Change of Heart (21 page)

Margaret and Walter had taken a suite of rooms on the top floor of a fashionable old hotel in San Francisco. They planned to stay a week and would arrive back in New York soon after Sharlie and Brian.

Since that eerie night by the lighthouse, Walter and Margaret had circled around each other, cautiously exploring and testing out their new relationship. He often took her out to dinner away from the hospital now, and they began to discover each other across white tablecloths.

With his new tenderness, she began to relax and bloom. He noticed she left her blouse open by one more button and even went bare-legged when she wore sandals. The day before, when he'd found her sunbathing on the terrace of the motel back in Santa Bel, she didn't instantly grab her robe and pull it closed with her belt as if protecting herself against imminent rape. Instead, she sat with straps tucked between her breasts and talked with him about the young man at the pool who had given her a diving exhibition that afternoon and how beautiful it was.

The first night of their trip to San Francisco Walter had lifted his wineglass to Margaret and said, “To honeymoons.” They had smiled at each other and taken the first sip. Then Margaret lifted her glass and said, “To middle age.” She was delighted with herself, and he was charmed by her happiness, and the mutual toasting became a kind of private rite between them. And sometimes as they walked together, he put his arm around her very lightly.

Walter found his sexual appetite for her undiminished but shifting. He was stirred by her as always but no longer tormented by the urgent need to crush her, to conquer her, and too apprehensive of damaging the delicate infancy of this new marriage with Margaret to assert himself sexually with her.

The last evening in San Francisco Walter ordered omelets and champagne, and they sat on the terrace overlooking the bay, bundled in heavy sweaters against the cool summer evening. They talked for a long time and gradually sipped their way through most of the champagne. They discussed Sharlie and Brian at first, with Margaret remarking how strange it was not to be thinking of her daughter all the time–practically the whole day had passed without her giving Sharlie a thought. She felt guilty about it, and they discussed how wonderful it would be if they could begin to enjoy their parenthood even at this late date in the way that other people with healthy children seemed to. Then they began to reminisce about their own parents, and Margaret asked Walter about his father. He would never tell her much, and now that he seemed willing to talk, she took advantage of the moment.

But she talked, too, about her mother's cool beauty, her grace, and her contempt for her husband, whom Margaret adored.

Perhaps when they had first met thirty years ago, they had discussed these things, but it all seemed new to them tonight, long forgotten on the other side of years full of wounds and habitual resentment.

Finally Margaret stretched and said, “I'm tired.”

“Go ahead. I'll sit a minute,” Walter said.

But Margaret didn't get up. She sat staring at him, and when he looked at her, she dropped her eyes.

“Walter …” she began hesitantly.

“What is it?”

“If you come with me … to bed, I mean. Do you think we could … well … oh, dear …”

He was stunned to silence. After a moment he got up and stood behind her to pull out her chair. They went inside. Walter closed the glass door behind them, and then the curtains.

Margaret began to undress in silence. She slipped off her bra and panties and slid into bed under the covers. She lay there looking at him with frightened eyes.

He undressed and sat at the edge of the bed beside her. His penis was huge, and he felt embarrassed at the blatant enormity of his response to her.

“Margaret, listen,” he began. “I don't want to screw things up between us…”

He saw she was smiling, but he went on earnestly.

“It's obvious that I want you. But you've got to be happy with me now.”

Margaret said quietly, “Let's go very slowly, and if I'm not … comfortable, I'll try to tell you.”

She tilted her face up to be kissed, and he leaned over her, trying to hold back his heat. They had never spent much time with preliminaries, and now they lingered over each other's mouths, delaying and exploring. Finally he pulled back the covers and slid next to her. In the past, Margaret had always worn a nightgown, forcing him to pull it up to her breasts to get it out of the way. Now her naked shoulders seemed lovely and vulnerable, a statement of trust.

