THE RENTAL OFFICE OF Paradise Apartments looked like a travel agency specializing in Club Med vacations. The walls were hung with poster-size photographs of gorgeous young men and women, most of them blond and bronzed and skimpily clad, and all of them apparently having fun. Some were playing tennis, while others cavorted around a pool or sank blissfully, in twosomes and threesomes, into a simmering hot tub. Music seeped gently into the room from hidden speakers: Jeffrey Osborne singing “On the Wings of Love.” Although Linda had never played tennis or been in a hot tub, either alone or in mixed company, she couldn’t help thinking, with a pang, of her own misplaced social life. After so many weeks alone with Robin, she wondered if she still remembered how to talk to someone her own age, if she could have a normal conversation with anyone at all.
The rental agent, a short-winded, overweight woman, who wore several extra pounds of gold jewelry and a gold-plated nametag identifying her merely as “Marlene,” didn’t seem like someone you could test your conversational skills on. “Make it snappy, I was just closing up,” she said in greeting when Linda walked in. Then she tapped on her desk top with lethally long, red fingernails and looked impatiently at her watch while Linda glanced around.
If Linda had any doubts after examining the photographs that Paradise was a singles complex, they would have been dispelled by the sign on the wall behind the agent’s desk that said PLEASURE, PRIVACY, PARADISE! in commanding letters, and underneath, in smaller print, ABSOLUTELY NO CHILDREN OR PETS. As if they were the same thing! Linda was afraid to ask what the cutoff age for childhood was, and she was much too tired and dispirited to consider getting back on the road. So when she asked if there was a vacancy, she simply failed to mention Robin, who was asleep again in the back of the Mustang; it was a deliberate oversight on her part, rather than a direct lie. Besides, this was just a place to crash for a while until they got their bearings. That’s why she signed up for a “tastefully furnished efficiency suite,” at the weekly rate, without even asking to look at it. The security deposit was steep—four weeks’ rent—but Marlene said it would be fully refunded whenever she moved out. Linda selected an apartment model from floor plans you couldn’t read without a magnifying glass, and she made her other choices—a conventional king-sized bed, rather than a round or heart-shaped one, and a view of the pool, as opposed to a view of a maintenance building—by thumbing hastily through an illustrated brochure. The latter choice soon proved to be a wise one. When she drove past the maintenance building on the way to Building C, with a copy of the lease, a map of the complex, and her apartment keys piled in her lap, Linda heard a weird humming, like the sound in science-fiction movies when the Martian spaceship is approaching Earth. It was probably only a generator or something, but it gave her the creeps, and she imagined that the softer, more congenial noises near the pool, of laughter and playful splashing, would be a lot easier to take on a daily basis.
The efficiency suite in Building C turned out to be a smallish square room with a pullman kitchen on one side and a tiny bathroom on the other. There was hardly anything efficient about the place, except that the refrigerator was tucked neatly under the counter, and you weren’t likely to lose your way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. The king-sized bed, with its cascade of fringed and flowered pillows, monopolized the room, crowding the few other pieces of furniture into the corners. Still, the bed, too, seemed like a good choice once Linda woke Robin and smuggled her inside. The girl groggily claimed the side she’d sleep on, her usual tactic, and then threw herself onto it without any complaints or questions. God knows what confusion a round or heart-shaped bed might have caused. Linda emptied the trunk of the Mustang by herself, making several trips back and forth to the parking lot. Even though they wouldn’t be here very long, she draped the double-wedding-ring quilt over Robin’s inert body, placed the prism on a windowsill that might get the morning light, and propped one of Wright’s paintings against the vase of artificial flowers on the bureau. The place still didn’t seem very homey, though. And when Linda lay down next to Robin, pulling an edge of the quilt over her own chest, she didn’t have the conviction or the strength to start reciting her mantra.
