The Bleeding Heart

by Marilyn French

  The old places there were beautiful, low-ceilinged, wood-beamed, walls yellowed with smoke. An old pub where Sir Francis used to hang out in the days when they didn’t say hang out or hang in or hang down or hang up or hang around or hang loose or hang tight or hang a left but did say hang by the neck until dead. So quaint the old seemed, you could forget that human cruelty is not a new invention.

  The sea looked cold here, grey-blue and rough. There were ruins of a fort over beyond the rocks. You could not tell the one from the other—the stones of the fortress, the stones of the sea. They weren’t, in fact, so different: one merged into the other naturally, as naturally as life moves into death. Perhaps Elspeth was now a different kind of rock.

  When Victor was finished in Plymouth, they drove to Exmoor because Dolores wanted to see the moors. They drove for hours along winding roads through forests. There was a little church at Exmoor, a village which some pop song had transformed into another Gatlinburg, but British style, with a church that was apart and left alone by the tourists. It held a stone plaque describing a terrible and odd thunderstorm that had hit the church centuries ago. The lightning had struck the church directly; it had killed some people and left others unharmed. It had fried the clothes off some people, but not their bodies. It was, of course, taken as a sign, and the plaque was duly engraved and erected. It offered thanks, thanks, thanks to the merciful Lord. Merciful Lord! Of course, since He saved those who had erected the plaque. Thanks be to God.

  They stopped at Looe, a beautiful little village piled high on rocks, overlooking the sea. The tiny circle of town that was at sea level was a mass of shops and pubs, blue water, boats, and blue sky. Made its living, it seemed, from tourists, but a rough place it must have been to live back then before there were tourists and telephones. They climbed up, trying to reach a peak where they could see the whole, but never found such a place. The climb down was almost as difficult.

  They went to St. Michael’s Mount, where Dolores did pop sociology on the differences between the English and the French. For St Michael’s Mount, the British equivalent of Mont-St.-Michel, is also a castle that is surrounded by water when the tide is high, and by sand when it is low. They walked out to the castle, which was small and neat and clean and efficient and guarded by military people. It had been turned into a military museum. Everything was proper and in order, there were lots of lists of commanding officers and portraits of same, lots of weapons, shields, mention of victories. Whereas the French castle is large and sprawly, and the top stories still house a religious order of monks who maintain beautiful austere salons and peaceful gardens from which you can gaze down a frightening distance to the white water splashing at the base of the rock. And the lower stories have been given over to the hungry, to masses of tiny shops selling junk souvenirs and crepes and postcards and even hamburgers; they bustle with humans and smells of a hundred different foods.

  She described all this to Victor with exuberance, crowing with joy about differences, differences! How wonderful!

  “And what do you think those differences mean?”

  “To me they’re just fun. But I suppose an Englishman could raise an eyebrow and drawl between tight lips some comment on French vulgarity and the insidious Roman Catholic Church. And a Frenchman could curl a lip and sneer at the uptight pompous British. But to me, they’re both wonderful, I love them both!”

  “Do you love Niagara Falls? The American side? With its souvenir shops and its tourists?”

  “No. But it stinks. It has stunk for thirty years, maybe longer. The smell hits you even before you come into town.”

  “I think people can tolerate differences only at a distance.”

  “But life is so dull without them! It’s a diminishment of experience to encounter the same Howard Johnson’s or Carvel stand or McDonald’s wherever you go. You never know where you are.”

  “Even you and I can tolerate differences only at a distance.”

  Dolores was silent

  They drove along the gorgeous Cornwall coast and ate mussels and pork pies and Devon cream.

  And Dolores talked about images, and how we never seem to be able to get beyond them. “Even we don’t, you know. If I probe down into my psyche, I see you as glamorous and handsome and powerful and intelligent and, well, invulnerable, I guess. It isn’t true. It probably has little to do with what you feel when you wake up some morning with a hangover, smelly because you were too tired to take a shower the night before, and your teeth ache.”