He held himself up on his arms when he entered her so that he wouldn't hurt her as he began to move with more intensity. She lay still and quiet at first, but after a few moments of his slowly moving in and out of her, she raised her hips toward him slightly, and he felt her gentle motion beneath him.

It was too much for him, her movement, and he came almost instantly, crying out against her shoulder. Then he lifted himself off her and lay next to her, his arm across the curve of her stomach.

“I'm sorry,” he said after a while.

“For what?”

“I was too quick.”

“No,” she murmured, and he thought he heard tears in her voice. He propped himself up on his elbow to look at her in the dusky light and saw that she was crying.

“Margaret, what did I do?” he whispered, anguished.

She shook her head, smiling through the tears. “No. It was … it felt good. Really. I don't know why I'm crying.”

She began to sob in earnest now. He put his arms around her, and she clung to him, with her naked breasts pressed against him for the first time in their lives, and he stroked her long, soft back and said awkwardly, over and over, ‘There, there. There, there.”

Traffic into the city from Kennedy Airport was heavy. When they finally inched their way through the Mid-town Tunnel, the cabdriver waved a disgusted hand at the bumper-to-bumper lineup and said, “Holy fucking Christ, will you look at this? First Avenue's a fucking parking lot.” He craned his neck around and shouted at Brian through the open partition. “Hey, fella, you mind if I try Park?”

Brian nodded that it was okay, and with some hair-raising maneuvers and a few expletives aimed at fellow drivers, they lurched their way to Park Avenue.

“Goddamn politicians, that's what screws it up. Buncha assholes. Jesus, on a Friday night even. Everybody's supposed to be leaving.”

He swung his face around again, keeping one hand on the wheel. “Ya know, Fire Island, Hamptons. Must be a fucking faggots' convention in the city this weekend.”

Sharlie and Brian blinked at him silently, and he faced forward in time to speed through a traffic light that had just turned red.

Sharlie smiled at Brian. “Home,” she whispered.

“California it's not,” he agreed.

She took a deep breath. The air seemed more like crisp September than July, but maybe it was just the difference between Los Angeles and the Northeast. She stared greedily out the window as they hurtled uptown. The awnings stretched out from the magnificent stone buildings, making her think of rich old snobs poking their tongues out at everybody else who couldn't afford Park Avenue rents. She snuggled happily against Brian's shoulder.

She had hoped he could spend the weekend at home with her while they settled in, but after his prolonged leave, he felt compelled to plunge back into his work first thing Saturday morning. She walked him to the front door, he pulled her by the sleeve to the elevator, both of them laughing at their reluctance to say good-bye. But once the doors closed and he had disappeared, she found herself enjoying the prospect of a day alone to poke around Brian's apartment and think of ways to make it theirs instead of his alone.

She poured herself a cup of tea and sat at Brian's desk, contemplating the accumulation of papers and bills, realizing that soon she would be familiar with all the mysterious cubbyholes of his days. She was tired and felt the need for quiet thought, for taking stock and assessing her new life and what she would do with herself now. Whoever thought there would be choices?

From long habit she cupped her hands around her mug as if to warm them. A police car raced up Third Avenue, siren screaming, and she smiled.

Until yesterday she had not realized how alien California had felt to her. Perhaps it was the frontierlike atmosphere of the place, as if the East were the staid mother country and the West her rebellious colony. Sharlie wondered ruefully that if she had been a settler during the American Revolution, she might have sided with England and King George. People seemed so earnest in California. The comfortable, shabby, worn-out East drew her back like a slightly cynical but dear old friend.

Out of embarrassment she had never admitted aloud to her fear of earthquakes. No one else in Santa Bel ever seemed to worry about them, but sometimes she had awakened in the night to a deep rumble beneath her hospital bed. The vibration had terrified her, no matter how hard she worked at convincing herself that it was only the generator snoring in the dark.

The East had sat placidly on the edge of the Atlantic for centuries, its gentle hills battered smooth and round. California perched on the other side, its landscape either scraped flat or tormented into monumental sharp protuberances. Surely the entire coast would someday tear free of the mainland and sink into the Pacific, leaving a jagged scar along the shore, lined with millions of young people with sun-streaked hair and disappointed faces, surfboards under their arms, and nothing but churning foam to greet them.

