The Girl With the Glass Heart: A Novel (39 page)

“They’re from the school library and some from the library in town. Why, what a bad young lady you are! You must have stolen them. A girl with all this. I’m surprised at you! Perhaps I won’t tell your parents, though. I like you.” He could not see the quality of the stare which she directed at the empty space before her and did not notice the little flecks of bubbly froth that appeared on her lovely lips.

“Why did you steal them? You must have. Some of them are dated a long, long time ago. But never mind that. We’ll talk about that when we’re alone sometime. And that painting in your closet. You shouldn’t have destroyed it like that. Under the smearing it looked like it might have been quite nice. I’d like—”

Elly spoke, hardly moving her lips. “Get out of here,” she said so softly Lanner had to bend forward a little to hear. “If you don’t go away something terrible is going to happen. Go away or something awful will happen.”

Her voice grew louder and Lanner turned away and slipped into a seat in the back row of chairs. He stole a glance at Elly and saw that her lips were still moving. She looked as though she hadn’t noticed that he was gone. Lanner listened to the music while a faint, apprehensive tingle began at the back of his neck.

The furious wind which the plane had been bucking for most of the trip had died down to a gentle breeze that fluttered their coats about them as Lang and Annette traversed the distance from the plane to the central building. She had refused to let him carry her bag and she looked as if she were limping along.

“I’ve heard of you,” she said, “or read about you somewhere.”

“Good,” he replied. “It’s about time somebody did. Isn’t it amazing how much space there seems to be on an airfield?” He looked to the right where, far off at the edge of the field, he could see, dimly illuminated by the momentary touch of a moving searchlight, the confining fence that bordered the field. The searchlights swept the thick clouds like brushes of white paint. Rather than seeing them as aids for the arriving planes he saw them as lights heralding arrivals.

“That’s because of the lights, I think,” Annette said. “They help create the illusion of space. I sound like an architect. God, I hope the busses are on time.”

“What bus do you have to get?”

“Weems Point—Colchester.”

“Fine, that’s mine too.”

Lang checked with the bus driver and, finding they had twelve minutes, suggested a cup of coffee.

“Why do they always slop some into the saucer?” he complained.

“They’re all sadists.” She smiled, but it vanished instantly. “I ought to thank you,” she said as he held his lighter’s flame to her cigarette.

“Oh?”

“For being so pleasantly distracting during the trip. I’m not very good company when I’m worried.”

Lang ran his fingers through the shock of gray hair that hung over his forehead and asked, “What about?”

“Nothing I want to talk about now. Isn’t it funny how all airports seem basically the same no matter where they are? They’re like embassies in foreign countries.”

“You mean somewhere there’s a country where all the houses look like airports and every family owns a great searchlight?”

“Well, I wasn’t going to be quite that imaginative. But that’s the idea. I remember even Tempelhof had the same quality as this Indianapolis airport.”

“You’ve been to Germany?”

“I studied there years ago. I’m a dancer.”

“I’ll be damned! I studied in Germany too. Years before your years ago, I’m sure.”

The bus driver, who was sitting at the far end of the counter, wiped the last streak of jelly from his chin and, beckoning to them and several other passengers, stamped his boots out to the waiting bus. He swayed a bit as he clambered into his seat and Lang whispered to Annette, “I think he’s had a few.”

She nodded tolerantly. “I could use a few myself.” The bus rolled off onto the asphalt and picked up considerable speed in a few moments. The rapidity with which the telegraph poles whizzed by reassured Annette and relieved her anxiety somewhat. She was on the last lap now.

It had the reverse effect on Lang. He was almost there now, and what would he say to the girl? Something stupid and sophomoric, like: “I’ve loved you since that afternoon.” Out of the question. “I think I need you” might be better and more honest. It was certainly true. But actually the best way would be to take it easy and let it build. To what? He wouldn’t be there more than a few days. He wondered if the photographers had arrived yet. That afternoon had been real, damn it. The analyst had said, two weeks before he’d quit treatment, that he, Lang, had carried around with him the picture of Elly long before he’d met her, which was probably why he’d been so aroused by her. Oh, stop thinking about it, he told himself. Everything goes toward her, pulling, pulling. Don’t talk it to death. The man in the seat in front was snoring loudly and Lang toyed with the idea of awakening him but decided against it. Suppose the man asked him what he wanted? What would he reply? They were passing through a small village when the bus began slowing and something in the rear made coughing noises and then emitted short blasts of hissing air. Finally they stopped entirely. The snoring man opened his eyes and said, “Huh!” The bus driver stumbled out of his seat, muttered something to the passengers and disappeared.

