Cornmarket is a street only two blocks long, and it is the real center of Oxford. And another world. It is lined with cheap shops selling clothes, handbags, shoes, books. And it is thronged with women.
“When I first came and saw it, I thought: so this is where the women are! The men get to have the colleges; the women get to do the marketing.”
They stood, then walked slowly down one side of the street and up the other. They passed the crowded cut-rate drugstore, the five-and-dime. The street was dominated by young women who sauntered in pairs, arm in arm, conscious of their stylishness. They were shopgirls and secretaries, out for a Saturday jaunt. Almost all of them had haloes of frizzed hair, long full skirts in flowery cotton prints, frilly blouses and short jackets, nothing warm enough for this brisk day. They trotted along on five-inch heels strapped to their ankles. Their faces had blobs of rouge at the cheeks and dark, almost purple lips. They were all very thin.
Only after you got used to the girls did you see the older women scurrying from shop to shop carrying string bags. They were uniformly shapeless and dowdy, whether they were plump or thin, tall or short. They did not seem to look out at the world at all, they seemed driven by some inner meter that never stopped ticking (forty p, that’s three pound ten, and I still have to buy a bit of fish for supper, Joe’s shoes will have to wait until next week or perhaps a fortnight it’s four o’clock already how the time goes such lines in the five-and-dime the children will be getting in and I still have to roll out the pie dough).
After that, you noticed that there were some men in the street, a few young ones: dark, rough, embarrassed. They did not walk together the way the girls did. When there were two or three in a group, they jostled and teased, they were uncomfortable with themselves, their bodies, their energy.
And finally, you saw the older couples. They walked together in a peaceful comfort one rarely saw in America, as if something important had been settled between them.
Or for them.
Still the girls dominated the street like brilliant-colored birds darting among sparrows and squirrels. And there didn’t seem to be any in between. You were young or you were ageless; you were flitting or you were settled.
“This is where the women are. Over here the girls—an infinitely replaceable generation—shine for their hour and give the place its animation, its vividness. Then they turn into the anxious housewives.”
“And over there the stone. Standing.”
IV
1
ONE DAY AFTER MARKETING they stopped at the Wykeham, a shop on narrow old Holywell Street, for a cream tea. It is a tiny place, with small tables placed close together.
“Clotted cream. It sounds disgusting.”
“Call it Devon cream. Then you can like it.”
“What is it, anyway?”
“Just cream that’s been set near warmth and allowed to get thick, almost like butter. You spread it on scones. You’ll like it.”
A young couple sat at the next table talking in low voices. The boy looked like a student—he had that tender-faced pink-and-white protected look, toney. A bit sulky perhaps, but very genteel. The girl looked vigorous, healthy, not as toney as he. Her accent, when Dolores could catch her words, wasn’t quite as U as his. They were both pretty, but distressed about something. Victor and Dolores glanced at each other with patronizing parental smiles: Sweet, aren’t they? their smiles said.
The young couple’s tea arrived. The waitress put the teapot down in front of the young man, the scones and cream near the young woman.
The two of them gazed at the things, then at each other. They hesitated. They seemed baffled. Then the young woman lifted the plate of scones and held it out to the young man. He looked at her in alarm. There was no room on the tiny table for the scones unless the teapot were moved.
He stared at the teapot.
Dolores and Victor glanced at each other with parental amusement: Funny, aren’t they? their eyes said. “Come on,” the girl said, wiggling the plate. Finally, with revulsion, as if lifting the pot would pollute him, he picked up the teapot and handed it to her, took the scones and set them down.
She poured the tea into their cups. Then she gazed at it, then at him. He gazed at her, then at it. Then at her again.
There were tea leaves floating in the cups. They observed the tea. They looked questioningly at each other. He looked mortified, she looked uncomfortable. They sat.
The waitress passed their table, bringing tea to Dolores and Victor.
“Oh, miss,” the girl called in a faint voice, “there’s something wrong with the tea.”
The waitress glanced at it. “Oh, sorry, luv, the tea-bag must’ve burst. I’ll bring you a fresh pot.” And took. the teapot and the woman’s cup.
