In the Palomar Arms

by Hilma Wolitzer

  Joe imagines getting up there himself and announcing that for his opening number he’s going to take his own life. There could be a long drumroll, a dramatic bow … and then what? No digitalis, no quinidines, not even a cyanide capsule like the ones Hitler had stashed in the bunker for his big act. And Joe has the fumbling fingers of an amateur now. Even if he had the right stuff, he’d probably drop it, let it roll out of sight under the piano. The crowd would hiss. They’d have to take him off with a vaudeville hook. His real talent, he knows, is for continuation, not much of a crowd-pleaser anywhere.

  There are prizes for all the participants in the talent show. Brady gets a ball-point pen. He asks the nurse with the paper mustache if she’d like his autograph. The woman who sang “Buttercup” is given a clear plastic rain hat with a design of pink and blue polka dots. “Oh,” she says. “I haven’t been out in the rain for years.” But then she opens its accordion pleats and ties it under her chin.

  12

  AH, THE NUMBERS, THE blessed numbers. For a while they flush everything else out of Kenny’s head. His fingers move over the calculator with virtuoso speed and precision, and he hardly ever makes a mistake. In another life he might have been a church organist, or a jazz musician.

  The client on the other side of the desk waits with almost breathless apprehension for the final tax figures. When the waiting becomes unendurable, he shuffles his feet in a little sit-down soft-shoe dance. Kenny flashes a fast, reassuring smile without losing a beat in his computations. He notices the other man’s telltale pallor, the patina of perspiration. People have passed out in this office, sliding suddenly and quietly out of sight, and Kenny keeps a vial of smelling salts in a handy drawer. He feels that the man’s fate is in his charge, that he’s about to deliver something almost as important as a biopsy report. The malignancy, though, is the client’s wish to defraud the government and get away with it, to make Kenny the knowing criminal and himself just a lucky dope.

  But the smile and his expertise are the only things Kenny will offer. He knows all the angles—the various deductions and dodges—and he gently indicates what is legal and what isn’t. He doesn’t proselytize or sit in judgment. Instead, he gives shrewd and suitable advice. That’s what he’s paid for, and he’s very good at his job. But it’s not the part he loves.

  Even when he was a little kid, Kenny was a whiz at arithmetic, although he never distinguished himself in other subjects. The thing was that numbers worked out, no matter what you did with them. You could depend absolutely on their pure truth. The introduction of more difficult concepts like fractions and percentages delighted Kenny, while most students struggled to grasp them. He did his friends’ math homework and they wrote his book reports in return. But he would have done his part without reward, simply for the pleasure of doing it.

  Occasionally, he thinks with vague uneasiness about those artists who contribute something of value to the culture of their time. Even the commercial moviemakers whose taxes he handles talk excitedly about “lasting social documents.” Kenny’s ability with numbers is a kind of gift, too, he supposes. Anyway, an honest and ungrudging commitment is what really matters. You do what you have to do and then it has value. Kenny’s younger brother, Robert, who loved drawing maps for Geography, coloring in each state with a fresh bright crayon, and who was voted Class Rembrandt in junior high, is an electrical engineer back East. Useful, yet unfulfilled. He keeps taking evening courses in pottery and weaving, but they don’t give him the satisfaction he needs. From the first, Kenny knew that his own future would involve those remarkable numbers that distracted him from unhappiness, that even worked as a soporific.

