She takes the folded bills warily, without looking at them. They both watch his uncertain, empty hand as it retreats to his side.
In the driveway, Daphne splits the money with Mkabi. It’s a stunning night. Masses of stars have congregated for their viewing. Darryl is waiting at the curb, leaning against his car. He and Mkabi kiss each other with leisurely pleasure. Watching them is like sitting too close to the screen at the movies.
Darryl has a surprise for Mkabi in the backseat of the car. Their son Bobby is sleeping there in his pajamas. She laughs out loud when she sees him.
31
THE MAGICIAN IS A local dentist who does his legerdemain on the side, billing himself as Dr. Magic. He brings his act, without charge, to prisons, nursing homes, and schools for handicapped children. When he comes to the Palomar Arms, Joe is reluctant to attend the performance, but Brady advises him to go. “It breaks it up, kid,” he says.
Brady goes to everything that’s offered: juggling acts, lectures on Eskimo life and shell collecting, demonstrations of driftwood sculpture and macramé, prayer meetings of any denomination, art slides, poetry readings, palm readings, sing-alongs. He even accompanied Joe the previous week when four young musicians from a university came to give a concert of chamber music. Brady confessed that classical music always puts him to sleep, but it’s still nice to do something different for a change. “It breaks it up,” he said.
Live music! The pianist twirled the piano stool. The other musicians settled themselves on squeaky folding chairs. They raised and lowered their music stands. The two women arranged the drapery of their skirts with a kind of sensual modesty. They wore the colors of summer, rather than the somber black of concert halls. Even their tuning up, with the disadvantage of the tinny old upright, was lovely. Joe has always liked that joyful racket of preparation. The cellist’s bare slender elbows sawed like a cricket’s wings.
The room was too small, of course. Sound would bounce off the walls and be distorted. Sustained notes couldn’t float slowly away as they should. But still, what a treat. The mountain coming to Mohammed. Joe sat in a trance of expectation.
Brady suggests they get into the front row for the magic show, so they can see what the guy is doing.
The magician takes out his baton and waves it with commanding majesty. It immediately droops in a rubbery dangle from his hand. He looks down at it, simulating bewilderment. Loss of power! Impotence! It’s a universal symbol, and the audience laughs and applauds.
He brightens; the baton straightens up, too, and he asks for a volunteer to assist him.
Brady makes a megaphone of his hands. “Hey, Doc, you want to saw me in half?”
Dr. Magic stares at Brady, dismayed. But when the audience laughs again, he regains his composure. He points to Joe. “How about this gentleman?” he asks. “Would you care to assist me, sir?”
Brady guffaws. “That’s no gentleman!” he shouts. “That’s my roomie!”
Joe makes all sorts of protests, but they blend with the involuntary movements of his body. Soon the magician is pulling a vivid chain of scarves from Joe’s bathrobe sleeves, coins from his ears, a skinny white rabbit from nowhere.
“Oh, God, oh, God,” comes from the side of the room, and Dr. Magic bows in the direction of such acclaim. He does card tricks and rope tricks, keeping up a light stream of humorous patter: “Please notice, folks, that my fingers never leave my hands! Are you wondering how I do this trick? Extremely well, I’d say.”
Every once in a while, Brady calls out, asking for a little levitation. He’s like the drunken heckler in a nightclub who repeatedly requests “Melancholy Baby.”
The magician ignores him, or puts him down with snappy, good-natured retorts, and no real break in his repertoire.
Brady whispers to Joe, “I seen all of this a hundred times,” but he seems enraptured, eager to be fooled yet one more time. “Wait and see,” he says. “He’ll end with the birds. They always end with the birds.”
Even sitting this close to the performance, Joe can’t detect the mechanics, the trickery of the tricks. The man is an excellent amateur. He’s probably a good dentist, too, with so much dexterity, and that gentle humor to distract patients from pain. But Joe is not enchanted by all this talent and kindness. He, too, has seen everything before. And when the doves do fly up for the finale, fluttering white and beating the air with their wings, he feels only a feeble responsive beating in his breast, and none of the old willing suspension of disbelief.
