him suddenly stalled after eighteen strenuous hours. She was at home at the time, in her own bed, where her two older children had both been safely delivered by a midwife. During the quiet eye of that third storm, Nathan’s father took her to the community hospital, and a doctor there named Nathan Glass committed some medical wonders, including turning the baby around at the last minute, so that he wouldn’t land feet-first into his life. So it was Natalicio on all the official documents, in honor of family tradition, and Nathan everywhere else, in honor of Dr. Glass.

  There was an explanation to be found for almost everything, Linda decided, if you looked hard enough for it. After she and Nathan arrived home from the custody hearing, she’d phoned Mr. Freed, her no-show lawyer, to tell him about the outcome and to ask where he’d been. He explained that he had been stuck in traffic—he’d called the courthouse from his car phone, but the message had never been delivered—and that he would waive his fee in light of his delinquency. A few weeks before, when Linda called William Sterling to thank him for the referral to Mr. Freed and for all his other kindnesses to her, she worked up the nerve to ask how he had happened to come across those confidential papers and letters. “Oh, I have my sources,” he said mysteriously. And then he added, “There’s hardly anything you can’t get in this town in return for reading a screenplay, or giving somebody an audition.” Hester, Linda thought immediately—or Mitchell. The only puzzle she still couldn’t solve was Robin, but she was willing to settle for simply having her here.

  Robin had never written back to Linda while she was in Glendale. She didn’t write to Lucy or Carmel, either, although they both wrote to her several times before giving up. Robin believed she had to sever herself completely from her old life before she could truly live her new one. But she couldn’t turn off her thoughts of home, of Phoebe and Linda and Nathan and the Thompsons. They would all go on living, she supposed, as if she had never existed. The way her mother had before Robin found her again. Without meaning to, she envisioned the apartment in L.A., everyone sitting at the table without her, talking and eating. She remembered doing the same thing here, in her mother’s house, when Tony was upstairs, dying.

  Robin walked around with an ache in her body she couldn’t exactly define or locate. It seemed to travel from her chest to her throat to her belly to her head. It wasn’t that her mother had proven to be imperfect—nobody’s really perfect—or that her attention kept wandering away from Robin to other people and things. Robin was hungry for attention, but she had learned how to wait for it, or to do without.
The problem lay mainly in herself, in her inability to forget. She longed for the sudden, convenient amnesia of soap operas, but she couldn’t forget the fact of Phoebe, no matter how hard she tried. She looked and looked at the pictures Linda had sent, and felt a growing panic of loss. And sometimes, when she was trapped in the shower with a headful of suds, or on the exercise bike, going nowhere fast, she would swear she heard Linda calling her, over the pounding water or the churning wheels.

  The day before she was supposed to begin classes at Goldwater High, Robin was in the house, waiting for her mother to come back from her new job at a car-rental agency. She had been told to start supper, to defrost a package of chicken parts and cut up some potatoes and onions. But she lost herself in a series of daydreams about Lucy and Carmel. In one of Carmel’s letters, she’d said that Lucy had broken up with Shay after her mother found out about them, but there was an ongoing intrigue of notes passed in school, and “accidentally on purpose” meetings at the mall, all of which fascinated Robin, despite her decision to be disengaged.

  Her mother came home and the chicken parts were still united in a block of ice, the potatoes and onions uncut. A lecture ensued, not very different from the ones Linda used to dispense, about responsibility and maturity. “I can’t do everything around here,” Robin’s mother said. “Don’t you ever think of anybody but yourself?” And Robin mumbled, “Big deal” and “Who cares?” whenever she could get a word in. The crazy thing was, the whole business only made her homesick. After a supper of tough, pinkish chicken and lumpy potatoes, she lay on the daybed, with that migrating ache settled firmly in her gut.