The Bleeding Heart

by Marilyn French

  “Do you feel like a failure about Edith?”

  “Of course.”

  She was silent.

  He put his head up. “You don’t believe that,” he said.

  “Yes.” Doubtfully. “But I don’t think you feel that as deeply as I feel about Elspeth. Of course it’s different, a child…. But I know families who have lost a child, and the mother feels it far more. The fathers say, yeah, what can you do, we did our best but the kid was mixed up. The mothers don’t say much, they sigh and the corners of their mouths droop down, and their eyes are full of sadness, it never departs, that sadness.

  “My friends Carol and John have a couple of … well, problem children. Barefoot kids, like mine, only more so. And Carol blames herself for the way they are, she was a screaming meemie when they were little. Well, her own childhood! …

  “One day we were sitting around on their patio and I was happy, feeling very fulfilled, you know? My book had just come out, the reviews were fine, my kids were doing well. And I felt the way I sometimes do, that I’d done everything I wanted to do in life, that I’d fulfilled my childhood images of what I wanted. And I asked them, if they were to die tomorrow, what would be their greatest regret.

  “I wasn’t thinking seriously at all. My own greatest regret—right at that moment—was that I had never danced to the waltzes from Der Rosenkavalier in a crystal-chandeliered, mirrored ballroom, wearing a white ruffled gown with a hoop skirt. But they took it seriously.

  “And John, who’s a good man, said: ‘Oh, a few redheads and a blonde.’ I thought he meant something serious: love, the love he’d missed having, giving. I thought he meant he didn’t really know how to love, faithful as he was. And I thought he was unusual, that most men’s regret would have been about their career: never having made it to vice-president, or president, never having earned forty thousand a year—or ten thousand a year. I know what Anthony would have said: never having played football for Army. And he would have meant it.

  “But Carol answered in a thin dead voice: ‘That I wasn’t a better mother,’ she said. And we all sat there, silent.

  “It’s strange.”

  Victor pounded the grass with his good hand in a fist. “Jesus, you women! No wonder you suffer so much. You define your children’s existences in terms of yourselves and make yourselves responsible for everything they do and don’t do, everything they are and aren’t! It’s crazy!”

  “Society has done that, Victor, not us. Everybody, from the psychiatrists to the kids, blames the mother.”

  “But it’s crazy! You just don’t have that much control over kids. It’s not like directing a project that doesn’t come off. You can feel bad about it, but you can also walk off it and start another. No one person has that much control over children, and you can’t just wipe them off when they go over the edge. You can’t draw up a little chart, as I can, showing wins and losses—projects completed and successful, projects abandoned or failed. And end up with a nice little edge, feeling proud of yourself. It isn’t like that. Even if the kids survive, even if they’re healthy and successful … I know that my mother,” his voice became hard, firm, and cold, “my mother died feeling she’d failed with me. Because she didn’t like me very well after I was grown. So even if the kids seem to be all right in the world, mothers blame themselves.

  “It’s a fucking self-indulgence, Dolores, feeling that way. It’s self-indulgence in responsibility, in guilt, in sorrow, in pain, and finally—that’s really it, isn’t it?—in power.”

  She sat up and gazed at him. He examined her face.

  “Are you angry?”

  “No. I’m thinking that you’re right, but that the raising of children is the only power society allows women. I suppose we do grab it whole hog. But the thing is, Victor, the children are our job. They are.”

  He sighed and lay down again. “They’re all our jobs.”

  “No. They should be, but they’re not.”

  “Well, they’re an impossible job,” he said.

  She lay down beside him again, and was silent, listening to the leaves turning, the water flowing, the air playing around them.

  “Ah, Victor, how am I ever going to let you go?”

  Victor found out in May that he would have to go to Plymouth for a few days. If she wanted to go with him, he would take some time off and they could spend ten days touring Devon and Cornwall.

  She wanted to go but she was alarmed. The time had sifted away so, it was almost June and she had much to do yet and only two more months.

