Change of Heart
Page 12
He smiled. “What’ve you got against turnips? A sturdy, humble American plant, and don’t they give them to you at Thanksgiving? Very apt.”
“I hate turnips.” She reached out for his right hand. He had kept it on his lap out of sight. Now she contemplated the cast and looked at him questioningly.
“A brief moment of irritation,” he said.
“Did you take a swipe at my father?”
“Ah ha,” he said, attempting a Viennese accent. “Classic fantasy, my dear.”
“Maybe that’s why he’s so docile.”
“The next time you take a stroll past ICU, there’s this picture hanging in a rather peculiar spot—kind of rib level. An ocean sunset, very phosphorescent.”
“You put your hand through the wall.”
He nodded.
She said thoughtfully, “What a waste.”
“Of energy?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “You should have aimed at Walter.”
“You know,” he said, tracing her fingers where they lay on his cast. “You’re a lot more fun when you’re conscious. You’d be dynamite with a new heart.”
“Will they let you come?”
He grinned. “I am now considered essential to your health. They’ll pack me onto the plane along with your Valium.”
“When do you think we’ll have to go?” Her voice quavered a little.
“Depends on beds. Soon, though.” Her lower lip began to tremble. “You going to marry me?” he asked.
“You’re insane. Get off my back, Morgan.”
“I’d rather be on your front”
“Brian, they’ll cut me all up and stick somebody else’s heart inside me, and you won’t love me anymore, and goddammit, I’m going to cry, oh, damn, damn …”
Brian leaned over the bed and held her, stroking her hair with his one good hand.
Chapter 23
Walter told Sharlie that Diller was like a pig in shit, rushing around making arrangements and throwing his weight all over the place. He’d managed to get himself a leave of absence from Saint Joe’s for “research” so that he could “supervise” the procedures in Santa Bel. Of course, Walter realized Diller was eager to check out the transplant center so that when he wormed the millions out of the Converse Trust, he could establish himself at the head of his own renowned medical warehouse in New York.
Sharlie lay back and gave herself over to the excitement and flurry of arrangements. Brian and her parents seemed relieved to be doing something finally, and they competed for every errand.
“I’ll do it.”
“No, I’ll do it.”
“No, I’ll be in the area, it’s simple for me. I’ll do it.”
Finally Sharlie would say, “Oh, for God’s sake, I don’t have anything better to do. I’ll do it.” And she’d make as if she were about to spring from her bed.
They all laughed a lot, though Sharlie felt her own giggles rising perilously close to hysteria. Breathing had now become difficult for her, but the pain had all but disappeared. Diller couldn’t understand exactly why this should be, and theorized about it with alternately hopeful and ominous speculations. Sharlie just closed her eyes and blessed the departure of Agony Jones even as she panted and gasped through the days, fighting for air with her slightest movement.
Today she had dozed away the morning because each time she tried to reach for her magazine, she began to feel like a fish expiring on a creek bank. She finally managed to dial Brian at his office and informed him she was attempting to make an obscene call.
“Are you (gasp) that lawyer (gasp) I read about in the Times who’s (gasp) defending the fornication case (gasp, gasp)?”
Brian replied, “Why, yes, madam.”
“Well I just (gasp) want to tell you that I’d (gasp) like to … (gasp)”
“Like to what, lady?”
“… to … (gasp) to get a look at your … (gasp). … fornicator.”
He laughed and said, “That’s supposed to be obscene?”
“Well, I’ve got this heart condition, see, mister (puff, puff), and I can’t let the fantasies get (gasp) out of hand. If you know what I mean.”
“Tell you what I’ll stop by your place this afternoon and give you a quick glimpse.”
“Okay,” she said. They hung up. She couldn’t seem to tell him how frightened she felt.
Finally he was sitting on her bed, and she was telling him about the obscene caller she’d had when she was eighteen.
