In the Palomar Arms

by Hilma Wolitzer

  That afternoon, while he and Joy and the children waited for the plane, which was a half hour late, and then an hour late, he murmured something about the men’s room and hurried around the corner of the lounge to a bank of telephones. Of course, he’d spoken to Daphne days before about Gus and Frances’s upcoming visit, but he felt a sudden panic during the flight delay, a need to explain it all again to her and be reassured again by her patience and understanding. While Joy’s parents were in town, he wouldn’t be able to get to Ventura very often. Gus and Frances would want to take the whole family out to lunch whenever possible. Since Gus’s surgery, they tried to find cause and occasion for celebration every day. They’d want to go to Knott’s Berry Farm, Universal Studios, and Disneyland. These were places Kenny usually avoided, even scorned, but he believed that their interest was forgivable, that it came from an innocent wish to please by conforming, not from some witless tourism.

  Daphne’s phone rang several times before she said, “Yes?” in a distracted, unfriendly way.

  He asked if she’d like to buy a magazine subscription to help a degenerate sex fiend through college, and she said, “Who is this?”

  “Hey, it’s me,” he protested. “How many sex fiends do you know?”

  “Well, you sound different,” she said.

  So did she. She sounded grudging and dispassionate, in fact, but this was no time for arguments. Instead, he told her where he was and that he missed her badly. “Are they there yet?” she wanted to know, and he realized that he probably couldn’t have made the call with Frances and Gus just around the bend, the way Joy and the children were. Cheating on them would have a different, more complex moral implication.

  Kenny had felt uncomfortable telling Daphne about their visit in the first place. He hardly knew what to call them. He didn’t like invoking Joy’s name; that seemed like a double betrayal. “My wife” was even worse, with its resounding possessive. So he didn’t say “my wife’s parents,” or even “my in-laws.” He finally settled on “the in-laws,” with a stand-up comic’s disparagement that was suitable, if false. “They show up twice a year,” he’d said, shrugging, and even made a face that won him a compassionate smile.

  On the phone, though, he sensed that Daphne wasn’t smiling. After he told her that the flight was late, he waited, growing more and more uneasy. “I’m going away for a few days,” she said at last.

  At that moment, Steven rushed up to Kenny, tackling his legs in a fierce embrace. Kenny’s knees buckled and he reached down to stroke Steven’s hair, a loving gesture and one of restraint.

  “They’re here!” Steven yelled. Daphne had to have heard him, too. He could probably be heard all the way to Pomona.

  “Where? Where are you going?” Kenny said into the phone, his hand sliding down Steven’s face, gently covering his mouth. The boy kissed his father’s fingers, and Daphne said, “To Seattle. To see my folks.”

  Kenny’s heart leaped and settled, leaped and settled. “That’s not a bad idea,” he said, as Joy, with Molly in her arms, came into view about thirty feet away. He’d get off fast, tell Joy it was a client. He often called people about business on weekends.

  “I think the plane’s in,” he said to Daphne. “I’ll call you tomorrow, okay? Daph?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “If I can get a flight, I might go out tonight.”

  “What about school? What about work?” he asked, as Joy and Molly came slowly toward him, looming closer and closer.

  “I’ll play hooky,” Daphne said. “Like you,” she added with soft significance, when Joy was only a couple of feet away.

  “Well, thanks,” he said mindlessly into the phone. “Why don’t you give me a call when you’re back in town. Maybe we can get together,” and he hung up. Steven was licking Kenny’s trembling fingers.

  “Jesus, stop that!” Kenny said sharply, and tears gathered in Steven’s eyes. “I was being a dog, Daddy,” he explained in a mournful voice.

  Joy said, “They’ve just landed. Let’s go to the gate.” She marched in front of him like a parade marshal. She never asked who he had been calling.

