In the Palomar Arms

by Hilma Wolitzer

Her brothers were summoned and went in their work clothes. Henry said, “All the damage is in the back, underneath.” He meant Jack’s soft perished head, like the fruit of the crooked peddler.

  William fingered her brown lace cuff, pleating and releasing it. “He’s the same, Norry,” William said. “You can look at him if you want to.”

  So she did. The hands were turned in at his sides, and someone had closed his eyes. His hair was rumpled and dusty. Tiny crumbs of plaster in his lashes and in the curl of his ear. If his eyes had been left open, would she see the blurred scene of his falling, everything upside down and rushing past? Would she see the shock of joy that was in them that other morning, when her knees gave way like the edge of the world?

  29

  STEWART BENCH IS, THANK God, as unlike that prick Larkin as possible. Kenny has been referred to Bench by a corporate lawyer he knows, to whom he briefly mentioned his marital problems. Bench has important political connections, and serious aspirations of his own. Everything about him—his dark paneled office, his grim expression, his impeccably tailored clothing—seems serious.

  When Kenny mentions that Joy knows about his love affair with Daphne, Bench becomes very upset. “Never, never admit to adultery at this stage of the proceedings,” he says, as if this is only the first in a series of divorces Kenny intends to initiate.

  “The courts are growing more lenient toward men in terms of custody,” Bench advises. “But there are still some mother-loving judges who’ll give children to hookers with child-abuse records. They’re hung up on some cockeyed vision of their own American Moms.”

  “Well, Joy’s not unfit, you know,” Kenny says. “In fact, she’s a pretty good—”

  Bench holds up one hand. “Please. Don’t be too civilized, Mr. Bannister, all right? Dustin Hoffman’s not going to play you in the movie. And we won’t need your testimony to your wife’s virtue and beauty. Her attorney will take care of that. It’s your own credentials we’re concerned with here.”

  The man is obsessively cautious; he must have been toilet-trained with a gun. He’s sharp, single-minded, and possibly unfeeling. Kenny had hoped for his formidable professional reputation in someone softer, a lawyer with whom he might have discussed the nuances, whose sharpness would be leavened by humor and a spirit of conciliation. Yet, if Kenny were choosing up sides in a stickball game, he knows he would even pick an archenemy who could hit.

  Bench suggests that he continue to live at home. Moving out at this point would be as legally dangerous as his confession to Joy. And he should not be in contact with the woman in question.

  “Daphne Moss,” Kenny says, and Bench waves his hand as if to strike her name from the record.

  “If you leave now,” he says, “you can be accused of abandonment, an added complication to your confessed infidelity. I assume you can remain in residence with your family?”

  “I guess so,” Kenny says.

  When he’s back in his own office, looking through the ledgers of a notorious tax evader, it occurs to Kenny that he didn’t ask Bench how long he has to stay at home, how long before he can resume contact with Daphne. He’ll have to call him and find out.

  That morning, Kenny had awakened very early in the guest room, without the usual assistance of his alarm clock, or the first stirrings of Joy’s body in the same bed. He was able to make his bed and be downstairs in the kitchen, dressed, before the children were up and could question the new sleeping arrangements. Eventually, he would have to explain things to them, but they didn’t have to witness every aspect of the estrangement. He wanted to spare them what he and Robert had not been spared. It seemed, at breakfast, that Joy would cooperate. She was passive, almost a sleepwalker who went from refrigerator to stove to table without unnecessary comment to anyone. Molly’s foot in Kenny’s lap, under the table, was like a secret handclasp of encouragement. He remembered how happy he’d been the day she was born, thinking that he would have a woman’s ideal love from the beginning of her life until the end of his own. This morning, he wasn’t feeling so secure. He’d braced himself for battle, and when it didn’t come he couldn’t relax.

  When he was a boy, his mother would grow inexplicably quiet and calm in the middle of a raging quarrel with his father. And his father couldn’t rouse an appropriate response no matter what he said or did. Finally, he would give up, dropping his guard and wandering away. Then she would attack him without warning and with such ferocity that Kenny felt his father’s bewildered alarm enter his own body.