That night, after lights out, Joe tells Brady that he’d once bought a magic set for his grandson Kevin, to help the boy become more confident, more popular with other children. It was a deluxe set that came with a top hat and a magic wand. But Kevin did the tricks wrong or clumsily, always giving himself away. He even had trouble opening the collapsible hat. His parents and brother were sympathetic, and pretended to be impressed and deluded. Deborah, however, was driven by a cold honesty. She said, “The dime was between your fingers. You held them stiff and funny.” And, “I saw you put that card in your sleeve, Kevin. It was sticking out the whole time.” After he failed and failed to deceive her, Kevin became so frustrated he ripped the cards up, snapped the plastic wand in two, and stomped on the top hat, collapsing it forever.
“Yeah,” Brady says. “Women can do that.”
“Well, she was only a child herself,” Joe says. “Only a little girl.”
“Yeah, they learn early,” Brady says. In the half-dark, in a voice that’s slightly deeper because he’s lying down, he tells Joe that his ex-wife, Alice, the blonde who visited him that one time, made him crazy in the same way. “If you think she’s good-looking now,” Brady says, “you should’ve seen her in the old days.” Joe doesn’t think she’s good-looking at all. With that metallic hair and heavy makeup, and her tough, inflexible jaw, she reminds him of a female impersonator. But he doesn’t comment.
“You know how nothing you can do is ever right?” Brady says. “Not enough money, the wrong kind of friends, the wrong neighborhood. She wanted me to drink with her, but not get drunk. She wanted me home on time and out of the house! I couldn’t even piss straight. Who the hell knows what she wanted? She made me crazy.”
“You can’t live with ’em or without ’em,” Joe says, amazing himself with his flowing articulate sentence, and by the way he’s picked up on Brady’s vernacular. And it isn’t true. He did live with a woman, and now he’s living without her.
“Anyhoo,” Brady continues. “One night we both had too much, and we got to yelling and screaming at each other. She told me to do her a big favor and drop dead; it would make her real happy. Why didn’t I just go someplace and die? So I drove down to the tracks, where the freights were. I was so plastered, I don’t even remember driving there. I could hardly open the car door to get out. But you do. And I lay down on the tracks.”
“My God,” Joe says.
“It was some night, like a painting of a night. I was going to make her happy, that’s all. I lay there for a long time. I must of fell asleep. When I woke up, the sky was lighter, or it was the lights of the train. And the noise of it was inside the rails, inside my head. Shit, I was sober! I was going to die! So I tried to get up or roll away and it was too late. I got halfway across when it came and came. The motorman saw me, saw something, but he couldn’t stop until he was all the way down the line.”
Joe waits for the rest of the story, as one waits in a theater for the last scene of a play. It is the same kind of mesmerizing darkness. But soon he hears Brady snoring.
Last week, when the chamber-music concert began in that inadequate room, Joe was lifted from the smaller room of his own body, from all the limits and restraints of his life, into the possibility of beauty. The musicians played some Mozart, and the Brahms Piano Quartet in C minor. In the third movement of the Brahms, there was a very long melodic passage for the cello. Joe watched the escape of other spirits around the room—the loosening of locked limbs, the changes in women’s fa
ces as they found objects or people misplaced in memory. Two lines from a lost Roethke poem came into his head then: “An old man with his feet before the fire, / In robes of green, in garments of adieu.”
Next to him, Brady slept, missing the act of levitation, but he didn’t snore or cry out the way he usually did at night.
32
BENCH ASKS IF HE’S been seeing the other woman.
“You mean Daphne,” Kenny says. It’s his only possible defiance. Bench is so coldly professional and impersonal, and Kenny lives with daily apprehension about the rise and plunge of Joy’s moods. There have been no outbursts for two days now, but he can’t be sure what she might do or say next, and he dreads being with her. His major fear, though, is of the correlation between her behavior and her legal intentions.
He has asked Bench to contact Joy’s lawyer and find out what plans she has for the children. Kenny is willing to be reasonable and sane. He doesn’t want to take them away from Joy, except for short periods of custody—weekends and holidays—and he would like to have easy access to them while they’re living with her. It’s the children’s emotional welfare that concerns him most, and maybe the two lawyers can convince her of that.
