The Bleeding Heart

by Marilyn French

  “I felt strong. I felt… pure, I guess. I’d backed a side I expected would lose but which was essentially right, and made up of decent human beings. I didn’t then know what was going to happen to the losing side, except that Reilly got the division instead of Dawes. But I felt I’d discovered my real strength—not the fake superiorities I’d been parading around all my life—well, since I was fifteen—but real ones, strengths you can grow from. And I knew nobody could hold me back now. I’d discovered you never know yourself until you’re tested and that you don’t even know you’re being tested until afterwards, and that in fact there isn’t anyone giving the test except yourself. Unconsciously, you test yourself against your own standards. And I also found that it felt good to be among people you respected, even if you lost. And that I had some courage, some principle. I felt damned proud of myself. So proud that, I think, I never pulled the superior act again.

  “Except on Edith. Anyway, all this had happened while she was away, and I felt changed and felt she was a stranger to the ‘new’ me. And I guess she’d gone through something, too, although I wasn’t thinking much about her, then. But we seemed strangers to each other.

  “She was sitting there with a drink, which was unusual, so I poured one for myself, and sat down opposite her, heavily, sighing, telling her how tired I was. She just looked at me. She hadn’t even smiled when I came in. I told her, rather bitterly, direly, that the Reilly faction had won. She didn’t blink. I talked about it for a while, managing to suggest by my tone as much as anything else that it was largely her fault I was so tired, that she had been reprehensible in going off and leaving me during such a trying period of my life.”

  Victor broke off and put his head in his hands. “Oh god,” he said, in anguish, deep in his throat. He lifted his head up again, and breathed in deeply. “I went on, full of gloom and doom, saying that I might be out of a job soon. And during all of it, she sat unblinking, without the little smiles and frowns and expressions of concern she usually showed when I spoke. Sat there like an iceberg.

  “So then I launched into a little speech about love. I’d never even said I was glad she was back, but I knew all about love. Looking back, it must have been pretty terrible, pompous and blind, but at the time I was full of a sense of my own Tightness. I was telling her that love understands, love tolerates, love does not get impatient, love does not get angry and hold grudges.

  “What I was really telling her was how she was to behave. It had never occurred to me that my way of loving wasn’t perfect, so this break had had to come from her. And I was telling her I wasn’t knuckling under to her, I was not going to be castrated.”

  “She was.”

  “Yes.”

  5

  DOLORES’S MOUTH WAS GRIM. “She was defeated in a war you imagined, and by imagining, created. Once it was seen as war, there had to be a winner and a loser. And there was no question about who the loser had to be.”

  “Yes,” he said faintly, leaning against the chair back, and reaching for another cigarette.

  “But in seeing it as a war, you made it a war, and you never escaped from that, did you.”

  “STOP!”

  She subsided.

  His face was anguished. “I remember once, long ago, before we were married, we were walking in Central Park in the late afternoon, the sun was setting behind the buildings and the sky was deep pink and the trees were lush, and she, oh, she was young then, she had hair that flew when she turned her head, and she was giddy and happy, and she swung around and took my hands and brought her face up close to mine and she said: ‘You know why I love you, Victor Morrissey? Because you have a name that sounds like freshly laundered sheets blowing in the wind!’ And I laughed, and kissed her, but to tell you the truth, I thought that was pretty silly. But it has remained in my mind ever since. I’ll never forget it….”

  It never occurred to me that I didn’t love Edith as I was supposed to. She was set in my life like a wedge of pie. There was Edith and the kids; there was work; and there was relaxation, which came, increasingly, to be weekends of golf. It’s true, I spent little time with her. But evenings, she’d watch TV, which bored me, so I’d go to my study and read. And weekends, there were always a million and one things to be done with the kids or around the house, so I just got out. So Edith wasn’t the biggest wedge in my pie, but she was a permanent one. Maybe she was even the crust, the base that held everything else.

  Anyway, I’m sincere when I say I did not know what more she wanted. I couldn’t even imagine what more there was for her to want. I used to quote Freud to myself, in amused annoyance: What do women want? They were, I was convinced, unsure themselves what they wanted, and insatiable.

  Well, anyway, I gave my little speech on love and she just sat there, cold and still. Then: “What will happen to your job?” I didn’t want to worry her unduly. In fact, I wasn’t very worried myself. So I told her I wasn’t too worried, that I thought there would be numerous possibilities, although we might have to leave Dallas.

  And she said: “Then it wasn’t such a risk you took after all, was it. You could afford to have principle, afford to do what you felt was right, couldn’t you. You had the luxury of feeling moral.”

  I was stunned. Someone I’d thought for years now was a part of, was inside my pie plate, had suddenly stepped outside, was looking at me critically from a distance.

  “That’s a very great luxury, Victor. It’s given only to a very few.” Her voice was as cold and hard as her eyes.

  “Do you want to explain that?”

  She looked at me with what I can only call contempt. Edith, look at me with contempt? She stood up. “If you don’t understand it, Victor, you’re blinder than I thought. Will you be having breakfast at home in the morning?”

  “The hell with breakfast! Where the hell do you think you’re going! You owe me some explanation for your behavior, damn it! Now sit down, Edith, and explain!”

