Change of Heart (8 page)

She stared at him, calm, with just the right touch of compassion in her voice. “Believe it, Brian.”

He nodded slowly. She kissed him once, putting her cheek next to his for a moment, grateful that he couldn't see the misery flooding her face. Then she got up with her eyes averted and walked quickly away from him.

She had lived two whole weeks without seeing him. She marveled at the vast stretch of a minute, how the second hand on her watch crawled along like an overweight turtle, laboriously, ponderously, excruciatingly slow.

She had felt crushed at first, and the time went faster then. At least the anguish was interesting, and she spent long hours in bed wiping her nose and replaying the memories of her times with Brian. She thought and talked to herself and contemplated swallowing the whole contents of a bottle of Valium that sat temptingly near her bed. But Margaret must have anticipated that possibility and made off with all of her drugs, henceforth dispensing them personally.

Sharlie's conversations with herself seemed to follow a particular pattern, beginning with the concept that perhaps she should continue the relationship. But she always ended up in the same place, just as Walter did. And as she examined her feelings, she began to suspect that something else was operating here, simultaneous with her fierce impulse to protect Brian. She realized that she had never truly believed in a future for them. Even introducing him to her family at Pietro's, she could not imagine a permanent life with Brian. Maybe it was because she had long ago learned to keep her sights trimmed short. Tomorrow or the next day was all she could realistically expect, and she had absorbed the habit of thinking ahead in very modest stretches.

But after two long days of analyzing her thoughts, she came to the realization that she was scared. Brian terrified her. He was so alive, his commitment to life so vital. He demanded from her the same passionate thirst. No holding back.

Take the transplant issue, for instance. Brian saw the chance for a better life and reached right out for it, asking her to do the same, demanding that she ignore her dread. Irrational dread. Foolish, queasy reticence that stood in the way of a new life for them both. Or at least the possibility.

The very idea of another heart taking up residence under her rib cage made her skin creep with goose-flesh. I have enough trouble coping with my own soul, she protested. Don't ask me to sublet my insides to some stranger.

Why was she talking to him? she asked herself. He was gone, and she was back in her constrained little niche where she belonged, safe and comfortable, cocooned in a world of invalidism. What she was, she decided, was an emotional shut-in, and Brian's headlong leap into her existence made her dizzy.

But the acknowledgment of her own reluctance to participate in life did nothing to ease her grief. She resigned herself to three months of mourning, figuring that the pain would begin to fade by midsummer. But this past week she found herself watching the second hand creep around her watch face past infinitesimal bits of time.

This morning she had awakened at six, dismayed that she couldn't sleep away a few more hours. She dragged herself out of bed and went to stand in front of the mirror.

Sickly cheeks and dark blotches under the eyes—corpses look better, she thought. Remembering her crack to Brian about necrophilia, she suddenly felt that if she didn't see him again, she might just as well drop in at the local mortician. Frank E. Campbell's was right up the street. She could put on a white dress, pick up a bouquet of lilies from the florist across Madison Avenue, and take a flying leap into the plushest unoccupied coffin.

Brian smashed the ball as hard as he could. It slammed into the tape at the top of the net and dropped with a small plop onto his side of the court. He threw his racquet at the net and began pacing back and forth at the baseline.

Susan stared at him from the other side, wide-eyed and silent. After a minute Brian walked slowly to his racquet, picked it up, shook his head at Susan, and headed for the bench where he'd put his jacket and warm-up suit. She followed him off the court and gathered up her things.

“Sorry,” he said as they started for the changing rooms.

“What's the matter?” she asked. He just shook his head. “Can I help?”

“Don't think so,” he answered, but he put his arm around her shoulders.

They shared a cab uptown. Brian was silent the whole trip. Susan kept giving him surreptitious glances, but she finally realized he wasn't even aware of her presence and she could stare at him with impunity.

In the elevator she took a deep breath and said, “Brian, I want you to come home with me.”

He looked at her with surprise, as if she'd jarred him out of a dream. ‘Thanks, but not tonight.”

