The Girl With the Glass Heart: A Novel (33 page)

The phone buzzed and Elly took it. “Alec,” she screamed, “it’s for you.” Turning to Jay she said: “You don’t know how wonderful it is having Alec home again and around the house all day. You can’t know.” And Jay felt a twinge of wonder as to how much Elly could concentrate on any one subject, no matter how exciting, before another one came along.

“Yes,” he said, “it must be,” and turned back to the piano.

“It’s a telegram,” she told Alec as he picked up the phone. They said nothing while Alec got his message, Jay thinking it might be Annette, although rather doubtful of this, and Elly thinking it was from her, but, unlike Jay, quite sure of it.

“My agent,” Alec said. He wore his pajamas. One side of his face was red and creased with sleep and his eyes were bleary. “Got a job in a picture starting October first. Also a picture I did a bit in last year is being released. Said it’s a pretty big part in this one.”

“Alec, that’s wonderful!” Jay exclaimed.

“Yes.” Elly kissed his cheek. “Congratulations and wake up.”

Alec rubbed his reddened cheek vigorously and said, “I’m up. I heard Jay playing. Has somebody got a cigarette? … I could have sworn it would have been Anny.”

Elly turned away sharply, picked up a silver cigarette box, flipped open the lid and extended it to Alec. “A job like that is good news, isn’t it?” she said.

He nodded and puffed the cigarette into a glow. “Isn’t anything in this house just a simple wooden box or something?” he said, holding the cigarette box up and looking at it distastefully. “Sure, it’s terrific news…. Where’s Max?” He turned to go.

“Wait a minute, Alec! We’ve got a tremendous idea to tell you. Tell him, Jay.”

“Huh-uh. It’s your idea. You present it.” Jay smiled a little self-consciously and turned away. Alec dropped onto a chair and said, “Let’s have it.”

“Alec, Jay’s going to give a concert. Right here in the house this week. We’ll invite whoever we want to. He’s got the drive to practice and we ought to get him while he’s hot.”

Alec stood up and walked over to Jay. “That’s the best thing I’ve heard in a long time. You know how I felt about your giving up playing. It’s about time the waste was over.”

Jay shrugged. “The waste will never be over with a guy like me, but at least it’ll be a start. Just a start—that’s all it is.”

“That’s enough. I’m really glad…. Where the hell are Max and Rose?”

“Dad’s in town and Mom’s around here somewhere. I’ll get her.”

Elly was gone, and Alec glanced at Jay.

“Well, boy,” he said, “who’d have thought it, eh? The art boys back home, that’s us. Your wife and my family. Screw ’em! How do you feel about all this?”

“You mean Elly?”

“Yeah, Elly and what seems to be moving you along.”

“I feel great. A little bewildered but great. I almost feel guilty about you and Annette, what with all this—”

“Never mind that. You can’t do me any good there, so concentrate on your own good luck.”

Rose appeared, a rather tense smile on her big face.

“What a wonderful idea! We can have it like a catered affair, sort of, and I’ll invite everyone. It’s very nice of you, Jay, to think of something like this in our house. I know Max will think it’s a regular honor.”

“What night will it be?” Elly asked excitedly.

“We’d better wait till Yom Kippur night. How’s that?” Rose asked. But it was not a question. It was settled, with that remark, for the night of Yom Kippur.

“We can have it as a party-concert for the breaking of the fast,” Alec said.

“When did you ever fast, my religious brother-in-law?” Rose laughed.

“That’s true. When did I? Anyway, whoever has fasted can break it at the concert.”

“Do you fast on Yom Kippur, Jay?” Elly asked.

He shook his head. “No, but I’ve been fasting from music a long time and I’ll break that one at the concert.”

Alec returned to his room to dress and Rose vanished to the kitchen to break the news to Mimi and Justin.

“Come on, talented,” Elly said and, holding Jay’s hand, pulled him out of the room. “Let me show you
my
talent. Or at least my memory.”

In her room she showed him the painting, accompanied by a stream of words: “Remember? Remember the painting in Alec’s place in Los Angeles—the girl, lost in the woods? Well, this is my contribution—a boy. You see, I changed it.”

“Yes, I see. It’s amazing that you could remember it so well after seeing it just once.”

