Children of the Albatross (12 page)

Just as the sea often carries bodies, wrecks,
shells, lost objects carved by the sea itself in its own private studio of
sculpture to unexpected places, led by irrational currents, just so did the
current of music eject fragments of the self believed drowned and deposited
them on the shore altered, recarved, rendered anonymous in shape. Each
backwash, each cross-current, throwing up new material formed out of the old,
from the ocean of memories.

Driftwood figures that had been patiently
recarved by the sea with rhythms broken by anger, patiently remolding forms to
the contours of knotted nightmares, woods stunted and distorted by torments of
doubts.

She played until this flood of debris rose from
the music to choke her, closed the piano with anger, and rose to plan her
escape.

Escape. Escape.

Her first instinctive, blind gesture of escape
was to don the black cape copied from Sabina’s at the time of their
relationship.

She wrapped Sabina’s cape around her, and put
two heavy bracelets around her wrist (one for each wrist, not wanting any more
to be in bondage to one, never to one; she would split the desire in two, to
rescue one half of herself from destruction).

And for the first time since her marriage to
Jay, she climbed the worn stairs of a very old hotel in Montparnasse,
experiencing the exaltation familiar to runaways.

The more she could see of the worn carpet and
its bare skeleton, the more acrid the smell of poverty, the more bare the room,
this which might have lowered the diapason of another’s mood only increased the
elation of hers, becoming transfigured by her conviction that she was making a
voyage which would forever take her away from the prison of anxiety, the pain
of dependence on a human being she could not trust. Her mood of liberation
spangled and dappled shabbiness with fight like an impressionist painting.

Her sense of familiarity with this scene did
not touch her at first: a lover was waiting for her in one of the rooms of this
hotel.

Could anyone help her to forget Jay for a
moment? Could Edgar help her, Edgar with his astonished eyes saying to her: You
are wonderful, you are wonderful! Drunkenly repeating you are wonderful! as
they danced under Jay’s very eyes not seeing, not seeing her dancing with Edgar
in the luminous spotlight of a night club, but when her dress opened a little
at the throat she could smell the mixed odor of herself and Jay.

She was taking revenge now for his effusive
confessions as to the pleasures he had taken with other women.

She had been made woman by Jay, he alone held
in his hands all the roots of her being, and when he had pulled them, in his
own limitless motions outward and far, he had inflicted such torture that he
had destroyed the roots all at once and sent her into space, sent her listening
to Edgar’s words gratefully, grateful for wo hands on her pulling her away from
Jay, grateful for his foolish gift of flowers in silver paper (because Jay gave
her no gifts at all), and she would imagine Jay watching this scene, watching
her go up the stairs to Edgar’s room, wearing flowers in a silver paper, and
she enjoyed imagining his pain, as he witnessed the shedding of her clothes,
witnessed her lying down beside Edgar. (You are the man of the crowd, Jay, and
so I lie here beside a stranger. What makes me lonely, Jay, are the cheap and
gaudy people you are friendly with, and I lie here with a stranger who is only
caressing you inside of me. He is complaining like a woman: you are not
thinking of me, you are not filled with me.)

But no sooner had she shed her cape copied from
Sabina’s than she recognized the room, the man, the scene, and the feelings as
not belonging to her, not having been selected by her, but as having been
borrowed from Sabina’s repertoire of stories of adventures.

Lillian was not free of Jay since she had
invited him to witness the scene enacted solely to punish his unfaithfulness.
She was not free, she was being Sabina, with the kind of man Sabina would have
chosen. All the words and gestures prescribed by Sabina in her feverish
descriptions, for thus was much experience transmitted by contagion, and
Lillian, not yet free, had been more than others predisposed to the contagion
by lowered resistance!

She was ashamed, not of the sensual meeting,
but for having acted in disguise, and eluded responsibility.

When the stranger asked her for her name she
did not say Lillian, but Sabina.

She returned home to shed her cape and her
acts, pretending not to know this woman who had spent hours with a stranger.

To put the responsibility on Sabina.

Escape escape escape—into what? Into borrowing
the self of Sabina for an hour. She had donned the recklessness of Sabina,
borrowed her cape for a shy masquerade, pretending freedom.

The clothes had not fitted very well.

But after a while, would this cease to be a
role and did the borrowing reveal Lillian’s true desires?

The possibility of being this that she
borrowed.

Blindly ashamed of what she termed
unfaithfulness (when actually she was still so tied to Jay it was merely within
the precincts of their relationship that she could act, with his presence, and
therefore unsevered from him), she discarded all the elements of this charade,
cape, bracelets, then bathed and dressed in her own Lillian costume and went to
the cafe where she sat beside Sabina who had already accumulated several plates
by which the waiter was able to add the number of drinks.

When Jay felt exhausted after hours of painting
he went to see Djuna.

He always softened as he thought of Djuna. She
was to him more than a woman. It had been difficult at first to see her simply
as a woman. His first impression had been an association with Florentine
painting, his feeling that no matter what hr origin, her experiences, her
resemblances to other women, she was for him like a canvas which had been
covered first of all with a coating of gold paint, so that whatever one painted
over it, this gold on which he had dissertated during one of his early visits
to her, was present as it remained present in the Florentine paintings.

But even though his obsession for dispelling
illusions, which made him pull at her eyelashes to see if they were real, which
made him open jars and bottles in the bathroom to see what they contained, even
though he always had the feeling that women resorted to tricks and contrived
spells which man must watch out for, he still felt that she was more than a
woman, and that given the right moment, she was willing to shed the veils, the
elusiveness, and to be completely honest.

