In the Palomar Arms

by Hilma Wolitzer

  Place mats. Pots. His whole fucking life will be strewn with household objects. He’ll be Atlas with a moving van on his shoulders. A domestic animal when he wants only to be animal. “I said it would take time,” he says, trying to ease the clench of his jaw. “And you’ve been great so far. You know it isn’t just a stall. You know that I love you very much.”

  “Sure. And you love your children. And you love family life.”

  “Some of it,” he admits. “In a way. I’m used to it. But I’m not happy there. If you imagined me happy there, Daph, you’ve made a big mistake. I shut off all the lights in all the rooms, and I kiss my children in their sleep. But I don’t make love to my wife anymore.”

  Daphne has strayed from the argument. She wonders why she recited that incredible inventory of her parents’ belongings. Does she want the torpid peace of their life? The word “rooms” that Kenny spoke evoked an image of her childhood home, and then one of the Palomar Arms. She sees an empty stretch of corridor broken only by the bars of light falling from each separate room. “Do you think we deserve to be happy, Kenny?” she asks. “I don’t mean just you and me. Do you remember in Philosophy when that guy with the shaved head said that it wasn’t our purpose on earth, that we weren’t put here to be happy?”

  He nods, still wandering in the strange gloom of his house, where he’s just shut off the lights, just kissed his children while they slept.

  “Well, he was a liar, or a lunatic. When I go to work every day, I see that everything ends in despair. Even with happiness, life is tragic. But without it, it’s … absurd! So I want to be happy now.”

  “I thought we were.”

  “In a way. For a while. But we have too many restrictions, too many limits. Oh, you know what I mean, Kenny.”

  He stands and goes to the fireplace, with his hands open in front of him. He could be warming them at the paper flames. It is chilly, Daphne realizes. The flesh on her arms has risen in visible bumps from the chill, and the fine hairs are up with emotion. She and Kenny are moving toward a separation, and yet there’s a perverse delight in this encounter. We’re merely talking, she marvels. Why is it thrilling?

  It occurs to Kenny that they’ve never spent so much time here without physical contact; that’s the trouble. He turns and walks to the side of Daphne’s chair, where he lowers himself, cross-legged, to the floor. With one finger he traces the curve of her ankle. “This is time in which we could be loving one another,” he says. “This is lost happiness.” He slips off her shoe and holds her foot in his palm, the way he holds Molly’s.

  She pulls it away. “Don’t,” she says, and remembers saying, “Don’t, don’t,” to Jesse Krantz, her hand guiding his with crazed indecision.

  “I only want us to comfort one another, puss,” Kenny tells her.

  “That’s not what you want, Kenny. You want to rip open the bed so we can fuck like rabbits, and then you can go back to L.A. and I can go to work.”

  “Okay!” he says. “Okay! I want that, too! Don’t you?” He moves quickly to the arm of her chair, before she can stand, and kisses her fiercely.

  She endures the kiss and then releases herself by shoving hard against his chest. She gets up as he sinks sideways into the chair. “Keep your tongue to yourself!” she shouts.

  “Come on,” he says, getting up, too, and holding out his arms.

  “Keep back!” she warns him.

  He wants to laugh, but doesn’t. “Come on,” he says again, softly now, taking a few steps toward her.

  She reaches behind her for support and finds the neck of a table lamp. She yanks the lamp up and holds it over her head. She’ll hit him with it if he comes any closer. A headline flashes by: MISTRESS SLAYS MARRIED LOVER IN TRYST.

  Jesus! When she pulled the lamp up like that, the plug came out of the socket, trailing sparks. She looks insane. Yet how beautiful she is, how terrific! He loves her the way he loved statues of women in museums when he was a boy—ideally—and in the astounding way he’s learned to love flesh-and-blood women. The lamp trembles in her fist, its shade rocking. She looks like the Statue of Liberty, raising her flaming torch. All at once he’s the tired and the poor, and deeply yearning. “Oh, Daph,” he says.

  “I just can’t live like this anymore,” she explains, slowly lowering the lamp.

