Change of Heart (6 page)

Gracious winner, Sharlie thought, I love you.

Over coffee the two men debated recent rulings by the Supreme Court, always on opposite sides of the issue, wary but polite. Sharlie began to feel uncomfortable again, but this time as if she'd gotten on the wrong train and couldn't reconcile the landscape whizzing by the window with what she knew was supposed to be out there. Uneasily she listened to her father's questions about Brian's practice. This respectful person could not possibly be the same father whom she had so long ago learned to regard with fear. Was she going to have to shift her attitude at this late date?

She remembered business associates of Walter's commenting privately to her on his astute judgment, his uncanny insight, even—remarkably—his tact. She would nod and smile and label the speaker as the kind of person who would definitely buy a used car from Richard Nixon.

Eventually Brian excused himself to go the men's room. Sharlie and Margaret instinctively looked at Walter, their eyes questioning.

Not meeting their gaze, he said, “Too bad he's got himself tied up with that crazy female. Okay, she's a good lawyer. But she's definitely a dyke.”

Ah, there's my Dad, thought Sharlie, surprised at her relief.

Outside the restaurant Brian got to the curb first and hailed a cab. He said he would walk home to work off his apple pie, but first held the door open for Sharlie. She slid inside, giving him a sickly smile. Margaret hesitated, then held out her hand and murmured how pleased she was to have met him. When she released his fingers and slipped into the taxi beside Sharlie, Brian turned to Walter, hand still extended. Walter brushed past him with a gruff good night, and Brian stuffed his hand into his pocket. The door slammed shut, and he stood at the curb watching the taillights recede, his breath forming an icy cloud around his face. Then he started off toward Third Avenue. His pace quickened gradually until soon he was practically running uptown.

There was silence inside the cab from the moment the door slammed shut outside Pietro's. Margaret sat wedged between Sharlie and Walter, Walter's massive shoulder pressing hard against her. She felt the impulse to leap out of the taxi into the dark street where she could breathe. The remarks about Barbara Kaye, so uncalled for. So humiliating, especially in front of Sharlie's young man. And why was it that she always made a fool of herself whenever it was most important to make a good impression? When Margaret was a child, her mother had insisted that she take up painting: “All the Mackins are artistic. Of course you can paint, Margaret.” But finally the tutor had gently set aside the little girl's muddy messes and explained to her disappointed mother that maybe they ought to try again when Margaret seemed a little more coordinated. There had been no more attempts at developing her artistic talents, but often, in Walter's presence, she remembered the splotchy efforts and wondered if that's what her brain looked like inside on nights like tonight, her thoughts all smeared and blurry when they came out of her mouth. Which only created more tension and made it all worse. When it didn't matter, when she was talking to the housekeeper or to Sharlie, well, then she had confidence. Then her thoughts and the words she used to express them felt sharp and clean. Sharlie had even told her once that she was witty.

The cab bounced painfully, and Margaret thought with resentment that Walter always chose the most beat-up-looking taxi with no springs or ball bearings or whatever it was that kept one's bones from being crunched into dust in the backseat. Oh, but Brian hailed this one, didn't he? She ran her hand across her forehead, trying to clear her brain of confusion. Then she scrutinized Walter's features as the lights from Madison Avenue flashed across his grim face. She wondered if she had missed something crucial with all her self-conscious anxiety at the restaurant. It had appeared to her that Walter had found Brian Morgan quite respectable. So why was he sitting next to her now like Mount Rushmore?

She stole a quick glance at Sharlie, whose expression was as rapturous as Walter's was dour. Margaret thought of those children's riddle books with the pages in which something was out of place—a tractor driving across the ocean or a carousel in the middle of a busy intersection. Sharlie gazed happily out the window, Walter glowered, and Margaret, looking at them both, thought uneasily, What's the matter with this picture?

Martha, the housekeeper, had already gone to bed, so they hung their own coats away in silence, Walter glaring and Sharlie oblivious. Margaret continued to watch them both with growing panic until finally Walter said tersely to Sharlie, “I want to speak to you.”

Sharlie blinked her eyes dazedly as if he'd just awakened her from a sound sleep. He nodded his head toward the living room, and they all filed in, Margaret trailing behind, uncertain whether her presence was required and yearning for something soothing to put out the blaze in her solar plexus.

