Change of Heart

by Sally Mandel

  “I’m sorry,” he said softly, then got up, slipped his clothes on, and let himself out the front door.

  The courtroom was almost devoid of spectators. One old man leaned against the wooden arm of his bench, sleeping. There were six children, about ten years old, with a middle-aged black woman. A field trip, perhaps—schoolchildren learning about the American system of justice.

  The jurors sat quietly along the wall. Perhaps it was the first day of this particular trial, because they seemed slightly awed, and all their faces were attentive.

  The judge, gray-haired and berobed, presided on the raised platform opposite his audience. He scribbled notes for a few moments, and when he looked up, his face seemed more businesslike than solemn.

  Back and forth across the center of the room between the judge and the spectators strode the young man. His pacing was not restless, nor were his words impassioned, but he seemed to require the motion of his body in order to speak. His steps were steady, his sentences quiet and deliberate. He glanced often at the jury, directing his attention to them rather than to the tense, corpulent man in the witness stand. Every eye was riveted on him, every head tilted toward him slightly so as not to miss a word.

  A slim figure stood in the doorway, half hidden. In the pale face were enormous dark eyes that gazed at the young man with sorrowful longing. The figure stood very still, watching, for a few moments. Then, with reluctance, the eyes dropped, the figure turned away, and just as the young man lifted his face, it slipped unseen into the hallway outside. He hesitated for a moment, as if he’d lost the thread of his thoughts, then began to walk again, and as he walked, the words continued in their quiet, steady flow.

  That evening Brian sat in his apartment while it grew dark. He didn’t bother turning on the lights, and although his mouth was very dry, he couldn’t work up the energy to get himself a drink. It had been years since he’d allowed himself a moment devoted solely to self-pity—not since his mother died. Whenever he had felt lonely in the empty apartment, he went out and found himself some companionship or talked Susan into a game of tennis or a friendly hour or two in bed. When he had lost an important case, he immediately threw himself into the next one.

  Not tonight, however. Nor the three weeks of nights preceding this one. So many hours of feeling sorry for himself. Again today his work had seemed meaningless. Then there was the late afternoon tennis match with another lawyer, who, for the first time, whipped Brian soundly and thought he’d been sent straight to heaven.

  Last week he had removed everything of Sharlie’s: the snapshots from the instant-photo booth in Woolworth’s in which she was making faces just like, she had said, Marlene Dietrich; a barrette he’d found under a pillow on the couch; two paperback books (a collection of Yeats’s poetry and a mystery story by Dick Francis that she thought he might like). He gathered everything into a small heap and stuffed it down the incinerator.

  Barbara had asked him if he’d like to plan a two-week vacation somewhere. She hated his vacations and had always become surly before he took time away from the office, so he was touched that she made the gesture. But there was no place he wanted to go. And there was nothing that eased the paralyzing mixture of gloom, anger, helplessness, and overwhelming need. He kept telling himself he’d give up just one more hour to wallowing in misery and then maybe he’d get back to his life with some degree of efficiency.

  Goddamn her, he thought. His eye caught the newspaper clipping he’d shown her, and he grabbed it from the desk, crumpled it furiously into a tiny angry wad, and tossed it at the wastebasket, smiling bitterly when it fell short of the rim.

  Wasn’t there something or someone to pin the blame on? Maybe Sharlie was right. Maybe it was an elaborate joke fabricated by her Great Creep in the Sky. The thought made him uneasy, and he asked God to excuse it. Somewhere in his head a remnant of Presbyterianism still lurked.

  It was just that everybody seemed to desert him. First his mother, and even now it hurt as if it had happened last week. Maybe because of the guilt for not being there. Maybe because, from what he could make out, her death hadn’t been necessary. She wasn’t that sick at first, and it enraged him that nobody bothered to fix her up while it still would have done some good. His father’s fault, nearsighted old bastard.

