Give Me Your Heart (2 page)

Dr. K—— of the Theological Seminary, biblical scholar and authority, protégé of Reinhold Niebuhr, and author of “brilliant,” “revolutionary” exegeses of the Dead Sea
Scrolls, among other esoteric subjects.

But I had no idea,
you are protesting.
I’d given her no reason to believe, to expect . . .

(That I would believe your declarations of love? That I would take you at your word?)

My darling, you have my heart. Always, forever.
Your promise!

These days, Dr. K——, my skin is no longer flawless. It has become the frank, flawed skin of a middle-aged woman who makes no effort to disguise her age. My hair, once
shimmering strawberry-blond, is now faded, dry and brittle as broom sage; I keep it trimmed short, like a man’s, with scissors, scarcely glancing into a mirror as I
snip! snip-snip!
away. My face, though reasonably attractive, I suppose, is in fact a blur to most observers, including especially middle-aged American men; you’ve glanced at me, and through me, dear Dr.
K——, upon more than one recent occasion, no more recognizing your Angel than you would have recognized a plate heaped with food you’d devoured twenty-three years ago with a zestful
appetite, or an old, long-exhausted and dismissed sexual fantasy of adolescence.

For the record: I was the woman in a plain, khaki-colored trench coat and matching hat who waited patiently at the university bookstore as a line of your admirers moved slowly forward for Dr.
K—— to sign copies of
The Ethical Life: Twenty-First-Century Challenges.
(A slender theological treatise, not a mega-bestseller, of course, but a quite respectable bestseller, most
popular in university and upscale suburban communities.) I knew your “brilliant” book would disappoint, yet I purchased it and eagerly read to discover (yet another time) the puzzling
fact: you, Dr. K——, the man, are not the individual who appears in your books; the books are clever pretenses, artificial structures you’ve created to inhabit temporarily, as a crippled,
deformed individual might inhabit a structure of surpassing beauty, gazing out its windows, taking pride in posing as its owner, but only temporarily.

Yes? Isn’t this the clue to the renowned Dr. K——?

For the record: several Sundays ago, you and I passed closely by each other in the State Museum of Natural History; you were gripping the hand of your five-year-old granddaughter (Lisle, I
believe?—lovely name) and took no more notice of me than you’d have taken of any stranger passing you on the steep marble steps, descending from the Hall of Dinosaurs on the gloomy
fourth floor as you were ascending; you’d stooped to speak smilingly to Lisle, and it was at that moment I noted the silly, touching ploy of your hair-combing (over the spreading bald spot),
I saw Lisle’s sweet, startled face (for the child, unlike her myopic granddaddy, had seen me and knew me in a flash). I felt a thrill of triumph: for how easily I might have killed you then,
I might have pushed you down those hard marble steps, my hands firm on your now rather rounded shoulders, the force of my rage overcoming any resistance you, a puffy, slack-bellied,
two-hundred-pound man of late middle age, might have mustered; immediately you’d have been thrown off-balance, fallen backward, with an expression of incredulous terror, and, still gripping
your granddaughter’s hand, you’d have dragged the innocent child backward with you, toppling down the marble steps with a scream: concussion, skull fracture, brain hemorrhage,
death!

Why not try, why not try to collect what he owes me.

Of course, Dr. K——, I didn’t! Not that Sunday afternoon.

Dear Dr. K——! Are you surprised to learn that your lost love with the “spun-gold” hair and the “soft-as-silk breasts” managed to recover from your cruelty and by the
age of twenty-nine had begun to do well in her career, in another part of the country? Never would I be as renowned in my field as you, Dr. K——, are in yours—that goes without saying—but through diligence and industry, through self-deprivation and cunning, I made
my way in a field traditionally dominated by men and achieved what might be called a minor, local success. That is, I have nothing to be ashamed of, and perhaps even something to be proud of, if I
were capable of pride.

I won’t be more specific, Dr. K——, but I will hint: my field is akin to yours, though not scholarly or intellectual. My salary is far less than yours, of course. I have no public
identity, no reputation, and no great wish for such. I’m in a field of
service,
I’ve long known how to
serve.
Where the fantasies of others, primarily men, are involved,
I’ve grown quite adept at
serving.

