The Girl With the Glass Heart: A Novel (7 page)

Her hand (she was trying not to, but with no great effort—resistance was a token to the idea of her mother) was at the inside of her thigh, the other one loosening the trousers of her pajamas. This was how beautiful it could be to be really alone and yet not to be alone. The hand on her flesh was not the hand undoing her clothes. She was so many people now—herself, Lang, Jerry Wilson and his fumbling in the car after the dance. Although she was told so often, only now did she know she was beautiful. This was how it would feel if Lang were really there rather than existing only on the surface of her closed eyelids.

She trembled and lay still, submerged in a wash of feeling. Life is real, she thought. I’m truly alive (as sometimes she might doubt, perhaps at two in the afternoon with the bright sun everywhere, darkening, by comparison, herself and her existence); anything is alive that is wet with life, unsatisfied. Still breathing a little heavily she slept, and soon after, sleep measured her breath, less prodigal of her energy than she herself was.

The way she was staring at me! John Lang was thinking as he drew a deep lungful of smoke from his cigarette, careful to drop none of the ashes on the green-striped pajamas his wife, Lorraine, had chosen for him against his will. Especially when I said that, it was as if she could see right through me and the lie as well. As if she were repeating to herself mockings—(
I don’t often stay at a client’s home while working
)
—
as if she had heard Lorraine and himself arguing, endlessly fighting, until finally she came out with it.
Unsatisfied, I’m unsatisfied,
stabbing him instantly with guilt, for what can make one more guilty than being called on in a deep need, sexual or otherwise, and failing.

It was as if this girl-woman with her steady gaze were accusing him too (after Lorraine, would all women accuse him silently?), saying, “A great big man like you. Look at the size of you, and your wife’s unsatisfied. You never stay at a client’s home while still working on plans, but after the endless turmoil at home the call from this Kaufman in a little town outside Indianapolis comes and you run to pack your bags to get away from the accusations for as long as you can.” He knew he would have to explain this sudden flight to the analyst Lorraine had procured for him three months ago.

But it was, of course, ridiculous about this Elly Kaufman and her steady stare. It could have been everything from wide-eyed admiration (if she had heard of him. Lorraine insisted that he made too much of his reputation. His success had been slow and steady, unlike that of some of the other men he knew, but his prices were higher than those demanded by many more famous men) or it could have been just a great interest in what he had been saying. What would a girl like that know about sexual inadequacy? It was his wife’s term; in encasing his problem in her words and voice he was able to remove himself, for a while at least, from the anguish implicit in any thinking of it.

He was sitting in an upholstered chair placed near the window covered with an awful flower pattern that made him wonder just how much he was going to have to contend with when he furnished the house. He wondered how old the girl could be; she was contradictory in every way—a girl-woman, and her beauty was fragile-robust. She must be about nineteen, he figured, and she didn’t know a damn thing about him, but just the same when he remembered her stare he felt a little shiver in the groin. I must be getting old, he thought; only the old think about very young girls. He stood up, flipped the glowing tip of his cigarette off the end of the butt and out of the window, and dropped the stub into an ash tray. He looked at his hand and thought, I’ve got to stop that clenching of the hands. Maybe that’s what she was staring at. He slipped under the sheets and thought, Well, tomorrow I’ll work.

And he did work, hard, thinking of nothing but the house—not of Lorraine, nor the girl, but only of this house that was to be his best. Elly was away at school most of the time he was at the apartment, and in the late afternoon and early evenings, especially after construction was begun, he was out at the house checking on the day’s work.

It was made pleasant for him at the Kaufmans’. He had even been invited to the wedding of one of Mrs. Kaufman’s nephews. Lang had been raised a Methodist, a faith with which he had no great sympathy any more. This was his first extended contact with a Jewish family in the Midwest. He had known several in New York and he was surprised at how little difference there was between them and the Kaufmans. There seemed to be little, if any, regional effect. He was glad he had come, and if Lorraine’s letters sounded a trifle petulant, this made him gladder still to be here.

