The Bleeding Heart

by Marilyn French

  “And when it comes to things like that—to survival, to sheer enduring—morality is a joke, a middle-class luxury, like white gloves and silver coffeepots. As far as I’m concerned.”

  “Yes,” Dolores agreed, “I understand. But that’s because of the kind of morality you’re talking about. A true morality, an honest one, would begin with that, survival. Survival, not the luxury of deciding on moral grounds that you will not have iceberg lettuce this week. With what people really need and really feel. When you talk about survival, sometimes it sounds terribly close to sounding like the survival of the world’s highest standard of living, not real survival.”

  “Ah, Dolores, who knows what people really need, really feel?”

  Yes. Who knows? Antony drank urine of horses if he had to. Whereas she, Dolores, felt deprived if someone entered her compartment on the London to Oxford run, and intruded on her privacy. And Victor would have had what even he would have to call a hysterical fit if he ever ran out of Scotch.

  There is no way to be right, Dolores knew that. But there is righter and wronger, isn’t there? And to be able to say that, you had to have some notion of what was good, what was bad.

  She tried to smooth out her brow with her hand.

  How could you love a man who had done that to his wife?

  How could you live in a world that did what this world did to its people?

  What other world could you live in?

  Join a nunnery, say beads all day, blank it out, say AAAUUUMMM.

  And even then, how could you live with yourself?

  Victor called the next day, sounding extremely gloomy. (How could he know? When I caressed him, when I smoothed his forehead, I smiled.) He had to go to Brussels, it would be a terribly busy trip and he couldn’t promise he’d be there for her much, but would she like to come along? It might mean dinners alone in strange hotels. He had to see important people, money people, he could not fudge this one.

  He did not want her to come: she would be a burden. She sensed it. Did he sound relieved when she said she was just this moment in the middle of an important segment of her work and could not leave it? Or did she want him to sound relieved?

  He accepted the refusal easily. He would call when he got back, he said.

  A week later, he had not called. Two weeks later, he had not called. She, nervous, developed a rash on her hands and wondered what she would say when he did call. Then, when he didn’t, the rash got worse.

  Images kept flashing in her brain: Victor, scolding Edith across the bridge table, mocking her. Victor, scolding Edith about an unrecorded check, an unbalanced checkbook. Victor, coming home late from a rendezvous (clean, showered) and finding Edith sitting in bed reading. She looks up, smiles, takes off her glasses. She asks him how the meeting was and he has to recall quickly what meeting it was supposed to be, says fine, fine, offhandedly, the way he would if there had really been a meeting. He finds it easier to answer her in monosyllables, he’s tired. I’m tired, Edith. Long day.

  The trouble was that when these pictures appeared in her mind, it was she, not Edith who lay in the bed, who sat across the bridge table, who had tears in her eyes over the checkbook. Because it was so hard to maintain yourself, so easy to slide back into seeing it his way, their way, the dominant way. To stay true to yourself, you had to hold yourself erect and stiff, you couldn’t give an inch. No.

  By the middle of the second week, Dolores began to talk to Mary. Mary couldn’t listen very well, she was terrified, her oral was in two weeks. Her hands fluttered across the table, she kept repeating the same things: “Yes, well, this all-male board of doctors, the kind who belittle women, who even when they think they’re being kind, automatically look down. And who don’t test women the same way they test men, although they think they do, but they can’t because they don’t see the genders the same way. They claim they use the same standards, but how is that possible when your mind shifts gears depending on the body shape of the person entering the room? They failed the last three women who came up.”

  “Did they deserve to fail?”

  “It’s so hard to know, you see. The women seemed intelligent to me, and I know they worked hard, but who can tell? I mean, you’re not there, in the examination room, and even if you were, you can’t see the pressures in their heads, the fear of failing just because they’re women, which might make them fail, you see….”

  “Is there no recourse for them?”