  Their parents were embattled way before the boys were old enough for school. They kept Kenny awake at night with their yelling, and the punctuation of banging doors. Robert slept through everything, open-mouthed and dream-bound. And after nothing else helped Kenny, not humming, not covering his head with his pillow, or stuffing the ends of the blanket into his ears, he would count—one two three four five six—he wanted to reach a trillion, but somewhere in the hundreds the crashing voices on the other side of the wall would start to recede, and Kenny would grow deliciously heavy with sleep. He never counted sheep, or needed any image but the physical numbers themselves: the handsome upright 1, the humble round-shouldered 2. What a fine counter he was for such a small boy. What a smug, performing little brat. The butcher his mother went to would give him pennies if he counted them aloud for the entertainment of the other customers. Kenny didn’t mind being the floor show in the circus sawdust of the butcher shop. He liked it when the customers declared him a baby Einstein and he could go home, his pockets jingling with bounty, the numbers still resounding in his head like a beloved song. Later, when he was older and had discovered the easy friendship of his own body, he helped himself to sleep by touching. At first, he didn’t give up his habit of counting. It simply became the accompaniment to his new work—the counting of strokes, faster and faster, the numbers going by in a blur!

  When he began to notice other bodies, and hear mystifying numerical jokes, about men with three or four testicles, about the number of sexual positions, about the number 69, he fixed his mind on something or someone else at night, and trained his willing hand to give him slower and more narcotic pleasure, and he didn’t have to count at all.

  Despite her looseness with money, Joy is clever at math. She balances her own checkbook, and chooses to do it without the aid of a calculator. Before the children were born, she worked for a philanthropic organization, and she always read their financial reports with professional interest and acumen.

  Daphne, on the other hand, says that math eluded her in school, that she’d break out in a sweat at problems that required calculations of the mileage of speeding trains, or the conversion from gallons to pints. “Oh, why didn’t I know you then!” she once asked Kenny. Her helplessness with numbers doesn’t amuse him; still, it’s only a small flaw among her numerous great virtues, and they often look over her bank statements in bed. But Daphne won’t even attempt to solve the little puzzlers he likes, those slightly more complicated versions of the math problems she’s always hated. “Please,” she’d beg him. “Stop! I don’t care how many times the missionaries row the cannibals across the river. I don’t care if they all drown, or get eaten by piranhas!”

  Both of Kenny’s children demonstrate an early talent for numbers. Molly keeps anxious tabs on her toys with a mysterious mathematical system of her own. And at four, Steven will do his multiplication tables for anyone who’ll listen. Kenny was like that, too, but out of a more compelling need.

  When he and Robert were little, Robert, the favored child, was overwhelmed by attention because he was frail and asthmatic. Or maybe he was frail and asthmatic because of the attention. Whenever Kenny began to feel deprived of his share, or when his parents became dangerously belligerent with one another, he would ask, “Hey, who wants to hear me count to a million?” Hardly anybody did, but it was a way of affecting the environment, of having some power at an otherwise powerless age. In a few years he expanded his repertoire to include riddles and mathematical card tricks.

  “So?” the client asks now. “Will I have to hock my kids?” A vice-president of Creative Development at a major studio, he’s also a gallows humorist. Others in his seat have made shaky jokes about jumping off cliffs or selling their blood, but they, too, were obviously grieving over impending loss. Like most people, they instantly convert numbers into dollars and cents, into sports cars and beachfront property, and they don’t appreciate the logic and beauty of simple addition and subtraction. They want miracles.

  Well, who doesn’t? Kenny could use one himself. His fingers go slack on the calculator as he recalls how horny he was that morning, and how sad. Frances made blueberry pancakes for breakfast, while Gus dandled and nuzzled his grandchildren. Joy, in a powder-blue bathrobe, was like a pretty teenager who is looking forward to the day, to her whole life. She set the table with a dre
amy lack of attention. She called her parents Mommy and Daddy. Steven drank his milk in breathless gulps, and Molly put her delicate foot in Kenny’s lap. He imagined tapping his orange-juice glass with a spoon, for silence, and then making an announcement. “Listen, everybody. This wonderful family scene is a lousy fraud. I’m in love with someone else, and it can’t be helped. It’s as inevitable as—as a progression of whole numbers!”

  The spatula Frances held would have trembled on the griddle, spattering batter and grease, and Gus might have keeled over in disbelief. Molly would probably have wriggled her little foot and then kicked Kenny, hard. And Joy would have looked at him with adolescent contempt, and at her own reflection in the toaster with vanity. All the boys who’d loved her once would be tickled pink to have the chance to love her again. Steven would have yelled in his loudest voice: “Two times three is six! Two times four is eight! Two times five is ten!”

