The Bleeding Heart

by Marilyn French

  Smells: of melon and strawberries, fresh sweet cream, cheese of the goat, cool lemon, salt everywhere to give it savor. Softness of lips, bodies like ripe fruit hanging with only curled leaves caressing it, fruit aching to be picked, held, turned over in the soft firm palm, rubbed against the cheek. Arms tired of hugging themselves hugged other bodies, cherished them, lavish in pleasure, treasuring the soft places, the hard places, places that were soft and hard at once. A strange hand, a strange mouth, sighs of a strange throat that seem to come from your own. Deep breath, from the soft-hard place far back in the cave of the mouth, warm and wet.

  Moving, so good to move, to bend, to twist, to encompass, to be encompassed, knees, arms, thighs, calves, hips, moving, clasping, pressed together, interwound. Which are whose? Lying together, around, over, under, rubbing softly, bending, flexible, warm. Alive. Feet cool and damp and smelling of the earth they walk on. Hands, masters of arts, doing, feeling, being, all at once. Giving, taking, in one instant; strong and delicate, hard and weak. Fingertips stroking lightly, being stroked, shivering satin flesh, silken flesh, flesh like the finest sheer cotton shimmering in the sun.

  Heat builds up in the engine of the body. Hot channels pump it all the way to the fingertips, while the feverish damp source aches with longing, hot and wet and silently crying, agape or athwart. Picasso mouth and tongue wanting each other, bodies almost violent trying to absorb, assimilate, meld together, wanting to become fluid and melt together, wanting to possess and control, wanting to be possessed and controlled, both at once, wanting it all, having it all, both swooning under hands, powerless, both making to swoon, powerful.

  Power meets power with both engines running, two eagles fornicating in midair, wings flapping lest they fall, head-on collision, joy in the power and the motion, joy in the powerlessness and the surrender. And all at once it is both, taking and giving in the one instant, and then it floods, the release, the relief, tension flooding out, away, giving in. Everything resolved.

  Contraries exist simultaneously. Paradoxes are simple truths. Pain and pleasure equally mixed impossible to differentiate. Solids turn liquid, filledness is emptiness, you are the fruit that is plucked and held and caressed and bitten into tantalizingly. You are the plucker who picks the fruit from the branch, holds it, caresses it, takes a tantalizing bite, then bites deep, the juice squirts and runs down your chin, you eat it all, hungrily.

  Smell of lemon, smell of salt, salt fish swimming upstream in eager encouraging waters. Hands holding, smoothing the fine damp silken flesh, holding firmly the firm soft bodies, lost and found, familiar and strange, filled and insatiable.

  7

  IT WAS SATURDAY NIGHT and they had decided to eat in for a change. Dolores cooked, made a blanquette de veau. Victor peeled onions and carrots and mushrooms, but mostly he sat at the kitchen table watching her and drinking wine.

  She told him everything, told him she had been confused and still was, but she couldn’t think anymore, couldn’t work it out so that it made sense. And that she couldn’t help feeling what she felt, and that she was sorry. All those lost weeks’. But she couldn’t help it.

  Yes, he said. Yes.

  Knight on white horse, perhaps.

  Yes, he said, I understand.

  Political differences, she said.

  Yes, he said, I understand.

  Poor Edith, she whispered, and he lowered his eyes and whispered too: Yes.

  And then: I don’t want you to live with her because it is killing you. But I don’t want you to leave her because that will kill her.

  He put his hand on his forehead: Yes.

  And Mach, she said. You work with him.

  Mach. Yes, he said. “But you know, darling, Mach is only an ant. You know, the soldier ants, who are hierarchical, like humans. The avant-garde goes out early in the morning and does the spying, then comes back and tells the rest it’s okay. And then they march. And the forward group marches out with banners flying, the rest plod behind. And they come to a river, and the forward group charges bravely in. And drowns. All the ants plow in behind them. And drown. By the millions they drown, until their minute bodies form a bridge, a human bridge, no, I mean an ant bridge; they drown, Dolores, one on top of the other until there’s a solid line and the millions who are left can walk across it, can get to the other side where there is food, where the race will continue.

