And if I don’t?
She raised her head to look at him. He was gazing steadily at her. And again, as in the train, their eyes locked.
He came to her and reached out his hand and she took it and stood up and they came together suddenly, violently. The violence was all inside, but both of them felt it. They embraced, they kissed, it was even more desperate than the day before, as if then they’d been separated for only a lifetime, but tonight was a coming together after a millennium. They felt looped together by some power outside them, larger than they, manipulating them.
Eventually they moved into the bedroom and lay on the bed, their hands filled again, palpable substance within their grasp, clothes, flesh, warmth, small throbbing vessels under the soft skin, curved bone. They undressed, rubbed part against part, cheeks rubbed until they were sore, chests rubbed together in something more primal even than sex, lying behind, beneath sex. Their fingers traced their faces, those writ-ten-on faces, with courses that could be followed, histories. And when their lips touched again, the violence inside them leaped and overwhelmed them. They were caught in it, not it in them, although it came from inside them.
It was a loving war, a way of flesh to get beyond flesh, to get to something not palpable. Grasping, twisting, holding, all intended to reach and keep something that could not be grasped, twisted, held. The iron loop surrounded them and as they surrendered to it, as it became the only reality, there flowed out from their bodies everything taut and selfbound, and the relief of that release came all the way from their bones, from the very marrow, it flowed out like a body melting into sleep.
Later, as he sat smoking and she lay half asleep, he touched her face. “I figured it out.”
“Ummmm?”
“What I was feeling last night. I was feeling—I have to get myself together and get out of here, right now, fast. If I don’t, I’ll never leave. I’ll stay and stay and turn into one of the pieces of furniture.”
“Oh, Victor,” she moaned. She sat up and took one of his cigarettes. She glanced at him. He was looking very pleased with himself.
“Feeling pretty good about yourself, aren’t you.”
He glinted. “It isn’t often I psych myself out”
She grimaced.
“Well?”
“It’s such a damned stereotype!”
“Oh God! The libber speaks!” He slid down on his pillow.
“Feminist, please.” She poked his arm. “What you’re doing is turning me into Circe.”
He had pulled the sheet up over his head. Only his hand, holding his cigarette, protruded. From under the sheet, a muted voice howled.
“How in hell can I turn you into something I never heard of?”
Firm teacher’s voice. “That doesn’t matter. You know the stereotype even if you don’t know the name.”
Groan from under the sheet.
“Circe was a goddess who enchanted men to keep them with her. She turned them into pigs.”
Sheet thrown off, body up. “And you don’t like being Circe?”
“I don’t like being seen as Circe.”
“Well, I sure as hell don’t like being seen as a pig!”
They laughed then, silly laughter, the kind that comes when it’s late and you’re tired and you love someone and you can afford to be a child. Victor slid down again and rested his head against her side.
“Listen, I have to know something. How long are you going to be here?”
“A year.” Caressing his hair.
He sat up abruptly. “A year!”
“You?”
“A year.”
They gleamed at each other like two children whose magnificent piece of mischief has come off without a flaw.
“Oh, Victor! If you could have heard my internal dialogue last night! You were killed, maimed, sent into an eternal iceberg! I walked on glass, hit my head, burned my hand, I was so mad!”
He turned his head and kissed her breast. Then lay back and stared at the ceiling. “I don’t like you to be angry with me,” he said, slowly, “but I do want … well, I want to know how you feel. I want you to tell me the truth. About that, I mean. I want to know how you feel all the time.”
“Well, I’m feeling sort of warm, especially around the ass, and sort of hungry but too. lazy to get up and fix something, and sort of tired but not ready to sleep.”
He took her hand and kissed it. “I mean it, though.”
“Okay.” She slid down on her pillow and stared at the ceiling too. “Don’t call me Lorie, okay?”
Made it a plea and not a demand.
2
EVENTUALLY, THEIR LIFE TOGETHER fell into a pattern, into the habitual that Dolores dreaded. But a month had gone by and she did not feel constricted. Victor had a flat in London paid for by his company. He spent most week nights there and came to Oxford to stay with her on the weekends. When Dolores had to work at the British Museum for two days, she stayed with Victor in London. When Victor had business in Oxford, he stayed at the Randolph and came to her flat evenings. He never took Dolores into the Randolph with him. She noticed.
Sometimes he would have to take business trips, to Manchester or Birmingham or Leeds. Perhaps even to the Continent. He told her this with delight. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if they could go together? He’d rent a car and they could drive up together. They’d be together, they’d see some of England.
She drew back a little. “Yes. I guess. Sometimes.”
“Don’t you want to?” Incredulous.
“Yes, I’d love to. When I can.”
“Well, why can’t you?”
“Victor, I have work to do. I have only a year here and a lot of material to get through.”
“Can’t you take your work with you? You work here.” He gestured towards the sitting-room table heaped with notes and file cards.
“Sometimes. It depends what point I’m at. Sometimes I have to work in the library.”
He was silent, sulky. She was biting the inside of her lip.
