The Bleeding Heart

by Marilyn French

  She wavered a little in her bed, her eyes closed as if she were dizzy. “I felt it passionately,” she said with a. thick voice, “that they were mine and he had no right to destroy them. And I felt that for Mary, you see.”

  “I see,” he said. “But Mary’s experience is different. You say she says her husband’s good to the children.”

  “Yes,” she sighed.

  He nudged her. “Awake?”

  She opened her eyes. They were wet “Yes. But you see, I did what she did, too. I abandoned my children. Not physically, but morally. I should have taken them away from him when they were babies, as soon as I realized how he was, but it took me years to realize he was always going to be like that. But I should have taken them away. No matter how we had to live, it would have been better than that But I didn’t. I didn’t,” she whispered.

  5

  IT RAINED ALL WEEKEND and they drooped around the apartment. They turned on the electric fire in the sitting room and closed the door so the room got warm, and worked—Dolores reading and taking notes in the big ugly rocker, Victor at the table, scribbling figures, studying a huge pamphlet of mimeographed notes. After some hours, they sighed, and turned to each other: “Want to play gin rummy?” Victor asked.

  But that bored them too, in time. They kept falling into conversation, idle conversation, until Victor said: “You know, that’s the third time you’ve mentioned Anthony today. After all these weeks with not a word about him. I think he’s on your mind.”

  “Probably because of Mary.”

  “Why? Was he like Roger?”

  “No. Not at all that I can tell, not having met Roger. Anthony was beige, blond, and blue.”

  Victor laughed. “And smoked a pipe.”

  “He did!” she exclaimed. “You peeked!”

  “How did you come to marry him?”

  Now, how could you tell someone that? So complicated it was, you couldn’t tell yourself. How he lowered his head in a self-deprecating way and raised his eyes to look up at you, coyly, the way a baby does. How he talked baby talk and wanted to be fondled, all the time. But then held his head up like a little boy, an earnest little boy scout, saying that what he really believed in was honor, duty, country, and said it without the slightest irony. He believed it. Or, he believed that he believed it. For how could he believe anything when he didn’t even know what he felt?

  “It’s boring. And complicated. I’m not sure I understand it myself.”

  How he wormed his way into your heart: sweet, adoring, playful. Looking at you with big baby eyes and biting his lower lip, keeping his teeth showing as he lost at cards, checkers, wrestling, running, at everything. Whenever we competed he lost. He said: You’re so strong, honey. And I believed it. I believed it!

  “Did you identify him with—Gregory Peck, or somebody like that? Did you associate him with someone whose image had enchanted you?”

  She shook her head. “The only male images that ever enchanted me were Ivan Karamazov, but I always knew he was me, and Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, and then later, Laurence Olivier playing him. But I knew Anthony was no Darcy. I knew there were no Darcys. Why? Did you?”

  “Did I ever! My image was a cross between Shakespeare’s Rosalind and his Cleopatra, and June Haver. Poor Edith had her work cut out for her!”

  “You imposed … ?”

  “I,” he paused, “expected.”

  “Poor Edith.”

  “Yes.” Dully.

  Darcy: proud, controlled, independent, graceful, sensitive, compassionate. Yes, but also legitimate: aristocratic, wealthy, part of Society. And under it all, passionate, as passionate as Heathcliff. But I think I invented that: I don’t think Jane Austen put that in. And all I got in the end was Heathcliff.

  “So why did you marry him?” Victor repeated.

  “He was sweet. He loved me. He admired my mind. He knew I wanted to do scholarship and that seemed to please him. He was loving to his mother and to all the children in his family, his cousins. He seemed stable, except for an occasional attack of jealousy—entirely unwarranted. But I thought those would disappear when we got married.”

  And why don’t you tell the rest? That you were in the army and running an obstacle course. You had ran the first hurdles: grade school, high school, college. After that came marriage, children, and happily-ever-after. It never even occurred to you that you had any other choice. Admit it.

