The Bleeding Heart

by Marilyn French

  Dolores insisted that Victor go with her on the boatride on the Seine (too touristy, he said). “I take it every time I come to Paris and I love it every time and so will you,” she said. They had a sunny afternoon, and they sat with the Germans and the Italians and the Scandinavians and the Americans and the crackly loudspeaker offering multilingual incomprehensibilities, and sailed down the river, under the bridge, along the Iles, past the heroic buildings of old France.

  Victor insisted that Dolores go with him to the top of the Eiffel Tower (“and you called the boat trip too touristy?”) because in all his trips to Paris, he had never been up, his trips being business trips, leaving little time for pleasure of that sort. The lines were not as long as they are in the summer, and they got there within an hour. But the view was disappointing, because the day was overcast and they could not see far. So Dolores tugged at Victor’s hand and led him to the Arc de Triomphe and they climbed that, and then they stood in the magic circle at the very heart of the old city, gazing in wonder at the broad tree-lined avenues spoking out and away, and turned and there was the Bois looking like a great forest in the middle of the very civilized and most beautiful city in the Western world.

  Both wanted to go again to Sainte-Chapelle, the little chapel built by Louis the Saint and connected to his palace. The room glittered with the dancing light of the stained-glass windows, and Victor said it was as if religion had merged with Merlin, and this was a faery place. Dolores wondered what the world had seemed like to him, to Saint Louis, what the world out-of-doors had seemed, that he could have built this indoors.

  Victor wanted to go to Versailles, but Dolores put her foot down on that one. He was adamant, he said one had the right to see it once, that she had, after all, and so she was forced to give in. He found it fine, impressive. But Dolores kept muttering, “No wonder there was a revolution.” He’d point to a gilt frame, a painting, a vase: Ugh, Dolores said. The only things she liked were the carpets.

  Victor launched into theory. The monarchy may have been selfish, but look what it left behind! Ugh, Dolores repeated. Art, Victor continued, ignoring her, always flourishes in cultures that have an elite, an aristocracy, a class with the leisure and wealth to appreciate and foster it. “Since we got government by committee, look at the stuff we get, look at Soviet art.”

  “If this is the sort of art aristocracies foster, I’ll take anarchy any day,” Dolores said. “And I think American art is fine. It’s vital, it’s thinking.”

  “You like yellow canvases?”

  “That isn’t all there is to American art …”

  “The trouble with American painting is that it thinks too much,” Victor said. “And artists aren’t taught craft. Look at the work on that gold hand mirror: there’s probably no one alive who could do that today.”

  “And why should they? That’s part of a different vision, when men declared themselves gods and ate up everybody else’s dinner. Our artists aren’t aiming for anything like that.”

  “You’re right. They’re aiming for art without content.”

  Their disagreement was total: it was aesthetic, moral, and political. But they liked it. Both of them were inclined to be contentious and both of them usually won their arguments. It was a pleasant change to argue with someone who responded strongly and would not give in, to argue in a closed circle, knowing you would never win. It made the argument play, which was liberating to the mind and the spirit.

  “Victor,” Dolores was snarling with a smile, “sometimes I think you haven’t read a piece of history since you were in high school.”

  “Dolores,” he snarled smiling back, “I sometimes wish I could get inside your head and see what broken gear in there is making an intelligent woman say such stupid things.”

  “I get pretty sick of being in my own mind,” she admitted. “It’s so convinced, so relentless, so grim.”

  “Okay, let’s change,” Victor decided, as they entered the Hall of Mirrors and Dolores said Ugh for the fiftieth time. “You use my mind and I’ll use yours. Mine is quite brilliantly full of facts and figures, names and dates. And in the place where your mind is grim, mine’s a blank.”

  “I wouldn’t mind,” Dolores said. “For an hour a day, anyway. Like airing out the rooms.”

  “We start now,” he announced energetically, and looked at his watch. “Three ten.” He looked around the hall, opened his mouth wide and stuck out his tongue. He said, “UUUUUUGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!”

  She broke into a giggle. “Not here!”

  “BBBBBBBBLLLLLLLLAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!” Victor continued. People were turning to look at him.

  Dolores walked away from him and tried to pretend that she didn’t know him, but she was giggling so hard she aroused as much attention as he did.

  “No, no, no escape.” He chased her and grabbed her arm. He made her stop while he gazed theatrically around the hall. “Ugh! This place is grotesque!”

  Dolores pulled her arm away and spread both her arms out, gesturing at the mirrored walls. “Ladies and gentlemen! Before you are fifty thousand mirrors, which took five billion tons of sand to produce, and several thousands of lives, as well. The workers, you see, kept drowning in the sand. However, the king thought it was a noble thing for the workers to give up their lives for their country, especially in such a magnificent cause! The Hall of Mirrors, ladies and gentlemen! The hall is twenty feet wide and a hundred feet long and every day five thousand four hundred and thirty-five tourists pass through its …”

  An American in blue jeans and a beard applauded. A party of German tourists looked at her confused, while their French tour guide sent darts of outrage at her. Victor grabbed her arm and pulled her along roughly. “That’s not my mind,” he said, very grimly.