“Oh, no!” Annette sighed. “I should have known.”

“Known what?”

“That the bus would break down. It’s the story of my life.”

The driver reappeared, his cap in his hand. The emergency seemed to have sobered him a bit. He spoke more coherently. “Half hour to an hour,” he said. “Everybody get a cup of coffee and take it easy. Maybe more than an hour. Sorry. Everybody out.” Grumbling and stretching, the passengers disembarked.

“Coffee again,” Annette murmured. “It seems like only yesterday that I had my last cup of coffee…. That was such a pretty little speech,” she told the driver, as she and Lang descended, leaving him to stare at her in bewilderment. But she joked only to cover her rising panic. It struck her as strange that, with all the fear for Alec that she was experiencing, she had no regrets about having forced the issue, about having left him.

They trod a dimly lighted gravel path, keeping between them that peculiar distance and peculiar closeness that traveling strangers observe when they recognize they will spend the rest of the trip in one stranger’s company but more than likely never see that stranger again.

“Mr. Lang,” Annette said, “let’s pass the coffee and get something to drink.”

“All right.”

The bar was grimier than any greasy spoon could have been. The damp sawdust clung to their shoes and the table top was flecked with cigar ash. Lang opened his initialed silver cigarette case and set it in the middle of the table. Annette ordered Scotch on rocks and Lang some brandy.

“It seems as if something is conspiring to keep me from where I’m going. Conspiring
with
me, not against me. I could almost turn back now. I won’t, but the least I can do is hope that the bus can’t be repaired at all tonight and that all the other busses break down too. But that’s asking too much of a friendly fate.”

“Don’t you dare,” Annette exclaimed. “I have no doubts. I want to get where I’m going and immediately.”

“Don’t worry. They never listen to my wishes up there. Or at least they haven’t so far. If you were a man my age—never mind what my age is—if you were, would you rush to see a very young, very lovely girl who hasn’t seen you in two years and who probably hasn’t thought about you since then?”

“But you’ve thought about her?”

“Just most of the time.” He sipped the brandy. It tasted better than any drink had in a long time. “Not really thought of
her
,” he added. “Of her very long dark-blond hair and her very long dark legs and all the usual romantic junk.” He touched his white hair and said, “It’s the old who are really romantic, in spite of the way it seems. We
believe
in lost causes. Did you every try to get a young person to believe a cause
is
lost?”

“You’re certainly trying hard to make me believe you’re old.”

He shrugged. “Fifty. Half of my life is over.” His hands clenched and unclenched on the glass.

“What a shame! Maybe she’s thought of you all this time.”

“People who plant ideas like that should be shot. She’s been living in a house I built, a big glass-and-wood one, mostly glass. If she thinks of me every time she looks at glass I’m doing fine. Oh, the whole idea is crazy! She’s not a girl, she’s a fantasy.”

“A glass house? Not Kaufman! John Marron Lang … John Marron Lang. You said you were John Lang.”

“I am.”

“But if you’d used your middle name I would have known you right away. Of course. You see, I’m—well, engaged to Alec Kaufman.”

“I don’t think I know him. But in that case I’ve talked too much as usual.”

“No. She is very beautiful and quite like somebody’s fantasy. She visited Alec last winter when she was in trouble—she’d had an abortion of sorts. Now
I’ve
talked too much.”

“An abortion,” he mused. “I suppose it was bound to happen. There was something wild about her—something—”

“It can happen to the tamest of us. I had one two years ago. It’s more common than we think. Alec and I broke up a while back. I got a telegram yesterday that he was … in trouble, and here I am stuck nowhere in a bar, depending on a drunken bus driver to get me there.”

Lang stood up. “I’ll see about a cab,” he said briskly as if he was sorry he had delayed so long. “You wait here.”

He was back in ten minutes, walking in as briskly as he had left. “I couldn’t get a cab to take us that far this time of night, so I rented a car.”

Annette started to say, “You shouldn’t have—” when she decided she thought it was a fine idea. “I’m glad you did that,” she said. “Let’s go.”

The car was a long, black job that probably rented for funerals and weddings. Lang loaded the bags in the rear and Annette opened her window wide to air the cushions which had a gagging, musty odor.

