Changes of Heart

by Liza Gyllenhaal

  “No,” Michael told him. “Anne may be upset about that, but I’ve given up on that part of your life, Zach. I’m pissed because you’re leaving early, because I know damned well you didn’t have a good time. I’m pissed because you didn’t even try.”

  “I’m sorry,” Zach said. “It’s not the party’s fault, you know, it’s mine. I’m … I’m going through a rocky stretch.”

  “No kidding,” Michael replied. “You think I’m blind, maybe? You think I don’t know you after—what’s it been, Zach?—almost five years? We’ve come a long way together since then, Zach. We’ve done damned well. We’re going to have our best year ever this year. I already know that, and we’re not even through the second quarter. We’ve a hell of a lot to be proud of.”

  “I know.”

  “Maybe you know it,” Michael told him. “Maybe intellectually you can accept the fact that you are a success, a really terrific, wonderful success, but you know what?”

  “What, Michael?” Zach demanded, stopping at the curb. He’d phoned for a taxi from the house, and he now glanced up and down the tree-lined street for a sign of it. Whatever the hell Michael was nattering on about, he wished he’d stop, let the thing go, and say a peaceful good night. Zach was tired, and there was a problem waiting for him at home—an old, old problem—that he just didn’t know how to solve.

  “You don’t feel it,” Michael asserted. “You don’t—and you never have—allowed yourself to take any credit for being who you are. Something, someone, I don’t know what, is holding you back.”

  “That’s a very interesting observation,” Zach replied. “I’m just curious how it is that you know this. I mean, as far as I’m aware, you’ve never actually crawled inside my skin. Or have you been making nocturnal visits without letting me know? I mean, how is it that you’re so cocksure about what I feel?”

  “If you were not my partner, if you were not one of my closest friends, I would tell you—right now—to shove it, Zach. I would say to you that if you can’t even let the people nearest you express concern and love for you, then you better just call your life off. But because I know you too well, I’m just going to say—think it over, Zach. And if you ever want to talk to me about whatever the hell it is that makes you so goddamned hard on yourself, I’m here. Until then, screw you, partner. Good night.”

  The taxi arrived a few minutes later, and within half an hour Zach was letting himself into his apartment on Columbus Avenue. Though it was past eight o’clock, the sidewalks were crowded with people rushing to and from the neighborhood’s ever-changing array of bars and restaurants. From a nearby roof someone let off the summer’s first firecracker.

  “Walter?” Zach called, as he locked the front door behind him. He made his way down the long hall, turning on lights as he went through, dreading to see what they might reveal.

  His father had come back, unexpected and unannounced, the day after his dinner with Janie. Walter simply rang the front doorbell around ten o’clock that night and said, “Hello, Zach.”

  Though he always tried to steel himself for the moments when Walter made such reappearances into his life, Zach was never ready to see the shriveled ghost of the man who had once been his robust father. Zach had hardly recognized the ratty derelict in dirty clothes who swayed toward him in the corridor.

  “Walter,” Zach had managed. And though it was the last thing he wanted to say, he had added, “Come in, come on in. Jesus, you look like hell.”

  “And I feel a good deal worse than I look,” Walter had replied, following Zach to the living room, “if you can imagine what that must mean.”

  “No,” Zach told him, sighing, gesturing to the couch, “I can’t imagine. Where the hell have you been? Why didn’t you write? Why…”

  “Not now, Zach, please,” Walter had begged, his voice a piteous whine. “I’m dead tired and thirsty. How about a spot of bourbon for the old man?”

  “No, Walter. We’ve been through this, Christ, how many times? I do not intend to serve you any booze in my house. How can you expect that of me? Look how it’s destroying you. Can’t you see, dammit?”

  “I know perfectly well what it’s doing to me, Sonny,” Walter had told him evenly. “The stuff is lethal, but it doesn’t matter. It’s not a question of my wanting it, Zach, it’s the fact that I need it. Now. Here. Or I’ll have to crawl back down into the gutter and lick it off the pavement.”