  He takes it from her and sets it back on the table, its shade drunkenly askew. “I know that,” he says. “It’s only temporary.” But she doesn’t seem to have heard him. She’s crying a little and has started to walk around the room. The fake firelight dances on her legs when she passes it. “It’s not only things, either. I want mornings and the middle of the night,” she says, marking her demands off on her fingers. “I want days when we’re not in bed together, but can look forward to it. I want to make love like it’s not an emergency—two firemen putting out a fire and then going their separate ways. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Yes,” he says. “I think I know what you mean.”

  “So it’s no good pretending I have any of it if I don’t, is it? It’s not lasting comfort.”

  “No, no, it isn’t”

  Daphne puts her hands to her face and he thinks she’s resumed crying, but she hasn’t. “I don’t want to smell like this anymore,” she declares.

  “You smell lovely,” he says. “You smell lovely everywhere. I’d like to keep your smell on me all day.”

  “I don’t!” she says. “And I can’t really wash it off, I can’t get rid of it. I think I’m starting to rot, like them. Only it’s too soon!” She waves her hands at him, two panic-stricken birds.

  “Shhh,” he cautions. “Don’t do that, puss.” He catches her hands and holds them to his mouth. “Lovely,” he says, kissing each folded finger.

  “I deserve to be happy!” she cries, drawing her hands away to the solace of her own lips.

  “You do,” he agrees. “Listen to me, sweetheart. I’ll do it. Oh, come here.”

  The room is too cold and too bright. Daphne wants to be wrapped in blankets, to burrow into their warmth. She also wants to keep talking, only partly for the lulling pleasure of voices. It’s as if they’re interested strangers again—just meeting—eager for the newness of unknown stories, and willing to keep lust waiting, breathing heavily in the wings. But Kenny is unbuttoning her shirt, slipping her jeans down, and her underpants. How quickly and deftly he does it. Her arms go around his neck of their own dumb accord. His shirt smells of laundry soap and sweat.

  “When?” she insists, and he misses her meaning for only an instant.

  “Right away,” he says. “I promise you that. I solemnly promise you everything.” God. He means it. After she helps him undress, hampering him, really, with fumbling bursts of passion, they move apart, each to a window to shut the blind.

  Then they open the bed, but not in the old frenzied way, as if something living were trapped inside. Daphne recognizes a married languor in their gestures, and as she lies down, she thinks giddily that they’re officially engaged. Fiancé. Nuptials. Bonds of matrimony. The ceiling stars glitter like tinsel. “Kenny, the stars,” she begins, and he says sternly, “Shhh! No more now,” so she closes her eyes. It’s all right; they’ll talk for years and years.

  For the first time, making love to Daphne seems to be a challenging, possibly dangerous assignment. Like a demolitions expert, he needs absolute silence, perfect concentration. With the bed open, the room is claustrophobically small. And crowded. He’s been followed here by the living ghosts of his family, and they surround him, bumping against each other. Who said that when two people lie down together they’re never alone? Here’s Joy and the kids, her folks and his. They lounge across the pillows, test the thin mattress with their fingertips. “Go away,” Kenny whispers roughly, tossing bedclothes into the shadows, flinging himself down.

  “What?” Daphne whispers back. And then Kenny is over her, and soon he’s inside her, nectar and cream. He has so many hands and mouths. She loses track of them, and of hersel
f turning on the bed, the bed spinning in the room. Yet she can’t come, although she labors forever at the edge of it. And he tries to wait for her, but is unable to. Well, it’s been days.

  They rest awhile and begin from the beginning, as if they already have all the time they need. And finally she cries out louder than she ever has, a shout of triumph, really, and of wonder.

  They have to get up soon. She’s due at the Palomar Arms, and Kenny has an appointment with a client. They can lie still only long enough for their galloping hearts to slow to a canter.

  While they’re getting dressed, he tells her that it will take a little while longer, just until his in-laws go home. Will she grant him that much?

  “Yes,” she says, with cold satisfaction and a terrible underlying excitement. When he buckles his belt, she has a fantasy that he’s putting on a holster. It’s as if she’s arranged with a hit man to do a murderous job.

