Hearts

by Hilma Wolitzer

  “Well, can we?” Robin’s voice had reached that treacherous pitch.

  “Yes,” Linda said. “I guess so. I mean, if you think it will be all right with your friend, Wolfie. He doesn’t even know us.”

  “She,” Wolfie said. “And it will definitely be all right. It’s not going to be a formal wedding. She’s not even sure I’m going to show up. And any friends of mine …” He curled the fingers of his right hand around her unprepared left one, and Linda celebrated her decision.

  Who did they think they were fooling? Did they suppose she was an idiot or a baby? She knew what was going on and she only grudgingly blessed it.

  Last night Robin had dreamed of swimming in a race through a dark, gelatinous fluid, and woke needing to pee. She sat up, disoriented. There had been so many different places, so many rooms. Then she noticed that Linda wasn’t there, that her bed was empty and the pillow had slipped to the floor.

  They had gone to bed at the same time. She remembered that Linda kept yawning, and she’d said, “I’m so tired, Robin, aren’t you?” It wasn’t that late yet. “Wolfie says we have to travel early in the desert, so we’d better get to sleep early, too. I can hardly keep my eyes open, anyway.”

  Thinking the bathroom was occupied made Robin’s need to use it more urgent. She pressed her lower abdomen and it was tender and full. “Come on,” she whispered at the closed bathroom door. “Hurry up.” Gradually she became aware of the silence. What was she doing in there now?

  While she waited, Robin’s eyes adjusted to the room’s dimness, and she saw that Linda’s pocketbook was on the dresser, openmouthed. She tiptoed quickly across the room. There was so much junk inside: keys, a flashlight that was still on, burning faintly, tampons, tweezers, a paperback Guide to Nature’s Playgrounds, U.S.A., crushed and lip-printed tissues, a thick envelope stuffed with papers and secured with a red rubber band. Where was her stupid wallet?

  It was at the very bottom, under everything else, and it was bulging. Maybe Robin’s whole inheritance was in there. When she opened it, she found it was jammed with more papers, notes, scrawled addresses and telephone numbers, photos. One of these was an overexposed Polaroid shot of Linda and Wright and Robin. Linda was wearing a drooping corsage and a broad-brimmed white hat that almost covered her eyes. She and Wright were smiling directly into the camera, and Robin, with a forkful of spaghetti halfway to her mouth, was scowling at them. How different and strange she looked, so chubby and babyish. A Chinese waiter could be seen in the background, clearing another table. Everyone was as pale as death. The spaghetti sauce was only slightly pink.

  On one rumpled piece of paper it said, Miriam Reismann? Hausner? 1418 Cornelia Street, Glendale, Arizona. Robin thought she heard a sound from the bathroom and she dropped everything hastily back into the pocketbook and closed the clasp painfully over her fingers. She sucked on them, listening anxiously, and it was quiet. She opened the pocketbook again and looked at her mother’s name. It was shocking to see it written out like that in Linda’s familiar spastic script. And who was Hausner? Was that him? Robin had to pee so badly now that she pressed her thighs together and bit the inside of her mouth. There was hardly any money in the wallet. She counted the soft wrinkled bills and the handful of coins. Thirty-two dollars and sixty-three cents. Linda probably hid the rest of it somewhere else. Maybe she started doing that after Robin warned her about pickpockets, back in Des Moines.

  She pulled the papers out of the envelope, breaking the rubber band, but there was no money, just some official-looking documents. A birth certificate from the Hall of Records in Slatesville, Pennsylvania, for Baby Camisko, Female, Feb. 13, 1953. There was a letter from an insurance company about an enclosed check. Robin shook the envelope, but no check fell out. What good would a check do her, anyway? No one would cash it for a kid, without proof.

  There was a marriage license with what seemed like stern language in it, considering the occasion. It bound Wright Henry Reismann and Linda Marie Camisko in the eyes of the state of New Jersey, city of Jersey City, county of Hudson. The last paper was Robin’s father’s death certificate. What did they need something like that for? If you were dead, why did you have to prove it? You just weren’t there any more. Robin could not pronounce the typed words after Cause of Death, but she believed she understood their code. She took the wedding photo out again. He looked peculiar, an impostor who only resembled her father. The headlights of a passing car scanned the ceiling and walls of the room. Maybe Linda had fainted in there. Maybe she had died. There were lots of singles in the wallet. Robin took three of them. It would have to be done like this, a little at a time. She wished she had started earlier.

