Winter of artifice; three novelettes (2 page)

Her eyes overflowed with expectancy as she met him. Then she noticed that he had come without a valise. She did not seek the

cause. She was struck by this as a betrayal of their love. Her being closed with an anguish inexplicable to him (an anguish over the possibility of a break, a separation, made her consider every small break, every small separation like a premonition of an ultimate one).

He spent his time in a struggle to reassure her, to reconquer her, to renew her faith, and she in resisting. She considered the demands of reality as something to be entirely crushed in favor of love, that obedience to reality meant a weakness in love.

Reality was the dragon that must be killed by the lover each time anew. And she was blind to her own crime against love, corroding it with the acid of her own doubt.

But a greater obstacle she had yet to encounter.

At the first meeting the dream of their encounter eclipsed the surrounding regions of their hves and isolated them together as inside a cocoon of silk and sensation. It gave them the illusion that each was tlie center of the other's existence.

No matter how exigent was the demand made upon Stella by her screen work, she always overthrew every obstacle in favor of love. She broke contracts easily, sailed at a moment's notice, and no pursuit of fame could interfere with the course of love. This^dlling:. ness to sacrifice external achievements or success_to_loye was typically feminineJjut^she expected Bru no to bghaye^ in th e same manner.

But he was a person who could only swim in the ocean of love if his moorings were maintained, the long established moorings of marriage and children. The stately house of permanency and continuity that was his home, built around his role in the world, built on peace and faith, with the smile of his wife which had become

for him the smile of his mother — this edifice made out of the other components of his nature, his need for a haven, for children who were as his brothers had been, for a wife who was that which his mother had been. He could not throw over all these creations and possessions of his day for a night's dream, and Stella was that night's dream, all impermanency, vanishing and returning only with the night.

She, the homeless one, could not respect that which he respected. He, by respecting the established, felt free of guilt. He was paying his debt of honor and he was free, free to adore her, free to dream her. This did not appease her. Nor the simplicity with which he explained that he could not tear from its foundation the human home, with the children and the wife whom he protected. He could only love and Uve in peace if he fulfilled his promises to what he had created.

It was not that Stella wanted the wife's role or place. She knew deep down how unfitted she was for this role and to that side of his nature. It was merely that she could not share a love without the feeling that into this region of Bruno's being she did not care to enter, that there lay there a danger of death to their relationship. For her, any opening, any unconquered region contained the hidden enemy, the seed of death, the possible destroyer. Only absolute possession calmed her fear.

He was at peace with his conscience and therefore he feared no punishment for the joys she gave him. It was a condition of his nature. Because he had not destroyed or displaced, he felt he would not be destroyed or displaced and he could give his faith and joy to the dream. Her anguish and fears were inexplicable to him. For him there was no enemy ready to spring at her from the calm of his house.

If a telephone call or some emergency at home tore him away from her, for her it was abandon, and the end of love. If the time were shortened it signified a diminishing of love. If a choice were to be made she felt that he would choose his wife and children against her. None of these fatalistic signs were visible to him.

This hotel room was for him the symbol of the freedom of their love, the voyage, the exploration, the unknovsna, the restlessness that could be shared together; the surprises, the marvellously formless and bodiless and houseless freedom of this world created by two people in a hotel room. It was outside of the known, the familiar, and built only out of intensity, the present, with the great exalted beauty of the changing, the fluctuating, the dangerous and unmoored. . . .

Would she destroy this world created only on the fragrance of a voice, enhanced by intermittent disappearances? The privilege of traveUing further into space and wonder because free of ballast? This marvellous world patterned only according to the irregularities of a dream, with its dark abysms in between, its change and flow and capriciousness?

Bruno clung desperately to the beauty, to the preciousness of this essence, pure because it was an essence. And for him even less threatened by death than his first love had been by the development of daily life. (For at a certain moment the face of his wife was no longer the face of a dream but became the face of his mother. At the same moment as the dream died, his home became the human and dreamless home of his boyhood, his children became the playmates of his adolescence.)

And Stella, when he explained this, knew the truth of it, yet she was the victim of a stronger demon, a demon of doubt blindly seek-

ing visible proofs, the proofs of the love in reality which would most effectively destroy the dream. For passion usually has the instinctive wisdom to evade the test of human life together which is only possible to love. For Stella, because of her doubt, so desperately in need of reassurance, if he surrendered all to her it would mean that he was giving all his total love to their dream, whereas to him surrendering all meant giving Stella a lesser self (since passion was the love of the dreamed self and not the reality).

There was in this hotel room stronger proof of the strength of the dream, and Stella demanded proofs of its human reality and in so doing exposed its incompleteness, and hastened its end (Pandora's box).

Stella! he always cried out as he entered, enveloping her in the fervor of his voice.

Stella! he repeated, to express how she filled his being and overflowed within him, to fill the room with this name which filled him.

He had a way of saying it which was like crowning her the favorite. He made of each encounter such a rounded, complete experience, charged with the violence of a great hunger. Not having seen her upon awakening, not having helped to free her of the cocoon web of the night, not having shared her first contact with daylight, her first meal, the inception of her moods for that day, the first intentions and plans for action, he felt all the more impelled to catch her at the moment of the climax, to join her at the culmination. The lost, missed moments of life together, the lost, missed gestures, were thrown in desperation to feed the bonfire known only to foreshortened lives.

Because of all this that was lost around the love, the hotel room

became the island, the poem and the paradise, because of all that was torn away, and sunk away.

The miracle of intensification.

