The Girl With the Glass Heart: A Novel (38 page)

“Don’t you think fasting includes not drinking, Dr. Warschauer?” he asked, waving a tubercular-looking hand at Carl to sit down.

“Like the whole idea, that’s up to you. I fasted today, also, but at sundown I ate dinner.”

“Yes, but I’m not a religious man. There’s the paradox. Can’t you understand that a man, when he’s struggling for will, and when he finds something that he can
will
, has to go ahead and do it no matter how irrational it seems? I was just lucky that I dropped the Torah in Shule the other day—don’t be shocked, I don’t enjoy abusing objects that are sacred to some people—but everything I’d heard about the imposing of self-punishment came back to me and I decided to fast, to
will
to fast, and I’ve felt more peaceful since then than I’ve felt in a long time. I guess I owed you that speech for being rude today in the garage.”

“I understand more than you would think. But I can’t sit here all night. I came over here to tell you something. I don’t like you, Mr. Kaufman—”

“Thanks for coming over and telling me.”

Carl ignored the interruption. “I think you’re a weak man, but that’s beside the point.”

“Hear! Hear!” Alec grinned.

“I think you should know that it was I who advised your family to lay down the ultimatum to you. They consulted me as their rabbi and were very upset about that girl. I thought about it and didn’t quite know how to advise them—”

“But young Dr. Warschauer found a way, eh?”

Carl looked straight ahead and not at Alec. “No,” he said, “someone else found a way for me. It’s hard to talk with all this noise but … I can’t masquerade and say that I found it in my own conscience—”

“God, you
do
sound like a rabbi! I hadn’t noticed it before.”

“… in my own conscience to destroy your happiness. It was your niece who finally insisted on it.” He restrained himself from heaving a sigh of relief and was aware that his face must be quite red.

“My niece? Elly? What are you talking about? We’re as close as—”

“I’m sorry. It’s true.”

“What do you mean she insisted? She doesn’t own you.”

“She did then. No, I’m not in love with her. I’d told her something about myself that could be damaging to my life here. And she—she threatened to disclose it unless I did what she wanted in that matter.”

Alec sat quite still in his chair. “That little girl?” he said half aloud. “Elly?”

“I had to and I felt you should know. I’m sorry. And I don’t think it’s necessary to tell what it was Elly knows about me—it might seem quite laughable to you, but it couldn’t be more desperate to me.”

“I don’t want to know,” Alec said softly. “Go away. Just go away now. This is a weak man telling
you
to go away.” When he looked up Carl was gone into a tangle of legs and bodies, but Alec spoke as if he were still there. “What would Elly have against Annette and me? Why?” The whole idea was flecked with horror—something unclean. He stood up, a little shaky on his legs. I’m weak, he thought. I should have eaten something. But not eating was my strength. He elbowed his way to where Elly stood watching Soames taking a flash-bulb photo of the garden through the exposed glass wall. It was a difficult shot and Soames did not notice Alec’s intrusion.

“Elly,” Alec said, “go into the garden. I’ll be right there.”

“But why in—”

“Get into the garden. Far in. Now go.”

His jaw was so tensed, Elly saw, that the veins stood out on the left side of his throat, so clearly defined that it seemed painfully vulnerable. She stepped from him, craned her neck, as if to avoid seeing something frightening, like the sight of blood, or someone striking a child, and began walking toward the door and then, free of human obstruction, she ran the last few steps and out of the door.

In the garden Elly was one fragrance among many, the wind whipping the flowers, making them tremble and sway. Elly knelt near a freshly cut hedge and breathed the sickly sweetness until it brought the moisture from beneath her tongue. She knelt there in a mindless stupor, too terrified to think until Alec said, “Stand up.” She stood up and he said, “Is it true—” and she began to nod her head before he had finished—“what Warschauer just told me? That you forced him to tell Max—well, you know the rest. Did you?” Elly nodded again. Her hands were tightly clenched at her sides and she noticed suddenly that she had worn too much perfume—the odor was lilac and was too heavy for lilacs, she thought.

“Why? You liked Annette—and you know I depend on Max for support. Why did you make me choose?” The iciness was gone from his voice, replaced by a raucous agony. His voice was hoarse as he said, “Baby, to me—Alec.”

