Seduction of the Minotaur

Fred threw a distressed glance at Lillian, who was laughing. One girl was kissing the lobe of his ear, and the other slipping her hand inside his shirt.

“Lillian, help me.”

He could not extricate himself. He had seen them at the beach selling shells, fish, lace. He had sen them entering the church, with black veils over their hair.

Seeing the depth of his distress, Lillian said: “Let’s go swimming. It’s too hot to dance anymore.” It was true: their clothes were glued to their bodies, and their hair looked as if they had been swimming.

The girls clung to Fred: “You stay,” they said.

Lillian leaned over to them and said in Spanish: “Some other night. Tonight he feels he must stay with me.”

Their hands fell off his shoulders.

Now they were in a taxi, joggling over dirt roads.

Fred did not know that during the evening he had lost his identity in Lillian’s eyes and become Gerard, her first defeat at the hands of passivity. A Gerard whose paralysis she now recognized and no longer desired. One could not lust for a wall, an obstacle, an inert mass, yet she had once been seduced by just such gentleness and passivity. It had calmed her fears. She did not know then what she knew now: it had been an encounter with a fear greater than her own. She could desire him violently (Gerard) because she had an instinctive knowledge that he would not respond. She could desire him without restraint (and even admire her own spontaneity) because the restraint was safely prearranged within him. She was free to desire, knowing that she would not be swept away into any fusion. It seemed absurd to say that one would refuse a glass of water when one was thirsty, but if this glass of water also represented all the dangers of love? When Lillian was sixteen or seventeen, fulfillment itself was the danger, love itself was the danger, a shared passion was slavery. She would be at the mercy of another human being. (Just as Fred now feared to be at the mercy of a woman.) Whereas by desiring someone who would not desire her, she could allow this fire to burn and feel: how alive I am! I am capable of desire. Poor Gerard, what a coward he is. He is afraid of life. It was not, as she thought, the pain of being alive she felt, but the pain of frustration.

How elated she was now not to have been seduced by Fred’s mute pleadings and his retractions. How grateful to have discovered not a failed love affair, but the secret of that failure to lie in the choice of partner, a choice which came out of fear. So it was fear which had designed her life, and not desire or love.

If they did not arrive too soon at the secret cove known only to Doctor Hernandez, she would have time to make inevitable deductions. She and Larry had selected each other and each had played the role which kept their fears from overwhelming them. How could they pass judgment on each other for playing the role they had assigned to each other? You, Larry, must not change, or move, must represent fixed, unalterable love. You, Lillian, must change and move for both to sustain the myth of freedom.

Fred was afraid of the night, afraid of Diana who was cooling her body by pulling her dress out away from her breasts, waving it before her like a fan. He was afraid of Lillian who was fanning her face with the edge of her cotton dress, exposing the lacy petticoat.

The taxi left them at the top of the hill, and >

Fred was afraid of the night, afraid his body would slip away from him, dissolve in that purple velvet with diamond eyes, the tropical night. The tropical night did not lie inert like a painted movie backdrop, but was filled with whisperings, and seemed to have arms like the foliage.

Beauty was a drug. The small beach shone like mercury at their feet. They undressed in the rocks which formed a cavern. The waves absorbed the words; one only heard the laughter, or a name. Diana, painted by the moonlight, walked like a phosphorescent Venus into the waves. The oil lamps on the fishermen’s small boats trembled like candlelight. The neon lights softened by the haze threw beams on the bay like miniature searchlights.

Fred was as troubled as if he had encountered the singing mermaids. He did not undress. Doctor Hernandez swam far out; he was familiar with every rock. Lillian and Edward stayed near the shore. The fatigue and the heat of the dance were washed away. The sea swung like a hammock. One could grow a new skin over the body. The undulations of the sea were like their breathing, as if the sea and the swimmers had but one lung.

Out of the full beauty of the tropical night, the full moon, the full bloom of the stars, the full velvet of the night, a full woman might be born. No more scattered fragments of herself living separate cellular lives, living at times in the temporary homes of others’ lives.

Fred stood further away, clinging to his locks and his clocks, to peripheries, islands, bridges. The taxi driver smoked a cigarette and was singing the melopee of love.

Fred’s immobility, sitting by the rock, not sharing in the baptismal immersion, gave birth to an image of Larry’s absence of mobility. But as the psyche changes, it recreates semantics, and the word “fixity” had once been considered a virtue. It was this fixity she had summoned, needed, loved, because in her chaos and confusions, fixity was the symbol of immutability, eternity. An unchanging love. How unjust to change its meaning when this unchanging love had been the hot house in which she had been born as a woman. Was it possible to begin one’s life anew with a knowledge of what lay behind the charades one had created? Would she circumvent the masks they had donned, those she had pinned upon the face of Larry? She now knew her responsibility in the symbolic drama of their marriage.

Lillian was journeying homeward. The detours of the labyrinth did not expose disillusion, but unexplored dimensions. Archeologists of the soul never returned empty-handed. Lillian had felt the existence of the labyrinth beneath her feet like the excavated passageways under Mexico City, but she had feared entering it and meeting the Minotaur who would devour her.

Yet now that she had come face to face with it, the Minotaur resembled someone she knew. It was not a monster. It was a reflection upon a mirror, a masked woman, Lillian herself, the hidden masked part of herself unknown to her, who had ruled her acts. She extended her hand toward this tyrant who could no longer harm her. It lay upon the mirror of the plane’s round portholes, traveling through the clouds, a fleeting face, her own, clear and definable only when darkness came on.