  Holding her legs together, she tottered to the bathroom door and knocked. “Hey,” she said, “I have to go in.” There was no answer. And the door had opened slightly under the pressure of her knocking. It was dark in there. “Linda?” Robin whispered, with an onset of dread. The bathroom was empty.

  Gone! Robin thought, and grew dizzy. A few drops of urine ran down her leg. She sat on the toilet and released the rest of it in a downpour. Would Linda have left her pocketbook and everything? Robin ran to the window and saw that the Maverick was still right there where they’d parked it hours ago. Then she remembered Wolfie.

  She went to the wall and pressed her ear against it. She couldn’t hear anything, except for a pounding like surf in her own head. A trick she’d once seen on television occurred to her. A detective had listened to gangsters plotting against him by holding a drinking glass between his ear and the wall. Robin went back to the bathroom and impatiently unwrapped the glass she found. There was nothing coming through the wall but the sound of someone snoring. But it was last night that Wolfie had the room next door. This time he was all the way down, at the far end of the motel. And that’s where Linda was. And Robin knew what they were doing. Those assholes.

  She borrowed Linda’s tweezers to hold the tiny roach, and finished it, sitting on the closed toilet seat. Then she got back into bed, where she forced herself to stay awake, using mind control. It was almost morning when Linda came back. An edge of pink sky could be seen where the green drapes were not fully closed. Robin breathed like a sleeper, in, out, in, out.

  Linda opened the door very slowly, with the expert caution of a thief. She was wearing her bathrobe. She walked across the room as if she were in agony, as if she were walking on broken glass or hot tar. Robin watched her through the white haze of her eyelashes and didn’t move once. Not even when Linda came close to Robin’s bed, looked down at her for a moment, and sighed. Then she got into her own bed, still wearing her bathrobe, still sighing.

  29 The bride’s name was Elena. She was about Linda’s age, and she was gorgeous, with the kind of confident bearing and blond radiance Linda always wished she had.

  Elena and the groom, Vincent, lived together in a two-bedroom, Spanish-style apartment near the University of New Mexico. The walls were stuccoed and decorated with many woven hangings.

  Vincent was about ten years older than Elena. He was very tall and stooped, and had thin curly hair that he wore long and absentmindedly placed. The weavings were his work, and he used the second, smaller bedroom as his studio. He moved his loom against one wall and partway into a closet so that Wolfie could sleep there. They inflated an air mattress and put it between Wolfie’s bedroll and a blanket on the terracotta floor. Linda and Robin were going to use a Simmons Hide-a-Bed in the living room.

  The wedding would be held in the courtyard of the building complex very early in the morning, before it started to get hot. Elena, who took voice lessons at the university and worked as a waitress in a café, had taken a three-day leave from both places for the occasion. When Linda and Robin met her, she had just come off her last shift and was wearing a pink uniform with a tiny white apron. She changed into a trailing silk kimono that was embroidered with brilliant birds. She was delighted to see Wolfie and held his face in her hands for a long time, and said, “You came. You�
�re really here. I can’t believe it.” If she was upset by his little entourage, she didn’t show it.

  Vincent was very emotional. He hugged Wolfie and kissed him on both cheeks, as if he were a French military hero about to receive a decoration. Then he kissed Linda and Robin, too, crushing them in his embrace. His eyes were wet and he had to blow his nose several times.

  Wolfie hadn’t seen Elena and Vincent for almost a year, since they had left Montreal. While they all ate lunch, the three friends exchanged information about their own lives and about the lives of other, mutual friends who had married, separated, died, or fallen into industry. Linda didn’t feel awkward in her role as outsider. She sipped strong coffee from an oversized mug and listened with the pleasure of an unbiased eavesdropper. Robin seemed content, too. Elena had asked her if she would be a bridal attendant and toss flowers during the ceremony. Linda was positive that Robin would be insulted and turn the offer down flat. Once again, the girl proved unpredictable. “Sure,” she said amiably. “What should I wear?”

