The Girl With the Glass Heart: A Novel (18 page)

“I’m not going to rise to the bait,” he was saying. “I’m not going to ask you what the trouble was. It was probably something to do with a man.”

“What makes you say that, Jay Gordon?”

“Because you’re beautiful.” Now what had made him say that? He hadn’t known he was going to until the instant before the utterance.

Why was it always older men who told her she was beautiful? Elly wondered. “You know,” she said, “the last man who told me that was a great architect. I hope you’re a great musician.”

“The word has been used in reference to me by certain obscure music critics in even more obscure towns. Who was he?”

Elly paused, calculating her timing, and then said, “John Marron Lang.”

What was this kid doing with Lang? “Really!” Jay exclaimed. “That’s like being hung in a museum.”

“He built our house outside of Colchester, Indiana,” Elly blurted, losing her sense of timing in a spurt of enthusiasm, and then paused. Well, he’s impressed enough, she thought.

“Oh? You’re right about coming here when you’re in trouble. I’ve always lived near a river and I know how helpful water can be. But it
was
man trouble, wasn’t it?” But his mind was not on the question he was putting to her. He was wondering: Why did I play for this girl, when I have refused everyone from my sister on down for a year? And I didn’t feel too badly afterward. Why am I walking along the beach with her now, and feeling rather contented, knowing that the stinking tour starts again when we leave here in three days. There was an accepting quality about her; he had the feeling that there was nothing too awful, no failure too great for her to encompass with a toss of that loose head of hair.

Across the beach, farther away from the water’s edge, a question nibbled insistently at a corner of Annette’s consciousness as she mopped her face with a handkerchief and moved away from the circle around the fire. What was it about Alec’s niece, Elly, that put life in him, in an odd sort of way, that seemed temporarily to resolve his conflicts (although, of course, objectively nothing had changed)? It was as if she filled out with flesh a relationship with his past, his family, that at other times was ghostly, at other times was only the signature on the check in the small, cramped hand,
Max Kaufman
. She didn’t like it. It made her guilty of keeping that relationship ghostly. Alec had not gone home since they had begun living together. But perhaps she was confusing it all. Maybe it was Elly, and only Elly, with whom Alec made contact in his family. It all made her feel suddenly like a stranger, after she and Alec had been so good together and she was slowly working on him to break the dependency on his brother. She determined to make him take her home with him for their holidays
this
year. She refused to feel like a criminal. She glanced over at Alec, shaking the sand from glasses and laughing with some people Annette did not know. How good he is with and for people! she thought. That’s pretty rare out here.

What have I done to her? Alec was thinking, flicking his glance away from where Elly strolled with Jay. What have
we
done to her? The fact that she came to me when she was in trouble is the biggest indictment of all. She thinks I got away and she’s to follow my example in whatever strange ways she can think up. And I told her: Find your own kind. Since she was a little kid I saw it. Nothing ever satisfied her. Even I am closer to Rose and Max than she is. She fought so damned hard to get away and now she has to go back. I wonder what this seems like to her. Probably like the promised land. Uncle Alec’s life, the dream-world, seeing nothing of the insubstantial foundation, the sudden fear that the kind of life led has been exposed in all its evanescence, because somebody breaks into your house and takes nothing. Of course, there was nothing in his and Annette’s life to take except some very shaky hopes. He would have to talk to Elly. But what was there to say? Don’t sleep with men. Don’t get knocked up again. Don’t try to escape whatever it is you feel holds you—the family, being a young girl in the world. Give in. Accept…. But could he tell her any of that until he had done it himself? And wouldn’t she know he had no right to say it?

“… And it began to rain and it was the craziest sensation as if the whole forest had gone mad and we didn’t stop—I don’t know why I’m telling you all this,” Elly said to Jay, thinking, Maybe it won’t be too bad. The house is wonderful—to live inside glass again—but now it’s different. Now I’m stuck. Before, it was a bunch of windows on the world. Now the door is closed and the farthest I can see is down the hill—I wonder if the filling station is still there—and to Crofts and the same faces, just another girl in the classroom, and no dancing.

