The Bleeding Heart (7 page)

But he wasn’t, about her, anyway. A bleeding heart, that’s what she was, although not the way he meant it. Maybe the way he meant it too. But, God, what could you do? If you were one, you were one. Your only alternative was to avoid situations that would draw the blood.

“You can reach me there if you need me.” Indeed! The way men assuage their guilt. They abandon you, but leave a phone number. What on earth could she need him for? To wash the dishes? To make the bed? No, it was in case you find yourself pregnant. Better find it out hurryupquick, baby, he may leave town tomorrow.

Was there a London phone number on that card?

Probably. She hadn’t even glanced at it when she ripped it up and threw it out. Well, anyway. He hadn’t even told her how long he was staying, hadn’t asked how long she was. Just:
I’ll call you.
Oh, he probably will call if he’s here for a few days. He’ll call late at night, a little high after a rousing time with the boys at dinner, finding himself suddenly alone and not sleepy in his dull hotel room. Men can’t stand to be alone. He’ll want to come over for a quickie. Not because he’s so horny: at his age he isn’t. No, just because he gets the heebie-jeebies being alone in bed, alone in the dark. He’ll come over and talk for a little while over a drink, rush us into bed, and leap up and pull his pants back on and rush back to the hotel to fall asleep quickly, before the relaxation wears off.

Damn.

Acting so emotional. Acting, talking even, as if it mattered! As if I mattered, we mattered. Why did he have to do that? I would have accepted it the other way, but no, he had to say things, act ways to make me think to make me feel to seduce not just my body but my feelings and why? Just so he could make me feel rotten afterwards, having led me to think it might matter, it might be something more than the usual casual screw. Oh god I hate men.

She got out of the tub and scrubbed it hard, then tied her hair back and put her robe on. It was chilly in the apartment, but she walked barefoot, not caring if she was cold, walked barefoot into the kitchen, not caring if she stepped on a sliver of glass. She hated herself even more than she hated him. She poured some jug wine into a chipped goblet, found her eyeglasses, went into the sitting room and opened her briefcase, spreading more papers on the round table.

The hell with him.

She began to code the notes she’d taken the past two days at the British Museum. But her mind wouldn’t work, it fought her. After an hour, she sighed, closed her file, righted a cigar, and moved herself with her wine to a comfortable chair.

What was it with men, that they could switch feeling off and on? As if they had separate selves, pieces not essentially connected to each other except by the fact that they inhabited the same body. One was full of desire and tenderness; it was vulnerable, needy, wanting. Another full of rage, vented at the slightest provocation. And another that was dressed in shirt, suit, and tie, and sometimes even a vest, crisp and ready for action. Body
and
mind in uniform.

They have compartments for things. Work. Buddies. Women. Sports. And they could act different in each room.

Whereas she had only one room. She was the same whatever she did. She was popular with students because she was a person with them, not a disembodied “teacher,” an Authority. Her books had been called
humane
, which in her field, and because she was a woman, meant that they were taken less seriously than books one could never suspect of harboring such a quality. Oh, if she’d had a class to go to, an appointment, she’d have left, of course. But first she would have hedged him round with embraces, assurances of love, of her sorrow at leaving him, of her guilt….

That was it, damn it.

No, it wasn’t. It went beyond guilt. It came from thinking about others, not all the time or before herself, but thinking of them at all. Which was what men never did. She would have known, let herself know, that it hurts to be left under any circumstances, and would have reassured him of her return, complete with time and place down to the minute. And the whole time she was away, she’d have been anxious that she might be late returning to him at the time she had set. She’d rush back to the apartment. And he wouldn’t be there. Not himself worrying much about deadlines, he would not expect her to keep hers. He might even have forgotten what she had said. He’d be gone for a stroll in the park, to pick up some milk, having a beer with a neighbor.

She put down her cigar. It was a rotten way to be, the way she was.

And what can you do about that?

She picked up the cigar again and puffed furiously. Well, maybe it wasn’t such a great way to be, but at least it was a
kind
way to be. There was no excuse at all for the way
he
was, turning himself off as if he were an electric light. Acting as if he didn’t even know her, as if she were a prostitute and he’d paid the bill.

