Change of Heart (9 page)

He reached out a hand and pulled her through the door. He held her as gently as he could, mustering barely enough control to keep from crushing her. She buried her head in his shirt, and he could hear her saying, “I can't do it anymore. I can't, I can't…”

Sharlie's face suddenly went frozen on him, and he knew she was thinking about her father's return tomorrow. They had crammed so much into these past two weeks, and both of them dreaded Walter Converse's reentry into their world.

The crosstown bus was packed with chattering children waving their
Ice Capades
program guides and the spinning toys that glowed in the dark. Sharlie had been fascinated with the spectacle when the lights went down in Madison Square Garden and all those whirling red circles began to dance in the darkness. She said it made her feel like the Statue of Liberty the night of the Bicentennial celebration when they surrounded the great monument with fireworks. He laughed and asked her where she kept her torch.

The bus lurched to a stop at Fifth Avenue, and the standees stumbled forward en masse, shrieking and giggling. Brian felt Sharlie looking at him and turned to smile at her.

“What're you thinking about, lady?” he asked. She shook her head. “You're smirking at me,” he insisted, then looked at his shirt. “Lousy combination with these pants, is that it?” She grinned and shook her head again. He said, “Well? Well?”

“I love you,” she said. Suddenly it seemed to Brian that her eyes had captured the crystal laughter of all the children on the bus and were beaming the joy back to him, transformed from sound into brilliant light. He leaned his face close to hers and said, “What was that again, Miss? Speak up, will you?”

Sharlie bellowed, “I
said
I
love
you!”

Everyone in the bus turned to stare at them, and Sharlie sat there, flushed and smiling and very proud of herself.

They picked up their dinner at the deli on the corner near Brian's building. So close to Walter's return, they both felt the unspoken need to be alone together without the intrusion of other people's eyes on them in a public restaurant. They spread their rolls and cold cuts and containers of potato salad on a blanket in the living room and drank soda from coffee mugs.

Sharlie didn't touch her sandwich, and when she got up and headed for the bathroom, Brian thought she might be ill.

“You okay?” he called after her.

She turned to give him a strange smile, almost conspiratorial. Her eyes were sparkling. “I'm fine,” she said, and disappeared beyond the doorway.

After what seemed like a long time, Brian called “Hey!” He heard a muffled sound from his bedroom. Alarmed, he sprang up and ran to find her.

She was sitting on the edge of his bed, gazing up at him, a streak of ink on her chin and torn fragments of paper beside her on the bed. He was about to burst out at her in baffled relief when he suddenly noticed something pinned to her sweater over her right breast. It was the remains of her paper napkin cut into the shape of a heart. On it she had written,
Out of order. To be replaced.

Brian's eyes snapped up to her face, staring closely to make sure there was no mistake. She was grinning at him.

“It's too late for Margaret Mead. I would have loved to get Margaret Mead's heart. You think they can find me one like hers?”

Brian toppled her over onto the bed and crushed her to him until she howled in protest.

Alone in her dark room she lay watching the red glow of the souvenir toy peering at her from the bookcase like a giant crimson eye. Brian had bought it secretly when he'd left his seat for the refreshment stand, and surprised her by slipping it into her coat pocket when he brought her home. He said it was for luck. God knows they needed it.

But she wasn't going to think about that. Now was the proper time to remember today before it faded, to go over its contours and impress them into her memory so she could always retrace them.

Why was it she cried during the show? She'd been embarrassed and told Brian her sinuses were bothering her, but the moment the skaters came gliding out onto the ice in their crazy, tacky, ludicrously sequined and beplumed finery, she choked up. Same thing with parades. No matter if it was the gnarled old codgers from the Ancient Order of Bison, straggling up Fifth Avenue in moth-eaten uniforms to the bleating of a dented trumpet. The tears came with the ceremony somehow. The Olympic Games were always worth a box of Kleenex—all that running around in body suits with eternal flames. What was it Yeats had said about ceremony? She'd have to look it up in the morning.