“We have so little time,” he said finally. “I want to use every minute of it, every minute we can use.”
“So do I. But I don’t ask you to take days off from work.”
“That’s different.”
“Why?” It’s always different for women. Whatever they do, it isn’t important. Todd, begging her to type his paper for him. “I have exams to grade, Todd.” “That’s different. You don’t have a deadline.” End of that affair.
“I’m regulated externally: I have to be at certain places at certain times. You can regulate yourself.”
“The work regulates me,” she said coolly.
He got up and went into the kitchen. She could hear him preparing coffee. She turned back to her collating of notes.
He returned with one cup of coffee, sat across the room, and sulked.
She stopped working and looked at him. “Victor, what would you say if I asked you to take a couple of days off from work so we could go to Aldeburgh for a long weekend?”
“Where?”
“Aldeburgh. Anyplace!”
“I’d say I’d see. I’d try.”
“Well, that’s what I’m saying to you.”
“Okay.” Gloomily.
“What do you want from me?” Exasperated.
“Nothing. Nothing.” A little martyred?
“You’re used to women dropping everything at your call, aren’t you. Do you own a whistle?” Vicious.
He glared at her. “I never needed one.” Vicious back.
But she laughed, and he laughed too, wryly, abashed.
“Okay,” he said. “You’ll try. How about next Tuesday and Wednesday. I have to go to Birmingham.”
“I’ll see where I get to. I’ll try.”
Tight-lipped. “And just when do you think you can let me know? Because if you’re not going to come, I’ll fly. It’s faster. And I have to make arrangements, reservations, rent a car.”
“I’ll know by this Friday. I’ll s
ee how far I get, how much collating there is to do.”
“That’s a bit late.”
“Make both—plane and car reservations. Then cancel the one you don’t need.”
“I don’t need your help in working this out, thanks.”
Impatiently, she turned back to her work. He sat drinking coffee, his own papers spread out on the floor beside his chair, his briefcase on the footstool. He kicked the footstool.
She looked at him. Really this was too childish.
“I know, I know! I understand. But I’m not used to it. It’s going to take some time for me to get used to it”
“Get used to what?”
“Oh, you! Your orneriness.”
“Orneriness!” Having your own work to do was orneriness?
He smiled nastily. “Cussedness?”
She smiled nastily back. “All you have to get used to is being a little flexible.”
“Okay, okay!” He kicked the footstool over. “I’m sick of this damned stuff. Let’s get out of here, go for a walk.”
Her back stiffened. She was in the middle of something and wanted to finish it “Okay,” she said.
They stood up, Victor walked toward her and put his hand on her back. “Honestly, Lorie, I don’t mean to be a pain in the ass.”
“I thought you weren’t going to call me that.”
“I like it. Can’t you be a little flexible too?”
“About my name?” Men seem to think they can name women as they please, just because Adam did. That way they give women the shape and function they want them to have. “All the years I was married, my husband never called me by name.”
“What did he call you?”
“Depended. Honey and sweetie. Or slut, bitch, whore.”
He laughed. “One sin I haven’t committed!”
“But you have! You are! Lorie. It’s so diminishing.”
“It’s loving.”
“Lorie. Judy. Jill. Pansy. Little girl names. We give women names they can’t grow old with. Can you picture a ninety-year-old Judy? Jill with a bald spot and a walker? Dawn taking out her false teeth?”
“You can call me any name you like and I’ll still come,” he grinned in mock lechery, and walked to the hall for their jackets.
“How about Anthony?” she smiled wickedly.
“What was that?” Muffled among the coats. In the doorway: “What? Oh, your husband’s name?” Looking at her grin, he began to laugh and went for her, wrestled her down, and that was the end of that walk.
3
IN THE END, SHE went to Birmingham with him. They drove along the motorways through rolling green English farmland. Cows rested on meadows velvety green, while in the distance white funnels rose—parts of electric generators?—and nearer, huge electric towers bore thick swaying wires.
“They do this better than we do,” she said, nodding toward the scene. “Combine industry and farmland.” “In places they do. But their rate of production is nowhere near ours.”
“It’s easy to be efficient when you want only one thing.”
He glanced at her briefly. “What do you mean?”
“If profit is all you care about, you can achieve it easily. But if you also care about the land you’re polluting, the people you’re poisoning, the safety of the product you’re making, then it’s not so easy. You have many goals and have to be circular, not linear.”
“And circular thinking never goes anywhere. There’s too much of it—too many softheaded critics who don’t know what they’re talking about.”
“Ecologists, you mean?”
“Among others. Academics. People without power who carp at those with it.”
“Oh, Victor, do you really think that’s all there is to it? That there isn’t real ground for concern?”
“Sure, there’s some. I guess. But what I know is that regardless of what people claim, their real motivation is to gain power. Power is what everybody really wants.”
She tried to adjust her mind, to turn its gears to a place where she could argue with him. She had trouble. His statements seemed to her to come from a land so alien to the one she lived in that she could never find sentences clean and clear enough to break through the border.
“There are many kinds of power,” she began falteringly.
