The Bleeding Heart

by Marilyn French

  And I’d have to quit my job. I haven’t saved much money. None, really. Suppose I don’t get a fellowship?

  Don’t quit your job until you know for sure.

  Then I wouldn’t be making a real commitment. I’d be letting everything depend on some stupid fellowship.

  Well, if you’re sure you want to do it, I’ll help you.

  But I’m not sure I want to do it

  Of course you do.

  They chattered on, Vickie describing at length the oddities of the brave new (to her!) world she was inhabiting. Finally, Victor asked: “How’s Mother?”

  She stopped dead, looked at Dolores, looked at him. “Fine,” she said uneasily.

  He shouldn’t have done that. She feels she’s betraying her mother. Should have waited until I was out of the room.

  “Really?”

  “Yes.” An edge of irritation in her voice: “She’s the same, Dad. You know.” Her eyes crept around her father and his lover sitting there, his arm around her. And something happened in her eyes, something fell into place, a decision was made.

  “And the kids.”

  “Fine. Leslie’s home for Christmas. She can’t wait to finish school, she hates it. She’s bored. Says she wants to be a pipe fitter, and Mother laughs, high and gay as if it’s a joke, but she’s a little nervous. Actually, she’s right to be nervous, but she doesn’t know it….” Her voice trailed off.

  “Why?” Victor barked at her.

  Dolores looked at him. “She’s trying to be honest with you, not to challenge you,” she said. Victor looked at her, and tried to soften his face. “The trouble with parents,” Dolores said to Vickie, “is that they think they always have to be parents.” Vickie watched them with wonder.

  “What’s wrong,” Victor asked gently.

  “Well.” She looked at her hands. “Now I feel guilty, as if I’m, like, betraying her. But I’m a little upset….” She looked up at Victor. “She’s heavy into drugs. Pot and coke. Well, everybody’s into pot, but coke …”

  Victor glowered. “How did this happen?” Parental. Authoritarian.

  Vickie shriveled. Shrugged. “At school, I guess.”

  Dolores was nasty. “She doesn’t know and right now she wishes she hadn’t brought it up at all.”

  “Oh, Vick, I’m sorry. Listen, is she in trouble?”

  “Well, her grades are bad. But I think they’d be bad anyway, you know? She doesn’t care about school.”

  “Well, what in hell does she care about?”

  “Oh, she likes to go to bars with Reg and drink and then snort a little coke. I think, well, I think all she really wants to do is get married!” Disgust.

  Victor sat back. “What’s so terrible about that?”

  “Get married? And end up like Mom?”

  Victor looked as if she had struck him across the face. Her hand darted to her mouth, her eyes filled. “Dad …”

  Dolores wished she could vanish. This was a private drama, she was an intruder. She could go get ice, pee, something. But she couldn’t leave Victor looking the way he did. So she pulled herself back, drew her energy within. She became absent.

  “I just meant,” Vickie was babbling, near tears, “that being a wife isn’t the greatest thing to do, you know.”

  “Maybe it could be different for Leslie,” he said, looking at the floor, twisting his hands between his knees. “The young men today, I’m told, are more liberated.”

  “Oh, they’re as piggish as ever,” she exclaimed in disgust, then put her hand over her mouth again. “Oh, I’m impossible tonight!” she cried, in real dismay, and Victor and Dolores laughed.

  Because for the first time in her life she feels she can tell her father the truth, she’s really slamming it into him, Dolores thought. So the all-American healthy family isn’t as ideal as it sounded. But he didn’t know that. I wonder if Edith does.

  The crisis passed with their laughter and other family news, less heavy, proceeded. Mark was driving Mom crazy because he was out in the car all the time. Jonathan was fine, on the junior-high basketball team, said it was only his height, not his skill, that got him there, didn’t believe he ever did anything right, and Mom said he was just like her.

  “I could kill him!” Victor smiled, grating his teeth at Dolores. “The one thing I can’t stand is lack of confidence, and that kid has it to a fare-thee-well.”

  “He’s also getting into girls,” Vickie added, giggling.

  “I hope you don’t mean that literally,” Victor grinned.