  She could not stop laughing. Her eyes were tearing, her face was wet. She pulled away from Victor again and spread out her arms: “Oh! What a gorgeous palace! This is the way kings should live! This is the jewel in the crown of the monarchy! Long live the king!”

  And to the curiosity of passersby, Victor swooped her up in his arms and kissed her wet face. She giggled through that too.

  Leaving for the airport, they looked out of opposite cab windows, sitting far apart but holding hands across the space. They looked out of different windows and so saw different things but the same thing, a different city but the same city. Dolores tried to absorb, assimilate this city she loved so much and would return to but never with Victor, wanted to absorb it with him in it. It made a difference, his presence, the air seemed differently salted or sweetened, motions were directed by a different pace. Both of them wanted to remember it this way, treasuring not just their experience of the city, but also their experience of each other. They looked out as if they were hungry, as if they could eat it, lardering their minds with the way it had been for them, was for them now, together, stocking it up against a winter of deprivation.

  2

  BUT OF COURSE THEY could not live in peaceful coexistence for very long. There were rhythms to things, and even harmony palls and requires discord and new development if a bond is to remain a living texture.

  They were back in Oxford, later that month. They had had a happy dinner at home, Victor having decided that he wanted to make moussaka, and having spent the entire day doing it, leaving the kitchen a dishwasher’s despair. And, of course, since he cooked, Dolores had to wash the dishes. She gritted her teeth and promised him next time she cooked it was going to be cannelloni. Three sauces! Watch out!

  But the dishes got done, eventually, and Victor even helped, and they were sitting quietly in the sitting room with cognac, and something triggered her memory, and Dolores launched into her lecture on women always having to swim upstream. Victor listened more and more uncomfortably, and when she got to the Nazi part, he looked extremely dour. But he said nothing.

  “You don’t like what I’m saying, do you.”

  “I don’t mind what you’re saying.” Short

  “Why don’t you like
it?”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t like it.”

  “But you don’t. Why don’t you admit it?”

  It came out in an exasperated burst. “What do you want me to do? Fire all my male managers and hire women? I try. We do appoint women at the managerial level, Dolores, and nine times out of ten, it just doesn’t work! Women don’t think like men! They don’t! I’m sorry if that sounds chauvinistic to you. I can’t help it. It is simply true!”

  There was a little hard place in her stomach. “It doesn’t sound chauvinistic to me. I agree, most women don’t think like most men. They think better. Men get caught up in status and games and winning, and they lose sight of everything else. Women see things in the round, they see the totality of things, and so they have different priorities. I’d say yes, you’d better fire all your male managers and hire women if you want your company to be decent.”

  A long, heavy exasperated sigh. “Oh, Dolores.”

  “I’m serious,” she lied. “That would humanize your company. If it wants to be humanized.”

  “You’re not serious. You’re simply trying to challenge me.”

  “I’m not serious because of course I know you won’t do it. But if you could keep your women managers, it would be a sign you were doing something right. Really. I mean this. Women are the touchstone. If they can tolerate your policies, that means your policies are decent.”

  “Oh, god. Really, Dolores. Sometimes you speak such arrant nonsense!”

  She glared at him.

  “Look, let’s talk realistically, okay? Given the competitive intense profit-motivated world we live in …”

  “Country we live in,” she corrected him.

  “Don’t delude yourself. The Soviets may not allow profit, but they’re motivated in exactly the same way we are—everybody wants status, money, and power. You think the Chinese are any different?”

  She shrugged. “No. They’re all male-dominated, male worlds. Male worlds are all the same, the differences are only in degree.”

  “Jesus!” he breathed. “Do you realize that you are a monomaniac? You see male domination everywhere and it’s all you see and you talk about it constantly and you are constantly on my back about it!”

  “I see it everywhere because it is everywhere.”

  “So is death, but I’d just as soon not have to look at every corpse that’s buried.”

  “Oh, what a ridiculous metaphor! In the first place, death is inevitable, male domination is not. In the second place, if you saw every example of the ugly consequences of sexism, it would take you the rest of your life just to examine this block, the people on one side of this street!”

  He relaxed his shoulders. “Okay, look I don’t want to do battle over this. It’s just that … it gets tiresome. Because not only do you see it everywhere, but it’s all you see. You go down and have dinner with Mary and her lover, whatever his name is, and you turn a Sunday dinner into a goddamned feminist drama! I get sick of it, Dolores!”

  “Oh, you don’t want to do battle. But you sit there and tell me I bore you.”

  “I’m not saying that! I’m not! It’s just that you’re constantly on my back!”

  “I am NOT!”

  “And you probe into the damnedest things! People’s private relations. You know, what people do in the privacy of their own homes is their business, and things are equal there, you don’t realize that, well, I suppose you had an especially lousy marriage, but you don’t know how much power women wield in the home.”

