Ladders to Fire (6 page)

When they walked together, Lillian sometimes
asked
Djuna
: “Walk in front of me, so I can see how
you walk. You have such a sway of the hips!”

In front of Lillian walked Lillian’s lost
femininity, imprisoned in the male Lillian. Lillian’s femininity imprisoned in
the deepest wells of her being, loving
Djuna
, and
knowing it must reach her own femininity at the bottom of the well by way of
Djuna
. By wearing
Djuna’s
feminine exterior, swaying her hips, becoming
Djuna
.

As
Djuna
enjoyed
Lillian’s violence, Lillian enjoyed
Djuna’s
feminine
capitulations. The pleasure
Djuna
took in her
capitulations to love, to desire. Lillian breathed out through
Djuna
. What took place in
Djuna’s
being which Lillian could not reach, she at least reached by way of
Djuna
.

“The first time a boy hurt me,” said Lillian to
Djuna
, “it was in school. I don’t remember what he
did. But I wept. And he laughed at me. Do you know what I did? I went home and
dressed in my brother’s suit. I tried to feel as the boy felt. Naturally as I
put on the suit I felt I was putting on a costume of strength. It made me feel
sure, as the boy was, confident, impudent. The mere fact of putting my hands in
the pockets made me feel arrogant. I thought then that to be a boy
mt
one did not suffer. That it was being a girl that was
responsible for the suffering. Later I felt the same way. I thought man had
found a way out of suffering by objectivity. What the man called being
reasonable. When my husband said: Lillian, let’s be reasonable, it meant he had
none of the feeling I had, that he could be objective. What a power! Then there
was another thing. When I felt his great choking anguish I discovered one
relief, and that was action. I felt like the women who had to sit and wait at
home while there was a war going on. I felt if only I could join the war,
participate, I wouldn’t feel the anguish and the fear. All through the last war
as a child I felt: if only they would let me be Joan of Arc. Joan of Arc wore a
suit of armor, she sat on a horse, she fought side by side with the men. She
must have gained their strength. Then it was the same way about men. At a
dance, as a girl, the moment of waiting before they asked me seemed
intolerable, the suspense, and the insecurity; perhaps they were not going to
ask me! So I rushed forward, to cut the suspense. I rushed. All my nature
became rushed, propelled by the anxiety, merely to cut through all the moment
of anxious uncertainty.”

Djuna
looked tenderly
at her, not the strong Lillian, the overwhelming Lillian, the aggressive
Lillian, but the hidden, secret, frightened Lillian who had created such a hard
armor and disguise around her weakness.

Djuna
saw the Lillian
hidden in her coat of armor, and all of Lillian’s armor lay broken around her,
like cruel pieces of mail which had wounded her more than they had protected
her from the enemy. The mail had melted, and revealed the bruised feminine flesh.
At the first knowledge of the weakness Lillian had picked up the mail, wrapped
herself in it and had taken up a lance. The lance! The man’s lance. Uncertainty
resolved, relieved by the activity of attack!

The body of Lillian changed as she talked, the
fast coming words accelerating the dismantling. She was taking off the shell,
the covering, the defenses, the coat of mail, the activity.

Suddenly Lillian laughed. In the middle of
tears, she laughed: “I’m remembering a very comical incident. I was about
sixteen. There was a boy in love with me. Shyly, quietly in love. We were in
the same school but he lived quite far away. We all used bicycles. One day we
were going to be separated for a week by the holidays. He suggested we both
bicycle together towards a meeting place between the two towns. The week of
separation seemed too unbearable. So it was agreed: at a certain hour we would
leave the house together and meet half way.”

Lillian started off. At first at a normal pace.
She knew the rhythm of the boy. A rather easy, relaxed rhythm. Never rushed.
Never precipitate. She at first adopted his rhythm. Dreaming of him, of his
slow smile, of his shy worship, of his expression of this worship, which
consisted mainly in waiting for her here, there. Waiting. Not advancing,
inviting, but waiting. Watching her pass by.