  Vickie began to feel fully at ease.

  “Say, how did you two meet?”

  They both smiled broadly. “On a train,” Victor said.

  “A train. Yeah. I’ve met people on trains. Not at home, at home I hardly ever take trains. But in Italy last summer, me and my girlfriend were on this train together. We were going to go all over, you know, we had a Eurail pass. But the guys in Italy are something else! At the end, we bought umbrellas and carried them with us as weapons. Can you picture it? Umbrellas in Italy?” she giggled.

  “Well, it must rain there sometimes too,” Dolores smiled.

  “Yeah. But I’ll bet you didn’t need an umbrella for my father!” And doubled over giggling wildly at the notion of her father as a sexual threat.

  “Now, listen, Vickie,” he whined in protest, but broke into laughter too.

  “Well,” Vickie sat back and wiped her eyes, “listen, you two. I gotta find a place to crash.”

  Pause.

  “Don’t be polite. I’m not going to intrude on you.”

  “I’ll find you a place,” Victor said, rising. “What’s more, I’ll even pay for it. It’s only fair.” He left the room.

  “Great,” Vickie glinted venally at Dolores. “Especially since I came over with my fare and my last hundred bucks. Spent all my savings on Christmas presents.” Giggle. Then her face became serious, she turned to Dolores and Dolores knew it would be different now, woman to woman, the conversation entering areas not usually entered when men were around.

  “How long have you known my father?”

  “Since September.”

  “Do you live with him?”

  “No, I live in Oxford. I came to London to spend the holidays with him.”

  “And I have to come bopping in.”

  Dolores smiled. “Well, to tell the truth, I wasn’t too happy when I heard you were coming. But now I’m glad you did, and I can see he is. It’s good for us that you came.”

  Vickie chose to believe Dolores, and flushed with pleasure.

  “I guess he’s in love with you,” she said, rubbing the fallen cigarette ash into her jeans’ leg. “I haven’t seen him look so good in years.”

  It was Dolores’s turn to try to hide her delight.

  “But isn’t it hard for you? I mean, he’s alone here, so I guess … It’s not that I have any of those ideas … oh, you know … that getting involved with a married man is wrong, particularly … I mean, I think that the arrangements made between married people are one thing and the arrangements you make with them are another … that, you know, it’s up to them to decide how they’re going to live, that you’re not responsible for their moralities … you know.” She leaned forward in Victor’s gesture, her hands dangling between her legs, her face probing Dolores’s. “But, if you’re in love with my father, and I guess you are, you look as if you are, well, isn’t it hard, knowing he’s married and all?”

  “You found it hard, I take it,” Dolores said gently.

  Vickie jumped back and looked warily at Dolores. “How do you know? Does my father know? How?”

  Dolores smiled. “Vickie, you just told me.”

  “Oh.” She settled down, but continued to look at Dolores a bit warily. “Yeah. He was my physics prof in grad school. When I was getting my M.A. He was married and he was bald and he had a yellow tooth, right in the front of his mouth,” she pointed to her own white one. “But … I don’t know, he was so … you know, I’d
go to his office with a problem and he … it was as if he knew the answers to everything. Not just physics problems, but everything. As if he knew what I was feeling better than I did. Knew what I should do, better than I did. Like you, just now….”

  Tell me, Dolores, tell me: How can I live without pain?

  “Yes,” she said. “But I can tell what you’re feeling only because you told me, or showed me, what it was. I don’t know what you should do. I don’t even know what I should do.”

  “Mmmm.” Vickie was doubtful. “But you’d know better than I do. And he did too. And I really came to feel …” she leaned forward, and her face turned yearning, “almost as if he was God, you know?” She sat back. “It’s bad, you know. I call myself a feminist—ever since I had this really great teacher in high school, I’ve thought I was a feminist. But,” she lowered her voice, although they could both hear Victor’s rumbling on the telephone, “the thing is,” she was nearly whispering, “I loved doing what he said, I loved seeing him as God. It was just the way they say, the way you read—I found my greatest fulfillment in obedience to him. Is that sick? Surrendering to him in everything was the most happiness I ever had.” She looked away, she lighted another cigarette, her mouth was quivering. “Do you think I’m some kind of masochist?”