  Kenny closes the ledger and reaches for the telephone. He discovers that Bench is gone for the day. Well, he’ll make one phone call to Daphne, just to explain what has happened and why they must temporarily keep their distance. He becomes aware of the mechanics of the instrument as he holds it. The dial tone is like a warning hum. He thinks of phone taps, and hidden tape recorders. His secretary is not making a sound on her side of the partition. Kenny has unbidden images of Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, and an absurd one of Miss Oberon, her ear pressed to a drinking glass that’s held against the wall.

  He waits until noon, and then excuses himself from the client he’s taken to lunch, and goes to the pay phone on the wall between the rest rooms. Here, too, the Muzak continues its relentless melody.

  “Hello, puss,” he says when he hears Daphy groggy greeting. “Did I wake you?” He feels better just picturing her, wound naked in bedclothes, heavy-lidded and slow with sleep.

  She comes awake quickly to his news, though, and makes welcome offerings of sympathy. “My poor sweetheart,” she says. And, “Oh, oh.”

  A toilet flushes and the door to the women’s room opens. A large woman squeezes past Kenny, holding his elbows as she goes by. “Excuse me,” she says.

  “Who’s that?” Daphne asks.

  He tells her that he’s using a pay phone in a restaurant, and she says she was wondering about the music.

  “This is actually an undercover phone call,” Kenny says with forced levity. “In fact, my lawyer warned me not to contact you at all.”

  “Are you serious?” Daphne says.

  He explains that it’s all stupid, but necessary. The whole business of custody will depend on a particular code of behavior for a while. He has to live at home. They can’t see one another. “Like Romeo and Juliet,” he adds, before remembering their tragic fate.

  “For how long?”

  He has to acknowledge that he’s not sure, that he didn’t have a chance to ask. When she doesn’t say anything, he covers the silence by telling her that even if they can’t see one another, he’ll continue to call her like this, against his lawyer’s orders. “That’s the best I can do right now, puss,” he says. “It’s very hard.”

  Now she withholds her sympathy. He hopes she’s reserving judgment as well. He is acting for both of them—she must surely recognize the minor heroism of that.

  Someone comes out of the men’s room and then stands there, jiggling coins in his hand, looking elsewhere, but listening.

  “I have to go now,” Kenny says. “I love you. Everything will work out.” Why does that sound like a recorded message?

  “Yes,” Daphne says. He wants more, but the eavesdropper’s eyes are on his back. Kenny would like to turn and confront the man with a hostile look. Instead, he whispers a hurried goodbye and slinks back to his table.

  That night, Joy doesn’t seem surprised by his punctual appearance.

  Molly and Steven cheer his homecoming with their usual excess. I can live through this, he thinks. The house is fragrant with dinner cooking. The furniture is standing in familiar places.

  There are dishes to do, the children’s baths, and then their bedtime. The racket they make in protest to the day’s end eases the awkward reticence between Kenny and Joy.

  He lies down on the children’s beds in turn, helping them to stave off the night with stories and songs and snuggling maneuvers. Their earnest nonsense soothes and reassures him. Steven says, “My Tonka truck can kill people’s hea
ds, right, Daddy?” Molly holds Kenny’s hair in a lover’s clutch while he sings “Good Night, Ladies.” As her grasp loosens, the song grows fainter and fainter, until he’s only mouthing the words and is almost asleep himself.

  Joy is in the living room, smoking a cigarette. She hasn’t smoked at all, until now, since her first pregnancy. They quit together then, and considered it their first gift to their unborn child. Kenny notices that she’s using her old king-sized, cork-tipped brand. He likes the gestures she makes, and realizes he’d forgotten them: her precarious grip on the cigarette as she brings it to her mouth, its burning end too close to her fingertips; the way she sighs audibly when she inhales, and how the smoke comes out through her nostrils in two narrow, haughty columns.

  “How long have you been fucking around?” she asks.

  His heart slams. He hadn’t expected her to speak, and she has never used that language outside of bed. It’s almost as if he’s hallucinated her voice.

  “That’s not exactly—” he begins.

  She doesn’t let him finish the sentence. “Is the fucking wonderful?” she asks.