Odd that she'd never been to an ice show before. She enjoyed skating competitions on television and was familiar enough with the participants to discuss with her father the relative merits of Peggy Fleming or Dorothy Hamill or even Tenley Albright, whom she remembered because the name appealed to her. She never missed an old Sonja Henie movie on
The Late Show.
So why had she never gone to a real live performance?

She supposed she'd been afraid of the crowds. So many people in that huge stadium, so unlike the staid glamour of the concert hall. What if she got sick? How would she get out? She'd be trapped.

But with Brian she was safe. She smiled to herself in the darkness and thought that if he said, Hey, see that tightrope a hundred feet above the ground with no net that you've never been on in your life? Let's walk across it, it'll be fun, and don't worry, I won't let you fall, she'd nod her head and say, Of course, and go find herself a pair of spangled tights.

Which was approximately what she was doing, she thought ruefully, except that the odds of surviving a transplant probably weren't as favorable as taking a long stroll on a tightrope. Oh God, they'd better give her the heart of a Flying Wallenda or she wouldn't have the heart to go through with it, pardon the idiom. If they'd let her choose, she thought she could manage the whole thing with a little more aplomb—
I'd like the one with the sexy aorta and the jaunty beat, please. Just wrap it up, and I'll take it with me.

She fell asleep imagining a glass case in Bendel's lined with plush blue velvet, displaying gleaming kidneys, hearts, and eyes.

She was in a small room, dark except for a smoky red glow that vaguely outlined her figure. Brian appeared, but no words were spoken. He held out his hand for hers, and she began to fall out of reach. She tried to call to him, but her mouth opened soundlessly as she fell backward, slowly, slowly. The sight of his face and of his outstretched hand grew dim as she fell, the distance to the floor a descent through miles of hot, dark, suffocating space. Inside her head she screamed his name but knew he couldn't hear her, and soon even that inner voice blurred until, just as she reached the floor, all consciousness ended.

She awoke in terror, gasping, realizing that she'd been holding her breath in her sleep. Her sheets were clammy, her hair soaked, and she lay unmoving as her body chilled. After a while she turned her electric blanket up as high as it would go, but she did not get warm again.

While Walter boarded the plane at Heathrow, Margaret was sitting in her quiet living room, the morning sun streaming in the window to warm the back of her neck as she labored over a baby sweater she'd been knitting. Margaret tried not to think about her husband's return and concentrated instead on the little baby, her only niece's child. Always a great-aunt and never a grandmother, she thought, her fingers working the thin yellow wool into an intricate pattern. She wished she had a little baby around again, a baby she could take care of herself, not like with Sharlie when they made her go away and leave the nursing to the experts. Walter always said she didn't hold her right. My Lord, such lovely pale skin she'd had, like porcelain. It was still the same. Except that lately it'd gotten quite pink and healthy looking. Obviously Sharlie was seeing her young man again. The girl was so oblivious to everybody else that watching her these days was like sitting behind a one-way mirror. Two weeks ago she was so absorbed in grief, so gray and sickly it was plain she'd broken off with him, just as she said she would. Frightened by the pinched, ghostly face, Margaret had become alarmed enough to hope for a reunion.

Had the Concorde left the runway in London yet?

Her head still told her that the relationship between Sharlie and Brian was impossible, and of course Margaret would never actively defy Walter's wishes. But if somehow it were all beyond her control, if the children were to run off together in the middle of the night …

Maybe Walter would be delayed, maybe he'd transfer himself to the London office, maybe something would happen to his plane … Oh, Margaret, shame, shame. And besides, how would she get along without him? She couldn't possibly manage.

In her preoccupation she had somehow dropped a stitch two rows back, leaving a noticeable gap in the complicated pattern. She stared helplessly at the defect, then suddenly found herself ripping at the fine wool, tearing out row after row, passing the site of her mistake until she had destroyed the entire piece, weeks of careful, painstaking work. She had begun to cry, and she gathered up the tangled spaghettilike pile to bury her face in its softness. After a few minutes she took a deep breath, got up, and carried the chaotic remains of her handiwork into the kitchen, dumped it into a paper bag, and stuffed it in the garbage can underneath this morning's coffee grounds.