She pedaled slowly, dreamily. Then slowly her
pleasure and tranquility turned to anguish: suppose he did not come? Suppose
she arrived before him? Could she bear the sight of the desolate place of their
meeting, the failed meeting? The exaltation that had been increasing in her,
like some powerful motor, what could she do with this exaltation if she arrived
alone, and the meeting failed? The fear affected her in two directions. She
could stop right there, and turn back, and not face the possibility of
disaointment
, or she could rush forward and accelerate the
moment of painful suspense, and she chose the second. Her lack of confidence in
life, in realization, in the fulfillment of her desires, in the outcome of a
dream, in the possibility of reality corresponding to her fantasy, speeded her
bicycle with the incredible speed of anxiety, a speed beyond the human body,
beyond human endurance.

She arrived before him. Her fear was justified!
She could not measure what the anxiety had done to her speed, the acceleration
which had broken the equality of rhythm. She arrived as she had feared, at a
desolate spot on the road, and the boy had become this invisible image which
taunts the dreamer, a mirage that could not be made real. It had become reality
eluding the dreamer, the wish unfulfilled.

The boy may have arrived later. He may have
fallen asleep and not come at all. He may have had a tire puncture. Nothing
mattered. Nothing could prevent her from feeling that she was not Juliet
waiting on the balcony, but Romeo who had to leap across space to join her. She
had leaped, she had acted Romeo, and when woman leaped she leaped into a void.

Later it was not the drama of two bicycles, of
a road, of two separated towns; later it was a darkened room, and a man and
woman pursuing pleasure and fusion.

At first she lay passive dreaming of the
pleasure that would come out of the darkness, to dissolve and invade her. But
it was not pleasure which came out of the darkness to clasp her. It was
anxiety. Anxiety made confused gestures in the dark, crosscurrents of forces,
short circuits, and no pleasure. A depression, a broken rhythm, a feeling such
as men must have after they have taken a whore.

Out of the prone figure of the woman,
apparently passive, apparently receptive, there rose a taut and anxious shadow,
the shadow of the woman bicycling too fast; who, to relieve her insecurity,
plunges forward as the desperado does and is defeated because this
aggressiveness cannot meet its mate and unite with it. A part of the woman has
not participated in this marriage, has not been taken. But was it a part of the
woman, or the shadow of anxiety, which dressed itself in man’s clothes and
assumed man’s active role to quiet its anguish? Wasn’t it the woman who dressed
as a man and pedaled too fast?

Jay. The table at which he sat was stained with
wine. His blue eyes were inscrutable like those of a Chinese sage. He ended all
his phrases in a kind of hum, as if he put his foot on the pedal of his voice
and created an echo. In this way none of his phrases ended abruptly.

Sitting at the bar he immediately created a
climate, a tropical day. In spite of the tension in her, Lillian felt it.
Sitting at a bar with his voice rolling over, he dissolved and liquefied the
hard click of silver on plates, the icy dissonances of glasses, the brittle
sound of money thrown on the counter.

He was tall but he carried his tallness slackly
and easily, as easily as his coat and hat, as if all of it could be discarded
and sloughed off at any moment when he needed lightness or nimbleness. His body
large, shaggy, as if never definitely chiseled, never quite ultimately
finished, was as casually his as his passing moods and varying fancies and
fortunes.

He opened his soft animal mouth a little, as if
in expectancy of a drink. But instead, he said (as if he had absorbed Lillian’s
face and voice in place of the drink), “I’m happy. I’m too happy.” Then he
began to laugh, to laugh, to laugh, with his head shaking like a bear, shaking
from right to left as if it were too heavy a head. “I can’t help it. I can’t
help laughing. I’m too happy. Last night I spent the night here. It was
Christmas and I didn’t have the money for a hotel room. And the night before I
slept at a movie house. They overlooked me, didn’t sweep where I lay. In the
morning I played the movie piano. In walked the furious manager, then he
listened, then he gave me a contract starting this evening. Christ, Lillian, I
never thought Christmas would bring me anything, yet it brought you.”