The young couple sat. Victor and Dolores tried not to stare, and tried not to look at each other lest they break out in laughter. Eventually the waitress returned with a pot of tea and a clean cup for the girl. The boy watched, still mortified. The girl poured fresh tea into her clean cup, added cream, and lifted it, about to drink.
“I say!” the boy protested. He sounded near tears. “Gillian, why don’t you take this one and let me have that?”
Dolores and Victor stared at him, and although he did not glance at them, he flushed, he felt their looking. The girl stared at him. There was no expression whatever on her face. After long seconds, she lifted her cup and saucer and handed them to him.
“Oh, no, don’t!” he protested. “No, don’t, don’t. Don’t be silly, Gill, it’s all right, don’t!” She kept holding it out to him.
“Take it, then, will you?” she said finally, and he did, his color rising, shaking his head at her, muttering about her foolishness, her silliness.
She poured cream over the floating leaves, and drank the flawed tea.
Victor and Dolores, no longer in danger of laughing, looked at each other.
“But I understand him,” Victor said, cycling home.
As they put the groceries away: “He’s always been waited on—by mama, grandma, aunts, servants probably from the look of him. He was mortified when the teapot was put in front of him. He didn’t know what to do. Life in his house has always been carefully ordered, graceful, proper. Women pour tea.”
“Yes, and it was below his dignity to do a woman’s job,” Dolores said tartly.
“It was partly unfamiliarity. You get accustomed to things being a certain way and when they’re not, it’s a shock. It’s hard to adjust.”
“If a teapot in an unfamiliar place is enough to send him into shock, God help him when he gets out into the world. Selfish little bastard. It seemed to me they were talking about wedding plans. If so, I feel sorry for her.”
“But she did it, Lorie, doesn’t that count?”
“Count for what?”
“As a contributing factor. She participated.”
“She felt she had to give in to him. He’s used to coming first. Surely you saw that she thought he was behaving like a spoiled child.”
“Well, why didn’t she tell him that, then?” he yowled.
She stopped and looked at him.
“How’s he going to discover that the things he does are rotten if she doesn’t tell him?”
“Good God, an idiot would know that was selfish! And weak to boot! All he had to do was ask the waitress for a fresh cup. Just speak up. But that was below his dignity too.”
“Oh, sweetheart, he’s just shy. They both were. You could see they really didn’t know how to handle the situation. I can remember when waitresses scared me, can’t you?”
“Victor, what’s the point of us arguing about it? You’re right, he couldn’t deal with it. He can deal with nothing. A nothing and a selfish bastard, that’s what he is. Typical.”
“Yes. He couldn’t! Couldn’t! Just like the people you talk about who are culturally brainwashed into inferiority, who can’t overcome their backgrounds. He can’t overcome his!”
They were sitting
at the kitchen table. Victor was smoking furiously, drinking a Scotch.
“Are you feeling attacked?”
“Yes!” he barked.
“By me?”
He looked at her, then away. “It’s just that I think there are mitigating circumstances, even for him. Of course he’s a selfish little beast. But my point is that she helps to keep him that way by assenting to it. So that they participate equally. Share equal blame for it.”
“No. Not equal.”
“Why in hell not!”
So she got angry too and rapped it out: how she isn’t responsible for his character, how you can’t talk about equal responsibility or equal blame when there wasn’t equal power. How you can’t blame an underdog for submitting as much as you can blame an overdog for oppressing. How she’d listened to a white South African expert talking about Biko’s separatist movement, and describe how he’d disapproved of it in the beginning, finding it “racist.”
“Racist! That’s saying that if an oppressed people join together to overthrow the oppressor, they’re the racists! That’s a Nazi mentality!”
“Jesus Christ! You can’t say anything around here without being called a Nazi! I’m not exculpating him! You’re so goddamned narrow about things, Lorie!”
Narrow. You have to be narrow when you’re at war.