  “Dammit,” Zach had cried, already weakening. And so had begun another of the long painful cycles represented by Walter’s visits. Zach had given him the bourbon, then helped him taper off and nurse his way back to sobriety through the doubtful—to Zach at least—lesser evils of beer and Librium. After a day or two, Walter had shaped up enough to meet Zach after work and buy some new clothes. Then he had promised to go back to AA and straighten out his life for good.

  “This time I mean it, Zach,” Walter had announced that very morning, his voice deep with conviction. “This time it’s forever.”

  “Don’t promise, Walter,” Zach had replied wearily. How many times had he witnessed Walter’s conversions only to see his father’s heartfelt resolve evaporate overnight in a cloud of cheap vodka? “Just do it.”

  “So you don’t believe me.” Walter had sighed, pushing back his chair and crossing his legs. Father and son examined each other over the breakfast table. It was miraculous, Zach thought, how quickly Walter could recover a patina of health and prosperity. Dressed in the new pair of chinos and a light blue broadcloth buttondown Zach had bought him, Walter could pass easily for a retired version of the insurance executive he once had been. He sat erect, hands clasped at the knee, gray hair still thick though now trimmed to an almost military closeness to his finely shaped head. True, his skin was roughened, his eyes permanently bloodshot at the corners, but his smile continued to charm all newcomers to his circle. And already, within the ten days of his visit, Walter had cast his magical net and pulled in several acquaintances gleaned from the supermarket and nearby coffee shop. These pensioners and aging shopowners, including some of his AA “pals,” were delighted enough by Walter’s never-ending flow of anecdotes from his peripatetic life to forgive their frequent repetitiveness and improbability.

  “I want to believe you can do it this time, Walter,” Zach had replied, “and I’m pulling for you with everything I’ve got. But can’t you understand? I’ve watched your ups and downs most of my life.”

  “Great son you are,” Walter had scoffed. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your confidence.”

  “I just want you to be realistic,” Zach had said hotly. Only Walter could drive up Zach’s anger quotient within seconds. Only Walter could get to him like this. Imagine, Zach told himself furiously, Walter actually accusing him of being a bad son! After all he’d done. “I just want you to, what do they tell you in AA? Take it one day at a time.”

  “Hey,” Walter had cried, scraping back his chair and standing up. “Don’t you tell me how to take life, Sonny. I know how to handle myself just fine, thanks. I don’t need any more of your handouts. I’m not asking for any of your goddamn holier-than-thou advice.” He was pacing Zach’s small, tidy kitchen, his handsome, blotched face reddening with self-righteous anger.

  “I’m just trying to help,” Zach replied defeatedly. Isn’t that what he’d been doing his entire adult life? Trying, hopelessly, time and time again to make Walter better? And then, when it didn’t work with Walter, turning this urgent craving to help, to fix, to repair on anyone he could find who needed him. But it never worked, did it? Zach asked himself, as he watched his father that morning. He couldn’t change Walter. He couldn’t—and suddenly Zach remembered Janie saying almost exactly the same thing to him the week before—change anyone but himself.

  “Some great help you are,” Walter had retorted bitterly. Zach tried to rationalize Walter’s anger by telling himself it was really self-loathing. Zach reminded himself that Walter was so riddled with regr
ets that he would probably never be able to understand and accept Zach’s love. Though Zach spent most of the time at Michael’s party silently arguing with himself over this point, nothing managed to ease the pain. But then nothing ever did.

  “Walter?” Zach called again as he switched on the reading lamp beside the living room couch. Their argument that morning had ended with Walter stamping out, saying he was going someplace where people showed a little faith in him.

  Zach had assumed he meant an AA meeting, and had left a note on the kitchen table that read: “I have faith in you, too, Walter. I always will believe you can be whatever you want to be. Let’s put this morning behind us and try again, okay? I’ll be back from my party around nine or so. How about a late dinner out? Zach.”

  Remembering his note, Zach made his way to the kitchen. The light had been left on. The clothes that he had recently bought for his father were neatly folded on the table. Walter had left a scribbled note of his own beneath Zach’s: “Got a call from an old friend in St. Louis. Going to catch a five o’clock Amtrak. Thanks for the hospitality. W.”

