Ladders to Fire (15 page)

The light. Why was the light so still, like the
suspense of their blood? Still with fear. Like their eyes.
Shadeless
eyes that dared neither open, nor close, nor melt.

The dresses. Sabina’s dress rolled around her
like long sea weed. She wanted to turn and drop it on the floor but her hands
lifted it like a
Bayadere
lifting her skirt to dance
and she lifted it over her head.

Sabina’s eyes were like a forest; the darkness
of a forest, a watchfulness behind ambushes. Fear. Lillian journeyed into the
darkness of them, carrying her blue eyes into the red-brown ones. She walked
from the place where her dress had fallen holding her breasts as if she
expected to be mortally thrust.

Sabina loosened her hair and said: “You’re so
extraordinarily white.” With a strange sadness, like a weight, she spoke, as if
it were not the white substance of Lillian but the whiteness of her newness to
life which Sabina seemed to sigh for.
t;You’re
so
white, so white and smooth.” And there were deep shadows in her eyes, shadows
of one old with living: shadows in the neck, in her arms, on her knees, violet
shadows.

Lillian wanted to reach out to her, into these
violet shadows. She saw that Sabina wanted to be she as much as she wanted to
be Sabina. They both wanted to exchange bodies, exchange faces. There was in
both of them the dark strain of wanting to become the other, to deny what they
were, to transcend their actual selves. Sabina desiring Lillian’s newness, and
Lillian desiring Sabina’s deeply marked body.

Lillian drank the violet shadows, drank the
imprint of others, the accumulation of other hours, other rooms, other odors,
other caresses. How all the other loves clung to Sabina’s body, even though her
face denied this and her eyes repeated: I have forgotten all. How they made her
heavy with the loss of herself, lost in the maze of her gifts. How the lies,
the loves, the dreams, the obscenities, the fevers weighed down her body, and
how Lillian wanted to become
leadened
with her,
poisoned with her.

Sabina looked at the whiteness of Lillian’s
body as into a mirror and saw herself as a girl, standing at the beginning of
her life
unblurred
, unmarked. She wanted to return to
this early self. And Lillian wanted to enter the labyrinth of knowledge, to the
very bottom of the violet wells.

Through the acrid forest of her being there was
a vulnerable opening. Lillian trod into it lightly. Caresses of down, moth
invasions, myrrh between the breasts, incense in their mouths. Tendrils of hair
raising their heads to the wind in the finger tips, kisses curling within the
conch-shell necks. Tendrils of hair bristling and between their closed lips a
sigh.

“How soft you are, how soft you are,” said
Sabina.

They separated and saw it was not this they
wanted, sought, dreamed. Not this the possession they imagined. No bodies
touching would answer this mysterious craving in them to become each other. Not
to possess each other but to become each other. Not to take, but to imbibe,
absorb, change themselves. Sabina carried a part of Lillian’s being, Lillian a
part of Sabina, but they could not be exchanged through an embrace. It was not
that.

Their bodies touched and then fell away, as if
both of them had touched a mirror, their own image upon a mirror. They had felt
the cold wall, they had felt the mirror that never appeared when they were
taken by man. Sabina had merely touched her own youth, and Lillian her free
passions.

As they lay there the dawn entered the room, a
grey dawn which showed the dirt on the window panes, the crack in the table,
the stains on the walls. Lillian and Sabina sat up as if the dawn had opened
their eyes. Slowly they descended from dangerous heights, with the appearance
of daylight and the weight of their fatigue.

With the dawn it was as if Jay had entered the
room and were now lying between them. Every cell of their dream seemed to burst
at once, with the doubt which had entered Lillian’s mind.

If she had wanted so much to be Sabina so that
Jay might love in her what he admired in Sabina, could it be that Sabina wanted
of Lillian this that
madeJay
love her?

“I feel Jay in you,” she said.

The taste of sacrilege came to both their
mouths. The mouths he kissed. The women whose flavor he knew. The one man
within two women. Jealousy, dormant all night; now lying lit their side,
between their caresses, slipping in between them like an enemy.

(Lillian, Lillian, if you arouse hatred between
us, you break a magic alliance! He is not as aware of us as we are of each
other. We have loved in each other all he has failed to love and see. Must we
awake to the great destructiveness of rivalry, of war, when this night
contained all that slipped between his fingers! )

But jealousy had stirred in Lillian’s flesh.
Doubt was hardening and crystallizing in Lillian, crystallizing her features,
her eyes, tightening her mouth, stiffening her body. She shivered with cold,
with the icy incision of this new day which was laying everything bare.