Was it true that love was the core of women’s lives and not of men’s? It wasn’t the core of hers, hadn’t been for years and years. Yes, but the moment she did let herself feel even a little she was back in the same old morass. Men did things so that they protected themselves; women did things so that they protected others. It was grossly unfair, but all she had to do was stop doing it

But I don’t know how. Besides, I’m not sure I want to. What I want is for men to be like women.

Yes. Years ago—before I was celibate? Probably—Bruce Watler. An MLA meeting it was. So attractive, vibrant and dark, wrongheaded of course, but wonderfully so. We’d met before, we were on a panel at Perm. Intelligent. Sensitive. Didn’t bother with academic nit-picking. Listed on the program as giving a paper on Elizabethan pastoral, a subject she was interested in, so she went to hear him.

Good paper, not pedantic: it showed feeling as well as thought. And she rather loved him for it: the prodigal son is always loved more than the dutiful daughter. She loved him, she was grateful to him because he was a man and sensitive. Whereas she would simply have
expected
sensitivity of a woman—not that one always got it. So she overlooked his receding hairline, his thick middle, his very large front teeth, and concentrated on his graceful hands, the elegance of his facial expressions, and the sensitivity of his gestures and vocabulary. She was seduced, finally, by his intelligence, which wasn’t the brilliant firework variety bright men usually have, but a wholeness, an integration of feeling and thought. She sat through his paper and the deadly others in the hot smoky Hilton seminar room, and afterwards, she went up to say hello and compliment him on the paper. Her admiration no doubt showed as she praised him. In any case, she was not surprised when he asked her to have a drink with him later, at five, in the lounge in the lobby.

Perhaps she agreed a bit too fervently. One never knows what one’s sin has been, but for women it is much more likely to be ardor than coldness. So she sat in the Hilton lobby bar alone for an hour, sipping Campari. He never arrived.

When she bumped into him accidentally the next day, she asked him about it lightly, very lightly. “Did we miss connections yesterday?” Smiling. (Always smiling.)

“Oh! Listen, I’m sorry. I bumped into an old friend and we got to talking and I completely forgot. But we’ll have to do it sometime, soon.” Squeezed her hand fervently and rushed off.

Forgot, my ass. I saw the way he was looking at me.

It was all perfectly understandable: a married man not wanting to get too close to a woman he finds attractive and has reason to believe is attracted to him—an unmarried woman, to boot. It made perfect sense, was fine. But they could have had a drink and talked and done nothing more. Or, if he felt he might slide, he knows himself after all, then he shouldn’t ask in the first place. Why did they do this over and over again? He asks, and gets his ego stroked when I say yes. He has his moment of triumph, he doesn’t need to screw, he’s scored without the anxiety of performing further. And I get left sitting for an hour in the lobby, waiting. “Oh, sorry!”

When women did things like that, men called them prickteases.

Oh, he’d never thought it through, probably, never thought about it at all. More comfortable that way. Turn on, turn off, like Victor. Everything separate. Bow and scrape to the boss, bully the wife, play hearty rival with the buddies.

Still, she remembered, puffing on the last bit of cigar, that her attraction to Bruce Watler had not been snipped. She’d gone out and bought his book and would prepare to get in bed at night to read it by saying: I think I’ll get in bed with Bruce Watler. She was a little disappointed in the book: it lacked courage. She feared for him: he might have gotten reviews that hurt. So she went to Widener and looked up and read all the reviews she could find, stretching her mind as hard as she could as she read them, trying to sense what he would feel, reading them. The reviews were not malicious, only bland. They did not notice the lack of courage. But bland reviews were the kind that bothered her most, and she wondered if he felt the same way. She wished she could talk to him, to know what he was thinking, feeling. But he probably wouldn’t tell her anyway, even if she saw him again, even if they talked.

What an idiot she was. What man would do something like that for a woman? A star-struck kid, maybe, adoring an actress, might see her films over and over, might read everything about her. But he would be imposing his fantasy upon her, not trying to feel what it felt like to be her.

