The Bleeding Heart by Marilyn French Page A

efficient when you want only one thing.”
    He glanced at her briefly. “What do you mean?”
    “If profit is all you care about, you can achieve it easily. But if you also care about the land you’re polluting, the people you’re poisoning, the safety of the product you’re making, then it’s not so easy. You have many goals and have to be circular, not linear.”
    “And circular thinking never goes anywhere. There’s too much of it—too many softheaded critics who don’t know what they’re talking about.”
    “Ecologists, you mean?”
    “Among others. Academics. People without power who carp at those with it.”
    “Oh, Victor, do you really think that’s all there is to it? That there isn’t real ground for concern?”
    “Sure, there’s some. I guess. But what I know is that regardless of what people claim, their real motivation is to gain power. Power is what everybody really wants.”
    She tried to adjust her mind, to turn its gears to a place where she could argue with him. She had trouble. His statements seemed to her to come from a land so alien to the one she lived in that she could never find sentences clean and clear enough to break through the border.
    “There are many kinds of power,” she began falteringly.
    “Sure,” he agreed breezily. “And everybody has the kind that’s right for him. The do-gooders ought to realize that. People know what they want, and they get what they want.”
    The border between their countries sprang a wall.
    “Not everybody wants political power. Nor can everyone handle it. But everybody wants some sort, and everybody has some sort. Maybe it’s only power over the wife and kids, maybe they roll a terrific boccie ball or play a mean game of Chinese checkers.”
    “This power of yours seems to be strictly male: power over the wife and kids?”
    “Oh, women! God, have you seen them in action, these dependent passive mommas? Never underestimate the power of helplessness!”
    She gazed at him, silent. He was driving fast. The average speed on the motorway seemed to be ninety, but even driving on the left-hand side of the road, Victor was not flustered. His window was open, the wind blew through his hair, his right arm rested on the window ledge, his left steered with assurance. He looked beautiful, he looked as if he were steering a sailboat right into the wind. Beautiful and sure and precise. He knew what he was doing. He knew what he thought. He had language to say what he thought.
    Easy to be beautiful, easy to be in harmony with yourself when you thought the same way as the powers in your world. So easy to be right and sure and clear if you were a man, white, interested in profit, successful. Whereas she, Dolores, could not even frame a sentence with which to argue with him.
    She tried again. “There’s power to: and everyone should have that, but everyone doesn’t. Power to play Bach, or tennis, or boccie if. you like. And there’s power over; and no one should have that, but people do.”
    “Hah! Ever seen a world in which they didn’t? You’re turning reality into an academic subject, into political science or some damned thing. Everybody has some form of power over, as you call it.”
    “For god’s sake, Victor, what kind of power over does a black slum kid have? An itinerant farm worker? An uneducated woman with a brutal husband and a job in a factory with an equally brutal foreman?”
    “The power to rip somebody off, maybe. To pick more lettuce than anyone else. To cook up a great pot of stew. I don’t know. I only know everybody has something.”
    She burst out explosively. “That is the most fucking complacent attitude I ever encountered! How nice to think we all have what we want, all have what we deserve! How nice to conceive of the entire human world as in a state of war—because that’s what you’re saying, really—when you already know you’re among the winners! The fact is a lot of people never even get the chance to figure out