The Bleeding Heart

by Marilyn French

  She went home after tea, faintly tremulous, and at home, tried to bring up what was bubbling below her surface. It had to do with the young man, with screwing him. Dance music played in her ears. Of course: yes. She was dancing with a boy, a young man, dancing close, teaching him to do the two-step, but he was holding her tight against his body, his body and his eyes were telling her I want you and he thought her body and her eyes were telling him the same thing. But they weren’t: her message was similar to his but not identical. She knew this because it had happened before. What she was saying was I want, I long. It was a general, not a specific, yearning that she felt, increased by the profound sexual longing in the jazz they were listening to. And their two longings would come together, and explode in fireworks that would last for a week, or two.

  At which time, she would have to find a way to send him off feeling hurt but not too hurt, would have to spend energy and time and delicacy in finding a way to do that. Because she hadn’t wanted him at all, she had merely wanted. Which would have been all right if he, if they, were her age, or even near it, if they had had a few callouses. But they were young and tender, they bruised easily.

  Each time this happened, she disliked herself more; each time she wondered how she could manage the thing better. Until one day she decided the thing simply wasn’t manageable. It wasn’t that they were younger than she that bothered her; it was that they equated sex with love and believed themselves in love, and were therefore devastated at her rejection. And that would have been all right—it was with Jack—had she loved them, them, and not just sex itself.

  The responsibility, the guilt, and the self-dislike that followed were too much for her. She stopped. Period. And since her choices of lovers lay between married men, who after Marsh were more unappealing than ever, and very young men, whom she ended by hurting, there was nothing for it but to move into celibacy.

  That was it! That was how it happened.

  She mused. She had reversed the usual male-female pattern, getting involved with young men. But the reversal had not worked for her. The young men were boring, callow, they had no rich, convoluted depths, and Dolores found that a good body and a good screw were not enough. One didn’t require love, but one did require interesting conversation, at least for as long as breakfast lasted. Although her young men had a habit of moving in, lodging themselves in her flat, so that she had trouble dislodging them. She could not, as men I could, did, screw, then slap an ass and say shoo, I’ll see you again late tonight, baby. She could not do that because to demean them in such a way would have made her hate herself.

  That was probably better morally than what men did, but it left you not getting what you wanted, while they got, men like that, exactly what they wanted when they wanted it.

  No justice.

  Mary took her oral and passed, and the house rocked a little that weekend. It was a nonchild weekend, but Gordon came out, and all Mary’s friends gathered to celebrate including the good-looking young man, whose name, interestingly enough, was Tony. And Dolores felt a little teary because Victor should have been there, he would have been a great celebrant, he liked Mary and he loved parties. The young man hung on her, but she did not invite him upstairs for a nightcap when the party was over, she smiled and kissed him good night and went up tired, feeling old, feeling that perhaps it was time she accepted that she was old, and that there were more and more things that she would never do again. She lay in bed staring at the ceiling, wondering how many more years she would have to live.

  Riding to the Bod, she pulled back her rain hood and let the fine rain fall on her hair and looked around her at the gardens coming back to color. The grass was turning deep green again, and the birds were making a clatter. Since they had returned, she no longer needed her alarm clock: they woke her up mornings.

  She remembered a garden party at Carol’s house just before she went to Mexico for her divorce. Ten or twelve people sat around on Carol’s fine patio, thick grey stone meandering around flower beds and trees. The sun was setting and the sky was resplendent. People spoke in low voices, desultorily; ice clinked in glasses. Then it was dusk, the sun was gone, but the horizon was still streaked with pink and red and salmon and lavender, it was still light. Carol lighted bug candles. Faces were beginning to grow dim, shadowy. There seemed to be a hush in the air that all of them felt, for the patio fell silent. Dolores watched the dark patterns of the leaves on the grass and thought about connections.

  Birds began to call to each other. Louder, louder. Getting shrill. “Watch this now,” Carol said. “They do this every night.”

