The Girl With the Glass Heart: A Novel (8 page)

She leaned against the closed door and listened to the Brahms for a moment. A partition separated them, but Lang was too absorbed in what he was writing to notice her silent entrance.

Finally she said, “Hello.”

He turned sharply and in the same instant thrust the pad and pencil into his pocket. “What are you doing here, Elizabeth?” They had never been alone before.

“I didn’t know you’d be here, honest I didn’t. I just came to see the house and maybe to listen to some music alone.” This last was not exactly true, but it sounded good on the spur of the moment.

Lang grinned. “Yes, it’s a beautiful concerto. I heard Heifetz do it last year in Carnegie Hall.”

“Do you go there often?” Elly dropped to the floor, facing Lang, and stared at him in just the same way as she had that first evening at the dinner table. It did not, however, unnerve him now.

“As often as I can. I’m pretty busy. My wife loves music very much.” As he said this last, it sounded to him quite irrelevant and he felt like a fool for feeling it necessary to mention Lorraine to this child. What was he afraid of?

“Does she?” Elly asked rhetorically, with the same clear-eyed gaze.

“As a matter of fact she doesn’t,” he was forced to admit. “I usually have to drag her to concerts.”

Elly laughed. “Nobody drags me. I can’t get enough out here. Sometimes we go into Indianapolis and even Chicago. Who’s your favorite composer—Brahms? I don’t know, I love Bach, especially the choral stuff—so rich. You know what I like about you?” She stopped, suddenly ashamed, the sound of the violin loud in the silence.

“Yes, go on, please, Elizabeth.” He was, against his will, fascinated by the tumbling of words from the pale-pink lips. “What do you like about me?”

“I’m being presumptuous, I guess,” she said. “There’s no reason for it, I suppose, but it seems to me that you’re so much a stranger here, so much like me in that way.”

“It doesn’t take much to tell that I’m a stranger here,” he said. He was playing naïve. He knew the difference between being a stranger and “so much a stranger here like me.”

“Never mind, I can’t make it clear.”

“Yes, I understand what you mean, Elly.” (
How did she know?
) “How do you like your house?”

“Oh, it’s wonderful. Do you know what I’ve been calling myself—I don’t know why I want to tell you this: the girl in the house in the hill.”

Lang laughed. “It sounds like a song. That’s wonderful.”

“Mr. John Marron Lang,” Elly said—there was somehow a great intimacy in the smiling use of his full name—“are you laughing at me?”

“No, Elly.” (Ah, she thought, so I’m not “Elizabeth.”) “To revive an old chestnut, I’m laughing
with
you, not at you. Let me turn the record over.”

She watched his big body bend over the phonograph and then let her gaze drift over the living room which seemed enormous because of the absence of furnishings. From where she lay on the floor she could see all the way down the hill, past the filling station quite a distance down the road and, vague in the distance, the first few houses that marked the beginning of Colchester.

“I’m playing hooky from my piano lesson. You can’t mention that I was here or that you saw me at all.”

He turned. “Why aren’t you taking your lesson? Don’t you like music?”

She scrambled to her feet. “You know better than that. I just can’t play. I get all tied up inside and the notes won’t come out. Besides, I’d rather listen.”

“So would I,” he said. “I’ll keep your secret.”

But he didn’t like the idea of being her fellow conspirator. She must have so many secrets, he thought, perhaps nothing but secrets. She may be skipping a lesson, but she knew I was here. But she’s so young, only nineteen or so. Was she experienced? he wondered. Well, even if she is, I’m not.

“We shouldn’t be here alone, you know.”

“That’s the nicest thing anybody’s said to me all day.”

“Anyway, it’s true.”

“Isn’t there anything constructive we can do to demonstrate the purity of our hearts? What were you doing when I came?”

“Taking some notes. Nothing important.” He
had
been taking notes, but they were for a letter to Lorraine. The kind of letter he would never send. The kind that said, If I’m not man enough for you why don’t you get rid of me; get yourself a more serviceable male? Or is it that you want me that way? Dear Lorraine, do you want me the way you tell me I am?

