Free The Girl With the Glass Heart: A Novel by Daniel Stern Page A

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