The Girl With the Glass Heart: A Novel (37 page)

There was a man wearing a tuxedo and she had to look again before realizing that it was Jay. He was like a stranger.

“Hi,” she said. “Did you do what I asked?”

“Yes,” he said. “I couldn’t get her on the phone, so I sent a wire, but that was hours ago. Where have you been?”

“I fell asleep in the pine forest. I’m going to get dressed. Tell the folks I’m here, will you?”

“Yes, dear, I will. Is there anything I can do?” He seemed to her to be speaking from such a long way off that she could hardly make out what he was saying.

“No, I’m fine,” she replied and hurried away because she was nauseated and was afraid she might vomit. Once in her room, the nausea was gone. She sat on the bed with her head in her hands for a while, wishing, oddly enough, that John Marron Lang were there. After all, she thought, it’s his house, not ours. Then she laid out her clothes on the bed and began to dress very carefully.

Setting the suitcase down for a moment, Annette brushed a few specks of face powder from her dress and straightened the belt that encircled her waist. A few passers-by glanced at the agitated young woman who, obviously leaving on a trip, was making last-minute adjustments that would be hopelessly wasted by the time she reached her destination. From the doorway of the little bungalow a rather bovine woman of about forty, wearing a house dress, looked despairingly at Annette. “Cut it out,” she drawled. “You look great.”

“Do I really look all right?” Annette murmured.

“Sure, sure. And it doesn’t matter anyway. By the time you get to Indiana you’ll be a wreck and have to do the whole job over again.”

Annette rushed up to her and threw her arms around her neck. “Thanks again, Clara. Thanks. I don’t know what I would have done without you.”

“You would have lived at the Y, that’s what. But I’m glad you came to me. Your mother would have liked that. Here comes your bus. If you get airsick later, don’t forget the dramamine I gave you. Give my love to that skinny bastard Alec and tell him if he doesn’t treat you right I’ll fly there right after you and slit his lying actor’s throat.” Annette laughed nervously. “And,” Clara added, “find out about this hunger-strike crap it said about in the telegram.”

Annette nodded. “I can’t imagine—the bus—’By, Clara.”

As the bus padded away Annette felt the damp air with a chill suddenly and closed the window next to her. She was on her way. Maybe, she thought, it will be warmer in Colchester than in Los Angeles, and smiled. That was hardly likely. But no less likely than the crazy telegram from Jay and some kind of a fast. Today was the Day of Atonement—Yom Kippur—she knew from Clara, who was Jewish, and the religious ones fasted on that day. But not Alec. And even if he did, what was the big deal? So he wouldn’t eat for one day. There must be something else. There were few other people in the bus. Four o’clock was a slow time. Most of the other passengers were going to the airport too. Feeling her neck brushed by a finger of chilly, damp air, she turned and saw that the window behind her was open.

“Pardon me,” she said to the tall gray-haired man sitting next to the window, “would you mind closing the window? It’s a little damp.”

He smiled, a quiet inward smile, Annette thought, as if he were amused at some private thought, and said, “Certainly.” He slammed it shut and then said: “This kind of day is the one we tell jokes about back East. The heavy Los Angeles dew.”

She had turned around already, by the time he had finished his remark, but he was so pleasant that Annette felt constrained to twist around for an instant and smile a tiny response. The bus moved incredibly slowly, it seemed to her. She was watching this new Annette with interest—anxious, tense. Her mother had always pointed her out with pride as the phlegmatic one of the family: feet on the ground, non-hysterical. Well, she had grounds for hysteria. Alec gone only a week and a half (seemed like a day and a half—she’d almost expected him to walk into Clara’s and pick her up for a rehearsal or tell her the latest news from his agent) and an insane telegram from Jay. Perhaps Alec didn’t even know she was coming. And she, Annette, spending the days carefully severing the threads, intently adjusting to a life without Alec’s bony-faced grin in the doorway as she went off to dance class. She had just been realizing that it could be done, battling with the most disturbing thought of all—that if it could be done so swiftly and so well, how did you know if you’d really loved at all?