Even though the airplane was taking her back to White Plains after an engagement of three months in Golconda, a little girl of six running up and down the aisle of the plane carried her by a detour into the past, to a certain day in her childhood in Mexico, where her father, frustrated by enigmatic natives and elemental cataclysms, would come home to the one kingdom, at least, where his will was unquestioned. He would receive from the mother a report on the day. And no matter how mild she made this, how much she attenuated the children’s infractions, the father always found the cause enough to march them up to the top floor, an attic filled with dusty objects. And there, one by one, he spanked them.

As the rest of the time he did not talk to them, nor play with them nor cuddle them, nor sing to them, nor read to them, as he acted in fact as if they were not there, this moment in the attic produced in Lillian two distinct emotions: one of humiliation, the other the pleasure of intimacy. As there were no other moments of intimacy with her father, Lillian began to regard the attic as a place which was both the scene of spankings but also of the only rite shared with her father. For years, in telling of it, she only stressed the injustice, the ignominy of it. She stressed how there came a day when she openly rebelled and frightened her father into giving up this punishment.

But once in Paris, she strayed into an arcade and saw people watching penny movies with such delight and interest that she waited her turn and slipped a penny in a slot. A little movie scene appeared, awkward and jerky like the movies of the 1920s. A family sat at dinner, father (with a mustache), mother in a ruffled dress, and three children. The young and pretty maid was serving the soup. She was dressed in black. Her dress was very short. It revealed a white lace-edged petticoat, and she wore a butterfly of white lace on her hair. She spilled the soup on the father’s lap. The father rose in a fury and left the table to go and change his clothes. The maid had not only to help him change his clothes, but to atone for the accident.

Lillian was about to leave, unmoved, amused, when the machine clicked and a new film began. The scene this time took place in a classroom. The students were little girls of six or seven (Lillian’s age when she was receiving the spankings). They were dressed in old-fashioned frilly and bouffant dresses. The teacher was angered by their mockeries and laughter, and asked them to come up, one by one, to be spanked (just as Lillian and her sisters and brothers were lined up and made to march up the stairs). At this scene Lillian’s heart began to beat wildly. She thought she was about to relive the pain and humiliation caused by their father.

But when the teacher lifted up the little girl, stretched her across his knees, turned up her skirt, pulled down her panties, and began to spank her, what Lillian experienced after twenty years was not pain, but a flooding joy of sensual excitement. As if the spankings, while hurting her, had been at the same time the only caress she had known from her father. Pain had become inextricably mixed with joy at his presence, the distorted closeness had alchemized into pleasure. The rite, intended as a punishment, had become the only intimacy she had known, the only contact, a substitution of anger and tears in place of tenderness.

She wanted to be in the little girl’s place!

She hurried away from the arcade, trembling with joy, as if she were returning from an erotic adventure.

Thus the real dictator, the organizer and director of her life, had been this quest for a chemical compound—so many ounces of pain mixed with so many ounces of pleasure in a formula known only to the unconscious. The failure lay in the enormous difference between the relationship she had needed, and the one she had, on a deeper level, more deeply wanted. The need was created out of an aggregate of negativities and deformations. When Lillian thought that in her relationship to Jay she was only in bondage to a passion, she was also in bondage to a need. When she thought her stays in Paris were directed entirely by a desire for Jay, they were in fact predetermined on those days in Mexico when she was six or seven years old.

Not enough of that measure of pain had existed in her marriage to Larry.

In the laboratories the scientists were trying to isolate the virus which might be the cause of cancer. Djuna believed one could isolate the virus which destroys love. But then there were outcries: that this would be the end of illusion, when it was only the beginning! Lillian had learned from Djuna that each cell, once separated from the diseased one, was capable of new life.

Erasing the grooves. It was not that Lillian had remained attached to the father, and incapable of other attachments. It was that the form of the relationship, the mold, had become a groove, the groove itself was familiar, her footsteps followed it habitually, unquestioningly, the familiar groove of pain and pleasure, of closeness at the cost of pain.

Lillian remembered Djuna’s words: Man is not falling apart. He is undergoing a kind of fission, but I believe in those who are trying quietly to isolate the destructive cells, so that after fission each part is illumined and alive, waiting for a new fusion.

Was this why Lillian had always wept at weddings? Had she known obscurely that each human being might lie wrapped in his self-created myth, in the first plaster cast made by his emotions. Static and unchangeable, each could move only in the grooves etched by the past.

Jay had appeared at first as the bearer of joy. She had loved his complete union with the earth, his acceptance of the hungry, the greedy animal within himself. He lived with blinders on, seeking only pleasure, avoiding responsibilities and duties, swimming skillfully on the surface, enjoying, suspicious of depths, out in the world, preferring the many to the few, intoxication with life only, wherever it carried him, not faithful to individuals, or to ideas. Seeking the flow, the living moment only. Never looking back or looking into the future.

His talk of violence suited her tumultuous nature. But then he had made love without violence, and then asked her: “Did you expect more brutality?” She did not know this man. The first room he had taken her to was shabby. He had said: “Look how worn the carpet is.” But all she could see was the golden glow, the sun behind the curtain. All she could hear were his words: “Lillian, your eyes are full of wonder. You expect a miracle every day.” His brown shirt hung behind the door, there was only one glass to drink from and a mountain of sketches and notebooks she was to song iut later, silk screen, and arrange into the famous Portfolio. He had no time to stop. There was too much to see in the streets. He had just discovered the Algerian street, with its smell of saffron, and the Algerian melopee issuing from dark medieval doorways.

