The Bleeding Heart

by Marilyn French

  He lighted a cigarette from the stub of the one he was finishing. “It seems ideal, but of course it’s not. You hurt the girls—sorry, the women. They get involved but you can’t get really involved. You have to hide, be secretive, to some degree at least. Still you go on doing it because it makes you feel alive.” He wiped his face with his hand. “And you think your wife must know. After all, it’s obvious, isn’t it? So many late nights in town, so many business trips that spill over into the weekends. You think she is giving you tacit agreement, saying just don’t tell me about it and I won’t complain. Maybe she’s even grateful, getting the horny bastard to take his horniness elsewhere. She’s been dutiful and unenthusiastic for years.”

  He swallowed a lump of Scotch.

  “And then one day your wife, the person all this was for—”

  “Or so you told yourself.”

  He gazed at her. “Yes, I suppose. But it was, wasn’t it? She was the one who was happy with the marriage.”

  “Maybe. But if you’d divorced her, what would you have done? Turned around and married someone else, had more kids, maybe, get a nice settled life with her, and then start the running around all over again. Wouldn’t you? I mean, ‘all this’ was for you, too.”

  He stared at the floor. “I’d like to think I wouldn’t. But maybe. Anyway, Edith rose up one day and recounted a list of my sins a mile long. Seems she’s never been happy. Says I kept her from having a career. My God, we got married right after she graduated from Sarah Lawrence, she never wanted to work, she never said a thing about it. And she has this list … things I did twenty years ago, for godsakes! Things, she says, that crushed her, wiped her out. But she never told me at the time! How was I supposed to know?”

  His voice edged on tears of rage and frustration.

  Dolores sat silent. A little sensitivity might have helped, she thought grimly. A little attention to her as a person in her own right, and not just as an extension of you.

  “Can you understand how I feel?”

  She nodded.

  His head drooped. “I took care of her financially. Good care. She could have done anything she wanted to do, we’ve had a housekeeper for years. I fathered some children for her. I thought that was what she wanted. I thought that was what I was supposed to do. God knows, the kids were hers….” He raised his head and his eyes glistened. “But she says now I’ve made her a total dependent, unfit for life!”

  He lurched to his feet and went into the kitchen for another drink. She hated him like this. Swallowing Scotch in huge gulps, like some insatiable baby. She sipped her wine. And I probably look like some prim disapproving spinster, funneling my pleasures so carefully.

  He returned with a fresh drink as dark as the last one, and sat down hard in his chair.

  “Thing is,” he resumed more calmly, “the sins she threw at me were like the sins of that jackass in the tea shop today. Selfishness. Total self-absorption. And … I guess it’s all true. But, Dolores, I swear to you, that’s the way I thought things were supposed to be! Stupid, I guess. But as if God, really, or Nature, or something, had made women, my wife, to serve me, to cater to me, to spend her life caring for the kids and the house and me. And had made me, all men, to support her, all women, financially, to give them babies and get treated royally for it. It wasn’t a question of believing that with my head. Because I never thought about it. At all. I just lived it, like everybody else.”

  Dolores was looking grim. Victor did not look at her.

  “All those years I thought she was happy. She acted happy, damn it! She was thrilled about the job in Dallas. So much money. She was pregnant, that made her happy too. We bought a little house out there. She decorated it, bought all the furniture. Christ, I remember buying up every house magazine on the stands. Then twenty years later she tells me the move to Dallas broke her heart because it separated her from her family and friends. That she was lonely and bored and miserable in Dallas.

  “But she never told ME!”

  What would you have done if she had?

  His eyes were wet again. He turned to Dolores. “She harbors grudges, she stores them up and pours them out in arguments like the stinking water that’s left after the flowers in the vase have died.”

  She watched him suffer.

  He hit the arm of the chair with his fist. “I’m sure everything she says is true. Said. But how was I to know? I acted like my father, I loved my father, I acted better than my father. My mother worked and did everything in the house too, he never raised a finger. She paid the taxes, mowed the lawn, paid the bills. I never asked Edith to do things like that.”

  “Too hard for her,” Dolores said nastily.

  He glanced at her and down. “Maybe.”

  She thought: he is changing before my eyes. Realizing. How happy that should make Edith. And he’s good, he really is. He’s feeling this, it matters to him. Most men would toss it off with a she’s-a-bitch-and-that’s-life shrug, not really caring. Go on finding their pleasures elsewhere—at work, with the boys, with other women. So he’s better than most men. But does that make him good enough?

  She said: “But you changed.”

  He turned his face away from her. “Yes.”

  “Is she happier now?”

  She could sense his tightness from where she was sitting, sense his whole body as a knot of muscles. But she did not reach out to him. He was tied in the configuration of his own pain, in which she would be an intruder. And besides, she recognized with dismay, she did not at that moment like him very much.

  “I’ve changed as much as she’ll allow me to.” He sat up straight and looked at her. “You know, if what happened to those kids at the tea shop had happened to Edith and me, she would have insisted I take the fresh cup. I wouldn’t have had to ask. And years ago, I would have taken it. I wouldn’t now. But it wouldn’t make her happy that I didn’t take it. You see? She wants it both ways.” He was growling, glaring at the wall. “She wants to keep her old ways so that she won’t feel guilty. But she wants to blame me for them, so she can justify her anger. But her anger is against the fact that she learned the old ways in the first place. And nowadays—she never shows her anger, never. She’s always sweet, always smiling.”