Dolores saw Bruce again, several years later. His book had brought him success, a major chair at a major university she would have had to write five books to get within calling distance of. He’d grown pompous. His hair was almost gone and he’d gained more weight. But she’d had some small success too in the intervening time, and he acted glad to see her. He took her hand in both of his. “We must have a drink sometime,” he said.

She tamped out her cigar and rose wearily. Her body ached. All that athletic sex. I wonder if men get aches in their thigh muscles. Or anywhere. I wonder if we pay every bill. She turned off the lamp and walked to the bedroom, ruminant, tired.

Yes, he probably will call. Assumes that whenever he chooses to call, I’ll be here, I’ll answer, I’ll be thrilled to see him. It will not occur to him that I might have meetings and dinners of my own.

Trouble is, I don’t.

She got in bed, her teeth clenched. She was not going to let him do this to her. She would go out early tomorrow and stay out all day, all night too. The Bodleian closed at five. Okay, she’d go have a drink and then dine out. Or if she did come back, she wouldn’t answer the phone. Perhaps—even better!—she would go to London tomorrow, she could do that. Stay a few days. See some shows.

If she did that she might never see him again.

Fine.

That was it! Back to London she would go.

B
UT NEXT MORNING HOW
was it? She woke late, after eight. She was tired. The sun, too, looked tired. That long trip to London, so tiresome. That lumpy hotel bed, those greasy eggs. Packing her bag again. Actually, she recalled, she’d never unpacked it. And she’d done what she had to do for the time being at the BM. She couldn’t really afford tickets to more than two plays. And she was out of cash: she’d have to walk to the bank, carrying her briefcase and her overnight bag, then walk to the bus, or to the station … oh, it was just too much.

She was so tired she considered not going to the Bodleian at all. She had not missed a single day of work at the library since she had arrived. It wouldn’t mean anything if she took today off: she would just not answer the telephone.

She wandered around the flat in her robe, feeling a little dazed. And all the while her mind was making excuses for taking a day off, another part of her mind was functioning at high speed on a rather different track.

It was really drab, this place. Of course the furniture was
real
, not American plastic, but you had to admit, no matter how much of an Anglophile you were, it was
ugly.
Wood, yes, but cloddy lines, chipped, scarred surfaces: what was called mission style at home, where it garnered high prices simply because it was made of wood and not foam. Cheap nylon rugs. Sofa fat and ugly and covered with a rash-producing fabric. Stumpy little lamps and damn few of them. Curtains à la Grant’s.

It would be nice to buy a few things, liven the place up. After all, she was going to be here a whole year. Of course, she really couldn’t afford it and she was fairly sure Mary couldn’t. And whatever she bought, she’d have to leave behind. And it would take precious time better spent at the Bod.

Still.

She absolutely
had
to buy some dishes. So while she was in town, she could just look at fabrics, bedspreads, rugs, curtains, furniture. No harm in looking.

(Make it beautiful, warm, welcoming. For Victor. Who will feel the difference even if he doesn’t see it.)

Shaking her head, grimacing at herself, calling herself hopeless, she dressed.

He will call. There is no question about that

Where am I going?

Don’t know.

She decided to let her feelings dictate her actions. She would move without thinking, do what her deepest impulses determined. She would end up at the shops or at the library. Or maybe somewhere else. Only not at the Randolph. No.

She picked up her briefcase and left. As she descended the stairs, however, she heard her phone ring. She stopped. Her Oxford friends worked all day and knew she did too. They wouldn’t expect her to be home at ten in the morning. She fought a little skirmish with herself, but continued to descend, hearing the rings, expecting each to be the last, and sinking a little at that thought. The phone stopped ringing. In the lower hall, she wheeled her bike out the door, and got on it, and headed downtown.

She loved the ride down to the Bodleian, past little old houses with wonderful gardens, still blooming in September, past St. John’s and Balliol. But she had gotten only as far as the Randolph when she realized: he couldn’t call her, he hadn’t asked for her phone number and she wasn’t listed in the Oxford directory. If he had had any intention of calling, he would have asked.