  She had begun to walk out of the room, but she stopped and turned partway towards me. Her face was very white. She put her hands on a chair back and clutched it. She did not sit down, though.

  “I left you because you care far more about your work than about me and the children. No!” She put up her hand to stop me. “Don’t try to interrupt. This may be the last full statement I can get out without interruption for the rest of my life. And don’t deny it. You spend the weekends lolling around here like a bored camel. You pay almost no attention to the children or to me. Then Monday morning, you’re up and about stomping and pulling like a horse heading for the barn. You put on your suit and tie and you’d think it was wings,” she added bitterly. The corners of her mouth were trembling. I was waiting for her to cry, because then I could get up and hold her and the whole thing would end. But she didn’t cry. “You don’t come home for dinner and you don’t even bother to call. It means nothing whatever to you that I spend hours preparing a meal for you—for you! Because the kids eat almost nothing, and I’m never hungry. My time, my concerns, my care—all of it is just so much … NOTHING! … to you!” Her voice was getting higher now and I expected the break at any moment.

  She turned her face away from me. I watched her back to see if she was crying, but I couldn’t tell. Then she turned her face halfway back to me.

  “All right. I am not stupid, although you think so, and I can see the way things are around me. You’re all like that, men. My mother says my father was like that. I guess he was. I was always away at private schools, I didn’t know. At any rate, I decided that the children need a father, and that I would do my duty. And so I came back. And I will keep my bargain.”

  She walked swiftly out of the room, so swiftly that I didn’t have time to yell the hell with your damned duty! And I sat there shocked. You see, she’d given the same speech I’d given, from the opposite side. I’d been telling her what love was—her love, not mine—and she’d been telling me what love was—her love, not mine. What I didn’t know then was that we were
saying the same thing in different ways. Because, indeed, from then on, Edith was understanding, tolerant, did not get impatient, angry, or hold grudges. I gave in on one point—I never again forgot to call if I weren’t coming home for dinner. And I tried—I really did—to spend a little more time with the kids, and with her.

  But something had changed. That heavy atmosphere I often felt in the house disappeared. I was relieved, it was less oppressive to come home. And Edith was always smiling, she never argued much, she never contradicted me. She listened when I spoke. She became rather quiet, although I’d hear her giggling and talking nonsense to the children.

  And in the beginning, I thought—good. I’d won, I’d shown her who was the head of this house, and she wouldn’t question it again. I saw her arranging everything for my comfort, and I thought good. Things were as they should be. But it was strange. And again, gradual. But over the next years—oh, we moved to Minneapolis and bought a new house and the kids started school, and she was pregnant again, twice, and there were two new babies to occupy her … but over the years I became aware of a kind of … emptiness. As though I came into a vacuum every night, a vacuum only I could fill. Like puffs of cloud that you walk into, that then shape themselves around you. I can’t describe it except to say it felt empty.

  And then, of course, Edith did her duty by night as well as day. Her duty and that’s all. No more ecstatic swoons. We screwed less and less often, because I didn’t enjoy that much either. And her face began to change. She developed little pursed lines around her mouth when she was only in her thirties, and her voice began to have a disapproving intonation. She seemed to disapprove of everything and everybody. I guess she thought (he added thickly) that everyone else was having fun in life except her.

  And meantime, out there in the world, were all these beautiful, vivid, intelligent women, all for the asking. Warm affectionate women who lighted up when I entered the room. I was on the way up, I seemed attractive, I guess. I was a roaring boy in those years, everything I touched turned to gold. And it was easy enough to hide my new sex life—I’d always spent late nights at the office, and now that I was in the top executive bracket, there were business trips and even weekends away from home, meetings that did, in fact, drag on until one or two in the morning.

  When we moved to Scarsdale, I got a little apartment for those late nights. So it wasn’t noticeable that instead of having dinner with George, I was having it with Georgia. It wasn’t noticeable to Edith, that is. And I was very careful, very discreet. I never went home without taking a shower first.

  When Georgia began to hound me about divorcing Edith and marrying her, I stopped seeing her. Before long I took up with Lillian. Lillian got tired of having a married lover—of being alone on Saturday night, on holidays—and walked out on me. But there was always someone else: they are what you called the Oxford girls, an infinitely replaceable generation. It’s pathetic, really. I don’t know where the men are. But there are hundreds, thousands of them, I guess, beautiful, intelligent, sympathetic women who are grateful, really grateful for-a good dinner in a nice place, a little attention, a little sex. Sometimes, when I could manage it, I’d take one of them with me on a “business” weekend—it was difficult for Edith to get away in those years, and she didn’t enjoy business conferences.

  Still, with all this, I sometimes felt sorry for myself. I wanted to come home to lovely Lauren in my bed instead of empty Edith—for I’d come to attribute the emptiness of home to what I saw as the emptiness of her head. But on the whole, I was, well not happy, but—well, yes, happy in those years. Yes, I was.