  “What I’m trying to say is that Mach isn’t a person, he’s a vehicle of the culture, he carries on the ideas of the culture, he’s its DNA. He has no ideas of his own. He plods along, he and his kind, creating napalm and penicillin, employment and deployment, food and starvation. He hasn’t any moral standards; to him napalm and penicillin are equally valuable because they make money. He’s an automaton, a machine.”

  She stared at him, her knife in air. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, exactly. And that’s the problem.”

  “But,” he said hesitantly, “don’t you think we’re better off with a Mach, simply because he has no moral priorities, than we would be with a man like … Hitler, say, who had clear plans for the human race?”

  “Better off? I don’t know. I suspect if Mach had Hitler’s power, he’d be as bad. It’s true that one man’s moral priorities are another man’s oppression. But I believe we have to get beyond that, have to find a more humane set of priorities. Oh, god, Victor, why is it so easy to be a monster and so hard to be human? When the very word human, as I use it, as others use it, means superhuman.”

  He stared at his glass, he fiddled with it. “Yeah. I can remember the moment when I realized I’d become inhuman. It wasn’t that night with Edith, wasn’t even when I sat there in the hospital waiting for her to come out of the OR. But it was that same day, it was the late afternoon of that day.

  “I went home, having seen Edith, knowing she was unconscious and would remain so for some time. I knew I had to tell something to the kids. I thought that maybe I’d even have to tell them the truth. And I had no idea how to do that. I’d been thinking about it for hours, sitting there in the hospital waiting room. Not knowing then if she’d come out of the operation alive. Wanting to tell them the truth, sick of deceptions, but not wanting to shock them into horror, to hurt them beyond recall.

  “I got home a little before dinner. Mrs. Ross was in the kitchen, there were warm food smells in the house. She came running to the door as I came in, she put her hands on my arms, she cried, ‘Oh, Mr. Morrissey, how is poor Mrs. Morrissey?’ So genuine, so concerned that I couldn’t answer her, couldn’t even swallow.”

  He swallowed, remembering. “I told her I didn’t know, that we’d have to wait and see, but she was in bad shape. And Mrs. Ross began to cry, softly, gently, like a light spring rain. ‘Ah, the poor lass!’ she said.”

  She told me the children were in the den, and I went in there. The children were all sprawled around. It was a big room, paneled, with a fireplace and a TV and couches and tables and a set of French doors leading out to the garden. The children never sat all together in the den. They stayed in their rooms, or a couple of them might have been in there watching TV, but they didn’t usually hang around together. But they were together that day, and that’s how I knew how scared they were.

  Vickie was sitting curled up in a chair reading a magazine. Leslie was watching the TV, filing her nails. Mark was making paper airplanes and sailing them across the room. There were tens of them lying around on the floor. And Jonathan was lying on the floor on his stomach, watching TV with Leslie. They looked up when I came in, they were silent. Leslie got up and turned off the TV set “How’s Mom?” Vickie said.

  There was a paltry little fire going in the fireplace. They must have built it themselves. I was getting more and more stuffed up, my throat felt as if it were going to burst. I walked over to the fireplace and began to roll and twist newspaper and put it into the fire.

  “We don’t know yet how she is,” I said.

  I began to pile kindling on top of the newspaper.

 
; “Is she going to die?” Mark said in a thin high voice.

  I poked the fire into life and sat down in an armchair. “I don’t know,” I said. “Nobody knows, yet.”

  Mrs. Ross came in with a tray bearing a bottle of Scotch, a glass, and a bucket of ice cubes. She almost curtseyed, she was so anxious to please me, so anxious to make me feel better. She caressed Vickie’s cheek on her way out. “Oh, ye poor lassies and lads,” she said.

  And Jonathan stood up, he began to wail. He was eight then, and he just wailed, he had no control. He started out of the room and I leaped up and tried to catch him, to hold him, but he wriggled out of my grasp, he fought me, he hit my arms, pounding them, and then he ran out of the room. I was dazed, I had tears on my face, the fury of him, the rage, the fear!

  I looked around at the other children. They were lying or sitting as they had been. Their faces were blank. I sat down again.

  “How did it happen?” Vickie said.

  “She ran into an underpass. On the parkway.”

  “When?”

  “Early in the morning. Late last night.”

