Change of Heart

by Sally Mandel

  “I don’t suppose we can forget that”

  “Yes, let’s,” Sharlie said.

  She still clutched her hospital gown at the waist, and now she released it, leaving soggy clumps of wrinkles where her hands had bunched the material. She sat down on the edge of the couch, and Mary began to clear away the piles of magazines that lay open on the coffee table. “I won’t have you going all morbid on me,” Mary said. “Not just before your wedding day. You just remember that what you got from that poor tortured creature was a hunk of muscle and nothing more.”

  She lifted Sharlie by the arm, and they walked to her room in silence. Then she helped her into bed. “You thank heaven for the gift of a healthy new heart and forget the package it came in.”

  She pulled the curtain, and the room turned soft gray. She stood in the doorway a moment, looking at Sharlie’s face as she stared wide-eyed at the ceiling.

  “You hear me?” Mary called. “Sharlie?”

  Sharlie said, “Yes. Don’t worry. I’ll be all right.” But she didn’t move her eyes a fraction and never noticed when Mary finally shook her head and left, closing the door quietly behind her.

  They now allowed Sharlie to stroll on the grounds, provided she wore a gauze mask and always kept someone with her. Occasionally she would spot another masked face and that made her feel less self-conscious.

  This afternoon she had tired quickly, so Brian spread his jacket on the grass, and they sat while he told her about yesterday’s trip to Los Angeles. Ordinarily Barbara would have refused the case, since it was destined for trial in California. But it involved a film producer’s unauthorized use of material written by a young woman screenwriter, and with Brian in Santa Bel, Barbara was delighted to leap headfirst into the action. Brian was secretly grateful for the chance to get back to work and away from the oppressive atmosphere of the medical center.

  “I stopped by at a supermarket in Beverly Hills,” he was saying, “and there was this old lady by the cornflakes. She must have been eighty-five, with a shiny gold jump suit thing—skintight—and Plexiglas sandals, and she had all this blue-white varnished hair that looked stiff enough to hang coats from and these huge hairy false eyelashes. And, I’m not kidding, she was shuffling down the aisle between the cereal and the lettuce with a walker.”

  Sharlie giggled and leaned against him. “Can we go there for our honeymoon? I’ll sew sequins all over my mask.”

  “How long are you going to have to wear that thing?” he asked.

  “Don’t know,” she answered. “I think I’ll hang on to it and maintain the mystery in our marriage, you know? The masked wife. You’ll always wonder what’s underneath—whether I’ve lost all my teeth, maybe I’ve grown a moustache …”

  “No, really,” he said. She reached up to unhook the mask, and he put his hand over hers to stop her.

  “Brian,” she said softly, “I’m never going to be very much like your everyday blushing bride.”

  “Thank God,” he said. But his eyes looked past her to the hospital gate.

  “Hey,” she said, poking him lightly to get him to look at her. “We’ve got options. We can live together and see how it goes. We can not live together. We can get married later. We can meet every Saturday night at a singles bar…” She was thankful for the gauze, which she hoped would muffle the trembling in her voice. He looked into the eyes that read his thoughts. Then he cupped his hands around her face.

  “Look, I’ve never gotten married before. Can’t I have a few standard prenuptial jitters?”

  “Are you sure that’s what they are?” She unhooked her mask deliberately. “My germs are going to have to learn to live with your germs.” He kissed her, and her body relaxed against him. Then he slipped the mask back on and pulled her to her feet. As they walked back toward the hospital entrance, he told her about the shopping-bag lady he’d seen who drove around Los Angeles in a beat-up Dodge crammed to the rusted roof with tiny pieces of paper and old scraps of rags, how, in California, even the crazies need wheels. Sharlie listened to him happily and told herself she didn’t care what happened to her as long as she had just a few days married to him.

  Diller stood next to Sharlie’s bed, listening to her heart with his stethoscope. He watched her warily, as if at any moment she might turn mad and stab him with her letter opener. Sharlie saw his eyes linger on the tapered instrument and smiled. It was sterling silver and elegantly monogrammed with the initials CCM, a wedding gift from Barbara Kaye. Sharlie hoped she’d get a chance to use it soon on something other than envelopes marked “Occupant,” since the only letters she’d ever gotten were from Margaret, sent from down the street, or postcards from Walter’s trips, to cheer her up when she’d been in Saint Joe’s too long.

