Change of Heart (7 page)

Sharlie and Margaret sat in the candlelit dining room trying to fill the silence with neutral conversation. Walter had left for London late that afternoon, and despite their relief at his absence, the table seemed lifeless without him. Their forks clicked against the china and echoed in the hollow corners of the room.

Sharlie's face glowed, pale and luminous. Her eyes glittered as if they were the only source of light in the room, the candles merely reflections of their brilliance. With Walter away, Margaret had hoped it would be easier to talk, but now it seemed as if the girl were more remote than ever. Each time Margaret had approached her daughter recently, she seemed to slip around a corner or behind a closed door, out of reach into some world her mother couldn't share.

Margaret set her fork down emphatically. The jarring sound brought Sharlie's eyes up, and Margaret folded her hands in her lap.

“I've been looking forward to speaking with you alone, dear,” she said ceremoniously.

Sharlie's face held the resentment of someone yanked too early from a warm, happy sleep. Margaret smiled apologetically and forged ahead, the words sounding rehearsed in her ears.

“I think it's time we talk about this young man of yours.”

Sharlie's face said, I think not, but Margaret went on. “As your mother, I have certain responsibilities to you.”

Sharlie said quietly, “I think I've heard enough parental obligation from Daddy.”

“Your father and I approach the matter differently.”

“But you both end up in the same place,” Sharlie said.

Margaret felt her stomach twist, wishing she could just drop the matter and ring for Martha to clear the table. But her conscience pressed heavily and forced her to continue.

“Your father's concern seems to be centered on your Brian. Not that he doesn't have a valid point, dear. You have to admit that.”

Sharlie didn't seem about to admit anything so Margaret stumbled on, feeling as though she were wading through great soggy heaps of mud, her thoughts turbid, her words sucking at her and pulling her down. Infuriating because only this morning, sitting in the kitchen over a cup of coffee, she had felt confident and clear about her anticipated conversation with Sharlie.

“I'm worried about
you,”
she said, remembering that this was what she had intended to say. Sharlie's smile said, I'm all right, but Margaret shook her head.

“No, I mean especially worried. It's just not healthy for you to fall in love.”

Sharlie burst out laughing, and Margaret sat bewildered and injured, waiting for her daughter's strange hilarity to dissipate. In a moment Sharlie was gazing at Margaret with open curiosity.

“What makes you think I'm falling in love?”

Margaret shook her head, puzzled.

“I mean how can you tell? Do I have symptoms or something?”

Margaret's memory flashed to Monday afternoon when she had come upon Sharlie standing by the mirror in the foyer. She was wearing her pale-pink sweater and gray slacks and was regarding herself with such intensity that Margaret's approach went unobserved. Sharlie had stared at the reflection of her own dark eyes, and at the same time her hands, beginning at her rib cage, moved down over the curves of her waist and hips, unselfconsciously and with undeniable pleasure. Margaret turned away quickly, but Sharlie's eyes caught her mother's movement in the mirror, and she spun around, face flaming. They stood looking at one another, embarrassed, until finally Sharlie moved her shoulders in a tiny shrug and smiled. It was a smug gesture, and Margaret responded to it with unspoken rage. She smiled back at her daughter with thin lips and said quietly, “Mirror, mirror, on the wall.” Before Sharlie turned to walk down the hallway, Margaret had detected a look of triumph in the flushed face.

Now Sharlie's voice, insistent, brought Margaret back to the dining room again.

“Really, Mother, I want to know. What does somebody in love look like?”

Margaret said primly, “All right, maybe
love
isn't the proper word for it. Let's just say ‘attraction.'”

Sharlie said, “You're talking about sex.”

Her last words were spoken just as Martha entered the room to clear the table, and Margaret shot her daughter a look that said, For heaven's sake, not in front of the servants. Martha grinned at Sharlie, obviously longing to stay, removing each plate slowly and methodically and then lingering by the sideboard. Margaret said icily, “The veal was delicious, Martha. I hope you'll make it again when Mr. Converse is home.”

“I'm glad you liked it,” Martha replied, then abandoned her delaying tactics as Margaret continued to stare at her in cold silence. She picked up the loaded tray, gave Sharlie a wink behind Margaret's back, and went out of the room.

