Changes of Heart

by Liza Gyllenhaal

  “I’ve never been happier,” Janie snapped, walking to the door. “Thanks a lot for the advice, Zach. Now I have a little for you.”

  “Fair enough.” Zach sighed.

  “Worry about your own life,” she said. “Deal with your own problems. The funny thing is—everything you said about me applies to you as well. Did you know that? You’re just skimming and dipping along the top right now. You’re not really living either. So you deal with you … I’ll handle me, okay? Don’t interfere again.” She slammed the door.

  Melina did not forgive easily, especially when it came to men. For the most part, women didn’t count for her. Men were the movers and shakers of the world, Melina reasoned, and anyone who thought differently was a fool. Men held you back or helped you ahead, depending on how well you handled them. And Melina realized, just a little too late, that she had handled Zachary Dorn very badly. In truth, she had gotten him into her bed easily enough, but the real challenge in these affairs was keeping the man there. After that debacle when Janie caught them together, he hadn’t called again.

  “All work and no play, Zach?” Melina had tried when she met him once in the hall a few weeks after that evening.

  “Oh, I still play, Melina,” Zach had told her, his dark eyes meeting hers. “I’ve just moved on to a better league.” His glance could be so cold, Melina thought, so unnerving. From the beginning, she had sensed his force and strength, and she had interpreted his charm as sex appeal mingled with a healthy share of egotism. She’d liked the fact that he was different, seemingly easygoing, totally unpredictable.

  But at first his lovemaking had been so gentle; she felt irritated and more than a little disappointed. She’d told him slyly, “Can’t we pick up the pace here a bit? I was bored with French kisses in high school already.”

  Well, heavens alive, he’d gone from choirboy to Casanova in all of three seconds! The sweetness was gone, all right, but an almost angry passion and a great deal of unexpected skill had made up for it. Zach turned out to be the most satisfying lover Melina had ever had. Yes, she had misjudged him. He was far more complicated than she first realized, and probably a great deal more interesting. Pity it had been so short-lived.

  “I get the picture, Zach,” Melina had answered simply enough. She knew when to leave well enough alone. She knew when it was over.

  “Friends?” Zach had suggested, holding out his hand. He was surprised she seemed so acquiescent. He had been expecting a tantrum of some sort, accusations, at the very least a few tears.

  “Let’s not push it, okay?” Melina replied, stepping around him and continuing down the hall. “I’ll settle for peaceable enemies.” So a silent truce had gone into effect, lines of acceptable behavior drawn up, and Melina had retreated. She longed to strike back at him in some way, but she couldn’t figure out how to do it without hurting herself in the bargain. Everyone at Dorn & Delaney adored the ground Zach walked on, including Michael, so Melina saw no possibility of dividing and conquering. She came to the unhappy conclusion that she would simply have to bide her time, find a way to get back at Zach or, if all else failed, start looking for a way to get out of the agency.

  Help came from a most unexpected source.

  She and Janie were working late on a promotional piece for Chanson. They’d had to revamp their entire original concept because Alain had suggested using the family chateau as background, and when a client “suggested” something in Melina’s mind, it was basically written in stone.

  They were in Janie’s new office that offered floor-to-ceiling views of midtown Manhattan: the futuristic spires of the Chrysler Building lit the early evening skyline. Melina was going through Janie’s revised layout and, as usual, was impressed with what she saw. She’d never worked with a designer who had so much innate talent … or who was so easy to get along with. Melina didn’t usually have much rapport with other successful women; a competitive edginess kept her from getting too close to those she admired. With Janie it was different and, though Melina hadn’t given it much thought, she was coming to rely on Janie’s taste and judgment.

  “This is terrific,” Melina said at last. “Though I really couldn’t tell a vineyard from a blueberry patch. Where did you get the photos from?”

  “The Wine Spectator ran a piece on Chanson’s fiftieth anniversary,” Janie replied. She’d pored over the article, cherishing each mention of Alain. “I clipped the photos from there.” Janie had kept the one of Alain standing in front of his family’s three-hundred-year-old chateau.