Yet Stella asked, mutely, with every gasp of doubt and anguish: Let us live together (as if human life would give a certitude!). And he answered, mutely, with every act of faith: Let us dream together!

He arrived each day with new eyes. Undimmed by familiarity. New eyes for the woman he had not seen enough. New, intense, deeply seeing eyes, seeing her in her entirety each time like a new person.

As he did not see the process of her walking towards their island, dressing for it, resting for it, fighting oflF the inundation and demands of other people to reach him, her presence seemed like an apparition, and he had to repossess her, because apparitions tend to disappear as they come, by routes unknovni, into countries unknown.

There was between them this knowledge of the missing dimension and the need to recapture the lost terrain, to play the emotional detective for the lost fragments of the selves which had hved alone, as separate pieces, in a great effort to bring them all together into one again.

At his wrists the hair showed brilliant gold.

Hers dark and straight, and his curled, so that at times it seemed

it was his hair which enveloped her, it was his desire which had the feminine sinuosities to espouse and cHng, while hers was rigid.

It was he who surrounded and enveloped her, as his curled hair wound around the straightness of hers, and how sweet this had been in her distress and her chaos. She touched his wrists always in wonder, as if to ascertain his presence, because the joyousness of his coloring delighted her, because the smoothness of his movements was a preliminary to their accord and rhythms. Their movements toward each other were symphonic and preordained. Her divination of his moods and his of hers synchronized their movements like those of a dance. There were days when she felt small and weak, and he then increased his stature to receive and shelter her, and his arms and body seemed a fortress, and there were days when he was in need of her strength, days when their mouths transmitted all the fevers and hungers, days when frenzy called for an abandon of the whole body. Days when the caresses were a drug, or a symphony, or small secret duets and duels, or vast complex veilings which neither could entirely tear apart, and there were secrets, and resistances, and frenzies, and again dissolutions from which it seemed as if neither could ever return to the possession of his independence.

There was always this mingling of hairs, which later in the bath she would tenderly separate from hers, laying the tendrils before her like the signs of the calendar of their love, the unwitherable flowers of their caresses.

While he was there, melted by his eyes, his voice, sheltered in his tallness, encompassed by his attentiveness, she was joyous. But when he was gone, and so entirely gone that she was forbidden to write him or telephone him, that she had in reality

no way to reach him, touch him, call him back, then she became possessed again with this frenzy against barriers, against limitations, against forbidden regions. To have touched the point of fire in him was not enough.p'o be his secret dream, his secret passion. She must ravage and conquer the absolute, for the sake of love. Not knowing that she was at this moment the enemy of love, its executionerT^

Once he stood about to depart and she asked him: can't you stay for the whole night? And he shook his head sadly, his blue eyes no longer joyous, but blurred. This firmness with which she thought he was defending the rights of his wife, and with which in reahty he only defended the equilibrium of his scrupulous soul, appeared to her like a flaw in the love.

If Stella felt an obstacle placed before one of her wishes such as her wish that Bruno should stay the whole night with her when it was utterly impossible for him to do so, this obstacle, no matter of what nature, became the symbol of a battle she must win or else consider herself destroyed

She did not pause to ask herself the reasons for the refusal, or to consider the validity of these reasons, the claims to which others may have had a right. The refusal represented for her the failure to obtain a proof of love. The removal of this obstacle became a matter of life and death, because for her it balanced success or failure, abandon or treachery, triumph or power.

The small refusal, based on an altogether separate reason, unrelated to Stella, became the very symbol of her inner sense of frustration, and the effort to overcome it the very symbol of her salvation.

If she could bend the will and decision of Bnmo, it meant that

Bruno loved her. If not, it meant Bnmo did not love her. The test was as devoid of real meaning as the tearing of leaves on a flower done by superstitious lovers who place their destiny in the mathematics of coincidence or accident.

And Stella, regardless of the cause, became suddenly blind to the feelings of everyone else as only sick people can become blind. She became completely isolated in this purely personal drama of a refusal she could not accept and could not see in any other light but that of a personal offense to her. A love that could not overcome all obstacles (as in the myths and legends of romantic ages) was not a love at all.

(This small favor she demanded took on the proportions of the ancient holocausts demanded by the mystics as proofs of devotion.)

She had reached the exaggeration, known to the emotionally unstable, of considering every small act as an absolute proof of love or hatred, and demanding of the faithful an absolute surrender. In every small act of yielding Stella accumulated defenses against the inundating flood of doubts. The doubt devoured her faster than she could gather external proofs of reassurance, and so the love given her was not a free love but a love that must accumulate votive offerings like those made by the primitives to their jealous gods. There must be every day the renewal of candles, foods and precious gifts, incense and sacrifice and if necessary (and it was always necessary to the neurotic) the sacrifice of human life. Every human being who fell under her spell became not the lover, but tlie day and night nurse to this sickness, this unfillable longing, this ravenous devourer of human happiness.

You won't stay all night?

The muted, inarticulate despair these few words contained.

The unheard, unnoticed, unregistered cry of lonehness which arises from human beings. And not a loneliness which could be appeased with one night, or with a thousand nights, or with a lifetime, or with a marriage. A lonehness that human beings could not fill. For it came from her separation from human beings. She felt her separation from human beings and beheved the lover alone could destroy it.

The doubt and fear which accompanied this question made her stand apart like some unbending god of ancient rituals watching for this accumulation of proofs, the faithful offering food, blood and their very lives. And still the doubt was there for these were but external proofs and they proved nothing. They could not give her back her faith.

The word penetrated Stella's being as if someone had uttered for the first time the name of her enemy, until then unknown to her.