The Bleeding Heart (35 page)

And I thought: Edith will never see dawn again. And I remembered her saying that she loved me because my name reminded her of freshly laundered sheets flapping in the wind, and I knew she must have loved the smell of that, the sound and look of it. And that she loved me once too, that way, innocent and clean and fresh. I remembered her bitter voice saying to do what you want to do in life is a very great luxury, Victor. And I realized then that long ago she’d had a yearning, an energy, not perhaps for anything specific, not
I want to be a lawyer
, but for something. Having the children wasn’t enough. There was something inside her she’d wanted to use, and never had, and now it had atrophied. And I understood her face then too, because to have an energy, a capacity that is never used, that dies a little year by year must be as painful as having your feet bound up, the bone learning to twist and stop, the flesh curling back on itself, stunted, crippled, the very blood kept from running…. And I remembered her standing there white and trembling, hurling my character at me like a hammer. She seemed at that moment very large in my imagination.

And then I thought of us at the bridge table. We used to play every couple of weeks, it was the one thing I could abide to do with her friends and their husbands. I’m good at it, better than she, although she’s not bad, not really bad. But every once in a while she’d do something I thought was stupid and when she did, I’d mock her. Mock her in front of everyone, and watch her dwindle and pull up her face and try to smile and make a joke of it And even as I watched her shrinking, I’d have contempt for her cowardice, and that became a self-fulfilling circle, you know? She deserved to be mocked, to be made to shrink, because she allowed herself to be mocked, to be made to shrink….

I laid that, her behavior that I considered cowardly, against her determination, announced so long ago, to
do her duty.
And her duty, as she saw it, involved taking my mocking, taking whatever I handed out… I could barely drive, my eyes were tearing. For that was courage, greater courage than I possessed, but at the same time it seemed to me crazy courage, sick, directed at useless ends….

Edith had driven her car directly into the wall of an underpass. Directly. The people at the hospital were suspicious, they asked me if she was suicidal. She was terribly smashed, but she was alive. She was in surgery, I didn’t see her all day. And that was only the first. She’d have seventeen operations before they were finished. They told me there was no point in staying, they’d call me when she came out of the OR, but I couldn’t
not
stay. I called home and spoke to Mrs. Ross, our housekeeper, told her what had happened and told her to tell the children some mild tale.

Edith didn’t come to until the next day. She was lying in an oxygen tent swathed in bandages. I poked my head in every once in a while, and once I caught her with her eyes open. She looked at me and closed them again. She couldn’t move her head, her neck was in a cast. But for the moment her eyes caught me, they spoke.
So I lived after all
, they said.
Wonderful.

After that, I didn’t bother her. I sat in the room. There were magazines and books there, I’d brought them, but I didn’t read. I sat there aware of her breathing, and thought. About my mother, and how I had never told her how fine I thought she was, how strong, and in the end, how smart, much smarter than her cocksure smart-aleck son. Smart about life, about how you live a life. And about Edith, and our last argument, and how I couldn’t resist sending her just one inch further down the road to madness, how I could not
not
give the rack one more twist. How winning had become, for me, all there was to life, and now I had won. The fruits of my victory were lying on that bed, breathing, with assistance. And I thought about that first time—the only time—she’d left me, and how, at the time, I read the whole thing as a power play directed at me. When in fact it had little to do with me. It was Edith’s trying to get away from me, her attempt to try out her rickety undeveloped wings, to see if she could manage alone. It had to do with
her
, and her failure must have killed something in her, humiliated it, taught it bitter fear and inferiority.

I thought about all that, and I thought about the present, the future. Sometimes, when Edith was asleep, I’d go and stand near her bed, raise the curtain and look at her, as much of her as I could see. And I saw a stranger, a poor beat-up woman I didn’t know now and had never known. Funny. When we were first seeing each other, Edith told me her mother was Catholic. I didn’t know why she said that; I knew Edith was an Episcopalian, because I’d gone to church with her. Years later, I found out her mother wasn’t Catholic at all, never had been. And I asked Edith about that. And she told me that she had thought I was Catholic—because of my name—and was afraid that I’d hesitate to marry a non-Catholic. So she’d made up a story, and I guess, if it had been necessary, she’d have gotten her mother to go along with it. Although in those days, there was much more anti-Catholic sentiment than there is now, and her old man might very well have vetoed a marriage to a Catholic. But I think—she really did love me once, Edith—that she’d even have defied her daddy to marry me.