  Now he deliberately looks away from the panic button’s light. He watches the gauzy shadows of the bedroom curtains instead. They move in and out of focus and he’s lured by sleep and resists. What if Joy had someone else before he had Daphne? He would have to have known that, wouldn’t he? Wouldn’t he? The sand tarts from Greenberg’s were different this time, less sandy or something. Maybe they have a new baker. Maybe Daphne’s plane is soaring above the house this very minute. There’s a thrumming noise that could be a jet, or distant traffic on the freeway, or his own blood circling through his body. Everything is red behind his closed lids.

  He wakes to the siren screaming and he must get up, must go … But the siren is still. It’s only the same old dream. An inner alarm has roused him to Joy’s hand tightly holding his erect prick. She is like a motorman at the throttle of a roaring train. With her other hand, she lifts her nightgown, and then she climbs across his hips, straddling him. His prick is still in the dream, still alerted to the siren that called it to such stiff attention. Joy’s eyes are open. Her face has a moonlight pallor as she urges him inside her with that firm assured hand. She impales herself on his obedient sentry, and rides it smoothly, slowly, in the tempo of dreams. He is a common soldier under her brilliant command. He is also oddly female, taken, used, without love or consent. The prick could be hers, for all he knows and feels. She rides and rides, clutching his arms, now a marathon dancer in the last frantic hours of dance, soundless until the very end, when she grunts and shudders desperately and rolls away.

  6

  DAPHNE SLAMS HER SMALL suitcase shut, catching one finger painfully. “Damn him!” she cries, and sucks on her finger to soothe it. It’s been two days since she spoke to Kenny and came up with the plan to go to Seattle. Now she has the last available seat on the last evening flight from Los Angeles, and she feels both vengeful and sad.

  Before Kenny’s call from the airport, she’d had no intentions of taking a trip anywhere. When he had first told her, in bed, about his in-laws’ imminent visit, he’d fumbled for diplomatic words. She could keenly sense his discomfort over sharing the news, and had been a model of loving concern. But even then, underneath her acceptance, lay a small, beating rancor. Kenny’s family bonds seemed to be growing stronger, rather than weakening. And his relief at her passivity annoyed her. She was playing a part—didn’t he notice?—instead of behaving honestly. She hated hearing anything about his life outside their private hectic passion. Yet she’d always smiled when he spoke about the children—their visits to the barber or the zoo—or about the burglar alarm that went off if you touched a lousy window by mistake. Who cared about his children’s hair, his windows? How false she was becoming, not just to him, but to herself. Maybe that falseness was inevitable in a relationship like theirs. Recently, Monica Mann had referred to Daphne as “the other woman” in a mocking, baiting way. What had she said, exactly? “All big eyes and sweetness. Nobody would ever bill you as the other woman, Moss, as the little homewrecker.” And Daphne had wept in Kenny’s arms until he convinced her that she hadn’t wrecked anything; had, in fact, revived his faltering life. His thrusting heart against hers was powerful testimony to that claim.

  And she had to give Kenny credit; he tried not to mention Joy to her. But the name itself was so defiantly happy and victorious. Beethoven had written an entire “Ode to Joy.” And every Christmas, carolers burst into “Joy to the world, the Lord is come!” Oh, boy, Almond Joy. Wife, and children, and now in-laws—a veritable army of victors.

  When he called her from the airport, she faced the resentment she’d been denying, and surprised herself with the cool splash of her own voice. Monica would have cheered. As Kenny continued speaking, his omnipresent family reminded Daphne of her own family, of her mother and father in Seattle, of her younger sister Margaret, who was still in high school and had not yet begun m
aking important choices or mistakes. Daphne had instantly made up the story about going to see them. Once she’d said it, it seemed like a sensible idea.

  Kenny’s control didn’t totally mask his fear that she, too, had another life that couldn’t be shared, and the new balance of power excited her. It was a little like the liquid thrill of sexual excitement, and it threatened to weaken her new, tougher stance. Oh, she would be sweet again, would let him off the hook. Then she heard the child’s voice screaming, “They’re here!” and she resolved, I will go to Seattle.