Once, when the house was nearly completed, he thought of the girl, remembering how he had characterized her as a girl-woman and her loveliness as fragile-robust. It seemed to him that evening that the house, springing as it did from the actual earth near the summit of the hill, was like that. The great panes of glass, glistening with a crystal upward flight, had a youngness. The earth in which the foundations were imbedded, of course, had its own age: girl-woman; the same qualities made for a delicate strength. He thought of telling her how he had thought about it, but for some reason did not….

As the house progressed and grew, Lang ate and slept better and better. The trouble with Lorraine seemed more and more unreal. When he worked, he was as good a man as anyone. Staying with the Kaufmans, he felt, was the smartest thing he had ever done.

The day on which Elly set out to walk through the museum-like town toward the newly completed house was Saturday, the day on which she habitually took her dreaded piano lesson. Elly woke that morning, as she did every morning, suddenly. To become conscious was always a shock.

She lay in the hot wash of morning sunlight streaming through the blinds and knew immediately that she was depressed. Having had long experience with early-morning misery, she could tell she was depressed before anything concrete could swim up to consciousness. Then she began to hunt for good, solid reasons with which to dispel the troubled state of mind. She kept her eyes shut. She could hear her mother rattling plates in the kitchen; it was a bright sound, carrying with it the promise of food and hot coffee in the mouth. Steps were paddling to or from the bathroom: Daddy, or—suddenly she remembered—Lang. That would do for a starter. This was a fine thought. Lang was the house on the hill. Then she remembered that she had to modify that phrase after having seen the house grow. It was the house
in
the hill, built right into the side of the earth. Well, that was just fine with her. “The girl in the house in the hill” tripped through her mind like a nursery rhyme. The girl in the house in the hill. That was to be her, Elly Kaufman.

“Elly.” It was her mother’s voice. “How about—” The voice stopped suddenly, as if Mrs. Kaufman had remembered the guest in the house.

“Coming,” the girl in the house in the hill shouted at the very top of her voice, and threw the covers off the bed and onto the floor. The depressed state of mind was staved off, and she felt as she always did at such times, that it would never return.

She hopped out of bed, still keeping her eyes tightly shut. It was a game she played sometimes to reacquaint herself with her world, the world being now this, her room, at other times the bathroom (which had the added thrill of danger since there was always the possibility of a razor blade carelessly left lying about, as her exploring hand swept the cold marble sink), at other times her parents’ room when they weren’t at home. It was always played in the morning, as the world was too familiar at any other time.

Deliberately depriving herself of the sense of sight, she ran her hand across the table next to her bed, over the rough binding of the book, the texture of which set her teeth on edge so that she moved on quickly to the smoothness of the lamp, and then stepping with unaccustomedly short paces she moved her bare toes over the brassiere lying on the floor just where she remembered having flung it the night before. So far so good. The room was beginning to take on its familiar configurations. But she had forgotten about the pile of music she had been going through the night before, looking for an easy piece to take with her in case she decided not to lie to Mr. Larkin about having to go to the dentist but instead
take
her lesson. She took a step forward too quickly and stubbed her big toe on the hard binding of “The Well-Tempered Clavier” by Johann Sebastian Bach. She sat down swiftly on the floor and, seizing her toe in her hand, massaged it furiously.

She began to feel depressed again, instantly. She decided at that moment that she would not attend her piano lesson. She was a little relieved then, and lying back on the tufted rug she closed her eyes as tightly as she could, then opened them suddenly. The effect was dazzling and she squinted ecstatically at the window. That was the wonderful thing about light. You could turn it on and off and manipulate it, not artificially with a wall switch, but with your own actual body, your eyes. She loved bright natural light or, if at night, brilliant electric light. “I’m a completely modern person in that sense,” she had once told Roz. “I can’t imagine myself when they had only gaslight. Maybe in the great ballrooms in Vienna—that might be, with millions of candles in a chandelier.”