“If she’s brainwashed, so is he. They both come out of the same cultural bag. In fact, it’s more to her advantage to break out of the old mold, so in some sense, she’s even more responsible than he is.”
“What atrocious logic!” she burst out. “It is not to her advantage to break out! Society penalizes women who break out, in tens of ways! She pays the price if she stays in, but she pays a higher one if she breaks out!”
“Really? Are you penalized? You seem to me to get along pretty well.”
“The punishment comes in the beginning,” she said bitterly. “By the time you’re my age, you are hardened to it. You can get beyond it because you don’t let yourself feel certain things.”
“Like sympathy for men?” he asked nastily, and she glared at him and got up swiftly and walked to the living room.
And broke her rule and lighted a cigar. All his fault. Oh God, all over again. All over again. Sick of this, she was. She didn’t want to spend her life fighting, arguing, converting. Didn’t want to ruin something that was warm and rich: an idyll. No, you couldn’t do it, just go off to a desert island someplace and pretend the world doesn’t exist. You brought it with you—it was in your brain cells, in your fucking genes. I was stupid to imagine we could annul our pasts. Why doesn’t he see? Why doesn’t he understand? It’s all so clear, but so hard to understand. And beyond that, he doesn’t understand why I have to hold so hard to my position, why I can’t give an inch. It’s more convenient for him that way. Besides, he was never in your position. She felt very tired.
Victor came into the living room with a very dark Scotch and a glass of wine for her. “Peace offering?”
She took it, said “Thanks” without smiling, sipped it. Tired.
He sat down opposite her. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“For what?” Shrug. Tired, long-suffering voice. “You meant what you said and you said it.”
“I’m sorry it upset you this way.”
“Things do what they do.”
“Well, can we talk about it?”
“Oh, Victor,” impatient voice, speaking to a child. “Do you really think talking about this is going to help? When you don’t see, you don’t understand anything about my most profound convictions, and I can’t seem to make you see them? Do you think the two of us aren’t as ingrained with things as the two in the tea shop? Even more, because we’re older. We tried to come together fresh and new, not dragging the past,” her voice grew thick, full of tears, “but we couldn’t. Couldn’t, like your boy. So there we are. I can’t accept your position. Can’t.” Her eyes were glistening and he moved swiftly towards her, and kissed them, wetting his lips on her tears.
The salt stung him, and he laid his head against hers, sitting on the edge of her chair, rocking her gently.
2
AFTER A LONG SILENCE, she spoke in a thick voice. “Oh, I hear what you’re saying. I mean, I heard. I understand. You were catered to, you were spoiled, by your mother, your wife. You’ve been selfish. Maybe you still are. And you feel you’re not entirely responsible for that. So you don’t want to feel the entire guilt I understand. But I won’t absolve you.”
“If I want absolution, I’ll join a church!” he yelled, pulling away from her.
“Sorry. I was confusing you with most of the other men I meet.” Cold and snotty.
He sighed heavily and stared at the floor. He spoke in a low voice, slowly, very calm. “Okay, okay. What I’d like is for you to explain to me why you, an intelligent woman, deny, even get hysterical about a perfectly logical position.”
“I get hysterical!”
“Well, what are you?”
“I’m furious, is what I am. And what were you?”
“Okay.” Sigh. Change in voice, turns to her with appeal in his face. “Is it so terrible that I want you to understand my side of things?”
She gazed at him warily. “I guess not.”
He sighed deeply. “Well, that’s all I was asking for.”
As if I didn’t already know his side of things. Haven’t heard it in replicate all my fucking life. As if there were, apart from a few people, any other side.
“All right,” she said.
He turned eagerly, trying to see if she too were eager. She tried to smile, but she felt tired, tired in her bones. “Your wife catered to you,” she began.
“My wife LIED TO ME!” he shouted.
Oh, she was tired. She didn’t want to hear, didn’t want to have to listen. She’d heard too many sad songs of marriage, from wives, from husbands, sometimes from both together, or both in turn. She had reached the end of her tolerance—what did they say in business? Victor said it: the bottom line—yes, the bottom line of pain. She could not stand anymore. She thought how nice it would be to get up and take a bath. It would even be nice to get up and do the dishes. What she really wanted to do was get out her notes and work. But that would be too cruel.
