The Bleeding Heart

by Marilyn French

  So he’d try to change the subject. He’d start to tell Edith about an incident at the office, but her eyes would glaze over, not because she couldn’t understand but because she didn’t want to hear. That was one thing she didn’t want to know about, his life at work. Didn’t want to know, didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to have to imagine him striding into the office full of energy, rapping out orders and jokes, sitting down behind that huge desk, of his dictating, calling meetings, telephoning the chairman of the board, letting his mind work on what it liked to work on, going to lunch at the best restaurants, where the maître d’ bowed at the sight of him, said, “Good afternoon, Mr. Morrissey,” led him to his table himself.

  No.

  Joined there by two or three like him, perhaps below in rank, perhaps above, all of them sitting there drinking, eating, plotting, talking, dramatizing everything that occurred, full of pleasure. Talking about all of it as if it were eminently serious. Once she’d believed that too, that Victor’s work was highly serious; he’d convinced her of it. But now she knew better, now she knew it was only a game that men in their egotism pretended was world-shakingly serious, when in fact it wasn’t, nothing was serious except losing your legs, nothing whatever.

  No.

  So her mind would glaze along with her eyes, and eventually Victor would notice and he’d get up and change the record and ask her if she wanted another drink and she’d say no thank you, sweetly, and he’d pour himself another, and while he was doing it, Edith, glancing anxiously at him, would open her book again, her finger red-lined from holding her place all that while, and when Victor came back she would be reading and he could sit down and read too. Free.

  Oh god. Dolores closed her eyes. No. No. She didn’t want that for him. She wanted him charging bareheaded out into the rain, poking, pointing, laughing, getting angry: amused at the spectacle of life, delighted by the London streets, standing with her, arm in arm, admiring the displays in British greengrocers’ shops, sitting on top of a double-decker bus, spouting hot-air sociology on British customs, tramping through the streets alive alive-o. In London. In New York. Anywhere.

  But of course there was no human spectacle on the neat, gardener-tended streets of Scarsdale, was there. All indoors there. Quiet suffering, lower your voice you don’t want the maid to hear, you know how these girls gossip.

  No. She wanted Victor the way he was at his office, the way he came Friday nights to Oxford, bounding up the stairs with an armload of booze, talking a mile a minute about what happened that week, getting impatient after her fourth interruption, saying he guessed she could have five minutes if she wanted to talk. She wanted him with an equal and opposite force. Yes.

  Which Edith was not.

  But whose fault was that? Hadn’t Victor himself pressed down on her harder and harder until she was a crumbled powder under his thumb? And didn’t he have behind him the weight of the entire culture, while she didn’t even have her parents’ help? So that even without pressing he would have had the advantage?

  Yes: you could not in any way talk about equality between men and women. Someday she would have to find a way to explain that to him. How you couldn’t do that because women were always salmon swimming upstream. How no matter where women went, they always found the old tradition in which implicitly men were important and women were not—in paintings, in books, in the laws and the customs. Women existed for men: their bodies for men’s pleasure and rage; their emotions to provide the suffering witness to men’s identities.

  Pick up the paper, any paper, she wanted to say. Any day. For instance, the other day I read an account of a woman who accused a man of rape. It was a tiny report on a, back page. And the man was tried and acquitted and the woman stood up in the courtroom and protested, cried out, damned the jury. And the judge sentenced her to thirty days for contempt of court. Sentenced her!

  Pick up the paper, she wanted to say. You will read about John Smith and his family, his house, his taxes, and his car. You will read about the working man, the men in industry, about man and his great destiny, and prehistoric man. The only time man isn’t used is in talking about mastectomies and hysterectomies.

  Did you read, she wanted to say, about the whole monastery and school that picked up and left the Episcopal Church and joined the Greek Orthodox Church because the Episcopalians had ordained a few women as priests? A handful of women priests was enough to send them reeling into apostasy! To renounce their religion! What could that handful of women mean to them? What were they seeing in those people whose bodies were different? Putrefaction? Blood? Sin? Flesh? What horror could send them flying into foreign arms?