Lillian felt they would live out something new. They had first known each other in New York when Lillian was disconnected from Larry. Jay had left for Paris because he wanted to live near the painters he admired. Lillian’s engagement took her there for several months each year. New for her, this total acceptance of all life, ugliness, poverty, sensuality, Jay’s total acceptance, lack of selectivity or discrimination or withdrawals. Lillian thought him a gentle savage, a passionate cannibal. Motherhood prepared Lillian for this abdication of herself. Lillian adopted all his infatuations and enthusiasms: she sat with him contemplating from a cafe table the orange face of a clock, the prostitute with the wooden leg; played chess at the Cafe de La Regence at the very table where Napoleon and Robespierre had played chess. She helped him gather and note fifty ways of saying drunk.

She abandoned classical music and became a jazz pianist. Classical music could not contain her improvisations, her tempo, her vehemences.

She watched over Jay’s work, searched Paris shops for the best paint, even learned to make some from ancient crafts. She watched over his needs. She had his sketch book silk screened and carried the Portfolios to New York and sold them. People were asking questions about Jay. They laughed at his casual gifts to them, loved the freedom, the unbound pages, the surprises, which gave them the feeling they were sharing an intimate, private document, like a personal sketch book.

His rooms remained the same everywhere: the plain iron bed, the hard pillows, the one glass. They were illumined by orgies: let us see how long we can make love, how long, how many hours, days, nights.

When she went to New York to visit her children, he wrote to her: “Terribly alive but pained, and feeling absolutely that I need you. But I must see you soon. I see you bright and wonderful. I want to get more familiar with you. I love you. I loved you when you came and sat on the edge of the bed. All that afternoon like warm mist. Get closer to me, I promise you it will be beautiful. I like so much your frankness, your humility almost. I could never hurt that. It was to a woman like you I should have been married.”

Small room, so shabby, like a deep-set alcove. Immediately there was the richness of Jay’s voice, the feeling of sinking into warm flesh, every twist of the body awakening new centers of pleasure. “Everything is good, good,” murmured Jay. “Have I been less brutal than you expected? Did the violence of my painting lead you to expect more?” Lillian was baffled by these questions. What was he measuring himself against? A myth in his own mind of what women expected?

In his own work everything was larger than nature. Was he trying to match his own extravagances? If in his eyes he carried magnifying glasses, did he see himself in life as a smaller figure?

In the same letter he wrote: “I don’t know what I expect of you, Lillian, but it is something in the way of a miracle. I am going to deman everything of you, even the impossible, because you are strong.”

Lillian’s secret weakness then became the cause of pain. She had a need of a mirror in which she could see her image loved by Jay. Or perhaps a shrine, with herself in the place of honor. Unique and irreplaceable Lillian (as she had been for Larry). But with Jay this was impossible. The whole world flowed through his being in one day. Lillian was apt to find sitting in her place (or lying in her bed) the most unlovely of all women, undernourished, unkempt, anonymous, ordinary, he had picked up in a cafe, with nothing to explain her presence except that she was perhaps the opposite of Lillian. To her he gave the coat Lillian had left in his room. The visitor had even brought with her a little grey wilted dog and Jay who hated animals was even kind to this dusty mongrel that was molting.

For Jay’s kindness was his greatest expression of anarchy. It was always an act of defiance to those one loved, to those one lived with. His was a mockery of the laws of devotion. He could not give to Lillian. He was always generous to outsiders, to those he owed nothing to, giving paints to those who did not paint, a drink to the man who was over-saturated with drink, his time to one who did not value it, the painting Lillian favored to anyone who came to the studio.

His giving was a defiance of evaluation and selection. He wanted to assert the value of what others discarded or neglected. His favorite friend was not a great painter but the most mediocre of all painters, who reflected Jay like a caricature, a diminished echo, who hummed his words as Jay did, nodded his head as Jay did, laughed when Jay laughed. They practiced dadaism together: everything was absurd, everything was a joke. Jay would launch into frenzied praise of his paintings. (Lillian called him Sancho Panza.)

Lillian would ask with candor: “Do you really admire him so much, as much as all that? Is he truly greater than Gauguin? Greater than Picasso?”

Jay would laugh at her gravity. “Oh no, I was carried away by my own words, just got going. I think I was talking about my own painting, really. I enjoy mystifying, confusing, contradicting. Deep down, you know, I don’t believe in anything.”

“But people will believe you.”

“They admire the wrong painters anyway.”

“But you’re adding to the absurdities.”

Lillian had the feeling that Sancho did not exist. True, he presented a Chinese face, but when she sought to know Sancho she found an evasive smile which was a reflection of Jay’s smile, a sympathy which was an act of politeness, an opinion which, at the slightest opposition, vanished, a head waiter at a banquet, a valet for your coat, a shadow at the top of the stairs. His eyes carried no messages. If her fingers touched him she felt his body was fluid, evasive, anonymous. What Jay asserted he did not deny. He imitated Jay’s adventures, but Lillian felt he had neither possessed life, nor lost it, neither devoured it nor spat it out. He was the wool in the bedroom slipper, the storm strip on the window, the felt stop on the piano key, the shock absorber on the car spring. He was the invisible man, and Lillian could not understand their fraternal bond. She suffed to see a reduced replica of Jay, his shrunken double.

“Right after being with me,” Lillian said once, “did you have to take up with such an unlovely woman?”

“Oh that,” said Jay. “Reichel believes me to be callous, amoral, ungrateful. He thinks because I have you I’m the luckiest man in the world, and it irritated me, his lecturing, so I launched into a role, to shock him. I talked to him about the whores, and had him gasping to think I might be callous about you. Can you understand that? I realize that it’s all childish, but don’t take it seriously.”

“Eh? Sancho?” Sancho would laugh hysterically. It was what Lillian called the Village Idiot Act. Lillian laughed with them, but not with all of herself.