Yes, Dr. K——, it’s possible that I’ve even served you. Indirectly, I mean. For instance: I might work in or even oversee a medical laboratory to which your physician sends blood
samples, biopsy tissue samples, et cetera, and one day he sends our laboratory a specimen extracted from the body of the renowned Dr. K——.
Whose life may depend upon the accuracy and good faith of our
laboratory findings.

Just one example, Dr. K——, among many!

No, dear Dr. K——, this letter is no threat. How, stating my position so openly, and therefore innocently, could I be a
threat?

Are you shocked to learn that a woman can be a professional—can have a career that’s fairly rewarding—yet still dream of justice after twenty-three years? Are you shocked to
learn that a woman might be married, or might have been married, yet remain haunted still by her cruel, deceitful first love, who ravaged not only her virginity but her faith in humankind?

You’d like to imagine your cast-off Angel as a lonely embittered spinster, yes? Hiding away in the dark, spinning ugly sticky webs out of her own poisonous guts. Yet the truth is the
reverse: just as there are happy spiders, observed by entomologists as exhibiting a capacity for (relative) freedom, spinning webs of some variety and originality, so too there are happy women who
dream of justice and will make sure that they taste its sweetness one day. Soon.

(Dr. K——! How lucky you are to have a little granddaughter like Lisle! So delicate, so pretty, so . . . angelic. I have not had a daughter, I confess. I will not have a granddaughter. If
things were otherwise between us, Jody, we might share Lisle.)

Jody—what a thrill it was for me, at the age of nineteen, to call you by that name! Where others addressed you formally, as Dr. K——. That it was secret, illicit, taboo—like calling one’s own father by a lover’s name—was part of the thrill, of course.

Jody, I hope your first, anxious wife, E——, never discovered certain bits of incriminating evidence in your trouser pockets, wallet, briefcase, where, daringly, I secreted them. Love notes,
childlike in expression.
Love love love my Jody. My BIG JODY.

You’re not BIG JODY very often now, are you, Dr. K——?

Jody has faded with the years, I’ve learned. With the thick wiry gypsy-black hair, those shrewd clear eyes and proud posture, and the capacity of your stubby penis to rejuvenate, reinvent
itself with impressive frequency. (At the start of our affair, at least.) For any nineteen-year-old girl student to call you Jody now would be obscene, laughable.

Now you most love being called Granddaddy! in Lisle’s voice.

Yet in my dreams sometimes I hear my own shameless whisper:
Jody, please don’t stop loving me, please forgive me, I want only
to die, I deserve to die if you don’t love
me,
as in the warm bath blood-tendrils seeped from my clumsily lacerated forearms; but it was Dr. K——, not Jody, who spoke brusquely on the phone, informing me,
This is not the time.
Goodbye.

(You must have made inquiries, Dr. K——. You must have learned that I was found there in the bloody bathwater, unconscious, nearing death, by a concerned woman friend who’d tried to
call me. You must have known but prudently kept your distance, Dr. K——! These many years.)

Dr. K——, not only have you managed to erase me from your memory, but I would guess you’ve forgotten your anxious, first wife, E——, Evie. The rich man’s
daughter. A woman two years older than you, lacking in self-confidence, rather plain, with no style. Loving me, you were concerned about making Evie suspicious, not because you cared for her but
because you would have made the rich father suspicious too. And you were very beholden to the rich father, yes?
Few members of the seminary faculty can afford to live near the seminary. In the
elegant old East End of our university town.
(So you boasted in your bemused way. As if contemplating an irony of fate, not a consequence of your own maneuvering. As, smiling, you kissed my
mouth, and drew a forefinger along my breasts, across my shivery belly.)

Poor Evie! Her hit-and-run “accidental” death, a mysterious vehicle swerving on a rain-lashed pavement, no witnesses . . . I would have helped you mourn, Dr. K——, and been a
loving step-mother to your children, but by then you’d banished me from your life.

Or so you believed.

(For the record: I am not hinting that I had anything to do with the death of the first Mrs. K——. Don’t bother to read and reread these lines to determine if there’s something
“between” them. There isn’t.)

And then, Dr. K——, a widower with two children, you went away, to Germany. A sabbatical year that stretched into two. I was left to mourn in your place. (Not luckless Evie, but you.) Your
wife’s death was spoken of as a “tragedy” in certain circles, but I preferred to think of it as purely an accident: a conjunction of time, place, opportunity.
What is accident
but a precision of timing?