  “Three,” Victor said.

  “June, July: two.”

  “August. You have August.”

  “No. I go home on July twentieth.”

  “A year!” he shouted. “We said we had a year!”

  She put her hand on his arm. “Victor, I had a year. I came in July.”

  “Okay. That’s okay. No reason you can’t stay another month, just change your reservation. If your grant money’s run out, that’s okay.”

  “Well, I was worried about money. I knew I’d be broke after a year here, as I am, almost….”

  “Darling, why didn’t you tell me? How much do you need? Will three thousand tide you over?”

  She laughed. “Victor, I can live for four months on three thousand dollars. But that’s not the point now.”

  “Well, what is?” He pulled himself away from her, stood, and began to pace the room. His voice was harsh.

  “I knew I’d be broke, so I signed up to teach a summer school course at Emmings from July twenty-first to August twenty-fifth. I have to go back.”

  Pacing. “Cancel it! Quit! Get someone else to do it! Christ, all the unemployed academics around—surely they can get someone else!” He whirled on her. “You could get someone else if you wanted to!”

  She looked at him with a firm face and he turned away and went to the window. He stood there looking out, his hands in his pockets, his head bowed.

  She went to him and turned him around and led him to a chair and made him sit in it. Then she sat on his lap and kissed his eyelids. They were damp.

  “Two months,” he whined. “It’s so short.”

  “Yes,” she said, rubbing her cheek against his.

  He put his arm around her. “I can’t bear to let you go.”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “You have to,” he said sadly, accepting it.

  “I have to.” She sat up and gave him a high-and-mighty look. “Listen, man, I live in a small world, it’s true, but I want you to know that in my little pond, I’m a bit of a star.”

  He smiled.

  “It’s my books, you see. Emmings used my name as sort of a drawing card, to get students to sign up for the summer school. So they can make money, of course. But I agreed. I said I would. And now I have to.”

  “Surely people have not shown up sometimes. Even stars.”

  “I suppose. But I couldn’t do that. I’d feel too wrong. Wrong towards myself. Oh, if I had a heart attack, or broke my leg….”

  “Let’s do it!”

  “What?”

  “Break your leg. I’ll carry you everywhere. Promise.”

  They laughed, but the image lingered in Dolores’s head: break your leg, become paralyzed, so I can carry you everywhere and never lose you. I promise to visit you nightly with books and flowers and booze in a brown paper bag….

  She did not tell him this, however. He did not like her forcing him to examine his acts, his words. He thought she was trying to change him. Besides, they had so little time.

  “I’ll work straight through for the next two weeks,” she said. “I’ll get to the Bod when it opens and won’t leave until it closes. Maybe I can get enough done.”

  He assented reluctantly and was a little sulky all evening. But made love to her that night with a passionate hunger that was limned with desperation, so strong, so insistent that she could only surrender to it, couldn’t herself play an active part. She was, for that night, the ul
timate object of his desire, and his desire, that night, was to arouse hers and fill it.

  And in fact it was wonderful, the engulfment, the encompassing, feeling like a cherished treasure, a musical instrument played upon, made to sing lyrical phrases, now in the violin section, now in the woodwinds, and oh, now, the basses! Appassionato, then a new tempo, the horns come riding in and violins swirl in a tempest, with a little flute riding in and out of it. Then the whole thing rises to dissonance, climactic chords rushing in disagreement to some resolution, not yet, not yet, then a thin high note on the oboe, then the whole orchestra smashing, smashing, smashing into resolution, harmony, as the peak note holds and the chords soften, slowly, grow silkier, still the tender note as the rest dies away, fades, is gone, but still the one note, sostenuto, lingering on the ear, reverberant.

  She lay there as Victor slept, thinking that was what an accomplished courtesan did for her clients, and that there ought, there really ought to be, brothels for women.