“He was foreign or illiterate or both, and he said things like, ‘Your teeths is good to eat, and I wan’ it’ or ‘I see you lower part up to the window, and I get you wit’ my things.’”
Brian laughed incredulously, and she said, “No, really. I couldn’t bear to give him up, so I never reported it to the phone company.”
“Does he still call?”
She shook her head. “He did it once when Daddy was home.…”
“Oh, Jesus,” said Brian.
“Daddy picked up the downstairs extension and outobscened the poor man.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Sad. I looked forward to it.”
“Listen, honey,” Brian said gruffly. “I’ll give you some stuff to melt your ear right off your head. Matter of fact, I’m gonna give you a little treat right now and show you my fornicator.”
He stood up and started to undo his belt. Sharlie whispered to him to stop, delighted.
“How you gonna know what I got to offer, doll? Gotta see da moichandize, right?”
Ramón Rodriguez poked his head through the door. “Need anything, Sharlie?”
Brian made a show of zipping up his pants, very cool and casual. Sharlie groaned, and the nurse nodded, gave them a conspiratorial grin, and backed quickly out of the room.
“Oh, Lord,” Sharlie wailed. “He thinks we’ve been messing around on my deathbed.”
Brian looked at her as if his eyes could never get enough, then grabbed her and held her as hard as he dared.
They left the hospital amid great fanfare. Everyone on the eleventh floor gathered at the elevator to send Sharlie off in style. Someone had attached half a dozen balloons to her wheelchair and a sign that said, Send This Kid a Sexy Donor, crayoned across the back.
As they drove away from the front entrance in Walter’ s sleek silver car, they passed the open plaza where many of the hospital staff took coffee breaks or enjoyed a picnic lunch. Today was a shining May morning, and Sharlie looked out at the white-clad groups of nurses and interns and thought they looked like crocuses standing in the warm spring sun. She grabbed for Margaret’s hand and squeezed it happily.
The flights to California were heavily booked, but Walter finally managed to reserve three first-class seats. The OPEC representatives were meeting in New York for two weeks, which meant Walter couldn’t go to California. Brian and Margaret let him vent his frustration by making all their travel arrangements. They watched the man tackle obstacles as if the trip were a religious crusade and each impediment the devil’s foot, set in his path to trip up the forces of justice and truth.
For Sharlie, the flight was enchanting. She had always loved excursions; even a ride in a taxi from her house to the opera was delicious—something about the sensation of moving, or surrendering herself to the driver’s skill, of not knowing what view would speed past next outside the window. It gave her a sense of adventure.
“Have you ever been across the country?” she asked Brian, holding his hand tightly as the pilot announced that they were cleared for takeoff.
“Not when I could see anything,” he said.
Margaret intoned sepulchrally, “I have.” She sat across from Brian in the aisle seat, gripping her armrests to brace herself for their inevitable crash.
Sharlie smiled and told her mother to relax. Margaret nodded stiffly, as though each slight movement were a possible threat to the precarious balance of the wings.
“It’s so sexy,” she said. Margaret stared with fixed eyes at a financial magazine, and Sharlie said to Brian, “Ask Mother if she thinks it’s sexy.”
Margaret glared across Brian at Sharlie’s mischievous smile, and Sharlie felt sudden remorse. As she looked into her mother’s sad, strained face, she imagined that she had experienced more physical joy in her aborted hours with Brian than her mother had known in a lifetime with her father.
Chapter 24
Walter looked out the window of his office and listened to Sharlie’s clock chime six bells. The sound pleased him, although at first its brilliant ringing had disconcerted everyone on the thirty-ninth floor. But if he closed his eyes, he could imagine himself at the wheel of a mighty ship, pushing through the gray ocean swells, alone in command against the sea.
He’d always been attracted to the ocean and was mortified and disappointed when the navy rejected him for sea duty during the war. Instead, they’d dumped him in Washington at one of those agencies where everybody pushed little flags around on maps and boozed it up in the officers’ lounge. Every time Walter spotted a sailor home on leave, he’d felt ashamed.
