The Bleeding Heart Read Online Free PDF

professor spending a year in England, moving between the British Museum and the Oxford libraries. Just like her. Perhaps they’d worked across from each other in the BM, eyes not meeting. Perhaps he’d seen her there, perhaps she looked familiar to him and that was why he was acting this way.
    No. He was a romantic, raised on novels of chivalry. He was like so many professors, all he knew about life came from literature. He would see her to her door, deposit her bags on her step, kiss her hand, and depart
    That had actually happened to her once, years ago, when she was lost in Manhattan, couldn’t find the building she was looking for. She stopped at a construction site and asked directions of a burly red-necked man in his sixties, who was standing on the sidewalk drinking soda from a bottle. He put his soda down on a pile of two-by-fours, whisked her suitcase out of her hand, and set off without a word. She had trotted behind him , too, followed by jeers, whistles, obscene remarks hurled at them by the men perched up on the scaffolding. She thought to be nervous, but wasn’t. She trusted her unlikely knight, all two hundred fifty pounds of him. He was impervious to the workmen’s cries, he walked proudly, silent. He stopped in front of her building, swept his arm out towards it, handed her her suitcases, then snatched up her other hand, kissed it, and bowed. Then disappeared.
    She smiled, remembering.
    So, now, she and this man walked in silence. The gardens were green on the Banbury Road; roses crumbled against the walls. Few people walked on the street—some teenagers, an old woman dragging her string bag of groceries and a huge black purse. She glanced at his body: no, he was too well-dressed to be a professor. She looked at his face. It was still composed, except for a tiny muscle twitching in his cheek.
    And that startled her. He was afraid!
    Afraid of me? Do I look like a mad rapist, a killer, a person who hits people over the head and takes their wallets? I’m the one who ought to be frightened. Of course, I am an experienced reader of faces, and he doesn’t look like a rapist or killer either. But you never could tell with men. Charles Carson, the distinguished and eminent professor, beat his wife Nancy for years until she left him. And he had flecks of white at the sideburns and a superior kindly manner. Lots of sweet and gentle men ended up killing their mothers.
    But no, no, that wasn’t it. He wasn’t afraid she’d do him bodily harm. It must be hard to act as he was acting, it cost something. He’d invested his ego in carrying this off, and suppose it didn’t carry? Male ego was so fragile, because it made everything into a game and then has to win every game. Or shatter. That man who wrote a letter to The New York Times about his tiny children, and kept saying “She won,” or “He won.” Tiny children.
    She was glad they weren’t talking.
    She came into my study and disturbed me at my work and she knows she’s not supposed to, so I was going to spank her but she was so cute I couldn’t: so she won. Man like that shouldn’t have children.
    Still, there was something about this man that wasn’t like that, something that had … felt? suffered? Or was she inventing that? God knows she’d done it before, looking at Anthony’s sad face after they’d had a fight, such a sad face it made her heart mushy, and she’d go over and put her arms around him. “Honey, let’s not fight.” And he’d glare at her furiously and pull away. “Leave me alone, you bitch!”
    They had reached her corner. “I turn here,” she said, and stopped and he stopped and turned to her and looked at her and her heart bounded: he’s going to leave me at the corner! She thought she could not bear it: to watch him leave, to trail down her street carrying her own bags, to return alone to the empty flat and stand there in the silent kitchen looking at the dirty dishes in the sink.
    But he did not put her bag down. He