Dr. K——, I would not accuse you of blatant hypocrisy (would I?), still less of deceit, but I can’t comprehend why, in such craven terror of your first wife’s family (to whom you felt so intellectually superior), you nonetheless remarried,
within eighteen months, a woman much younger than you, nearly as young as I, which must have shocked and infuriated your former in-laws. Yes? (Or did you cease caring about what they thought? Had
you siphoned enough money from the father-in-law by that time?)

Your second wife, V——, would be spared an accidental death, and will survive you by many years. I have never felt any rancor for voluptuous—now rather fattish—Viola, who came
into your life after I’d departed from it. Maybe, in a way, I felt some sympathy for the young woman, guessing that in time you would betray her too. (And haven’t you? Numberless
times?)

I have forgotten nothing, Dr. K
——.
While you, to your fatal disadvantage, have forgotten almost everything.

Dr. K——, Jody shall I confess: I had secrets from you even then. Even when I seemed to you transparent, translucent. Deep in the marrow of my bones, a wish to bring our illicit love to an
end. An end worthy of grand opera, not mere melodrama. When you sat me on your knees naked—“nude” was your preferred term—and gobbled me up with your
eyes—“Beautiful! Aren’t you a little beauty!”—even then I exulted in my secret thoughts. You seemed at times drunk with love—lust?—for me, kissing,
tonguing, nuzzling, sucking . . . sucking nourishment from me like a vampire. (The stress of fatherhood and maintaining a dutiful-son-in-law pose as well as the “renowned theologian”
were exhausting you, maddening you in your masculine vanity. Of course, in my naiveté I had no idea.) Yet laying my hand on the hot-skinned nape of your neck I saw a razor blade clenched in
my fingers, and the first astonished spurts of your blood, with such vividness that I can see it now. I began to faint, my eyes rolled back in my head, you caught me in your arms . . . and for the
first time (I assume it was the first time) you perceived your spun-gold angel as something of a concern, a liability, a burden not unlike the burden of a neurotic, anxiety-prone wife.
Darling,
what’s the matter with you? Are you playing, darling? Beautiful girl, it isn’t amusing to frighten me when I adore you so.

Gripping my chilled fingers in your hot, hard fingers and pressing my hand against your big powerfully beating heart.

Why not? why not try? try to collect?
—
that heart.

That’s owed me.

How inspired I am, composing this letter, Dr. K——! I’ve been writing feverishly, scarcely pausing to draw breath. It’s as if an angel is guiding my hand. (One of those tall
leathery-winged angels of wrath, with fierce medieval faces, you see in German woodcuts!) I’ve reread certain of your published works, Dr. K——, including the heavily footnoted treatise
on the Dead Sea Scrolls that established your reputation as an ambitious young scholar in his early thirties. Yet it all seems so quaint and long ago, back in the twentieth century, when God and
Satan were somehow more real to us, like household objects . . . I’ve been reading of our primitive religious origins, how God-Satan were once conjoined but are now, in our Christian
tradition, always separated. Fatally separated. For we Christians can believe no evil of our deity, we could not love him then.

Dr. K——, as I write this letter my malfunctioning heart with its mysterious murmur now speeds, now slows, now gives a lurch, in excited knowledge that you are reading these words with a
mounting sense of their justice. A heavy rain has begun to fall, drumming against the roof and windows of the place in which I am living, the identical rain (is it?) that drums against the roof and
windows of your house only a few (or is it many?) miles away; unless I live in a part of the country thousands of miles distant, and the rain is not identical. And yet
I can come to you at any
time. I am free to come, and to go; to appear, and to disappear.
It may even be that I’ve contemplated the charming facade of your precious granddaughter’s Busy Bee Nursery School,
even as I’ve shopped for shoes in the company of V——, though the jowly-faced, heavily made-up woman with the size 10 feet was oblivious of my presence, of course.

And just last Sunday I revisited the Museum of Natural History, knowing there was a possibility that you might return. For it had seemed to me possible that you’d recognized me on the
steps, and sent a signal to me with your eyes, without Lisle noticing; you were urging me to return to meet with you, alone. The deep erotic bond between us will never be broken, you know: you
entered my virginal body, you took from me my innocence, my youth, my very soul.
My angel! Forgive me, return to me, I will make up to you the suffering you’ve endured for my sake.