Damn her anyway! John Marron Lang was thinking. If there’s anything I need it’s a brisk breeze, after this California warm soup they call air. And a little dampness is welcome too. Well, she is dressed awfully lightly. I should have closed my window when I saw her close hers. You’d think for a man who’s so anxious to get away from here I’d have been long since gone. I was finished here three days ago. I could have stayed at the Kaufmans’ for at least two of those three days. What was I afraid of? Maybe, for me, going East means going toward Lorraine, and I’m certainly in no hurry for that. He tried to absorb himself in some of the sketches in his portfolio. He was to do a cliff house for a famous portrait painter who lived in Vermont. Somehow, on the wetly sliding bus in the light of day the sketches didn’t look so good as they had the night before. Nothing he’d done in the last few years had been as good as the Kaufman house. That was why, when
The American Architect
had asked him to pick the one he wanted photographed for their article on him, he hadn’t hesitated a moment before choosing the Kaufman house. The other boys got their photographs and articles in the big magazines:
Life
,
Time
, all of them. Wright, Le Corbusier, even Chester, who wasn’t really an architect, but more of a painter. He, Lang, was an architect’s architect. And a man’s man too. He certainly wasn’t a woman’s man.

What did a woman like the solid, broad-boned girl think of him at first sight? It was too bad one couldn’t just ask her. He settled back in his seat and tucked away the sketches. Lang liked departures. They made him less tense than arrivals. Across a furze-covered field the airport defined itself against the late-afternoon sky.

Annette paused in the doorway of the plane, poised on the hostess’ bright smile, and running her eye over the vacant seats deliberately chose the one next to the gray-haired man she had spoken to on the bus and who had been so friendly.

“Hello,” he said, “I seem always to have your window.”

“Not really,” she said. “The one in the bus was yours. Besides these don’t open.” She lighted a cigarette, pursing her red mouth around it in an incongruously delicate gesture while Lang thought, listening to the beginning buzz of the motors, There’s still time to get off, time to forget about this wild idea born because I made love to a kid in a house I’d just built, time to forget that she was the only one with whom I ever felt like a man, time to forget about wanting to be a man and go back to work and Lorraine and her damned sarcastic laughter. But there was no more time—they were airborne and the little red light on the side of the wing nearest him told him there was no more time. Of course he could disembark in Indianapolis and get a plane going east and wire the Kaufmans, but he knew that he was only playing with the ideas and that he was as committed to this flight as iron was to a magnet, and quite as irrationally.

A man in front of them was nudging his companion and laughing at something Lang couldn’t hear. He turned to Annette and said, “Why is it laughter sounds more lonesome on a plane than anywhere else?”

“I don’t fly that much,” she replied, “and I wasn’t listening to them. The last thing in the world I want to think about now is loneliness.”

“It’s nice that you have a choice,” he said quietly, and she turned and stared at him as though she had not really seen him before.

Far beyond the hill, even halfway toward town, the approaching cars could hear the faint sounds of the party, wind-borne. Even before the house could be glimpsed, adumbrations of the party could be felt: the dim glow of the Japanese lanterns reflected against the overhung sky and, coming closer, the tinkling sound of a piano, playing popular songs in the high register, the whir of motors as Justin drove cars to and around the garage. It all gave the arriving guests the impression of a much bigger party than it actually was. There were only about forty people invited and probably thirty-five or thereabouts would attend. It was the briskness of the wind that carried sound so well and gave the evening its air of busyness, of events happening and about to happen.

Elly walked swiftly past her parents, who stood at the door welcoming the latest arrivals, and into the living room. Jay was at the bar and she said, “I’ll have one.”

“Hello,” he said. “You look beautiful. Is this the same girl that wore blue jeans and a gruesome T-shirt this afternoon?”

“I hope not,” she replied, and spilled her drink just before it reached her lips. None of it touched her dress however. Jay slid another one from the triangular grouping of highballs and looked at her. She wore a cocktail-length pink, or orange, dress—Jay couldn’t tell which—and her hair was brushed to a sheen and hung about her shoulders and framed her face a little too perfectly—as the evening wore on, Jay knew that the strands would separate and touch her forehead, her cheek, fall more loosely on her bare shoulders.

He touched the flesh of one shoulder and said, “Hey, you shouldn’t be the nervous one. I’m the one who needs false courage.” He raised his glass and, smiling at her, said, “I’ve been trying to touch you all day. You’ve been somewhere else. How long has it been since we complained that we love each other? Seems like a long while. I feel like complaining again.”