  His face appealed to her. “Can you see why I feel a little—unjustly accused about all this?”

  My foot you don’t want absolution.

  But there are women, you’ve met some, who stay in a marriage, especially in a wealthy one, even though they’re stultified, and blame the man for that.

  Ah, but it’s because they’re too frightened: poverty and independence are terrifying things.

  His pain was like a fog, a dampness in the room. She had to say something.

  “I understand what you say, how you feel. I’m sympathetic to Edith, too, though. It’s too hard for me to give judgment on such a thing, and I think that’s what you’re asking me for. I mean, my suspicion is that you could have known what Edith was feeling if you’d wanted to. It was more convenient not to. Whereas if she’d told you what she was feeling, your marriage would have been in trouble. I’d guess.”

  He stared at her.

  “But I can’t stand all this, Victor. These situations. The personal. It’s so harrowing. We all get caught in the world’s traps and toss around in a web we’ve helped to weave, unable to free our arms and legs, tied in them forever. It’s intolerable to me. And we look for someone to blame. And sometimes there’s someone handy,” she smiled, putting her hand on his arm. “Someone who maybe deserves a bit of blame. But I try, I guess I’m an emotional coward these days, I try hard to avoid involving myself in such things. I try to concentrate on the universal, the abstract, to look for the larger cultural patterns that make us so miserable, to get to the bases of these things, the sociological, psychological, intellectual bases. So I don’t have to deal with this: with you, with Edith. With pain.”

  He was hurt. He heard her saying she didn’t want to listen to him. And she was u
nable to think of a single thing to say that would soften what he felt, moderate what she’d said.

  3

  DOLORES WAS WALKING HOME from the bus stop in the teeming rain, when a car pulled over and stopped.

  “Want a lift?” Mary Jenkins’s head, shrouded in yellow plastic, stuck out of the car window.

  Dolores got in for the half-block ride. The women were laughing. “I’m soaked!” Dolores cried. “The rain’s gone clear through my raincoat, my jeans, even my underwear is wet!”

  “Yes, rain is one thing the British do better than anybody else,” Mary said mock-proudly.

  They ran up the path to the house and shook themselves off in the front hall.

  “You are a sight! You should get a slicker, like mine. Why don’t you get yourself dried off and come down and I’ll give you a nice warming glass of sherry.”

  Mary’s old-fashioned kitchen was primitive by American standards. No appliances except a tiny fridge and an old gas stove. A high-backed sink with two spigots. An electric kettle, a mesh basket to be placed over the gas for making toast.

  But it was lovely. Light poured through the high windows facing the garden. An old wooden hutch held odd plates, cups, pitchers, all different, lovely old china used every day. Wooden table, well worn. Wooden cabinet with shelves above it, open shelves showing the few cans, the pound of sugar, the small bags of good coffee. And mess everywhere. Half a loaf of bread sat on the breadboard, a knife beside it, crumbs all around it. Open jam jar, butter soft and oozy from sitting out, soiled coffee cups, plates, an earthen jug and strainer that Mary used as a coffeepot.

  Dolores felt completely at home.

  Mary moved around the kitchen, doing things as she talked, but nothing she did seemed to clear the mess. She appeared to be constantly in motion—perhaps it was merely that she gestured a great deal, maybe it was her alert intelligent eyes constantly changing expression. For her face was calm and composed, yet she never seemed still.

  It was quiet in the flat. “Where are your children?” Dolores asked.

  “With their father. He has them most of the time. He has custody,” she added in a thin dry voice.

  “Oh.” Pause. What on earth could she have done, that he got custody? Walked the streets? Taken drugs? Beat them? But maybe she didn’t want them: she was so busy.

  “You’re so busy—always running, every time I see you.”

  “Oh, yes, frightfully. That damned qualifying exam, you know. Plus my surgery and the hospital work. I’m done in, really.”

  “I don’t understand why you have to take a qualifying exam at this stage.”

  “Well, I’m trying to qualify as a specialist, you see—in internal medicine. I’ve been studying for two years, squeezing it in between office hours and rounds and trying to see the children. It’s very difficult, because there’s an oral exam and the board is all male. They give women an extraordinarily hard time. If you try to be agreeable, they say you’re not serious, and if you try to be serious, they say you’re abrasive. There’s not an awful lot of room in between. It might be a teeny bit easier if I were going for pediatrics or even gynecology. They could accept that more readily.”

  “Maybe you should put your hair in a bun.” Mary’s long dark hair hung midway down her back.

  Mary giggled. “Do you really believe that would help?”

  “You know men,” Dolores laughed.

  “Yes, of course. Someone my age with long hair might just … well, good heavens, might just do anything at all, actually. Smoke pot, or take lovers. And does, in fact. You’re right. Bun it is.” She sighed. “It’s stacked against me anyway, though. One of the men on the board is a friend of my former husband’s.”

