Tunnel of Love

by Hilma Wolitzer

  “It’s kind of a misunderstanding,” Linda said.

  Nathan beeped his horn.

  “Why are you crying?” Robin said.

  “I’m not, really,” Linda said, wiping her eyes. “I’m just feeling a little emotional.”

  Nathan beeped his horn again, and Robin said, “I gotta go. Here.” She took a sweaty-looking plastic container from the shopping bag, pecked Linda on the cheek as she handed it to her, and left. Linda put the container on the table next to the bed, and touched her cheek, where she could still feel the startling pressure of Robin’s lips. She could still feel Nathan’s imprint, too, everywhere on her body, and she knew she’d be crazy to stay here any longer, even crazier than Cynthia appeared to be. She would call Nathan, as soon as everyone in this house was asleep, and ask him to rescue her, as he had that day in Culver City. If she didn’t think too much about it in advance, they could work things out, somehow, together.

  Much later, after Lupe and Maria came back, and Phoebe had been fed and bathed and put to bed, Cynthia came into the guest room, carrying two trays of food. She set one on Linda’s lap and sat down on the edge of the recliner with the other. Linda wasn’t hungry, even for that modest soup-and-salad supper. “Cynthia, listen,” she said, and Cynthia put her soup spoon down. “Nathan and I made a mistake today,” Linda continued. “I mean, we used poor judgment, I guess, but you were really awful to him. Why do you hate him so much?”

  “I don’t hate him,” Cynthia said. “That would require more effort than he’s worth.”

  “How can you say that—he’s been wonderful to me!” Linda said.

  “What do you really know about him, Linda?” Cynthia asked.

  “All I need to know,” Linda said. “That he’s kind and funny and good …” And beautiful and a fabulous lover, she might have added, but didn’t.

  “Hmm,” Cynthia said. “How about his background?”

  “Well,” Linda said, “he was born in Baja. His father died when Nathan was a teenager, and his mother still lives down there. He has two older sisters, in Nevada.” Cynthia waited. “He’s had many interesting jobs, and he’s been dancing forever, just like me.”

  “Does he go to San Diego a lot?”

  “Not a lot. Sometimes, on business. Why?”

  “Did he ever mention anyone named Delila Diaz to you?”

  Why did that sound so familiar? “Who’s that?” Linda asked. “His sister? A cousin?” Her heart was beating very fast.

  “Why don’t you try ‘wife’?” Cynthia said.

  Linda’s arm twitched and the soup splashed all over the tray. Cynthia put her own tray down and got up to take Linda’s from her. “What do you mean?” Linda said. “Nathan’s not married!” It occurred to her then that she’d never asked him if he was, at least not directly. She had once asked if he’d ever been in love before and he’d said yes, but that it was a long time ago, and was something he didn’t like talking about. That was the same night he first told Linda he loved her, and when she told him all about Wright and Manny.

  “I’m afraid he is,” Cynthia said, sitting down on the side of the bed.

  “I don’t believe you. Where did you get that idea?” Linda demanded.

  “From Paragon Private Investigators. Or one of their special agents, to be more precise. Would you like to see his report … on Natalicio Diaz?”

  “You put a private detective on Nathan?” Linda said. “But why?”

  “Because I’m concerned about you and the children, and I don’t want you to get hurt. Because you’re charmingly naive, Linda—easy game for any fast-talking Romeo. You need someone to look out for you.”

  “No, I don’t,” Linda said. “I can look out for myself.” Who was Cynthia to talk, anyway? She’d been sleeping with that new, muscle-bound trainer of hers from day one. It was something Linda had known for a while, but had never acknowledged before, even when Craig came down the stairs after their sessions, whistling and buttoning his shirt, and let himself out the front door.

  “I believe the evidence indicates otherwise,” Cynthia said. She stood. “What’s this?” she asked, picking up the plastic container Robin had left. She pried the lid open, sniffed at the contents and recoiled, snapping the lid shut again. “Good God!” she exclaimed. “Did he bring you this? Is he trying to poison you?”

  Linda didn’t answer. The real poisoner, the liar, the evil witch, was in the room with her.

