In the Palomar Arms

by Hilma Wolitzer

  The real beauty of being a father is that it’s a created job. The biological part can be hit-and-run. Nowadays you can even hit into a test tube; conception doesn’t require two warm bodies anymore. Women have always been the heroes of childbirth, anyway. They bloom with it, they almost die from it. And they claim, without qualification, to endure the greatest possible physical pain.

  Once, when Steven was a baby, Kenny broke his leg in two places, skiing. A few weeks later, he and Joy had three other couples in for dinner. One of the men said, admiringly, that Kenny’s leg must have hurt like a sucker, and Joy smirked. The other women nodded at her, knowingly, without a word passing among them. Kenny was amazed and outraged. He said that the pain had been excruciating, and one of the women actually laughed out loud. She folded her arms and said, “It wasn’t anything like labor; buster, you can bet on that.”

  Kenny said he wouldn’t know, but that the bone had literally pierced the skin. It was whitish yellow, like a huge, emerging tooth. A seasoned ski pro had fainted when he looked at it.

  “Ha!” the woman said. “Ha, ha,” the other woman added, even Joy, who had wept in the ambulance and said, “Darling darling darling,” until they’d put him under for surgery.

  The mildest of the men said, “We get more heart attacks, more lung cancer, more sports injuries. I mean, that’s statistics.”

  “My water broke with Steven hours before I began to dilate,” Joy said. “It was a dry birth.” She ripped off a ragged piece of bread and chewed it.

  “Have you ever been shot?” Kenny asked no one in particular. “Guys in Vietnam got it in the guts, in the head.” It was a weak, even a specious argument, since nobody at the table, including Kenny, had been in Vietnam. Joy hefted the heavy meat platter with one hand and left the room.

  There was a long, troubled silence during which the wine was finished and crusts of bread were shredded into little hills of crumbs. Then one of the men said, “Hemorrhoids!”

  Joy was carrying in the dessert, her lips a narrow pleated line. “Please,” she said.

  “I know it’s not a pleasant subject,” the man admitted. “It’s not dinner-table chitchat, like water breaking and dilation, so do forgive me. But the anus happens to be the area of the body that is more sensitive to pain than any other part of man.”

  “Oh ho, of man,” his wife said, spooning her parfait. “Man couldn’t take a half hour of hard labor. Not five stinking minutes.”

  Her husband stood up, his napkin falling to the floor. His face was dark with blood. “Why don’t you shut your trap,” he suggested.

  “Hey, everybody,” Kenny said, recalling that he was the host of this shipwrecked party. But he felt helpless, with that malingerer—his leg in an ankle-to-thigh cast—propped on a pillowed chair.

  The evening ended badly; it was a long time ago. Two of the couples have since divorced, and Kenny’s leg has healed completely. He has to use strong light to find the thin surgical scar. But the children are conspicuously here, are flourishing like trees.

  And birth is the greatest drama he can imagine, one he had to watch from the sidelines, moaning and cheering like a football fan whose team is in danger of losing the playoffs.

  Joy’s labors were long and arduous, and her courage extraordinary. Her streaked blond hair that he’d always loved was dark with perspiration. The terrible, wanton ease of screwing, Kenny thought the first time he watched her writhe and pant and thrust. Whose asshole idea was it to let fathers in, anyway? A few months before, they had quarreled bitterly over an expensive lamp Joy had bought. If anything happened to her now, Kenny promised himself, he’d cut off his prick with a broken light bulb.

  But it didn’t. And he hasn’t. Thank God.

  When Steven was finally born, and held up for scrutiny in all his glazed perfection, Kenny had lost sight of his own long-past participation in this event. He was astounded and moved to see that the baby looked just like him.

  Even before he met Daphne, though, things were not good in Kenny’s marriage. This was the truth, not just a story he’d invented to console Daphne that day she’d wept in his arms and said, “I’m not a homewrecker, am I, Kenny? I’m not, am I?”

  He and Joy argued about the most trivial matters. He often couldn’t remember the details an hour later, but the anger remained, and a shameful appetite for revenge. Joy became more extravagant, pushing him into petty stinginess. She bought a white fox jacket, and he traveled five miles to save three cents a gallon on gas.