  He smiled. “Well, my image of you is accurate.”

  “Hah!”

  “You’re beautiful and exotic and full of mysterious knowledge and the power to glide into a room and see through faces and eyes. And you’re a priestess of pain, too, that’s what you are.”

  She groaned. “Circe still! My knowledge isn’t in the least mysterious!”

  He smiled.

  “Ah, well, you would want to break my legs,” she sighed. “And I’d keep breaking the back of your book, and giving you a new one.”

  “The Anatomy of Melancholy,” he said. “You already did.”

  5

  THEY WERE LYING ON the beach at St. Ives and Dolores was feeling foolish because she was tremulous and because everything around her rose into the air wavy with sunlight and heat and all of this was because she was lying on the same sand that Virginia Woolf once walked on, and she kept imagining the little girl running along, skinny, her long dark hair streaming behind her, shouting about her find, a bare dead white sheep’s skull, being told that young ladies do not shout.

  And she was telling Victor about it, and about Woolf and who she was and what she did.

  But he was glum today, who knew why? The sun was high, the water lapped gently, and there were children all over the beach. Even if the Stephens’ garden was now an asphalt parking lot, the Stephens’ house hedged up tight and owned by a motelkeeper. Better, she thought, to have your cottage swept out to sea. And then thought how unpleasant most of the alternatives were, to anything.

  She lay down on the blanket, she gazed at the sky.

  “Dolores,” Victor said portentously.

  She looked at him.

  “I’ve decided.”

  She sat up. “You’ve decided what?”

  He stared at the sky. “I’m going to leave Edith.”

  She stared at him. He was not looking at her. She turned towards him. Her shoulders were slumped over, very hunched.

  “I know you insist on keeping a place of your own. I won’t try to move in with you. I can’t anyway, I have to be in New York. But it’s only a forty-five-minute plane ride between cities, and we can spend weekends together, and you have long vacations. We can be together as much as we’re apart.”

  He lighted a cigarette.

  “I know it’s terrible. Terrible. But life is too short. And I’ll provide for her. What do I give her anyway? She doesn’t care about me, I’m only a symbol to her, a husband. She wants my presence, not me. She’ll get over it. Life is too short to give this up.”

  Dolores turned away and stared at the sea.

  “What we have doesn’t come around very often. It doesn’t come around at all, for most people. I don’t want to live without you.”

  He fell silent.

  Just like that, she thought. Doesn’t ask me, he tells me. Just announces his decision, sure I accede to it. Is that a portent?

  She’ll get over it, he says. Oh, no, she won’t, man, you don’t know her yet although you’ve been married to her for nearly a quarter of a century, you’ve had time. She won’t get over it, and you will never be able to forget that she hasn’t got over it And you won’t get over it either, because there is something about yourself you do not know….

  “You will be lonely,” she said.

  Coming home, night after night, to an empty dark apartment, no dinner made, no noises, no smiling person sitting there in her wheelchair asking you how was your day. Heating up a frozen dinner, or frying a lamb
chop to the noise of the television set, not watching it or listening to it, having it on for the noise. And all those other things they do, Edith and Mrs. Ross, that you hardly notice, sending out your shirts and suits and shoes, dealing with the markets and being there for the delivery boys, answering the telephone, making arrangements, ordering only the filet for Mr. Morrissey.

  “You’d lose services.”

  “What?”

  “You have no idea. You’ve never taken care of yourself.”

  He laughed. “Well, surely that can’t be much of a chore.”

  Coming home from a late-running faculty meeting, the kids sitting around glum, hungry, eating chips or cupcakes; grabbing something out of the refrigerator, deciding to cream it with rice, Elspeth! make a salad. Remembering that the laundry isn’t done, Tony! put the light clothes in the washer and start it! and Sydney needs her navy top tomorrow, she’s going to be singing in the chorus, I’ll need to do another load of wash. Damn! no milk. Syd, be an angel and run out for milk and pick up something for dessert too, will you? Goddamn, no oil and Syd’s gone. Well, Russian dressing, mayonnaise and ketchup. Elspeth looks so tired, set the table, Elspeth, she should rest after dinner, we sat up late last night, I wonder if she went to school today. Don’t ask. I should redo that Daniel lecture for tomorrow, last year’s was over their heads, but I’m so tired, maybe I can wing it.