  That afternoon, though, she went to work as planned. It was her turn, which came every four weeks, to go in on Sunday. Daphne knew that it would be hard for them to replace her at the last moment on a weekend, and certain lies didn’t come with facility. The telephone rang and rang while she folded her uniform and put it into the knapsack, but she didn’t answer it. Let him be the one to wait and worry this time.

  The place was pretty sloppy, she noticed as she prepared to leave. Underwear was draped over the chair arms, like a queer set of doilies. A corner of the blue blanket trailed out of the hastily made-up bed. Daphne’s lunch dishes were still on the table, and an unmated slipper lay on its side in the center of the room. She thought of how much Kenny liked order, and how she usually tried to tidy things up just to please him. Sometimes she hurriedly threw everything—books and papers, shoes and coffee mugs—into a carton just before his arrival. Now she took spiteful satisfaction in the litter. He doesn’t live here, she told herself, closing the door.

  Sunday was always a difficult day at the Palomar Arms, with only a skeleton crew on hand. They were easily outnumbered by the visitors, who got in the way even when they tried to be helpful. There were the middle-aged children with their relentlessly cheerful and loud voices; the bored grandchildren; and the assorted minor relatives and friends who came bearing flowers and candy and fruit, as if they were seeing someone off on a cruise. Nobody was going anywhere, at least nowhere that food or flowers were liable to be useful. Yet the ancient Egyptians used to bury their dead with such offerings, just in case.

  Pushing a cart of supper trays toward the elevators that Sunday, Daphne remembered the Egyptian exhibit she’d seen in a museum on a class trip when she was a child. Those small, mummified figures—many of them child-sized, too—their awesome repose, their stubborn refusal of worldly treasures. She shivered and knew she was being morbid because of Kenny’s phone call (the moment of triumph had passed), and because someone on her floor here had died during the previous night. He’d been a new man, in residence less than a week, and Daphne had hardly known him. Perhaps he was unknowable, reduced to mute despair by senility and the brutal deterioration of his body. While he was still conscious, he began rejecting sustenance, and he ignored the vigorous example of get-well plants.

  The Sunday visitors slowed the progress of the elevators even more than usual. Little kids played in them, pressing every button, shoving one another in and out in wheelchairs, for the fun of the ride. While the aides waited, they gossiped about the latest death, and Daphne was surprised to learn that the dead man’s place had already been taken. There were seldom any admissions on the weekend.

  “Ah, what do you expect?” Feliciana asked. “The beds here are like parking spaces downtown. They don’t get time to cool off. The new guy’s a shaker,” she added, and Daphne understood that she meant Parkinson’s disease, and not the man’s religious affiliation. Evita hit the elevator button yet another time. “Come on, you bastards,” she said, and then knocked her fist against one of the doors.

  As Daphne pushed her cart down the corridor of the second floor, visitors came slowly toward her, maneuvering patients in wheelchairs as if they were babies in prams. Daphne knew there was a weight to those chairs that the wasted bodies didn’t prepare you for. And an awkwardness to the job that came from being upright and ambulatory. A four-footed animal doing tricks on its hind legs. Occasionally, when she tried to help a patient stuck at a turn of the corridor, or in a corner of a room, she was embarrassed by her own ineptness, and frustrated, the way she was when she tried to push those crazy-wheeled shopping carts at the market. But here the burden was invariably human.

  “Oh, look, Pop, dinner!” someone from the outside cried at the first sight of the stacked Styrofoam trays. The microwaves were humming with menace. Daphne tossed a few trays inside and stepped quickly away. The plan to go to Seattle was forming clearly in her head. The odors of the heating food helped her to choose the illness she would pretend in order to get a few days off. A stomach virus. There was one going around, anyway. Daphne actually felt a little queasy then; the merest suggestion could do it, or the reactivated smell of the steamed hamburgers beached in their mysterious gravy.

  Au jus, it said on the mimeographed daily meal plan. Mrs. Shumway is often given to French tiding of her institutional fare—to Carrots Julienne, Chicken Supreme, and Pears Belle Helene.