  With whom rested desertion number two? Brian supposed it was a toss-up as to who walked out on whom, but God knew he worked very hard to get a response out of the man. Displeasure was simple enough, but Brian knew that pleasing his father meant to quit toting home academic honors and instead put on his hip boots and wade out into the manure with Robert and Marcus. If it hadn’t been for his mother, maybe he would have, he was so damn eager to make his father happy. In retrospect, she must have had a tough time of it keeping his father off his back about school.

  Brian used to watch his face when she handed him his report card. He would have liked to hold a magnifying glass up to those stony eyes to see if there was maybe a flicker of pride there someplace. Nothing. Maybe a grunt. Brian had been shocked at graduation after his valedictory speech when his father shook his hand. There was water in the old man’s eyes. Maybe it was the air conditioning.

  But the granite cracked when his mother died. Not at the funeral, or even at the cemetery. Not until they all sat around afterward in the old farmhouse wondering where all the warmth had gone. Four grown men with their hands on their knees not knowing what to do with themselves without her standing in the middle dispensing smiles and lentil soup.

  At first Brian had thought his father was choking on his pipe, that weird gagging noise, but then he had looked closely and seen that the man was crying. Didn’t even bother to cover his face, just sat there with the tears dripping onto his lap. Robert and Marcus got up and left him to it, but Brian figured he’d just sit there with him even if he didn’t know anyone was there.

  The old man deserved to grieve, self-centered old piece of Pennsylvania slate rock. He should have saved her.

  And now Sharlie. Brian never thought himself a masochist, but taking an objective view of the facts, he had to wonder. She told him she was going to die, but who ever believed that? Too goddamn melodramatic.

  Somewhere he’d read that neurotics repeat destructive situations or traumatic events over and over again, helplessly reliving some tragic pattern in the vain hope that, okay, folks, this time you watch, it’s gonna work out fine. And of course it never does. Did he choose Sharlie, knowing how ill she was, figuring he’d make her all better and relieve himself of the guilt he felt about his mother?

  He reached out a long leg and kicked idly at the wastebasket.

  Oh, for Christ’s sake, he thought I sound like Susan. Poor Susan with the quotations from her incessant assortment of Manhattan shrinks.

  It all came down to the same thing, and that was that he couldn’t stop wanting the girl. They were hooked up in some basic way, some psychic way, perhaps, as if when she took a step, his foot moved too. In the middle of the night when she rolled over in her bed on Seventy-fifth Street, his body must turn to face hers, his arms reaching out for her. Someone would have to explain to him how there could possibly be anything wrong inside a body so beautiful. And her eyes. And watching her come to life sexually. Oh, he’d been blessed, and if he never saw her again, that was something he wouldn’t forget in his lifetime. Not if a thousand other women sat on his lap and took off their clothes.

  If I never see her again …

  The room had gone completely dark, but Brian remained immobilized in his chair. The word intolerable kept flashing in his head, so he continued repeating “never see her again,” hoping that eventually the concept would entrench itself in that mental collection of unpleasant facts where his mother’s death was now firmly embedded.

  He looked down at his hands and flexed them, his fingers remembering the texture of her skin, the long, soft lines of her body. When he had held her, one hand on each side of her rib cage with the padded area beneath hi
s thumbs touching the round beginnings of her breasts … how the hell was he supposed to live like this? She was used to pain. She’d transformed it into Agony Jones, someone as familiar as a lifelong boarder. How could she leave him before she’d taught him how?

  It was past midnight when the doorbell rang. She stood in the soft light of the hallway, and he stared at her, unable to speak or move. She smiled a little, shook her head, and said, “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Or something.”

  He reached out a hand and pulled her through the door. He held her as gently as he could, mustering barely enough control to keep from crushing her. She buried her head in his shirt, and he could hear her saying, “I can’t do it anymore. I can’t, I can’t…”

  Chapter 16

  Sharlie’s face suddenly went frozen on him, and he knew she was thinking about her father’s return tomorrow. They had crammed so much into these past two weeks, and both of them dreaded Walter Converse’s reentry into their world.

