Ladders to Fire (11 page)

The red lights from a hotel sign shone into the
studio. A red well. A charging, a hoofing, a clanging, a rushing through the
body. Thumping. The torrent pressure of a machine, panting, sliding back and
forth, back and forth.

Swing. Swing. The bed-like stillness and
downiness of summer foliage. Roll. Roll. Clutch and fold. Steam. Steam. The
machine on giant oiled gongs yielding honey, rivers of honey on a bed of summer
foliage. The boat slicing open the lake waters, ripples extending to the tips
of the hair and the roots of the toes.

No stronger sea than this sea of feelings she
swam into with him, was rolled by, no waves like the waves of desire, no foam
like the foam of pleasure. No sand warmer than skin, the sand and
quicksands
of caresses. No sun more powerful than the sun
of desire, no snow like the snow of her resistance melting in blue joys, no
earth anywhere as rich as flesh.

She slept, she fell into trances, she was lost,
she was renewed, she was blessed, pierced by joy, lulled, burned, consumed,
purified, born and reborn within the whale belly of the night.

At the beginning of their life together he had
constantly reverted to his childhood as if to deposit in her hands all the
mementos of his early voyages.

In all love’s beginnings this journey backwards
takes place: the desire of every lover to give his loved one all of his
different selves, from the beginning.

What was most vivid in Jay’s memory was the
treachery of his parents.

“I was about six years old when a brand-new
battleship docked at the Brooklyn Navy yard. All the boys in the neighborhood
had been taken to see it but me. They kept describing it in every detail until
I could dream of it as if I had seen it myself. I wanted desperately for my
father to take me to it. He kept postponing the visit. Then one day he told me
to wash my hands and ears carefully, to put on my best suit and said he was
taking me to see the battleship. I washed myself as never before. I walked
beside my father neat, and proud and drunk with gaiety. I kept telling him the
number of guns we would see, the number of portholes. My father listened with
apparent interest. He walked me into a doctor’s office instead, where I had my
tonsils taken out. The pain was a million times multiplied by the shock of
disillusion, of betrayal, by the violent contrast between my dream, my
expectations, and the brutal reality of the operation.”

As he told this story it was clear to Lillian
that he still felt the shock of the deception and had never forgiven his
father. The intensity of the wish had been made even greater by the poverty of
his childhood which made the visit to the battleship a unique pleasure
discussed by his playmates for a whole year and not easily forgotten.

“One very cold, snowy night my mother and I
were walking towards the river. I was very small, five years old maybe. My
mother was walking too fast for me, and I felt terribly cold, especially my
hands. My mother carried a muff. Every now and then she took her right hand out
of the muff to
gb
mine when we crossed the streets.
The warmth of her hand warmed me all through. Then she would drop my hand again
and nestle hers back in her muff. I began to weep: I wanted to put my hand
inside of her muff but she wouldn’t let me. I wept and raged as if it were a
matter of life and death—probably was, for me. I wanted the warmth and her
naked hands. The more I wept and pulled at the muff the harsher my mother got.
Finally she slapped my hand so I would let the muff go.”

As he told this his blue eyes became the eyes
of an irrevocably angry child. Lillian could see clear through his open eyes as
through the wrong end of a telescope, a diminutive Jay raging, cold and
thwarted, with his blue frozen hands reaching for his mother’s muff.

This image was not being transmitted to Lillian
the woman, but to the responsive child in herself understanding and sharing his
anger and disillusion. It was the child in herself who received it as it sank
through and beyond the outer layer of the woman who sat there listening with a
woman’s full body, a woman’s face. But of this response there was no outer sign
showing for Jay to see: the child in her lay so deeply locked within her, so
deeply buried, that no sign of its existence or of its response was apparent.
It did not beckon through her eyes which showed only a woman’s compassion, nor
alter her gestures nor the pose of her body which was the pose of a woman
listening to a child and looking at his smallness without herself changing
stature. At this moment, like Jay, she could have slipped out of her maturity,
of her woman’s body, and exposed her child’s face, eyes, movements, and then
Jay would have seen it, known that he had communicated with it, touched it by
way of his own childhood, and the child might have met the child and become
aware of its similar needs.