  He knows better than to answer this time.

  “I see,” Joy says. “One doesn’t talk about it, does one? One just fucks.”

  Without thinking, he reaches for the pack of cigarettes and shakes one into his hand. He trembles, lighting it.

  “I wouldn’t really know,” Joy says. “I never went that far myself.”

  What is she talking about?

  “Feeling up near the coats doesn’t count, does it? Or a little tongue-kissing?”

  The smoke makes him light-headed. It’s not dissimilar to the first sensation he gets from grass.

  “A little cocksucking?”

  Jesus.

  “Gene practiced a lot at parties, you know, before he went pro.”

  It’s a sad, vicious, childish lie. He finds it difficult to look at her face.

  Joy stands and lays her cigarette, still burning, in an empty candy dish. “The children are the real business between us,” she says. And then leaves the room.

  Immediately, Kenny goes to the candy dish and extinguishes her cigarette, and his.

  30

  THERE IS ALMOST NOTHING besides work and school during these new days and nights. Neither totally engages Daphne, and she looks around for other ways to occupy herself. Anything not to simply wait in her room for Kenny’s occasional, hasty, and surreptitious phone calls. She knows that he’s suffering; he tells her so each time they speak. She knows that his absence now is necessary, and will finally lead to his constant presence. But in some hard internal place she’s resentful and unreasonably impatient. In the past week, she’s gone to the movies with Feliciana, and to a bridal shower for one of the nurses. The movie theater was crowded and they had to sit too close to the screen. At the shower, the bride received eight cheese boards, including the one Daphne had brought. She has turned down offers to go out with Marshall Haber, and with the instructor of her World Lit class. When Kenny calls from a gas station, with the highway roaring like the ocean behind him, she resists a strong urge to inform him of these spurned invitations. She does so by summoning up her better, bighearted self. He has enough troubles.

  One evening, Mkabi tells Daphne that she’s graduated from the bartending school and has her first job. It’s at a private catered party in Santa Barbara the following night, a Saturday, when both women are off-duty. Mkabi says that the caterer mentioned needing another person for serving and cleaning up, and she wonders if Daphne might be interested. She says yes immediately.

  They drive there together in Daphne’s car. Later, after Darryl finishes work, too, he’ll pick Mkabi up and take her home. The party is in a beautiful old mission-style house owned by a couple who run an art gallery. Almost a hundred guests are expected. The caterer’s refrigerated panel truck arrives soon after Daphne and Mkabi. The two women are wearing their regular uniforms, without name tags, naturally, or cap or hairnet. Daphne has tamed and pinned her hair into a braided bun.

  Everything in the house looks radically expensive and hardly used. In the kitchen, counters and appliances gleam like floor samples, and when Daphne peeks into the darker area of the living room and den, she can see the plush white of pillowed couches, and bold modern paintings hovering on the walls above them. An hysterical soprano dog is whining and yipping somewhere.

  The hostess comes in with her husband right behind her, still buttoning the back of her long red dress. She looks at Daphne and Mkabi. “Are you serving?” she asks. “God, they look like nurses.” She supplies them with tiny black organdy aprons to wear over their uniforms. They smile at each other after tying them on. Mkabi whispers, “Ooh, la la! Now we look like the maids in a dirty movie.”

  The caterer, an Italian woman, specializes in Greek delicacies. Trays and trays of phyllo-wrapped hors d’oeuvres are brought in from the truck. Portable ovens are carried in, too. No wonder the kitchen looks so pristine; it’s just a backdrop for the action. The bar is set up in a far corner of the den, and Mkabi is banished to it. “Well, break a leg,” Daphne says before they separate. Soon, she’s toting a tray of miniature spanakopites, wedging it between groups of men and women who all seem to have arrived at once, as if they’ve been brought in a chartered bus to populate the house, to form a small privileged nation. Of course, they haven’t come in a bus. The driveway and the street beyond it are lined with sleek shiny cars, like the ones in the Saks parking lot the day Daphne took the sweater. She passes the hors d’oeuvres among the guests. “Hot,” she finds herself warning an instant too late, and “Napkin?” as spinach filling oozes onto a shirtfront. She should have returned that sweater by now. It’s just been lying at the bottom of the bottom drawer of her dresser. She’s been too preoccupied, has not really thought about it until she entered this room filled with handsome, well-dressed people. Well, the money she earns tonight can be her first payment on the sweater, in case she decides not to send it back. As she works her way through the crowd, Daphne tries to listen to some of the conversation. She can only manage to hear disjointed words and phrases.