  “Oh, they can take it again. But it’s so devastating, you see, to fail at all. After all those years of study, all that effort, feeling you’ve tried as hard as you can…. It undermines you, makes you think perhaps you’re really not clever after all. And then that damned examiner who’s Roger’s friend …”

  “He should disqualify himself.”

  “Yes, but of course he won’t. They are so bloody sure they can keep things separate. So sure they’re fair, objective. When any woman, any woman at all, can see they’re not. All you have to do is listen to them talk. But they have the power, there’s no way you can convince them….”

  Mary gazed at her. “But listen to me babbling on, you must be sick of listening to this. You’re upset, I can see it. Is it Victor?”

  So Dolores told her the whole story.

  “Oh, dear,” Mary said in a little sad voice. “Oh, dear.”

  Dolores stared at her drink. It was late Friday afternoon. Mary had neither children nor Gordon coming this weekend. Dolores had no one coming this weekend.

  “Would you like it if he divorced his wife and married you?”

  “No. Not at all. He’d be the same to me, in time. Anyway, I’d never marry again.”

  “Nor I. Gordon comes on weekends twice a month and it’s quite wonderful. The other weekends he spends with his children. When he had a sabbatical last year, he came and stayed here for the entire time and his children visited him here. It was lovely. But marriage—being a wife—the very thought is appalling.”

  Dolores laughed. “I heard the same sentiments from a young German woman in a railroad carriage one long dark journey. We were together for twenty-four hours on that train. We barely spoke the other’s language, but we were able to communicate that. Maybe it’s a new international movement!”

  “With three members,” Mary laughed. “Still, I think one wants to have been married. Once.”

  “To have laboratory-tested the recipe for happiness-ever-after.”

  “Yes. But have you quite turned against him, then?”

  Dolores gazed at the table. “I don’t know. I can’t tell you what I’m feeling, they haven’t invented words for it yet. It’s a mixture. It’s as though I had one picture of him and I liked it, it was the centerpiece of my present album, you know? And he came to visit and ripped the picture out of the book and tore it up right in front of my eyes and substituted another, one I don’t like at all….”

  “But he is the one you had at first, isn’t he?”

  “Is he? He is, yes. But he’s also the other. People don’t change so completely that the old person isn’t always showing through, like old paint. And even the new Victor deals with men like Mach.”

  “Someone has to, I suppose.”

  “That’s what Victor would say.”

  “Yes, quite. Because even if the man is the incarnation of evil you feel him to be, he exists. Isn’t one’s only course to deal with him and try to defuse as many sticks of his dynamite as you can?”

  “If you don’t get polluted by him first.”

  Mary laughed. “Is he that contagious?”

  “It isn’t just Mach. It’s the whole system. It’s poisoned. You suck it in from the moment you enter and you develop a kind of immunity, like people who take a little arsenic every day. After a while your body can tolerate large amounts of the poison without even noticing it. But you are infected. You just don’t know it.”

  “But we all live within the system. Even hermits do. If there are any hermits nowadays. We must all be poisoned.�
��

  “And so we are. That’s why it’s imperative that we work against the current all the time, to the highest degree possible.”

  Mary sighed. “Ah, well, Dolores, I can’t see things as clearly as you do. For me, everything is murky. Or perhaps it’s just that I see things in more personal terms. If the person Victor is lovable, I’d love him. It sounds to me almost as if you are … well, taking a position in a certain square. And saying, because I stand here and I am opposed to that and that, I cannot love this man. Because it’s politically against your principles. Everything you say makes so much sense, you know,” she laughed, “that I can’t deal with it. I don’t have that much sense. I live in a far more chaotic world.”

  Dolores smiled sadly. “Yes, you’re right except for one thing. I stand in my little square and I am opposed to that one and that one. That’s true. But I am not saying that I cannot love this man because I’m standing in this square. Those two things happen at once, they are the same thing. Recognizing fully, for the first time, where he does stand, has destroyed my love for him, because I stand where I stand.”