The living room was so still that their intrusion seemed an affront to its dignified paneled sanctity, the only sounds the shifting of coals in the fireplace as the ashes settled and the tiny clicking of the clock's gold pendulum. But Walter's heavy tread scraping against the Oriental rug as he paced back and forth and his careless slam of the door behind them offended Margaret. He had no respect for the ghosts of all those gracious people who'd once lived in this lovely old house.

Margaret, Walter, and Sharlie, shut up in the living room with Walter about to unleash some kind of tirade—well, thought Margaret, Sartre could do no better. She gazed with longing at the door, but Sharlie's frightened face held her there.

Suddenly Walter spun around, pointing a large square finger at his daughter. Margaret restrained the impulse to cover her ears.

“I'd just like to hear how you justify this thing.”

Sharlie stared at her father uncomprehendingly, and Margaret thought her daughter looked very young, like a little girl groping for the response to a mysterious grown-up accusation.

“The boy is apeshit about you,” Walter pronounced.

“I know,” Sharlie said softly, and Margaret saw her search her father's face for clues.

“I want to know if you told him you can never have children.”

Sharlie dropped her eyes and murmured something.

“What?” Walter bellowed.

“Yes, I told him that,” Sharlie said, swallowing hard but meeting her father's eyes now.

Walter raised his arms and dropped them helplessly to his sides.

“Then he's more of a sucker than I thought.” He made his words elaborately simple, as if he were speaking to a dull child. “Brian Morgan is not your friend. He is not some person who feels sorry for you or comes to see you because you are sick and he wants to make himself feel like a nice guy. Brian Morgan is infatuated. In-fa-tu-ated. He's got a great big hot lust for you. He wants your body. The poor sap probably wants to get married.”

Sharlie's eyes flickered, and Walter exploded.

“He does, doesn't he? Are you crazy, or are you just monumentally selfish?”

Sharlie's face turned ashen, and Margaret felt her insides divide into two warring factions: concern for Sharlie versus terror of Walter. They thundered away, eroding the lining of her stomach.

“Did you ever stop to think what it would be like for a healthy fellow like that to be married to you? He's a real
man,
my girl, with guts and balls and …”

At this, like the summoning of reserves, Margaret's revulsion joined forces with her maternal instincts. She reached out a hand toward her husband, trying to restrain him.

“Walter, really, you're being very cruel.”

He didn't hear her, or at least gave no indication that he had. He continued his diatribe as if Margaret were a piece of glass he could look right through.

“Think about his life,” he was shouting. “If you have to trap a man, find yourself some pale, sweet thing, some interior decorator or that hairdresser of your mother's. Get yourself a nursemaid. Not a lover, for Christ's sake.”

Walter turned abruptly toward the door, but before he got all the way across the room, he swung around again, his eyes all but invisible behind the bulging muscles of his cheeks and forehead.

“Brian Morgan may be a fool. But you,” and he shook his finger at Sharlie again. “You …”

Without finishing his sentence, he waved his hand in disgust and dismissal and slammed out of the room.

Margaret put her head in her hands and began to cry. After a few minutes she looked up and saw Sharlie sitting quietly, staring in the direction of the door. Her face was so full of hatred that Margaret spun around to see if Walter was still standing there.

Finally Sharlie looked at her mother, her cheeks matching the stony white of the marble fireplace. With a thin, ghostly smile, she said, “Well, Mother, if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn't have thought it was possible for a person to clench his face.”

Walter sat in the lounge area of the Fifth Avenue Racquet Club. Behind the plate glass of the exhibition court two men hurtled back and forth, the hard ball slamming against the walls. Walter watched them dazedly, sweat trickling down his face in rivers, soaking his shirt. He sat on the edge of the couch so as not to dampen it. He had taken Freeman easily just now, three to one, and though his opponent had struggled hard over each point, he was barely damp under the armpits. And here I am, irrigating the rug, he thought, annoyed at the insubordination of his glands.

He wondered if Brian Morgan played squash. Good athletic body. Lean, probably quick, too.
How could she?