By her attitude she did not become one with him
in this return to his past self. What she overtly extended to him was one who
seemed done with her child self and who would replace the harsh mother, extend
the muff and the warm naked hands.

She became, at that instant, indelibly fixed in
his eyes not as another child with possibly equal needs, but as the stronger
one in possession of the power to dispense to all
hisneeds
.

From now on was established an inequality in
power: he was the cold and hungry one, she the muff and the warm naked hands.

From now on her needs, concealed and buried as
mere interferences with the accomplishment of this role, were condemned to
permanent muteness. Strong direction was given to her activity as the muff, as
the provider of innumerable battleships in compensation for the one he had been
cheated of. Giving to him on all levels, from book to blanket to phonograph to
fountain pen to food, was always and forever the battleship he had dreamed and
not seen. It was the paying off of a debt to the cheated child.

Lillian did not know then that the one who
believes he can pay this early debt meets a bottomless well. Because the first
denial has set off a fatality of revenge which no amount of giving can placate.
Present in every child and criminal is this conviction that no retribution will
repair the injury done. The man who was once starved may revenge himself upon
the world not by stealing just once, or by stealing only what he needs, but by
taking from the world an endless toll in payment of something irreplaceable,
which i the lost faith.

This diminutive Jay who appeared in the darkness
when he evoked his childhood was also a personage who could come nearer to her
own frightened self without hurting her than the assertive, rather ruthless Jay
who appeared in the daytime when he resumed his man’s life. When he described
his smallness and how he could
entersaloons
to call
for his father without having to swing the doors open, it seemed to Lillian
that she could encompass this small figure better in the range of her vision
than the reckless, amorphous, protean Jay whose personality flowed into so many
channels like swift mercury.

When Jay described the vehemence, the wildness,
the hunger with which he went out into the streets to play, it seemed to her
that he was simultaneously describing and explaining the vehemence, the hunger,
the wildness with which he went out at night now and left her alone, so that
the present became strangely innocent in her mind.

When he talked about his impulses towards other
women he took on the expression not of a man who had enjoyed another woman
sensually, but of a gay, irrepressible child whose acts were absolutely
uncontrollable; it became no longer infidelity but a childish, desperate
eagerness to “go to the street and play.”

She saw him in the present as the same child
needing to boast of his conquests out of a feeling of helplessness, needing to
be admired, to win many friends, and thus she attenuated in herself the anxiety
she experienced at his many far-flung departures from her.

When she rebelled at times he looked completely
baffled by her rebellions, as if there were nothing in his acts which could
harm her. She always ended by feeling guilty: he had given her his entire self
to love, including the child, and now, out of noblesse oblige, she could not
possibly act…like his harsh mother!

He looked at the sulphur-colored
Pernod
and drank it.

He was in the mood to paint his self-portrait
for anyone who wanted to listen: this always happened after
someonehad
attacked his painting, or claimed some overdue debt.

So Jay drank
Pernod
and explained: “I’m like Buddha who chose to live in poverty. I abandoned my
first wife and child for a religious life. I now depend on the bowl of rice
given to me by my followers.”

“What do you teach?” asked a young man who was
not susceptible to the contagion of Jay’s gaiety.

“A life from which all suffering is absent.”

But to the onlooker who saw them together,
Lillian, ever alert to deflect the blows which might strike at him, it seemed
much more as if Jay had merely unburdened all
sadnesses
upon her rather than as if he had found a secret for eliminating them
altogether. His disciples inevitably discovered they, too, must find themselves
a Lillian to achieve his way of life.

“I’m no teacher,” said Jay. “I’m just a happy
man. I can’t explain how I
arr
his
entirt
such a state.” He pounded his chest with delight.
“Give me a bowl of rice and I will make you as joyous as I am.”

