Give Me Your Heart Read Free Page A

adore you so.
    Gripping my chilled fingers in your hot, hard fingers and pressing my hand against your big powerfully beating heart.
    Why not? why not try? try to collect? — that heart.
    That’s owed me.
    How inspired I am, composing this letter, Dr. K——! I’ve been writing feverishly, scarcely pausing to draw breath. It’s as if an angel is guiding my hand. (One of those tall
leathery-winged angels of wrath, with fierce medieval faces, you see in German woodcuts!) I’ve reread certain of your published works, Dr. K——, including the heavily footnoted treatise
on the Dead Sea Scrolls that established your reputation as an ambitious young scholar in his early thirties. Yet it all seems so quaint and long ago, back in the twentieth century, when God and
Satan were somehow more real to us, like household objects . . . I’ve been reading of our primitive religious origins, how God-Satan were once conjoined but are now, in our Christian
tradition, always separated. Fatally separated. For we Christians can believe no evil of our deity, we could not love him then.
    Dr. K——, as I write this letter my malfunctioning heart with its mysterious murmur now speeds, now slows, now gives a lurch, in excited knowledge that you are reading these words with a
mounting sense of their justice. A heavy rain has begun to fall, drumming against the roof and windows of the place in which I am living, the identical rain (is it?) that drums against the roof and
windows of your house only a few (or is it many?) miles away; unless I live in a part of the country thousands of miles distant, and the rain is not identical. And yet I can come to you at any
time. I am free to come, and to go; to appear, and to disappear. It may even be that I’ve contemplated the charming facade of your precious granddaughter’s Busy Bee Nursery School,
even as I’ve shopped for shoes in the company of V——, though the jowly-faced, heavily made-up woman with the size 10 feet was oblivious of my presence, of course.
    And just last Sunday I revisited the Museum of Natural History, knowing there was a possibility that you might return. For it had seemed to me possible that you’d recognized me on the
steps, and sent a signal to me with your eyes, without Lisle noticing; you were urging me to return to meet with you, alone. The deep erotic bond between us will never be broken, you know: you
entered my virginal body, you took from me my innocence, my youth, my very soul. My angel! Forgive me, return to me, I will make up to you the suffering you’ve endured for my sake.
    I waited, but you failed to return.
    I waited, and my sense of mission did not subside but grew more certain.
    I found myself the sole visitor on the gloomy fourth floor, in the Hall of Dinosaurs. My footsteps echoed faintly on the worn marble floor. A white-haired museum guard with a paunch like yours
regarded me through drooping eyelids; he sat on a canvas chair, hands on his knees. Like a wax dummy. Like one of those trompe l’oeil mannequins. You know: those uncanny, lifelike figures you
see in contemporary art collections, except this slouching figure wasn’t bandaged in white. Silently I passed by him as a ghost might pass. My (gloved) hand in my bag, and my fingers
clutching a razor blade I’ve learned by this time to wield with skill, and courage.
    Stealthily I circled the Hall of Dinosaurs looking for you, but in vain; stealthily I drew up behind the dozing guard, feeling my erratic heartbeat quicken with the thrill of the hunt . . . but
of course I let the moment pass; it was no museum guard but the renowned Dr. K—— for whom the razor blade was intended. (Though I had not the slightest doubt that I could have wielded my weapon against the old man, simply out of frustration at not finding you, and out of female rage at centuries of mistreatment,
exploitation; I might have slashed his carotid artery and quickly retreated without a single blood drop splashed