  The crosstown bus was packed with chattering children waving their Ice Capades program guides and the spinning toys that glowed in the dark. Sharlie had been fascinated with the spectacle when the lights went down in Madison Square Garden and all those whirling red circles began to dance in the darkness. She said it made her feel like the Statue of Liberty the night of the Bicentennial celebration when they surrounded the great monument with fireworks. He laughed and asked her where she kept her torch.

  The bus lurched to a stop at Fifth Avenue, and the standees stumbled forward en masse, shrieking and giggling. Brian felt Sharlie looking at him and turned to smile at her.

  “What’re you thinking about, lady?” he asked. She shook her head. “You’re smirking at me,” he insisted, then looked at his shirt. “Lousy combination with these pants, is that it?” She grinned and shook her head again. He said, “Well? Well?”

  “I love you,” she said. Suddenly it seemed to Brian that her eyes had captured the crystal laughter of all the children on the bus and were beaming the joy back to him, transformed from sound into brilliant light. He leaned his face close to hers and said, “What was that again, Miss? Speak up, will you?”

  Sharlie bellowed, “I said I love you!”

  Everyone in the bus turned to stare at them, and Sharlie sat there, flushed and smiling and very proud of herself.

  They picked up their dinner at the deli on the corner near Brian’s building. So close to Walter’s return, they both felt the unspoken need to be alone together without the intrusion of other people’s eyes on them in a public restaurant. They spread their rolls and cold cuts and containers of potato salad on a blanket in the living room and drank soda from coffee mugs.

  Sharlie didn’t touch her sandwich, and when she got up and headed for the bathroom, Brian thought she might be ill.

  “You okay?” he called after her.

  She turned to give him a strange smile, almost conspiratorial. Her eyes were sparkling. “I’m fine,” she said, and disappeared beyond the doorway.

  After what seemed like a long time, Brian called “Hey!” He heard a muffled sound from his bedroom. Alarmed, he sprang up and ran to find her.

  She was sitting on the edge of his bed, gazing up at him, a streak of ink on her chin and torn fragments of paper beside her on the bed. He was about to burst out at her in baffled relief when he suddenly noticed something pinned to her sweater over her right breast. It was the remains of her paper napkin cut into the shape of a heart. On it she had written, Out of order. To be replaced.

  Brian’s eyes snapped up to her face, staring closely to make sure there was no mistake. She was grinning at him.

  “It’s too late for Margaret Mead. I would have loved to get Margaret Mead’s heart. You think they can find me one like hers?”

  Brian toppled her over onto the bed and crushed her to him until she howled in protest.

  Alone in her dark room she lay watching the red glow of the souvenir toy peering at her from the bookcase like a giant crimson eye. Brian had bought it secretly when he’d left his seat for the refreshment stand, and surprised her by slipping it into her coat pocket when he brought her home. He said it was for luck. God knows they needed it.

  But she wasn’t going to think about that. Now was the proper time to remember today before it faded, to go over its contours and impress them into her memory so she could always retrace them.

  Why was it she cried during the show? She’d been embarrassed and told Brian her sinuses were bothering her, but the moment the skaters came gliding out onto the ice in their crazy, tacky, ludicrously sequined and beplumed finery, she choked up. Same thing with parades. No matter if it was the gnarled old codgers from the Ancient Order of Bison, straggling up Fifth Avenue in moth-eaten uniforms to the bleating of a dented trumpet. The tears came with the ceremony somehow. The Olympic Games were always worth a box of Kleenex—all that running around in body suits with eternal flames. What was it Yeats had said about ceremony? She’d have to look it up in the morning.

  Odd that she’d never been to an ice show before. She enjoyed skating competitions on television and was familiar enough with the participants to discuss with her father the relative merits of Peggy Fleming or Dorothy Hamill or even Tenley Albright, whom she remembered because the name appealed to her. She never missed an old Sonja Henie movie on The Late Show. So why had she never gone to a real live performance?