Pleased about her decision to play hooky from her piano lesson, Elly bubbled at breakfast, scrambling through her food, taking her time only when the coffee arrived. She and her mother were alone in the kitchen, her father having left long before. He was to be in Indianapolis for the day. Lang had apparently left after a quick cup of coffee.

“You ready for your lesson?”

“Yes, Mother,” she said with the lowered eyes and preoccupied voice which sometimes discouraged further discussion.

“You came in pretty late last night, didn’t you?”

“Pretty.”

“Where were you?”

“Out.”

“Out where?”

“For God’s sake leave me alone! I was out with friends, that’s all.” She was still feeling pretty good, but under the barrage of questions she felt her good spirits withering.

“All right,” Mrs. Kaufman said, “take it easy.” She had no real purpose in asking these questions; she meant only to let Elly know that it was not too easy to do
anything
she wanted to do.

“Don’t forget to pick up your taffeta dress. The wedding’s tomorrow night.”

“I don’t understand what any girl would see in my cousin Lester.”

“That’s the trouble with you. You can’t see the things other people see. You’re a bright girl, Elly. You just don’t see what you don’t want to see. Lester is a lovely boy. He’s got success marked on his forehead in indelible ink.”

“Did Daddy have success written on
his
forehead? Seems to me we were miserably poor for an awfully long time.”

Mrs. Kaufman mopped up some spilled coffee near Elly’s saucer. “We always tried to make you feel you weren’t poor. But I don’t know—it seems like you could never wait to get out of the house. All right, so it wasn’t
the-the
, but it was a clean, nice place to bring your friends.”

Elly was silent, thinking about what to tell her piano teacher that afternoon.

“Well, now you’ll have a home like nothing anyone around here has ever seen before.”

Elly nodded, thinking,
The girl in the house in the hill.

Mealtimes were usually just an ordeal of her mother talking and herself giving the illusion of listening. Frequently she placed a book beside her plate, at which she could glance from time to time when it became necessary to avoid a particularly unpleasant recrimination.

“Mom, when did Dad say we’re moving?”

“It’s not up to your father. It’s my decision to make.”

“When do
you
say we’re moving, then?”

“Next week, sometime. All the furniture will have arrived by then.”

“Isn’t it marvelous, Mom! And the custom-built phonograph is finished. I took up an album of records the other day, the Brahms Violin Concerto, and tried the machine out. It sounded terrific.”

“Try not to talk so that you sound so excited all the time, dear. You’re a young lady now. A little poise.”

“Yes, Mom,” she answered absently and left the house.

Elly trailed her hand in the water, which flowed slowly over the mud and stone which blocked its path. This little trickle, Elly knew from her recent explorations on their property, widened to a vigorous riverlet, some two acres or so behind the house, flowing through, as if it had lost itself temporarily, a pine forest, so that the little muddy splash in which she dipped her fingers carried at some later time and some other place a richness of green pine needles embellished with rough, crumbly brown pine cones.

She was not far from the house now and she stood up and began to run. She hopped over the stream, conserving her breath in deep draughts. Near the road she saw, as she crossed it, two children skipping rope, racing each other; they seemed to be moving incredibly slowly because of her own speed. Things looked so different when you were moving. She had just learned the meaning of the word
kinetic
in dance class and had decided that people ought to keep moving as much as possible all the time. That’s what she would do if she ever got away.

She was panting when she reached the foot of the hill. She walked up the stone steps slowly, one careful step at a time. Halfway up, she heard a sound that certainly didn’t belong to the open air of the afternoon. It was a violin accompanied by a piano. It was the recording that she had left the other day. When she reached the top and walked through the transplanted flowers and bushes, she saw Lang leaning against the glass wall nearest her, making notes on a pad. She had assumed he would be in Indianapolis with her father.

There was a long terrace that curved around the asymmetrical shape of the house. On either end of the terrace the glass that was the main substance of the house was replaced by a dark wood, rich and grainy in texture. There was no furniture in the house except for the beds, which were built into the walls in each bedroom. She opened the door softly.