Daphne and Richard start dancing again, and she thinks of Kenny. The chronology of their past is scrambled, because she’s flung too far back, to the time they danced barefoot to Leon Russell in her room. And then ahead much too quickly to the last day. She shuts her eyes and can see herself opening the door and the way he came into her arms, weeping.
Her old roommate’s daughter comes over to congratulate Nora. “All the best. You look simply lovely. My mother sends her regards.”
There’s a long lineup of well-wishers. They might use up the rest of her life. One of them throws an afghan across Nora’s knees, and she’s grateful. The air is turning cooler.
The band plays a fanfare, and a circle of fire comes toward her. “Make a wish, make a wish!” they all say.
“I’m only ninety-seven, you know,” she whispers confidingly, but nobody hears. They’re too busy singing. Well, let them think what they want. She can’t blow out a single candle, anyway. Once, she was fourteen. Once, she could blow out the moon. She looks upward and can’t see anything but the dark quilt of night. What if her brother Henry is hiding behind the moon now, waiting to jump out and yell “Boo!” at her? “I’m not ready,” she says.
The first of the fireworks is sent up and bursts into golden rain. “Ahhh!”
42
THEY GO OUT TO eat often, and they spend most of each day near the pool. Kenny has taken his vacation now, after hiring two recently graduated accountants to finish some overdue work. The ménage a trois he’d pictured has expanded into a quartet. He and Joy each visit a separate therapist, and the therapists consult one another on the telephone. His, Dr. Menkin, refuses to listen to Kenny’s report of recent events. He wants him to delve directly into childhood, which makes Kenny impatient and fearful. When he merely thinks about that time, he uses the careful selection of memory, and still has a sense of control. But when he talks in the slanted light of that office, lying on the leather couch made soft by the bodies of other former children, he is much too vulnerable to hide anything; he becomes more and more the child whose experience he slowly reveals. Like Portnoy’s analyst, Menkin wants Kenny to begin at the beginning. Eventually, he will be a grown man.
As if she knows that he’s spinning backward in time, or because she’s undergoing the same process with Dr. Blau, Joy won’t let Kenny back into their bed yet. Her most intimate gesture, so far, has been to offer him bits of food from her plate in a restaurant.
They don’t tell one another what happens in the privacy of their respective sessions, although they make little comic asides. Joy sometimes refers to the two therapists as Cheng and Eng, Abbott and Costello, or the Captain and Tennille. Because of the phenomenal fees they charge, Kenny calls them Bonnie and Clyde.
The children are in the water, and Joy and Kenny are their lifeguards, the twin sentinels of safety. Their talk is lazy, intermittent, summery.
“Do you want some iced tea?”
“Let’s put a jacaranda in behind the garage.”
“Hmmm?”
Her hand is hanging limply in the green shadows at the side of her chaise, as if it were trailing from a canoe into a pond. He picks her hand up and holds it against his face.
She turns to look at him. “I’m an only child,” she says. “It was always difficult for me to share.”
It’s dark inside after all that sunlight. Joy rests every afternoon at this hour, just like the children.
Kenny doesn’t like going to his isolated bed during the day; it’s more regression than he can tolerate. So, while everyone else sleeps, he roams the house like a caretaker, or a ghost. Sometimes he thinks about Daphne, but in a hazy, abstracted way. It could be his old defenses at work. Or maybe he just can’t allow himself more than that. After all, they’re turning him into a child, but one that isn’t permitted to play. Only once he was caught without warning, and she spun across his mind’s vision in a cartwheel, and was gone.
He looks at books, and is unable to read. Nothing in the refrigerator tempts his appetite. Music, no matter how softly played, would be an intrusion on the quiet of the house.
Joy is taking an antidepressant that helps her to sleep, and to feel hopeful. On another day at this hour, Kenny went to the library to look up her medication in the Physicians’ Desk Reference. Among the possible side effects, he discovered, is a lessening of the libido. His own is chastened, too, without the benefit of drugs. On the way home from the library, he stopped at a store and bought some magazines: Playboy, Hustler, and another one with an oiled woman on the cover, one knee tipped toward each border of the page. He looked at the pictures as he sat in his car, in the parking lot of a supermarket. His vagrant heart ached a little at the sight of all those slick, beckoning, impossibly beautiful bodies, but they didn’t excite him. After a while he noticed the real women going by, pushing shopping carts, and felt a tremendous rush of recognition.
It is loneliness that makes him go to the door of the master bedroom and put his ear against it. Joy says, “What is it?” and he opens the door.
She’s lying on her own side of the bed, a fact that gives him inordinate pleasure.
“May I come in?” he asks.
“Why?”
He considers the question, and knows that it’s essential for him to be truthful. He’s the youngest son, who has set out to seek his fortune, and now he’s being tested by the most powerful witch in the kingdom. “I don’t want to be by myself,” he says.