  She supposed she’d been afraid of the crowds. So many people in that huge stadium, so unlike the staid glamour of the concert hall. What if she got sick? How would she get out? She’d be trapped.

  But with Brian she was safe. She smiled to herself in the darkness and thought that if he said, Hey, see that tightrope a hundred feet above the ground with no net that you’ve never been on in your life? Let’s walk across it, it’ll be fun, and don’t worry, I won’t let you fall, she’d nod her head and say, Of course, and go find herself a pair of spangled tights.

  Which was approximately what she was doing, she thought ruefully, except that the odds of surviving a transplant probably weren’t as favorable as taking a long stroll on a tightrope. Oh God, they’d better give her the heart of a Flying Wallenda or she wouldn’t have the heart to go through with it, pardon the idiom. If they’d let her choose, she thought she could manage the whole thing with a little more aplomb—I’d like the one with the sexy aorta and the jaunty beat, please. Just wrap it up, and I’ll take it with me.

  She fell asleep imagining a glass case in Bendel’s lined with plush blue velvet, displaying gleaming kidneys, hearts, and eyes.

  She was in a small room, dark except for a smoky red glow that vaguely outlined her figure. Brian appeared, but no words were spoken. He held out his hand for hers, and she began to fall out of reach. She tried to call to him, but her mouth opened soundlessly as she fell backward, slowly, slowly. The sight of his face and of his outstretched hand grew dim as she fell, the distance to the floor a descent through miles of hot, dark, suffocating space. Inside her head she screamed his name but knew he couldn’t hear her, and soon even that inner voice blurred until, just as she reached the floor, all consciousness ended.

  She awoke in terror, gasping, realizing that she’d been holding her breath in her sleep. Her sheets were clammy, her hair soaked, and she lay unmoving as her body chilled. After a while she turned her electric blanket up as high as it would go, but she did not get warm again.

  Chapter 17

  While Walter boarded the plane at Heathrow, Margaret was sitting in her quiet living room, the morning sun streaming in the window to warm the back of her neck as she labored over a baby sweater she’d been knitting. Margaret tried not to think about her husband’s return and concentrated instead on the little baby, her only niece’s child. Always a great-aunt and never a grandmother, she thought, her fingers working the thin yellow wool into an intricate pattern. She wished she had a little baby around again, a baby she could take care of herself, not like with
Sharlie when they made her go away and leave the nursing to the experts. Walter always said she didn’t hold her right. My Lord, such lovely pale skin she’d had, like porcelain. It was still the same. Except that lately it’d gotten quite pink and healthy looking. Obviously Sharlie was seeing her young man again. The girl was so oblivious to everybody else that watching her these days was like sitting behind a one-way mirror. Two weeks ago she was so absorbed in grief, so gray and sickly it was plain she’d broken off with him, just as she said she would. Frightened by the pinched, ghostly face, Margaret had become alarmed enough to hope for a reunion.

  Had the Concorde left the runway in London yet?

  Her head still told her that the relationship between Sharlie and Brian was impossible, and of course Margaret would never actively defy Walter’s wishes. But if somehow it were all beyond her control, if the children were to run off together in the middle of the night …

  Maybe Walter would be delayed, maybe he’d transfer himself to the London office, maybe something would happen to his plane … Oh, Margaret, shame, shame. And besides, how would she get along without him? She couldn’t possibly manage.

  In her preoccupation she had somehow dropped a stitch two rows back, leaving a noticeable gap in the complicated pattern. She stared helplessly at the defect, then suddenly found herself ripping at the fine wool, tearing out row after row, passing the site of her mistake until she had destroyed the entire piece, weeks of careful, painstaking work. She had begun to cry, and she gathered up the tangled spaghettilike pile to bury her face in its softness. After a few minutes she took a deep breath, got up, and carried the chaotic remains of her handiwork into the kitchen, dumped it into a paper bag, and stuffed it in the garbage can underneath this morning’s coffee grounds.