“Because you want to tell someone,” Jay was saying. “I don’t blame you. It sounds like a rough time—afterwards, I mean,” he added, a little embarrassed, thinking: No one has spoken to me like this since I first met Jeannie. It’s as if I were to say, blurting it out in one breath: My wife divorced me because I had no future and I gave up what future I had and now that it’s over with her I find she’s right I have no future and very little present and I haven’t enjoyed sleeping with a woman since her or talking with a woman until you.

But he said nothing, feeling a sudden gust of wetness in the face. I really should notice things more often, like whether a breeze is wet or dry. I really should. I must keep my mind and sensations alive in case I should ever have to use them again.

“You’re easy to talk to,” Elly said.

“I guess we both are, then.”

Annette waited until there was no one near Alec for a moment.

“Al,” she said.

He kissed her lightly on the cheek. “Hi. What’s up?”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“What for?”

“The business about the money. It’s your decision to make. I shouldn’t push you.”

“It’s not so much that you shouldn’t, but that it doesn’t seem to work too well with me. I’m just not pushable. I’ll have to work it out somehow. But don’t you start feeling guilty. You’ve got a stake in the whole business. You’re my wife.”

“Am I?”

“Aren’t you?”

Elly was alone now, Jay having gone off to get some sandwiches for them, and she was angry at herself for having told a stranger so much. Far off, close under the horizon, there was what seemed to be a ship, but she couldn’t be sure. It distracted her from her attempt to decipher whatever it was the sea was trying to tell her. Won’t it ever end? Ah, if one could stop the sea! But then it would be a lake, like Lake Crescent, where they used to spend their summers. She envisioned the entire ocean lying still under the moonlight, but it became unreal, awful. Better any kind of movement, even the idiot ceaseless beating of wave on shore, rather than the silent lake-death.

“Where’s Jay?” Alec asked.

“Oh, you scared me! He went to get some food. This is so lovely. I’m almost glad everything happened so that I could come out here.”

“Well, in any case, it’s good to see you.”

She took one of his swinging hands and studied the sharply protruding bones. “Alec, we’re different from other people, aren’t we?”

“How do you mean, baby?” (Here it came. This was
his
work.)

“Oh, I don’t know exactly. The way we don’t accept what’s around us, like Roz, or Lois at school or Mom and Dad, Charlotte, everybody. The way you’ve always been running off since I was a little girl, coming home mostly on holidays—there’s always a quality of going, of out-away that I have too. I knew it before I went to school and I knew it when I got there and I know it now and the—” She stopped short; she had almost begun to tell him that this was what the sea was trying to tell her with its long
whooooosh
in her ears.

“We’re not that different. I’ve been a little slow in adjusting, that’s all. Believe me, I’m looking forward to settling down and having a family and all the rest of it I never cared for.”

“Yes. But you’ve had the journey, haven’t you? You’ve been somewhere, haven’t you?”

“I don’t really know. You’ve got to slow down, Elly. Take it easy and let things run their course. I’m not being very clear, I know. Well, look, there’s a line in this play we did last month—I played the father, an old man, and I had this line—I think you’ll understand it.
To live,
I said,
is to exist always on the brink of freedom.
That’s something important to learn.”

She nodded slowly. “And you told it to me on the brink of the ocean.” Perhaps that’s what the message was: that the brink of the ocean was the brink of freedom. But what did that mean? Death by drowning or across to new places?

“You see what I mean. Annette and I have a long way to go for any kind of freedom, and we may never get it at all.”

“Yeah. I want you to marry that girl, Alec. I like her. Are you definitely going to marry her?”

“Yes, honey.”

“When?”

“Soon,” he lied. “Anyway, try and make it easy for yourself and Mom and Dad at home, as much as I know you hate being there. Right now there’s nothing you can do. It won’t be so bad.”

“Will you come for the holidays this year like you used to?”

“Yes, I’ll show up. Here comes Jay…. What’s the matter?”

“Mrs. Rich is ill,” Jay said breathlessly.

“It’s not a miscarriage, is it?” Alec asked. “Did she fall?”

“No, she’s just ill. We’d better go.”

Jay reached, surprising himself, for Elly’s hand, as they started to leave. She let him take it and then after running a few steps she slipped her hand out and said, “I’ll be right along,” and turned away from where she could see them all clustered around the prostrate woman on the sand. That was one thing she’d been spared. The swollen belly, the sickness and danger of accidents. She ran, slipping a little in the sand, over a near-by dune so as to be entirely out of sight. She went ever farther to make sure no one could see her. Her back to the sea for a moment, she could see the lights beyond the low cliffs that rimmed the beach.