He looked down over the concrete shadows of Manhattan. Why was he so enamored of the water? He’d never lived near it except for those couple of summers up in Maine when he was, what, about six or seven. When Father was still alive. He imagined that tall, dim figure, towering above him in the bright afternoon, his back to the sun so that the light outlined his body and his features were a hazy blur. He remembered still his sense of awe gazing up at the man—the rough shirt against Walter’s bare legs as he was lifted up and set on the broad shoulders—smooth tree branches under his hard little bottom. Walter had dropped his pail on the way up, he remembered, and hadn’t even cared if the sand he’d so carefully tamped down and soaked with saltwater got kicked over and crushed under his father’s bare feet.
Where was Mother then? He had to strain to find her. Finally he caught a quick glimpse of her, smiling and wearing a pale flowered dress, of all things. Maybe memory lied. He couldn’t imagine now that she’d really have worn such a fanciful thing, and the face he put with the summer memory was old and haggard and stern, and didn’t belong with the soft folds of the full skirt anymore than the sunburned hands she held out to him, so young and full of whimsical motion. He knew that her fingers had become arthritic by the time she reached forty, and she always held them quietly in her lap, a twisted bouquet, gnarled memorial to her youth.
Eight bells already. He shook his head, trying to clear away the unproductive clutter of memories and daydreams. The sky outside his window was gray—no discrete clouds, just a shabby curtain that seemed to stretch across the entire universe. Hard to believe the sun was probably shining in California.
The plane should be landing just about now. God damn, to have to sit here until tomorrow while God knows what was going on in Santa Bel. For sure they were screwing it all up, getting the records confused, paying too much for housing near the hospital, renting the wrong kind of car. That Brian Morgan was in such a fog over Sharlie he could barely find his way out of the Midtown Tunnel.
Then he remembered Margaret. How peculiar that her image emerged so distinctly when she’d always seemed just another incidental detail to cope with, someone to invent harmless errands for so she’d be out from underfoot. But as he thought of her now, it was as if she’d changed color. She had always seemed beige or pale gray—a shadow, really, and sometimes less than that, a transparency. Today the word Margaret evoked a darker shape—not completely formed, the outline was changing, indefinite, but her color, he decided, was vivid enough—a splash of deep violet What the hell was happening to the woman? Or was it happening to him?
The extraordinary thing of it was that once he got past the initial shock of her behavior, she didn’t seem all that strange to him. As a matter of fact she reminded him very much of his mother.
He grunted aloud in the empty office and forced himself to concentrate on Sharlie and the operation. He always preferred to plan ahead so that there’d be no surprises. Nothing wrong with his ability to think on his feet and make split-second decisions under fire, but here he was stuck with the frigging sheikh until tomorrow morning. He might as well try to put himself closer to Santa Bel by at least giving it some thought.
The odd thing was, the harder he tried to think about his daughter, the more he saw Margaret’s face. The more he tried to blot it out the sharper into focus came the image of Margaret bending over Sharlie’s body on the dining room floor, thrusting his arm away when he tried to help. Amazing what a little bit of loathing can do to a person. Not that he ever thought that she was head-over-heels or anything, but hate he didn’t expect. It really wasn’t fair of her. He was only saying what had to be said. His mind veered away from the detested scenario, but the silent accusation of the rebellious Margaret, crouched over their daughter, confronted him stubbornly. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. Margaret, he thought, I’m sick of your face. Go away already.
Chapter 25
California. Like landing on the moon, Sharlie thought, as they whirred silently down wide, flat streets in the ambulance. Brian and Margaret sat on either side of her, holding her hands, and they all stared out the window. To Sharlie, western flora seemed like prehistoric beasts—stubbly trees with knuckles where there should have been branches, nothing leafy except for scattered palm trees, long-necked creatures with frazzled clumps of green on top. The fearsome Conconutus rex and his vegetarian sidekick, Palmetto dinosaurus.