He waited and she said nothing. She was thinking, That’s not what he’s angry about. It’s only a cover-up. It’s Jay of course. He felt betrayed from the beginning because I was in love with Jay. But for an instant the muddiness with which this thought was coated cleared and she realized the nature of her betrayal.

“And how could you threaten the man? A secret is a secret. You can’t use people like that. What’s happened to you, baby? Did you want to ruin me?”

If he asked one more question she would scream and they would all come and she would—of course, she would finally tell them what she had wanted to tell them about Mr. Larkin, her old piano teacher, but had been too afraid, only she would tell it about Alec.
He tried to make love to me.
But she didn’t have to because he did not ask another question. He grasped her arm and said, “Answer me!”

“Because she hated me—she was jealous of me—she wouldn’t let you come when I was in trouble at school and if you’d have come maybe I wouldn’t have had to come back here and I could have been free—”

“Hated you—” and he stopped. It was so tangled. He should have gone when Max wired him to help but hadn’t because he couldn’t face Max’s questions about Annette (it was like a child’s notebook of questions and answers designed to lead to the one right answer) and because of that fear, months later, halfway across the country, he had lost Annette.

“I could hate you now,” he said quietly, “if my own hands were clean.”

She heard his footsteps and did not look up until the front door slammed. She clasped her hands over her ears and shut out the party noises and then, pressing and releasing her hands, she made an accordion effect of the sounds of laughter and conversation until they seemed something else; perhaps a faulty phonograph record which could be smashed at will. She was shivering but, unable to admit she was
that
disturbed by what Alec had said, she allowed herself to become aware that the wind had subsided somewhat and left in its place a biting cold that was numbing her hands. She touched a flower and was surprised to find it was not of an icy temperature or texture.

I guess flowers don’t get cold, she thought; they either bloom or they die.

Through a little peephole of glass made by drawing one fold of the draperies aside, Ralph Lanner observed Elly standing alone in the garden. To the group with which he stood he gave the impression of merely glancing absently outside now and then. But he had seen Alec grasp Elly and then leave, had seen her touch the petal of a flower and continue standing there. He was remembering what she had said to him the other day in the bar in town, something about manufacturing conflicts and making capital of them—vindictive, she had said. It was a picture of himself he liked, but sometimes felt unworthy of. He was afraid that he was much too sentimental for the kind of man he wanted to be, Mephistopheles in the classroom. He had been attracted to Elly the moment she walked in, embarrassingly so. She had been wearing a soft-textured sweater which outlined her full breasts in an extremely sensual manner, and Lanner had found himself instantly more aroused than he had ever been in a classroom. From that day on he had baited her mercilessly and she had played along with the mock battle. But he had noticed a certain disorientation in her responses at times, answers which were not even remotely germane to the questions—and had, in fact, once remarked to a friend, “She’s crazy, that Kaufman girl.” What must the private life of such a girl be like? His cheeks suddenly burned when he remembered that she had reviled him before the pianist from New York. He saw Elly leave the garden slowly and he dropped the curtain gently against the glass wall and, excusing himself, walked to the door as she entered.

“Hi,” he said. “I’ve been looking for you. We’ve been having an argument and I need the textbook for Philosophy Three—you know, the one you took with me last term. Could you let me use yours for a moment? You know me—I have to prove every point.”

Barely audibly, Elly said, “In my room. I’ll—”

“No, don’t bother, don’t leave the party. I’ll get it. In your bookcase, I suppose. Down this way—up past that bathroom? Thanks.” And he moved away swiftly.

The room was being reorganized now, for the music. Justin and Mimi were busily setting the last rows of chairs in place. A flash bulb went off, casting a nightmarish glow over the room and as quickly wiping it away. Max was at her side. “Why hasn’t Lang arrived?” he said, more to himself than to her, and then moved off busily. “Or Annette,” Elly said aloud, “or Steven Burke, and Danny and little Lois.”

A young man standing near by sipping a drink paused and said, “Were you speaking to me?” She shook her head vigorously and walked a few steps away.