“I think it would be a very good idea.”

He shook his head. The elevator stopped at the seventh floor, and she stood against the door, holding it open. She pulled at his arm. “Come on.” She smiled at him. “Please. Keep me company.”

He smiled back at her finally and nodded.

In bed he clung to her as if he were drowning. Susan found herself murmuring, “I've missed you. Brian, I've missed you.” Their lovemaking was quick, desperate for them both. Afterward, Susan gazed at his profile in the shadows next to her. He stared up at the ceiling, and except for the glint of light from his eyes, he might as well have been made of stone. After a while he sat up on the edge of the bed and turned to look at her. His smile was full of apology and sorrow, and when he put his hand to her cheek, Susan swallowed hard to keep herself from crying.

“I'm sorry,” he said softly, then got up, slipped his clothes on, and let himself out the front door.

The courtroom was almost devoid of spectators. One old man leaned against the wooden arm of his bench, sleeping. There were six children, about ten years old, with a middle-aged black woman. A field trip, perhaps—schoolchildren learning about the American system of justice.

The jurors sat quietly along the wall. Perhaps it was the first day of this particular trial, because they seemed slightly awed, and all their faces were attentive.

The judge, gray-haired and berobed, presided on the raised platform opposite his audience. He scribbled notes for a few moments, and when he looked up, his face seemed more businesslike than solemn.

Back and forth across the center of the room between the judge and the spectators strode the young man. His pacing was not restless, nor were his words impassioned, but he seemed to require the motion of his body in order to speak. His steps were steady, his sentences quiet and deliberate. He glanced often at the jury, directing his attention to them rather than to the tense, corpulent man in the witness stand. Every eye was riveted on him, every head tilted toward him slightly so as not to miss a word.

A slim figure stood in the doorway, half hidden. In the pale face were enormous dark eyes that gazed at the young man with sorrowful longing. The figure stood very still, watching, for a few moments. Then, with reluctance, the eyes dropped, the figure turned away, and just as the young man lifted his face, it slipped unseen into the hallway outside. He hesitated for a moment, as if he'd lost the thread of his thoughts, then began to walk again, and as he walked, the words continued in their quiet, steady flow.

That evening Brian sat in his apartment while it grew dark. He didn't bother turning on the lights, and although his mouth was very dry, he couldn't work up the energy to get himself a drink. It had been years since he'd allowed himself a moment devoted solely to self-pity—not since his mother died. Whenever he had felt lonely in the empty apartment, he went out and found himself some companionship or talked Susan into a game of tennis or a friendly hour or two in bed. When he had lost an important case, he immediately threw himself into the next one.

Not tonight, however. Nor the three weeks of nights preceding this one. So
many
hours of feeling sorry for himself. Again today his work had seemed meaningless. Then there was the late afternoon tennis match with another lawyer, who, for the first time, whipped Brian soundly and thought he'd been sent straight to heaven.

Last week he had removed everything of Sharlie's: the snapshots from the instant-photo booth in Woolworth's in which she was making faces just like, she had said, Marlene Dietrich; a barrette he'd found under a pillow on the couch; two paperback books (a collection of Yeats's poetry and a mystery story by Dick Francis that she thought he might like). He gathered everything into a small heap and stuffed it down the incinerator.

Barbara had asked him if he'd like to plan a two-week vacation somewhere. She hated his vacations and had always become surly before he took time away from the office, so he was touched that she made the gesture. But there was no place he wanted to go. And there was nothing that eased the paralyzing mixture of gloom, anger, helplessness, and overwhelming need. He kept telling himself he'd give up just one more hour to wallowing in misery and then maybe he'd get back to his life with some degree of efficiency.

Goddamn her, he thought. His eye caught the newspaper clipping he'd shown her, and he grabbed it from the desk, crumpled it furiously into a tiny angry wad, and tossed it at the wastebasket, smiling bitterly when it fell short of the rim.

Wasn't there something or someone to pin the blame on? Maybe Sharlie was right. Maybe it was an elaborate joke fabricated by her Great Creep in the Sky. The thought made him uneasy, and he asked God to excuse it. Somewhere in his head a remnant of Presbyterianism still lurked.