Although husbands did that to wives all the time. Walked out on them when they were emotional, saying they had to work.
Well, the point isn’t to get even, it’s to be decent, isn’t it?
Is it? You know being decent always puts you at a disadvantage.
Shit. Power, always power, crisscrossing with the other things, making everything impossible. And love was so hard for her, was impossible for her, because of what it meant to her. Being there for another. Not fidelity in sex. Not being a servant. But utter being there for the other, the way she was for her friends even if they called at two in the morning, even if they needed a place to hide out when she was finishing a manuscript. And for her children whenever they called, whenever they came, whatever they needed.
Why did she feel she owed him this? Would he grant it to her? She looked at him. He might. Then she looked again, shocked. He was gazing into space, he looked gaunt, hollow-eyed, drained of life. He looked old, spectral. He was a walking-around dead man.
She reached out and stroked his head, and he turned to her slowly, suspiciously. She did not try to smile this time, she merely gazed at him and stroked his head. “Your wife lied to you,” she said.
“Yes.” He relaxed a little, his back slumped. He took her hand and kissed it, then replaced it on her lap, and got up and moved to the other chair. He sat down and sipped his Scotch. He was facing her, he pulled the chair up close to her.
“You see: you go along for so many years doing things a certain way, thinking you’re a decent person, well, average anyway, no, damn it, decent, because whatever you’re doing, everybody else is doing too, or almost everybody else. And nobody seems to see anything wrong. So you don’t think about it, really….”
“What kinds of things?”
He shrugged. “Well, all kinds. You know. Little things, like opening car doors for women as if they were too weak to do it themselves. Or carving the roast even though Edith carves better than I do. Fetching drinks. Deferring to women in social situations. Taking out the garbage—whenever I was home to do it. Not ever, ever, dusting a table or clearing a table or washing or drying a dish.” She sighed. Dishes.
“But essentially what I mean is staying in a marriage that’s been dead for years, simply because you are married and your wife is a good woman, and because it is wrong, wrong, wrong, to walk out on a woman just because you’re missing something, some vitality. Especially a woman like Edith, who never worked, who’s devoted her life to me and the kids, to taking care of everything, really. I say I did the ‘male’ jobs, but in fact, I was almost never home. She really did everything….” He was watching her face carefully. Does he think this tale is going to upset me? Does he think I don’t already know it, haven’t heard it hundreds of times before, couldn’t have told it about him?
“Well, so you decide that it is foolish and immature to walk out on such a solid good thing. That’s what you call it in your mind. But you are hankering, there’s an itch, you want more, it’s not enough. She doesn’t seem to be unhappy, she seems content with the way things are. So you tell yourself women are different. She has the kids, she has the house, those things really seem to matter to her.
“Whereas, they don’t matter to you, much as you try. Oh, the kids are cute, sometimes they’re even interesting, but not often. And it is a goddamned pain in the neck to watch them even for a couple of hours, if she goes out on a Saturday afternoon and leaves you to baby-sit. And you can’t really grasp her total involvement with them, it seems strange to you. And you tell yourself women are a different species from men, and you shrug, and you accept it.”
“Easily.”
“Yes.” He did not look at her. “And you’re already spending two or three nights a week in town, having dinner with so-called important people, and it’s not a difficult thing to expand that to four nights a week and cut back on the important people a little. And it’s not a difficult thing either to get a little place of your own in town, you can even tell her about this, it’s for nights when there are late meetings and you stay over in town. Or you can share one with some of your friends. I didn’t though. Share it, or tell Edith. I just got it. But in fact I hardly used it, because they all had their own places, the girls. Wonderful girls—women. It seems an ideal solution. You get the excitement and vitality you’ve been missing, you keep the solid marriage, the house, the kids, wife’s not unhappy, you’re happy. It seems,” he looked up at her bewildered, “the decent thing to do.”
The Bleeding Heart Page 11