Read Online The Bleeding Heart by Marilyn French - Free Book Online Page A

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