It was just that everybody seemed to desert him. First his mother, and even now it hurt as if it had happened last week. Maybe because of the guilt for not being there. Maybe because, from what he could make out, her death hadn't been necessary. She wasn't that sick at first, and it enraged him that nobody bothered to fix her up while it still would have done some good. His father's fault, nearsighted old bastard.

With whom rested desertion number two? Brian supposed it was a toss-up as to who walked out on whom, but God knew he worked very hard to get a response out of the man. Displeasure was simple enough, but Brian knew that pleasing his father meant to quit toting home academic honors and instead put on his hip boots and wade out into the manure with Robert and Marcus. If it hadn't been for his mother, maybe he would have, he was so damn eager to make his father happy. In retrospect, she must have had a tough time of it keeping his father off his back about school.

Brian used to watch his face when she handed him his report card. He would have liked to hold a magnifying glass up to those stony eyes to see if there was maybe a flicker of pride there someplace. Nothing. Maybe a grunt. Brian had been shocked at graduation after his valedictory speech when his father shook his hand. There was water in the old man's eyes. Maybe it was the air conditioning.

But the granite cracked when his mother died. Not at the funeral, or even at the cemetery. Not until they all sat around afterward in the old farmhouse wondering where all the warmth had gone. Four grown men with their hands on their knees not knowing what to do with themselves without her standing in the middle dispensing smiles and lentil soup.

At first Brian had thought his father was choking on his pipe, that weird gagging noise, but then he had looked closely and seen that the man was crying. Didn't even bother to cover his face, just sat there with the tears dripping onto his lap. Robert and Marcus got up and left him to it, but Brian figured he'd just sit there with him even if he didn't know anyone was there.

The old man deserved to grieve, self-centered old piece of Pennsylvania slate rock. He should have saved her.

And now Sharlie. Brian never thought himself a masochist, but taking an objective view of the facts, he had to wonder. She told him she was going to die, but who ever
believed
that? Too goddamn melodramatic.

Somewhere he'd read that neurotics repeat destructive situations or traumatic events over and over again, helplessly reliving some tragic pattern in the vain hope that, okay, folks, this time you watch, it's gonna work out fine. And of course it never does. Did he choose Sharlie, knowing how ill she was, figuring he'd make her all better and relieve himself of the guilt he felt about his mother?

He reached out a long leg and kicked idly at the wastebasket.

Oh, for Christ's sake, he thought I sound like Susan. Poor Susan with the quotations from her incessant assortment of Manhattan shrinks.

It all came down to the same thing, and that was that he couldn't stop wanting the girl. They were hooked up in some basic way, some psychic way, perhaps, as if when she took a step, his foot moved too. In the middle of the night when she rolled over in her bed on Seventy-fifth Street, his body must turn to face hers, his arms reaching out for her. Someone would have to explain to him how there could possibly be anything wrong inside a body so beautiful. And her eyes. And watching her come to life sexually. Oh, he'd been blessed, and if he never saw her again, that was something he wouldn't forget in his lifetime. Not if a thousand other women sat on his lap and took off their clothes.

If I never see her again …

The room had gone completely dark, but Brian remained immobilized in his chair. The word
intolerable
kept flashing in his head, so he continued repeating “never see her again,” hoping that eventually the concept would entrench itself in that mental collection of unpleasant facts where his mother's death was now firmly embedded.

He looked down at his hands and flexed them, his fingers remembering the texture of her skin, the long, soft lines of her body. When he had held her, one hand on each side of her rib cage with the padded area beneath his thumbs touching the round beginnings of her breasts … how the hell was he supposed to live like this?
She
was used to pain. She'd transformed it into Agony Jones, someone as familiar as a lifelong boarder. How could she leave him before she'd taught him how?

It was past midnight when the doorbell rang. She stood in the soft light of the hallway, and he stared at her, unable to speak or move. She smiled a little, shook her head, and said, “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Or something.”