  “Ah,” Mary said softly, “so then there’s no conflict, is there. No reason to grieve.”

  “Am I grieving?”

  Mary smiled at her with soft eyes. “Perhaps a little.”

  4

  SHE WENT UPSTAIRS THAT evening, after a dinner of cheese and tomatoes with Mary, feeling warm and cared for, feeling mommyed, as she sometimes did with her women friends. She missed them, her beloved Carol and Barbara and Suzanne and Letty. She prepared for bed remembering how good it always felt to talk to them, not just because they were cherishing and funny but because they saw, with clear intelligent minds, and saw as she did. She did not have to fight with them, explain things to them, struggle against a current. Nor did they with her.

  Even Mary, whose sight was not quite as focused, had seen, had been able to say it: Dolores’s politics were ruining her love affair. It was true. It was sad. And there wasn’t a damned thing she could do about it. You could give up a love affair, but you couldn’t give up a political stance that had grown out of your very gut, out of your entire experience of life. That would be giving up your integrity. It would be like Edith pretending to be Catholic.

  She worked hard that, following week. All her energy and her attention were directed at her work. She did not even miss Victor, and she wondered if love weren’t just another of those things we tell ourselves is important, when in fact it is about as important as having a delicious meal every once in a while.

  She did not miss Victor until the weekend, that is. And then, the library closed, wandering around the apartment, she felt … well, some lack. So she was grateful that Mary had invited her for dinner on Sunday, to meet Gordon and the children.

  She went downstairs with a bottle of wine. Mary threw open the door at her knock, bent over a pile of something, her face damp and pink, her hair hanging over it. Dolores had to climb over the pile of something, which appeared to be chair cushions and turned-over furniture.

  “Oh, hullo, Dolores, come in, won’t you, sorry about the mess, yes, do step over if you can, thanks so much, children, this is Dr. Durer, Dolores, this is Linton, and,” Mary lifted her head a bit and nodded in the direction of the front room, “that is Elise.”

  Linton was beautiful and delicate-featured, with large intelligent eyes. He stood beside his mother, he was exercised about something. At the introduction, he looked at Dolores, full face, straight, for a moment and then returned to arguing with his mother. Elise was sitting crouched in a corner of the front room. She had long straight red hair and was very tiny. She glowered from her corner, but said “Hullo” when her mother bade her.

  Socialization already begun. Male and female created we them.

  Mary was picking up toys and carrying them into the front room, which was the children’s playroom and bedroom. She glanced at Dolores again, breathless and unkempt, and said, “I’ll just get this picked up a bit, you don’t mind, do go in and say hullo to Gordon, I’ll be in in a jiff.”

  “Why can’t we? Why can’t we then?” Linton was complaining. “It was a good fort!”

  Mary, breathless, said, “Pick up those cushions, then, Linton, and return them to the sitting room, that’s a dear, Elise, I want you to come out here and turn these chairs right side up and put them back where they belong. Come along now.”

  The children argued, complained, whimpered; Mary explained, cajoled, pushed; her voice was calm, but Dolores could hear the exasperation just below the calmness.

  Dolores stepped down into the kitchen. A large man with a big bushy black-and-white beard was standing at the sink washing dishes. He turned slightly when she entered.

  “Hello. I’m Dolores, and I expect you’re Gordon.”

  “Hello.” Cool British manner. He returned to the dishes. He was, Dolores, knew, a mathematician, had written a book or two in mathematical theory. He taught at a college on the east coast of England. Mary clearly thought he was a genius.

  She set the bottle of wine on the cluttered kitchen table. The mess, it appeared, was from breakfast. “Can I help?”

  “No, thanks, we’re fine.” He finished the dishes, dried his hands, and sat down in a chair beside the fireplace. He did not look at the food and crumbs still covering the table. He picked up a newspaper and began to read.

