by Sally Mandel
Sharlie felt the pain begin to suck at her chest. She took three deep breaths, willing herself to unbend her clenched fists. Double betrayal, she thought. Not only does he forbid me my love, but he does it to protect my lover from his evil daughter! Thanks a lot, Pops.
She looked toward the window, a bright blue rectangle, wondering if her father were somewhere safe on the ground, where the violence of her hatred couldn’t rip through space and shoot him down, twisting and burning, conscious through it all, until finally he’d hit the cold waters of the English Channel and, with one brief hiss, sink to the bottom like a hunk of black sludge.
She groaned and turned away from the daylight, despising herself. This will get us nowhere, she thought, hand against her clattering heart, except maybe Room 1108 at Saint Joe’s. Brian. What to do about Brian?
She had worked out three scenarios so far, like that book she’d read where the author (in a rather cowardly fashion, she thought) provided several endings and let the reader make the decision.
Finale Number One: Sharlie and Brian at Brian’s apartment. They make passionate love, Sharlie has a heart attack at the very moment of her first orgasm, and Brian is stuck with nude dead body, or perhaps in nude dead body, depending on how fast rigor mortis sets in.
Finale Number Two: Same scene, except Sharlie lives through it to get pregnant and die in childbirth, leaving Brian with (probably defective) child.
Finale Number Three: Sharlie and Brian meet in a neutral, well-lit coffee shop, shake hands across their cheese danishes and remain friends, close enough and chaste enough to enjoy an occasional game of Go Fish.
She had opted for Number Three, but as the crack in the ceiling took on the shape of Brian’s long leg, she found the composition of the dialogue difficult.
“Brian, this is no good.” Hackneyed.
“Brian, we can’t go on this way.” Melodrama.
“Brian, I don’t love you anymore.” Bullshit And besides, she’d never told him she loved him anyway, so what was the point of telling him she didn’t? He was always the one to bring up the subjects of love and marriage.
The fact remained that her involvement with Brian would mess up his life. Distasteful to find herself morally aligned with Walter, but there it was. Lying on her bed as noon approached and she still hadn’t composed her speech, she thought, Okay, amazing as it continued to seem, she loved Brian more than she loved herself. Her happiness was temporary under the best of circumstances anyhow. Say, for instance, her heart managed to thump its way through another year or two. In which time she could so screw up Brian’s life that he would probably never extricate himself from the swamp of it.
She had always thought self-denial for love was too altruistic to be believed, but perhaps it wasn’t nobility at all. The feelings she had for Brian seemed no more to her credit than the fact that she had been blessed with pretty eyes instead of beady ones and round breasts instead of the banana-shaped ones that used to fascinate and repel her in the old issues of National Geographic that her parents collected.
It’s not nobility of spirit, she thought, but something chemical and scientific. And now, since she’d already said good-bye in theory, it remained only to do it in fact.
She picked up the phone and dialed Brian’s office.
An hour later she took a cab downtown to the Pierpont Morgan Library on Thirty-sixth Street. She was glad it was a bright day. Reality seemed so sharply in focus in the white light glaring off the stone buildings on Fifth Avenue. No room in this merciless sunshine for dreams.
Brian’s voice had sounded apprehensive over the telephone. He listens to voices through that receiver all day long, Sharlie thought. He knows there’s something. And he said he wanted to talk to her. Could it be that he was planning to break off with her? Oh, Lord, let it be true, she said to herself. I’ll make him go first just in case.
He was already waiting on the steps in front of the elegant old building, and his arm felt tense as he helped her out of the cab. They walked into the gray light of the entrance hall.
“How’re you doing?” he asked.
“Okay.” But as she looked around at the graceful stone and wood surfaces, their lines soft in the shadows, her courage began to fail. She suddenly tugged at Brian’s arm and pulled him back outside into the brilliant sunshine. She sat down on the steps and brushed off a place next to her.
“I think I’d rather stand,” he said, his face rigid. “What’s going on?”