  Dr. Diller slid the silver disk under her left breast and dropped his head, concentrating on the thumps from inside her chest. Despite Sharlie’s regret for embarrassing him, she was amused by the surgeon’s cautious respect. Since her public outburst, he no longer brushed off her hesitant inquiries, and it was now easier to ask questions.

  “What do you think? Is there going to be a wedding?”

  Diller stood away from the bed and offered her a cool smile. “As far as I’m concerned, yes,” he said. “I’ve told you the conditions.”

  “Will you come?”

  Diller was a literal man who carefully memorized other people’s jokes and used them in speeches at benefits. He had little patience with humor, but had learned through experience that Sharlie was not always entirely serious. He searched her pale face now and saw only entreaty there.

  “Please come,” she repeated.

  She held out her hand to him, and finally he took it. For a moment Diller looked at the pretty girl on the bed and felt his life touched by hers. He gripped her hand tightly, and then suddenly she was Walter Converse’s daughter again, valuable as a potential sponsor for his research program. Sharlie watched the detachment move into his face and change his eyes to ice again, but she remembered the brief thaw and was pleased.

  After he’d left, it occurred to her that she had never seen Diller really smile. He could manage a tense curvature of the lips, but the stiff arc did nothing to light up his eyes or lift the other muscles of his face. She remembered the drawings she used to make as a child—round faces with great sad eyes and a straight line for the mouth. Margaret would take a look and say, “That’s very nice, dear,” in her automatic voice, but Walter invariably burst out, “Christ! Can’t you put a smile on the thing? Looks like a goddamn mortician.” After a while she began to put the curved mouth on her faces before Walter got to them. A few months ago she’d dug one of the childhood scribbles out of her mother’s desk drawer, and the face seemed horrible to her—terrified eyes, anxious eyebrows, and the hideous crescent grin. So much like Diller—a cartoon face in which only the mouth changed positions, a mechanical twitch.

  That’s why he’s so intimidating, she thought suddenly. That solemn expression always made her wonder what offense she’d committed: Had she forgotten her green pills? Sneak a nibble from somebody’s banana cream pie?

  Maybe if Sharlie did what he did all day, she wouldn’t be able to smile either. Hands stuffed down into some poor slob’s chest, holding the future quite literally in his fingers. She would make it her particular goal to see if she could persuade the stiff old thing to smile. Maybe at the wedding, if they pumped him full of champagne and surrounded him with a dozen adoring nurses.

  Smiling was an admission of one’s humanity, an acknowledgment of being touched by someone else, a response to the world. Diller made smiling seem like a weakness, other people’s grinning faces contemptible and childish. There’s nothing funny about science, he was saying with that sober expression, or about disease or the origin of the universe. Life is serious, this medical center is serious, and A. Carlton Diller is serious. Untouchable, inaccessible man—that’s why she was always trying to entertain him, to charm him.

 
Well, what the hell, she smiled all too much anyway. How pleasing to just relax her facial muscles and frown to her heart’s content. Excuse, please. To his heart’s content. How much had her donor, poor Martin Udstrom, smiled in his lifetime, after all? Probably only in the midst of committing some heinous sadistic act.

  She decided to try it out on the next person who walked into the room. Not one twitch of a smile, and she’d discover if she could suddenly become a figure of vast authority like Diller.

  Chapter 40

  Brian drove more slowly than usual. Barbara must be pacing the airport lobby, chain-smoking and glancing at her watch every thirty seconds with that quick gesture—arm stretched to push back the sleeve, then crooked back so she could see the large face of her watch, a man’s size, so that she wouldn’t have to put on the hated glasses to find out what time it was.