  Oh, if only I had a wife.

  A wife to sit up talking to Elspeth until five in the morning so I can get some sleep. To stop at the store and buy some milk. Do the laundry. A wife to do all the feeling that needs to be done in this house, feeling I don’t want to do, it drags me down, it’s undermining me. Oh, god, for a wife to smooth my brow and hold me and tell me I’m fine and take care of all of this all of this.

  A mommy. Yes. I want a mommy too.

  “You will want a wife, Victor,” she said.

  “What for? I’ll have a lover.” He caressed her wrist.

  Victor: I am not insensible of the honor you are conferring upon me, but I am not certain I am worthy to be your wife.

  Victor: I am a person who never believes that the lane marked by the white line is going to continue around the curve, where it seems to disappear.

  Victor: At what point will my refusal to enter your pumpkin shell and your refusal to reform your thinking become intolerable to us?

  “Victor. I want you to leave Edith. I do. It’s selfish of me, but I hate to think of you with her, dragged down into silence and paralysis. But I don’t want you to leave her for me. I want you to leave her for yourself.”

  He looked at her puzzled. “What the hell else would I leave her for except you?”

  “Yes, I know. And that’s what’s wrong. I don’t want the guilt of that. I don’t want the responsibility of that. And above all, I don’t want to feel I have to be for you what she was for you because you left her for me. Don’t you see?”

  He didn’t see.

  “I don’t want to have to promise you anything. I don’t want to have to say till death do us part. I want you to be enough for yourself. If you are, then you can accept that I can be enough for myself. As I am. And then we can see.”

  He sat up. “Are you saying no?” He was indignant.

  She sighed. “Leave her if you want to leave her. Don’t leave her if you don’t want to leave her. But I promise you nothing. I don’t promise to be there for you. I can’t promise I will love you in six months.”

  Oh yes I will.

  Are you sure? Suppose he takes you to a party given by Mach?

  “You have to leave her for your own sake.”

  If you can.

  It was a quiet night. They did not make love.

  6

  HE DIDN’T UNDERSTAND. HE couldn’t see himself as she saw him in her mind’s eye: gaunt and hollow and dead-looking, his arms dangling at his sides, standing behind a doll-woman in a wheelchair.

  He was unhappy and quiet as they drove on the motorway back towards London. She was quiet too.

  Oh, leave her! Leave her! Live rich and high, full of vigor, you don’t need a woman in a wheelchair!

  But he did. She knew he did. She knew that if he left Edith, he would be unhappy until he had another woman in a wheelchair. That was the only way he could feel safe.

  He talked about his last conversation with Vickie, as they approached Wells. She had told him about her professor, her abortion, her despair. She had also told him that Leslie had tried to commit suicide last year, had swallowed some sleeping pills and had then called Vickie, who rushed to her, who got her to a hospital, who had managed to cover it up. She told him about Mark, who was beginning to think it was smart to drink, and how he had in fact cracked up the van one night, ran into a tree, luckily hitting it on the passenger side after he had dropped off his friends. Had told Edith some story. Edith did not know about the rest.

  “Nowadays, it seems,” he said, “the children protect the parents.”

  Wells was a medieval market town, with the town square still there, still full of hucksters selling cheap blouses and shoes, vegetables, plastic ashtrays. They saw the cathedral, and stayed in an ancient tavern, where both of them had to duck to get through the passageways, and had to get up carefully from bed lest they hit their heads on the gabled ceiling. The place was still bustling, still alive. How had they managed that?

  He held her in his arms, he said, “Maybe I understand.”