He hunched his powerful shoulders, elbows on knees, hands hanging limp, and took two deep breaths, trying to cool off. He'd hoped a hard game with Freeman would work off some of his fury, but even now at the thought of young Morgan his jaw muscles began to ache. Good thing he had to be out of town the next few weeks. He didn't think he could bear looking at his daughter's face.

Walter knew he set his standards very high, knew that he extended his intolerance for weakness in himself to others. Humanity never seemed to measure up, leaving him with a constant nagging sense of disappointment. Except for Sharlie. Brave, uncomplaining, stoic Sharlie. How proud he felt when the medical staff remarked on her courage. Never whining, she faced the agonies of her condition with quiet fortitude.

An occasional lapse now and then, all right. A temper tantrum, a crying jag, some self-indulgence to let off steam. But to ensnare another person in her crippled life—a young man with lousy judgment, but obvious vitality. She wasn't deluding herself about his feelings for her, either—he was hooked. Walter saw in her face that they'd already begun discussing marriage. Marriage! Holy Christ! Hadn't she accepted long ago the unanimous prognosis concerning her life expectancy? And hadn't he explained to her himself that her capacity to function as a woman was negligible? Nonexistent, for all practical purposes—if you consider screwing a practical purpose—or childbearing.

He'd recently read an article about homosexuals that said you can't always tell. Sometimes they're married with kids, sometimes they're even pro ballplayers. Was Brian Morgan a fag? He shook his head, sending a shower of sweat onto the floor.

As Sharlie had approached puberty, Walter watched her carefully, taking note of the new softness in the lines of her body, her reluctance to undress for her doctors, her eyelash-shaded glances at his own body when he walked around in his underwear. Despising his own cowardice, he put off the job of enlightening her.

Finally one evening after dinner when Margaret had gone off to the opera, he marched Sharlie into the living room and sat her down at the couch. He explained to her what he knew she was beginning to feel, and he tried to be specific, realizing that her only sources of information, other than him, were books. Margaret would never discuss such things, and unless a kid went to school where there were other kids to exchange information with, there just wasn't any other way.

He told her about menstruation and that it might occur pretty soon, since she was twelve years old already. He asked her to tell him when it happened, and she nodded solemnly.

Then, pacing back and forth in front of the couch, he explained about sex—the part of it that went beyond reproduction. As tactfully as he could, he told her it could never be for her. That despite the warmth of her feelings, despite the yearnings of her young body, sexual expression was most definitely out.

Christ, how she had sat there, her eyes never leaving his face for a moment, looking at him as if his words came straight from the mouth of God. He'd felt as if he were pulling the wings off a butterfly.

When he was finished, she nodded slowly. Her hair reflected the light from the fire, and he watched it shimmer around her face.

“I didn't think I'd be able to get married or anything,” she said thoughtfully. “But could I have a friend? A boy, I mean, if it was just like having a girl friend?”

Walter said yes, that was all right, and he saw her considering this, sorting it all through. He said he wanted her to come to him whenever she had a question or wanted to talk about it, and she had said she would. But except for telling him—reticently—just before Christmas that she had gotten her first period, she never mentioned the subject again. Sometimes he wondered if she'd understood what he'd told her, and then one night he studied her face during a romantic scene on television. The curiosity had disappeared, leaving behind a silent flash of pain and then a numb expressionlessness.

Pathetic joke of nature, he thought, that Sharlie had inherited his warm physical nature rather than Margaret's icy constraint. While Walter rejoiced in physical experience—sex, in particular—Margaret walked around in her high-necked dresses wishing that her too, too solid flesh would melt or something.

And Sharlie got stuck with his high blood. Mother Nature appeared to possess a rather warped sense of humor.

Suddenly the air-conditioned room seemed very cold, and he shifted his shoulders under his clammy shirt.

He rose stiffly, not noticing Freeman, fresh from the showers, wave at him on his way to the elevators. His feet had fallen asleep, and he shook them as he stared at the glass-enclosed court, now unlit and empty.

Fact is, no matter how tough it may be for Sharlie, she must accept reality. You don't take a young man's life and nail it in a coffin. Facts were facts, and she
would
be the courageous girl and give up this idiocy with poor besotted Brian Morgan before she destroyed his life the way … His mind halted abruptly. He shook his head and strode quickly to the locker room, hoping to shower away his sudden sensation of being particularly unclean.