  Dolores sat. She looked out at the garden. She would have liked to clean up the mess on the table for Mary, but Gordon had made her feel that would be intrusive. She stood up and went back into the hall. Mary was crouched down with the children, who were standing beside her. Her arms were around them and she was explaining something in a soft voice, nuzzling them occasionally. They listened to her soberly, but Linton pulled away when she kissed his neck.

  “I brought some wine,” Dolores said. “Shall I open it now? Would you like a glass?”

  “I’d love some!” Mary smiled.

  “You’re not going to drink wine, are you, Mother?” Linton said disapprovingly.

  “I am, why not?” she answered lightly.

  “And would you mind,” Dolores went on, “if I cleared your table a bit?”

  Mary looked guilt-stricken. “Oh, Dolores! I’d forgotten. It must be a mess.”

  “It doesn’t bother me. But clearing it would give me something to do,” Dolores smiled.

  “Oh, dear, thank you,” Mary smiled gratefully, and turned back to the children. Elise moved and rested closer to her mother, leaning lightly against her body.

  Dolores returned to the kitchen. “Is there a corkscrew handy?”

  Gordon looked up from his newspaper. “Oh, yes, of course.” He fished around the shelves over the cupboard and came up with it. “I’ll do that for you,” he said, taking the bottle from her.

  It’s okay, I can do it, she wanted to say, but the bottle was already in his hands; He handed it back to her. “Presto!”

  Oh, you are a marvel.

  “Thank you. Are there glasses?”

  He searched the top of the old hutch and found some wineglasses behind an old china pitcher and sugar bowl. Dolores let the wine breathe for a moment, and began to clear the table. She put the butter in the fridge, and the cream pitcher, and the jam, although she wasn’t sure that’s where Mary kept it. She put the cut loaf on the cupboard, and wiped away the crumbs. She left the sugar bowl and salt and pepper, but carried the ceramic coffee jug and strainer to the sink and washed them.

  Gordon had returned to his newspaper.

  Dolores poured the wine and carried a glass across the room to him. She glanced down the hall, but Mary was gone. In the children’s room, probably, dealing with problems, problems. Dolores’s stomach twisted for Mary: how could you have any authority at all with your children if they believed you were mad? You had little enough normally, unless you wanted to act like a tyrant. She would not bother Mary now. She sat down and sipped her wine.

  “Thanks,” Gordon said, and put the paper down. He
put it down reluctantly, not as if he were finished with it but as if he would pick it up again at the first opportunity.

  “I understand you’re a mathematician.”

  “Yes.” Bored. Didn’t want to talk about it? Didn’t want to talk to her about it?

  “I teach English,” she offered.

  “Yes.”

  They sipped their wine.

  “Mary tells me you’ve written two brilliant books. Can you explain them to a layman?”

  “Not really, no.”

  Silence.

  “I understand you and Mary converted the house to two flats. Put in the kitchen upstairs and the bath down. You did a good job.”

  “Actually, the toilet was already in downstairs. But, yes, we did the rest. It was fun, actually.”

  “I can understand that. You get sick of using only your head all the time. It’s good to use your body.”

  Silence. He frowned, ever so slightly.

  “At least, that’s the way I feel,” she added quickly. “I like to go out bike-riding.”

  “Umm.” He looked out the window, and slowly, reluctantly, returned his eyes to her. “Yes, we quite like riding our bikes.”

  Maybe she was just a stranger to him? Maybe he was shy? Maybe he was wary of people after what had happened at the hearing. For Roger, Mary had told her, had mustered her friends to testify against her, to testify that she read books all day and had a lover.

  “Mary’s told me about the situation with Roger. The hearing. The decision. The children. It’s appalling.”

  His mouth twisted a little. “Beastly.”

  “Mary’s remarkable. I wouldn’t be able to stay so calm. I’d want to set bombs in the court, shoot Roger, at least shout and scream.”

  His head raised and so did his voice, just a trifle. “But I don’t want her to get angry, you see. My former wife was angry all the time. I abhor anger,” he finished, mildly enough.