  “And under everything, under the beige, blond, and blue, under a certain childlikeness that Anthony had, I sensed a terrific intensity. Passion. Intensity still draws me, it’s a magnet for me. And I also sensed that Anthony had a fidelity I didn’t have. I had never—and still have never—felt that anyone, anyone at all, was the one and only person I wanted to be with. Except at moments; there are many moments when I feel that way. But I’ve never felt I wanted to spend the rest of my life with just one person.

  “I can’t help that, you know. I really can’t,” she pleaded.

  Victor looked at her strangely. “I understand,” he said, but his voice didn’t sound right.

  “It’s just not my nature,” she insisted. She stared at him. “What’s wrong?”

  He laughed uncomfortably. “I thought only men had that disease.”

  “Is it a disease? It seems normal to me, except there are people who aren’t like that, who really are monogamous. It’s always seemed unfair to me that the rules were all set up in their favor. I always felt there were thousands of wonderful people in the world and I wanted to know them all. And I wanted to screw all the beautiful, sexy men,” she grinned. “Until awhile ago, anyway.”

  He smiled, but his smile wasn’t right. “Well, with you, at least, I don’t have to apologize for my past.”

  She gazed at him. “But you wish you did, don’t you,” she guessed.

  He did not answer. “So he was going to be faithful while you screwed around.”

  Aha. Doesn’t like the arrangement turned around.

  “No.” She was tired. “The point was that his fidelity would keep me faithful too. His leash was my leash: and he’d always have his fixed firmly in one spot. His passion and his possessiveness would root me to my place. Because in those days, I thought there was something wrong with me. I thought I was coldhearted, not like other people. Certainly not like other women. I thought Anthony’s example would teach me how to be a decent human being, to feel what other people claimed they felt.”

  Song I loved then: Sarah Vaughan singing, “I’m not the kind of a girl for a boy like you.” Or was it “You’re not the kind of a boy for a girl like me”? Whatever, she was a tramp and he was a knight. Yes. And you loved the baby talk and the coyness too. Why don’t you tell the truth? Anthony made you feel that he looked up to you so much that his admiration annulled the edge, the privilege men always have over women. Made you feel safe, made you feel you two could be equals. Not knowing then about what you have to pay for what you get.

  Victor seemed to relax a bit. “So you enjoyed his possessiveness.”

  “I didn’t know what possessiveness was. I knew he tried to come between me and my friends, tried to cut me off. But he had so many friends himself that I believed him when he said he didn’t like my friends because they were x or y, which his friends weren’t. I thought my standards just weren’t as high as his. Although, in fact, I didn’t like most of his friends. But I liked some, and that was enough to reinforce his message.

  “And then, we did have ecstasy. I remember one night when I was still in college, and we went out late. The night was very black, and they were putting a building up somewhere in Cambridge. It was just scaffolding then, and Anthony said: Let’s climb it! So we did. We took off our shoes and began. We mounted higher and higher, terrified, at least, I was. I’m pretty sure he was too. The higher we got, the more splendid the View was down below us. We could see for miles, the lights sparkled like colored stars: mostly white, but red, green, and yellow too. When we got to the top, we both took off all ou
r clothes. We’d never seen each other naked before. It was ecstatic—his body gleaming, the lights below, the wide sky, velvet blue with a mound of dark clouds low on the horizon, more like a fluffy comforter than a threat….

  “And Anthony got along with people, at least it seemed that way then. He seemed humane and tolerant in ways I wasn’t. I admired that.”

  Yes, he got along with his friends, not with yours. He seemed humane and tolerant because he tolerated fools. Such dopey guys he hung out with, fools who talked about nothing, laughed about everything. The most hilarious subject was drinking, I never knew why. And fuckups. Inadequacy. Men making fools of themselves. I didn’t understand that either, then.

  “The people in school with me were terribly intellectual. They intimidated me, but I always had this lurking suspicion that they were phonies. Something Anthony clearly wasn’t. At least not in the same way. At least so it seemed then….”