The flight from Heathrow had included a movie, a “fantasy,” they called it, about a prizefighter who gave birth to twins. Walter had spent most of the trip listening to Muzak through his earphones to escape the laughter of people who obviously hadn't a grain of taste. Not that he didn't appreciate entertainment. He could never fathom anybody's subjecting himself to those highbrow Scandinavian “films” that looked like they were photographed in a swamp in the middle of the night. Or those Italian jobs with dwarves jumping into the sack with obese women sprouting two-hundred-pound breasts. Why pay for a freak show when you can get one for free by walking west on Forty-second Street?

Good to get back to New York. He was looking forward to it, despite the pleasures of being away. He always enjoyed his first glimpse of the skyline—gave him a funny knot in the larynx. All the gleaming power, a shimmer rising from the skyscrapers like energy from millions of people hustling below. They saw you cut your life short a couple of years living in the midst of it, but Christ, each day here was worth at least ten in a town like Boston or Atlanta—or London.

In London he had met with the minister of state for energy, a real gentleman, although, to be honest, they all sounded like gentlemen with those accents. The minister had arranged for Walter to be driven up north to the dismal gray city where Transamco sat quaking in anticipation of a dockworkers' strike.

The management greeted him with the fanfare due a representative of the company's heaviest investors, but despite the hospitality Walter had been displeased. One trip through the plant convinced him that the American operation was already infected with the slipshod habits of the British industrial community. Just two years ago Walter had personally overseen the formation of the outfit, ensuring its efficiency and profitability. And now look at the place—two-hour lunch breaks, card games in the lavatory. Was all of England managed by incompetents?

Rhetorical question. Of course it was. The country was washed up, the brilliance of its glorious past eroded by the shuffling feet of strike lines, the shifting asses of men playing poker or whist or whatever the English play. The U.S. government ought to send every budding American hippy socialist to the British Isles and let him try to negotiate the newly built dual carriageways—why, in Christ's name, couldn't they call them thruways?—that began crumbling from poor workmanship the month they were laid down. What about those overpriced tin cans they called cars? And, my God, the
hamburgers!
Must grind up their stray-dog population to produce those pale-orange gristly lumps.

Mind you, he wasn't one of those nationalist jerks who debarked at Heathrow waving flags and yelling about how we Yanks won the war for the Limeys. He'd fought side by side with them—well, not exactly in the foxholes, but he'd read the reports at his desk in Washington—and there wasn't a country on earth that could have defeated them, except for the crazy Krauts. Even without us, they might just have pulled it off. Stoic bastards they were then. Pathetic what a dose of communism can do in just a few years.

In the limousine on his way into Manhattan, he gazed out the window at the yellow-gray smog hanging over the city and worried about Sharlie's oxygen supply. These were her worst days; he'd seen her turn pale blue as her body fought for air. Poor crippled Sharlie with her hot longings for that young fellow. Her mother must wonder what it's all about. Margaret with the ice reaching down into her very bones. She never sweated, never belched, never had bad breath. Never laid a fart in her life.

He knew he should never have married her, but there was all that pressure from Mother, all the sensible advice about the Mackins and the benefits to his career. Which had paid off, undeniably. Margaret's credentials, like her underwear, were impeccable. God damn the woman, with her long, cool limbs. She was fifty-five years old, for Christ's sake. How the hell did she keep her shape? She never took more than two steps forward and three steps back, as far as he could tell. Certainly didn't get that glowing skin from a healthy romp in the sack once or twice a week, that's for damn sure. Infuriating, he thought, that the sight of her still aroused him after all these years.

That woman at the hotel in London—same thing again. Right in the middle of a really good screw, damned if she didn't begin to look like Margaret. Not that it was a turn-off—on the contrary. He snorted, wondering if the act with that broad in London would be technically considered adultery if he could make it only by imagining that she was his wife.

He hunched himself upright in the back seat of the Mercedes as they drove across the Queensboro Bridge. Women. Christ, what a bewildering species.