“I’m finding my own world,” said Jay. “A certain condition of existence, a universe of mere BEING, where one lives like a plant, instinctively. No will. The great indifference, like that of the Hindu who lets himself be passive in order to let the seeds in him flower. Something between the will of the European and the karma of the Oriental. I want just the joy of illumination, the joy of what I see in the world. Just to receive vibrations. Susceptibility to all life. Acceptance. Taking it all in. Just BE. That was always the role of the artist: to reveal the joy, the ecstasy. My life has been one long opposition to will. I have practiced letting things happen. I have dodged jobs, responsibilities, and I want to express in painting the relaxing of will and straining for the sake of enjoyment.”

This was the climate he created and to which Lillian responded, the yieldingness of the body, relaxed gestures, yielding to flow, seeking pleasure and being nourished with it, giving it to others. When something threatened his pleasure, how skillful he was at evasion. He had created something which on the surface seemed untainted by the anxiety of his time, yet Lillian felt there was a flaw in it. She did not know what it was.

The flaw she was to discover was that his world was like a child’s world, depending on others’ care, others’ devotions, others’ taking on the burdens.

He received a letter from his first wife, telling him about his daughter now fourteen years old, and showing exceptional gifts for painting. At first Jay wept: “I cannot help her.” He remembered saying to her when she was five years old: “Now remember, I am your brother, not your father.” The idea of fatherhood repulsed him. It threatened his desire for everlasting freedom and youthfulness.

“Let her come and share our life,” said Lillian.

“No,” said Jay. “I want to be free. I have too much work to do. I have to take the frames off my paintings. I want them to become a part of the wall, a continuous frieze. My colors are about to fly off the edge, and I don’t want restraint. Let them fly!”

While Lillian cooked dinner in the small kitchen off the studio, he fell asleep. When he awakened he had forgotten his daughter and his guilt. “Is dinner ready? Is the wine good?”

How I wish his indifference were contagious, thought Lillian. He can forget his daughter, and I cannot forget my children. Every night I leave Jay’s side to go and say goodnight to my children across the ocean. I have to give Jay the same kind of love I gave my children. As if I knew no other expression of love outside of care and devotion.

She spent all her time consoling the friends he had misused, paying his debts, preventing him from paying too high a price for his rebellions.

When they first met he was proofreading in a newspaper office. His paintings were not selling yet. The work irritated his eyes. He would come to his room and the first thing he would do was to wash his inflamed eyelids. Lillian watched him, watched the red-rimmed eyes, usually laughing, and now withered by fatigue, and watering. These eyes which he needed for his work, wasted on proofreading under weak lights on greyish paper. These eyes he needed to drink in the world and all its profusion of images.

“Jay,” said Lillian, extending a glass of red wine. “Drink to the end of your job at the paper. You will never have to do it again. I earn enough for both of us when I play every night.”

He had at times the air of a gnome, a satyr, or at other times the air of a serious scholar. His body appeared fragile in proportion to his exuberance. His appetite for life was enormous. His parents had given him money to go to college. He had put it in his pocket and gone to wander all over America, taking any job that came along, and sometimes none, traveling with hoboes, as a hitchhiker, a fruit picker, a dishwasher, seeking adventure, enriching his experience. He did not see his parents again for many years. In one blow, he had severed himself from his childhood, his adolescence, from all his past.

What richness, Lillian felt, what a torrent. In a world chilled by the mind, his work poured out like a volcano and raised the surrounding temperature.

“Lillian, let’s drink to my Pissoir Period. I have been painting the joys of urinating. It’s wonderful to urinate while looking up at the Sacre Coeur and thinking of Robinson Crusoe. Even better still in the urinoir of the Jardin des Plantes, while listening to the roar of the lions, and while the monkeys, high up in the trees, watch the performance and sometimes imitate me. Everything in nature is good.”

He loved the boiling streets. While he walked the streets he was happy. He learned their names amorously as if they were the names of women. He knew them intimately, noted those which disappeared and those which were born. He took Lillian to the Rue d’Ulm which sounded like a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, to the Rue Feuillantine which sounded like a souffle of leaves, to the Quai de Valmy where the barges waited patiently in the locks for a change of level while the wives hung their laundry on the decks, watered their flower pots and ironed their lace curtains to make the barges seem more like cottages in the country. Rue de la Fourche, like the trident of Neptune or of the devil, Rue Dolent with its mournful wall encircling the prison. Impasse du Mont Tonnerre! How he loved the Impasse du Mont Tonnerre. It was guarded at the entrance by a small cafe, three round tables on the sidewalk. A rusted iron gate which once opened to the entrance of carriages, now left open. A hotel filled with Algerians who worked in a factory neaby. Rusty Algerian voices, monotone songs, shouts, spice smells, fatal quarrels, knife wounds.

Once having walked past the iron gate, over the uneven cobblestones, they entered the Middle Ages. Dogs were eating garbage, women were going to market in their bedroom slippers. An old concierge stared through half-closed shutters, her skin the color of a mummy, a shriveled mouth munching words he could not hear. “Who do you want to see?” The classical words of concierges. Jay answered: “Marat, Voltaire, Mallarme, Rimbaud.”

“Every time I see one of those concierges,” said Jay, “I am reminded of how in the Middle Ages they believed that a cat must be buried in the walls of a newly built house; it would bring luck. I feel that these are the cats come back to avenge themselves by losing your mail and misleading visitors.”

Through an entrance as black and as narrow as the entrance to Mayan tombs, they entered gentle courtyards, with humble flower pots in bloom, a cracked window one expected to be opened by Ninon de L’Enclos. The smallness of the window, the askewness of the frame, the hood of the grey pointed slate roof overhanging it had been painted so many times on canvas that it receded into the past, fixed, eternal, like the sea-shell colored clouds suspended in time which could not be blown away by a change of wind.