It turned out that Robin was five years shy of the minimum age required at Paradise. Linda had to keep her under wraps, prepared to say, if necessary, that she was her eighteen-year-old sister visiting from the East to look at colleges. An unlikely story, given Robin’s mouthful of braces and her careless grammar. Robin wanted more than anything else to use the pool, which was, of course, out of the question. And she was dying to start working on her tan, the only point, in her opinion, to being in Southern California. Given her extreme fairness, she would have only burned to a crisp in that brutal sunlight, but it was an argument she’d have strongly rejected, as she rejected any other sane advice Linda offered her. Linda, too, would have liked to swim and sun herself, but she knew it would be blatantly unfair to go out while Robin was forced to stay indoors. So they hid out together in the darkened, air-conditioned chill of their room, where Robin mostly lay on the unmade bed, sipping Cokes and watching television, while Linda stood at the window, peering through the blinds at the boisterous singles gathered around the pool, the ones unencumbered by children or pets. An interchangeable cast of men and women sprawled sweating on the chaises, rubbing one another so vigorously with baby oil it seemed they would ignite from all that friction and be incinerated before Linda’s eyes. No one had touched her for ages, even by accident. Sometimes she would rub the goose bumps on her own arms and think, with an exceptional absence of charity, that every one of them would probably be dead within a year of skin cancer or some sexually transmitted disease. She tried to dismiss such loathsome thoughts by engaging Robin in conversation, but after a few moments Robin, whose eyes had never left the flickering screen, would say something like “Okay, be quiet now, this is the good part.”
Some nights they snuck out and amused themselves by driving around and gawking at all the other people driving around. To indulge Robin and to save money, they stuck to a fast-food diet: burgers and tacos and pizza and fries. But Linda kept a supply of milk and cheese and other nourishing snacks alongside Robin’s cache of Coke in the little refrigerator; she had to think of the baby, who was still pretty much of an abstraction. Only someone who’d known Linda for a while would have noticed the subtle new changes in her body. If she really showed, she would never have gotten this apartment, as awful as it was, and she certainly wouldn’t get a job at the Whittier branch of the Fred Astaire Dance Studios. She had a letter of recommendation to the manager there from Simonetti, the manager of the Newark studio. She’d been one of his best and most popular instructors, and even though she’d resisted his repulsive advances, he had said positive things about her in his letter. She’d steamed the sealed envelope open before they headed west, to make sure. “Good smile, good dancer, great build,” Simonetti had written. But if she didn’t look for a job before the abstraction started to become an obvious reality, she’d be out of luck.
One afternoon, after they were in the apartment a little more than a week, Linda gave up on Robin’s reluctant company and tottered out to the poolside, just to escape from Kojak or Pat Sajak or somebody trapped in that squawking box, and to restore her normal body temperature in the sunlight. She’d put on an old, stretched-out tank suit, and stood in the middle of the bed, next to the recumbent Robin, to try to get a look at herself in the bureau mirror. It was a headless view, which allowed her to be somewhat objective. She still had her muscular dancer’s legs and that startling but not unattractive fullness everywhere else. She tugged here and there on the suit, and stuck one hand inside the top to redistribute her burgeoning breasts. “Well, that’s that,” she said, as she climbed down from the bed. “Bye-bye,” she called to Robin, who continued to ignore her, and then feeling guilty about her own relative freedom, Linda added, “Listen, we’ll treat ourselves to a really nice dinner tonight, okay? And we’ll even take in a movie if you want to. The heck with the money right?” The heck with what money she asked herself bitterly as she opened the door. Their meager savings were dwindling fast, despite the low-cost junk food, and nothing else was coming in; she really did have to get over this lethargy soon and look for a job. Right now, though, she was going to the pool. “Bye-bye,” she said again, and Robin grunted something incomprehensible and waved her away.
Outside, as Linda perched on the edge of a chaise to remove her sandals, at a distance from the clustered sunbathers, a bearded man rose like a god or a devil from the Jacuzzi’s steaming foam and stood before her in a bikini brief that appeared to be laminated to his genitals. He was handsome, in a horrible sort of way, with too much curly body hair and too many large, perfect teeth bared in a relentless smile. “Hi, there. You’re new,” he said, and expertly flicked a few drops of water from his shoulder onto hers.