  Cynthia stacked the trays, dropping the offending container on top, and carried everything to the door. Then she turned around. “Linda,” she said, “listen to me. I know you’re very angry and distressed by all this. But don’t let your anger get misdirected. Just remember that I’m here for you, that I’m on your side, okay? I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Linda was shaking so hard the bed rattled. When Lupe came in later to help her get ready for the night, she pretended to be asleep, and Lupe covered her, shut off the lights, and tiptoed out. Linda waited until the house was completely quiet and then she reached for the phone and dialed Nathan’s number. It rang four times before he answered, sounding drowsy. “Hey,” he said, when he recognized Linda’s voice. “I didn’t think the warden still let you make outside calls. Well, have you come to your senses yet? Are you ready to be paroled?”

  “Nathan,” Linda said. “Are you married?” She hadn’t meant to say it that bluntly, and the ensuing silence seemed to go on forever and ever. She was about to hang up when she heard him say, “Linda, mi amor, listen, it’s not as simple as that.” Then she did hang up, and lay there, acutely awake, while the room gradually turned from lavender to pink to gold.

  24

  What Are You Wearing?

  RIGHT BEFORE HER CASTS came off, Linda felt the way she had at her high-school graduation—terribly excited about her imminent freedom, and a little scared. “This is gonna cost you an arm and a leg, ha-ha!” Dr. Marcuvitz shouted over the screaming of his hand-held saw. Linda wanted to scream, too, like poor Phoebe did when her doctor came at her with a hypodermic.

  Dr. M. slipped on his mask and worked on her leg cast first. A vacuum attachment on the saw sucked up the plaster dust as he cut a perfect seam down the length of one side and then the other, so that the pieces came off neatly, like the two halves of an oyster shell—Nathan’s blurred blue hearts on one half, Cynthia’s indelible black message on the other. And there, under the matted padding, was Linda’s pearly, skinny, hairy leg, stained with Betadine, and wearing an impressive pink scar down its shin. She remembered taking her roller skates off as a child and experiencing this same airy lightness in her feet and legs. The unveiled leg itself seemed to be a relic of her girlhood, before she’d developed those dancer’s calves, before the razor’s first scrape. Dr. Marcuvitz asked if she wanted to save any part of the cast as a souvenir—one of the autographs, perhaps, or a drawing? Another patient of his, he told her, a well-known country-and-western singer, had his whole cast glued back together and shellacked, and then kept it as a piece of fun sculpture in his living room. Linda tried to imagine something similar in her own apartment, where Wright’s landscapes were currently the only works of art. “Thanks, but I don’t think so,” she said, and watched as the doctor sliced up the remains of her plaster prison and tossed the fragments into the trash. Then he proceeded to liberate her arm.

  Back at Cynthia’s, Linda limped around, leaning on a cane, and still using the Hermés scarf as a sling for her stiff, tired arm. It would take several weeks of intensive therapy before she’d be completely healed. She had known this all along, but now that the casts were off, she was impatient to move freely again. Sometimes she stood at the foot of the staircase, wishing she could run up and see Phoebe whenever she felt like it, but she wasn’t allowed to climb stairs yet, even slowly and with care.

  One afternoon, Cynthia watched Linda’s painstaking progress from the garden to the kitchen and said, “Well, you’re almost human again. It’s time for a makeover.”

  Linda si
ghed. She felt far from human. She had become more and more dispirited since she’d learned of Nathan’s deceit, as if her very soul had been punctured and suffered a slow but steady leak. Lately, she found it simpler to yield without debate to Cynthia’s bulldozing, and save everybody’s time and breath.

  This time Cynthia meant a cosmetic makeover, the sort of major renovation the women at the Bod indulged in whenever they grew restless, or dissatisfied with who they were. Linda had been raised to realize she was no beauty, and that vanity was a foolish waste of time, in any case. But when she tried to convey the gist of this to Cynthia, she was treated to that hand-waving gesture again. And then Cynthia went to the phone and called a famous, full-service salon on Rodeo Drive. “Believe me, Luba darling,” Linda overheard her say. “She needs everything. Just bill my account.”