  Yes. You have a fight with your wife and you go to your local bar and sit there staring in your glass and somebody starts talking about the Red Sox and pretty soon you start telling him about your wife and he sympathizes, he shakes his head, he knows, oh he knows. Yeah, all the same, broads, dames, bitches, cunts, squaws, whores, cows, dogs, WOMEN. Yeah, yeah, he shakes his head in agreement. Sure, he’d been there too. Somethin, ain’t they? Every man in the bar will agree.

  But I, she wanted to say, have a fight with my husband and I don’t dare go to the local because I’ll get dirty looks or dirty hands, I’ll get something to diminish or enrage me. And if I try to tell my women friends, five of them will look at me askance, will priss their lips, will assume there must be something terribly wrong with me to have such trouble, they don’t have such trouble, they say and I think: Wait until next week. They shake their heads as if I were a bug in their ear they are trying to shake loose.

  How there are only the other five women, thank god for them, who understand, and who know they are the only ones who do. And how we have to hold hands and form a circle and stay together because there is only we, there is no one else, and we’re alone in our world.

  Because, she wanted to say, look at the world! Look at the cracks, the jokes, the whistles, the pawing hands, the rapes, the judgments, the ads, the movies, the TV, the books, the laws, the traditions, the customs, the economic statistics, the government, the Catholic Church, the Jewish tradition, the Moslem beliefs, the rulers of the socialist countries, the rulers of the fascist countries….

  Yes, she wanted to say, the whole world goes the same way. There is a word for hatred of all people: misanthropy. There is a word for hatred of women: misogyny. But there is no word for hatred of men, males. Apparently such a thing is inconceivable. Oh, there was a war all right, but it wasn’t women who declared it, it was men, thousands of years ago. They declared women invalid and built that illegitimacy into the laws, into the very dreams of the human race. That division lies curled deeply at the very root of our whole power-hungry, industrial, nature-crushing, ambitious, structured, patriarchal, hierarchical world. But when women started to fight back, men threw up their hands in horror and screamed in hate and fear about man-hating women! Yes!

  So that—and now she would soften her voice, be a little kind to him because he is fragile—so that men who don’t go as far as others in their misogyny, men who are willing to admit that perhaps women can do “men’s” jobs, can think, can act, men who are willing to admit that perhaps men haven’t been entirely fair to women over the ages, men like that feel virtuous and pure and large and generous and expect women to fall all over them with gratitude. Yes.

  But a woman who protests—and she would have to insist that he grasp this fully—a woman who blames men or male society for anything, who complains, is seen as a nut, a freak, an aggressor, humorless, petty-minded, a shrew, a virago, a castrator, an Amazon, a ballbuster. Yes.

  And because she has to raise her voice to be heard at all over the dominant machinery, because those who will listen to her are so far away and so few, she is shrill, abrasive, strident, yes. And she must speak largely, because people will shrug off small things. And loudly. Whereas a man can whisper and the maître d’ will seat him.

  Men can take their bad feelings about women anywhere they go, becau
se everywhere such feelings are accepted. But women must keep their bad feelings about men locked up, the outside world is hostile to them. They sit in silent kitchens, simmering, wondering if they are insane, knowing they are alone. To be a woman in such a world is to be an occupied population, with the Nazis in control everywhere. To be a woman in such a world is to be an outlaw. By birth.

  Victor wouldn’t like that. He would say: Are you saying all men are Nazis by birth? Is that what you’re saying?

  And she would say: Any man who profits from the exploitation of women, profits in any way at all, is responsible for the exploitation of women.

  And Victor would say: Are you saying all men are Nazis?

  And she, because she was swimming upstream and therefore couldn’t give an inch; because she was engaged in a war not for the survival of her body but for the survival of her self-respect, couldn’t give an inch; she would have to say yes. When that wasn’t exactly what she meant. But she couldn’t say no. No.