It might have been some kinky benediction or baptismal rite. Or maybe that moment of water play was considered an entire courtship around here. Not being with anyone for so long must have defused Linda’s desire, or maybe it was only another side effect of her pregnancy. Lately aside from her body’s general loneliness, she’d only experienced an occasional, mild carnal itch, which she could, so to speak, scratch herself. But now she was both aroused and repelled, which made her glance shyly away, and then stare back at him, glance away and stare again.
All that time he waited, looking amused and using up all of the highly charged air around them. Finally, he reached down and ran one puckered finger slowly across her collarbone, making her shudder and clench her teeth, as if he’d dragged a screeching piece of chalk across a blackboard. “So? Wanna get wetter?” he said, and Linda picked up her sandals and scurried back to her tomb.
Robin came awake when Linda fell into bed beside her. There was a tantalizing odor of sunshine emanating from Linda’s hair and skin—even, it seemed, from her breath. Why should she get to go out and have a good time while Robin had to stay locked up alone in this stupid place? There was nothing on television she wanted to see anymore and nothing else to do. The minute she shut the set off, unbidden images of her father rushed into her head: the way he’d been when he was alive, with his tender, oppressive love for her—his Roblet, his Redbird—and the way he was now, strewn among the pine needles and beer cans at that rest stop off the highway in Arizona. She’d have to turn the TV back on or escape into sleep, without any guarantee that her dreams wouldn’t be worse than her waking thoughts. Linda had fallen asleep almost immediately, and her monotonous breathing, the simple, solid fact of her being there, was getting on Robin’s nerves. She crept out of bed to the window, lifted one of the slats, and looked out at the pool. This was siesta time at Paradise, and there wasn’t anyone out there now. They were probably all in their rooms boinking their brains out. Nobody would know or care if she took a fast dip, if she jump-started her tan.
She ransacked the bureau drawers Linda had so neatly arranged until she found her blue bikini. The apartment keys were on top of the bureau, where Linda had dropped them, right next to the painting Robin’s dad had done last year of that park in Rahway. A bunch of fake-looking trees next to a fake-looking stream, and a couple of cartoony rabbits chasing each other in the foreground. Was that the flat way he saw things? Was that the way he saw her, like something Disney might have dreamed up? She wriggled into the bikini and stared at her three-dimensional face in the mirror. It was too round and babyish, and it was still that sickly white color, just like the rest of her, whiter than the Jersey snow she’d probably never see again. Well, she thought, grabbing the keys, she’d soon take care of that.
She swam several furious laps. Then she floated on her back with her hair streaming around her like seaweed and her face tilted up in sun worship. She’d found a bottle of baby oil on one of the abandoned chaises and had basted herself with it until she slid right off the chaise. Now, floating near the deep end, she felt a shadow pass over her, as if the sun had suddenly gone behind a cloud in that cloudless blue sky, and she opened her eyes. A fat woman in a flowered dress and high heels was standing there with her hands on her hips, huffing and puffing like a dragon. The flash of her gold bracelets and rings and neck chains was blinding. “What are you doing here?” she demanded, and Robin thrashed around and went under in an effort to right herself. When she came up again, flailing and sputtering, the woman was still standing there, blocking the sun. Robin hoisted herself out of the pool, not even bothering to swim to the ladder first. She grabbed her flip-flops and the keys and ran in the direction of Building C, without looking back. She thought she heard the jangle of jewelry, though, and the clatter of heels on the concrete path behind her. When she let herself into the apartment, Linda was still asleep. She looked dead lying there like that with her hands folded across her chest. Robin peeked out through the blind; the woman was nowhere to be seen.