  They were lousy together in bed, and each accused the other of simply getting off without concern for sentiment. Then she stopped having orgasms, hardly moved at all. He felt as if he were trying to resuscitate a drowned stranger. Had she faked it before? All those previous outcries and shudders struck him now as too convulsive, as theatrical and contrived. He started to come almost before he’d begun, or he lost his erection completely. “Well, I’m not a necrophiliac!” he’d yell, on his way to the bathroom, the refrigerator, the sofa. She wouldn’t say anything. He had the conviction, though, that she was smiling secretly in the darkness.

  Often they spoke to one another only through the children. “Give Daddy the mail, honey. There’s an important bill in there.”

  “Tell Mommy I’ll be home late.”

  Even when they were all in the same room, Steven delivered their messages with the cheerful willingness of a dog.

  Kenny and Joy had been strongly in love once; he’s certain of that. Years ago, when they were separated for the first time by a business trip, he had sent a telegram that simply said: I AM JOYLESS.

  Yet it’s difficult now to trace their history and find the very beginning of that love’s dissolution. They went to a marriage counselor, but Joy became frustrated by the man’s refusal to take sides, especially hers when she felt vehemently righteous. And Kenny resented the counselor’s insistence that they argue only in his presence, as if they were children who could not be trusted alone with matches, with their dangerous combustible rage. Mutual dissatisfaction drew them together for a while, and they quit the counselor, but it was a false, temporary peace. With the loss of a common enemy, their own hostilities soon resumed.

  A little over a week ago, on Saturday, Joy went into Beverly Hills to shop, and Kenny was supposed to be babysitting. He fell asleep in his chair, drinking a beer and watching a rerun of a Rams game. He woke in a panic and found the children playing safely and quietly near his feet. Kenny’s chest was strewn with doll blankets and dish towels. Kids were always doing and saying things that could kill you later when you remembered them, especially if you didn’t live at home anymore. He thought of Joy at that moment, in the dressing room of some exclusive boutique, avenging his failure to make her happy by attacking his slight tendency toward thrift.

  When she learned about Daphne, wouldn’t she strike back by trying to deprive him of the central passion of his life—Steven and Molly?

  Three months after he met Daphne, Kenny privately consulted a lawyer. Bill Larkin, plucked from a prominent ad in the Yellow Pages—Divorce/Civil/Real Estate/Criminal/Advice to Do-It-Yourselfers—because the man he regularly used, whose office is right down the hall from Kenny’s, is also Joy’s cousin. Her whole family is crawling with lawyers.

  Larkin told him to ease himself very slowly out of the marriage. “It’s like defusing a bomb, you know?” he said. He had a handy metaphor or aphorism for everything. “Don’t admit to anything,” he advised. “She’ll nail you to the cross if she finds out about what’s-her-name. A woman scorned and all that jazz. Sometimes it’s only the dough you’ve spent on your honey that gets them. They add it all up: motels, dinners, gifts, you know? It makes them crazy, especially if they’ve been stretching the meat loaf with soy beans, squeezing the yellow into the oleo.”

  Kenny bypassed the inconceivable notion of Joy on a household budget. And what motels? What dinners? He’d been so fearful of detection that he hadn’t taken Daphne anywhere, at least not until he’d convinced
her to move out of L.A. for a while. Even in Ventura, where no one else he knows lives or works, he chooses a dark, obscure restaurant for the occasional lunch they share. The menus can barely be read by the weak, flickering light of the memorial candle on each table. But he is so sick with love and apprehension he can hardly eat anyway, or make proper conversation. It doesn’t matter; the fork in her hand starts to tremble less than halfway through the meal. They race back to Daphne’s apartment and throw open the sofa bed, working faster than that kid in the Castro commercial.

  Bill Larkin gave him a scenario to play out at home. He said, “When the time is ripe, put it to your wife like this: ‘You’re not happy, right? Well, I’m not happy, either. Life is short and misery’s long. Why should we torture ourselves? Why shouldn’t we be happy? Only not together.’ Then make love to her a couple of times,” Larkin advised. “Send her a dozen roses. Just remember that goodbye is a lot like hello.” He leaned back and lit a big cigar, while Kenny searched the diplomas on the wall behind the desk.