  Victor would get outraged, and would barely listen as she tried to explain more clearly. He’d shout: All right! All right! But can’t you find some other word?

  And she would smile at him wickedly and glint: No other word would be as effective, though, would it.

  Yes, that’s what she wanted to say.

  2

  YES, SOMEDAY SHE WOULD, she’d tell him all that. Someday when he wasn’t feeling so wounded, when the scar he’d dug around in to show her had healed over again, when the blood was not there in his eye. Tell him that he couldn’t judge Edith the same way he judged himself, because she was a lonely fish swimming upstream and he was surrounded by respectful if not friendly fish, and swimming with the current Tell him you cannot judge equally things that have different contexts, and that no man knows what it is like to live as a woman. Tell him that you can’t equate passive dependent power with assertive power because the dependent kind isn’t fun, it doesn’t give you a kick, it just allows you to survive. Whereas the assertive kind, as Victor says, is wonderful, it is using yourself in the world, doing, being, achieving.

  And tell him, finally, that Edith was not calculating her behavior, was not consciously planning to dominate him any more than he had calculated, in the early years, had consciously worked to grind her down. Oh, he had consciously planned to dominate, yes. But he hadn’t then known what that meant, what it would mean to Edith. People think that if they can just rule you, you will remain the same, except that you will defer to them, your rulers. But that is not true. The state of being ruled changes you, hones down your edges, softens your bones, kills the spontaneous anarchic spark.

  No, Edith was not consciously plotting against Victor. She was simply going along with the tide, as Victor had twenty years before, going along with what her world permitted her, taking that as her “decent allowance,” the only allowance she could have.

  Dolores knew, of course, that Edith would have been among those who would protest her analysis. Mild in voice and manner, uncertain in judgment and inclined to fall silent with pursed lips, she would talk about complementary roles, about people being helpmates to each other. After all, where would be her maid, her nurse, her swimming pool, her car, her paints, without Victor?

  And without Victor, she might have kept her legs.

  Dolores sighed deeply. Her stomach was burning, there was a hole in it, or so it felt. She went into the kitchen and poured a glass of milk and drank it down. She stood there, motionless, looking at nothing. Something had come into her mind that she did not want there, and she pressed her temples as if she could shoo it out that way.

  She was recalling Edith’s complaints. The young wife had been unhappy—oh, how many years ago!—at her brilliant young husband’s energetic preparation for work, his uniformed taut Businessman self emerging from the chrysalis of his slack homebody self. Yes. You don’t love me, she’s said, all those years ago. You go to work as if you had wings, you fly out of here in joy and come back to sleep. Had she added to screw? How many years ago did she say that? It was only a few months ago that Dolores had said the same thing, the same complaint. September, after the first night Dolores and Victor had spent together. It was indeed.

  You don’t even call when you’re not coming home for dinner, Edith had complained. Never dared, probably, to complain about the nights he did call but didn’t come home for dinner. Didn’t dare say—you leave me alone, you don’t want my company. Un-American to say that to a man on the rise. But Victor did neglect her, all the time, her, Edith-Dolores, whom he left in hotel rooms for long hours after pressuring her to come along on his trips. Yes.

  DON’T TOUCH ME! Edith had screamed, like Dolores herself. And Victor had said: Why do you throw hysterical fits? to both of them.

  Dolores, in a daze, poured a Scotch, a dark one, like Victor’s, and returned to the sitting room. It was a grey day, midafternoon, but it looked like five, no rain, but the air was thick with moisture. It was the first time Dolores had neglected to go to the library. She sat in the rocker, her feet firmly placed on the floor, her body leaning forward, her shoulders hunched over as if they would protect her heart.

  A scene formed in front of her brain. It was the conference for businessmen and humanists, the first time she’d met Mach. Victor might even have been there, she might have seen him. And if he was? What would he have been like, there, across the room from the observant academic spy, Dolores?