  They drove to Bath, around the huge crescent of those eighteenth-century houses left standing after the bombing. “Why would they bomb Bath?” Dolores asked. “To get to the waters?” They stayed at The Priory, a beautiful old hotel with cool large rooms furnished with antiques, and a garden in the back, a great spreading tree at least a hundred years old, shading the lawn. There were gardens at the borders, around the pool, and the dining room faced the gardens, with clear high windows. The service was smiling and graceful, the food was superb. Dolores felt to the brim with contentment.

  “Do you ever do this with Edith? Eat out at wonderful places? Does she ever travel?”

  He tightened. “No. She feels conspicuous in public places, she doesn’t go out very often. We go to her sister’s house once in a while, or her sister comes to ours. We have a few friends in on her birthday. But mostly, we are alone. And she can’t eat many things, you know. Sitting so much, her digestion is poor.”

  “Does it make you feel bad, talking to me about her? As if you were betraying her?”

  Tight. “A little.”

  “I’m sorry. I won’t bring her up again. You have to go back to her soon. You don’t want to go back with the guilts.”

  “I don’t, for Christ sake, want to compare!”

  Oh, Victor, Victor. I will miss you.

  Oh, he will break his bargain again. He can’t stick to it now. Maybe he will leave her, even, but it will be for another Edith, younger, perhaps a little more spirited, but essentially the same. Victor needed Edith and Edith knew it. And Edith needed Victor. They had been bred to be complements.

  “Oh, I just wasn’t thinking,” she said. “Or I was, but not of you. I was thinking of my you.”

  “Your me?”

  “Yes. My you is free and dancing and alive, my you doesn’t get dragged down by anything for long, doesn’t need false havens.”

  “Doesn’t get dragged down by broken wings. Or legs.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s my you, too. Crowing and exuberant and analyzing and amazed and talking talking talking. Not a pillar of salt.”

  “But my you is the true you.”

  “Is that so. Your me is truer than my me?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Well, so is my you truer than your you.”

  “Oh!”

  They were laughing so hard they got a little noisy, and the quiet, correct, smiling British faces turned to gaze at them, ever so politely.

  7

  “YOU KNOW, THE THING is,” Victor said just before he fell asleep, �
��you’re an idealist.”

  He nuzzled her neck and in seconds his breathing came easier, heavier, sonant. She lay on her side with her back to him. He was lying on his side behind her, clasping her around the waist. His body was loose and easy against hers.

  She plotted: first line tomorrow—if she could just remember it on awaking—would be: “You know the thing is, you always have to have the last word.”

  Giggling before morning coffee always meant slaps and pummels, tickling and wrestling in the bathroom. She smiled.

  They were in London. Late in June she tied her books up in neat packages and shipped them back to Boston. She gave up her Oxford flat on the last of the month, embraced Mary, promised to write, to visit again some other year, to keep in touch.

  Then she packed her bags and went to live with Victor in London for the last twenty days, nineteen, really, since her plane left at noon on the twentieth.

  She had an introductory lecture to give on the twenty-first, and had nothing prepared. She could write something on the plane, it would help, it would keep her mind off things.

  Sydney had written in June, said she wanted to visit Dolores for a couple of weeks: could she fly over, stay with Mommy at Oxford, and fly back with her? Besides, she wrote, I miss you.

  Dolores wrote back saying: I can’t afford your fare and neither can you. And besides, I have only a little time left with Victor. I’ll be home soon, you’ll come to Cambridge, we’ll talk all night. And we’ll both save hard this year, maybe I’ll give up smoking and you can give up eating, and next year we’ll go someplace together, to Italy or Greece or England.

  Victor put off an Eminent Person in his company, said he’d act as tour guide during the day but had to have his nights free. And was taking the first three weeks in July as vacation. Risky, given his situation, to make such a statement. But the Eminent Person had merely raised his eyebrows, looked knowing, and rather admired Victor for it. People always imagine that other people are doing utterly sensuous orgiastic things, stuffing green grapes up vaginas, screwing in the bathtub, while they get left out, Victor said. Have you ever tried screwing in the bathtub?