  And suddenly the air was full of birds, they were a huge dark cloud over the treetops. They flew in by the hundreds, wave after wave, coming from the west to settle in the great cedars at the foot of Carol’s garden. They called to each other, and more rose up at a distance and joined. So many there were that she imagined she could hear their flying, hear the flap of delicate tough wings against the delicate tough wind. They swept into the cedars, barely ruffling the leaves, and disappeared. Stragglers followed, calls from the trees directing them. Patches of sky were dotted with groups of latecomers, and behind these there were a few single birds tailing the tardy ones, coming home really late. Then, suddenly, another great wave arose, beat the wind, and settled in the cedars, followed by their own stragglers and the really late singular birds.

  It lasted ten minutes and was over. The birds disappeared into silence, into the dark cedar leaves, into the sky, blue, royal, preparing for darkness. Not a leaf rustled, not a chirp sounded. The locusts began then-saw, their timbre rose swiftly, they sang high, a drone, monotonous and comforting.

  “Oh, god, how I wish I could fly!” Dolores said. “I’d like to get one of those tanks the army has, that you strap on your back, you know? And just take off.”

  “Like to be free as a bird, huh?” Bert Janes leaned towards her. “Well, you will be soon.”

  She glanced at him. He was giving her a USDA standard-brand lecherous look. She looked away.

  “They are free and singular, but they all gather together at night, they all sleep together,” she said.

  He slid an arm around the back of her chair. “And so can we!” he laughed.

  “Knock it off, Bert,” she said, and rose and walked down to the cedars and stood there looking up. She could see nothing, yet there were thousands of beating hearts up there, thousands of small creatures, soft and delicate for all their power, you could break one in your hand if you chose.

  She stood there until the mosquitoes had bitten her ankles to shreds. They had it knocked, those birds. Free, alone, arching air, soaring with the wind, against it. Then together, settling down, tucking a head under a wing, all of them close together on a branch, perfectly poised on a thin limb, no fear of falling. No insomnia. No bad dreams. Perfect balance. Together, friends, calling out to each other, knowing if one was missing, calling out to the straggler.

  She turned and looked at the people on the patio. They were gathering up glasses and ashtrays, they were preparing to retreat indoors. Bert Janes was slumped in a chair, looking dejected. He’d been dejected ever since Mildred had left him. He was right, she thought, they could all be together, they had been together for some minutes there, as dusk settled. It was imaginable, people acting like birds, all cuddling up together on a giant bed, sleeping with their arms around each other, over each other, touching a hand.

  She would not have minded curling up on a bed with Bert Janes, even alone. Just lying there feeling body warmth, hearing another’s breathing. She wasn’t sure she’d want to screw him, but it was possible. Had they been lying warm and comforting to each other, it was likely.

  But she would never do it. Because Bert Janes didn’t want her; he didn’t want her. Or maybe he did want, but didn’t know he did, had long ago lost the capacity to express, and perhaps even to feel, simple yearning. So he thought and acted as if what he wanted was to score. He wanted nooky, he wanted brownie points. He wante
d to win. One more notch in the gun belt.

  So of course she could not lie on a bed with Bert Janes. Women did, sometimes, lie together with men like that, hoping they can get the real longing to show itself, but meanwhile taking the winner for a lover. And they always ended being manhandled; well, what can you be with a winner but a loser?

  The birds were twittering in Oxford now, all this many years later, and Bert Janes and Charlie Roberts, who had also been there that night, were dead of cirrhosis. And Binnie Walsh had taken too many sleeping pills. And beautiful elegant Mina was dead of cancer. Yes. So short, so short. The life of man is very brief and very miserable and as it is miserable it is well it is brief.

