Ladders to Fire (8 page)

Against me. Now the pain about the pianos left
out in the rain suddenly touched her personally, and she understood why she had
not been able to laugh freely. Those pianos were not only those of Jay’s friend
in the past, but her own too, since she had given up playing in order to work
for Jay’s support. She had surrendered any hope of becoming a concert pianist
to attend better to their immediate needs. Jay’s mockery wounded her, for it
exposed his insensitiveness to anyone’s loss, and to her loss too, his
incapacity to feel for others, to understand that with the loss of her pianist
self she had lost a very large part of herself, annihilated an entire portion
of her personality, sacrificed it to him.

It was her piano Jay had left out in the rain,
to be ruined…

He was wearing bedroom slippers and he was
painting, with a bottle of red wine beside him. Circles of red wine on the
floor. Stains. The edge of the table was burnt by cigarette stubs.

He didn’t care. He said that what he had
painted today was not as good as yesterday, but he didn’t care. He was enjoying
it just the same. He wasn’t worrying about art. Everything was good, hang
perfection, and he was out of cigarettes and if she would give him one he might
finish that watercolor. She had come to interrupt him, that was good too, that
was life; life was more important than any painting, let the interruptions
come,
specially
in the form of a woman; let people
walk in, it was good, to paint was good, not to paint was just as good, and
eating and love making were even better, and now he was finished and he was
hungry, and he wished they might go to the movies, good or bad…

The room was black. Jay was asleep in her arms,
now, heavily asleep. She heard the organ grinder grinding his music. It was
Saturday night. Always a holiday with him, always Saturday night with the crowds
laughing and shouting and the organ grinder playing.

“According to the Chinese,” said Jay,
awakening, “there was a realm between heaven and earth…this must be it.”

Tornadoes of desire and exquisite calms. She
felt heavy and burnt.

“I want to keep you under lock and key,
Lillian.”

Suddenly he leaped up with a
whiplike
alacrity and exuberance and began to talk about
his childhood, about his life in the streets, about the women he had loved and
ditched, and the women who had ditched and bitched him, as he put it. He seemed
to remember everything at once, as though it was a ball inside of him which
unraveled of itself, and as it unraveled made new balls which he would unravel
again another day. Had he actually done all these things he was relating to Lillian
with such kaleidoscopic fury and passion? Had he really killed a boy in school
with a snow ball? Had he really struck his first wife down when she was with
child? Had he really butted his head against a wall in sudden anger because the
woman he loved had rejected him? Had he really taken abortions and thrown them
off the ferry boat in order to pick up a little extra change? Had he really
stolen silver from a blind news vendor?

All the layers of his past he unraveled and
laid before her, his masks, his buffooneries, and she saw him pretending,
driven by obscure revenges, by fears, by weaknesses.

She saw him in the past and in the world,
another man from the one she knew. And like all women in love she discarded
this man of the past, holding others responsible for his behavior; and
thinking: before me he sheds all his poses and defenses. The legend of hardness
and callousness she did not believe. She saw him innocent, as we always see the
loved one, innocent and even a victim.

She felt that she knew which was the rind and
which the core of the man. “You always know,” he said, “what is to be laughed
away.”

Then he rolled over and fell asleep. No noise,
no care, no work undone, no imperfection
unmastered
,
no love scene
unresumed
, no problem unsolved, ever
kept him awake. He could roll over and forget. He could roll over with such
grand indifference and let everything wait. When he rolled over the day ended.
Nothing could be carried over into the next day. The next day would be
absolutely new and clean. He just rolled over and extinguished everything. Just
rolling over.

Djuna
and Jay. For
Djuna
Jay does not look nonchalant but rather intent and
listening, as if in quest of some revelation, as if he were questioning for the
first time.

“I’ve lived so blindly… No time to think much.
Tons and tons of experience. Lillian always creating trouble, misery, changes,
flights, dramas. No time to digest anything. And then she says I die when she
leaves, that pain and war are good for me.”

Djuna
notices that
although he is only forty years old, his hair is greying at the temple.

“Your eyes are full of wonder,” he said, “as if
you expected a miracle every day. I can’t let you go now. I want to go places
with you, obscure little places, just to be able to say: here I came with
Djuna
. I’m insatiable, you know. I’ll ask you for the
impossible. What it is, I don’t know. You’ll tell me, probably. You’re quicker
than I am. And you’re the first woman with whom I feel I can be absolutely
sincere. You make me happy because I can talk with you. I feel at ease with
you. This is a little drunken, but you know what I mean. You always seem to
know what I mean.”

“You change from a wise old man to a savage.
You’re both timid and cruel too, aren’t you?”

“There is something here it is impossible for
Lillian to understand, or to break either. I feel we are friends. Don’t you
see? Friends. Christ, have a man and woman ever been friends, beyond love and
beyond desire, and beyond everything, friends? Well, this is what I feel with
you.”

She hated the gaiety with which she received
these words, for that condemnation of her body to be the pale watcher, the
understanding one upon whom others laid their burdens, laying their heads on
her lap to sleep, to be lulled from others’ wounds. And even as she hated her
own goodness, she heard herself say quietly, out of the very core of this sense
of justice: “The destroyers do not always destroy, Jay.”

“You see more, you just see more, and what you
see is there all right. You get at the
ce
of everything.”

And now she was caught between them, to be the
witch of words, a silent swift shadow darkened by uncanny knowledge, forgetting
herself, her human needs, in the unfolding of this choking blind relationship:
Lillian and Jay lacerating each other because of their different needs.