  As soon as things open up between Joy and himself, as soon as he feels they can speak sanely to one another, he’ll get a proper attorney, a powerful and respected shark like Joy’s cousin; somebody who will make sure he doesn’t lose his kids. Until then, he must be careful not to say Daphne’s name in his sleep, or even worse, when he’s awake.

  The silver Mercedes passes on the right, its horn screaming. The singing driver gives Kenny the finger.

  Jesus, he must have passed Camarillo. When Aristotle said that happiness is good, he probably didn’t mean this kind of happiness, taken on the sly. If only bigamy was an accepted practice. It could save so much aggravation, time, money. He doesn’t have anything kinky in mind, either, like both women at the same time or anything like that …

  He has a dual reverie of Daphne in the shower at her Ventura apartment, washing her seaweed hair, her full breasts sleek and running with water; and of Joy sitting fully clothed on a chair in their Sherman Oaks living room. He holds them together in his head for one thrilling moment. Then Daphne shuts off the water and wraps all of herself discreetly in a large towel. She disappears into a mist of steam. Joy continues to sit there, staring straight ahead, waiting for him to come home.

  3

  SHE’S LATE AGAIN, ONLY fifteen minutes this time, but Mrs. Shumway gives her a killing look. Daphne’s partners, who chat together in Spanish, are already setting out the sectioned Styrofoam trays to be filled. Other aides are at their places across the kitchen.

  After Kenny’s visits, all of Daphne’s reflexes seem slowed, as if the efforts of love are numbing. On these days, knowing that she might be late, she puts on her white uniform at home, something she prefers not to do because it arouses staring and comments from strangers. People want to know if she’s a hairdresser, or a nurse. A woman in a supermarket once asked Daphne to remove a sliver of glass from her finger. Today, as she walked to her car, a drunk sitting on a bus-stop bench assumed she was a bride, and said that she should not wear white if she wasn’t pure.

  Daphne puts her hairnet on, and looks into the steaming pots and pans on the nearest stove. Some kind of fish tonight, and macaroni, and a cauldron of murky soup in which bits of vegetables rise to the surface like flotsam in a boiling sea.

  The Rolodex file of dietary restrictions is on the counter, where Feliciana Juarez places a cellophane packet of plastic utensils on each tray.

  Daphne calls out, “Aaron, Mrs. T.! 215A! No sugar! No salt! No fat!”

  Feliciana’s sister, Evita, staples a name and a room slip to one of the trays and intones, “Aaron, Senora T., doscientos trienta y cinco A. No azúcar. No sal. No grasa … Ay, que vida!” Feliciana ladles it all out.

  When Daphne gets to McBride, Mrs. N., who is only low sodium, there’s a break in the assembly rhythm and a flurry of Spanish between the two other women. McBride is the ninety-nine-year-old. The whole place is in a state of excitement about the party planned for her hundredth birthday on September 6. There has not been such a celebration at the Palomar Arms for years, which isn’t surprising, considering the circumstances. Loneliness and boredom might have carried off a few contenders, or the food alone could have done it. Mrs. Shumway roasts or boils everything until it turns black or white and lies defeated in the shallow grave of a serving tray.

  And Daphne knows that mistakes are made, that dinners, and occasionally medicines, are delivered to the wrong patients. Last month, a severe diabetic, delighted by the sweet and unexpected change in his diet, polished off the ice cream and fruit salad meant for somebody else. He had to be revived with an emergency dose of insulin when he was found, slumped and stunned over his bed table, two hours later.

  Mrs. McBride is well, though, and has attained the status of a local celebrity. Other patients and their visitors look in at the doorway of 227 and exclaim, “That’s her!” as if they’ve sighted Elizabeth Taylor or Jackie Onassis. Once in a while her photograph is taken with a flash camera, probably blinding the old woman for minutes afterward. Her good health is toasted by staff members with pint bottles in the linen room and the pantry, where bets are placed as to whether or not she’ll make it. The latest odds are in her favor, and should increase as the days are counted down.