It’s the right answer, because she nods, bidding him to enter.
He steps out of his bathing suit and rums back the covers on his side of the bed. The pillow remembers his head. The sheets are delightfully cool and smooth, and he imagines his old dreams still trapped in them, waiting for his return. When he and Joy are able to make love again, will the sheets have to be brought to Menkin and Blau as proof of consummation? Kenny stifles a mad rising of laughter.
“Don’t talk, all right?” Joy murmurs.
“All right,” he agrees. He’s happy to be relieved of the burden of conversation, although he knows there are things that must be said, sooner or later. Later. Not now.
She turns her back, but doesn’t move completely away from him. He dares to come closer, finding an old, almost-forgotten position for sleep—arm flung over arm, leg over leg, as if they’re running alongside one another and only giving the illusion of touching.
Daphne was adored. She was young, exciting, and desirable. It was marvelous to be so cherished. Her married lover was tender, grateful, and crazily aroused most of the time … And then he left the magic of Daphne’s foldout bed to return to his real life.
Kenny was mad about Daphne. He was sincere in his suit of her. But at home he heard the cry of “Daddy,” a sound even more compelling than the call of passion.
And Daphne reluctantly returned to her real world—a place where people lived only in the past—and fantasized about her future.
A Biography of Hilma Wolitzer
Hilma Wolitzer (b. 1930) is a critically hailed author of literary fiction. Her work has been described by the New York Times as “often hilarious and always compassionate.” Born in Brooklyn, New York, she began writing as a child. She was first published at age nine, when a poem she wrote about winter appeared in a local journal. She was voted the poet laureate of her junior high school, but after graduating from high school at sixteen she worked at various jobs, from renting beach chairs under the boardwalk in Coney Island to pasting feathers on hats in a factory and holding a position as an office clerk.
Wolitzer married at twenty-two, and though her family consumed most of her time, she began writing again. Her first published short story, “Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket,” appeared in print when she was thirty-six. Eight years (and several short stories) later, she published Ending (1974), a novel about a young man with a terminal illness. The New York Times called it “as moving in its ideas as it is in its emotions.” Ending was released when Wolitzer was forty-four years old and she w
as dubbed the “Great Middle-Aged Hope.”
She followed this success with In the Flesh (1977), a well-received novel of a conventional marriage threatened by an affair. Since then, her novels have dealt mostly with domestic themes, and she has drawn praise for illuminating the dark interiors of the American home. In the late seventies and mid-eighties, Wolitzer also published a quartet of young adult novels: Introducing Shirley Braverman (1975), Out of Love (1976), Toby Lived Here (1978), and Wish You Were Here (1984).
Following her novels Hearts (1980), In the Palomar Arms (1983), Silver (1988), and Tunnel of Love (1994), Wolitzer confronted a paralyzing writer’s block. Unable to write more than a page or two a day—none of which ever congealed into a story—she did not publish a book for more than a decade.
After working with a therapist to try to understand the block, she completed the first draft of a new novel—about a woman who consults a therapist to solve a psychic mystery—in just a few months. Upon its release, The Doctor’s Daughter (2006) was touted as a “triumphant comeback” by the New York Times Book Review. Since then, Wolitzer has published two more books—Summer Reading (2007) and An Available Man (2012).
In addition to her novels, Wolitzer has published nonfiction as well, including a book on writing called The Company of Writers (2001). She has also taught writing at colleges and workshops around the country. She has two daughters—an editor and a novelist—and lives with her husband in New York City, where she continues to write.
A three-year-old Wolitzer poses for a portrait, taken in 1933.
Wolitzer with her mother, Rose Liebman, and sisters, Anita and Eleanor, circa 1943.
Wolitzer drew this picture of FDR in 1945.
Wolitzer and her husband, Morton, celebrate their wedding day, September 7, 1952, in Brooklyn, New York.
Wolitzer sits on a park bench with her daughters, Meg and Nancy, in 1964.
Wolitzer relaxes on the beach in Oyster Bay, New York, with her daughters in the 1960s.
Pictured here (clockwise): Wolitzer, Linda Pastan, Stanley Elkin (with his back to the camera), and Tim O’Brien talking at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 1985.
Wolitzer has frequently visited schools across the country to teach children about writing—experiences that she remembers fondly. Pictured here is a thank-you note from a fifth-grade student in Greenville, South Carolina, circa 1992.
Wolitzer enjoys time with her grandsons, Charlie and Gabriel, in Springs, New York, in 1996.
Wolitzer with her husband, now a retired psychologist.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1983 by Hilma Wolitzer
cover design by Angela Wilcox
978-1-4532-8790-3
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In the Palomar Arms Page 24