The Bleeding Heart Read Free

the years, their pillowed bodies, hair grey and wispy in the light wind.
    A dream: he drinks; she nags. She stays at home, ostensibly because of the rheumatism, but really because the silence between them oppresses her, and she has nothing to do on the wretched boat but make him stupid cups of tea. He listens to the football on a transistor radio, and on his stops he eyes the occasional barmaid or waitress and drinks his pint. At home, he spends his evenings in the pub, arguing scores, players.
    Why is it that the miserable always sounds truer than the felicitous?
    Because it is, dope.
    Yes. After the bargeman there would be open farms, then suddenly, inexplicably, high-rise apartments. Then warehouses. Warehouses? Granaries, perhaps. Then again farms, wonderful old ones with walled courtyards dusty with chickens, old brick walls dusty with roses, like the farms in Normandy and Brittany. Then Reading, full of soot and chimneys, people rushing on and off. Then green farmland threaded by the river and then! Of course it had to be sham, and was, but there it rose in the sunlight, all medieval tracery, spires, and towers: Oxford. It looked older than the buildings really were: it looked like fairyland and it shone in the sun. The first time she’d come, she had entered the town warily, as if it might turn to Disney if she put her glasses on.
    She did not light her cigar. She would wait until the train started. Deferred gratification is good for you, she told herself. All the little games you learn to play as you grow older, things designed to make life more pleasant, to stretch the little pleasures out like a thin swatch of flowered fabric stretched out to cover an open wound. Smoking is bad for you, so you smoke less and look forward to it more. Obscene, somehow, life measured out in coffee-spoons. But what else could you do?
    Her students, sitting cross-legged on her living-room floor drinking wine, smoking grass, listening to her jazz records as if the music were an ancient foreign mode. Leaning back and scratching a taut belly, or twisting a strand of long straight hair, and asking, asking, “Dolores, tell me. Tell us.” The question was always phrased differently, but it was always the same question. Tell me, tell me, how can I live without pain?
    I don’t know.
    You do! You do! I know you do! Look at you! You have it made! A great pad, two books published, tenure at Emmings, two kids, Europe in the summers, and all those jazz records! How can I get to live like you?
    You can be me if you want, she wanted to say. All you have to do is pay for it with lines, as I have. This line along my mouth, now, that was a particularly expensive one. “The only prescriptions I know for life without pain are early death, daily skiing, or smoking dope,” she’d grin.
    Impossible to tell them much truth. Didn’t want to. Why poison life for them before they’d barely begun? Weary, she’d send them home feeling full although not full enough (never full enough), and sigh her way to bed alone and lie there feeling it, the pain that was with her always, so familiar and accustomed a guest that it could be ignored for long stretches. It shuffled around her house in bedroom slippers, and made its own tea.
    Dolores the walking robot: push the button and the creature weeps. Her eyes and throat would fill with tears even watching TV photos of famine victims, reading newspaper interviews with parents whose children had been violently snatched to death, being handed, in Brattle Square, a leaflet describing the torture of political prisoners in the Philippines. God knows there was never a dearth of things to cry about. And she, she was like one of Pavlov’s dogs, salivating at every gong. Hard to say which was worse—the fact that the horrors of the world aroused in her nothing more forceful than a tear, or that every one of its horrors aroused that same tear. Something indiscriminate about her. Weeping, of course, really for herself, as Homer