  Mina’s mother-in-law was a vegetable in the hospital. Mina went to see her every day. She would come into Dolores’s office at lunchtime and they would walk to lunch as Mina reported on the woman’s condition. She was paralyzed and nearly blind and deaf. The nurses had no patience with her, they left her food in front of her but she couldn’t feed herself. Mina went, on the days she wasn’t teaching, to feed her lunch and dinner, and on the days she taught she fed her at least dinner. “Otherwise, she’d starve,” Mina said, her mild rich voice registering a dignified outrage.

  “Why doesn’t your husband feed her?” Dolores asked crudely. “It’s his mother.”

  “Oh, he’s so busy. And I don’t mind. I like to watch her. I think she can see a little light, perhaps peripherally, but I think she’s conscious of sun. And she enjoys her food, she relishes it, I can see that. And when I take her hand, her face warms over, it’s beatific, really.”

  “That’s all? Food, a touch, a bit of sun? God, I’d rather be dead. She’d be better off dead than living like that.”

  “Never say that!” cried Mina, mild, elegant, dignified Mina. “Never!” said Mina, who had had cancer of the uterus, but who had recovered. She went on passionately. “When they wheeled me into that operating room, I knew I might never come out. Alive, that is. And my heart was breaking, as they wheeled me. It was clinging to all the things I was leaving. Some of it clung, wisps of it, to the sunlight, and the trees down below, outside my window. And some of it would not let go of my nurse, who was a dear. And gobs of it clutched onto Tom, onto his body, to the smell of him, the look of him, the feel of him. I tell you, Dolores, if you can see the sun and feel its warmth, if you can taste a spoonful of food and roll it around in your mouth and find it good, if you can hear a human voice and let it embrace you, oh, the gold of sound! I love your voice, you know. If you can find anything at all to love, to enjoy, then you want to live. And you will want to live.

  “They took out my uterus, they said if the cancer grew back they’d have to take out my vagina. My vagina, Dolores! But I won’t let it happen, it can’t happen. I want to go on fucking until I die, I want to go out fucking. I want life, I want it all!”

  She had died of cancer of the breast. Quietly, elegantly, considerately, as she would.

  I don’t have a picture of her either.

  There was a beautiful garden on the west side of the Banbury Road, and Dolores rode across to look at it. She stopped her bike and just gazed. Blues and yellows and whites, unusual tulips with stripes, iris, daffodils. She looked at it for a long time, thinking about Mina, wishing she could talk to Mina now, just pick up the phone and dial heaven. Hear her laugh.

  Then she got up on the seat again and stepped on the pedal and rode on down towards the Randolph, and there was a man standing there waiting for something, a man in his early fifties, tall and gaunt and dead-looking, but with a face you could cherish, a face that had felt.

  She stopped dead. Victor didn’t see her. The car he was waiting for pulled up, there were two other men in it, and Victor got in the back seat and the car pulled away.

  She began to pedal again, slowly, seeing the car vanish in the distance, then turning left into The Broad, her head in a daze, in a place that was numb and distant and dying and crying and yearning and full of sorrow.

  6

  THERE WAS NOTHING TO be thought, nothing to be said. She would stop at the Randolph on her way home from the library and leave a note for Victor. In spite of everything, anything.

  He might not want to see her, and she would not blame him if he did not. She had turned her face away from him when he showed himself naked. She might go up and touch his arm and say “Victor!” and he might turn cold eyes on her, and say “Hello, Dolores,” in a calm tone with a composed mouth, as if she were someone who used to work for him.

  But there was a worse possibility. Suppose she left a note and he met her and she went up to him and at the moment of meeting realized, heard her body saying that she was repelled by him, that she could not bear saying that she was repelled by him, that she could not bear to have him touch her. Oh, she could cover that over with social forms—“I’d like us to remember each other as friends”—but he’d know and she’d know that she had hurt him even more. And that seemed unforgivable.

  But it didn’t matter, she had to do it Had to risk hurt and guilt, remorse.

  Late in the afternoon, on her bike, riding towards the hotel, she composed notes in her head. “Saw you this AM by chance; would like to see you some PM by intention. D.”