“Well, is there anything at all left to do?” she asked, noticing how pensive he seemed, feeling him slip away from her, leaving her alone in the transparent house.

“We could hang the draperies. The rods and all are up already.”

“Let’s. Then if anyone came you wouldn’t be compromised.”

“
Me
compromised?” He laughed.

“Yes, you. My family already expects the worst of me.”

His eyes recorded her entire body, almost involuntarily, and he said, as if he didn’t expect her to hear him, admiringly: “Yes … yes, I can believe that.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Just that you’re going to be a very beautiful woman.”

He was committed now; under the guise of aesthetics we were all made prisoners; carry the ideas for a house with you and after a while it built you; it said, I am right this way, build me, and free choice was gone; he built. He had told her she was beautiful. What awful responsibilities could be demanded of one, after that first and final tribute?

After all, the only weapon Lorraine had in making him suffer was that he had told her that he loved her. Without that she was as helpless as any other woman.

Elly very nearly moved toward him then but she was suddenly afraid. “To the drapes—oops, Mother makes me say ‘draperies’—to the draperies then.”

She hated herself for retreating to what must be his idea of what a young girl was like. She contradicted this, however, with a movement which she always employed when desirous of attracting a man, a trick she had always known, or at least since climbing on the knees of uncles who smelled of cigars and perspiration. She shook her long, dark blond hair so that it fell out like a halo close about her cheeks and looser upon her half-bare shoulders. She was gratified to see Lang turn swiftly.

“They’re back here in the kitchen.”

When he returned with the thick green material she was standing on the first rung of the ladder left there by the workmen, face pressed against the glass, staring down the field of the long, long afternoon. There was a terrible twinge within him, seeing her. It was as if he had been away tor years, leaving in the living room a child, and returning to find a woman, staring hopelessly at what might be the bright day, or a vague hint of his reflection in the glass that surrounded them. The sight of her long legs made him harden himself. They would hang the draperies and go away from here. Then he felt like a fool. She would probably scream if he touched her. What the hell was he thinking of!

They worked in silence, except for his instructions to her and a bit of joking, mostly from Elly and rather tense wit at that. Lang felt dizzy standing on the top rung of the ladder. He had lost all sense of time. The girl might have been there five minutes or five hours. She smelled of lilacs. The afternoon sky was clouding over and the sun disappeared and reappeared with some regularity.

“I hate it when the clouds get thick,” she said. “It makes me kind of depressed.”

They were finished and he descended and tested the drawstrings. It was quite dark in the room until he opened them again. Elly was still on the stepladder and Lang was hoping she wouldn’t say anything. He was afraid that she would utter some word or combination of words that would touch some depth in him that had prompted the never-to-be-mailed letter to Lorraine. She spoke. She turned to him and, looking down, said, “I want to thank you. You’ve made us very happy. Myself, more than Mom or Dad. This house is going to change everything for me.”

Good God, did he believe in magic? He was relieved that these weren’t the words. “Yes, I know,” he said, “the girl in the house in the hill.”

“I wrote a letter to my cousin in New Haven yesterday. I said—I don’t know if she’ll understand. You can see I’m a bug on being understood—‘Dear Joan,’ I said, ‘the heart is made of glass. And now my house is made of glass.’”

Lang pulled the drawstring and the room was dark again. They were the words all right, or close enough to them to do the job. It was Lorraine who was moving him toward Elly, Lorraine placing
his
arms about her waist and lifting her from the ladder in one movement. She was light and kissing her was feathery at first; she was only an idea, an idea of a younger girl to whom he was as much a man as his height and strength seemed to indicate; but then her flesh and his became quite real.

Is he going to? Elly thought. And will I if he wants to? They were running, it seemed to her. No, they were walking, arms tightly entwined, and Elly was surprised to find there were no sheets on the bed and almost laughed, a little hysterically. She hadn’t been expected, there were no sheets and, as in her fantasy alone in her bed, he rested his face on her breast and his great hands were clenching and unclenching. And then his hands big enough for each one to encompass a breast opened her blouse and her wide, wide skirt and she was as wild and abandoned as when she fled screaming with laughter from the boys chasing her after school, and then over his shoulder she could see past the open door of the room an undraped portion of glass wall and the shadowy reflection of something strange and she remembered fleetingly the horrid thing in school in the play they read:
the beast with two backs
, only it wasn’t horrid at all and there was the clenching and unclenching of his hand on her shoulder.