  “I wonder if we have the budget to shoot on location?” Melina asked dreamily. She’d been sitting next to Janie at her worktable, but now stood up and stretched. “God, wouldn’t that be fantastic? A couple of weeks in France … with Alain Chanson at your side.”

  Janie didn’t answer, and Melina glanced over at her curiously. Janie was staring out the window, recalling once again her fateful conversation with Zach. How could she have let him in on the single most important fact of her life? She was furious with herself—and with him. His knowledge of how she felt about Alain gave him a kind of power over her. But much worse than that was what he had said about her not wanting to change. His words had struck a chord deep within her, disturbing her more than she cared to admit. There was too much truth in what he’d said, truth she wasn’t yet ready to face … and she was beginning to distrust and fear Zach because he could see so clearly into her heart.

  “Janie?” Melina asked again. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful? Why don’t you check with Zach tomorrow and see what the overall budget is for this.”

  “Why don’t you?” Janie retorted. She had been studiously avoiding him since their confrontation.

  “I … don’t see much of Zach anymore,” Melina answered carefully. “I thought you knew. Anyway, you’re Zach’s big buddy. I’m sure it would sound better coming from you.”

  “I’m no buddy of Zach’s,” Janie answered sharply. “Not anymore.”

  “Oh?”

  “No.”

  “I’m surprised…” Melina replied gently. “I guess I shouldn’t ask … but why?”

  “He meddled where he didn’t belong,” Janie answered. “Zach thinks he has all the answers for everyone. Too bad he doesn’t have any for himself.”

  “I’m gratified,” Melina drawled, “that someone else besides me around here has started to see Zach for what he is.”

  “And for what he isn’t,” Janie added bitterly.

  “Exactly,” Melina replied softly, almost to herself. “I’m so glad that we see eye to eye.”

  Chapter 10

  Zach knew something was coming. He could feel it in his bones: a chill, a premonition, a dull achiness. But then, he ached a lot these days. The flamboyant, irrepressible Zachary Dorn had come down with a bad case of sadness. Was it a real depression? The thought terrified him. It was about the age Zach was now, in his late thirties, that Zach’s father began to fall to pieces, causing Zach’s childhood to come apart as well.

  Zach’s father was a charmer. Tall, solidly built, his dark wavy hair going gray at the temples, Walter Dorn was the comptroller at a large insurance company headquartered on Wall Street. Insurance was a booming business right after the Second World War, and Walter’s career blossomed with it. The Dorns weren’t wealthy, but in the tree-lined Brooklyn Heights community where Walter settled with his wife and young son, they were considered well-to-do and highly respected. Then, when Zach was going into the second grade, his mother found a lump in her breast. It was diagnosed as malignant, and for five long, sad years she fought the inevitable. The struggle was tough on Zach, but it was even harder on his father.

  Walter Dorn tended to get by on the force of his personality. Flash a smile, extend the hand, pat the shoulder—everyone loved him. And though he ran a well-organized department, he personally wasn’t so good at the nitty-gritty, the everyday. His wife’s illness seemed to amplify all his faults. He couldn’t cope with keepi
ng up the house, so he hired a woman to come in and clean for them. He couldn’t stand the thought of his wife’s flesh slowly wasting away, so he was forced to hire a full-time nurse to change her bed pans and administer the ever-growing supply of painkillers. And he couldn’t quite cover all these expenses and still continue to live in the style to which he had become accustomed, so he fiddled with the books just a little at the office. Not that anyone, Walter told himself, would ever notice. And he would see that every last penny was returned once things were straightened out at home.

  By the time Valerie Dorn drew her last breath, everyone—including Zach, who couldn’t sleep because of her screams—was grateful that she was at last freed from her terrible prison of pain. For a year or so after his mother’s death, Zach’s troubled childhood grew sunnier. His father kept the housekeeper on to attend to his son’s day-to-day needs and his own night-to-night ones. Zach sensed the secret intimacy between Walter and the housekeeper, and it pleased him. His father had seemed alone for so long. There was laughter in the house again. Music and wine. Too much wine, according to the housekeeper, who was soon after dismissed.