  “What was she doing out, early this morning, late last night?”

  “We’d had a quarrel. She was angry, she ran out, she drove away.”

  Silence.

  Then Leslie picked it up. “Why did you quarrel?”

  “Oh, Les, it’s so complicated. We quarreled because we live together and living together is hard.”

  Vickie’s voice came in cold and hard. “In other words, she finally gave it to you.”

  My head jerked up. “What?”

  “For never being here, for never being really nice to her, for never paying any attention to us.”

  “Oh, Vick, Vick!” I cried then, it had been a long day, I couldn’t help it. And they stood or sat where they were, I couldn’t see them but I could sense the stillness in that room. Then Vickie got up, she moved towards me, she stood a foot away, she watched me. She must have felt terrible, it had probably never occurred to her that I could be hurt by anything, that I could cry, that I could be defeated. She inched closer. She put her hand on my arm. She laid it there very lightly, then removed it, as if I might jump up and hit her.

  “I’m sorry, Daddy,” she said in a thin little voice.

  The real fall from innocence: realizing her power, realizing that she could hurt, she could make me cry.

  “It’s okay, Vick,” I said, wiping my face. “Where’s Jonathan?”

  “In his room, probably,” Mark said. Mark and Leslie were sitting there on the floor, as erect and trembling as catkins.

  I got up, I staggered to my feet. That drink had hit me, I was exhausted. I left the den and went to Jonathan’s room. The kids trailed behind me.

  He wasn’t in his room. We searched the house. He wasn’t anywhere. The kids went outside, they looked all over. Jonathan was nowhere. I went back to the den and poured myself another drink. I thought: just what I need, a runaway kid. I was about to go out to the car, to drive around the neighborhood searching for him, when Vickie came into the den.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “He was sniffling in his closet I heard him. He’s in his room.”

  We went to Jonathan’s room. He was curled up into a ball on the floor of his closet, in a corner, sniffling. I pulled him up, I pulled him out, I carried him to the bed, I sat down with him on my lap, I held him, he laid his head against my shoulder, he bawled. I sat there holding him, stroking his back, stroking his head, kissing his hair, saying, “Okay, honey, it’s okay,” and as I did that I felt him, his little body, felt his backbone, his vertebrae under his shirt, such little bones, so fragile. And I smelled him, he smelled of sweat and dirt and lamb chops, child smell, smell of flesh, childflesh, sweaty hair sweet as corn. His body was warm and his heart was beating very fast and his sobs were coming more slowly, were dying down. And I felt his body, the delicate ribs, the delicate vertebrae, thinking how fragile he was, how fragile we all are, Edith in the hospital with her fragile body smashed to smithereens, ruined, ruined, all of us ruined, and I rocked him, I laid my head against his and I let myself cry too, twice in one day, some record, but I was tired, I didn’t care, let them see. I let the tears run down my face, I knew the kids were standing there gaping. I didn’t care.

  And he fell asleep with his arms tight around my neck, fell asleep out of pure emotional exhaustion, and I looked up at the kids to say I think we’d better undress him and get him to bed the hell with his bath tonight, and then I saw Vickie’s face, she was staring at me, she looked at me as if she were watching something inconceivable.

  And I knew, oh, well, we weren’t close, Vick and I, when she bothered to talk to me at all she shot a nasty crack of some sort, and I didn’t like it, and I’d told Edith she had to do something about it, but I didn’t really pay that much attention to her. But here she was, looking at me as if I were a stranger, as if it had never occurred to her that I might do something like that, comfort a baby. As if men never did things like that. As if—the way you feel sometimes—as if men were an occupying army that marched around shouting Achtung! Now hear this! And shifted their rifles and shoved the barrel at a kid’s butt, pushing. But couldn’t, ever, possibly, sit there rocking a baby.

  She didn’t know I’d done that to her tens of times when she was a baby. She couldn’t remember back that far. Because along the line I’d stopped doing it, I’d rocked Leslie a little, Mark once or twice, Jonathan never, I think.

  Anyway, I saw her looking at me and I understood that I’d become inhuman for her a long time ago and she couldn’t quite grasp what she was seeing. And I thought about how good it felt to sit there holding Jonathan’s little body, feeling him needing me, feeling me needing him, feeling us tied together by bone and flesh and heartbeat and the rhythms of life. Love. I understood love then, at that minute. For the first time.