This was the Pacific Ocean she was turning back to at this moment, and in a few days she would be on the shore of the Atlantic. Fantastic. Two oceans in a few days. How could she feel nothing for Danny except hatred for him as the instrument of her forced return? And what did she feel for Lang, the other man, the first man? She didn’t know, except she wished she was with him right then, to love in the sand. Alec
was
wrong—they were
so
different from the others.

She flopped down on the sand and dug her fingers in deep. She imagined Jay’s face for a moment and was sorry she had told him about Danny and everything, but he could never use it against her. He would never see her again. The night was murmurous and she closed her eyes and stretched. She was Elly. This was herself on a beach. There was no ambiguity here. Her flesh was her flesh. She was seventeen and alive in her stomach, everywhere that could be touched. The wind was stronger now and the long beat of the sea became less even, less regular, as did Elly’s breathing. I’d better not, she thought. Someone might come. But she returned anyway, to the old ritual—the old self-love masquerading in her fantasies as the recapitulation of the loving of others. It was strange on the beach and she opened her eyes a few times to reaffirm that she was alone and unseen. Tense, she flung an arm over her eyes and thought in the darkness, as if it were her own original thought, and brand-new at that:
To live is to exist always on the brink of freedom.
What a sad thought! She visualized Jay Gordon. He was good because he had been aloof, had not defined himself and therefore could be manipulated with ease by the sensual fantasy. As the wave of feeling drenched her she lay back, eyes covered by an arm, either perspiration or the beginning of tears in the corner of her eyes, and was angry with herself in a tired way. When will it stop? she thought. Will I always, even when I’m married? She became aware that the ocean was transmitting nothing to her now. Nothing but a steady meaningless roar.

Well, there was the journey to New York before the final return. She rolled over and rested her closed eyes on her arm, feeling the gritty sand on the lids. She felt sleepy. She could hardly feel her legs. The sound of voices coming closer joined the sea-sounds. Someone was laughing. She turned over on her back again, her arm blotting out the sky. New York, soon. All she wanted, she thought, as the wind blew the voices and the sounds of the nighttime and the sea closer, all she wanted before the long, cold, glass-enclosed winter was a season of spring for the heart.

New York under a blanket of foot-soiled snow was a revelation to Elly (feeling as she did that she was recovering from some sort of illness) and it was like a great sanatorium. She and her cousin Charlotte had lunch the first day at the Café Français in Rockefeller Plaza while watching through the glass the skaters perform arabesques of freedom in the cold sunlight.

They took a room at the Sherry-Netherland (Max Kaufman having booked their reservation by phone from Colchester) and proceeded to see the town. The theater the first night, making the mistake of picking a musical, with many dancers, the sight of whom upset Elly so that she spent the entire second act in the lobby waiting for Charlotte.

To Charlotte it was a shopping trip. To Elly it was merely a pretense to put off her return. She dragged Charlotte down to the Times Square area and ran her through the human congestion at the most crowded time of day. She loved being buffeted by men, by fat women laden with bundles; loved the neon lights, obscene in the glaring daylight, the pigeons in Duffy Square, squatting on the snow. Then suddenly, she’d turn to Charlotte and say, “Let’s get out of here. It’s filthy,” and run off to catch a cab to upper Fifth Avenue and a small, gaily striped awning covering a restaurant at which they would recuperate over lunch.

Then, a trifle quieted, they would stroll down Madison Avenue and pick out (as well as their own personal items) a tie for Max (Charlotte’s idea) and something for Uncle Harry (Charlotte’s idea).

As the days passed, Elly began to feel panicky. Her reprieve was running out. One night Charlotte awakened and, finding Elly’s bed empty, quickly dressed, ran down and across the street to the park, only to realize the impossibility of finding her in New York at three in the morning. Then her eyes fell on a hansom cab, a white-haired old man in the driver’s seat, and inside, Elly, dressed in blue jeans and sweat shirt, sitting there, tears streaming down her cheeks, unsobbing, still.