“Maybe that's what love is, do you think? Physical attraction?”

“Oh, no,” Margaret said emphatically. “Why, if that's all it was, your father and I …”

She stopped abruptly, twisting her napkin in her lap. She looked so stricken and confused that Sharlie reached across the table to touch Margaret's arm.

“Mother,” Sharlie said softly, “I'm going to give him up. It just seems so important to know what it is I'm losing.”

Margaret and Sharlie looked at each other, both close to tears.

“Don't worry,” Sharlie went on. “I'll work it out.”

Margaret nodded. “Of course you will, dear.”

Sharlie stood up and leaned over the table to blow out the candles.

“Come on. Daddy's away. Let's go sit by the fire and play Scrabble and listen to
Don Giovanni.
Loud.”

Margaret got up, head high, and started out of the dining room. Sharlie followed, marveling again at how pleasing it was to watch her mother's motion.

The next morning Sharlie stayed in bed late, staring at the ceiling and concluding that it was all over with Brian. Well, she thought, tracing a hairline crack in the plaster with her eyes, that's the first time I've gotten so far as to admit it to myself. Progress of a sort.

Dinner at Pietro's had whipped her feelings into a turmoil. She had expected Walter to reject Brian, instantly and violently, perhaps dragging his daughter out of the restaurant by the hair to lock her away in some remote seaside tower. But Walter had eaten his dinner, drunk his wine, and even uttered a few civil words. She looked back on it now and traced the progression of her feelings from terror to surprise to relief, and finally, to hope. Seductive, treacherous hope that so quickly burst into flame, a blazing retribution upon her head. It was as if Young Love, her gentle apparition at the restaurant table, had been suddenly set afire with a foul cigar, to disappear into tiny flakes of ashes around her icy feet.

Sharlie felt the pain begin to suck at her chest. She took three deep breaths, willing herself to unbend her clenched fists. Double betrayal, she thought. Not only does he forbid me my love, but he does it to protect my lover from his evil daughter! Thanks a
lot
, Pops.

She looked toward the window, a bright blue rectangle, wondering if her father were somewhere safe on the ground, where the violence of her hatred couldn't rip through space and shoot him down, twisting and burning, conscious through it all, until finally he'd hit the cold waters of the English Channel and, with one brief hiss, sink to the bottom like a hunk of black sludge.

She groaned and turned away from the daylight, despising herself. This will get us nowhere, she thought, hand against her clattering heart, except maybe Room 1108 at Saint Joe's.
Brian.
What to do about Brian?

She had worked out three scenarios so far, like that book she'd read where the author (in a rather cowardly fashion, she thought) provided several endings and let the reader make the decision.

Finale Number One:
Sharlie and Brian at Brian's apartment. They make passionate love, Sharlie has a heart attack at the very moment of her first orgasm, and Brian is stuck with nude dead body, or perhaps
in
nude dead body, depending on how fast rigor mortis sets in.

Finale Number Two:
Same scene, except Sharlie lives through it to get pregnant and die in childbirth, leaving Brian with (probably defective) child.

Finale Number Three:
Sharlie and Brian meet in a neutral, well-lit coffee shop, shake hands across their cheese danishes and remain friends, close enough and chaste enough to enjoy an occasional game of Go Fish.

She had opted for Number Three, but as the crack in the ceiling took on the shape of Brian's long leg, she found the composition of the dialogue difficult.

“Brian, this is no good.” Hackneyed.

“Brian, we can't go on this way.” Melodrama.

“Brian, I don't love you anymore.” Bullshit And besides, she'd never told him she loved him anyway, so what was the point of telling him she didn't?
He
was always the one to bring up the subjects of love and marriage.

The fact remained that her involvement with Brian would mess up his life. Distasteful to find herself morally aligned with Walter, but there it was. Lying on her bed as noon approached and she still hadn't composed her speech, she thought, Okay, amazing as it continued to seem, she loved Brian more than she loved herself. Her happiness was temporary under the best of circumstances anyhow. Say, for instance, her heart managed to thump its way through another year or two. In which time she could so screw up Brian's life that he would probably never extricate himself from the swamp of it.