  Despite all the personal attention she received at The Essential Me, Linda was reminded of an automatic car wash, of a chained car being dragged through an assembly line of hoses and brushes. First, a huge Russian woman slathered green wax onto her eyebrows, upper lip, underarms, forearms, bikini area, legs, and even down that fine line of fuzz below her navel she’d had since her pregnancy, and that Nathan had assured her was sexy. She hoped it wasn’t all going to grow back dark and bristly, which her mother had always warned her would happen if she used a depilatory on her legs, but she felt too embarrassed to ask. Instead, she yelped with each brutal yank of those hair-lined linen strips, while the Russian woman sternly insisted, “Doesn’t hurt, doesn’t hurt one bit.”

  At least the sea-salt bath and herbal massage were nice and relaxing. As she was being gently slapped and kneaded, Linda realized how much she’d missed being touched, and that her longing wasn’t strictly sexual. Between the mud mask and the European hydrating facial, someone creamed her hands and feet and slipped heated mitts and booties on them, leaving them to sauté inside. Then a team of four miniature Asian women, one at each of Linda’s hands and feet, performed a simultaneous manicure and pedicure, while some models paraded past, for her benefit, in beachwear.

  Her hair was attended to next, by a couple of specialists who added some russet highlights and gave it a stylish, layered cut. The grand finale (the equivalent of simonizing, Linda thought) was a meticulous application of makeup. She had hardly ever used more than a little lip gloss, but now a cosmetician primed her face and neck with a creamy foundation and “brought out” her cheekbones with strokes of blusher. Layers of shadow and mascara were applied to her eyes, and her lips were carefully outlined and then painted the same Chinese red as her nails. Linda was astonished by her own reflection, and even Mitchell did a double take when he picked her up. “Whoa,” he said. “For a minute there I thought you were some glamour babe.” Linda had been given samples of the various beauty products to take home with her, but she didn’t think she’d be able to achieve the same effect herself, or that she’d really want to. It was glamorous, all right, but impractical; her eyelids were starting to droop under the weight of that glop, and she probably couldn’t eat a thing without ingesting some lipstick, too. And as Mitchell had hinted, she was still her plain old self underneath it all.

  Cynthia pronounced her gorgeous, though, and said that some cosmetic dentistry was the obvious next step. Linda hadn’t thought about her overbite since that horrible experience with Dr. Leonard in Culver City. But here she was, as Cynthia pointed out, practically in the job market again, and needing to look her very best. Once more, Linda gave in without a struggle, although she had a flashback of Nathan saying she was like Sleeping Beauty, needing to be awakened by his kisses. She made herself think about something else in a hurry, something less disturbing. Nathan had tried to call her for days after their last, disastrous conversation, but she hung up immediately the first time, and instructed Lupe to answer the phone after that and say she wasn’t available.

  Vicki brought Robin to visit now, only once a week, and she wasn’t ever left completely alone with the baby anymore. She complained about that, and she remarked that Linda looked and acted even weirder than usual—sort of hypnotized or stoned. “What happened to Nathan?” she demanded. “Did you bump him off, too?” Her own dental retainer had finally been removed a few months ago, and she was amazed to see Linda sporting braces now. Vicki was, too. “I don’t believe this,” she said. “Do you have a date for the junior prom yet?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with making the most of yourself,” Linda said, trying not to lisp or drool as she said it. It was less trouble to echo Cynthia’s attitudes than admit how defenseless she was against them.

  “Do you remember the Moonies?” Vicki asked. “If you keep this up, we’re going to have to call in a deprogrammer. Or set you up selling flowers in the airport.”

  “Stop it,” Linda said.

  “Well, Lady Bountiful’s spent a bundle on you, hasn’t she?” Vicki said. “What’s in it for her?”

  “I intend to pay her back someday,” Linda said, evading the question.

  “Like in the year 3000?” Vicki said. “Listen, I’ve been picking up some extra cash doing piecework at home. It’s easy, I just glue some shi—some glitter onto Christmas cards. You can practically do it in your sleep. If you want in, I’ll speak to the boss lady.”

  Cynthia had said she’d help Linda find a real job, something better paying and more interesting, she hoped, than making Christmas cards. But she didn’t want to hurt Vicki’s feelings. “Well, maybe,” she said. “I’ll see.” Linda hadn’t told Vicki or Robin the entire truth about Nathan, either. That was still too painful to talk about. She would only say they’d had some “differences” and had gone their separate ways. “Which way did he go?” Vicki asked, and Robin said, wistfully, “That was one awesome car.”