Jay was sitting at the small coffee-stained table like a hunter on the watch for adventure. Lillian said: “The painters and the writers heightened these places and those people so well that they seem more alive than today’s houses, today’s people. I can remember the words spoken by Leon Paul Fargue more than the words I hear today. I can hear the very sound of his restless cane on the pavement better than I can hear my own footsteps. Was their life as rich, as intense? Was it the artist who touched it up?”

Time and art had done for Suzanne Valadon, the mother of Utrillo, what Jay would never do for Sabina. Flavor by accretion, poetry by decantation. The artists of that time had placed their subject in a light which would forever entrance us, their love re-infected us. By the opposite process which he did not understand, but which he shared with many other artists of his time, he was conveying his inability to love. It was his hatred he was painting.

Jay once said: “I arrived by the same boat that takes the prisoners to Devil’s Island. And I was thinking how strange it would be if I sailed back with them as a murderer. It was in Marseilles. I had picked up two girls in a cafe, and we were returning by taxi after a night of night clubs. One of the girls kept after me not to let myself get cheated. When we arrived at the hotel the taxi driver asked me for a ridiculously high sum. I argued with him. I was very angry, and yet during that moment I was conscious that I was looking at his face with terrific intensity, as if I were going to kill him, but it was not that; my hatred was like a magnifying glass, taking in all the details, his porous meaty face, his moles with hair growing out of them, his soggy hair falling over his forehead, his cloudy eyes the color of Pernod. Finally we came to an agreement. That night I dreamed that I strangled him. The next day I painted him as I saw him in my dream. It was as if I had done it in reality. People will hate this painting.”

“No, they will probably love it,” said Lillian. “Djuna says that the criminal relieves others of their wish to commit murder. He acts out the crimes of the world. In your painting you depict the desire of thousands. In your erotic drawings you do the same. They will love your freedom.”

At dawn they stood on the Place du Tertre, among houses which seemed about to crumble, to slide away, having been for so long the facades of Utrillo’s houses.

Three policemen were strolling, watching. A street telephone rang hysterically in the vaporous dawn. The policemen began to run towards it.

“Someone committed your murder,” said Lillian.

Two waiters and a woman began to run after the policemen.

The loud ringing continued. One of the policemen picked up the telephone and to a question put to him he answered: “No, not at all, not at all. Don’t worry. Everything is absolutely calm. A very calm night.”

Lillian and Jay had sat on the curb and laughed.

But whatever Jay’s secret of freedom was, it could not be imparted to Lillian. She could not gain it by contagion. All she could feel were Jay’s secret needs: “Lillian, I need you. Lillian, be my guardian angel. Lillian, I need peace in which to work.” Love, faithfulness, attentiveness, devotion, always created the same barriers around Lillian, the same limitations, the same taboos.

Jay avoided the moments of beauty in human beings. He stressed their analogies with animals. He added inert flesh, warts, oil to the hair, claws to the nails. He was suspicious of beauty. It was like a puritan’s suspicion of make-up, a crowd’s suspicion of prestidigitators. He had divorced nature from beauty. Nature was neglect, unbuttoned clothes, uncombed hair, homeliness.

Lillian was bewildered by the enormous discrepancy which existed between Jay’s models and what he painted. Together they would walk along the same Seine river, she would see it silky grey, sinuous and glittering, he would draw it opaque with fermented mud, and a shoal of wine bottle corks and weeds caught in the stagnant edges.

He had discovered a woman hobo who slept every night in exactly the same place, in the middle of the sidewalk, in front of the Pantheon. She had found a subway ventilator from which a little heat arose and sometimes a pale grey smoke, so that she seemed to be burning. She lay in a tidy way, her head resting on her market bag packed with her few belongings, her brown dress pulled over her ankles, her shawl neatly tied under her chin. She slept calm and dignified as if she were in her own bed.

Jay had painted her soiled and scratched feet, the corns on her toes, the black nails. But he overlooked the story Lillian loved and remembered of her, that when they tried to remove her to an old woman’s home she had refused saying: “I prefer to stay here where all the great men of France are buried. They keep me company. They watch over me.”

Lillian was reminded of the Talmudic words: “We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

Lillian would become so confused by Jay’s chaotic living, his dadaism, his contradictions, that she submitted to Djuna’s clarifications. Jay’s “realism,” his need to expose, debunk, as he said, his need for reality, did not seem as real as Djuna’s intuitive interpretations of their acts.

Lillian had no confidence in herself as a woman. She thought that it was because her father had wanted her to be a boy. She did not see herself as beautiful, and as a girl loved to put on her brother’s clothes at first to please her father, and later because it gave her a feeling of strength to take flights from the problems of being a woman. In her brother’s jeans, with short hair, with a heavy sweater and tennis shoes, she took on some of her brother’s assurance, and reached the conviction that men determined their own destiny and women did not. She chose a man’s costume as the primitives chose masks to frighten away the enemy. But the mystery play she had acted was too mysterious. Pretend to be a boy, when what she most wanted was to be loved by one. Act the active lover so the lover will understand she wished him to be active with her. She acted the active lover not because she was the aggressor but because she wanted to demonstrate…

Because her father had wanted her to be a boy she felt she had acquired some masculine traits: courage, activity. When she shifted her ground she felt greater confidence. She thought a woman might love her some day for other qualities as they loved men for their strength, or genius, or wit.