It was not her clarity either, which he called
honesty. Her clarity he distrusted. She always made wonderful patterns—he
admitted that. There was a kind of Grecian symmetry to her movements, her life,
and her words. They looked convincingly harmonious, clear—too clear. And in the
meanwhile where was she? Not on the clear orderly surface of her ideas any
longer, but submerged, sunk in some obscure realm like a submarine. She had
only appeared to give you all her thoughts. She had only seemed to empty
herself in this clarity. She gave you a neat pattern and then slipped out of it
herself and laughed at you. Or else she gave you a neat pattern and then
slipped out of it herself and then the utterly tragic expression of her face
testified to some other realm she had entered and not allowed one to follow her
into, a realm of despair even, a realm of anguish, which was only betrayed by
her eyes.

What was the mystery of woman? Only this
obstinacy in concealing themselves—merely this persistence in creating
mysteries, as if the exposure of her thoughts and feelings were gifts reserved
for love and intimacy.

He suspected that some day an honest woman
would clear all this away. He never suspected for a moment that this mystery
was a part of themselves they did not know, could not see.

Djuna, he ruminated, was a more ornamented
woman, but an honest one.

He had long ago found a way to neutralize the
potencies of woman by a simplification all his own, which was to consider all
women as sharing but one kind of hunger, a hunger situated between the two pale
columns of the legs. Even the angels, said Jay, even the angels, and the
mothers, and the sisters, were all made the same way, and he retained this
focus upon them from the time when he was a very little boy playing on the
floor of his mother’s kitchen and an enormous German woman had come straight to
them from the immigration landing, still wearing her voluminous peasant skirts,
her native costume, and she had stood in the kitchen asking his mother to help
her find work, using some broken jargon impossible to understand—everyone in
the house dismayed by her foreignness, her braids, her speech. As if to prove
her capabilities through some universal gesture, she had started to knead the
dough expertly, kneading with fervor, while Jay’s mother watched her with
increasing interest.

Jay was playing on the floor with matches,
unnoticed, and he found himself covered as by a huge and colorful tent by the
perfoliate skirt of the German woman, his glance lost where two pale columns
converged in a revelation which had given him forever this perspective of
woman’s be, this vantage point of insight, this observatory and infallible
focus, which prevented him from losing his orientation in the vastest maze of
costumes, classes, races, nationalities—no external variations able to deprive
him of this intimate knowledge of woman’s most secret architecture…

Chuckling, he thought of Djuna’s expression
whenever she opened the door to receive him.

The dreamer wears fur and velvet blinkers.

Chuckling, Jay thought of himself entering the
house, and of her face shining between these blinkers of her vision of him as a
great painter, shutting out with royal indifference all other elements which
might disturb this vision.

He could see on her face this little shrine
built by the dreamer in which she placed him as a great painter. Won by her
fervor, he would enter with her into her dream of him, and begin to listen
raptly to her way of transmuting into gold everything he told her!

If he had stolen from the Zombie’s pocketbook
she said it was because the Zombie was provocatively miserly. If he complained
that he was oversleeping when he should be working Djuna translated it that he
was catching up on sleep lost during the period when he had only a
moving-picture hall to sleep in.

She only heard and saw what she wanted to hear
and see. (Damn women!) Her expression of expectancy, of faith, her perpetual
absolution of his acts disconcerted him at times.

The more intently he believed all she believed
while he was with her, the more precipitately he fell out of grace when he left
her, because he felt she was the depository of his own dream, and that she
would keep it while he turned his back on it.

One of the few women, chuckled Jay, who
understood the artificial paradise of art, the language of man.

As he walked, the city took on the languid
beauty of a woman, which was the beauty of Paris, especially at five o’clock,
at twilight, when the fountains, the parks, the soft lighting, the humid
streets like blue mirrors, all dissolved into a haze of pearl, extending their
fripperies and coquetries.

At the same hour New York took on its masculine
and aggressive beauty, with its brash lighting, its steel arrows and giant
obelisks piercing the sky, an electric erectness, a rigid city pitiless to
lovers, sending detectives to hotel rooms to track them down, at the same hour
that the French waiter said to the couples: do you wish a
cabinet
particulier
—atthe same hour that in New York all the energies were poured
into steel structures, digging oil wells, harnessing electricity, for power.

Jay walked leisurely, like a ragpicker of good
moments, walked through streets of joy, throwing off whatever disturbed him,
gathering only what pleased him, noticing with delight that the washed and faded
blue of the cafe awning matched the washed faded blue face of the clock in the
church spire.

Then he saw the cafe table where Lillian sat
talking with Sabina, and knowing his dream of becoming a great painter securely
stored in the eyes of Djuna (damn women!) he decided to sin against it by
sinking into the more shallow fantasies born of absinthe.

Djuna awakened from so deep a dream that
opening her eyes was like pushing aside a heavy shroud of veils, a thousand
layers of veils, and with a sensation similar to that of the trapezist who has
been swinging in vast spaces, and suddenly feels again in his two hands the
coarse touch of the swing cord.

She awakened fully to the painful knowledge
that this was a day when she would be possessed by a mood which cut her off
from fraternity.

It was also at those moments that she would
have the clearest intuitions, sudden contacts with the deepest selves of
others, divine the most hidden sorrow.

But if she spoke from this source, others would
feel uneasy, not recognizing the truth of what she said. They always felt
exposed and were quick to revenge themselves. They rushed to defend this
exposure of the self they did not know, they were not familiar with, or did not
like. They blamed her for excess of imagination, for exaggeration.