  Robin’s television debut had come and gone in a twinkling. Linda had hoped they’d watch it together, but Robin elected to be with her friends at their house. She kept calling Linda for days beforehand, though, to remind her she would be on that Thursday afternoon. Cynthia was at a casting call, but Linda lured Lupe, Maria, Hester, and Mitchell into the guest room to watch it with her. Robin didn’t appear until almost the end of the half hour of that episode of Love in the Afternoon. And then she was only in the blurred background of one scene for about a minute, sitting at a restaurant table behind the stars of the show, along with a handsome and pleasant-looking elderly couple. Robin’s hair was in her face, as usual, but you could tell that she was scowling. The elderly couple smiled and chatted while Robin glared at her food and seemed to be muttering to herself, like some crazy street person. The camera concentrated on the stars, and she never got a close-up or came into full focus. Still, everybody in the guest room applauded politely when it was over, and Linda felt foolishly tearful and proud. Robin called immediately afterward, to collect her kudos. “Wasn’t that the crappiest show you ever saw?” she asked gleefully. “Didn’t I suck?”

  As she had promised, Cynthia arranged a few job interviews for Linda, and she was finally hired by a small law firm in the Beverly Center mall, as a front-desk receptionist. Her duties included answering a multiline telephone and doing some filing and typing, all of which taxed her healing arm and her tentative office skills. Albano and Murphy was mainly a personal-claims practice, and Mr. Albano, the partner who hired Linda, decided to overlook her clerical deficiencies because of her lameness. He thought it added a nice touch to the place, making it seem more “simpatico” to their injured clients. He offered to handle her case, too, for next-to-nothing, although she’d said she didn’t really have one. In fact, the man in the Caprice had sued Linda, just as he’d threatened to do, and her insurance company had already settled with him. “It was completely our fault,” she told Mr. Albano.

  He shook his head. “Rule number one,” he told her, wagging his forefinger too close to her face. “It’s never your fault.”

  “Oh, but it really was,” she said, pulling back a little. “My stepdaughter—”

  “You’re adorable,
do you know that?” he said. But all she knew was that she was going to have to try to stay out of his way.

  Mitchell drove Linda to and from work and her physical-therapy sessions, which were taking place at the hospital again, on an outpatient basis. In a few more days, he would be driving her home. Cynthia came into the guest room one night to discuss the transition. “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “You and Robin really ought to get used to the apartment and each other again before the baby joins you.”

  “What?” Linda cried. “Oh, no, Cynthia! I want all of us to be together right away. That’s what I’ve been dreaming about, what I’ve been living for.”

  “I’m sure that would be good for you,” Cynthia said, “but what about Bebe? Remember, she’s gotten used to things here, used to Lupe and me and the house.”

  “She’ll adjust,” Linda said resolutely. “Babies are very adaptable.” This was one time she wasn’t going to just fold under pressure. And she didn’t need anyone to kiss her awake, either.

  “Of course she’ll adjust, eventually,” Cynthia said, “but the change should be gradual. We’ve discussed it at length in our Mommy and Me class, and I’ve talked it over with Jocelyn, too.” That was Cynthia’s shrink, Linda remembered, the one who charged two hundred and fifty dollars a “pop.” There were probably whole families who lived on less than that for a week. And then Linda recalled craving some teenage fad back in the seventies—Sea-Monkeys, a Mood ring, or the latest Bee Gees album—and her mother reminding her of all the starving children in remote corners of the world. “By the way,” Cynthia continued, “Jocelyn wants to speak to you. She’s completely booked, but maybe we can schedule a phone session after hours tomorrow.”

  Linda couldn’t imagine talking to a total stranger about her personal life, especially on the telephone. It made her think of phone sex, of all those lonely people out there making sad, imaginary connections. “What are you wearing?” they’d say into the darkness. “What would you like me to do to you?” And Linda’s mind was definitely made up about Phoebe. But when Cynthia said, “Just talk to her once, Linda, okay? As a special favor to me, please?” she felt obliged to do it. After all, Cynthia, bestower of uncountable favors, had never asked one in return before. And what harm could a single phone call do?