  3

  SHE WORKED HARD THE next two weeks and tried not to think, no, tried not to feel anything about their impending separation. She tried also not to think about the broken-legged phrase that lingered in her mind. And tried not to feel anything about that, too.

  Time enough later, when she was back home in Cambridge, alone with her books, her course plans, and a stack of themes. “Henry V and the Idea of Kingship.” “Shakespeare’s Two Whores: Cressida and Cleopatra.” “Nature in The Winter’s Tale.” Ugh. Impossible to grade papers in which you found, not ideas you disagreed with, but an entire way of thinking you found immoral. You could hardly mark down students because their morality didn’t agree with yours, especially since they did reflect the ideas of the rest of their culture. But it made you tired. When will people start to think something else?

  Received ideas were so tiresome and so impregnable.

  Anyway, in the long evenings at her desk, when she took off her reading glasses and rubbed her eyes, she could think about Victor and find him wanting, then. And she would, she would.

  Still, it had been an idyll, despite all that was nonidyllic in it, despite … But it was a fact that one forgets idylls, except for moments. And moments she had, tens of them.

  A beautiful afternoon on the beach at Lissadell, near the family mansion of Con Markiewicz, with a beautiful charmer named … what was his name? Terrible liar, but it hadn’t mattered that day. The sky pale blue, the beach warm, they lay in reeds behind a dune that hid them from the hill behind them. Shane, yes. He had asked her to be faithful to him, for that night at least. She had howled with laughter. Ah, but what a smile he had!

  Yes, and two days in Venice with an Italian seaman whose name was forever lost, but she remembered the day at Lido with him, and dinner with his friends, he so proud of his American accomplishment, and proud that she loved his city. Evenings they walked along the narrow streets, stopping on the little bridges to kiss or talk, walked towards the Grand Canal and watched the sunset and the lights. They got into a gondola and sailed away from twilight over the harbor. He said: It is so good is like first time, no, Dolores? Closed his eyes and pretended she was a virgin. She was amused, she said yes, she had not let that interfere.

  Ah, and the afternoon in Zmigrod with Adam, seeing at firsthand the Polish farms, the peasants, real peasants, not movie ones. They were short and bent, even the young ones, from hard labor. They were stained like potatoes, brown and mottled, and had no teeth and were illiterate and they looked at you as you passed as if you were of another race. Smell of manure in the sitting room, hay in the kitchen. A cross on the wall and a plastic model of the Vatican with an electric light in it that they could plug in: the only luxuries in the sparse house. And Adam, of another race in his beige suit, beautiful and poised and polite, bowing, speaking to everyone with respect and kindness, saying Pan and Pane even to the janitor of his building. He disregarded class in this extremely class-conscious society of Poland. And she loved him for his manners, but he made love like a machine.

  And the morning at Bandelier, watching the sun rise over the high cliffs that guarded this valley, then climbing up and walking carefully along the narrow paths that bordered the cave dwellings, the air like spring water, clear and crisp and crystalline, the pueblos silent and empty as they had been for hundreds of years now. Standing there looking out, imagining how they had stood, those hundreds of years ago, training their eyes on the cliffs, on the pass, wary of enemies. Looked down below and saw the ruins of their working places, where they had cooked and grown and sat, imagining them there, brown and bending, working, rising, staring out with stoic backs, firm faces. And turned and saw Morgan standing there staring at her and felt full of love because she knew he saw too, saw as she did, and when their friends moved on, she and Morgan fell together in line, naturally, as if they were old friends.

  But he couldn’t make love at all, no.

  And a day at Walden with Jack, alone for a change, the kids off somewhere, walking, talking about Thoreau, bright day. She’d swum nude and delighted him, and he dived in after her. Standing beside the stones that were all that was left of Thoreau’s hut, looking out at the lake, wondering what he saw, back then before there was anybody there but him. Jack enthusiastic, bubbling over, his energy and joy making up for all of what he did not yet know.

  Yes. There was much to be found in imperfection.