  When the trays are all filled, they’re placed onto rolling meal carts, and then taken up to the second and third floors for re-warming and distribution. As the aides wait in the basement for the two elevators, which are notoriously slow, they take turns hitting the call button, even though it’s already lit. Sometimes they tell horror stories to help pass the time. It’s a sort of open competition in which Daphne has never participated, except as an audience. She would like to join in, but has not yet come up with a worthy anecdote, or the necessary nerve.

  Now she thinks of a story idea one of the men in her scriptwriting class presented the week before, about an aborted fetus that returns to threaten a wealthy beach community. It has enough incredibility for this occasion, and is suitably gruesome. But something, maybe the setting, makes Daphne feel it’s inappropriate, so she doesn’t volunteer to speak.

  Instead, she listens as an older woman describes the ghost of a man who was buried without his dentures, and who haunts the Palomar Arms on the midnight-to-eight shift, searching for them in the night-table drawers.

  It’s a flat and familiar tale that’s greeted with a mixture of catcalls and disparaging murmurs. The narrator shrugs and punches the call button.

  Soon another woman begins. She worked at a nursing home in Chicago once where the cook poisoned every old lady who looked the least bit like her own mother. She injected their canned peaches with arsenic, and must have killed fifty or sixty of them before anyone caught on.

  “Why did she do it?” Daphne asks.

  “Her mother would never let her ride on the carpet sweeper when she was a little girl,” the woman explains.

  “Aaah, go on,” the first storyteller says, but Evita whispers, “Dios mío,” and Daphne looks back toward the kitchen, where Mrs. Shumway is starting tomorrow’s soup from a pile of bones.

  There’s a thoughtful pause.

  “Dr. Rauscher hypnotizes people into leaving him all their money,” someone announces.

  “Oh, who don’t know that,” Feliciana says, her disdain instantly silencing the other.

  Then a black aide named Lucille James says that she doesn’t know if she should even tell her story, because it’s so disgusting it could give somebody permanent nerves.

  It’s a wonderful opening, and her best friend, Ruthann, promptly says, “Tell it, girl. I’ve heard everything; you won’t get me.”

  “Okay,” Lucille says. “But don’t get mad if you’re sick or something later.” This story really happened, she states, to a friend of her cousin’s, in Detroit. The person it happened to, a middle-aged lady, had this big dog—some brand name, an Irish or German dog. Mean. “But he loved this lady who owned him,” Lucille says, “so she gets nervous when she comes home from work one da
y and he doesn’t come to the door or anything.”

  “He’s dead!” Ruthann proclaims.

  “Naw. But the lady hears something strange, like a choking sound.” Lucille pauses, surveys her rapt audience, and goes on. “She comes inside and that dog is lying on the floor, choking his head off. So she calls to him and says, ‘What’s the matter?’ like you do, and then when she sees he can’t even bark, and all his legs are twitching like a roach in Raid, she sticks her hand right down his throat. But she can’t find anything. Whatever’s in there, it’s too deep.”

  “If it’s a rat,” Ruthann says, “just keep it to yourself. I can’t stand when it’s about rats.”

  “So she picks him up and runs out into the street and goes to the animal hospital. All this time that dog’s choking and twitching.”

  “I don’t even like when it’s about dogs,” Feliciana says.

  Lucille continues. “The doctor has to open up the dog’s throat to get out what’s choking him, and that lady’s standing right there watching the operation, so she sees him take out this finger and put it on the table.”

  “A finger?” Daphne asks. “A human finger?”

  “Lord, Lord,” Ruthann intones.

  “You know any other kind of finger?” Lucille asks Daphne.

  “Did the dog die?” Feliciana says.

  “So the doctor says, ‘We better call the police,’ and they do.”

  “I’m not eating my dinner,” Evita announces.

  “Honey, you’re gonna lose weight,” Lucille assures her, before resuming the narrative. “The lady goes back to her apartment with the police and they notice these bloodstain’s she didn’t notice before, because she was all upset about the dog. And they follow those bloodstains right to the closet in the lady’s bedroom.”