  Well, life went on like this for a long time. But it ended, in 1973, in March of 1973. I came home about two one night to find Edith sitting in my study. This was unusual, first because she’d long since stopped sitting up for me, but also because—and I didn’t realize it until I saw the study light on—no one, no one but me ever went into my study. Edith had made it sacrosanct—the kids never even knocked on the door if I was in there. I hadn’t asked for that, hadn’t demanded it. But it had been done.

  Anyway, there Edith was, sitting in my leather chair hugging herself and rocking herself back and forth. I had a rush of remorse: something had happened to one of the kids and she couldn’t find me! I rushed to her.

  “Edith what is it?”

  She eyed me. Her face was viperous. There was a glass on the table. I wondered if she was drunk. I signed. Drunk scene with charges of neglect. I knew I had it coming, but I was tired. I poured myself a drink and settled down wearily in the chair opposite her, prepared for a long screaming siege.

  She looked odd. Edith was always extremely neat, every hair in place. Never a run in her stocking—she always carried an extra pair—never a bra strap showing or a bulge. She was never overweight. I never saw her without makeup—she’d get up early in the morning and put it on before I was awake. The only times I ever saw her hair in disarray were at the beach and after the babies were born.

  But that night her face looked different. It appeared she’d been crying, because she was puffy. And maybe had washed her face and had just not bothered to put on makeup again. She looked—real. As if all these years I’d been looking at a mask, and this was what lay beneath. Her hair was tousled. And she had been drinking, a little.

  She smiled sweetly at me. “So did you enjoy your little dinner at Hanson’s, holding hands across the table?”

  Oh boy.

  Turns out she’d seen me there. And I was probably the one who told her to go there. I never thought. I was so convinced of her—I don’t know—total powerlessness, I guess. Lack of will and power. She’d been depressed for a while and she and her friends Jean and Margaret, who also had husbands who were away a lot, decided they would start to go out together one night a week. I knew about this, I thought it was a fine idea. They always stayed around Scarsdale, they didn’t like to drive long distances at night. But that night they had tickets to a play and were taking the train to New York. Edith had probably told me about it. I paid so little attention to her….

  They decided to eat at Hanson’s because Edith said I’d recommended it And there I was, with Alison. Jean spotted me across the room and turned and tried to block Edith, but Edith peered around her and saw me.

  She didn’t tell me this calmly. She screamed, she cried. I knew she was hurt, but in a way I couldn’t understand why. Surely she couldn’t feel possessive about me sexually after all these years, after all her indifference? Twenty years. I wasn’t possessive about her. I wouldn’t have minded her having an affair if she’d done it discreetly. That’s what I thought, anyway. It’s easy, I guess, to think such a thing when you’re positive your wife will do no such thing.

  So although I knew that infidelity was one thing the world gives you permission to go into a rage about, I couldn’t believe that she actually felt what she was showing. I thought it was an act, another power play. And this time, her motive was clear: she had a dull sex life, she was damned if I was going to have a lively one. Well, I was damned if she was going to lock me in a closet in my prime. Divorce wasn’t such a shocking thing anymore. I was prepared to risk everything—what could I lose, after all?

  She kept saying, over and over: “Right in front of my friends, right in front of them! Everybody will know about it by the end of the week!” I homed in on that. With impeccable logic, lighting my pipe, I pointed out that in fact she wasn’t hurt for herself, that her main distress was humiliation in front of her friends, and since I happened to know their husbands were doing the same thing, she needn’t feel humiliated. I added also that I found her motivation rather shabby.

  Needless to say, this didn’t help matters. She screamed, she went crazy. I sucked on my pipe, waiting for her hysterics to end. It took awhile, but eventually she calmed down and sat there sniffling. “Edith, I’m sorry if you feel humiliated. But you have to admit there hasn’t been much life around here for years.”

  “Whose fault is that? Besides, ho
w would you know, you’re never here.”

  “Well, you must realize there’s some reason I’m not here. You don’t do much to keep me here, do you?”

  “How would you feel if I’d done this to you?”

  I shrugged. “After all these years …”

  “Oh, don’t lie! I can see you about to lie! Suppose everybody in Scarsdale knew I was … playing around.”

  I had to admit she had a point: that I wouldn’t have liked. But I wasn’t going to let her see she’d won a point. “Well, I certainly wouldn’t be throwing a hysterical fit.”

  “Oh, wouldn’t you!” she shrieked.

  I got up and closed the study door. “You’re going to wake the children.”

  “Let them hear! Let them know! Let them find out what kind of man their father is!” She jumped up and went to the bar and poured more whiskey in her glass. She wasn’t much of a drinker, couldn’t handle it, so I crossed the room to try to stop her and she shrieked: “Don’t touch me!” She stood there holding her glass, clutching it. Her face was white and her hair was falling in her face. She looked like a fury and for the first time, in all the years I’d known her, I saw the Edith who lived underneath that stiff smile, that sweet manner.

  She was unstoppable. “If you’d seen me with a man and your friends had been with you, you’d have charged across the room and grabbed me and hit the man if you could. Then you would have dragged me home clamping your hands down as hard as you could on my arms, leaving me black and blue. You might have hit me. You surely would have pushed me down in a chair and shouted at me, laying down the law. But the one thing you would not do is call that a hysterical fit! Oh, no! Only I have hysterical fits!”