Well, I’d stand there and think, but I couldn’t come to any calm place. I didn’t know Edith, I’d never known Edith, but willy-nilly, we knew each other, we’d been married to each other for twenty years and that was that. We may not have known what the other felt, but we knew each other’s smells, tiniest habits, manners….

And I still couldn’t see any hope for us, if Edith recovered. None.

F
OR WEEKS THEY DIDN’T
know if Edith would live. There was so much internal damage, besides the external. I went home after she came out of the OR unconscious, and sat down with the kids and tried to explain. It was stiff, it was difficult. I realized I barely knew my children. Oh, I knew their names and ages and even what foods they liked, but I didn’t know anything about their emotional contexts, about what they
felt
like—how they responded to things, how they processed things. I knew Mark had been a crybaby, and that Jonathan was given to playing quietly in corners alone. I knew that Vickie, who was eighteen then, gave me flak whenever she could, and that Leslie always covered me with kisses. Well, it was difficult.

At first I wouldn’t let them go see her. I didn’t want, if she died, that they should remember her that way, wrapped in all those bandages. The way I remembered my father, weak and weeping about my mother’s death the last time I’d seen him. Six months later he’d had a coronary and died too, but I remembered a feeble crying old man, and I didn’t like that.

Of course, later on, Edith said I was selfish and a bastard as usual. Because of course the one thing she wanted, if she could have asked, was to see the children. And it is true that after she saw them, she began to improve more rapidly. And kids are funny, you know? No manners. They walked into her room, after she’d somehow managed to communicate to the nurse, who told the doctor who told me she wanted to see them, and stared at her as if she were a foreign species. She was out of the oxygen now, but she was still hooked up like a computer. They walked all around her, staring at the equipment, and Jonathan had a disgusted look on his face, he walked around pointing to things asking “What’s
that!
and
that!
” about every appurtenance she was hooked up to. I’d explain, and she watched, and her eyes were laughing. She still couldn’t talk, her jaw was broken, and she couldn’t move her arms very well because they were stuck full of needles from the intravenous feeder, and strapped down to boards. But the children could read her eyes, and Jonathan plopped down on the bed next to her and said, “Mommy, do you
like
all those machines?” and I was about to stop him, to get him off the bed, and her eyes swung round to me and they warned me off, oh, did they warn me, and so I learned to read eyes too. And then the kids all flopped on her bed, the hell with the machines, and talked to her and she answered them with her eyes.

It was too tiring for her to have them all there for very long, but after that, one or two of them would go with me most nights on my regular visits to the hospital. She was glad when they came so she didn’t have to look at me. Because what her eyes told
me
was: I hate you. I went every evening, for an hour. I don’t know why, it was clear she didn’t want me, but I had to go. And when I wasn’t at the hospital, I was with the children. Because I was the only parent now. Mrs. Ross was wonderful, she kept things going, and she loved the kids and they felt and returned that. But she wasn’t their parent. I felt terrible for them—orphaned, really, because I was hardly a parent. So I put a stop to most late-night meetings, and came home and helped Jon with his homework, and helped Mark with special projects, and tried to talk to the girls and to keep Leslie from continually sitting on my lap—she was sixteen and too old for that, I felt.

I had to break off with Alison, of course: there was no time for her now. I had lunch with her as soon as I went back to work and told her what had happened.

“Boyoboy, she was willing to do anything at all to get you back, wasn’t she?” Alison said with a nasty ironic smile.

I wanted to strike her, whether for her nastiness or her accuracy, I don’t know. Maybe both.

