The Bleeding Heart by Marilyn French Page A

that! And that!”
    She sat back on the ladder and pushed her hair out of her eyes. Her fingers were wet and she could feel that she’d gotten paint on her forehead.
    He kept screaming. “You’re making a frigging mess!”
    “Anthony,” she said calmly, trying to calm him down, “there’s nothing wrong with it. The paint will dry fine. Look at that wall, there’s not a streak on it. I’ve done two rooms and I know how this paint works. It will dry fine. Look at Sydney’s room.”
    But he kept circling, pointing, screaming. She watched him, incredulous. He saw streaks everywhere, when there were none at all.
    “Anthony!” she yelled, finally. “Either shut up or finish the job yourself!”
    He whirled around and shouted: “Bitch! Stupid bitch!” And stormed out of the room.
    She sat on the ladder and cried, hating herself for crying, unable to do anything else. Why couldn’t she be harder? Things pressed around her heart. Self-pity: here she was working so hard while he watched a stupid football game and he dares to criticize? Hot and tired and sweating, didn’t she deserve appreciation? Oh, injustice, injustice!
    But worse, and more frightening: what was wrong with him? Sweet Anthony, acting like this? Did he hate her? Why did he hate her? He’d been acting like this regularly, ever since his father died and his mother moved in with them. Was it his mother he hated? What could make him see streaks where there were none?
    Something was terribly wrong. She cried for a long time, maybe just because she was hot and sweaty and daubed with paint. Maybe because she knew more than she could let herself know.
    By nightfall, when she’d finished the ceiling and cleaned up the paintbrushes and the drop cloth and put the paint away, and made dinner and bathed the children and gotten them to bed—putting Tony in a sleeping bag on the floor of the girls’ room—which upset Anthony: “Are you going to make him sleep with girls? What else are you going to do to make a pansy out of him?” but which she overruled: “It is bad to sleep breathing in the fumes of fresh paint”—by then, he’d forgotten. He never praised the job she’d done, but he never brought up streaks again either. One had to be grateful for small favors.
    But indeed, there were no streaks. It was over, another little tempest. Anthony’s rages came suddenly and left suddenly, and she was so grateful when they left that she did not sufficiently think about them. She did not want to think about them. Easier to tell herself, that’s over , and pretend it would never happen again. Because if she had thought about them, she would have had to recognize that something was corroding him. It was inexplicable. She tried hard to be sweet to him even when she didn’t feel sweet, to keep him calm. So another one was over and forgotten.
    Except by her body. Forever after that, whenever he approached her, her body flinched a little. It was unconscious and probably barely perceptible, the way plants, they say, flinch at the approach of someone who has hurt them. She did not want him to touch her. As often as she could, she put him off sexually, and on the rare occasions when she pitied him or felt she owed him something, she submitted to his fuck the way she submitted in a dentist’s chair: just get it over with fast.
    Did he sense that, do you suppose? With the part of him that never came up for air, never made it even into his conscious mind? Did that, perhaps, make him worse? If so, he never complained. He even seemed more solicitous of her sexually.
    She sat there remembering, shuddering. Was it her body that was going to make the final decision about Victor? Couldn’t her mind have a little piece in the decision?
    Because her mind had decided, firmly.

III

1
    W HEN THE BELL RANG , her heart jumped a little, although she’d been expecting it. She ran downstairs to let him in. He looked pale in the dim hall light, and rumpled and tired, and he was