  16

  THE LOUNGE IS CROWDED tonight, and filled with smoke and tension. When Daphne was living in Los Angeles, she worked in the campaign of a man running for the city council, and this room reminds her of headquarters on the eve of Election Day. The candidate was a born loser, yet there was a charged atmosphere created by the hard-core gambler’s optimism and the sadist’s excitement.

  Jerry is smoking a big cigar. It looks like the kind that explodes. “If McBride croaks before the sixth,” he says, “I’m out fifty bucks.”

  “You always going in over your head, man,” one of the maintenance crew scolds.

  “Ah, it’s just a cold,” Feliciana says. “Don’t get so uptight.”

  “Just a cold, huh?” Jerry says. “Then how come they got her hooked up like a monkey in a lab?”

  “Yeah, where they sending her, to Mars?”

  A male aide says that they have to turn the old lady all day and night, like a goddamn hourglass.

  “Just wait until you’re old,” Mkabi tells him.

  “Yeah, I can hardly wait,” he says. “It looks like a laugh a century.”

  Daphne sits next to Mkabi on the orange couch. She is possessed by her own news and wants to announce it.

  But she sees that it might be difficult for the others to understand that a major change has taken place in her life. Mkabi would say that Kenny’s promised Daphne the sun and the moon before, and she’ll believe him when the divorce papers are filed, not a minute sooner. Monica wouldn’t give Daphne’s tidings more than a cursory smirk. Daphne longs to share everything now, while she’s still stunned with success. She could also use some fresh assurance that she’s not a bad person. She’ll just have to wait until the evidence is entirely and clearly in. They’re all so preoccupied, anyway.

  “Your dance card filled for the big day, babe?” Jerry asks Daphne. “You’d better save me a waltz.”

  No one mentions her recent absence, or asks if she was ill or only playing truant.

  “I saw Mrs. McBride,” Daphne says to Mkabi. “She didn’t get a tray tonight.”

  “Save her life, probably,” Feliciana remarks.

  “But she looked awful.”

  “I don’t think it’s quite as bad as it looks,” Mkabi says. “It’s a nasty cold and a fever, that’s all. Of course she’s so old, and Rauscher’s covering himself, against bronchitis, pneumonia, uremia. He doesn’t want to take any chances. Doctors get sued these days if they cut your toenails crooked.”

  Daphne remembers the poor man in Madame Bovary who loses his leg because of a bumbled operation on his foot.

  “And there’s the party,” Mkabi continues. “He wants to make sure she keeps going until then.”

  “It will keep Rauscher cool with the authorities, help them overlook the violations.”

  “Yeah, inspectors don’t notice mice and roaches wearing party hats.”

  “Listen, a reporter came yesterday. They may be doing a feature. We’ll all be famous!”

  “So why doesn’t Rauscher send her to Community Memorial or Ventura General?” Daphne asks.

  Monica squeezes between them on the couch. “’Cause that’s where they bump them off, Moss,” she says. “How many do you think come back, once they leave?”

  “And the families start worrying they’ll lose the beds here, if they do pull through,” Mkabi adds.

  “Hey, maybe I ought to reserve one now,” the youngest aide says, but nobody laughs. “Well, it’s like low-cost housing, right? You’ve got to get on the waiting list.”

  “It’s like buying a grave,” Monica says. And there is a long, troubled, smoky silence.

  Mr. Brady, who’s watching Hogan’s Heroes, salutes Daphne when she comes to collect the trays. He’s cleaned his, but Mr. Axel still seems to eat barely enough for survival. Earlier, she’d offered to help him with his food, but he declined. Now he’s the first one to remark on her absence. “Missed you,” he says. “You all right?”

  “Yes. I went home for a few days, to Seattle, to visit my family.” How long ago that seems now. She might have imagined the whole trip.

  “Done you … good,” he says. “You seem happy.”