  Walter, who had not yet returned the money he’d “borrowed” from the till, started to take his son out to Belmont on Saturdays to see what the horses might bring in. Instead, they tended to take. More money, unfortunately, than Walter had on hand. Back to the books again. It became an ever-increasing, ever more vicious cycle. Walter, the charmer, the glad-hander, began to drink too much at lunch. Concerned colleagues tried to take him aside and warn him that his habits were being frowned upon by his higher-ups, but he brushed off all attempts at help; he was full of bluster and riddled with fear. He started to drink all the time. Three years after his wife’s death, the insurance company discovered some major discrepancies in the books, investigated, despite Walter’s assurances that everything was fine, and finally uncovered their comptroller’s larceny. When given the chance to explain his actions, Walter lied, loudly declaring that he had been set up by a subordinate. He was fired.

  Zach was ten years old. Despite the trauma of his mother’s death, he had always been an outgoing, fun-loving child. He was bright and loved school, where he was the center of a tough little clique of boys. He had also always been enormously proud of his father who was taller and more handsome than anyone else’s. Zach believed in Walter. Believed when Walter told him that he had unfortunately just discovered that the company he had slaved for for so many years was crooked, rotten to the core, and he couldn’t continue working for such an organization. He believed in the succession of “deals” his father then started to put together: the get-in-on-the-bottom-floor real estate plan that never quite got off the ground, the red-hot stocks on margin that forced Walter to take an icy bath, and even the get-rich-quick investment strategy that nearly sent them to the poorhouse.

  Walter never worked full-time again, though he was always able to pick up part-time accounting jobs to make ends meet. He spent his free hours out at the track, scheming, planning, always on the verge of his next big break. Walter still managed to keep up the house payments, despite a second mortgage, but it fell more and more on Zach to do everything else—the cleaning, the shopping, the laundry. He managed. He refused to admit to concerned neighbors (or for that matter to himself), that anything was amiss at the Dorn residence.

  “My dad’s on a business trip for a few days,” he’d tell people when they worried about the small boy who seemed to be living all alone in the big, crumbling brownstone. “We expect him back any day now.” He continued to do well at school and have a lot of friends. He forced himself to look normal, to act the part of a well-adjusted thirteen-year-old. Fifteen-year-old. Seventeen-year-old. But each year, his father drank a little more, worked a little less, and disappeared for longer periods of time. Finally, the year Zach enrolled at City College, Walter dropped out of sight altogether, and Zach, heartsick but unable to keep up the payments, was forced to watch the bank foreclose on his childhood home.

  Zach moved into a cheap six-story walk-up just off the Bowery in Manhattan, and focused all of his intense, pent-up energies on his college work. He was determined to be the best, the brightest, the most loved. And, like his father, he was a natural charmer. Women were drawn to his down-turning smile, his knowing look, the lighthearted humor that couldn’t quite disguise a certain world-weariness. Men liked his arrogance and his smarts. He didn’t seem to need anyone or anything, yet he was always eager to give—time, advice, support. He threw himself into the roiling political cauldron of the late 1960s, passionately demonstrating against Vietnam and Cambodia, for black’s and women’s rights. He helped out in the run-down church soup kitchens on the Bowery. He spearheaded clothing and food drives. Zach gave everything he could, but he never asked for anything in return. He tried his best to locate his father, but he didn’t have enough money to launch a nationwide search, and a part of him didn’t want to know where he was. He began to pretend to himself that his father was doing great somewhere, in California, perhaps. He started to tell people that his father lived in Los Angeles, that he was a comptroller for one of the major studios.

  Then, in the summer of Zach’s senior year at City, his father found him. A decrepit vagrant with a wine-soaked face gave Zach a bleary-eyed once-over across the dining room of a men’s shelter in the Bowery. He continued to stare and then shuffled over to where Zach was assembling sandwiches for the lunch line.

  “That you, Zach?” The voice was as cracked and scratched as an old Victrola record.

  “Ten more minutes until we’re ready here, champ,” Zach replied, not looking up. “You’ll have to wait your turn like everyone else.”