“You mean you’re not going to talk about impasto and chiaroscuro and all that?”

“Nope. The most sophisticated thing I can say about this painting is that it’s nice.”

“Nice! That’s the last thing in the world it is. It’s depressing.”

“You know what Alec said about it, don’t you? How it was a barometer for the way he was feeling when he looked at it—whether or not the kid would ever get out of the woods.”

“Well, what do you think? Is this one going to make it?”

“Sure.” He smiled. “This one’s almost out now.”

“Good,” she said. “I’m glad you liked it. Go practice. You’ve got a concert coming up in a few days.”

“That’s right, I have. But don’t listen.”

When he was gone, Elly took a tube of white paint and squeezed some onto the canvas. Slowly she smeared it over the green forest, over the boy standing trapped among the trees, covering it all with a thick blur of fresh white paint. She played God in this manner for a half hour until the painting was an unrecognizable horror, while from the living room came the sounds of scales and arpeggios played over and over again. There was a faint throbbing in the lump in her thumb, and she waited anxiously, as one waits for a telephone conversation to begin, for the pulsing to develop into a pain, but it did not and finally the throbbing disappeared, leaving only a memory and the sensation of having been loved.

The next day while the family was having a drink before dinner and Jay was upstairs showering, Elly stood in the kitchen listening to Mimi chattering.

Then it happened, worse than ever before. First, it was like a shadow passing across the glass wall she was facing. Then it was like a great
whoosh
of breath (was this what the sea had been trying to tell her?) blown on the house, clouding up the transparency before her, obscuring the bright sun, and she was gazing at a mirror in which her face was intermingled with Jay’s, and she could not see beyond them. It was because of his face, his love, that the cloudy unreality was so bad now. She held her breath and fought the stinging back of her eyes so that no tears appeared. Finally it was as before. Behind her she heard, with sudden hatred, the sound of the piano and she thought of Alec carrying his remorse and misery about the house all day and of Jay whose playing seemed to be everywhere and all the time now and she thought, fingering gently the lump in her thumb, What a mess I’m making of my life—all the exhilaration gone—What do I really have, not Jay or Alec or being a dancer? Only you, she thought, and held the thumb with its hidden deformity against the now translucent glass.

Jay descended the stairs, refreshed by his shower, and heard someone playing the piano, probably Max Kaufman. Max had mentioned how he had studied many years ago, but could hardly play at all now. It wasn’t really the shower that had exhilarated him, he knew. Since the planning of the concert had begun, he’d been on air, feeling like shouting to people in the streets as they passed, or grabbing little Mimi and kissing her, doing the most incongruous things he could imagine. It reminded him of the time he had signed his first contract with American Concerts. He and Jeannie had linked hands and run up Fifty-seventh Street, laughing and looking at the people they passed, calling to each other: “Don’t they know? Don’t they understand?” pausing, breathless with laughter, to watch the pigeons whirring and catching the bright sunlight on their wings.

When Jay entered the living room, Max had stopped fooling around at the piano and Elly was there, a drink in her hand—and on her lovely, dark face a look of bewilderment, and in the hazel-eyed stare was mirrored some obscure hurt.

John Marron Lang stopped at the hotel desk and asked for enough change to make the call to New York. He could have called from the room, but hotel rooms made him uncomfortable and he didn’t want Lorraine asking him why he sounded so strange and was he sure everything was all right.

Several people turned to stare at him as he passed. He was an impressive-looking man. Long, loose-boned, he strode across the lobby, brushing a shock of gray hair from his eyes set deep in the prominently boned face. With some distaste he glanced at the brightly colored clothes of the Los Angelenos who lounged about the lobby. It was fall and it seemed a little obscene for these people to dress in the outlandish manner that only the summer vacation might on occasion permit.

He stepped into a vacant phone booth and gave the operator the number. Lorraine answered, “Hello.”

“Hello, Lorry. John.”

“Oh, I’m glad you called.”

“Why? Anything wrong?”

“No. No. I’m just glad you called, that’s all. Are you finished with your work?”

“Yes. I finished up yesterday. It went very well.”

“Then you can be home tonight if you fly.”