  It was another hot day, but this time Kenny was going to escape to the office for a few hours. He could try calling Daphne’s apartment, and if she was there he’d make an impassioned and eloquent case for himself. They would meet; things would go on as before. He looked again at the scene in his kitchen, marveling at its unbroken peace. He raised his cup and it was filled with steaming fragrant coffee. Butter slid and melted over the pancakes, and Kenny squeezed Molly’s foot. “What’s on today’s agenda?” he asked.

  The client has one hand over his nose and he’s making snuffling noises. He’d never looked like a crybaby to Kenny. Besides, his eyes are dry and furtive. Jesus, movie people. They have such a weird lack of propriety. “Are you snorting coke, Mr. P.?” Kenny asks.

  The man opens his hand to reveal a Vicks inhalator. “Nah, I’ve just got a little cold. Anyway, can I afford coke?” His question has the whining inflection of a plea.

  “I’ll let you know in a few more minutes,” Kenny says.

  When he has the total, he leans across the desk and the client backs away slightly from the news, before leaning forward, too. Kenny writes the figures on a pad and pushes it across the desktop.

  “Oh, fuck,” the man says. They always say that, or something like it.

  It’s time for Kenny to do his stuff. He suggests other possible allowances and shelters. “We need bigger writeoffs,” he says, “and we want to avoid preference items. Let’s see if we can convert some of this income into capital gains.”

  The client is less rigid now, is almost ready to smile.

  Kenny feels exhilarated. He explains it all carefully, his fingers playing with the calculator at the same time. Now he’d like to show the guy a couple of card tricks that would knock him on his ear. But he has to move him out of the office quickly, so he can start calling Daphne.

  The client makes a brave crack about getting off the breadline, and Kenny relaxes him further by saying that he wouldn’t have to pay such big taxes if he didn’t earn so much money in the first place. “Yeah,” the man concedes, and his smile breaks.

  Kenny looks at his watch, remembering that Daphne has a class starting in a few minutes. If she’s back from Seattle, that’s where she’ll be. By the time the class is over, he can be in the parking lot at the college, waiting for her.

  13

  IT AMAZES DAPHNE THAT she is able to behave as if her life is not about to be radically changed. Feeling only a little silly and self-conscious, she stands near the black-board, where Mr. Steinmetz has instructed her to stand. She glances at the mimeographed script in her hand and sees that many of its lines have been marked with a yellow highlighter. She has the lead in this reading, the part of Jacqueline Saunders, a heroine Daphne herself has created.

  On the other side of the classroom, the heavyset man who always wears a Dodgers cap, and who still has the kind of sideburns that were popular in the sixties, is ready to play opposite her in the role of Jake Monroe. When Daphne wrote this teleplay, she had pictured Jake as looking something like Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief. When she’d indicated, in her original treatment, that he was an “older” man, she’d meant it in the sophisticated sense, meant someone worldly and experienced, sexually attractive, but without youthful superficiality. Mitchell? Marty? She can’t remember the name of the man in the baseball cap, but he’s hardly right for the part of Jake. This is just a reading, but Mr. Steinmetz has put unfair pressure on the script by casting one of the leads so poorly. Any of the younger women in the class might have played Jacqueline with credibility, although Daphne realizes that her description of the heroine, whose hair is waist-length and brown, and whose voice is throaty, could also be a description of herself. Is the likeness limited to physical characteristics? Plays are a little like dreams. And dreams rise up from the unconscious, heavy with clues to the real concerns of the dreamer. Daphne is suddenly afraid that personal feelings will overtake her in the middle of the drama, and that she won’t be able to continue. Her decision to break with Kenny is an ache in her body that travels from head to belly to fingertips. She is not immobilized by it, but surely that could happen at any time. Perhaps, if she’s lucky, the full force of her resolution won’t strike her until she has spoken to him. It’s an occasion she dreads, and yet one she must pass through.