The forgotten inch of tea remaining in Sharlie's cup had grown cold. She got up from Brian's desk and walked stiffly to the window to peer into the apartment across the courtyard. She smiled, remembering how Brian had insisted on pulling the shade when they made love this morning. She had tried to persuade him that no one could see inside during the day unless the lights were on. Or unless she and Brian pressed themselves to the window and made love against the glass. She'd reminded him of her opera glasses and how she knew from firsthand frustration how impossible it was to see past the black reflection of a sunlit window.

Brian, unconvinced, pulled the shade down anyway, but prodded her to elaborate on her Peeping Tom experiences. She told him that the only diverting event she witnessed that didn't emerge from the embellishments of her imagination was provided by a middle-aged couple who stood near their lighted window one evening, and, with a kind of ritual slowness, exchanged clothing with each other. When they had finished, the woman was wearing the man's vested suit and he her flowered blouse and skirt—and her bra as well, which he stuffed with her nylons. Then they undressed each other and moved away from the window. Sharlie knew they would make love. She only saw this happen once, and sometimes wondered if she'd made up the whole thing. But no, it had happened, and it seemed to Sharlie a beautiful ceremony and somehow very touching.

This morning there was no one home across Brian's tiny courtyard, and Sharlie chided herself for looking. The spectator impulse was deeply ingrained. She turned away from the window, stood in the center of the living room, and decided that today she would become a participant in life.

Bloomingdale's. She would go to Bloomingdale's. Her mother had always sniffed at the place, considering it the epitome of ostentation. After all those years of sedate shopping in boring Bonwit's, she would strut down to Fifty-ninth Street and buy herself … what? As she scrambled out of her nightgown and into a skirt and sweater, she decided that one of the rules was not to foreclose any possibilities. Spontaneity, that was the theme of the day.

On her way out she wished the doorman a slightly embarrassed good morning, thinking he must know what she and Brian had been up to at seven
A.M.
, newlyweds and all. When she was first learning about sex, she had been fascinated by pregnant women she'd pass on the street, staring at them and thinking, She
did
it. She had sexual intercourse with somebody, and there's no way she can deny it. Sometimes the lady in question seemed so austere that it seemed impossible. But there was the evidence before everyone's eyes in the extended belly and loose clothes. Some of those ladies
must
have been raped.

The main floor of Bloomingdale's looked like Fifth Avenue on Easter Sunday. Sharlie stood at the millinery counter, trying on one hat after the other. She watched the parade pass by, wondering if anyone actually bought anything here or whether they all simply stopped by to stare at everybody else. In the contest between fashion and comfort, fashion seemed to win out every time. Women tottered past in toe-crushing high heels, stiff-kneed in the effort to remain vertical. Men with tennis sweaters and pancake makeup eyed one another over the cosmetics counter. Didn't their mascara run during their singles matches?

Finally she wore out the supply of hats and rode the escalator up to the third floor. She passed through the designers' section, heading straight for the blinking colored lights of a boutique called In the Wild, Secret Heart. An omen, she thought, I'll buy a new dress for my heart. For Udstrom's heart. She hoped he didn't mind becoming a transvestite.

Hanging amid suspended velvet, plastic, satin, Plexiglas, and aluminum hearts were items her mother would hardly describe as clothes. Everything was brocaded or tassled—not at all the tailored understatement of the wardrobe Margaret had chosen for herself and her daughter.

I'll look like my mother's dining room curtains, Sharlie thought, choosing a lacy white-fringed dress. But when she tried it on, she was surprised at how attractive it looked. Radical, certainly, but pretty. She pirouetted in front of the mirror, enjoying the contrast between the dark sheen of her hair and the milky lace bodice.

