Hearts (25 page)

“Who are you talking to?” Robin asked. She was wearing pink shortie pajamas and carrying her discarded clothing in a crushed heap. A sock wafted to the floor as she crossed the room. Linda retrieved it and put it on top of the pile in Robin’s arms as Robin let it all fall and scatter between the beds. “
Who
?” she insisted.

“Nobody,” Linda said. “I’m just thinking out loud.”

“You can’t think out loud,” Robin told her. “There’s no such thing. If it’s out loud, it’s talking. If it’s thinking, it’s inside your head and it’s quiet. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have two different words for it, would they?”

“Oh, be still,” Linda said, and miraculously, she soon was. Oh, faithful and glorious sleep.

Linda took off her own clothes and folded them neatly across the chair. She did not have the courage to look in the mirror again. Instead, she showered quickly and put on her favorite nightgown, the white cotton one with chains of embroidered violets as straps.

She pulled back the covers on the other bed and climbed into it. The traffic moved steadily and an abbreviated cheer came from the miniature golf course. A hole in one at Gettysburg, maybe. But there was no sound from the room next door.

Linda was oppressed by all her contained secrets. She had looked forward so much to being alone with Wolfie, and yet she hardly knew him, and had no reasonable claim on his attention. It wasn’t fair for her to expect an urgent response to her own urgency on such short acquaintance.

She told herself it was only because he was another adult, after all this claustrophobic time with Robin, that he was merely someone she could tell things to who would not judge her, who would not whine or shrug or argue. There was no reason in the world why she couldn’t just get up now while it was still early and knock on his door and say casually that she felt like talking—did he?

Except that he might give her the same gentle brush-off he’d given Robin. See you first thing in the morning, kid. We’ll have a nice little talk at breakfast, okay? And she couldn’t bear that, not the disappointment or the humiliation. So she lay there until she gave in to the heaviness that was drawing her eyelids down.

She didn’t sleep long. It was the kind of doze you fall into on buses and trains, from which you can always
wake yourself in time for your stop. She had dreamed knocking and knew quickly that it
had
been a dream. Still, she listened for a moment to be sure. Then she rose from the bed and put on her robe. Robin was sprawled in sleep, looking as if she’d been mugged.

Linda opened the door with infinite care, and stepped outside. The Maverick was parked right in front of their room. For a moment she indulged in the childhood fantasy that allowed nocturnal life to inanimate objects. She felt affection for the car, and gratitude for having been taken this far in safety on her journey. She imagined a giant map of the United States, and the yellow state of Oklahoma as a vast moonlit area on which she and the Maverick stood absolutely alone.

Then she heard the other door open, and Wolfie, still in the clothes he’d worn all day, came outside, too.

“I couldn’t sleep,” Linda said, positive as she said it that it was a line from a famous movie, one that everyone else has heard and would instantly recognize.

Wolfie only said, “I know. Me, too.” He had a drink in his hand.

Linda shivered with nervousness and tried to remember the way she had spoken to men on the job at Fred Astaire’s. What had she ever said to all those strangers in whose damp embrace she’d moved so easily across the dance floor? What does anyone ever say?

“Cold?” Wolfie asked, and when she nodded, teeth chattering, he opened his door and she went inside. She sat down in the chair near the window and Wolfie sat on the edge of his bed. He looked at her without speaking and Linda glanced away and said, “You have a very nice room.” It was exactly like hers, dismal and tiny.

Wolfie smiled, relentlessly engaging her eyes.

“So,” Linda said. “What are you going to do? Love it or leave it?”

“What? Oh, love it, I guess. The way you love Robin. Hoping all the time it will change.”

Did she love Robin?

“As soon as I crossed the border, I felt friendly toward the country again,” Wolfie said. “Once, in Montreal, a Yugoslavian poet showed up to visit a guy I knew. He’d been a really well-known poet in Europe and then I guess he got too political. First there was a little censorship, and then they started shoving him around, and his books disappeared from the stores, from the libraries. He was even arrested, and they only released him because some bigwig American poets started making noises. Yet he was going back. We couldn’t believe it. But he laughed. He said, ‘Well, you know, I
live
there. It’s my country.’ ”

And what about your woman, the one you were so happy with up there? Linda wanted to ask, but didn’t.