  Sharlie’s the same, he thought, stopping for an amber light, which he would ordinarily have sped through. He smiled at the improbability of any resemblance between them. But Sharlie, too, preferred to squint rather than submit to her own myopia. The first time he’d caught her in glasses was at the movies, when she’d been forced to surrender to the subtitles of Swept Away. She’d slipped them on surreptitiously and whipped them off again before the credits had finished. She responded to his teasing by maintaining that the world seemed more palatable just slightly blurred. And besides, she’d protested, indicating a nearby apartment house, wasn’t it more tantalizing to read Superior Promises than Supt. on Premises?

  Oh, yes, he thought, pulling into the parking area of the airport. Let’s just sit here in the car and think about Sharlie. Maybe the boss missed her connection in Chicago.

  But Barbara was standing by the telephones, exuding clouds of smoke from her Lucky Strikes. Brian, striding toward her, thought uncomfortably that she looked a lot like Mount Etna.

  “Hello, dear,” she said, reaching to give him a cool kiss on the cheek. “Traffic?”

  He nodded, and decided he was better off not apologizing. “Good trip?” he asked, picking up her suitcase and leading her toward the glass doors.

  “Shitty, thank you,” she said. “Why do they assault us with those asinine occult films when there’s no way to escape except by jumping out at thirty-five thousand feet? Really, I don’t find prepubescents who use their brain waves to knock down walls and lop off their parents’ extremities particularly diverting.”

  “You don’t have to watch,” Brian said.

  “Oh, come on, with all those jerks oo-ing and ahhing up and down the aisle? Irresistible.”

  “First Amendment,” Brian said, smiling and opening the car door for her. She rolled her eyes at him and slid into the passenger seat. They were silent until they got to the exit toll booth. A tall brown-skinned blond took Brian’s ticket and told him he owed eighty-five cents. He paid, and as they pulled away, Barbara said, “Why is it everybody in the godforsaken state is so fucking wholesome?”

  “You’ll get used to it,” Brian said.

  “I won’t be around long enough to get used to it.”

  They were silent again until finally Brian said, “Thanks for coming. I appreciate it.”

  Barbara lit another cigarette. “Don’t mention it. Your father going to be here?” Brian shook his head, and she looked at him closely. “I guess if you’re a farmer, it’s tough to write off a trip to California as a business expense.”

  Brian was silent.

  “You did tell him you were getting married,” she said.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Now that is unconscionable.”

  Brian heard the combativeness rising and cut her off quickly. “Hey, look, I’ll send him a note in a couple of weeks.”

  She shifted in her seat, visibly working to restrain her displeasure. “Are you taking a honeymoon?”

  “The weekend. We’re not going anywhere.”

  “Oh,” Barbara said. Brian heard the effort to sound indifferent.

  “I hope to be back in the office within ten days,” he said. “It depends on how she weathers the excitement.”

  “Oh,” Barbara said again.

  Brian laughed and said, “You know, I’m so glad to see you.”

  “You sound surprised.”

  “What I meant was, you should have canned me.”

  “I admit the thought has occurred to me now and then.”

  “I was wondering if maybe you had it in mind this trip,” he said slowly.

  “Don’t be a schmuck.”

  “No, Barbara. I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

  She interrupted him again. “Shit, whoever knows what’s going to happen to anybody? We’ll manage.”

  They stopped at a traffic light, and he turned to her. “You have been, you are the most incredible—”

  “Shut up,” she said tersely. Brian accelerated as the light changed to green. Her last words had sounded genuinely angry, but after a moment she murmured disconsolately, “I was looking forward to getting a peek at your daddy. Who knows? I might have spent my twilight years with the old codger, out in the boondocks.”

  Brian laughed, imagining Barbara sloshing through the mud in her Guccis, pitchfork in one hand, cigarette in the other.

  She peered at him. “That’s the look of a happy groom. You are a happy groom?”

  He nodded.

  “Sure?” Her voice was soft and concerned. Brian swallowed against the sudden tight place in his throat.

  “Hey, Morgan,” she went on briskly, “I don’t want to get you pissed off at me, but I did come three thousand miles, and that gives me a certain latitude. You doing this crazy thing for the right reasons?”

  “Are there any?” he asked.