  No. Too peremptory.

  “Would you like to get together some evening? Call me. D.”

  No. Promised too much.

  “I would like to see you. Dolores.”

  Yes.

  Parked her bike and walked into the hotel head down, thinking about what she would write, pushed through the hotel door and bumped into Victor.

  And it was the same as it had been that day on the train. They did not touch. They did not speak. But their bodies cried out, sent out and received messages on the same line. Chemical, electrical, or romantic; delusion, illusion, or penetration to the basic truth: whatever it was, it was so strong that when Dolores moved to allow a couple who were leaving to pass between her and Victor, she could physically feel herself breaking a field of force. There was a snap, she heard it and looked around to see if others had heard it too.

  They stood facing each other, bodies clamorous, faces speaking. She knew her face looked like his, soft with longing and pain and desire, hard with anger and knowledge and the past.

  “Excuse me, sir but would you allow me to pick you up? I’d like to buy you a drink.”

  “Madam, I’d be honored.”

  “I don’t, of course, ordinarily pick up strange men.”

  “Of course. I realize that I am extraordinarily attractive.”

  They walked into the lounge and he ordered drinks. “Will you excuse me for a minute, Dolores? I have to make a phone call.”

  “Was it hard to explain?” she asked when he returned.

  He looked at her startled for a second, then expanding, his face moving into a broad smile. So there you are, he was saying. I’ve missed you, you old sharpie. “A little,” he laughed.

  They sipped drinks.

  “How have you been?”

  “Miserable. And you?”

  “Numb, mostly.”

  “Work going well?”

  “Very. And yours?”

  “Fine, fine.”

  “Have you been traveling?”

  “A little. Brussels. And I flew back to New York for ten clays.”

  Silent pause. Caught breath, expelled. “Oh, how nice. And how are things there?”

  “Fine. The same.”

  They will always be the same.

  “That’s good. How’s Vickie?”

  “Fine. Good. We had a long talk, it was really good. She’s applying for graduate school.”

  “Oh, that’s good.”

  “And your children?”

  “Fine, fine.” Like to tell him the news, but then I’d have to tell him the truth of them, show him my barefoot children, my babies.

  “You never called,” she began.

  He stared at the table. “No.”

  Silence.

  He
turned a wrenched face to her. “I felt … well, I know how you think, your … politics, I guess. And I felt … well, I didn’t want to pressure you, to embarrass you. I knew if you wanted me, you’d call me.”

  “Yes,” she sighed.

  “Well,” he lifted his glass to her, “and here we are!”

  “Here we are,” she smiled.

  They finished their drinks.

  “Would you like another?”

  “Umm. What I’d really like is to see your room.”

  “My room?”

  “Yes. Don’t you have a bottle up there?”

  He grinned then and reached out his hand and pulled her up and they walked as swiftly as they could, careful not to run, to the elevator, and she bumped her knee on a chair in the lobby, but paid no attention, although it made her limp a little, and she followed him to the elevator and they went up up up up up.

  And down the hall and he unlocked a door and she saw a blur of pink around a lamp, dusk at the windows, a bedspread pinky-red, salmon. And him, his body, his face, and that was all there was then, him holding her, her holding him. Holding, standing still, just holding for a long time. Then there was rubbing and feeling and their bodies spoke. They did not tell about, they told, like counting coins. They held, they felt the fine rough wool and the silky cotton and tissues of silk and cotton smooth and cool as water, buttons cold as pearl. They held, they felt, they rubbed and smoothed and caressed.

  Oh, so good, so good to lie down, to lie down together, warm and solid and fitting. And, oh, so good that golden shining place just beneath the opened collar, smooth as cotton or silk but rippling with intrusions, mountains of bone around a valley as vulnerable as a wound. Around it the throbbing landscape of body, ear against it, hear the throbbing, like hearing the earth’s heartbeat when you lie against it, the other side of silence, absorbing its rhythms into your own, harmonizing them.