As the limousine neared Madison Avenue, he began to wonder about Sharlie. How to make it easier for her, that was the thing. Maybe another trip to the Continent?

If he could only get her interested in something outside herself and her books and all that intellectual crap that does nothing to expend sexual energy. Sharlie would have been an athlete, with those long legs and her quick reflexes. As a little girl she'd dreamed of joining the circus, and for a short while she became a trampoline artist on her bed, an acrobat on the living room rug. She could take about thirty seconds of it, with Walter's heart in his mouth as he watched, but in those brief moments her expression was transformed from the pale wisdom of a tired old person to the sparkling exuberance of a healthy child, reveling in the activity of wild young limbs. Then suddenly she'd lie still, pale again and frightened as the knocking began in her little bony chest. He couldn't bear to stop her joy when she had it, hated seeing it disappear behind aged eyes. Once she'd cried when the pain began, but when she saw he was watching her, she had surreptitiously dried her face on the back of her hand and given him a ghastly smile. He'd patted her on the head, saying something like, “Never mind, Chuck,” when he really wanted to gather her up in his arms and weep with her. Or somehow strap her to him so that when he played his own rough physical games, she could share the exhilaration of it.

Put a defective heart into Margaret and nobody'd notice, he thought as the car pulled up. Not even Margaret.

Dinner was particularly quiet. None of the usual eager questioning from Sharlie about the places he'd seen. Come to think of it while he'd stood inside the front door, sweaty and exhausted, Sharlie had shown up to give him a perfunctory welcome-home kiss and then disappeared into her room. Usually the day he got back from a long trip she'd sit on his bed as he unpacked and pry into the corners of his suitcase to see what he'd brought her. And Margaret, too. Those first nights home were often the friendliest times between them. Her face would glow with an animation that deadened as the hours passed and life resumed its old patterns of wariness. But tonight Margaret sat at the other end of the table with a tense face, avoiding his eyes.

Sharlie's seeing that young man.
For a moment he was astonished, but, looking at her more closely as she played with her napkin, it occurred to him that after all, she was his daughter, wasn't she? Therefore a spark of rebellion lurked in her character somewhere, misguided though it may be. Certainly she was seeing him. How myopic of him not to have realized it from the minute he stepped inside the door and looked into her face. He set down his fork and spoke into the strained silence.

“I forbid it, Sharlie.”

Both women's eyes shot up. He watched his daughter swallow hard and force herself to face him steadily.

“I know,” she said, but her voice was quivering.

“If you give a damn about him,” said Walter, “you'll leave the poor sucker alone.”

“We're getting married.”

Margaret made a little choking noise at the other end of the table. Sharlie's face was now as white as the delicate bone china dinner plates, and there was a tiny moment when he felt himself weaken—perhaps if his words struck too hard, that porcelain face would crack into millions of tiny pieces. But in the space of one deep breath objectivity returned.

“What kind of feeling could you have for him if you're willing to cripple his life, too?”

Sharlie grabbed hold of the edge of the table and closed her eyes. Walter steeled himself to get it over with as mercifully as possible.

“What kind of love is it to deny a man his sex?”

Her eyes still closed, Sharlie said hoarsely, “We'll work it out.”

“You going to hire a live-in mistress? Who gets to have his babies, the hired help?”

Sharlie stood up and held onto the back of her chair with stiff arms. Her skin had turned pale gray now, and she breathed unsteadily. But Walter couldn't stop.

“He thinks he cares for you. Well, don't delude yourself. Before you can say, ‘Here comes the bride,' three times, he's going to hate your guts.”

Margaret rose, reaching out her hand just as Sharlie gave a little sigh and crumpled onto the floor. Walter bolted to his feet, but by the time he reached Sharlie's unconscious body, Margaret was kneeling beside her. As Walter leaned over to lift up his daughter, Margaret struck fiercely at his arm. Stunned, he recoiled, and she spat out at him,
“If … you … touch … her…
”

Walter stood for a moment, his massive head bent, his shoulders sagging, watching Margaret murmur softly, as she stroked Sharlie's masklike face. Then he strode to the telephone to call for the ambulance.