  She shook her head and laid her hand on his arm. “Just want you to be a happy kid,” she said lightly.

  Chapter 41

  The hospital chapel was spilling over with flowers. Walter had rounded up a hundred white roses, but the nurses thought the effect was too sterile and colorless. They raided the day’s crop of incoming bouquets—a rose from this vase, a bird-of-paradise from that—and confiscated the leftovers from those patients who had checked out. The effect was startling, as if someone had joyously flung a wild assortment of color against the altar.

  Spectators crammed the aisles. The hospital staff, dressed in white or green, far outnumbered friends and relatives, but some of the nurses had pinned flowers in their hair, and the doctors wore makeshift boutonnieres. Walter had chosen a pale-pink shirt, and when Sharlie touched his collar with pleasure, he smiled sheepishly, proud of his flamboyance. Margaret, preoccupied but stunning in a raw silk silver-gray suit, stared blankly down the hall away from the chapel entrance. Sharlie stood trembling in her white dress, face feverish, eyes shining. Over the protestations of Mary MacDonald, she had chosen a very simple, long-sleeved, high-collared gown that fell in soft folds to midcalf. She wore no veil, but gathered her hair back and pinned it with a gardenia. She peered through the chapel door, eyes widening at the sight of so many people waiting to watch her march to the altar. She put her open palms against her cheeks and started talking in long, compulsive streams.

  “I hope they have an extra donor hanging around OR. I don’t think Udstrom’s going to make it through this. Oh, Lord, please don’t let Mary play ‘Here Comes the Bride.’ She promised, but I know she’s gonna do it, I just know it, and I pleaded with her for some nice stately Bach … Mother?”

  She watched Margaret forcibly withdraw her gaze from some far-off place.

  “What are you thinking about, Mother?”

  Margaret’s smile was so remote that Sharlie just shook her head and clutched at her bouquet. She’d insisted on pink roses because too much white was boring, and secretly she imagined the red ones looked like a splotch of blood against her dress. When she’d ordered the pink ones, that’s when Walter had crept out to the department store to buy his fancy pink shirt. With French cuf
fs, no less, so he’d bought a pair of gold cufflinks as well.

  Mary had begun to play the preprocessional music they’d agreed on. Sharlie, finally silent, stared up at her father as he stepped closer to her to give her his arm.

  “Well, Chuck …” He was smiling. Sharlie felt the tears beginning. She blinked hard, took her father’s arm with one hand, her mother’s with the other. As they passed through the doorway, the quiet music swelled into resounding chords. The guests stood and turned toward the rear of the chapel, and the strains of “Here Comes the Bride” bellowed forth from beneath the stubby fingers of Mary MacDonald. Sharlie groaned, and looked toward the altar. Without squinting, she could make out Brian’s tall form, resplendent in his new dark-blue suit.

  The ceremony was a blur, but she remembered a few isolated details—the honeybee that flew in the window and cheerfully dive-bombed the roses behind the minister; the curly brown hair at the collar of Brian’s shirt, so reassuringly familiar; the warm glimmer of the rings, slipping easily onto fingers stretched toward one another, fingers that didn’t seem to be attached to anyone she knew. There was an intensity to these images and yet a fuzziness overall, as if the event itself weren’t really happening, only little pieces of it—bright, sparkling mosaics that didn’t fit together cohesively but were beautiful and astonishing on their own.

  After what seemed like both a moment and many hours it was all over, and they were striding down the aisle, laughing and elated, past the grinning faces of the crowd.

  At the reception the fact that they were married began to come into focus (perhaps, Sharlie thought wryly, because she’d finally relented and put on her glasses). And so many people took her hand and congratulated her that after a while she began to believe something momentous had happened.

  It was hot, but they had decided to forgo air conditioning in order to celebrate on the grounds outside the solarium. In the midst of the initial flurry Mary MacDonald, her perspiring face glowing pink, pulled her aside and said, “I’m sorry, I tried. I did. But when the time came and I saw the doors open and your face there with your parents, well, I couldn’t help it. It was sacrilegious to play anything else, and my fingers just …”