How gently he had walked into her life, how
quietly he seemed to be living, while all the time he was drawing bitter
caricatures on the bar table, on the backs of envelopes. Drawing bums, drunks,
derelicts.

“So you’re a pianist…that’s what I should have
been. I’m not bad, but I would never work hard enough. I wanted also to be a
painter. I might have been a writer too, if I had worked enough. I did a bit of
acting too, at one time. As it is, I guess I’m the last man on earth. Why did
you single me out?”

This man who would not be distinguished in a
crowd, who could pass through it like an ordinary man, so quiet, so absorbed,
with his hat on one side, his steps dragging a little, like a lazy devil
enjoying everything, why did she see him hungry, thirsty, abandoned?

Behind this
Jay,with
his southern roguishness, perpetually calling for drinks, why did she see a
lost man?

He sat like a workman before his drinks, he
talked like a cart driver to the whores at the bar; they were all at ease with
him. His presence took all the straining and willing out of Lillian. He was
like the south wind: blowing when he came, melting and softening, bearing joy
and abundance.

When they met, and she saw him walking towards
her, she felt he would never stop walking towards her and into her very being:
he would walk right into her being with his soft lazy walk and purring voice
and his mouth slightly open.

She could not hear his voice. His voice rumbled
over the surface of her skin, like another caress. She had no power against his
voice. It came straight from him into her. She could stuff her ears and still
it would find its way into her blood and make it rise.

All things were born anew when her dress fell
on the floor of his room.

He said: “I feel humble, Lillian, but it is all
so good, so good.” He gave to the word good a mellowness which made the whole
room glow, which gave a warmer color to the bare window, to the woolen shirt
hung on a peg, to the single glass out of which they drank together.

Behind the yellow curtain the sun seeped in:
everything was the color of a tropical afternoon.

The small room was like a deep-set alcove.
Wto
the
barist
and warm blood;
the high drunkenness which made Jay flushed and heavy blooded. His sensual features
expanded.

“As soon as you come, I’m jubilant.” And he did
somersaults on the bed, two or three of them.

“This is fine wine, Lillian. Let’s drink to my
failure. There’s no doubt about it, no doubt whatever that I’m a failure.”

“I won’t let you be a failure,” said Lillian.

“You say: I want, as if that made things
happen.”

“It does.”

“I don’t know what I expect of you. I expect
miracles,” He looked up at her slyly, then mockingly, then gravely again. “I
have no illusions,” he said.

Then he sat down with his heavy shoulders
bowed, and his head bowed, but Lillian caught that swift, passing flash, a
moment’s hope, the lightning passage of a spark of faith left in his
indifference to his fate. She clung to this.

Jay—gnome and sprite and faun, and playboy of
the mother-bound world. Brightly gifted, he painted while he enjoyed the
painting; the accidental marvels of colors, the pleasant shock of apparitions
made in a game with paint. He stopped painting where the effort began, the need
for discipline or travail. He danced while he was allowed to improvise, to
surprise himself and others, to stretch, laugh, and court and be courted; but
stopped if there were studying, developing or disciplining or effort or
repetition involved. He acted, he acted loosely, flowingly, emotionally, while
nothing more difficult was demanded of him, but he evaded rehearsals, fatigue,
strain, effort. He pursued no friend, he took what came.

He gave himself to the present moment. To be
with the friend, to drink with the friend, to talk with the friend, he forgot
what was due the next day, and if it were something which demanded time, or
energy, he could not meet it. He had not provided for it. He was asleep when he
should have been awake, and tired when his energy was required, and absent when
his presence was summoned. The merest expectation from a friend, the most
trivial obligation, sent him running in the opposite direction. He came to the
friend while there was pleasure to be had. He left as soon as the pleasure
vanished and reality began. An accident, an illness, poverty, a quarrel—he was
never there for them.