  Daphne has come directly from the airport to school. Her suitcase is under her seat across the room. Again, she imagines the telephone ringing in her apartment, and is grateful for this delay in her confrontation with Kenny. She twists a lock of hair around one finger, and looks at the lines of the script, silently mouthing some of the words.

  Oh, Jake, honey. Sometimes 1 worry that we’ll always be this intense. Or that someday we won’t be.

  She can’t even remember writing that. It sounds so artificial and dumb. The man about to play Jake has a paunch that he taps with one hand, making it quiver. His breath is audible. My God, what if she starts to laugh? She does that sometimes, when she’s nervous or unhappy.

  “Okay, okay,” Steinmetz says. “We don’t have sets or costumes, so for all intents and purposes this is a radio play. When I was a little kid, they had this great new invention called the radio. It was a little box, and they squeezed all these little people inside: the Lone Ranger and Tonto, Jack Benny, the Green Hornet, the Singing Lady … All I had to do was hear them speak their lines and I was transported. I could picture everything. The horses, the dust they kicked up when the sound man knocked two coconut shells together, everything. So we have to forget about Daphne and Marshall here, and concentrate on Jacqueline and Jake, on the magic of the words they speak, and see if we’re persuaded. Okay, stand by. Action!”

  Daphne begins. “Oh Jake honey,” she mumbles as quickly as she can. “Sometimes I worry that we’ll always be this intense or that someday we won’t be.” She glances around the room apologetically, but everyone is attending to the script.

  Marshall clears his throat, something Jake wouldn’t do in a million years. He lifts his eyebrows and grins at Daphne, as if asking to be forgiven for this foolishness. Then he reads: “Baby, I want you to move in with me.” His voice is high-pitched, his eyes dart like a shoplifter’s.

  Baby, I want you to move in with me! She remembers writing that all right, the words she would have had Kenny speak at any time. Now they are as trite as the lyrics to a fifties hit. Bay-bee, I want you to move in with me-ee, we could be so ha-a-a-pee! And her own next lines are positively ludicrous.

  It’s funny. I’ve longed for you to say that, but now I’m kind of scared …

  She’s been nagging the guy for three scenes to make a move toward commitment, and now she’s scared. What is she supposed to be scared of? That she can’t live with his furniture? That his landlady won’t approve? Daphne says her lines, looking at Steinmetz and praying for an interruption. He should be yelling “Cut!” or something by now. But his eyes are shut and his face is peaceful and expectant. He actually seems convinced, even transported. How little people settle for, Daphne thinks. No wonder everything on television is so bad. No wonder the quality of life isn’t
much better.

  Marshall, as Jake, reads: “Scared of what, my love?”

  “Of nothing,” Daphne says firmly. “I’m just being an idiot. I’ll pack my things and be at your place in thirty minutes.”

  Marshall peers at his script, turns a page, perplexed.

  Steinmetz opens his eyes. “That’s not in the script, is it?”

  “I’m improvising,” Daphne says. “For the sake of verisimilitude.”

  “You can’t do that,” Marshall says. “What am I supposed to say?”

  “What’s in your heart,” Daphne advises, and is astonished when his face blazes with color.

  “That would be swell if this was a theater class,” Mr. Steinmetz says. “Then we could do improvisation, psychodrama, method acting, anything you want. You could get to be a table, or a rosebud opening. But in television you’ve got to stick to the script. And so far, so good, I’d say. Any comments?”

  Mrs. Spurgeon, a woman in her sixties who’s working on a children’s fantasy about George Washington returned from the dead, raises her hand. “What about morals?” she asks.

  “What about them?” Steinmetz says irritably.

  “Well, doesn’t somebody have to take responsibility for all this looseness? Doesn’t somebody have to say, why don’t they just get married if they’re so crazy about each other, and make it legal?”

  “What is she, a lawyer?” another woman asks.