She clutched her arms around her knees. “You said you had something you wanted to talk about.”
Brian shook his head. “Drop it.”
They stared at each other. Sharlie opened her mouth to tell him, and finally she burst out, “We can’t go on this way. Oh, no…”
She couldn’t believe she had said it, and she began to laugh, making sounds halfway between giggles and chokes. She wiped her eyes and looked up at him to try again.
“I’m sorry. I always laugh at funerals. I can’t help it.”
“If this is a funeral, you’ve been talking to your father.”
“No,” she lied.
“You’ve been putting me off since Pietro’s. I haven’t had one second with you alone.”
“I needed to digest it. Oh, damn. Not the pasta.” She started to laugh nervously again.
He looked at her closely. “You are not in great shape.”
She held up her hand in protest. “No. No, I’m okay. Really. I’ve just needed to think everything out.” She was acutely aware of the long line of his leg near her shoulder. Just this one last time, she thought, let him be near me. “I’m getting a stiff neck,” she said, stretching to look up at him.
He sat down and stared into her face with clear eyes that seemed to look straight through her skull. She swallowed hard.
“I think you impressed him,” she said. “Even if you do work for Crazy Babs.” She gave him a feeble smile, but his face was grim. Not doing so hot here, she thought, and took a deep breath, wondering what nonsense would possibly come out next.
“What I’ve been thinking about was us sitting there all domestic and cozy at Pietro’s and how unrealistic that was and how we should all quit kidding ourselves. I should quit kidding myself.”
“You’re rambling, Sharlie.”
“I mean that I’m not … long for this world, and any ideas you or I might be cooking up about long-range … Oh God, I did it again.”
Brian put his hand on hers and said, “This is the most incredible bullshit.”
Sharlie stared at his tie—a paisley print with lots of maroon that clashed with his pale-peach-colored shirt. She had asked him once how he picked out his clothes each day, and he said he just put on a favorite-colored shirt and a favorite-colored tie. If he liked both colors, it had to work, right? Sharlie had looked unconvinced, and he confessed that one day Barbara had stood him in front of her full-length office mirror and said, “There, look. Don’t you hear anything?” He had shaken his head, and Barbara told him that his shirt and pants were screaming bloody murder where they met at his waistline. Sharlie had wanted to know what he was wearing, and he told her—his rust-colored suit and pink shirt. They looked fine to him.
“All right,” Sharlie said, forcing her eyes off his tie and pulling herself up straight. “It all comes down to this. I’m sick. My relationship with you makes me sicker. I have to choose between you and a longer life. So I’m choosing life.”
He stared at her.
“Emily Brontë would not have approved, but I can’t help it”
He sat thinking for a moment and finally he said, “If this is what you really believe, I can’t blame you for taking a walk. But I’m telling you, you look better every day. You’re stronger now than when you got out of the hospital.”
“I have my good days. But there are things I haven’t told you.”
“Like what?”
“Like what happened the night we … the Swept Away night
. It’s not just virgin modesty that keeps me from your bed, Brian. It’s fear.”
“You got sick.”
She nodded.
“So we won’t mess around.”
“Oh, Brian, don’t be ridiculous. The instant I see you, I want to start peeling off my clothes. It’s practically Pavlovian.” He was silent. “As a matter of fact,” she went on in a desperately chatty voice, “that’s how I can tell you’re around. Suddenly I get this compulsion to unbutton my dress, and I say, ‘Hmm, Brian must be about to walk through the door.’ It could be very embarrassing at a cocktail party.”
“I want to show you something,” he said, reaching into his jacket pocket. He pulled out a newspaper clipping and flattened it on her knees: A DECADE OF HEART TRANSPLANTS: THE FANFARE’S OVER BUT AT LEAST 85 LIVE.
A gray-uniformed guard sauntered over to them, his feet scraping abrasively. From her vantage point on the steps Sharlie noticed that his shoes were scuffed. One of the laces had broken and been knotted halfway up.