  Zach stared down at the words until they blurred, then he sat down at the table, folded his arms on the stack of clothes and breathed in the lingering but already elusive smell of Walter Dorn. He didn’t know how long he had sat there or how long he had been crying. But finally he realized he couldn’t carry the weight of it all alone anymore. He stumbled back into the living room and dialed a number.

  “Hello? Michael? Did I wake you? Sorry. Listen, I hate to bother you, but do you have a second? I mean, would you mind hearing me out a little bit? Remember you said I should call if … well, I think … I need … somebody to talk to right now.”

  Chapter 28

  Janie had grown up surrounded by valuable and handsome things. Faith collected Amish quilts and Shaker furniture and was said to have built one of the best private collections of John French Sloan paintings in America. But the bulk of the Penrod capital was still where nobody could see it: invested securely in blue-chip America by a team of experts who handled nothing but Janie’s extended family’s estate.

  Janie had met with some of the directors of the Penrods’ investment firm on a few occasions in New York, each time at their suggestion. Their offices, in the expensive shadow of Battery Park City, were ultramodern and, it seemed to Janie after the heavy metal decibel level at D&D, remarkably hushed. Antique Kashan carpets hung like portraits along the richly enameled, softly lit corridors.

  “We feel, Janie,” they had informed her cautiously the first time they met, “that you are not caring for your trust fund in a way that you perhaps ought to.”

  “Not caring?” Janie had replied. “But I’m not even using the money at the moment. How can I be hurting it? It’s just sitting there, untouched.”

  “Well, exactly,” she was told. “Money such as yours needs to be handled, nurtured. It can’t just, uh, sit there, gathering dust. It has to be put into play … or it will never grow.”

  “I see,” Janie had replied, thinking of the rather alarming tally in her savings account. “So you would like the money back … to play with?”

  “Well, yes,” they had replied, “that is what we happen to be suggesting, if you are amenable.”

  On subsequent visits, they had proudly explained to her just how cleverly they’d coached the money she’d given them. They traced the outline of their various game plans on graphs and explained the play-by-play through expensive-looking little booklets that they seemed to have printed just for her. She had nodded agreeably throughout their presentation and thanked them profusely at the end of the meeting. But the fact was—and she was afraid they couldn’t help but notice and silently disapprove—Janie didn’t really care.

  To the rather puritanical attitude toward wealth Janie had inherited from Faith and Henry, she had added her own hard-earned knowledge about what money couldn’t buy: self-esteem, friendship, beauty. So, in general, she was unmoved by expensive things. She found a single rustling beech tree a thousand times more lovely than an intricately wrought Lalique masterpiece, the smell of the seaside in the heat of summer far, far more fragrant than Patou’s most expensive perfume.

  So it was the flowing green countryside of France, far more than the expensively kept-up historic chateaux, that enthralled Janie during the drive down to Bordeaux. In the sunny, mist-shrouded May afternoon, the verdant hills of the Loire valley seemed to possess an almost magical quality. The lush fields spotted with dairy cows, the winding shallow brooks lined with weeping willows, the long, sure stand of poplars against the blue horizon—all seemed to Janie beautiful beyond words. How could I ever paint this? Janie asked herself silently as they passed through the centuries-old town square of Potiers. How could I ever capture the deep sadness of an empty café table in the noonday sun? The ennui of laundry strung to dry across an open courtyard?

  Alain had dismissed the chauffeur in Paris, explaining to Janie that though he despised city traffic, he had discovered a certain visceral thrill driving his white Porsche cross-country from Paris to Bordeaux. Janie had at first found his tendency to speed alarming, and had sat with her foot pressed down on an invisible brake for the first twenty miles of the trip. Alain, noticing her tense silence, had glanced sideways at her and had seen her set expression and the pantomime braking. He had laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” Janie had demanded, looking quickly around and out the window to see what she had missed.