  There was a piano tinkling in the room, soft, undemanding, meandering diminished chords, no climaxes, music that flowed and went nowhere. And there were people, very well dressed in a conservative way, standing all around the huge room with the glass wall looking out at a garden, standing in front of the glass wall, or in front of the huge paintings on the other walls, paintings of yellow or pink, sometimes with a black line or a splotch. The people all smiled a great deal, even the men.

  There was Victor, tall, tanned from golf, showing just the right amount of joviality, the right degree of control, no hearty backslapper he, no pincher of bottoms. Indeed, none of the men at this party would think of pinching or patting or slapping a bottom (at this party). Victor was talking to a man in a plaid jacket, a man who had less class than he, was paunchier, cruder. Victor manages to convey—oh, so subtly: is it the way he stands? the position of his head? the tone of his voice?—manages to convey that he is aware of the difference between them, but because of Bitlow’s success with the OXI program, he is willing to offer him, Bitlow, his, Victor’s, respect. Bitlow is flattered, seduced. He will become one of Victor’s ardent boosters, and claim friendship.

  There is Victor talking to Mach, who is seventy-two and still powerful, thick red mottled neck, red mottled face, full-bodied, eyes like yellow creases, mouth a thin straight line. He talks without inflection in his voice, and without moving his lips more than necessary, and he looks at men, when they speak to him, like a wary animal, his eyes watery blue thin slits with a cold yellow light. He listens as if he were a machine, and everything that is said to him must go through a certain number of coils and bobbins and gears and printouts before he can respond to it. He never responds to anyone’s face. It is one secret of his success.

  Mach never looks at all at women. Once in a while you may catch him appraising an ass or a pair of boobs, and it may be upsetting if the boobs are yours because the eyes look only at your breasts, never raise themselves to the face. But he does not look lustful, merely appraising. If he wants anything, he can have it, he doesn’t even have to pay, his name delivers it to him. But he rarely wants anything.

  Someone brings up Suzanne Hein, the great physicist, to be presented. Mach does not look at her, does not listen to what she says. It is just as well, because she is protesting something, some chemical process which is having a bad effect on the atmosphere. In the middle of her words he turns away to say something between his teeth to a man standing nearby. It is Victor. Mach turns to speak to Victor, and his body turns strangely, all at once, without any give at waist or knee
. He sleeps the same way. He doesn’t turn fluidly, movement rippling through the flesh and bone, the dreaming body murmuring, snoring a little, hands coming up to slide under the pillow. When Mach turns in his sleep his whole body turns at once, suddenly. His body lifts, turns, and hits the mattress hard and becomes rigid again. His snores are like drumbeats.

  Maybe he is afraid, who knows? But what does he have to fear? It is well known that Mach never wears a coat because he never needs one. He has a chauffeur to drive him to the front door of wherever he goes, a man to walk behind him carrying the briefcase and the cash and the credit cards and Mach’s cigar case, a man to pay the bills and give directions to the driver and open doors and close them: for Mach. This man will tell the chauffeur to be waiting at twelve thirty to drive Mach and him and a few deferential, anxious corporation presidents to lunch and to pick them up afterwards. The chauffeur will be kept waiting half an hour to drive them, half an hour to pick them up from lunch. But he doesn’t care, he’s being well paid, he had to go through a security check to get this job, he drives one of the most important men in the world, and he knows it, on cold days he tucks Mach’s knees under the lap rug with such solicitousness that Mach growls at him. Besides, he’s used to waiting. The aide pays the lunch bill and scribbles the amount down in a little lined book, or signs the charge slip. Everything will be charged to the corporation.

  Mach lives in a penthouse apartment in Houston, owned by Blanchard, and takes his vacations in Aspen in a glass-walled house surrounded by a chain link fence and guard dogs, owned by Blanchard, or in an island in the Caribbean, rocky island set in azure and turquoise waters that play in white foam around it, covered with trees, lianas, bananas, orchids, the very air is perfumed, and the house is a fortress, Spanish style, cool promenades under stone-arched cloisters, heels resounding on the tile floors. Island and house owned by Blanchard, and Mach flies there in his jet, owned by Blanchard.