  “Zach,” the old man mumbled. “Zach. It’s me. It’s Walter.”

  “Oh, God…” Zach replied, staring at the man now. Yes, it was him. It was the very worst of all the possible scenarios that Zach had been playing in his head all these years. Walter’s nose was bashed in, his skin blotched with broken blood vessels, his clothes ill-fitting and filthy. Most of his hair and almost all of his teeth were gone. But worse, far worse than how he looked, was the downtrodden, thoroughly defeated way he acted.

  “I’m sorry, son,” he whispered. “I guess I’ll just … move on.” Walter started to shuffle back across the room. He moved like a very old man.

  “Dad!” Zach cried, coming around the table. “Hey, Dad.” He touched Walter’s arm, but felt himself unable to embrace him. He found himself looking down on his father’s head. Walter’s once luxuriant crop of hair had thinned to a few greasy strands that Walter had carefully fanned out across his skull. This minor vanity, far more than Walter’s larger misfortunes, filled Zach with sorrow … and sympathy. “Hey, listen,” he said, putting his arm around the old man’s shoulders, “you’re coming home with me. Now.”

  So Walter moved in with Zach, sleeping on the fold-out couch in Zach’s small, cluttered living room. In the beginning, Walter was abject with embarrassment over his ruined life, brimming with gratitude to Zach who had pulled him from the gutter. He promised Zach he’d stop drinking. He began to attend AA meetings around the Lower East Side. He even got a job bagging groceries at the Grand Union. It didn’t take him too long to pull himself together. He bought some secondhand clothes at the Salvation Army store on First Avenue. He found an ivory-handled cane on the street and a dark gray fedora that fit him so perfectly it seemed custom-made. He let his mustache grow and, surprisingly, it came in dark brown with only a light sprinkling of gray. And, finally, through an inexpensive dentistry clinic in Chinatown, he got himself fitted with a pair of dentures.

  One night Zach came back from classes to find a gaudy new Oriental-style rug in the living room. It was made from a weave of nylon and cotton, comprised of bright reds and oranges.

  “What do you think, Zach?” Walter asked him proudly when he came home a few hours later. “I thought it would spice up the joint a bit.”

  “Where’d you get it, Dad?”
Zach demanded. He knew Walter’s weekly take-home pay barely allowed him to contribute a small share to the rent and utilities. And though Zach would have gladly paid for everything, he hoped that by asking Walter to take some responsibility for his life … he would actually become more responsible.

  “Uh, well…” Walter hesitated, unnerved by Zach’s obvious disapproval. “I found it on the street, son. If you don’t like it, we can always just dump it again. Too bright for you, huh? A little too much?”

  “Where did you get the money to buy it, Dad?” Zach demanded grimly. He glanced at Walter’s jauntily cocked fedora, the handkerchief in his vest pocket, his new two-toned loafers, and the bright, visionary gleam in Walter’s eyes.

  “I told you already, Zach,” Walter protested. “I found the damn thing. You don’t like it? We dump it. That’s that. Won’t hurt my feelings in the least. I was just trying to give this godforsaken place a little life, is all.”

  “Listen, Walter,” Zach said, sighing. “I don’t care about the rug, okay? I only care about you … and what happens to you. And suddenly, over these last few weeks, I notice you’ve got new shoes—not secondhand ones, Walter, not something you picked up on the Bowery. And I notice in the bathroom a spanking new all-leather shaving kit. And I see we have some fancy smoked glass dishes in the kitchen. And I can’t help but wonder where it all came from, Walter.”

  “I found the stuff, Zach,” Walter replied truculently. “I keep my eyes open. I’ve been on the street, remember. I know where to look.”

  “Bull!” Zach shouted, slamming his fist against the doorjamb. “Don’t lie to me, dammit! I’ve listened to your lies all my life. I won’t stand for them now. I won’t be suckered again, Walter. If I hear, if I discover somehow, that you’ve been out at the track or gambling down at OTB—you’re out of here. And if I catch you drinking, or smell wine on your breath, you’re out of here. Do you understand?” Zach was almost crying, his breath coming out in angry, rasping sobs. “Out!”