Across the room Max was removing the elaborately carved wrought-iron statuettes which adorned the piano and placing them on the floor near the wall against which Elly now leaned. He flashed a smile at her and returned to open the piano for Jay. People were seating themselves noisily and Elly saw Alec talking to Jay, standing in the doorway from which Jay was to make his entrance. Alec paused and Jay shook his head. Elly could not see clearly the expression on his face. Why were the two of
them
together? Alec had told him of course, but only because of hating Jay, because of jealousy. She folded her arms and clutched herself tightly. Alec and Jay could no longer be seen.

Max Kaufman stood up, looking rounder than ever in his tuxedo, and called for quiet. Except for the occasional clinking of glasses by the barman, a reasonable silence was established. He began to say something about the first recital in two years by this—and then, like a film when the projector has gone out of commission, Elly could not co-ordinate the sound with the visual image and the scene seemed to be moving too fast as well. It seemed to her as if Max introduced Jay and there was applause and Alec sat down next to him to turn pages and Jay had begun the Bach “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” all in a few seconds and accompanied by a blur of sound. In contrast to this it seemed as if her gaze which floated around the room, pausing here and there, was moving more slowly than she had ever imagined eyes could move.

It was whole at this moment, she knew—the Elly-flower. She, of course, was the stem and the center (as the lump in her thumb was the center of her, generating the pulsing that had been building for days). There was gaunt, starved Alec, one of the petals of the Elly-flower; and Rose, sitting waiting for the music to end—another petal; and Max, proud and ineffectual, sitting in the first row—also a petal; and Jay, the newest petal, the one with most life; and the ones which were outlined only in shadow but which were, nevertheless, present: Danny and Mr. Larkin and crazy Eddie Roth and Jerry Wilson, all slender petals that breathed through her, the stem, the life-giver; and even poor Steven Burke and his shattered plan for escape (and it must have been escape, why else does one leave anywhere?)—he was attached to her stem forever. If only she could end them all by stopping herself like a clock. The petals would shrivel and fall. Alec would be sorry when there was no more Elly-flower, and Jay …

… was thinking: I got through the first one and they seemed to like it. He moved the piano stool a little closer to the piano and broke the expectant silence with the first chords of the Beethoven sonata. Now it pays off, he thought, the years of training, of practicing. When all the crap was gone, when all the fear and tension went, underneath was always that residue, the training and work that enabled him to lean back mentally while he leaned forward physically, to detach himself and play. He was glad Mrs. Kaufman had turned the lights down and drawn the draperies open all around the room. It created more of the quality of the concert hall. The old familiar excitement and intensity were back. There was no coughing or shifting of chairs. He had them. He knew he was playing as well as he ever had. He looked up for an instant before beginning the second movement and tried to catch a glimpse of Elly but could not. He remembered, as he sank into the second movement, what Elly had said about the clouding up of the glass walls. She’d inadvertently put her finger right on the last two years since Jean had left him. He’d made mirrors of his world and reflected only the past. Those were shattered now. Elly, Elly, he thought rhythmically as Alec leaned forward and smoothly turned a page.

Okay, Alec was thinking, so Elly did it. What’s to be done now? Maybe it’s the lack of food but I feel a kind of dizzy sense of somehow being justified. I
willed
, like I told the rabbi who called me weak, I
willed
to fast and I haven’t eaten. I’ve been pressured into one thing or another all my life, but this is mine whether or not they all treat it as a temporary joke; it’s mine, and maybe it will give me enough strength to piss on Max’s money and grab Anny if she’s still around. Still around? he thought. This crazy interlude has been only a week.
People are nothing, if there is no will.
Like Jay here, playing again. For Christ’s sake, am I just using the fast and Yom Kippur, like any other Jew, to atone for Anny, for giving her up? He felt a belch rising from his empty, flatulent stomach and struggled to hold it and dissipate it within. Just
will
it away, he thought, just
will
it, and immediately belched, but softly and unnoticeably.

Lanner tiptoed up to Elly as she leaned against the wall, staring ahead of her. “Elly,” he whispered. “All those books. They’re not yours.” He was smiling. She did not turn her head or in any way acknowledge his presence.