She had always thought self-denial for love was too altruistic to be believed, but perhaps it wasn't nobility at all. The feelings she had for Brian seemed no more to her credit than the fact that she had been blessed with pretty eyes instead of beady ones and round breasts instead of the banana-shaped ones that used to fascinate and repel her in the old issues of
National Geographic
that her parents collected.

It's not nobility of spirit, she thought, but something chemical and scientific. And now, since she'd already said good-bye in theory, it remained only to do it in fact.

She picked up the phone and dialed Brian's office.

An hour later she took a cab downtown to the Pierpont Morgan Library on Thirty-sixth Street. She was glad it was a bright day. Reality seemed so sharply in focus in the white light glaring off the stone buildings on Fifth Avenue. No room in this merciless sunshine for dreams.

Brian's voice had sounded apprehensive over the telephone. He listens to voices through that receiver all day long, Sharlie thought. He knows there's something. And he said he wanted to talk to
her.
Could it be that he was planning to break off with her? Oh, Lord, let it be true, she said to herself. I'll make him go first just in case.

He was already waiting on the steps in front of the elegant old building, and his arm felt tense as he helped her out of the cab. They walked into the gray light of the entrance hall.

“How're you doing?” he asked.

“Okay.” But as she looked around at the graceful stone and wood surfaces, their lines soft in the shadows, her courage began to fail. She suddenly tugged at Brian's arm and pulled him back outside into the brilliant sunshine. She sat down on the steps and brushed off a place next to her.

“I think I'd rather stand,” he said, his face rigid. “What's going on?”

She clutched her arms around her knees. “You said you had something
you
wanted to talk about.”

Brian shook his head. “Drop it.”

They stared at each other. Sharlie opened her mouth to tell him, and finally she burst out, “We can't go on this way. Oh,
no…
”

She couldn't believe she had said it, and she began to laugh, making sounds halfway between giggles and chokes. She wiped her eyes and looked up at him to try again.

“I'm sorry. I always laugh at funerals. I can't help it.”

“If this is a funeral, you've been talking to your father.”

“No,” she lied.

“You've been putting me off since Pietro's. I haven't had one second with you alone.”

“I needed to digest it. Oh, damn. Not the pasta.” She started to laugh nervously again.

He looked at her closely. “You are not in great shape.”

She held up her hand in protest. “No. No, I'm okay. Really. I've just needed to think everything out.” She was acutely aware of the long line of his leg near her shoulder. Just this one last time, she thought, let him be near me. “I'm getting a stiff neck,” she said, stretching to look up at him.

He sat down and stared into her face with clear eyes that seemed to look straight through her skull. She swallowed hard.

“I think you impressed him,” she said. “Even if you do work for Crazy Babs.” She gave him a feeble smile, but his face was grim. Not doing so hot here, she thought, and took a deep breath, wondering what nonsense would possibly come out next.

“What I've been thinking about was us sitting there all domestic and cozy at Pietro's and how unrealistic that was and how we should all quit kidding ourselves. I should quit kidding myself.”

“You're rambling, Sharlie.”

“I
mean
that I'm not … long for this world, and any ideas you or I might be cooking up about long-range … Oh God, I did it again.”

Brian put his hand on hers and said, “This is the most incredible bullshit.”

Sharlie stared at his tie—a paisley print with lots of maroon that clashed with his pale-peach-colored shirt. She had asked him once how he picked out his clothes each day, and he said he just put on a favorite-colored shirt and a favorite-colored tie. If he liked both colors, it had to work, right? Sharlie had looked unconvinced, and he confessed that one day Barbara had stood him in front of her full-length office mirror and said, “There, look. Don't you hear anything?” He had shaken his head, and Barbara told him that his shirt and pants were screaming bloody murder where they met at his waistline. Sharlie had wanted to know what he was wearing, and he told her—his rust-colored suit and pink shirt. They looked fine to him.

“All right,” Sharlie said, forcing her eyes off his tie and pulling herself up straight. “It all comes down to this. I'm sick. My relationship with you makes me sicker. I have to choose between you and a longer life. So I'm choosing life.”

He stared at her.

“Emily Brontë would not have approved, but I can't help it”

He sat thinking for a moment and finally he said, “If this is what you really believe, I can't blame you for taking a walk. But I'm telling you, you look better every day. You're stronger now than when you got out of the hospital.”