  Dolores smiled. “Listen, if I met somebody I was sure was God, I’d enjoy surrendering too. After all, what else can you do with God? But only with God, of course,” she added, sarcastically. “I don’t know if it’s masochistic, Vickie. I do know it’s not female. I’ve had young male lovers who acted like that with me. Those things never lasted very long, because I’m not comfortable in the role of God … but they were happy with it.”

  Vickie looked at her dubiously, “You think it’s all right? I mean, not sick?”

  “I don’t know what’s sick or well. I do think it’s a young thing to do. And I think it wouldn’t last forever.”

  Vickie sighed. She crossed the room to the little bar and made herself another drink, talking almost wildly all the while. She had her father’s excesses. “I hope so. Because I really worshiped him. I had dinner at his house a lot, we all did, his research assistants, he had several because he got all kinds of grants and stuff all the time. And his wife—well, she was this tall woman, big-boned and skinny, and blond, and she wore her hair in a bun. And she was always good-humored, always nice to me, she didn’t seem to mind cooking dinner all the time for two or three extra people. And she never deferred to him at all. And that freaked me out sometimes. I mean, how can you not defer to God? She sort of treated him like one of the kids. She ignored him completely when he sat at the dinner table giving … well, lectures, really. I’d be hanging on every word, and she’d be passing the mashed potatoes,” Vickie giggled. “It seems funny now, but at the time it seemed terrible. I felt so sorry for him! Married to such a philistine, who didn’t listen to his brilliant words! His pearls! Now, I figure she’d heard them all a thousand times before. And probably once upon a time, she’d listened the way I did. She was his second wife, and she’d been his research assistant too. Years ago. Now she takes care of their three kids, and on weekends the two from his first marriage as well. Quite a handful, I guess. There was a time when I would have given anything to supplant her, to oust her the way she’d ousted the first wife….” Vickie’s voice drooped again. “Terrible, I know.”

  “Then maybe you’d have had six or seven children to care for. A real communal family,” Dolores said drily.

  “Yes. They had this really great old house, lots of little rooms full of books. Books everywhere. And records. He must have had a thousand records. There were back staircases and little back bedrooms. Nothing like our house. And I’d go and have dinner there and then he and I would go into the living room and he’d play me Bartók or Hindemith, or somebody else I’d never heard of, while she put the kids to bed, and I was enthralled, but I was uneasy, I wondered what she was thinking, why she wasn’t jealous…. She used to look at me with a certain expression in her eyes. I thought it was pity, and I hated her for it. I thought she was saying: yes, I know you think he’s God, but I have him, he belongs to me. Now I’m not so sure….”

  Vickie sat back and was quiet for a moment,

  “When I found out I was pregnant, he was furious with me. He said it was my responsibility to take care of things like that and to teach me a lesson, he wasn’t even going to help me pay for an abortion. And I cringed, I apologized, I insisted I wasn’t asking for money, if he’d only go with me. But he wouldn’t. I got the money together, that wasn’t a problem, but I had to go alone, and that felt awful. And after that, I was just … well,” her eyes filled with tears, “I was craven, Dolores! He was annoyed with me, and I was terrified of losing him. And I was about to get my degree, and I just … I was like a slave. I’d do anything he said, I dangled on a string he didn’t even seem to want to bother to pick up. I got the job in Boston, and I said I’d keep a weekend place near him, so I could still see him, he said that was ridiculous, I had my whole life before me. I found out later he was already involved with another grad student, a really brilliant girl. And then I understood his wife’s eyes.” She turned and blew her nose.

  “Looking back, the thing is … it was so humiliating! I can’t imagine I’d ever do a thing like that again. But still,” she looked imploringly at Dolores, “I think I’m still in love with him. Even though I know what he is. Or, I’m not in love with him, but with what I thought he was. Which I know now he isn’t. But which I go on feeling he is. Or that someone is. Or that, if someone isn’t, I can’t bear to go on living!” She turned her head swiftly again, but Dolores heard her cries. “Am I going to go on like this all my life?” Thick voice, nasal. “Wanting something that doesn’t exist?”