  Daphne had a childlike curiosity to see Mr. Axel, the new man. What did she expect? He would certainly be elderly, like the others, and there was the further common denominator of a geriatric disease. Parkinson’s wasn’t unusual, and she already knew about the rigidity, the tremors, the drool. There were always fewer men in residence, giving them slightly more novelty than the women, who seemed to outdrive them through sheer determination. The ratio between the sexes here, she realized, was probably close to that in singles’ bars. But there was a greater blurring of gender in old age. The women, balding, with chin whiskers, and the men growing those soft and useless breasts.

  Mr. Axel had the bed nearest the door, and when she looked inside she witnessed a tableau she had seen a few times before—the ceremony of the first leave-taking. The new man was wearing a suit that had outgrown him, and he sat in a wheelchair that still bore the dead man’s name, stenciled on its back like a movie director’s. Mr. Axel’s daughter stood on one side of him, her husband on the other. It was easy to tell who everyone was. The daughter was aflame with feeling, and the son-in-law was as superfluous as an usher at a wedding, flanking the main players with dignified carriage and a sympathetic face.

  “Hello,” Daphne said. “Welcome to the Palomar Arms. Here’s your supper.”

  The woman grabbed one tray and laid it down on the table nearest the window. “Are you a nurse?” she asked Daphne, who shook her head. “A volunteer?” the woman prompted.

  Daphne shook her head again, self-consciously. “An aide,” she said finally. And foolishly added, “I’m a student, actually. This is only a temporary job.”

  But that information seemed to feed the woman’s intensity. “A college student? That’s wonderful! Dad,” she said, and paused to squint at Daphne’s nameplate. “This is Diane Moss.” Her voice would get louder after her father had been there a while, not because of anyone’s hearing loss, but out of the knowledge of growing separation, like one person on the shore calling to another one in a rowboat, drifting away. Now her tone was soft and pleading. “This is my father? Joseph Axel, who’s going to be staying here?”

  “Hello,” the man managed, along with a sweet, skewed smile, and his daughter wiped the corners of his mouth with a readied Kleenex.

  “He’s a … he was a pharmacist, and he’s self-taught in other areas,” she said. “In history, the arts; you know, books, music …” She trailed off, and looked for assistance to her husband, who only looked away.

  “How do you do?” Daphne said to the room in general. “How are you tonight, Mr. Brady?” she called to the other bed, and the legless man there said, “Can’t kick,” his daily deadpan joke.

  The daughter was appalled, but Mr. Axel laughed. Then he said, “Traffic, Sandra. Should start … home.”

  “Soon, soon,” she answered. “We want to see that you’re really settled in here.”

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  “Well, we just want to be with you now,” she insisted. But then she followed Daphne out of the room. “Could you …” she began, and
pulled at her lips as if trying to extract the right words. “Could you look out for him?”

  “I only deliver the suppers,” Daphne said. “And clean up, later.”

  “Oh, I know, but if you could make some conversation when you do. He’s really intelligent, and nice. But we both work and travel a lot. Bud, that’s my husband, travels a lot for business, and I like to go with him. We’re getting older ourselves … everybody is.” The woman shrugged and laughed. “Well, maybe not you, yet.

  “I’ll try,” Daphne said. “I really will.”

  “They treat them all right here, don’t they? I mean, given that it’s an institution and all. I had to wait over a year to get him in, and it was a special favor, the way apartments used to be during the war. World War II, you wouldn’t know about that. We paid supers under the table for the privilege of tiny rooms without a view …” Again, her sentence unrolled and came to a stop.

  Daphne was eager to get away before she heard too much, before the woman revealed episodes of her childhood, like home movies, and visions of the manly father who had once pointed out the Big Dipper in a summer sky, and who had seemed as tall and powerful as a building against the sky. “I’ll come in,” Daphne promised. She had a headache and a sudden longing for Kenny. She wished back some of the old innocence that had allowed her to trust without fear or judgment, and knew it was surely gone. His last stilted sentences during that phone call had to mean that Joy was standing right there. She felt indignant for both herself and Joy. The paths of their parallel lives were shifting dangerously toward convergence, and not in the way that Daphne had hoped.