Bench keeps harping on Daphne, and Kenny explodes. No, he hasn’t been seeing her. He’s been staying home like a good little pussy-whipped boy. How the hell long is this going to go on?
Bench’s nostrils dilate in distaste. Have there been telephone calls, he asks.
Kenny sinks into the leather hot seat. Yes. So what?
He’s been discreet, anyway. He uses pay phones, like a bookie. He talks so quickly he’s reduced to phrases instead of whole sentences.
“You’re jeopardizing your whole case,” Bench warns, and when Kenny only sulks, Bench asks, “Letters?”
Kenny walks out, slamming the door behind him. Maybe he should have stuck with Larkin, who was simple enough to believe that goodbye is a lot like hello.
Joy continues to prepare meals. The dayworker still comes twice a week to clean the house. On the days she’s not there, Kenny notices that Joy has stopped making their bed in the morning. He went to the room once to look for a jacket he had not yet moved to the guest-room closet, and found the bed a mad tangle of pillows, sheets, and blankets, as if Olympic lovemaking had taken place there. Since then he checks it furtively every day, and it is always the same scene of disarray. His own chaste bed, now that he’s learned to escape quickly into sleep, is as tidy and as spare as a monk’s.
He looks for other clues to what she may be thinking or feeling, by stirring through the contents of the waste-baskets, the laundry hamper, and the refrigerator. He has become the house detective, an inspector of the heart. Aside from the disheveled bed, he doesn’t find anything of significance.
In the middle of the day at the office, he has a sudden intuition that she’s turning the children against him in some subtle and cunning way. His own mother had done that. Long ago, she started referring to Kenny’s father as “he” or “him” with disparaging emphasis. She took away his name and title, and he became a dishonored general to his own men. When she bathed and fed Kenny and Robert, she told them what was going on, talking to herself mostly, scrubbing their arms and legs too roughly while she did so, or scraping the supper plates with teeth-shocking screeches. Although both boys were too young to comprehend much of what she said, they’d felt the chill of her contempt, and learned to share it. Later, when she’d say, “That bastard,” they would know instantly who she meant.
Although he speaks to his mother on the telephone about once a month, Kenny has not heard from or called his father in a long while. Six months, or more. Was he really such a cowardly bully, or was he bullied and cowed into being one? Is he lonely now, heartsick with regret? Kenny is sure he’s projecting his self-pity onto his father, who’s married to another disagreeable woman and is as uncommunicative as ever.
Robert isn’t married, and in his rare meetings with Kenny, he refers to their parents collectively as “them.” Whenever that happens, Kenny feels the abrasive swipe of the washrag again.
He envisions a grown Molly and Steven, drinking cocktails in an airport bar, sharing distorted memories of their childhood, and he rises from his desk chair to pace. He tries to dredge up positive memories of his own. His mother whistled off-key sometimes, while she did housework. And his father showed up once, in a daytime audience of women, to watch Kenny, as Columbus, discover America in a school play.
He sits down again, swiveling back and forth, holding on to the desk ledge the way Steven does when he comes to the office and plays at being Daddy. Kenny picks up the telephone, and wonders who he will call. His father, to offer false, long-distance absolution? His mother, to ask her to whistle a few bars for him? Joy, to say: What’s going on there, stop immediately, I know what you’re up to? Robert, to say: Guess what, I’ve become “him”? The children, to warn them against dangerous lies and subterfuge? Daphne, to squander his lust in short, staccato bursts? Instead, he dials Bench’s number and apologizes for being obstinate and rude. He intends to be more cooperative from now on. He knows it’s for his own good. Even the phone calls will stop.
33
SO BE IT. DAPHNE is mature enough to accept a further delay of gratification. The phone calls didn’t amount to very much anyway. She’s had far less hurried ones from obscene strangers. And Kenny is such a wreck about it. If it weren’t for the children, he’d be here right now, opening the bed, turning on the fireplace fan, unbuttoning his shirt.