Linda woke up to find Robin lying next to her, watching a game show. “I must have dozed off,” Linda said, yawning and stretching luxuriously, and Robin smirked. “You look a little flushed,” Linda told her. “I hope you’re not coming down with something.” She reached out to touch Robin’s forehead, but the girl shrugged her off.
“Leave me alone,” she said. “It’s just hot in here.”
The room was actually freezing, but there was no sense in arguing with Robin when she was like this. Instead, Linda went in to take a shower, thinking that the shower curtain or something in the bathroom smelled strangely of chlorine. It was probably only her imagination, or a sensory memory from that unpleasant moment near the pool.
That night, Linda kept her word to Robin; they had a good seafood dinner and went to see City Slickers afterward, a movie so hopelessly silly they laughed at it together, a rare and relaxing occurrence. But in the car going back to Paradise, while Robin kept spotting movie stars through the dark windows of passing limousines, Linda felt compelled to focus on more practical matters. The dinner and movie had been a big extravagance, and although an evening of such harmony was worth every penny, she knew that her days of idleness were numbered.
When they got back to the apartment, Linda found an envelope under the door. She hoped it wasn’t from that man at the pool; an unwanted suitor was the last thing she needed right now. She picked the envelope up before Robin noticed it, and tucked it into her pocket. Later, she locked herself in the bathroom and took it out and opened it. There was a typewritten note inside, with the apartment-complex logo and motto—“Pleasure, Privacy, Paradise!”—on top. The note itself was brief and impersonal. “Come to the office without fail at 9 a.m. tomorrow,” it said, and it was signed, “The Management.” No “Dear Tenant” or “Please,” or “Sincerely yours,” or anything polite and friendly like that. Linda wondered what they wanted, but it hardly mattered. She’d intended to go there first thing in the morning, anyway, to check herself out of this prison and back into real life.
The next day Robin’s good mood continued, and she helped Linda gather and pack up their things. Then Linda instructed her to lay low in the apartment while she walked over to the rental office to cancel their lease. “Don’t get lost now,” Robin teased, and she even wiggled her fingers at Linda in farewell.
Robin had hardly been at the pool at all yesterday when that fat witch showed up, but she still had a pretty impressive sunburn. If you squinted at it in the right light, it looked more tannish than pink. After Linda left, Robin knocked the ice cubes out of a freezer tray and ran a handful of them up and down her exposed skin, where they quickly melted, making her shiver and moan with pleasure.
Marlene was sitting at her desk, just as she had been that first night, but she looked up at Linda as if she’d never seen her before, nor hoped to ever again. “Yes?” she said.
“I’m Linda Reismann? Apartment 2, Building C?” She wished she could drop the questioning tone from her speech. “I got this note? But I really came in to say goodbye, anyway. You know, to check out?”
Marlene began clicking her nails on her computer pad. She stared at the monitor’s screen. “You’ve only been here nine days,” she said finally.
“I know,” Linda agreed. “But I think we need to move on now, to get something more … permanent.”
“Who’s we?” Marlene asked.
“Pardon?” Linda said. “Oh … I guess it’s just a habit I have. I was married for a while.”
“Paradise has a two-week minimum, you know,” Marlene said.
“It does?” Linda said in dismay. She had hoped to work out a pro-rated fee.
“Didn’t you read your lease?” Marlene asked.
Linda shook her head. She remembered scribbling her initials and her name in several places, each time Marlene pointed with a blood-red fingernail and said, “Here,” and “Here,” and “Here.” And she remembered carrying a copy of the lease into the apartment that first night, but she didn’t read it then, and she hadn’t seen it since.
Marlene walked herself in her swivel chair to a file cabinet at the side of her desk, opened the top drawer, and pulled out a stapled sheaf of papers. “Here,” she said. “If you’ll look at page 4, clause 3, part F, you’ll see that underage occupants are strictly forbidden.”
“She’s only my sister visiting from the East—” Linda began weakly.
“Nor are outside overnight guests who are not registered with the office in advance,” Marlene said. “Next clause, part B.”