This always brought an invitation to dinner.

“Nothing to worry about,” he always said to
Lillian. “Someone will always invite me to dinner.”

In return for the dinner Jay took them on a
guided tour of his way of life. Whoever did not catch his mood could go
overboard. He was no initiator. Let others learn by osmosis!

But this was only one of his self-portraits.
There were other days when he did not like to present himself as a laughing man
who communicated irresponsibility and guiltlessness, but as the great
barbarian. In this mood he exulted the warrior, the invaders, the pillagers,
the
rapers
. He believed in violence. He saw himself
as Attila avenging the impurities of the world by bloodshed. He saw his
paintings then as a kind of bomb.

As he talked he became irritated with the young
man who had asked him what he taught, for Jay noticed that he walked back and
forth constantly but not the whole length of the studio. He would take five
long steps, stop mechanically, and turn back like an automaton. The nervous
compulsion disturbed Jay and he stopped him: “I wish you’d sit down.”

“Excuse me, I’m really sorry,” he said,
stopping dead. A look of anxiety came to his face. “You see, I’ve just come out
of jail. In jail I could only walk five steps, no more. Now when I’m in a large
room, it disturbs me. I want to explore it, familiarize myself with it, at the
same time I feel compelled to walk no further.”

“You make me think of a friend I had,” said
Jay, “who was very poor and a damned good painter and of the way he escaped
from his narrow life. He was living at the Impasse
Rouet
,
and as you know probably, that’s the last step before you land at the Hospital,
the Insane Asylum or the Cemetery. He lived in one of those houses set far back
into a courtyard, full of studios as bare as cells. There was no heat in the
house and most of the windows were cracked and let the wind blow through. Those
who owned stoves, for the most part, didn’t own any coal. Peter’s studio had an
additional anomaly: it had no windows, only a transom. The door opened directly
on the courtyard. He had no stove, a cot whose springs showed through the gored
mattress. No sheets, and only one old blanket. No doorbell, of course. No
electricity, as he couldn’t pay the bill. He used candles, and when he had no
money for candles he got fat from the butcher and burnt it. The concierge was
like an old octopus, reaching everywhere at once with her man’s voice and
inquisitive whiskers. Peter was threatened with eviction when he hit upon an
idea. Every year, as you know, foreign governments issued prizes for the best
painting, the best sculpture. Peter got one of the descriptive pamphlets from
the Dutch embassy where he had a friend. He brought it to the concierge and
read it to her, then explained: Fact one: he was the only Dutch painter in
Paris. Fact two: a prize would be given to the best painting produced by a
Dutchman, amounting to half a million francs. The concierge was smart enough to
see the point. She agreed to let the rent slide for a month, to lend him money
for paints and a little extra change for cigarettes while he painted something
as big as the wall of his cell. In return, with the prize money, he promised to
buy her a little house in the country for her old age—with garden. Now he could
paint all day. It was spring; he left his door open and the concierge settled
in the courtyard with her heavy red hands at rest on her lap and thought that
each brush stroke added to her house and garden. After two months she got
impatient. He was still painting, but he was also eating, smoking cigarettes,
drinking aperitifs and even sleeping at times more than eight hours. Peter
rushed to the embassy and asked his friend to pay him an official call. The
friend managed to borrow the official car with the Dutch coat of arms and paid
the painter a respectful visit. This reassured her for another month. Every
evening they read the booklet together: ‘the prize will be handed over in cash
one week after the jury decides upon its value…’ The concierge’s beatitude was
contagious. The entire house benefited from her mellowness. Until one morning
when the newspapers published the name and photograph of the genuine Dutch
painter who had actually won the prize and then without warning she turned into
a cyclone. Peter’s door was locked. She climbed on a chair to look through the
transom to make sure he was not asleep or drunk. To her great horror she saw a
body hanging from the ceiling. He had hanged himself! She called for help. The
police forced the door open. What they cut down was a mannequin of wax and old
rags, carefully painted by Peter.