Pale beauty of the watcher shining in the dark.

Both of them now,
Jayand
Lillian, entered
Djuna’s
life by gusts, and left by
gusts, as they lived.

She sat for hours afterwards sailing her
lingering mind like a slow river boat down the feelings they had dispensed with
prodigality.

“In my case,” said Jay, alone with her, “what’s
difficult is to keep any image of myself clear. I have never thought about
myself much. The first time I saw myself full length, as it were, was in you. I
have grown used to considering your image of me as the correct one. Probably
because it makes me feel good. I was like a wheel without a hub.”

“And I’m the hub, now,” said
Djuna
, laughing.

Jay was lying on the couch in the parlor, and
she had left him to dress for an evening party. When she was dressed she opened
the door and then stood before her long mirror perfuming herself.

The window was open on the garden and he said:
“This is like a setting for
Pelleas
and
Melisande
. It is all a dream.”

The perfume made a silky sound as she squirted
it with the atomizer, touching her ear lobes, her neck. “Your dress is green
like a princess,” he said, “I could swear it is a green I have never seen
before and will never see again. I could swear the garden is made of cardboard,
that the trembling of the light behind you comes from the footlights, that the
sounds are music. You are almost transparent there, like the mist of perfume
you are throwing on yourself. Throw more perfume on yourself, like a fixative on
a water color. Let me have the atomizer. Let me put perfume all over you so
that you won’t disappear and fade like a water color.”

She moved towards him and sat on the edge of
the couch: “You don’t quite believe in me as a woman,” she said, with an immense
distress quite out of proportion to his fancy.

“This is a setting for
Pelleas
and
Melisande
,” he said, “and I know that when you
leave me for that dinner I will never see you again. Those incidents last at
the most three hours, and the echoes of the music maybe a day. No more.”

The color of the day, the color of Byzantine
paintings, that gold which did not have the firm surface of lacquer, that gold
made of a fine powder easily decomposed by time, a soft powdery gold which
seemed on the verge of decomposing, as if each grain of dust, held together
only by atoms, was ever ready to fall apart like a mist of perfume; that gold
so thin in substance that it allowed one to divine the canvas behind it, the
space in the painting, the presence of reality behind its thinness, the fibrous
space lying behind the
illuson
, the absence of color
and depth, the condition of emptiness and blackness underneath the gold powder.
This gold powder which had fallen now on the garden, on each leaf of the trees,
which was flowering inside the room, on her black hair, on the skin of his
wrists, on his frayed suit sleeve, on the green carpet, on her green dress, on
the bottle of perfume, on his voice, on her anxiety—the very breath of living,
the very breath he and she took in to live and breathed out to live—that very
breath could mow and blow it all down.

The essence, the human essence always
evaporating where the dream installs itself.

The air of that summer day, when the wind
itself had suspended its breathing, hung between the window and garden; the air
itself could displace a leaf, could displace a word, and a displaced leaf or
word might change the whole aspect of the day.

The essence, the human essence always
evaporating where the dream installed itself and presided.

Every time he said he had been out the night
before with friends and that he had met a woman, there was a suspense in
Lillian’s being, a moment of fear that he might add: I met the woman who will
replace you. This moment was repeated for many years with the same suspense,
the same sense of the fragility of love, without bringing any change in his
love. A kind of superstition haunted her, running crosscurrent to the strength
of the ties binding them, a sense of menace. At first because the love was all
expansion and did not show its roots; and later, when the roots were apparent,
because she expected a natural fading and death.

This fear appeared at the peak of their deepest
moments, a precipice all around their ascensions. This fear appeared through
the days of their tranquility, as a sign of death rather than a sign of natural
repose. It marked every moment of silence with the seal of a fatal secret. The
greater the circle spanned by the attachment, the larger she saw the fissure
through which human beings fall again into solitude.

The woman who personified this danger never
appeared. His description gave no clues. Jay made swift portraits which he
seemed to forget the next day. He was a man of many friends. His very
ebullience created a warm passage but an onward flowing one, forming no
grooves, fixing no image permanently. His enthusiasms were quickly burned out,
sometimes in one evening. She never sought out these passing images.

Now and then he said with great simplicity:
“You are the only one. You are the only one.”

And then one day he said: “The other day I met
a woman you would like. I was sorry you were not there. She is coming with
friends this evening. Do you want to stay? You will see. She has the most
extraordinary eyes.”

“She has extraordinary eyes? I’ll stay. I want
to know her.”

(Perhaps if I run fast enough ahead of the
present I will outdistance the shock. What is the difference between fear and
intuition? How clearly I have seen what I imagine, as clearly as a vision. What
is it I feel now, fear or premonition?)

Helen’s knock on the door was vigorous,
lik
an attack. She was very big and wore a severely
tailored suit. She looked like a statue, but a statue with haunted eyes,
inhuman eyes not made for weeping, full of animal glow. And the rest of her
body a statue pinned down to its base, immobilized by a fear. She had the
immobility of a Medusa waiting to transfix others into stone: hypnotic and
cold, attracting others to her mineral glow.

She had two voices, one which fell deep like
the voice of a man, and another light and innocent. Two women disputing inside
of her.

She aroused a feeling in Lillian which was not
human. She felt she was looking at a painting in which there was an infinity of
violent blue. A white statue with lascivious Medusa hair. Not a woman but a
legend with enormous space around her.

Her eyes were begging for an answer to an
enigma. The pupils seemed to want to separate from the whites of the eyes.