Linda went through the pages of the lease now, belatedly, mesmerized by the wordy clauses Marlene had mentioned, and by a multitude of others, about floods and firearms and willful destruction, all endorsed by her own careless signature.
“You realize you’ve forfeited your security deposit by not complying with the terms of the lease,” Marlene said.
Linda labored to clear her constricted throat. “Oh, but listen, Marlene,” she said, leaning earnestly over the desk. “I really was married, but he died, I mean he just dropped dead—his heart. We didn’t even get to use some of our wedding presents. And now I have his child to take care of, and there’s another one on the way!”
“We all have our troubles,” Marlene said. She rolled the lease up and slapped it against her palm, like someone slapping a rolled-up newspaper in warning to a bad dog. Linda stepped back. “And in case you were wondering, this lease is airtight,” Marlene went on. “Our attorney goes over everything himself, personally, with a fine-tooth comb.”
Why did that word “attorney” have a much more terrifying authority than “lawyer”? “But can’t you make an exception?” Linda pleaded. “Just this once? For human error?”
“This is a business, Ms. …” She paused and unfurled the lease. “Ms. Reismann. If we started making exceptions we’d soon be out of business, wouldn’t we?”
When Linda went past the humming maintenance building on her way back to Building C, the noise seemed louder than ever, as if it were following her, and she put her hands over her ears and began to run. By the time she got to the apartment, everything had fallen into place: her own selfish, abbreviated outing yesterday; Robin’s telltale sunburned face; that smell of chlorine in the bathroom.
Robin came to the door of the apartment carrying Wright’s painting of the park. “So are we sprung yet?” she said.
Linda glared at her. “You deliberately disobeyed me, didn’t you?”
“What? What did I do?” Robin asked.
“You know what you did. And she saw you, didn’t she?”
Robin’s eyes widened and then narrowed again, registering her understanding of what Linda had said. Still, she doggedly held out. “Who?” she said.
“Marlene, that’s who! And it cost us almost a thousand dollars!”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I lost my security deposit. Four weeks’ rent! I told you you couldn’t be seen outside. I told you there were rules here against children. There ought to be rules against having them in the first place!” Linda shouted.
“What are you yelling at me for? I didn’t ask to come here. And I didn’t ask to be born, either!”
“I didn’t mean that part,” Linda said. “Oh, God. I’m just upset.”
“I bet you are,” Robin said. “You threw away a thousand dollars of my dead father’s money! And you drag me across this whole stupid country so I can hide out in this dump and watch TV until I go blind!”
“Okay,” Linda said wearily. “I’m sorry. Let’s just drop it, okay? It’s over and done with.”
But Robin couldn’t let it go. All those accumulated days and nights of silence seemed to have led directly to this moment of release. “It’s not over,” she said. “Why can’t we just live somewhere, like normal people? I hate this place,” she continued, gesturing wildly with Wright’s painting, “and I don’t want to keep moving around like a bunch of gypsies. I want to have somebody to talk to, and I’d like to stay still long enough to get a tan. I’m sick and tired of this!”
“Me, too,” Linda said quietly, taking the painting from her, and all the air went out of their argument.
Later, after they found the place in Hollywood, and had put most of their things away, and sat down in the kitchen to eat supper, Robin said, “I should have drowned that fat bitch when I had the chance. Like her jewelry alone probably would have sunk her.”
“Let’s try and forget about it, Robin,” Linda said.
“She deserves to die.”
Linda had a vision of Robin’s mother, standing in her bathrobe in the doorway of her house in Glendale, with her bathrobed husband in the background, waving goodbye and telling them to keep in touch. “Right,” Linda said. “Fine. Now, do you want any more milk before I put it away?”
“If I had a gun, I’d go back there and shoot her,” Robin said. She pointed her trigger finger at the carton of milk Linda was carrying back to the refrigerator, and sighted it down the length of her bright pink arm. “Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!”
Linda flinched at each sharp explosion of sound, as if Robin held an actual gun and she was the intended target of her rage.