Heavens, I'll take it, she thought. Oh, God, Mother would hate it. She resisted the impulse to giggle and marched soberly back to the dressing room.

When Brian got home, she was standing in the kitchen with her hand on the portable mixer. She wore her new dress, and her face was flushed from the heat of the oven.

“Hi,” he said, leaning over to give her a kiss. “What're you making?”

“Yorkshire pudding,” she said, looking at him with a distracted smile.

He peered into the bowl, his hand around her waist. Then, feeling the ropy belt under his fingers, he stood back a little, looking at her from head to foot. “What's that, an apron or something?”

“No, it's not an apron or something, it's my trendy new dress from trendy Bloomingdale's.”

“Oh,” Brian said. “Well, I'll go change.”

“You don't like it.”

“Well, it's … interesting.”

Sharlie looked up at him briefly, still mixing. “What's the matter with it?”

“I don't know if it's you, that's all,” Brian answered.

“You only like me in my nice little tweedy stuff,” she said, irritation building in her voice.

“Tell you what, why don't we shop together from now on, and we'll get something we
both
like.”

“Hey, I'm a big girl now,” she snapped. “I can pick out my own clothes.” Her eyes were flashing.

Brian smiled at her. “What's all—” he began.

“Freedom,” she interrupted. “Hey, look, I spent a lifetime trailing behind my mother in department stores, letting her put clothes on me as if I were her personal paper doll. I'm not going to start that all over again with you.”

“Sharlie, for Christ's sake …” he said, staring toward her with his hand out placatingly. She backed away from him, unconsciously lifting the still-whirring mixer into the air like a weapon. The thin batter flew about the room, whirling and splattering against the walls, speckling their faces and clothes with pale-yellow droplets. They both stood paralyzed for a moment Then they looked at each other and began to laugh. Sharlie, still holding the mixer with one hand, pointing at Brian with the other, barely able to breathe from laughing.

“You … you …” she said weakly.

“Turn off the mixer, you idiot,” he shouted, but as he grabbed for it, she dipped it quickly into the batter again, reloading and held it above her head where he couldn't reach. It splattered wildly, and he grabbed her around the waist, reaching behind her to pull the plug out of the wall. Then they collapsed against each other, laughing and smearing the mess into their clothes.

It wasn't until they sat down to dinner much later, after a chastened Sharlie had scrubbed the yellow drops off the walls, that she said, almost surprised, “That was a fight, wasn't it?”

“Gooiest argument I ever had,” he said, finishing off a slice of roast lamb.

“No, I mean about my dress.”

“Mmm, that was a fight,” Brian said.

“Sometimes I think I'm going completely insane,” she said. Brian suddenly looked up at her, wondering at the fear he thought he heard in her voice. “I was ready to kill,” she went on. “Over a damn piece of material.”

Brian reached out and took her hand. “There was Bunker Hill, then there was Gettysburg, and finally the Great Bloomingdale's Batter Battle.” She smiled back at him, but he felt her fingers tremble.

She walked through a densely wooded area carrying a basket on her arm. It was an unfamiliar path, and she stopped to rest, sitting on a large rock that projected from a mossy bank. Suddenly she felt the rock begin to move beneath her. She stood up, startled, her basket falling to the ground, strewing flowers at her feet.

The granite surface shifted and writhed, gradually taking on the shape of a man's face. The eyes were deeply hollowed, almost like a skull, but they followed her wherever she moved. The mouth twisted until it became a cave, and from its depths howled a scream of outrage.

She stood rooted to the ground with fright, unable to tear her eyes from the shrieking, tormented face. Finally, carefully, she stooped to gather the flowers. She drew back in horror. The pansies and forget-me-nots had turned to lumps of oozing flesh. Her fingers were stained with blood, and the more she wiped the grass to clean them, the gorier they became. She turned her back on the rock and began to run, and she could hear the voice behind her crying, “Mine … you are mine …”

She woke up trembling and pressed herself against Brian's warm back. It took her nearly an hour to fall asleep again.