  Another bad divorce. Don’t tell me about it. Please.

  “And Roger has great prestige in Oxford, great—what you Americans call—credibility. Ugly word, but useful, I guess.” She laughed again. She had a tinkly laugh, silvery, like a little girl’s. And her manner was gay and light and appealing.

  “Roger Jenkins? The physicist?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “How long have you been divorced?”

  “Four years. I had to, you see. He tried to kill me.”

  Oh god. Please don’t tell me.

  But Mary did. She poured it out as easily and smoothly and quietly as milk from a jug in a Vermeer painting. She never speeded up, she never slowed her pace. Composed, a minuet, her telling. She paused occasionally to sip her sherry, or to pour more sherry into their glasses. Dolores interrupted her occasionally to ask a question, to get things clear. Mary was not always as coherent as Dolores would have liked, and it was only that—her hopping from thing to-thing without providing background—that seemed distraught. But she told her tale calmly, often smiling, her face impassive when she told the worst parts.

  And there were lots of worst parts.

  Finally Dolores burst out: “How can you sit there smiling?” She was enraged, she wanted to break crockery, or a head; she wanted to leap up, to do something, something!

  “It doesn’t do to get angry in this country. People hold it against you.”

  “Can’t you appeal?”

  “I have no money. They pay very little at the National Health. I had to borrow from my mother to pay for the last trial. And she’s a widow and can’t afford it, really.”

  “That judge should be disbarred! De-seated! Defrocked! Whatever they do to judges,” Dolores stormed.

  “Yes,” Mary smiled evenly. “Extraordinary, isn’t it.”

  Dolores put her head in her hands. Damned three sherries hadn’t helped. Like having the dry heaves: wanting to cry, needing to cry, not being able. Pillar of salt.

  “My plan,” Mary said sweetly, “or at least what I hope for is that I’ll pass the qualifying exam, and then I should get a bit more money. The National Health doesn’t promote women often, but they’ll have to do something for me. And then the rent from the flat. Gordon and I did it ourselves, created that flat. This used to be a one-family house. We put in a kitchen upstairs and a bath down, and walled off the stairwell. So I could get a bit more money. Then, perhaps in a couple of years, I’ll have saved enough to appeal.”

  “And in the meantime?”

  “I see the children as often as I can. Whenever Roger doesn’t stop me.”

  Dolores’s throat was full of pain, but there wasn’t a tear in Mary’s eye. Maybe there’s something wrong with me. Certainly if she has to live this way it’s better that she be calm about it, accept it.

  I couldn’t, though.

  “The trouble is, they’re so young, they don’t understand. And Roger turns them against me. Elise is only five, she doesn’t see what’s happening, but Linton is nine. I can see what it’s doing to him. He’s angry with me, feels, I guess, that I’ve abandoned them. And then, Roger tells them I’m crazy, it’s been his sole line of defense all along. And they start to see me that way. You know if you start with the notion that someone is mad—anyone at all—they begin to look mad. Whatever they do seems insane. If I drop something, or I forget something, they look at each other and roll their eyes. Of course, they live in a far more orderly household. Roger has a housekeeper. I have to juggle this”—she waved at the kitchen—“with a full practice and studying for the exam. I read all night, or nearly. I get only five hours’ sleep a night. But it’s all right, actually, I don’t mind.”

  “Reading the books the judge damned you for.”

  “Yes,” she laughed. “Extraordinary, isn’t it. Anyway, every time I have them, it takes me a day or more just to get them to accept me, to act normal. Linton baits me, taunts me. He’s unhappy. He doesn’t understand that I want to be with them. He doesn’t understand that it isn’t my fault.”

  Dolores nodded heavily.

  “So I try, but I have them only two days, three at the most, and then they go back with him. And I don’t see them for another two weeks. Three now, thanks to the lovely judge. And then I have to start al
l over again.”

  Dolores put her head in her hands. Her children! Her children! She raised her head. Her fists were tight, her teeth were clenched.

  “I’d kill. I’d kill.”

  Mary smiled at her with pity.

  “Can you poison his food? Arrange an accident? Get a voodoo doll?”

  “I can’t even pray for him to die,” Mary said quietly, “because you see, the children love him. He’s good to them, he really is. Now. I shudder to think what will happen when they get older. But now… they’d be desolate if he died.”

  Dolores stared at the table. She wanted to be out of here. She examined Mary’s pretty softly-lined pink-and-white face, her wispy long hair, her expressive, moving hands. Dolores searched for weakness, for something she could blame. Her storytelling had been a little incoherent, hadn’t it? Maybe Roger was right, maybe she was crazy. Maybe she didn’t really love her children.

  Dolores looked at herself. She wanted to blame Mary, wanted to find something she could pin the blame on. She wanted to be able to say: this could never happen to me. I would never allow myself to get into such a position. She brought this on herself.

  Knowing, of course, that this could happen to any woman, that it was just a question of luck. Some of us lose our children.

  Her eyes filled with tears.

  Mary sat calmly, smiling sadly at her. As if I’m doing her fucking feeling for her. Goddamned good manners. Well, I can have good manners, too.