  She nearly leaped out of her chair. “Things are not equal there!” she shouted. “What do you think I’ve been telling you? They can’t be equal there when they’re not equal anyplace else! The genders are subject to different conditions….”

  “Okay! Simmer down! The point is, anyway, that those things are petty, they’re not worthy of your attention, you have too good a mind to be sitting around thinking about what Mary said to John and what John said back. Who the hell cares?”

  “OOOOOH!” she screamed and stood up, holding her temples with her hands. She went to the wall, she banged her head against it. “OOOH! OOOH! OOOH!”

  “Dolores, for godsakes!”

  She whirled around at him. “Petty, is it? Beneath consideration? It’s the fucking future of the world, you dolt! On the relations between women and men rests everything else: the well-being or not of the children, the character of the children, the character of the society, the future of the society, the character of the entire culture! It just happens to be, Victor Morrissey, the most profound subject there is! I suppose you think oil lines matter more! Well, that’s because you’re a man!” Her tone made man synonymous with stupid, at the very least.

  He glared at her and puffed hard on his cigarette. He pulled himself into composure. Then he launched his attack. He leaned forward and gestured at her with his hand, the cigarette in it flailing ashes on the carpet “And this is the thing I hate most about you. You get hysterical and then you go into a goddamned sermon! You are constantly preaching at me, trying to teach me. Well, I don’t need your preaching, I’ve gotten along pretty well for fifty-one years without it. You act as if you’re challenging me to completely rethink the way I live, the way I fucking think! Nagging at me, all the time, to redecorate my moral house, rearrange it, or maybe even abandon it and get a new one.”

  She was stiff and cold. The little place in her stomach was a knot now, small but tight as a fist. She sat down, hurt. The nagging had got her. Only the powerless nag. Only the powerless have to nag. The powerful command.

  “Well, it isn’t possible for me to change the way I think, but even if it were, I wouldn’t do it. I don’t want to do it. I like the way I think. I like my work. I like myself.”

  “Sometimes,” she shot in nastily, and he glared at her.

  “Well, that’s mutual,” he retorted and it was her turn to glare.

  “You want me to adopt your way of seeing, your way of thinking, your way, period. I’d have to change everything in my life. I’d have to give up my work….”

  “I haven’t tried to get you to give up your work.”

  “No. You just spatter it with sarcasm continually: corporations, capitalism, organization men.”

  She was silent. That was true.

  “You see everything that’s bad about those things, but nothing that’s good.”

  “That’s because there isn’t anything good.”

  “That’s NONSENSE! Dolores. Jesus! I don’t know how you can be so blind! No system is perfect, can we say that? But capitalism allows greater freedom to a greater number of people than any other system …”

  “And requires a slave class if it’s to operate smoothly.”

  “… and corporations are structures designed to maximize efficiency, and because of them the United States has a higher mass standard of living than any other country….”

  “That’s industrialization and rich natural resources. All corporations permit is legalized robbery and exploitation….”

  “ACCCCH!” he shouted. He stood up, frustrated beyond bearing. He began to pace the room.

  “You see!” His voice was shrill. “You refuse to see, you will not give an inch! You want me to give feet, yards, miles, for godsakes, you try to make me question everything I do or say to see if it’s pure enough for the puritan Dolores, which is not only goddamned self-indulgent, it’s sick! Sick!”

  “I don’t have the power to force you to do anything,” she said coldly. “If you do it, you do it for yourself. Don’t lay the blame on me.”

  He whirled around. “Look, I get along fine in the world. Better than you, if the truth be told. I don’t need your help!”

  “You get along fine in the world because you think and feel and act the way the world thinks and feels and acts. Talk about Mach being an ant! You’re just an automaton, that’s all. But you don’t do so well in your personal life.”

  “And you’re an expert on that, I suppose!” Savagely.


  Elspeth.

  He didn’t mean that, he doesn’t know about that.

  She was shivering from the cold hard tight place in her belly.

  He was pacing, he looked hot, he was sweating. His pacing annoyed her. She clenched her hands in her lap.

  “You might get along a little better if you went along with the world,” he said. “You women complain all the time that you’re left out. All you have to do is join. If you have the brains for it.”

  She grimaced. “That was cheap and stupid. Give me one reason we should want to join you. Become hollow men like you, wear uniforms, never have a thought that isn’t in the service of the system? Never!”

  “What in hell do you want!”

  “Oh,” she mocked him in a mincing voice, “Was das Weib will? What I want, Victor, is to change the world, what do you think? To make it a place where women’s way of seeing, thinking, feeling, is as valid as men’s. Where maybe even men will join the women because they will see that women’s way of thinking is more decent, more humane, and in the long run, Victor, more likely to preserve the human race!”

  “Well, I don’t want to change the world! It never occurs to me, since I’m not a megalomaniac, that I can! And that’s exactly what I object to in you, that you’re constantly trying to change the world. And since you can’t do that, you spend your energy trying to change me!”