“Now,” Wolfie said. “Tell me about you.”

Linda began her story. She told him about Wright, their first meeting, the marriage, his death. She realized that she now remembered Wright longer than she had known him.

Wolfie listened with an intensity that matched her telling, and he passed the glass to her. It was a sweetish wine, but as she drank from it, she felt like an obedient child taking medicine at bedtime because she has faith that it will make her well.

She told him about Robin, about the small, ongoing war that was their relationship, about finding her grandfather’s
address and the private detective’s report, and how they had been received in Iowa, and had fled. As she spoke, she thought about the pregnancy, and the abortion-clinic bombing, and her recent rediscovery, in their chronological sequence. Without fully understanding why, she withheld all of that from him. By the time she got to her plans to look for Robin’s mother in Glendale and go on to California alone, they had passed the glass back and forth several times, and Linda had stopped shivering.

“You’ve had a very rough time, haven’t you?” Wolfie said.

“It feels better, just talking about it,” Linda told him. “Thank you for listening.”

“I like listening to you,” Wolfie said. “You have such a sweet voice, Linda. It’s like being read to.”

“You do? It is? I always worry. Robin says I’m not, you know … spontaneous. Maybe the wine helped. I feel kind of … light.”

“It’s a nice feeling, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Do you know, before? I did sleep a little and I dreamed you knocked on my door.” Linda was dazzled by her own boldness and poise.

Then Wolfie stood up and she felt a rush of despair. Was he going to dismiss her now? Maybe she had gone too far, had been
too
spontaneous.

She stood up, too, trying to look as if it had been her idea as well to call it a night. She even managed a queer little yawn. “Well!” she exclaimed, leaving herself breathless.

“I wanted to knock,” Wolfie said slowly, and Linda started trembling again. It’s only the wine, she thought, or the fatigue. Or longing. Or lust.

“But I couldn’t take that chance,” he continued. “Miss Teenage America might have been waiting right behind the door with her putting iron. Instead of you.” He unstrapped his watch and laid it on the table next to one of the beds.

“Oh, no,” Linda said, and she had to lean against the wall. “She’s a very good sleeper. Her father was like th …”

Wolfie turned back the covers on the bed.

So this was it, the excitement before touching that was better than any touching she had known so far. “I mean she could sleep through anything, once she’s out. Through an earthquake, even.”

He came toward her across the room and there was a splendid spasm in her chest and belly. “Oh, babe. Oh, babe, come on,” he said. His voice was gruffly, gravely sweet.

“And other natural disasters,” Linda whispered, going into his arms. They reached the bed and lay down on it still in the violence of that first embrace, still clothed. The struggle to release themselves from their clothing was like some mad competition in which they had to do so without ever letting go of one another. At last they were victors, skin to burning skin, and when he entered her she became a vessel, a room, a house!—in which all the lights came on at once.

They slept, woke, talked, and made love again, a few times.
Five
times, to be exact. Why should she deny she kept this exultant mental record? She remembered a woman she’d known who carried around a written diary of all her sexual statistics: duration of orgasm, partner’s birthstone, color of sheets, time of day, phase of moon.

When they were awake, she lay with her ear to
Wolfie’s chest, and listened to the impressive drumbeat of his heart. When he fell asleep before her, she was forlorn, and when they woke and moved together again, she was rowdy with happiness.

Someone had once told Linda that there are still primitive cultures in which the men assure their pregnant women that lovemaking is what nourishes the fetus. Oh, that’s what they
all
say, she thought, realizing immediately that she had made a spontaneous, if silent, joke. She laughed out loud and Wolfie said, sleepily, “Hey, what’s so funny?”

“Me,” Linda answered. She acknowledged, not without wonder, that it was possible to be articulate with passion. It was as if she had finally been released from some long and terrible enchantment.

