Children of the Albatross (11 page)

Every moment this current established itself,
this state of flow, of communication by seduction.

She always returned with her arms full of
adventures, as other women return with packages. Her whole body rich with this
which nourished her and from which she nourished others. The day finished
always too early and she was not empty of restlessness.

Leaning out of the window at dawn, pressing her
breasts upon the window sill, she still looked out of the window hoping to see
what she had failed to grasp, to possess. She looked at the ending night and
the passersby with the keen alertness of the voyager who can never reach
terminations as ordinary people reach peaceful terminals at the end of each
day, accepting pauses, deserts, rests, havens, as she could not accept them.

She believed only in fire. She wanted to be at
every explosion of fire, every convergence of danger. She lived like a fireman,
tense for all the emergencies of conflagrations. She was a menace to peaceful
homes, tranquil streets.

She was the firebug who was never detected.

Because she believed that fire ladders led to
love. This was the motive for her incendiary habits. But Sabina, with al her
fire ladders, could not find love.

At dawn she would find herself among ashes
again.

And so she could not rest or sleep.

As soon as the day dawned peaceful, uneventful,
Sabina slipped into her black satin dress, lacquered her nails the color of her
mood, pulled her black cape around her and set out for the cafes.

At dawn Jay turned towards Lillian lying beside
him and his first kiss reached her through the net of her hair.

Her eyes were closed, her nerves asleep, but
under his hand her body slipped down a dune into warm waves lapping over each
other, rippling her skin.

Jay’s sensual thrusts wakened the dormant walls
of flesh, and tongues of fire flicked towards his hard lashings piercing the
kernel of mercury, disrupting a current of fire through the veins. The burning
fluid of ecstasy eddying madly and breaking, loosening a river of pulsations.

The core of ecstasy bursting to the rhythmic
pounding, until his hard thrusts spurted burning fluid against the walls of
flesh, impulsion within the womb like a thunderbolt.

Lillian’s panting decreased, and her body
reverberated in the silence, filled with echoes…antennae which had drunk like
the stems of plants.

He awakened free, and she did not.

His desire had reached a finality, like a clean
saber cut which dealt pleasure, not death.

She felt impregnated.

She had greater difficulty in shifting, in
separating, in turning away.

Her body was filled with retentions, residues,
sediments.

He awakened and passed into other realms. The
longer his stay in the enfolding whirls, the greater his energy to enter activity
again. He awakened and he talked of painting, he awakened laughing, eyes closed
with laughter, laughing on the edge of his cheeks, laughter in the corner of
his mouth, the laughter of great separateness.

She awakened unfree, as if laden with the seeds
of his being, wondering at what moment he would pull his whole self away as one
tears a plant out by the roots, leaving a crevice in the earth. Dreading the
break because she felt him a master of this act, free to enter and free to
emerge, whereas she felt dispossessed of her identity and freedom because Jay
upon awakening did not turn about and contemplate her even for a moment as
Lillian, a particular woman, but that when he took her, or looked at her he did
so gaily, anonymously, as if any woman lying there would have been equally
pleasant, natural, and not Lillian among all women.

He was already chuckling at some idea for a
painting, already hungry for breakfast, ready to open his mail and embark on
multiple relationss, curious about the day’s climate, the changes in the
street, the detailed news of the brawl of the night before which had taken
place under their window.

Fast fast fast moving away, his mind already
pursuing the wise sayings of Lao-tse, the theories of Picasso, already like a
vast wheel at the fair starting on a wide circle which at no point whatever
seemed to include her, because she was there like bread for him, a
non-identifiable bread which he ate of as he would eat any bread, not even
troubling with the ordinary differentiations: today my bread is fresh and warm,
and today it is a little dry, today it lacks salt, today it is lifeless, today
it is golden and crisp.

She did not reach out to possess Jay, as he
believed, but she reached out because so much of Jay had been deposited, sown,
planted within her that she felt possessed, as if she were no longer able to
move, breathe, live independently of him. She felt her dependence, lost to
herself, given, invaded, and at his mercy, and the anxiety of this, the
defenselessness caused a clinging which was the clinging of the drowning…

As if she were bread, she would have liked Jay
at least to notice all variations in moods and flavors. She would have liked
Jay to say: you are my bread, a very unique and marvelous bread, like none
other. If you were not here I would die of instantaneous starvation.

Not at all. If he painted well, it was the
spring day. If he were gay, it was the Pernod. If he were wise, it was the
little book of Lao-tse’s sayings. If he were elated, it was due to a worshipful
letter in the mail.

And me, and me, said a small, anxious voice in
Lillian’s being, where am I?

She was not even the woman in his paintings.

He was painting Sabina. He painted her as a
mandrake with fleshy roots, bearing a solitary purple flower in a purple
bell-shaped corolla of narcotic flesh. He painted her born with red-gold eyes
always burning as from caverns, from holes in the earth, from behind trees.
Painted her as one of the luxuriant women, a tropical growth, excommunicated
from the bread line as too rich a substance for everyday living, placing her
there merely as a denizen of the world of fire, and was content with her
intermittent, parabolic appearances.

So, if she was not in his paintings, Lillian
thought, where was she? When he finished painting he drank. When he drank he
exulted in his powers and palmed it all on the holy ghost inside of him, each
time calling the spirit animating him by a different name that was not Lillian.
Today it was the holy ghost, and the spring light and a dash of Pernod.

He did not say what Lillian wanted to hear:
“You are the holy ghost inside of me. You make my spring.”