  “You took his possessiveness for great love,” Victor said.

  “Yes. And his lack of intellectual pretension for genuineness.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  She shrugged. “What’s genuine? I think the word ought to be reserved for describing leather, the way I think ‘pure’ should be reserved only for butter or milk,” she smiled, shakily. “Oh, I think it was the Anthony of his stories that I fell in love with, really. And when I had to leave him, it was leaving that Anthony that broke my heart.”

  “Stories?”

  “He used to tell me stories about his childhood. Not anything spectacular, just what happened to him when he was growing up. And I fell in love with that little boy, and sometimes Anthony was that little boy. But mostly he wasn’t. It took me years to discover that the real Anthony, the Anthony of the stories, wasn’t ever going to come out and play. And that Anthony faded, year by year. I divorced the Anthony I lived with, a person I disliked intensely. But it nearly killed me to give up the Anthony of the stories.

  “So I guess you were right. It wasn’t Darcy or Karamazov—it was a boy in a tale…. I remember one that wasn’t a childhood story, or was just on the edge. He was seventeen or eighteen, and in the air force. Like you, he enjoyed being in the service. He was in training, in OCS, someplace out west but east of the Rockies. He was very young, even for his age, and the guys in his unit called him ‘Sweets’ and took care of him. His best friend was an older guy, the unit Lothario, something Anthony admired enormously then. This friend would have a date every weekend with some woman in L.A. or San Francisco, and would have her get one for Anthony too.

  “Whenever they had a weekend pass, and I guess that was most weekends, and there was nothing to do in the desert where they were, a bunch of guys would get together and con some pilot into taking up an old plane that was used only for training and couldn’t go far. They’d talk him into flying them to California for the weekend.

  “But the plane was really weak, it had trouble getting over the mountains. So whenever the pilot wanted to get the nose up to climb above some peak, he’d yell: BACK! And everybody would run to the rear of the plane. But then he had to level out, to get the nose back down, so he’d yell: FRONT! And they’d all run forward.

  “He’d tell this story with a nice, gentle, self-deprecating laugh. It was his kind of story, it had just the right elements. A little derring-do, at least by my protected standards. A little risk. And considerable incompetence. All wrapped in humor. It seemed he was laughing at himself, and I loved him for that …”

  6

  “WHAT DID HE DO?”

  Tired. Tired. Why was Victor cross-examining her?

  “I told you. He worked in his father’s mail-order house.”

  “Oh, yeah. Did he do well?”

  “You mean did he make money? He did all right. Nothing sensational. But I worked too, so we were comfortable. But that was later. In the early years, he dallied, couldn’t decide, and we were always in trouble. I remember being pregnant with Elspeth.” Tired, tired. “I was still working days as a typist. Nights I was studying for my M.A. Anthony had quit his job again, although the baby was due in a month or so. The rent was due, so I paid it, and then realized I had no more money. We had no money for food. I got a little panicked, because the baby was due in a month and I suddenly realized I wouldn’t be working anymore for a while. And I tore into the living room with my watermelon of a belly and I yelled at him: ‘Anthony, we haven’t any more money! There’s no money for food!’ He was reading the paper, and when I said that, he threw the paper down and threw me a disgusted look and stormed out of the house. He came back a couple of hours later and threw twenty dollars at me. He never told me where he got it. From his mother, I guess. He got it from her ever after. To the day he died. Even after his father died, he went to his mother for money.”

  “Anthony’s dead!”

  She nodded.

  “I thought you were divorced.”

  “We were.”

  “He died afterwards?”

  “He died when,” she said bitterly. “He didn’t want the divorce, you see. I don’t know why—our marriage was horrible. Constant arguing over the children. He continually picked on them, to a degree of insanity, really. And insane fits of jealousy in which he literally turned purple, went into his own private nightmare world. I had no respect for him, and no love either, except for the boy who never came out, but whom I glimpsed every once in a while through the curtains. But I was like Edith, you see, I tried to be decent to him, tried to smile. Still, I don’t know how he could not have known what I felt, although he claimed not to.