“Sure,” he agreed breezily. “And everybody has the kind that’s right for him. The do-gooders ought to realize that. People know what they want, and they get what they want.”
The border between their countries sprang a wall.
“Not everybody wants political power. Nor can everyone handle it. But everybody wants some sort, and everybody has some sort. Maybe it’s only power over the wife and kids, maybe they roll a terrific boccie ball or play a mean game of Chinese checkers.”
“This power of yours seems to be strictly male: power over the wife and kids?”
“Oh, women! God, have you seen them in action, these dependent passive mommas? Never underestimate the power of helplessness!”
She gazed at him, silent. He was driving fast. The average speed on the motorway seemed to be ninety, but even driving on the left-hand side of the road, Victor was not flustered. His window was open, the wind blew through his hair, his right arm rested on the window ledge, his left steered with assurance. He looked beautiful, he looked as if he were steering a sailboat right into the wind. Beautiful and sure and precise. He knew what he was doing. He knew what he thought. He had language to say what he thought.
Easy to be beautiful, easy to be in harmony with yourself when you thought the same way as the powers in your world. So easy to be right and sure and clear if you were a man, white, interested in profit, successful. Whereas she, Dolores, could not even frame a sentence with which to argue with him.
She tried again. “There’s power to: and everyone should have that, but everyone doesn’t. Power to play Bach, or tennis, or boccie if. you like. And there’s power over; and no one should have that, but people do.”
“Hah! Ever seen a world in which they didn’t? You’re turning reality into an academic subject, into political science or some damned thing. Everybody has some form of power over, as you call it.”
“For god’s sake, Victor, what kind of power over does a black slum kid have? An itinerant farm worker? An uneducated woman with a brutal husband and a job in a factory with an equally brutal foreman?”
“The power to rip somebody off, maybe. To pick more lettuce than anyone else. To cook up a great pot of stew. I don’t know. I only know everybody has something.”
She burst out explosively. “That is the most fucking complacent attitude I ever encountered! How nice to think we all have what we want, all have what we deserve! How nice to conceive of the entire human world as in a state of war—because that’s what you’re saying, really—when you already know you’re among the winners! The fact is a lot of people never even get the chance to figure out what they want, much less to figure out ways of getting it!”
“It doesn’t take chance, it takes thought.”
“It takes room! The room to choose, the room to entertain possibilities. Some Indian woman in a sleepy Guatemalan town can’t see beyond her own dusty village, can’t see any future for herself beyond the one her mother, her aunts, her sisters, her friends must live.”
“And what’s wrong with that?”
“What’s wrong with it is that she may be miserable!”
“Nonsense. Her expectations aren’t great, so she’s probably less unhappy than a middle-class woman with pretensions. And when your woman’s sleepy Guatemalan town is ready for progress, it will find it.”
Dolores clenched her hands so tightly her nails dug her palms.
“Apathy,” Victor continued. “Most people live in apathy. I can’t spare a sigh for them.”
Nor spare a sigh/Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie.
She spoke calmly, sadly. “You sound as if you believed that all people need is ambition and will. But there are millions of peop
le whose ambition and will have been sapped before they’re five years old. Who will never have room enough to choose because they can’t see enough, who don’t have energy because they weren’t fed enough. People are slotted into their positions in life.”
“We’re doing what we can about that.” Coldly. “There are social programs….”
He fished for a cigarette. She did not offer to help him. He found one, found his lighter, and tried to light it, but the wind blew out the flame.
“There are social programs,” she repeated, cold too, as he waited for the car lighter to pop out. “Most of them are useless. Band-Aids. You can’t cure a disease by cutting off the symptoms, you have to get at the root. And the root is our system of values.”
“Capitalism, I suppose,” he drawled nastily.
“No. Socialism is bad too. Better in some ways, worse in others. I see little difference between them. Both see people as means to ends. If the end is called by different names, that doesn’t make it necessarily a different thing. Production is the great aim, production and power. Not felicitous life.”
“What the hell do you think the production and power are supposed to do but help people live more pleasantly?”
“Supposed! Supposed! In fact, the end of power is power and more power!”
“That’s the thinking of a person who doesn’t know anything about power! Goddamned ivory-tower academics! I’m sorry, Lorie, I don’t mean to be unkind, but the people you work with have infected your thinking.”
“Maybe I’ve infected theirs,” she shot in angrily.
He ignored her. “Winning is wonderful! Success is wonderful! There’s nothing like it! That’s felicitous life!”
She rubbed her forehead. “Victor, this is hopeless. Winning is wonderful, yes—if you don’t have to pay too much for it. To win money and lose your emotional life is not to win. Success too—it isn’t success after all, is it, if it isn’t an expression of your deepest energies? You know that old Greek recipe for happiness? Happiness is the exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a life affording them scope.”
“Okay, okay.” He nodded agreement, nodded eagerly. He wanted them to find some common language, wanted to agree. She watched him carefully. “I’ll buy that,” he nodded.
The Bleeding Heart Page 8