  “You, Jane,” he had told her, “terrified of my horrible European speeding habits. Please don’t worry. I used to test-drive new models for Citroen in my younger and more rebellious years. I know what I am doing, believe me. But if it will make you more comfortable, darling, I’ll slow down.”

  The “darling,” far more than his reduced speed, warmed and relaxed her. As usual, there were long but not unpleasant silences between them.

  Finally, Janie said, “Tell me about those young, rebellious years. I read someplace that you spent a few of them in Kenya as—what was it now?—a great white hunter?”

  “You’ve been reading up on my notorious past, have you?” Alain laughed. “It’s not really all that interesting, I promise you. Rather typical Eurotrash stuff. I refused to buckle down at Chanson after the Sorbonne. I just felt I’d been tied to one institution or another all my young life—so I went through nearly eight awful years pursuing the idea of adventure: in Tangiers and Kenya, Argentina and Mexico. I dabbled in just about everything: hunting, hang gliding, race sailing, polo. I still have a lovely string of ponies that I now get to see maybe twice a year at most.”

  “Why was it awful?” Janie asked. “It all sounds wonderfully romantic to me.”

  “Oh, I was making everyone so unhappy, you see. My maman, especially. She takes great pride in the Chanson family, the company, our so-called place in society. She wanted me to set a sterling example. Instead I turned into this roving international sort of playboy. We didn’t speak at one point for two full years.”

  “And you? Were you making yourself unhappy, too? It sounds to me like you were just having fun. Is that so wrong?”

  “Ah, you Americans!” Alain said with a laugh. “Your pursuit of happiness and so on. Perhaps, yes, I was having a good time, but, well, it just wasn’t enough. I felt more and more guilty and uncomfortable with myself. I felt this responsibility weighing down on me, pressing in on me. And finally I decided that if the feeling of the responsibility was there constantly—I might as well carry it in actuality, right? Since I wasn’t exactly escaping my fate, you see, I decided I would come to grips with it.”

  “I see,” Janie answered. “So now that you are fulfilling all your obligations, you are happy?”

  “I would never use that word,” Alain replied somewhat abruptly. “It is, as I said, an American concept, one I don’t really approve of. What is happiness for, after all, if not just personal aggrandizement? And if we were all to pursue it willy-nilly, what
would happen to this world? What’s important in my mind is accepting your fate, understanding your responsibilities to your family and the society, and fulfilling them as best you can.”

  There was no question that Alain’s sentiments were strong and heartfelt. And yet Janie felt something within herself denying what he was saying. Accept your fate? If she had, she would never have been able to change, she would never be sitting next to Alain at this moment. She would be fat, shy, friendless Jane Millicent Penrod, painting lonely seascapes in the attic studio at Baldwin. Fulfill your responsibilities—but whose were they, after all? Weren’t they really his parents’? Perhaps specifically his mother’s? Wasn’t your true responsibility, Janie asked herself silently, to find out what you wanted from life, and then go do it?

  And though Janie turned these questions over in her mind, she merely asked Alain, “I’m just curious … if you didn’t have these obligations, what would you choose to do?”

  “Polo,” Alain answered at once. “It’s a thrilling, demanding sport. And it contains all my favorite things—riding and gamesmanship, courage, and speed. But, alas, it’s also a young man’s game. It’s a good thing really I have no choice in the matter. That way I can have no regrets.”

  “Let me know,” Janie told Alain a few hours later, “when we’re getting close.” They had passed through Angoulême just as the sun was setting, and now the twilight—fragrant with newly mown fields and damp earth—was fading into a thickly misted darkness. As they sped past open fields, Janie could hear the whine of insects, the light moan of wind in the trees.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Alain replied, “we’ve been on our property since that last turn. The arched stone gate we passed through? That’s the entrance to the chateau.”

  Even in the gathering darkness, Janie had been impressed with the carved stone lions that had flanked the gate, their muzzles blurred by age. She should have recognized them immediately. The stone lion was the Chanson family symbol. In one form or another it appeared on every label that Chateau Chanson distributed. Now Janie thought she glimpsed the white pillars of the chateau itself through the long lane of plane trees.