Things mended slowly, and when Edith had pulled some strength together, they always shot her back into the OR for one more operation. So it wasn’t steady progress—it was three steps forward, one back. For a long time she wouldn’t look at me. Then she’d give me a brief glare when I entered, and look away. But sometimes, as I sat there thinking, feeling rather dejected, I’d glance up and she’d be watching me. But then she’d look away.

When her jaw was mended, and she could speak, she was still very weak and could not talk much. She would ask the children some questions, smile at them, and by now, she could even lift her hands and caress them, although Edith was never given to demonstrative affection. But when I went alone, she never spoke to me.

One night, about three months after the accident, I went alone. I said hello, and kissed her forehead, as I always did, and she glared at me, as she always did, and I went and sat down facing her across the foot of the bed. And I began to tell her the little news there was, as I always did. I used to feel like a woman at a kaffeeklatsch, reporting the tiny events that made that day different from the one before. Vick wanted to buy a long dress for a dance. She had her eye on one that was low cut, with skinny straps, and bright red. What did Edith think of that? She shook her head
no.
The dog had gotten sick all over her beige Persian rug, but Mrs. Ross had cleaned it up fairly well. Jimmy Mehdvi, my old Iranian friend from grad school, was in town, did she remember him? Her eyes closed briefly, assenting. I’d invited him to the house for Sunday dinner, Mrs. Ross had agreed to cook it. Thought he might like a break from hotel food.

And suddenly she opened her mouth. “You mean you’re not taking him
out
to dinner? You could get three nights of mileage out of him, Victor. But I guess you don’t need cover stories anymore, do you.”

I didn’t answer. There was nothing to say. But her outburst had opened her up, and she continued, she went on with the long list of her grievances, a list kept for twenty years inside her mind, so deeply engraved on that mind that she didn’t need a written record. She poured them out in a long stream, she dwelt on them with the pleasure of a victim who finally has a chance to hurl back the stones that have weighed her down all those years. I listened. I did not defend myself at all, even when I felt there might be a few words to be said in my defense. Most of what she said concerned things I did not remember, and that she could have been making up, as far as I knew—except, of course, she was not. She went on until she was exhausted, then looked at me, with her scarred pale face, expectantly, waiting for my refutation. I said nothing. I was sitting with my forehead resting in my palm, listening, thinking, trying to feel. Trying. But I couldn’t I knew that however true or false her specific charges were, the overall charge was true: I knew I was guilty. But I felt nothing—not guilt nor shame, and now, not even pity for her. It was as if we’d passed beyond such feelings, that now her survival was at stake, and maybe, mine too. I could feel only: All right, that’s that, you said it all. What are you going to do now?

But she wasn’t satisfied, she wanted more. She wanted me to suffer as she had, she wanted to rub my nose in every turd I’d ever laid. That’s how it felt, and I questioned myself about it—maybe I was again turning something that wasn’t, into a power struggle. I wanted to give her what she wanted. I struggled with words, I tried to find some that would suggest I was suffering as she wished, and that I had learned through that suffering, and that I was now changed. But she knew better, of course: she scoffed at me. She stopped speaking, and I left. But I went back the next night, and the next, and the next. For days she continued this litany of my sins; for days I listened. It was the best I could do, it was all I had to offer—my presence, my silence. And in time, she accepted that—at least, she stopped.

I came in one evening and she said, “
Don’t
kiss me!” so I didn’t I sat down, but before I could launch into the evening news, she said, sharply: “Why did you prevent the children from coming to see me!” I explained, and she sneered at me: “Oh, thoughtful Victor! Who were you thinking of then? Certainly not me!”

Then: “Why do you prevent my sister from coming to see me?”

“I don’t.”

“She’s been here once. Once in all these months! Why?”

I sighed. Whatever I did, I was damned. If I didn’t tell her, it must be because I was keeping Kitty away. If I did … “Edith, you seem not to realize that Kitty is an alcoholic. She’s not often fit to go out.”

She glared at me and I prepared myself for an outburst like the one about her father. But none came. She fell silent. After a time, I began to tell her what was happening with the children. She listened in silence. Her face looked very thoughtful.