Sabina’s appearance, first as a model for Jay’s paintings, then more and more into their intimate life, her chaotic and irresistible flow swept Lillian along into what seemed like a passion. But Lillian, with Djuna’s help, had discovered the real nature of the relationship. It was a desire for an impossible union: she wanted to lose herself in Sabina and BECOME Sabina. This wanting to BE Sabina she had mistaken for love of Sabina’s night beauty. She wanted to lie beside her and become her and be one with her and both arise as ONE woman; she wanted to add herself to Sabina, re-enforce the woman in herself, the submerged woman, intensify this woman Lillian she could not liberate fully. She wanted to merge with Sabina’s freedom, her capacity for impulsive action, her indifference to consequences. She wanted to smooth her rebellious hair with Sabina’s clinging hair, smooth her own denser skin by the touch of Sabina’s silkier one, set her own blue eyes on fire with Sabina’s fawn eyes, drink Sabina’s voice in place of her own, and, disguised as Sabina, out of her own body for good, to become one of the women so loved by her father.

She had loved in Sabina an unborn Lillian. By adding herself to Sabina she would become a more potent woman. In the presence of Sabina she existed more vividly. She chose a body she could love (being critical of her own), a freedom she could obey (which she could never possess), a face she could worship (not being pleased with her own). She believed love quite capable of such metamorphosis.

These feelings had been obscure, unformulated until the night the three of them had gone out together and Sabina had drunk a whole bottle of Pernod. She had become violently ill. Jay and Lillian had nursed her. Sabina was almost delirious. She was easily prone to fever and Lillian was alarmed by the way her face seemed to be consumed from within. She stretched out beside her to watch over her and Jay had gone to sleep in the studio.

In the first version of that night, gathered from Sabina’s smoky talk and Lillian’s evasions. Jay had believed that jealousy of him had sprung between them and separated them. But this was only on the surface. Later Lillian saw another drama.

Both Sabina and Lillian, faced with a woman, realized they felt closeness but not desire. They had kissed, and that was all.

Sabina wanted something of Lillian: her inexperience, her newness, as if she wanted to begin her own life anew. They both wanted intangible things. Impossible to explain to Jay who made everything so simple, and reduced to acts. He could not understand atmosphere, moods, mysteries.

The true bridge of fascination was the recognition that in Sabina lay a dormant Lillian. A Lillian Jay had not been able to awaken, a liberated Lillian. For he had needed the devoted Lillian.

Sabina was a drought of freedom. Every gesture she made, every word she uttered. She was free of faithfulness, loyalty, gratitude, devotion, duties, responsibilities, guilts. Even the roles she played were chosen by herself.

Faced with the culmination of their fantasies of a possible closeness to woman, neither one wanted to go further. They both realized the comedy of their pretenses. Something so absurd in their bravado towards all experience, in their arrogance about playing Jay’s role. They could not escape their femininity, their woman’s role, no matter how difficult or complex.

The story which had filtered out had become wrapped in poetry, myth, and drama. It became more and more difficult to reveal the truth, for it was so much more simple, so much more human. Lillian kept the secret because she felt it would make Jay love Sabina more. Jay thought Sabina loved women and that this would explain her water-tight compartments.

What would Jay have thought of their hesitations, awkwardnesses, their own bewilderment. He might have laughed at them. They had both played roles: Sabina in a theatrical way, with capes, make up, late arrivals, dramatic effects, disappearances, mysteries; Lillian the one dictated by her outward appearance of naturalness and honesty. “From you I expect honesty,” said Jay. Everyone knew Sabina was an actress. Everyone believed Lillian sincere.

Lillian loved Sabina’s fluidity, because she wanted it for herself. When she thought she was courting a woman, she was courting Sabina’s gift for escape from whatever interrupted the course of passion, whatever interfered with life as an adventure.

They kissed once. It was soft and lovely, but like touching your own flesh. All this was on the edge of their bodies, not at the core. Sabina was touched to see Lillian’s bedazzlement. She smiled a triumphant smile.

Lillian had imagined that by loving Sabina a miraculous alchemy would take place. What took place that night was not love of woman. It was a hope of an exchange of selves.

It was Sabina’s feelings Jay was curious about.

But there were so many things Lillian could not tell Jay. So many things he did not want to hear. Jay thought he could arrive at a dissolution of Sabina’s potency by an acid bath of truth. He was seeking to exorcise her power.

He would never believe that they had contemplated allying themselves because they felt incomplete and exposed and less strong than he imagined them. Jay was tone deaf to such secret weaknesses, needs, moments of helplessness.

He would not believe that they both wanted to be consoled as by a sister, or a mother, for his erratic behavior, his multitude of treacheries.

Antiphonal music of desires at cross currents repeated to infinity. Jay the gate-crasher seeking a truth too black and white. And the key lay in prefabricated myths which appeared in dreams with veiled faces, mute, undecipherable.

Until Djuna took up each strand, delicately separating each one from pain and blindness, the pain of blindness. Strange how in this light, high above the earth, flying through the regions of awareness which Djuna had taken her into by a method of ascension she had finally learned from her. Djuna’s words, Djuna the aviator of language, air force for grounded lives.

For awhile Lillian had been devoted to both Jay and Sabina. And what had Jay wanted? To own them both? She remembered his letter to her: “You are really strong. I warn you. I am no angel. I am insatiable. I will ask the impossible of you. What it is I don’t know.”

And a few years later he demanded of her that she understand the presence of Sabina at first only in his paintings…and then later in their lives. He even wanted Lillian to help him know Sabina.

