Free The Bleeding Heart by Marilyn French Page B

response to it, as indeed, you seem to. As if it affected you. That is historically naive.”
    He leaned back in his chair (How does he get a desk chair like that? All I have is a wooden one, with a hard seat) and smiled, his great pale forehead shining at her.
    “I don’t understand why you can write about any trivial subject—someone just published a book about animal imagery in Shakespeare—and it is respected. But if you write about women, you’re being …”
    “Ideological. Quite simply, my dear, because you are.”
    “But it is not ideological to write about men?”
    He whooped a laugh. “I see you are becoming quite a fanatic!”
    “I’m serious, Cal. I want an answer.”
    He leaned forward. He tossed her essay across his desk towards her, and his famous kindly face became a sneer. “I can only suggest that you send this to one of them feminist journals,” he said.
    She stood up stiffly, feeling utterly humiliated. How dare he speak to a colleague like that? How dare he speak to anyone like that? Everything was behind him, the weight of thousands of years of tradition. No one else would question his right to treat her this way. But where had he earned that right? Who conferred it upon him?
    She looked at him coldly. “You know, Cal, you and your ilk will die too, someday,” and strode out of the office with as much dignity as she could muster.
    Cal snubbed her ever after when they passed each other on the campus. She’d lost the assistance of her most eminent colleague. She’d lost—nothing. Nothing he could do, even were he willing, could ever help her. His mind was set in a different place from hers, and it was a place that declared her point of view illegitimate.
    She sighed and stood up. She picked up her books, standing for a few minutes in the soft pale light of the afternoon, wishing there were still sun, wishing she could feel something warm containing her, embracing her. Sunlight. But there was none.
    She walked down the aisle and turned in her books, then turned around to look back at the room. The past ought to be burned, Ziggy said. Not just some of the books, but all of them.
    Yes, if you could bury it that easily. But then you’d lose this too, this room, soft and gold even without sunlight. What a room! Can you imagine building such a room for yourself? Built to house his library, Humfrey, the king’s brother. It must once have held great scrolls, manuscripts. He could sit and read and watch the sun burnish the wood, smell the parchment, hold it in his hands, trace the illuminations with his fingers. He could watch the light shift from window to window as the day slowly died, see the blazoning of the stained glass. Silent room, smelling of true things: wood and wax and leather and parchment and ink and quills. And bodies and bad teeth, rotting in the mouth.
    Still, there was something so human about its size, its proportions. Before man, Man , decided to transcend. Could transcend only in heaven. Oh, that’s not true, Dolores. What in hell else were they doing, starving themselves, denying themselves sex when they were going mad for lack of it?
    Don’t sentimentalize. There was far more human misery then than there is now, the daily sort, cold wet hungry toothless smelly people walking around, losing legs, dying, dying all around you. Most of us have never known anyone hungry, really hungry. Most of us have never seen anyone die.
    The lucky ones.
    She sighed. She heard St. Mary’s bells and turned and descended the wide creaky old staircase. Her whole body ached, her mind ached too. It came on her at moments, this depression, and felt like an enormous, wet, heavy canvas just sinking on top of her. As if everything were useless, as if life were misery for everyone in every place and at every time, and there was simply nothing anyone could do about it. You could delude yourself that you were aiding the cause of humankind by—what?—discovering penicillin, or writing a book. But it