  In the evening, two other out-of-town guests arrived, one at a time. The first was Tanya, an old friend of Vincent’s from his undergraduate days at Alfred University’s School of Ceramics. Again, Vincent’s eyes grew wet and he hugged her so fiercely her glasses slipped to her chest and the frames snapped between them. “Forget it!” she cried gaily when Vincent tried to apologize, and she allowed him to repair them with black electrical tape. A rollaway cot was placed at the foot of the Hide-a-Bed for Tanya.

  As everyone was preparing for sleep, the last houseguest showed up. He was Elena’s younger brother, who had flown in from Seattle for the wedding. Montie was about sixteen, his body not yet synchronized with the towering promise of his hands and feet.

  Vincent walked around for a while holding Montie’s head in the curve of his elbow as if it were a football. “Look at this beautiful kid, will you?” Vincent kept saying, growing tearful again. “Will you look at this kid?” Linda thought she noticed a shift in Robin’s attention after Montie’s appearance.

  He announced that he was going to sleep on three chairs in the kitchen. Everyone began to protest at once. Wolfie said that Montie could have the air mattress or the bedroll or both. Linda said she and Robin should give up the Hide-a-Bed, since they were intruders and actually strangers.

  Montie thanked everyone and said nothing doing. If he didn’t know it would make his sister hysterical, he would sleep directly on the terra-cotta floor. Man wasn’t meant to sleep on soft surfaces, because they made his spine soft, too. Most people, he told them, have spines like Jell-O before they’re twenty-five from sleeping on mattresses in regular beds. Linda put a casual hand to her own back and touched each hard vertebra she could reach. Montie put the chairs together and allowed Elena to arrange a couple of blankets over them to mask the joining. Poor immigrants, he announced, had to sleep this way, and were lucky if they had two chairs per person. He lay down across the construction immediately to show everyone how comfortable it was.

  It took a long time for the household to settle down. There was the distribution of pillows and towels, the assignment of shifts for the bathroom, and the last-minute need for bedtime snacks. Montie’s makeshift bed blocked the refrigerator door, but he was good-natured about getting up so that Tanya could rummage for apples and cheese and pickles before she tucked herself in. Vincent drank milk from a carton, his Adam’s apple moving like a conveyor belt. The bride ate a salami sandwich and dripped mustard onto her nightgown. Linda stopped her from dabbing it with a dishcloth dipped in hot water, advising lukewarm instead, mixed with liquid detergent and a little vinegar, something she’d once heard her mother tell Mrs. Piner. When the stain came right out, Elena cried, “Where did you find this wonder?” Wolfie, who had been brushing his teeth at the kitchen sink, gave her a mad, frothing smile.

  Linda waited patiently for her turn in the bathroom. As soon as she closed the door behind her, it opened again.

  “Shhh,” Wolfie warned, slipping quickly in and locking the door. He put his arms around her and kissed her face and neck and then her fingers when she put up her hands to stop him.

  “Everyone will wonder what I’m doing in here,” she whispered, before she began kissing him back. “Your friends … are so … nice,” she said. “Elena is beautiful …”

  “You’re beautiful,” he said. “You’re delicious, do you know that?”

  “You’re using up my whole time in here,” Linda said, her voice sliding on the last words.

  “Linda, I want to be with you tonight.”

  “Oh, but we can’t …” Linda told him. “There’s Robin and Tanya …”

  “I didn’t have the women’s dorm in mind,” he said. “Come on over to my place. As usual.”

  “I don’t know if I—” Linda began, and his hands and lips stopped her progress in midsentence. As her knees folded, she groped behind her and flushed the toilet, twice, in case anyone was listening and wondering what was going on.

  Someone knocked on the door.

  “Who is it?” Linda called, her voice high.

  “Oh, are you still in there?” Montie said. “I wasn’t sure.”

  “I’ll be right out,” she called.

  “No, no. Take your time. I don’t even have to do anything. Take your time.”

  When Wolfie left a few minutes later, Linda heard Montie say, “Oh. I thought Linda was in there.”