  “It was difficult to get him to leave. I had to get a lawyer, had to go through some nasty business just to get him to separate. And then, after we were separated, he’d come to the house every night, just at dinnertime. He said he was coming to see the children. The children. He’d never paid any attention to them, except to yell, when he lived with them. He’d come at dinnertime and watch us eat It was unbearable. I didn’t want to invite him to join us, didn’t want to encourage this. But try to get your food down your throat in such a situation. I told him he had to stop. I told him that if he came only once a week, and on a night I’d name, I’d give him dinner. He agreed, but then started to come over a couple of nights a week after dinner. I told him if he didn’t stop, I’d have him kept from coming into the house at all. I wasn’t at all sure I could manage it, though. Legally I mean, or the other way: how can you keep somebody out of a house he half-owns? Then I said if he gave me a power of attorney for a divorce, I’d let him visit twice a week. He was so desperate he did it.”

  Her voice wandered off. Victor handed her a cigarette and she took it

  “I felt so goddamned sorry for him,” she went on in a thick voice. “He was like a wounded animal. He kept coming back and coming back to the house, as if he couldn’t imagine where else to go. The marriage couldn’t have been much worse than it was. Why did he want a woman who could barely look at him without contempt? A contempt he’d earned, the hard way.

  “On the nights he came, I’d go into my study after dinner. I had done that all through the later years of our marriage. The kids cleaned up the kitchen, he used to watch TV, and I prepared my lectures. It was a good arrangement, because he didn’t pick on them nearly so much if I wasn’t around to be hurt by it.

  “But during the separation, although he knew I was working, he’d come down to the study. He’d sit there, arguing, pleading. He kept saying he couldn’t understand why I wanted the divorce when we were so happy together. There just wasn’t any way I could demonstrate to him that we weren’t. The problem was, he said, that I’d never loved him the way he’d loved me. I said it was closer to the truth to say I’d never hated him the way he hated me. He insisted he didn’t, never had, not even for an instant. It was impossible to talk to him. I’d say I had to work, and he’d begin to cry, get down on his knees and put his head on my lap and weep.

  “It broke my heart. I couldn’t bear his humiliation, but even more I
couldn’t bear his pain. Little Anthony had finally come out of the house, here he was, crying in my lap. I wanted to stroke his head, to say, ‘It’s all right, baby,’ to tell him Mommy wouldn’t go away and leave him again.

  “But I couldn’t. He was destroying me, destroying my children. I had to sit there coldly, telling him coldly to go away. ‘Sweetie, sweetie, you’re killing me,’ he’d say, and I believed him because the ordeal was killing me. And the kids. I mean, they had to sit there at the dinner table with him, listen to him tell jokes in a hollow voice, trying to be social. They sat listening to him, trying to swallow their food. And then, of course, they knew or had some idea of what was going on in my study on those nights. The house was always very quiet on those nights, everything orderly, TV turned off early, kids in their rooms doing homework. With their doors firmly shut. Beware the quiet orderly house: something’s wrong. They never said anything to me. I never said anything to them besides the bare facts. What could I tell them? That their father and I were tied together in some insane bond? That if our marriage had destroyed us, our divorce was destroying us, too?

  “I came to feel that we were at war, and all the winner would get was survival. If I gave in to him, we were all doomed. By then, I hated myself so much for having stayed with him so long that I would, I think, have killed myself if I’d gone back to him. Leaving the children with him! So I had to win, had to. For their sake and my own. But for some reason, I had to go through this ordeal, too. I owed it to him, maybe, or maybe I had to see if I could really abandon him, the fragment of the child left in him, Anthony.

  “After an hour or so of pleading, he’d get angry. He’d get up then, and stand there, starting low, with bitter accusations that I’d never loved him, then mounting higher, ending with shrieking accusations: you bitch, you whore, you slut! He’d been calling me names like that for years, and I was able to ignore them now. Long ago, they’d made me cry.