“I have my good days. But there are things I haven't told you.”

“Like what?”

“Like what happened the night we … the
Swept Away
night. It's not just virgin modesty that keeps me from your bed, Brian. It's fear.”

“You got sick.”

She nodded.

“So we won't mess around.”

“Oh, Brian, don't be ridiculous. The instant I see you, I want to start peeling off my clothes. It's practically Pavlovian.” He was silent. “As a matter of fact,” she went on in a desperately chatty voice, “that's how I can tell you're around. Suddenly I get this compulsion to unbutton my dress, and I say, ‘Hmm, Brian must be about to walk through the door.' It could be very embarrassing at a cocktail party.”

“I want to show you something,” he said, reaching into his jacket pocket. He pulled out a newspaper clipping and flattened it on her knees: A D
ECADE OF
H
EART
T
RANSPLANTS:
T
HE
F
ANFARE'S
O
VER
B
UT AT
L
EAST
85 L
IVE
.

A gray-uniformed guard sauntered over to them, his feet scraping abrasively. From her vantage point on the steps Sharlie noticed that his shoes were scuffed. One of the laces had broken and been knotted halfway up.

“Can't sit here.”

“Why not?” Brian asked affably.

“Rules.”

Brian said, “Can't you see the young lady is ill?”

The guard shook his head. “Looks fine to me.”

Brian shot Sharlie a quick glance that said, See? But he went on to the guard in a firm voice, “If she
stands
up, she will
throw
up.”

The guard thought this over, then scraped his feet back to the entrance and remarked sullenly, “Ten minutes.”

“I might,” Sharlie said.

“What?”

“Throw up.”

He gave her a puzzled look and she held the article out to him.

“I've read this before. Makes my stomach go all revolted.”

“I bet you feel the same way about having a tooth pulled.”

She rolled her eyes at him.

“Look,” he said, “we could go see somebody. At least find out about it.”

“I already know about it.”

“That was a long time ago. Techniques have changed. The odds have changed. Oh, come on, Sharlie, maybe you can have it all. Life. Me. Babies …”

She closed her eyes and held up her hand. “Stop. I don't want to hear about it.”

“Just to find out? Where's your grit?”

“I've run out. I don't have any more. I used to keep it under my fingernails.” She held out a hand to him, showing him her immaculate nails. “See? All gone.”

Brian sighed and snatched the clipping from her. He muttered, “If it weren't so self-defeating, I'd take my own heart out and give it to you.”

“I'm not noble, Brian. I won't have a transplant, not even for you. I don't want to prolong my life one second if it means living with somebody else's heart inside me.”

“Why not?”

“It's … against nature, that's why not.”

“Ah, a fundamentalist. What about kidney transplants? Spleens? Pacemakers? Or let's get back to teeth for a minute. I know for a fact that you have one tooth …”

She interrupted him angrily. “It's irrational, all right? Upper plates and hearts are not the same thing.”

He shook his head in exasperation, and she said quietly, “Listen, Brian, we've had enough memories to last a lifetime, easily. A long lifetime. Let's leave it at that.”

“Stick with me a couple more months and make up your mind then. We'll have a whole other bunch of memories.”

“You'll have a bunch of memories. I'll be six feet under.”

“I'm not going to let you die.”

His tenacity was beginning to wear her down, and she burst out in frustration, “You're a closet necrophiliac, that's what you are.”

“I don't think that's very funny.”

She glanced at the guard, who was staring at them resentfully. Then she looked into Brian's stubborn face. Okay, she thought, I am not convincing this man. Brutality is the only way.

“If I see you anymore, I will die.” Brian started to interrupt, but she went on coldly, willing her eyes to stay dry. “You may not believe that, but I do. It may seem amazing that I would rather live another few months without you than expire next week in your loving arms, but it's a fact.”

He was watching her very carefully, trying to look past her expressionless eyes. She saw him searching, asking himself if he believed her. She dug deep into the lifetime supply of self-control, the place where she found the will to sustain her through hours of grueling pain.
I will make it through the next couple of seconds,
she vowed to herself,
and then he will go away and I can have a good cry.