The Bleeding Heart Read Free Page B

for her. Since she allowed herself so few, and waited so long for each one, she felt, as she lighted them, a deep sensuous pleasure, a surrender to the welcome aroma, the hot smoke in her mouth and nose, the feel of the fine smooth shape against her lips. But’ she could not let herself feel this now, with him watching. Her surrender to pleasure would show, and somehow it seemed shameful that someone else should see that. It was too personal, intimate, even. He leaned back and pulled his newspaper up, hiding his eyes. She closed her eyes and leaned back and let herself feel the pleasure of the cigar after all. Apparently he had some decency.
    Smoking, she gazed out the window. But she barely noticed the landscape as it passed. That was what happened when someone invaded your space: you were too conscious of them to feel fully, see fully, be. You couldn’t just be , you had to be something ; sloppy, correct, flirtatious, friendly, proper. Skirt pulled down? Be careful not to pick your nose or scratch your groin or spread your legs. Not, she had to admit, that she usually did such things in a train compartment even alone, but knowing she couldn’t constricted her, made her feel self-conscious. Oh, well: retreat inward. What was I thinking about? My life, solitude, yes. (Why isn’t he turning the pages of his newspaper?) Yes, it was a good life, it went on being good and vivid although a certain sameness had set in. But that happened to everyone, together or alone, didn’t it? (Why is he so still?) Still, there were things that never palled. A fine fall day in Cambridge, the burnished leaves, the smell of them in the nose, dusty and acrid and sweet, the light on the brick sidewalks; or mornings when she didn’t have to teach and had time for breakfast and boiled a two-day-old egg and smeared a fresh sisal rye-bread slice with fresh sweet butter and smelled the freshly ground bourbon Santos coffee slowly dripping through the filter, and drank it with just a dollop of cream…. (Even not looking at him, she could sense he was utterly still. It felt as if he was looking at her. Damn him!)
    Yes, and friends and dinners and parties and wonderful arguments and coming home late and simply collapsing in bed with a smile pasted on her idiot face. And special moments, like that first morning in Madrid when they could not sleep despite the seven long wakeful hours on the plane and had charged out into the city like horses freed from a corral, she and Sydney and Tony, and had rushed to the Plaza Mayor and stopped and Tony stopped and looked at it (his first time abroad) and she looked at his face and her heart stopped because he was seeing it, really seeing it, and she could see him seeing it. What was he seeing? Ah, but she knew, it was what was there to be seen—a different world, a different century, and that time, the eighteenth century, was still there somehow, hanging, the way they say sound waves linger in the atmosphere forever. The women with their high white wigs and hooped satin skirts, the men in their satin coats and white silk stockings, the carriages and footmen, the rolling bump of the wooden wheels, the maids and beggars, the blood, the flirtations, the foolishness. The lovely formal square, decorous, bowing, brilliant, had also been home to horseshit and straw, urchins skipping past the urine-filled gutters, to a stray cow and its offal. And which was the real, which was the life, if not both? She had watched Tony’s face: it was shining. Everything on it was open—the eyes, the mouth, the very pores.
    Open: the way Sydney had read her a Yeats poem she had just discovered, her voice sounding as if she had just discovered a new dimension. “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Sydney had concluded, looking up at Dolores with wonder on her face. “How can we, Mommy?”
    Open. And she too, despite the routine of a tenured professor, years and years of freshman English, years and years of trying to find a