  “ … purple and the palest mauve.”

  “ … word processor …”

  “ … riddled, riddled with cancer.”

  “ … like a couple of bitches in heat.”

  “ … moral imperative …”

  “ … about sixty, severity thousand …”

  “Phoenix? Oh, God, don’t go to Phoenix.”

  “ … signed, limited …”

  “ … orgasms?

  On her fifth or sixth trip from the kitchen, a man grips her arm, so that the tray almost tips over. “Sweetheart,” he says, “can you get me a refill?” He puts his empty glass on her tray, in the center of the dolmades she is about to serve. “Martini, dry, oh the rocks,” he adds, and winks, as if they’ve just shared a private joke.

  At least this errand brings her to Mkabi, who had vanished from sight as the party escalated. They quickly exchange complaints as Mkabi mixes the martini. “My feet are killing me,” Daphne says. “I should have worn my Palomar shoes.” She looks down at her high-heeled white sandals with regret.

  “All those drinks I learned,” Mkabi says. “I’m thrilled to make this martini. Everybody’s drinking white wine, or Perrier with a twist. Not one Rob Roy or White Russian; not even a Manhattan. Bobby could’ve worked this job. Okay, here you go.” She puts the glass on Daphne’s tray.

  When she turns back into the crowd, Daphne realizes she can’t remember which of the men asked for the martini. She wanders around, holding the tray aloft, hoping he’ll notice her first and make some signal. It’s so noisy and smoky. Everyone looks alike. There is too much laughter, in bursts like gunfire. Nobody is paying attention to a man in a tuxedo playing rippling cocktail music on a grand piano. Daphne feels odd, as if her metabolism has suddenly altered.

  People put empty glasses on her lifted tray, and then toothpicks, and then half-eaten hors d’oeuvres. S
omeone dumps an ashtray. The fresh dolmades she has not had a chance to serve are buried under the debris. If the caterer sees this, she’ll be murdered. The hostess wings by in her red dress, and Daphne holds the tray even higher, her arms aching. She goes back to the kitchen and empties the mess while the other workers are busy. Looking into the depths of the black plastic garbage bag gives her vertigo. It is like peering into a lake at night. She takes the untouched martini and slips into a small bathroom near the pantry. A little white poodle, wearing a jeweled collar, escapes between her feet and joins the party. Leaning against the locked door, Daphne downs the drink. She chews the olive and drops the ice cubes into the toilet. With one hand to her breast, she wonders if she’s about to die.

  There’s a telephone mounted on the wall. Although she has never called Kenny’s number, it comes instantly into her head. I’ve always meant to do this, she thinks as she picks up the phone and pushes the buttons. A woman (Joy!) answers. She says, “Hello. Hello? Hello!” with increasing volume and annoyance. As Daphne hangs up, someone knocks on the bathroom door. She takes several deep, even breaths, and then looks around for a place to hide the glass. When she can’t find one, she lifts the top of the toilet tank and sets the glass afloat

  After the work of cleaning up is finished, and almost everyone has gone home, the host beckons to Daphne, and she follows him into what turns out to be a study. He shuts the door behind them. Now what?

  She’s so tired. She longs to undo her hair and lie across the paisley-covered daybed, among its inviting cushions. But she’s not even going to sit down.

  He’s had too much to drink. She can tell by his dull, languid eyes. How did those thick fingers ever do up the tiny covered buttons on his wife’s dress? “What’s your name?” he asks.

  “Daphne. Daphne Moss.”

  “You a college student?”

  “Yes.”

  Slowly, his hand extends toward her. Lust crosses his face like a summer storm. “Good,” he says. His hand lowers. After a few moments he says “Good” again, and reaches into his pocket to take out a money clip. “Tip,” he says. “Nice job.”