Just before dawn she said she’d better get back to her room before Robin woke up. Wolfie staggered into his jeans while Linda watched from the nest of blankets and pillows. “I’ll walk you home, babe,” he said, and they went lockstepped to her door.

They lingered there, draped against one another, kissing, kissing. It was like a prelude to the evening rather than its conclusion. “I have to go,” Linda whispered, without real conviction. “Good night.” “Good night,” Wolfie answered, and then they kissed some more before they let their arms drop, their bodies fall away.

Wolfie went to his door. “Good night,” he called again.

“Good night,” Linda said, and went inside. As advertised, Robin had slept through everything. Linda covered her and then collapsed into bed. She had decided not to sleep, though, not to allow this to become one of
those transient ecstatic moments she’d thought about earlier, in the shopping center. If she reviewed and replayed what had happened as if it were a filmed historical event, she could prevent its untimely passing.

The physical memory was easy; her body still hoarded every nuance of touch. She tried to remember some of the things they had said to each other. He had been concerned at the last minute about birth control, and asked, “Is it all right?” Linda had said, “Oh, yes, it’s fine, it’s wonderful,” her answer layered with meaning. The word “love” had come up, but only in the worshipful naming of parts, of acts. During one period of rest there had been a short exchange of history. His father was dead; his mother now lived in Oregon. What was it he’d said? You’d like my mother?
You’ll
like my mother? Something. And hadn’t he rerouted her trip himself, and then shown up on that very route? The effort at recollection was making her drowsy against her will. But it didn’t matter. She had kept the resonance of experience, if not every detail, and could afford to rest her guard now and sleep.

When she woke, she was alone in the room. The pink shortie pajamas were on the floor between the beds. From the bathroom window she looked out onto the miniature golf course. Robin and Wolfie were just teeing off.

27
Robin didn’t make a hole-in-one, but she beat Wolfie by two points, anyway. That was close enough to make his loss legitimate, and she didn’t suspect him of throwing the game, the way her father always did. It took her years to figure it out, to understand why she consistently won, no matter what they played (miniature golf, Go Fish, Ghost, Monopoly), why her pile of play money seemed to increase mysteriously whenever she went to the bathroom. He must have dealt himself
bad
cards from the bottom of the deck, must have kept Boardwalk and Park Place as undeveloped property on purpose. She guessed now that he’d probably done those things to help build up her self-confidence, to make the small areas of her life within his control pleasant and even victorious. But she felt cheated by the deception and knew that because of it she had never learned to be a cheerful loser.

When she made the fifth hole in two under par, Wolfie whistled appreciatively. “Did you stay up all night to practice?” he asked. But he was the one who kept yawning.

It was a beautiful day; some of the cool night air still lingered, and there was real dew on the artificial grass at their feet. Robin thought it was especially nice to have Wolfie all to herself for once. Maybe after she was completely on her own she would get in touch with him. Maybe the two of them could travel somewhere together, taking turns driving, the way he did with Linda. If Linda didn’t screw everything up first by acting so wimpy he’d never want to see either of them again. As if on cue, she appeared in the doorway of their room, waving and smiling, as Robin and Wolfie walked back from the golf course.

They drove slowly on side roads, stopping from time to time to examine something more closely, a cluster of wildflowers or a herd of cows. Robin wouldn’t admit this to anyone, but she was actually afraid of cows. Seen close up, with only a few strands of wire separating her from them, they were enormous, and truly exotic, with their cartoon eyes and shivering flesh. Those udders, as pink and stretched as bubble gum, seemed like remarkable sexual baggage, and she glanced around nervously, wondering if there were any bulls in the neighborhood, too. Robin had always been afraid of animals, but it was a fear she had been able to dismiss or disguise pretty easily in Newark, except for an occasional encounter with a stray dog. Now she tried to appear casual, even indifferent. She stood back from the barbed wire with her hands in her pockets. “Moo, yourself,” she said.

When they’d first stepped out of the car at the edge of the meadow, Linda brushed away the flies that dive-bombed them, then inhaled deeply. “Smell this air!” she shouted. “Will you tell me why people live in crowded, polluted cities when there’s all this glorious air to breathe?”