“How about your own doubts?” she asked, marveling at the sudden change in him, from a pleasant, indecisive man to the determined man of action.

“I would have gone away. I was just talking. You’ve
got
to go and we’re heading for the same place, so—”

“Do you know the way?”

“Yes.”

Annette leaned back in her seat. She could relax for a while now. This was really the last lap. What a dead life he must have with his wife (Lang had told her, as he immediately told everyone he met, that he was married) to go on a wild-goose chase like this!

There was a wire fence running alongside the road, and beyond that Annette watched a dark, shadowy underbrush outlining a little stream which seemed to run as fast as the automobile, watched the moist, green moving shadows until, more exhausted than she had imagined, she fell asleep.

There had been no intermission, Jay having planned a much shorter recital than most—a concession to the fact that this was a home, not a concert hall—and he was playing like a demon now, a temporarily displaced demon who had been returned to hell and was in his element again. His shirt was glued to his back, and his arms, unused to such exertion, ached furiously. He was concluding his final piece, the Liszt “Etude in E Flat,” a dazzling work replete with aural fireworks.

Elly, standing precisely in the same place where she had stood all during the performance, was breathing hard. The pulse was going full blast, as if it responded to the increased tempo of the music. She had definitely localized it in her thumb and more specifically in the little hard lump. Her index finger was squeezed tightly against the piece of tissue. She was terrified and wished the music would stop. If this was
music all the time
, it was horrible. She was sweating as much as Jay and her hair was spread in a wet disarray over her shoulders, her forehead, and a few strands were caught in her pressure-whitened lips over which uncontrolled bubbles of saliva flowed.

Lanner had glanced back at her several times during the last half hour, and was afraid for the girl. But he didn’t know what to do. He was sure that, were not the lights turned so far down for the music, and everyone facing the pianist, someone would have noticed and have done something. He bent down low, lighted a cigarette, and did nothing but puff guiltily and close his eyes.

The pulsing was telling her something and she was sure it was much the same message the sea with its ceaseless
whoooosh
had been trying to deliver to her. She tensed her entire body in a convulsive attempt to absorb what it was the pulsing wanted her to be or do and she felt a warm trickle running down her leg. She saw in the glass wall behind Jay’s bobbing head and Alec’s still profile a clouded glass wall, thick with reflections, and it would never be clear again, she knew, and in an agonizing movement of release and convulsion she seized the wrought-iron figure on the floor beside her and ran (or rather it was as if she were hurled) down the center aisle, like a drunken bride, stumbling over a chair as she approached the piano, the iron figure grasped in her slender, upraised hand, her hair all unconfined trailing behind her like smoke, and she felt a great sense of relief, all through her body even into her bowels rather than in her mind alone, because she knew she could clear the glass and stop the pulsing. Lanner was the first to shout and, like a match set to a string of firecrackers, cries flew up after his. Jay pulled his hands from the keyboard and, seeing Elly bearing down upon him, jerked back in fear, calling her name. She was almost upon him, the raised figure parallel with his head, when she swerved imperceptibly (Max was running down the aisle now) and lunged at the exposed glass wall, the iron figure shivering and splintering it instantly (the noise of the shattered glass was embedded in the screams and stifled cries everywhere) and with furious momentum she was fallen half through the jagged split in the sheet of glass, and lay there quite still while all around her the tumult raged.

Alec had half leaped and half fallen from his chair as she plunged, and he grabbed hold of her legs while he shouted something to those milling about behind him. “Don’t pull her!” Max shouted. Soames, the photographer, fought his way to the front door and outside. He ran to the broken wall. Elly was slumped almost exactly half in and half out. She was breathing, he saw, and, motioning Alec not to touch her, he felt underneath her abdomen to see if she was caught. She was not; the flesh moved freely but his hand came away wet and red. I’d forgotten it was so bright, he thought. Grasping her under the armpits, he called, “Lift her slowly—up, straight up, or you’ll slash her.” Alec, his face contorted into a horrible mask, grasped Elly’s legs and lifted up slowly. Soames exhaled deeply: she came away freely and he handed her (she was not limp, he noticed, but rigid) gently in to Max and Alec. They carried her, stepping ever so slowly like slaves carrying a queen on a palanquin, to a sofa and laid her down, Max mumbling something, Alec silent, his bony face stiff in grief.