“I’m sorry, Jay. I’ve been feeling funny.” Where’s Alec? she was thinking. Why isn’t Alec here?

Green filled a glass with gin, sipped it and said, “Here’s how!”

Elly and Jay nodded politely.

“Some day—tomorrow, I think, after this nightmare—I mean this lovely dream of a concert—is over, I’m going to tell you what you’ve done. Do you know I can’t even remember too clearly what the hell I’ve been doing these last two years, running around the country with the ballet and all that. I’ve got my Christmas gift from you, early this year—Jay Gordon, all wrapped in the nice, shiny tuxedo he wore when he played his first recital in Carnegie Hall. In case I forget to thank you around Christmas time, thanks, Elly.”

“What are you going to give me?” Elly asked, knowing that she was playing a game, that it wasn’t real, no matter how real it seemed to this strange young man.

“Haven’t I given you anything?” Jay asked, feeling a little sick in his stomach at the distance in her voice.

“No, you’ve taken.”

Carl stood next to her and, excusing himself for interrupting, said, “May I speak to you for a moment, Elly?” She shook her head. “I’m talking to Mr. Gordon.”

“Just for a moment.”

The urgency in his voice and face were clear enough to Jay for him to say, “It’s all right, we’ll talk—”

But Elly cut him short by saying, “Not now. Later, Carl.”

He turned away, more sure than ever about where his duty was. She would never tell his secret. And if she did—He moved off in search of Alec.

“You should have spoken to him. He seems upset,” Jay said seriously.

“Everybody’s been upset around here these last few days.”

“I haven’t. But that’s because I’ve taken so much from you, I guess.”

“Don’t be sarcastic. I can’t stand sarcasm. My mother’s sarcastic.”

“I’m sorry. I’m nervous about playing and you seem so cold.”

“Don’t be nervous about playing. I’m a crazy little bitch—don’t pay any attention to me. And, God, you’ve played so many concerts in your time—” There was a cracking within her as of ice breaking and there was an unexpected flare of warmth inside, as one might feel who had died and was allowed for a moment to catch sight of a place where one had once been happy, or good, or loved. She wanted to cry out to him to hold her just there where she was (as if it was a place or a time through which she moved rather than a condition of feeling), not to let her slip back, but the sense of herself was too strong and she realized he had been speaking to her.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t hear you, Jay.”

“Stop saying you’re sorry every other minute. I said crazy little bitch or not I’m happy with you—and I’m a guy who’d given up the idea, the word, all of it. That’s why it’s tough when you’re angry and I don’t know why.”

“I’ve never been less angry in all my life. Play well.” She kissed him on the cheek, lightly, and he knew she was gone from him again.

The room was filling now and the bar was crowding. “You’ll play about eleven,” Max said to Jay, glancing at his watch. “We’ll set up the chairs back there and you come out from this doorway.”

“That’s a while yet, Mr. Kaufman,” Jay said.

“That’s true,” Max said, wiping his heavy face with a handkerchief. “You see these people? Well, it gives me a kind of funny feeling to think that so many of them in some way or another depend on me for their source of income. Still I pride myself that most of them like me for myself.”

“I like you for your daughter.” Jay grinned nervously.

“Yes, I know.” Max lighted a cigar and puffed intently. “I know. Well, she’s prettier than I am.” He glanced at Elly to make sure he would not be overheard. “Are you in love with her? She’d kill me if she heard me ask you that.”

“Yes. You can tell, can’t you?”

“It’s not hard. She is too. For the last week she’s been better than I’ve seen her. Of course today she’s worried about Alec and she’s not herself. But I’m very glad. Even her mother has been feeling better since you and Alec got here.”

Jay started to reply, not quite sure what he wanted to say, but it was something uncertain about Elly, when Soames came along to ask Max about setting up for the pictures of the concert, and Jay turned instead to his half-empty glass, remembering with a sudden palpitation that these people were all assembled here to hear him play. It’s been only two years, he told himself. Hold on. Hold on.

Carl found Alec miraculously alone at the far end of the crowded room near the portion of the glass wall that turned suddenly into solid wood. He was refusing a drink for the third time.