  And I said to Vickie, “Where are his pajamas?” and she found them, and we undressed him, gently, took his little body out of his pants and shirt and slid the pajamas on, and we all kissed him, asleep as he was, and stroked his head and tiptoed out and turned off the light.

  And Vickie didn’t remember with her head that I’d rocked her like that once, but maybe she remembered with her body. Because after we closed the door, she turned and put her arms around me and held me and said, “I’m sorry, Daddy.”

  Dolores was silent when he finished. She stood there, her knife dangling in her hand, chunks of veal sweating on the cutting board before her. No, he was not Mach if he could see Mach; was not Mach if he could tell this, if he could say his need and mine.

  “And to think I wanted you on a white horse,” she said.

  He turned his head sharply, startled out of his mind’s place. And she went to him and held his head against her, embraced him, saying, “When you’re so much better off it, so much better.”

  And let herself forget, for a time, what Edith had had to do to get him that way, what Edith had had to pay.

  VIII

  1

  DOLORES HAD NOT GONE on a business trip with Victor since the terrible night in Manchester, but when he said he had to go to Paris in April, she cried “April in Paris! I’ve never seen April in Paris!” He grinned, and said he had a week’s work there, so if they spent the surrounding weekends, they would have nine days of Paris in April.

  April in Paris proved to be damp and chilly most days, with some rain and not a chestnut blossom in sight. But it didn’t matter. Dolores loved Paris, and knew her way around the central part of the city without a map, something she never mastered in London. She walked continually, never tiring of Paris streets. She probed and poked into little neighborhoods that were unfamiliar to her, always finding a fine little café in which to sit and rest and observe. She went to parts of the Louvre she hadn’t visited before, gaped at the startling new Beaubourg, and browsed in the little art shops facing the river on the Left Bank.

  At night, she and Victor would go out in raincoats and walk al
ong the Seine on the lower path, something she’d never done with a lover, something she’d always wanted to do with a lover. They walked with their bodies close together, holding hands, speaking little. They spent all their energy savoring the scene, storing it up against dearth. They went to a café on the Ile, opposite Notre Dame, and stared up at the different cathedral revealed by the spotlights—spare, stark, eerie, and angular, it was beautiful and overpowering. It was inhuman, Dolores thought, thinking too that humans had made it, just as humans performed the behavior they called inhuman, humans had made it purposely to dwarf the human, to awe it. They sat looking at it, drinking café filtre, holding hands, drinking the scene in too, cellaring it, like camels, against the desert.

  One Saturday they went to Chartres by train, and stood for hours at the portals and the windows, Victor enraptured by the blue madonna, Dolores, as always by the gargoyles. And by some happy chance, an organist was practicing for a concert to be held in the church the next evening, and Victor and Dolores were able to sit down and listen to him rehearse, hearing the whispering shuffle of the tourists’ feet, a tap of heels on the marble floor, low conversations, sudden sharp orders to children. And they watched the arches rising and the light flooding in through the clerestory, dim light radiating around the stained glass. And heard the Bach that comprehended it all, that grumbled with the tired feet, was sharpened with the smell of bodies damp and soiled from use, that soared up from the floor and sang, touching with delicate fingers the highest point where the arches met, tingled against glass, which trembled and sang too.

  Body and minds heavy with lading, they took the late train back to Paris, sitting opposite each other so they could see the other’s face, silent, eyes and mouths speaking without words, saying nothing new, nothing startling, only the same utterness, the emotional-totality of their bond. They could not bear to take their eyes away from each other, yet they did, turning to gaze at a wistful figure, to listen to a man berating his wife, to watch a middle-aged couple sit in the silence of years of marriage. And they commented, continually, on these events, with tiny twists of mouth or eyebrow, with flickers that seemed mere light rippling on their faces. Their delicate communication ranged from amusement and malicious delight to pity or contempt or simple interest. It was fun and a luxury, this silent communication, it hung on the reverberating air between them and took up all the space around them. And through it all they were gazing at each other’s faces as a portraitist would, limning them inside their own heads, etching them on the inside of the eye against absence.