She was not even sure of that—of being his holy
ghost. At times it seemed to her that he was painting with Djuna’s eyes. When
Djuna was there he painted better. He did not paint her. He only felt strong
and capable when he tackled huge masses, strong features, heavy bodies. Djuna’s
image was too tenuous for him.

But when she was there he painted better.
Silently she seemed to be participating, silently she seemed to be transmitting
forces.

Where did her force come from? No one knew.

She merely sat there and the colors began to
organize themselves, to deepen, as if he took the violet from her eyes when she
was angry, the blue when she was at peace, the gray when she was detached, the
gold when she was melted and warm, and painted with them. Using her eyes as a
color chart.

In this way he passed from the eyes of Lillian
which said: “I am here to warm you.” Eyes of devotion.

To the eyes of Sabina which said: “I am here to
consume you.”

To the eyes of Djuna which said: “I am here to
reflect your painter’s dream, like a crystal ball.”

Bread and fire and light, he needed them all.
He could be nourished on Lillian’s faith but it did not illumine his work.
There were places into which Lillian could not follow him. When he was
tormented by a half-formed image he went to Djuna, just as once walking through
the streets with her he had seen a child bring her a tangled skein of string to
unravel.

He would have liked the three women to love
each other. It seemed to him that then he would be at peace. When they pulled
against each other for supremacy itwas as if different parts of his own body
pulled against each other.

On days when Lillian accepted understanding
through the eyes of Djuna, when each one was connected with her role and did
not seek to usurp the other’s place he was at peace and slept profoundly.

(If only, thought Lillian, lying in the
disordered bed, when he moved away I could be quiet and complete and free. He
seems bound to me and then so completely unbound. He changes. One day I look at
him and there is warmth in him, and the next a kind of ruthlessness. There are
times when he kisses me and I feel he is not kissing me but any woman, or all
the women he has known. There are times when he seems made of wax, and I can
see on him the imprint of all those he has seen during the day. I can hear
their words. Last night he even fraternized with the man who was courting me.
What does this mean? Even with Edgar who was trying to take me away from him.
He was in one of his moods of effusive display, when he loved everybody. He is
promiscuous. I can’t bear how near they come, they talk in his face, they
breathe his breath. Anyone at all has this privilege. Anyone can talk to him,
share his house, and even me. He gives away everything. Djuna says I lack
faith… Is that what it is? But how can I heal myself? I thought one could get
healed by just living and loving.)

Lying in bed and listening to Jay whistling
while he shaved in the bathroom, Lillian wondered why she felt simultaneously
in bondage and yet unmarried, unappeased, and all her conversations with Djuna
with whom she was able to talk even better than to monologue with herself once
more recurred to her before she allowed herself to face the dominant impulse
ruling her: to run away from Jay.

Passion gathered its mometum, its frenzy, from
the effort to possess what was unpossessable in reality, because it sprang from
an illusion, because it gained impetus from a secret knowledge of its
unfulfillable quality, because it attacked romantic organisms, and incited to
fever in place of a natural union by feelings. Passion between two people came
from a feverish desire to fuse elements which were unfusable. The extreme heat
to which human beings subjected themselves in this experiment, as if by
intensity the unfusable elements could be melted into one—water with fire, fire
with earth, rock and water. An effort doomed to defeat.

Lillian could not see all this, but felt it
happening, and knew that this was why she had wept so bitterly at their first
quarrel: not weeping over a trivial difference but because her instinct warned
her senses that this small difference indicated a wider one, a difference of
elements, by which the relationship would ultimately be destroyed.

In one of his cheerful human moods Jay had
said: “If my friends bother you so much, we shall put them all against a wall
and shoot them.”

But Lillian knew that if today Jay surrendered
today’s set of friends, he would renew the same kind of relationships with a
new set, for they reflected the part of him she did not feel close to, the part
in fact she was at war with.

Lillian’s disproportionate weeping had seemed
childish to Jay who saw only the immediate difference, but Lillian was weeping
blindly with a fear of death of the relationship, with her loss of faith
sensing the first fissure as the first symbol of future dissolution, and
knowing from that moment on that the passion between them would no longer be an
affirmation of marriage but a struggle against death and separation.

(Djuna said: You can’t bear to let this
relationship die. But why must it die, Djuna? Do you believe all passion must
die? Is there nothing I can do to avoid failure? Passion doesn’t die of natural
death. Everyone says passion dies, love dies, but it’s we who kill it. Djuna
believes this. Djuna said: You can fight all the symptoms of divorce when they
first appear, you can be on your guard against distortions, against the way
people wound each other and instill doubt, you can fight for the life and
continuity of this passion, there
is
a knowledge which postpones the
death of a relationship, death is not natural, but, Lillian, you cannot do it
alone, there are seeds of death in his character. One cannot fight alone for a
living relationship. It takes the effort of two. Effort, effort. The word most
foreign to Jay. Jay would never make an effort. Djuna, Djuna, couldn’t you talk
to him? Djuna, will you talk to him? No, it’s useless, he does not want
anything that is difficult to reach. He does not like effort or struggles. He
wants only his pleasure. It isn’t possessiveness, Djuna, but I want to feel at
the center so that I can allow him the maximum freedom without feeling each
time that he betrays everything, destroys everything. )

She would run away.

When Jay saw her dressing, powdering her face,
pulling up her stockings, combing her hair, he noticed no change in her
gestures to alarm him, for did she not always comb her hair and powder and
dress with the flurry of a runaway. Wasn’t she always so uneasy and overquick,
as if she had been frightened?

He went to his studio and Lillian locked the
door of the bedroom and sat at her piano, to seek in music that wholeness which
she could not find in love…