They were both silent for a long while. Elly felt that he was tense beside her, knew he was angry with himself, was afraid he had done something terrible to her. But he hadn’t at all. She lay there, one bare foot dangling over the bed (she had kicked off one of her ballet slippers earlier), with her skirt spread high on her bare thighs and she was fine. She felt as relieved as on receiving a gift so long delayed that she had almost given up hope of it. There was no question of disappointment. She had always wanted to know but some inbred quality of doubting had prevented her deciding in advance what it was to be like. Now she knew, through the awkwardness and the pain at first, what it was and she couldn’t let him lie there, thinking terrible things, as he must.

Then something seemed to lift her like a cat being pulled by the scruff of the neck and she whispered, “I’ll be right back,” and slipped out of the room and then out the front door. She could hardly feel herself walk. There was that in her throat which had brought her inevitably outside, where she could see and touch something that could not possibly be an extension of herself, as Lang, lying inert next to her, might be. Something made her stretch out on the evening-damp grass and dig her fingers into the ground. This was where she ended. She wiggled her toes. She could go no farther than the soles of her feet and the top of her head and the tips of her fingers. But all those could touch Lang’s great body and she felt herself an entity, a being that had an existence of touch only, and looking at the smeary evening sky she knew it did not exist because it could not be touched, because it did not begin where she, Elly Kaufman, ended. She bit off a mouthful of grass and felt it against her tongue, sore from the half hour of friction. So love was knowing where she ended and where someone else began.

She felt suddenly weak and, getting to her feet, found her legs were trembling a little. She leaned against a tree and closed her eyes. She was dizzy and felt ill, the sudden sting of tears against the lids. A fist flew to her mouth and her teeth bit into the flesh for a moment. Then she walked back to the house and to Lang. She lay on the bed next to him. “Hello, stranger,” she whispered.

“Hi.” He twisted his body around and smiled a pale smile at her. “What happened?”

“Guess.”

“It was me, wasn’t it, who—”

“We both did it. It was lovely.”

“Another question. Was I the first? I … I couldn’t tell.”

“No,” she lied. “You weren’t the first. Don’t worry so.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry either.” She grasped his convulsive hand. “Stop that.” She wiped a few moistened strands of hair from the corner of her mouth, bloodless from the half-hour-long kiss.

He put his arms around her shoulders, held her for a moment and then said, “We’d better get out of here.”

After shaking down her skirt and combing her hair she walked out after Lang.

“Hey,” she said.

“What?”

“It was really wonderful.” The words, which she knew were those which were supposed to be spoken only by the experienced, came so easily to her lips that she realized she felt experienced, that for some people there is never a first time for anything.
We live in museums.

He smiled broadly. “Really,” he said. “Well, I’m glad for that. You’re a real woman.” But he was thinking, I’m a real man, right now anyway. Outside they both agreed it should have been dark but the April afternoons were long and the light was grayish. She kissed him quickly. He stood looking at the house. The glass wall was clear and open, an eye on them. Elly was beginning to wonder and worry a little about whether or not Mr. Larkin had called to check on her excuse for missing a lesson. But there was no reason why he should. If only she didn’t have to go on lying about things like her music lessons and where she had been last night.

“Take me with you,” she said.

“What?”

“Take me with you.”

“Where?”

“Wherever you go.”

“Do you think you’d get along with my wife? I’m sorry.”

“No, I hadn’t forgotten about her. It was just a crazy thought.”

“How old are you, Elly?”

“Nineteen,” she lied. “My folks will deny it, because they hate me to go with men.”

“Yes. You’re so goddamned much older.”

He fought off feeling guilty. She was over the statutory age anyway. The sky clouded for a moment and Elly said, “Look.” They were caught in the glass, reflected by the comparative darkness; it was a dim, anonymous portrait with no distinctive features of profile or age. Just a man and woman. Then the sun erased the image.