“Can’t sit here.”
“Why not?” Brian asked affably.
“Rules.”
Brian said, “Can’t you see the young lady is ill?”
The guard shook his head. “Looks fine to me.”
Brian shot Sharlie a quick glance that said, See? But he went on to the guard in a firm voice, “If she stands up, she will throw up.”
The guard thought this over, then scraped his feet back to the entrance and remarked sullenly, “Ten minutes.”
“I might,” Sharlie said.
“What?”
“Throw up.”
He gave her a puzzled look and she held the article out to him.
“I’ve read this before. Makes my stomach go all revolted.”
“I bet you feel the same way about having a tooth pulled.”
She rolled her eyes at him.
“Look,” he said, “we could go see somebody. At least find out about it.”
“I already know about it.”
“That was a long time ago. Techniques have changed. The odds have changed. Oh, come on, Sharlie, maybe you can have it all. Life. Me. Babies …”
She closed her eyes and held up her hand. “Stop. I don’t want to hear about it.”
“Just to find out? Where’s your grit?”
“I’ve run out. I don’t have any more. I used to keep it under my fingernails.” She held out a hand to him, showing him her immaculate nails. “See? All gone.”
Brian sighed and snatched the clipping from her. He muttered, “If it weren’t so self-defeating, I’d take my own heart out and give it to you.”
“I’m not noble, Brian. I won’t have a transplant, not even for you. I don’t want to prolong my life one second if it means living with somebody else’s heart inside me.”
“Why not?”
“It’s … against nature, that’s why not.”
“Ah, a fundamentalist. What about kidney transplants? Spleens? Pacemakers? Or let’s get back to teeth for a minute. I know for a fact that you have one tooth …”
She interrupted him angrily. “It’s irrational, all right? Upper plates and hearts are not the same thing.”
He shook his head in exasperation, and she said quietly, “Listen, Brian, we’ve had enough memories to last a lifetime, easily. A long lifetime. Let’s leave it at that.”
“Stick with me a couple more months and make up your mind then. We’ll have a whole other bunch of memories.”
“You’ll have a bunch of memories. I’ll be six feet under.”
“I’m not going to let you die.”
His tenacity was beginning to wear her down, and she burst out in frustration, “You’re a closet necrophiliac, that’s what you are.”
“I don’t think that’s very funny.”
She glanced at the guard, who was staring at them resentfully. Then she looked into Brian’s stubborn face. Okay, she thought, I am not convincing this man. Brutality is the only way.
“If I see you anymore, I will die.” Brian started to interrupt, but she went on coldly, willing her eyes to stay dry. “You may not believe that, but I do. It may seem amazing that I would rather live another few months without you than expire next week in your loving arms, but it’s a fact.”
He was watching her very carefully, trying to look past her expressionless eyes. She saw him searching, asking himself if he believed her. She dug deep into the lifetime supply of self-control, the place where she found the will to sustain her through hours of grueling pain. I will make it through the next couple of seconds, she vowed to herself, and then he will go away and I can have a good cry.
She stared at him, calm, with just the right touch of compassion in her voice. “Believe it, Brian.”
He nodded slowly. She kissed him once, putting her cheek next to his for a moment, grateful that he couldn’t see the misery flooding her face. Then she got up with her eyes averted and walked quickly away from him.
Chapter 15
She had lived two whole weeks without seeing him. She marveled at the vast stretch of a minute, how the second hand on her watch crawled along like an overweight turtle, laboriously, ponderously, excruciatingly slow.
She had felt crushed at first, and the time went faster then. At least the anguish was interesting, and she spent long hours in bed wiping her nose and replaying the memories of her times with Brian. She thought and talked to herself and contemplated swallowing the whole contents of a bottle of Valium that sat temptingly near her bed. But Margaret must have anticipated that possibility and made off with all of her drugs, henceforth dispensing them personally.