Just before she left Paris for the last time, abdicating, Lillian said to Jay: “Now the time has come for me to tell you of the Sabina I know, because it will make you love her more. You see, what I was given to see was a glimpse of Sabina’s innocence. That night…we had both dreamed of escaping from our bodies, our molds. At a certain stage of exaltation all the boundaries are lost, identity too. Sabina was awkward too; she did not know how to behave before a woman. She kept repeating: ‘I’d like to be at the beginning of everything, when I could believe, I’d like to be at the beginning of all experience, as you are, able to give yourself, trusting.’ She wanted my innocence, and what we want is what we are. And I…all my life I could hardly live or breathe for fear of hurting anyone, I had seen Sabina take what she wanted and being loved for it. And I wanted to catch from her by contagion that irresponsibility. Now you will love her more.”

“No,” said Jay, “much less. Because she would never tell me what you have told me. What you describe—I could not hate that. There’s some beauty to it. I have just realized that what I gave you was something coarse and plain compared with that.”

“No, Jay, you made me a woman. Sabina would have thrust me back into being a half woman, as I was before I met you.”

“Beyond the love,” said Jay, “we were friends. Sabina and I will never be friends. I hate her unnecessary complications.”

“But they interest you. They are your drugs. I could not give you that. It is I who gave you something plain. I am not a drug.”

She looked at the grey blond hair on the nape of his neck, and felt almost capable of staying at his side while he experienced his passion for Sabina. But she was too certain that the body of Sabina would triumph. They were better matched in violence. But what would become of the tender Jay she had known?

So she said: “I must go and see my children. Adele is ill.”

“Whatever you do is right. For the first time I see some beauty in it.”

The plane was flying into the night now. At times it shivered as from too great an effort to gain altitude.

Jay had been concerned with being the lover of the world, naming all it contained, caressing it with his short and stocky hands, appropriating it, exploring it. And Djuna concerned only with the longitude and latitude and altitude of human beings in relation to each other.

For a while it seemed as if Lillian were flying into a storm. Luminous signs informed her she must strap herself to her chair. Other passengers slept, confident that strapped to their chairs they would safely reach earth again. Lillian slid the curtain open and through the porthole watched the immensity of space in which sorrows seemed to lose their weight. She looked at the moon, as if to communicate with it, as if it would assure her that the storms of earth could not reach her. Looking at the moon intently it seemed to her that the plane flew more steadily.

It was the year when everyone’s attention was focused on the moon. “The first terrestrial body to be explored will undoubtedly be the moon.” Yet how little we know about human beings, thought Lillian. All the telescopes are focused on the distant. No one is willing to turn his vision inward.

What she had seen of Larry during their marriage was only what he allowed her to see, giant albatross wings, the wings of his goodness. She had been unable to see above or beyond the rim of them. Larry had collaborated in this. He only offered his goodness. He never said: “I want, I like, I take,” but “What do you want? What do you like?” He deliberately obscured any vision into his being.

“The moon is the earth’s nearest neighbor.”

They had slept side by side. In the night, or at dawn, his body had been there. She had felt its radiations. In his voice there were caresses. In his sympathy, a tropical balm. In his goodness, a universe. His attentiveness blinded her. If he had another life, other selves, he turned like a planet, only one face towards Lillian.

“A rocket that would take months to reach one of the planets can travel to the moon in a day or two.”

“An instrument station on the moon could communicate with the earth with greater ease than one on Mars or Venus.” It was not necessary to circumnavigate around Larry or go to Paris, to Mexico. At last she was a receptor for Larry’s messages!

“To investigators preoccupied with the remarkable developments in contemporary astronomy and physics the moon had seemed a dead and changeless world.”

But only because she had not looked beyond the mask. The rim of density around Larry had been his goodness. It was selfless, almost anonymous. He was present only when summoned, and summoned only by distress. Lillian had fixed the distorted image, but Larry had contributed the mask.

“The moon is an astronomical stone. Because its surface has preserved the record of ancient events, it holds the key to the solar system.”

The key to the marriage? Larry had achieved changelessness.

Whereas Lillian was created “out of the air and water that support life on earth which continuously wear away the surface of our planets. Processes in the interior of the earth heave up chains of mountains for demolition by the forces of erosion, and the cycles of building and erosion from one epoch to the next erase the records of the past.” That was a portrait of Lillian’s turbulences in planetary terms! And of Larry’s conservation of the past, of their life together.

“The moon, on the other hand, has neither atmosphere nor oceans, and has never been eroded by wind and water. Furthermore, the circular formations that dominate the moon’s topography indicate that its crust has never undergone the violent changes which are involved in mountain-building processes on earth. “

Larry had sought to present such an undisturbed surface to Lillian’s investigations. But this evenness had been as much a mask as Sabina’s more theatrical disguises. What do you feel? Where are you? Will you share my enthusiasms? My friendships?

What had sent Larry so far away from human life into the position of a spectator, so far away from earth? What had made him wrap himself in an unbreathable atmosphere of selflessness and then be absent from his own body? There were incidents she knew. But she had never coordinated them. She was landing for the first time on this new planet, Larry. “In any case, a planet would be cool at birth.” His mother had not wanted him to be born. This was the first denial. He had arrived unsummoned by love and jealously resented by his father.

“A cool birth does not exclude the later heating and melting of planetary bodies by radioactive elements they contain.”

The child, inhibited by such “a cool birth,” sought warmth by running away from home to the huts of the Negroes living and working nearby for his father. His father was drilling oil wells in Brazil for an American firm.

His pale mother had faded blue eyes, and wore white dresses which covered her neck and arms, and on which the sewing machine, as if in fear the material would undulate, swell, or fly off like a parachute, had criss-crossed a thousand stitches, tight and overlapping, controlling every inch in a stifling design called “shirring.”

The father believed in unremitting work, and no idleness or dreaming. He clocked the universe, constantly pulling out his watch like a judge at a running match. His mother was beset with fear. Every pleasure was dangerous. Swimming led to drowning, fireworks could blow your finger off, hunting fireflies could anger a rattlesnake, associating with native children would turn you into a “savage.”