  And others too, many others. Nancy and she in Assisi, she glued to the Giottos in the cathedral, Nancy bored and restless, the two of them together in their immaculate two-dollar-a-night hotel room, Nancy plump and giggling, showing her a tap dance and disappearing at the foot of the bed, simply vanishing, slipped and sliding on the polished floor, unable to get up she was laughing so hard.

  And alone at Delphi in April, at Athena’s overgrown temple, no one there, the grass brilliant with yellow wild flowers, bees humming all around her. And her first time in Paris, walking in the Tuileries towards the Orangerie, going to see the Monet water lilies only because they were there, not having then much respect for Monet Music was playing in the park that day, Beethoven. She didn’t know where it came from, but she walked with it, followed its light and solemn rhythms, the third movement of the Eroica. And then had entered the Orangerie and saw them, my god! She had let herself down slowly onto a bench, her mouth gaping, my god, my god, such beauty!

  And her first sight of the Baptistery doors in Florence, feeling holy, saved, full of gratitude that she’d been lucky enough, oh, more than lucky, to be able to come here, to see this, those doors she’d dreamed of seeing for years and years. And examined them for days, tracing every detail in her mind. And a pigeon had come and perched on her shoulder.

  And when the guard was in another room of the Bargello, she had reached out her hand and stroked Donatello’s David. Lust, she felt, the hell with aesthetic distance.

  And boating up the Navua River in Fiji, the hills rising on either side, the treacherous, rocky, shallow, swift river winding past villages perched in the mountains above them. The children swimming, splashing you, a lone woman far off washing clothes on a rock, beautiful and brown and round in a brilliant red-flowered pukasheela.

  Moments enough, yes, and more. Moments of such beauty that even remembering them made her life shine, made her glow with gratitude for having been allowed to see them, for having been spared.

  Sometimes they were tainted, those moments, by later events. The night walking on the beach in Puerto Rico with Marsh, taking off her shoes and walking in the surf, his watching her and the electricity between them. The night on the scaffolding with Anthony, the day they rode the Pocono trails and his horse wouldn’t move.

  What would happen to this year with Victor, to the flat in Oxford where so little and so much had happened, the flat in London, the bike rides along the Cherwell, walks along the Seine in evening?

  Would she occasionally recall his face and forget his name?

  Terrible.

  But what was the alte
rnative? Even if they could have taken each other home, tried to pack such exotic food into the neat slices of their everyday lives, what then? Let’s break your leg, Dolores, let’s put you in my pumpkin shell. And she would try to change him completely, make him see the world as she did. And he would not be better for that, she’d seen that with Jack. It would be a graft, and would not take gracefully.

  No. There was no way.

  Was love always like that, do you suppose? Clamping down on the beloved and crushing them like the bound feet of a Chinese girl-child? How could you work it out, the togetherness, the distance? The old way had been to turn the woman into the man’s creature: one will, one mind, one flesh: his. But there was no new way, was there.

  But even in the old days, it had been impossible, except then, only the women suffered. Impossible. Woman and man. Woman and woman. Man and man. Love is the word we use. The fig is rich and juicy and nourishing, but at its very core, unyielding and indigestible, was the hard pit from which and only from which new figs come.

  4

  THEY DROVE TO DEVON along the motorway so Victor could get there quickly and fulfill his obligations. They would take the coast roads out of Plymouth and meander around until their time was spent. While Victor met his appointments, Dolores wandered along the docks of Plymouth, the old city that was one beginning of America. There was little left of the old city. Dolores was astonished, felt provincial at her ignorance. For she’d always thought of the blitz as the battle of London. She had not known that the southern, shipbuilding coast had been bombarded savagely, had been leveled, really. Plymouth, the seaport, sometimes resting place of Sir Francis Drake and his cronies, departure point of the Mayflower, Plymouth had been nearly demolished. A few old streets, a few old houses were all that was left. The rest was high-rise warehouse, American style.