In the meantime, he’s going to send telepathic messages. There isn’t any law against that, is there? All they have to do is think about one another with savage concentration at various times of the day. On the hour? They agree, murmur, send kisses crawling through the telephone wires, and hang up.
It’s Daphne’s day off again, and she doesn’t have any classes. She intends to plan every minute of this unwelcome freedom. The people in the apartment above hers have started the day too early, by moving furniture and waking her. She lies there for as long as she can, willing sleep, feigning sleep, and then she gives in and gets up. It’s only ten of nine. Daphne likes to sleep late, especially on mornings following work, and most especially today. She decides to wash her hair, to squeeze fresh orange juice (for a change), and to do some calisthenics. The body, love’s main vehicle, can be terribly neglected during the frenzy of love. She’ll use this respite to restore herself, and the restoration will help kill time. Just shampooing her hair, because of its length, can absorb the better part of an hour. On other days, Kenny had combed out the wet tangles for her, a sensation almost as lovely as flesh against flesh. While she’s in the shower, her eyes shut against the streaming suds, she realizes that it must be nine o’clock by now, or even a little past that. She concentrates on Kenny’s face, on his body, imagines him next to her, deflecting the water into a fine spray against her belly and breasts. He is thinking of her, too; she’s sure of it. Daphne feels the electricity of his sexual gaze, and shivers under it, as she does in bed, saying his name.
She forgets to strain the orange juice, and swallows a few small seeds and lots of pulp, but it’s delicious anyway. And it tastes healthful—a golden elixir, like a love potion. She makes a resolution to squeeze fresh juice every day from now on, and to take vitamins as well.
After closing the bed, Daphne has just enough room for the calisthenics. She puts some music on the stereo—Leon Russell’s “Tight Rope,” which she and Kenny had danced to in dreamy half-time once, just before he left the apartment. At ten o’clock she pauses during a series of sit-ups and gets to her feet. This time she conjures him clothed from the waist down, and barefoot, as they both were the day they danced. She holds her arms out to enclose a man-sized portion of air. It’s easy to pretend, and sort of fun. Beyond Russell’s aching, throbbing words, she’s positive she can hear her own name said again and again.
Daphne calls Feliciana, who has a date, and Louise Weber, who’s working. S
he dials two other friends in Los Angeles. The first phone rings and rings without an answer. A man picks up the second one and says that Jeanine is indisposed at the moment; can he take a message? Well, there’s no law against being alone for a single day, either.
Daphne does some work on her Tolstoy paper, referring frequently to the marked-up text of Anna Karenina. She used to deplore the fact that other students wrote in books; it seemed like a sacrilege. But now, when she reads in the margins Yes, yes! and This is absolutely true! next to the passage about the birth of Kitty and Levin’s baby, she is very moved. She turns the pages and writes similar comments about Anna’s passion for Vronsky, even though she knows how it all ends.
Daphne puts the paper aside and gets dressed. Maybe she’ll take a drive, head for the beach. She packs a picnic lunch and throws her bathing suit and a towel into the car, too.
There’s a call-in talk show on the radio as she starts out, heading south on the freeway. The subject is euthanasia, and the show is titled Pulling the Plug. Her hand reaches for the dial, and then goes back to the wheel. Euthanasia is something she and the others have discussed in the lounge. Mkabi suggested that all healthy adults sign papers saying whether or not extreme life-saving methods should be used on them, and whether they want to donate their hearts, kidneys, and corneas for transplant. Jerry said that he can’t see the point of living if you don’t know up from down anymore. Monica asked what his point was, then, and he laughed, goosing her. Daphne began to be short of breath and had to leave the room. If something like that happens now, she’ll simply turn to a music station, or shut the radio off. It wouldn’t be the first time she was stricken by anxiety in an inconvenient place. At that party she and Mkabi had worked. And in class, when they analyzed the scene in Madame Bovary where Emma and Rodolphe go into the woods on horseback. God! Sex and death, sex and death, that’s all she ever thinks about. Maybe she’s seen too many Woody Allen movies.
In the Palomar Arms Page 19