  Victor came striding back into the room, pleased with himself, glowing. “Well, don’t ever say your father isn’t a miracle worker! Getting a hotel room over Christmas with no advance warning at all! Come on, ladies! Let’s go! Fast, before they change their minds. Besides: I’m starving.”

  3

  VICKIE’S PRESENCE—AND HER confidences—totally changed their mix. Dolores found herself talking to Vickie more than to Victor, being solicitous of the young woman, pointing things out to her, touching her hand in silent messages of sympathy, support, affection. And although Victor too pointed out certain things to Vickie, and teased her benevolently, and although it was his arm she clung to as the three of them tramped the streets, increasingly it was Victor who was left out, as if the two women had something between them, something he had not been initiated into.

  As was indeed the case.

  Is this how it begins, Dolores wondered, mothers and children against the fathers? She didn’t like it. After all, she wasn’t the mother. When Victor went to pee one lunchtime, Dolores suggested to Vickie that she tell her father her story.

  “Oh, I couldn’t. He’d be horrified. He’d go off and shout about killing the bastard or something. I know he would.”

  “I don’t think so,” Dolores demurred gently. She could not be sure she knew the real Victor better than his daughter did. “Look, tonight, why don’t I stay home and the two of you go out to dinner alone, and you talk to him?”

  “On Christmas Eve? I wouldn’t do that to you, Dolores. But thanks.” Vickie eyed her even more gently, trustingly.

  Which made it all the harder for Dolores to discover that she was jealous of Vickie’s presence. Even though she was the one giving Vickie her main attention. It made no logical sense, but there it was. She wanted Victor all to herself, and all of herself for him: with no distractions. She felt abashed, wry: so this is what it’s like, jealousy.

  But it all balanced out on Christmas Eve, when they decided to have a banquet in, and went to Harrod’s and bought pâté and cheeses and wine and a stuffed goose and cakes. And ate before the electric fire, and went out near midnight, to hear a choir sing in a nearby church. And next morning—after all three had secretively and fur
iously rushed around buying gifts for the others—Victor’s original presents for Vickie having been mailed to the States, Dolores not having bought one for Vickie, nor Vickie for her—with Christmas music on the BBC, and the electric fire warming them, and good coffee and pastries, they unwrapped hurriedly the lavishly wrapped boxes. “I made out like a bandit!” Vickie said. “Double presents!”

  Dolores and Victor had had their own private Christmas the night before, after Vickie returned to her hotel, with champagne and lots of other warming things.

  And Vickie was sensitive, under that bland and giggly exterior. At least, so Dolores concluded when she came tramping into the apartment late in the afternoon the day after Christmas and announced that guess what, she’d been walking down the Strand past Charing Cross and who should she meet but Toad and Vee and Boo and Ram and they were all going to fly to Paris and if Victor would “lend” her the money, she’d like to go with them, it sounded great, didn’t it?

  “Damn it, she conned me,” Victor said after she’d left. “She did, that kid,” he chuckled. “It’s the old quarter routine they used to pull in the comic strips. You know, boy sits on the—what did they call them then—the davenport! waiting for girl and kid sister or brother comes slithering around offering privacy for a dime. Or a quarter. And gets it, of course.”

  Dolores eyed him reproachfully. “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  “There’s another?”

  “You might consider it this way: the poor kid comes ‘bopping’ in, as she puts it, expecting a nice week with Daddy, seeing the sights of London, and doing the poor old man a favor, keeping him company over Christmas. And finds herself an intruder, and broke to boot. She knows that as long as she stays, both of us will feel obligated to spend our time with her. She knows I’m visiting you for the week, and that that is special, our holiday. What is she to do? I thought she carried it off bravely. I only hope there really are a Toad and Vee and Boo and Ram,” she concluded, laughing.

  Victor gazed at her without smiling, thoughtfully. “It could be,” he said finally. Then, vigorously, hugging her, “But I am damned glad to have you back! It’s, as Vickie would say, something else to find myself jealous of my own daughter!”