Larry ran to the Negro huts for warmth of voices, warmth of gestures, and warmth of food. He liked the half-nakedness, the soft laughter. Home here seemed like a nest, with joyous flesh proximity. Caresses were lavish. There was a hum of content, a hiss of doves. Violence came and went like tropical storms, leaving no traces. (At home a quarrel led to weeks of silence and resentment.) It was Larry’s first closeness to human beings. He threw off his too tight clothes. The Negro mother was his nurse. She smiled upon his fairness. Her flowered cotton dress smelled of spices, and she moved as easily as cotton tree seeds. When she was happy her body undulated with laughter. Their laundry, swollen like sail boats, was more vivid than a rainbow.

Yet she betrayed him.

He had played with the naked dark children. After swimming in all the forbidden lagoons and rivers, they had openly admired each other, half mocking, half tender. In his own home Larry had wanted to repeat these games with his younger brother. But it was not a swimming adventure as it was out in the country, among plants and grass and reeds. It was in the bathroom. Larry thought all discoveries of bodies could be made as merrily as by the riverside. His younger brother was so delicate, his hair so fragile, his skin like a girl’s. With delight they contrasted skin tones, breadth of chest, length of legs, strength of legs. But this scientific erotic exploration was watched by the nurse through the transom window, and the same thing she laughed at in nature, she now reported like a policeman on the frontier of some forbidden land.

A shocking treachery from the world he loved with a trusting passion, a treachery which came not from where he might have expected it, the shaggy-browed father with his eyes too deeply set in tired flesh, or from the cool eyes of the pale mother, but from the spice-scented, barefooted, tender handed black mother he loved. Such treacheries throw human beings into outer space, at a safe distance from human beings. They are propelled into space by attacks from the human species. Could not the nurse have laughed at the children exploring the wonders of the body? Could she not have laughed at their games as she laughed at their games while swimming? Did she not herself keep her warm dry hand on his coltish shoulder blades and comb his hair with her fingers “To feel the silk of it”? He had almost reached the earth with her, with her he had almost been born fully to his molten life.

The child has set his planet’s course, has chosen his place in outer space, according to the waves of hostility or fear he has encountered. Pain was the instrument which set him afloat and determined his course. The sun, whether gold, white, or black, having failed him, he will exist henceforward in a more temperate zone, twilit ones, less exposed to danger.

Lillian had at first misinterpreted his silences. He communicated only with children, and with animals. His absences (if only I knew where he was when he was gone) distressed her. Never knowing until later that, as a measure of safety he had sought periphery, the region of no-pain, where human beings could not reach him.

The first betrayal had thrust him into space to rotate at a certain distance from the source and origin of the first collision.

Lillian calculated the effect of his not having been wanted. The effect of adopting a family and then being betrayed. The atmosphere of gaiety and freedom was altered. When the Negro shack was accidentally destroyed by fire he had no regrets. When he was made to sail away from the Brazilian planet to England, he was sullen. The parents had decided he could not grow up into a native “savage.” He needed discipline. Larry already preferred drumming to sixteenth-century English songs. He liked the stamping of bare feet more than the waltzing of high heels and patent leather shoes. He liked vivid pinks, not his mother’s colorless dresses. He liked time for dreaming, not his father’s tightly filled days.

He entered a cold atmosphere of discipline and puritanism. His mother’s sister held the watch now, and also a whip. Every infraction was severely punished. The long walk to school was timed. The purchase of a water pistol was a crime. Pulling a little girl’s hair or pushing her down on the grass was a crime. And as for the mystery of where her legs started and asking if inside the bouffant dress there was a corolla as in the heart of a poppy… Whatever food she served had no taste, because she imposed it. She measured and enforced time and appetite, just as she commanded the flowers to bloom at a certain date.

Larry disappeared behind a facade of obedience. There was a Sea of Tranquility on the moon. Larry lived there. There were no ruffles on the surface. Outwardly he conformed until his marriage to Lillian. Lillian having spent her childhood in Mexico, seemed to be a messenger from the happier days of Brazil.

“The relative smoothness of the lunar surface poses a question.”

Much of men’s energies were being spent on such questions, Lillian’s on the formation of Larry’s character. Their minds were fixed on space; hers on the convolutions of Larry’s feelings.

Her vehement presence became the magnet. She summoned him back from solitude. She was curious about his feelings, about his silences, about his retractions. His mother’s first wish that he should not exist at all was pitted against Lillian’s wish that he exist in a more vivid and heightened way. She made a game of his retreats, pretended to discover his “caves.” He was truly born in her warmth and her conviction of his existence.

How slender was the form he offered to the world’s vision, how slender a slice of his self, a thin sliver of an eighth of the moon on certain nights. She was not deceived as to the dangers of another eclipse. She could hear, as you hear in musique concrete, the echo in vast space which corresponds to new dimensions in science, the echo which was never heard in classical music.

Lillian felt that in the husband playing the role of husband, in the scientist playing his role of scientist, in the father playing his role of father, there was always the danger of detachment. He had to be maintained on the ground, given a body. She breathed, laughed, stirred, and was tumultuous him. Together they moved as one living body and Larry was passionately willed into being born, this time permanently. Larry, Larry, what can I bring you? Intimacy with the world? She was on intimate terms with the world. While he maintained a world in which Lillian was the only inhabitant, or at least the reigning one.

Such obsession with reaching the moon, because they had failed to reach each other, each a solitary planet! In silence, in mystery, a human being was formed, was exploded, was struck by other passing bodies, was burned, was deserted. And then it was born in the molten love of the one who cared.