Even the ambulance attendants were alien. A young woman with a naturally streaked blond mane, and a young man—her brother, perhaps—with strawberry hair, freckles, and a cleft chin. Sharlie found herself expecting them to offer her a stick of Doublemint gum.
She gazed admiringly at the girl. “Do you surf?”
The attendant shook her head.
“Doesn’t everybody in California surf?”
“Not around here,” the young man said, flashing his white teeth at her. Sharlie stared at them, transfixed.
“What do you do around here?” Brian asked.
They both answered at once: She said, “Disco”; he said, “Movies.” They laughed, and the girl said, “Oh, we just lie around our swimming pools with movie stars picking grapefruits off the trees.”
“Have you ever been to New York?” Sharlie asked. The girl shook her head, grimacing a little. Sharlie thought, Nobody looks like that in New York. People from the West must come to the city. What happens to them? Do they get covered with soot and turn pale and pinched and anxiety-ridden on their way in from La Guardia?
They pulled into the emergency entrance of the Santa Bel Medical Center and removed Sharlie from the ambulance—a very smooth and efficient operation, not the usual Laurel and Hardy routine of the New York crew, with all the accompanying grunts and complaints: Hey, schmuck, whadya tryna do with this here sick lady? Tryna shake her brains loose or what?
Before she knew it, they were whisked through Admissions, leaving a businesslike Margaret to remain downstairs and cope with the paperwork. Sharlie was deposited in a bright room with pale-yellow walls and flowered drapes. Before the attendants had even left them, a nurse with a name tag that read, Irene Wynick R.N., entered. She said, “Welcome, Miss Converse. Mister Morgan. How was the trip?”
Sharlie said, “Fine,” in a cowed voice.
Nurse Wynick nodded. “This afternoon you will have a chest X ray and an EKG. We’ll take some blood and urine samples, and that’ll be it. Mainly we want you to rest
. Tomorrow we’ll begin the other tests. You can have a few more minutes, and then I’ll have to ask Mr. Morgan to leave.”
She tucked in a loose sheet at the bottom of Sharlie’s bed. On her way out she turned to Brian and said, “Fifteen minutes.”
Sharlie and Brian looked at each other in silence, then Sharlie breathed, “Boy, they don’t mess around in California.” Brian laughed. “It took me three trips to Saint Joe’s before they got my name straight,” she said, “and they still send me the wrong tray. I’m not used to this, I mean, these guys are scary.”
“On my way out I’ll see if I can arrange a little screw-up in the medication.”
“I’d appreciate it.” She fell silent again.
“Scared?” he asked.
“Yup.” After a moment she said, “How many minutes have we got left?”
He looked at his watch. “Twelve. And a half.”
“I bet they split them into centiminutes around here. Give me a hug and go, okay? I can’t take the anticipation.”
“Oh, honey,” he said, leaning over her.
“Oh, shit,” she said, and kissed him. He looked at her in mock horror at her use of the word. “Well, I’ve been associating with the wrong sort of people lately.” She felt tears beginning at the tenderness in his face. “Go,” she whispered, giving him a little shove.
He lifted himself away from her, and with a wave left her alone.
Sharlie listened to his footsteps disappear down the hallway toward the elevator—characteristic sound, no muted shuffling in hushed hospital corridors, but bold, loose-limbed strides. She remembered the first time he’d come to see her at Saint Joe’s, how she’d been seized with identical panic at his leaving her. What if she were a normal woman and they fell in love just like anybody else? Barbie doll standing at the front door waiting for a chaste kiss from Ken doll before he set off for his job at the insurance company. Would she still feel the same horrible tearing sensation when he withdrew from her, would her insides bleed all over her little white apron and cover adorable Ken junior with blood and gore? Brian once said he felt like diving head-first down her throat. How she’d love to swallow him whole and let him live inside her.