Sharlie’s conversations with herself seemed to follow a particular pattern, beginning with the concept that perhaps she should continue the relationship. But she always ended up in the same place, just as Walter did. And as she examined her feelings, she began to suspect that something else was operating here, simultaneous with her fierce impulse to protect Brian. She realized that she had never truly believed in a future for them. Even introducing him to her family at Pietro’s, she could not imagine a permanent life with Brian. Maybe it was because she had long ago learned to keep her sights trimmed short. Tomorrow or the next day was all she could realistically expect, and she had absorbed the habit of thinking ahead in very modest stretches.
But after two long days of analyzing her thoughts, she came to the realization that she was scared. Brian terrified her. He was so alive, his commitment to life so vital. He demanded from her the same passionate thirst. No holding back.
Take the transplant issue, for instance. Brian saw the chance for a better life and reached right out for it, asking her to do the same, demanding that she ignore her dread. Irrational dread. Foolish, queasy reticence that stood in the way of a new life for them both. Or at least the possibility.
The very idea of another heart taking up residence under her rib cage made her skin creep with goose-flesh. I have enough trouble coping with my own soul, she protested. Don’t ask me to sublet my insides to some stranger.
Why was she talking to him? she asked herself. He was gone, and she was back in her constrained little niche where she belonged, safe and comfortable, cocooned in a world of invalidism. What she was, she decided, was an emotional shut-in, and Brian’s headlong leap into her existence made her dizzy.
But the acknowledgment of her own reluctance to participate in life did nothing to ease her grief. She resigned herself to three months of mourning, figuring that the pain would begin to fade by midsummer. But this past week she found herself watching the second hand creep around her watch face past infinitesimal bits of time.
This morning she had awakened at six, dismayed that she couldn’t sleep away a few more hours. She dragged herself out of bed and went to stand in front of the mirror.
Sickly cheeks and dark blotches under the eyes—corpses look better, she thought. Remembering her crack to Brian about necrophilia, she sudden
ly felt that if she didn’t see him again, she might just as well drop in at the local mortician. Frank E. Campbell’s was right up the street. She could put on a white dress, pick up a bouquet of lilies from the florist across Madison Avenue, and take a flying leap into the plushest unoccupied coffin.
Brian smashed the ball as hard as he could. It slammed into the tape at the top of the net and dropped with a small plop onto his side of the court. He threw his racquet at the net and began pacing back and forth at the baseline.
Susan stared at him from the other side, wide-eyed and silent. After a minute Brian walked slowly to his racquet, picked it up, shook his head at Susan, and headed for the bench where he’d put his jacket and warm-up suit. She followed him off the court and gathered up her things.
“Sorry,” he said as they started for the changing rooms.
“What’s the matter?” she asked. He just shook his head. “Can I help?”
“Don’t think so,” he answered, but he put his arm around her shoulders.
They shared a cab uptown. Brian was silent the whole trip. Susan kept giving him surreptitious glances, but she finally realized he wasn’t even aware of her presence and she could stare at him with impunity.
In the elevator she took a deep breath and said, “Brian, I want you to come home with me.”
He looked at her with surprise, as if she’d jarred him out of a dream. ‘Thanks, but not tonight.”
“I think it would be a very good idea.”
He shook his head. The elevator stopped at the seventh floor, and she stood against the door, holding it open. She pulled at his arm. “Come on.” She smiled at him. “Please. Keep me company.”
He smiled back at her finally and nodded.
In bed he clung to her as if he were drowning. Susan found herself murmuring, “I’ve missed you. Brian, I’ve missed you.” Their lovemaking was quick, desperate for them both. Afterward, Susan gazed at his profile in the shadows next to her. He stared up at the ceiling, and except for the glint of light from his eyes, he might as well have been made of stone. After a while he sat up on the edge of the bed and turned to look at her. His smile was full of apology and sorrow, and when he put his hand to her cheek, Susan swallowed hard to keep herself from crying.