  “She is,” Wolfie told him. “We were doubling up. You know, man, the water shortage, the energy crisis.”

  “I didn’t mean to rush anybody,” Montie said.

  Robin and Tanya were both reading in bed. Linda got in on her side of the Hide-a-Bed and lay there in a tremor of anticipation. Tanya was reading a novel and Robin had a newspaper open across her lap. Every few minutes it rattled as she turned a page.

  A chain of good nights started in the other end of the apartment. “Good night, kid!” Vincent called to Montie.

  “Good night, sucker!” Montie yelled back. “And good night to you, too, Miss Pellegrini, for the last time.”

  “Ms. Pellegrini to you, brat,” Elena returned.

  “Listen to my horoscope for tomorrow,” Robin said. “ ‘Financial problems eased by nightfall. But martial tensions increase. Be patient. Hold your temper.’ ”

  “Let me see that,” Linda said, grabbing the paper. “That’s marital tensions, Robin, not martial.”

  “Same difference, if you ask me,” Tanya said. “I’ve been around twice myself. How about you?”

  “Once,” Linda answered.

  “Splitsville?”

  “Dead.”

  “Oh, really? What are you, Pisces?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Sagittarius?”

  “No, Aquarius.”

  “Yeah, that figures.”

  Linda didn’t think it would be polite to mention that she wasn’t a believer, and she didn’t want to say anything that might promote further conversation.

  “I’m Taurus,” Robin said, and no one else spoke for a while.

  When Linda looked at her again, she saw that Robin had fallen asleep, the newspaper covering her chest. Linda picked it up carefully and let it slide to the floor. “Poor kid’s out like a light,” she said. “It’s really been a long day for all of us. Funny, she usually can’t go off like that with the light on in the room.”

  “You don’t mind, do you?” Tanya asked. “I’m one of those crazy night people. I have to read myself to sleep or I’ll be up all night. I was probably a nocturnal animal in my last incarnation—like a bat, or an opossum. How about you?”

  “Oh, I don’t think I was ever here before,” Linda said.

  “How do you know?” Tanya asked.

  “Well, I don’t know, really,” Linda answered. “It’s just that everything seems so new.”

  Tanya considered this, closing her novel, using her finger as a bookmark. “Jamais vous déjà vu?” she asked.

  “Pardon?”

&nbs
p; “Haven’t you ever thought you’ve had exactly the same experience twice?”

  “I don’t think so,” Linda said. “No, actually I haven’t.” Worrying that she might seem merely disagreeable, she added, “Maybe I was a very low form of life then, like an insect or a germ, without any memory.”

  Tanya nodded and went back to her book. After a few minutes she said, “Did you ever think Elena and Vincent were going to make it?”

  “I don’t really know them,” Linda confessed. “Robin and I came here with Wolfie.”

  “You know him very long?”

  “No, not very,” she said truthfully, marveling once more at the realization.

  Robin had moved in her sleep, hogging the mattress, practically forcing Linda to the opposite edge. A strand of the girl’s hair fell across Linda’s shoulder and she had a longing to touch it, the way one wants to touch the tame fur of a sleeping wild beast. She didn’t dare, for fear of waking her. One down, and one to go.

  “So you didn’t know him when he was in Canada with Elena?”

  “No,” Linda managed. “Since then.”

  Tanya began reading again and Linda was grateful for the silence in which to compose herself. So Elena was the woman in Canada. And Wolfie had come all this distance to give her away, ceremonially, to Vincent. It was over between them, Linda knew, or she would have perceived it herself. Wouldn’t she? The pain was radical and quick. She wished she could pick up the burning lamp and club Tanya into unconsciousness for being the bearer of such news and for staying awake once she had delivered it.

  This was going to be Linda’s last night with Wolfie, no matter what his history, and she knew she wanted to spend it with reckless extravagance. She hoped she would remember which door was his. She hoped she would be able to put aside sorrow and jealousy in favor of joy.

  Tanya closed her book. “What bullshit,” she said. She took off her taped eyeglasses and put them on the table before she turned off the lamp.

  The apartment was humming with sleepers. Linda rose from the bed without disturbing Robin, a maneuver as tricky as the first one in a game of pick up sticks.