  His observation delights her. If visible changes are taking place, it must all be right somehow. Should she tell Mr. Axel, an impartial stranger, about herself and Kenny? It’s not the most appropriate moment. The canned laughter from the television set is loud; Mr. Brady is joining in. And Daphne knows she is ready to reveal only the parts of her story that are guaranteed to win approval. Again, she decides to contain her news. Happiness is a much more general subject. “Mr. Axel,” she says, “do you believe in happiness as a human right?” His tremors are rampantly active tonight, and she hopes he doesn’t think it’s a savage or stupid question. “I mean,” she emends, “do you think that’s why we were all put on earth, to experience pleasure?”

  “Oh, no!” he answers, so quickly and fluently that she’s surprised, and unaccountably let down.

  “Then why are we here?” she demands.

  He shrugs. “Same … reason … as cockroaches,” he says, “ … dinosaurs.”

  “Oh, but our brains!” she protests.

  He makes a rattling sound that resembles laughter. “The … fancy brain … thumb … the noble … heart. Just dirty tricks.”

  He’s drooling, and without self-consciousness Daphne takes a tissue from his bedside table and wipes his mouth, the way his daughter did that first day. He swallows convulsively a few times, and she’s scared that she’s stimulated him too much, that something bad is about to happen. But after a while she notices that the tremors have abated slightly, and that his eyes are glossy with animation.

  “We eat … brains of other … animals,” he says, “and … don’t get … smarter.”

  “We eat their hearts, too,” Daphne says, prompting him.

  “And are we … more … loving?”

  It is a comment, not a question, and one against which she feels hopelessly weak. She can’t even make a subjective argument: you are loving, I am loving, Mr. Brady is loving, Mkabi is loving, my mother and father are loving. It’s the world he’s talking about, and how can she come to its defense in a nursing home, and in the aftermath of her own treacherous happiness?

  17

  “I WON’T!” NORA SAYS, and opens her eyes. No one is there now, but a moment ago a group of small boys circled her bed and urged her to get up, to stop faking, or else. She’s dreaming too much, that’s the trouble. The medicine they’re giving her for the cold brings dreams before she’s fully asleep, and worse ones after.

  “It’s only a cold,” she told the nurse that morning, or yesterday. “Just let me sleep.”

  But they didn’t. They touched her forehead and her feet. They pulled the sheets and plucked her from sleep as if it were a Boston morning and she was late for school. “I’m finished with all that,” she told them, and they pricked her fingers and wrists for spite, and blew chalk dust into her face until she had to shut her eyes.

  The television set is playing, and she can’t make th
e picture out clearly, but there’s grand funereal music. Someone important must have died. Who is left?

  Her roommate’s daughter turns the sound up and waves at Nora. “Did you have a good nap?” she hollers. “This doesn’t bother you, does it? Mother and I just want to get a look at the bride.”

  What is that girl blathering about now? Brides in funerals, and the mother propped in a chair with pillows and made to watch, even though she’s crying, “Wah! Wah! Wah!”

  Nora’s nose hurts, and her hand. Things in them. Everyone’s cheering. “Here they come!” her roommate’s daughter cries. “Oh, she’s beautiful, isn’t she?”

  A flock of aides and nurses rushes in. “Hurry up, it’s the Princess,” one of them says. “Lady Di!” another one squeals.

  Did a princess die? Is that all the fuss? They even the on television now. There is no privacy left for anything.

  “Do you know how much that gown cost?” somebody asks.

  “Lower the volume a little, will you?”

  “She’s not sleeping. You sleeping, Mama? Man, look at all those crazy people.”

  “It’s their custom. You know, it’s their thing, like we have about our Presidents.”

  “Huh! We shoot ’em.”

  “Not enough, if you ask me.”

  “Shame on you, girl. Oooh, look at the Prince!”

  “Wah, wah!”

  “I heard he’s a fairy. How old is he, he’s just getting married?”

  “I wish I had a chance at him. I never even had a single lousy chance.”

  “Is she contagious, do you think? Should I have my mother moved?”

  “Princey don’t play polo in Ventura.”

  “You want that mother-in-law wears a crown to bed?”