“Well, no, that’s why I called. Max Kaufman called me here. You remember the Kaufman house I did out in Indiana? Well, he wants me to stop off and take a look at what they’ve done with it and also stay a day or two.”

“John, I want you to come home tonight.”

“I thought you’d say that.”

“Of course I’d say that. You’d think with things the way they are between us that you’d be afraid to leave me at home alone.”

“Lorry, dear, anytime you get the urge you just go right ahead.”

“Don’t try me too far, John. Come on home. You can visit them some other time.”

“No, I’m going. I’ll call you from the Kaufmans’ and let you know when I’m coming home.”

“Any one of these times may be the last time, John. Don’t you know that? Any one of them.”

“Lorry, I’ve grown so used to your threats that I’m anesthetized. You’ll have to try something new.”

“Maybe I’ll try leaving you.”

“All right, Lorraine. All right.”

He expected the click to come when it did, exactly on cue. And it was as if he had deliberately given her the cue to hang up. He hung up too and turned to go when the phone buzzed.

“One moment for your overtime.”

He waited and finally deposited all the change he had, hung up again, walked away swiftly and left the hotel.

He stood on the corner bathed in a garish smear of neon and laughed. He was thinking of Elly and the crazy hope that stirred him whenever he thought of her. Once two years ago they had touched each other, and since then he had, as if it were a parting gift she had given him, the feeling that somehow she was the way out. He could never leave Lorraine, but if one day she would make good on her eternal threat to leave him, what then? Then Elly—Elly who was by now, to Lang, a flutter of ashen hair against a glass wall, a muted cry at the moment of climax, a quality of strength in him, his potent hands, their continual convulsive opening and shutting, for at least one instant, stilled in fulfillment.

Lang crossed the street. He was carrying his overcoat and he slung it over his shoulder now, feeling the way he felt when sometimes, in deep depression, he went to a cheap, stupid movie, one with no pretensions, and from the mock heroics of the actors derived a peculiar sort of satisfaction, as if he could identify himself with the cardboard figure of the hero. While addressing the architects’ convention in Chicago the spring before, he had suddenly become furiously depressed in the middle of his speech, and thought to himself with sly humor: If only they knew that after I leave here I go to a movie downtown and become a pirate or Robin Hood or a great lover.

But I have no right to think of her. I wonder what she thought on receiving my letter? Hell, it was only two years ago, but of course two years at her age is an enormous stretch of time. To me, just a few houses, trips, fights with Lorraine, lies to myself that I’ll leave her. And now the new lie—Elly. God, what a man will do to prove himself a man! Once with her, and twice with that prostitute in Detroit. Once, too, with Lorraine—and the sarcasm afterwards (Well, congratulations! You’re a big boy now).

No wonder he had blown up that little idyllic island of a few days with the Kaufmans out of all proportion. He had enough objectivity to see that. He had no idea what to expect from Elly. He knew only that he must go. Down the street there was a crowd that drew his unfocused attention. He hung around the edge of it and saw that a car had hit someone. Oh my God, he thought, someone’s hit a child. There was no car there now, so it must have been a hit-and-run driver. He pushed his way into the crowd until he could see the small shape lying amid little ribbons of blood, thinking, My God, a child!

It was a rather small dog that was still moving convulsively. Lang turned away, feeling that he had in some way been betrayed. Before his unseeing eyes the long evening and then the night stretched out its lonesome, deceptive arms.

All afternoon Alec had been annoyed at something and unable to place exactly what it was. Now, as they entered the high arch of the synagogue, he realized he hadn’t wanted to come to Shule at all this evening. But the evening before Yom Kippur was one of the most important services and he knew Rose would make a fuss if he declined to attend. Screw all this, he thought, thinking how paralyzed he had been since coming home and how much freer he had felt in L.A. with Annette. This was only a visit, but to keep it a visit one needed a central point to which to return. That had been Annette, but now—

Carl Warschauer stood at the door and Elly was not sure what she would say to him. Carl, however, spoke first.

“How’ve you been, Elly?”

“Fine. Do you know Jay Gordon?”

“I don’t think so. How are you? Happy New Year!”

“Happy New Year!” Jay replied.

“Aren’t you giving a, concert at the Kaufmans’ home tomorrow night? I’ve heard about you.”