Bare eyes looking at each other with naked,
knife-pointed questions.

To stare at each other they had to disentangle
their hair, Sabina’s long hair having curled around Lillian’s neck.

Lillian left the bed. She took the bracelets
and flung them out of the window.

“I know, I know,” she said violently, “you
wanted to blind me. If you won’t confess, he will. It’s Jay you love, not me.
Get up. I don’t want him to find us here together. And he thought we loved each
other!”

“I do love you, Lillian.”

“Don’t you dare say it,” shouted Lillian
violently, all her being now craving wildly for complete devastation.

They both began to tremble.

Lillian was like a foaming sea, churning up
wreckage, the debris of all her doubts and fears.

Their room was in darkness. Then came Jay’s
laughter, creamy and mould-breaking. In spite of the darkness Lillian could
feel all the cells of his body alive in the night, vibrating with abundance.
Every cell with a million eyes seeing in the dark.

“A fine dark night in which an artist might
well be born,” he said. “He must be born at night, you know, so that no one
will notice that his parents gave him only seven months of human substance. No
artist has the patience to remain nine months in the womb. He must run away
from home. He is born with a mania to complete himself, to create himself. He
is so multiple and amorphous that his central self is constantly falling apart
and is only recomposed by his work. With his imagination he can flow into all
the moulds, multiply and divide himself, and yet whatever he does, he will
always be two.”

“And require two wives?” asked Lillian.

“I need you terribly,” he said.

Would the body of Sabina triumph over her
greater love? “There are many
Sabinas
in the world,
but only one like you,” said Jay.

How could he lie so close and know only what
she chose to tell him, knowing nothing of her, of her secret terrors and fear
of loss.

He was only for the joyous days, the days of
courage, when she could share with him all the good things he brought with his
passion for novelty and change.

But he knew nothing of her; he was no companion
to her sadness. He could never imagine anyone else’s mood, only his own. His
own were so immense and loud, they filled his world and deafened him to all
others. He was not concerned to know whether she could live or breathe within
the dark caverns of his whale-like being, within the whale belly of his ego.

Somehow he had convinced her that this
expansiveness was a sign of bigness. A big man could not belong to one person.
He had merely overflowed into Sabina, out of over-richness. And they would
quarrel some day. Already he was saying: “I suspect that when Sabina gives one
so many lies it is because she has nothing else to give but mystery, but
fiction. Perhaps behind her mysteries there is nothing.”

But how blinded he was by false mysteries!
Because Sabina made such complicated tangles of everything—mixing
personalities, identities, missing engagements, being always elsewhere than
where she was expected to be, chaotic in her hours, elusive about her
occupations, implying mystery and suspense even when she said goodbye…calling
at dawn when everyone was asleep, and asleep when everyone else was awake. Jay
with his indefatigable curiosity was easily engaged in unraveling the tangle,
as if every tangle had a meaning, a mystery.

But Lillian knew, too, how quickly he could
turn about and ridicule if he were cheated, as he often was, by his blind
enthusiasms. How revengeful he became when the mysteries were false.

“If only Sabina would die,” thought Lillian,
“if she would only die. She does not love him as I do.”

Anxiety oppressed her. Would he push everything
into movement again, disperse her anxieties with his gaiety, carry her along in
his reckless course?

Lillian’s secret he did not detect: that of her
fear. Once her secret had almost pierced through, once when Jay had stayed out
all night. From her room she could see the large lights of the Boulevard
Montparnasse blinking maliciously, Montparnasse which he loved and those
lights, and the places where he so easily abandoned himself as he gave himself
to everything that glittered—rococo women, spluttering men in bars, anyone who
smiled, beckoned, had a story to tell.

She had waited with the feeling that where her
heart had been there was now a large hole; no heart or blood beating anymore
but a drafty hole made by a precise and rather large bullet.

Merely because Jay was walking up and down
Montparnasse in one of his high drunken moods which had nothing to do with
drink but with his insatiable thirst for new people, new smiles, new words, new
stories.

Each time the white lights blinked she saw his
merry smile in his full mouth, each time the red lights blinked she saw his
cold blue eyes detached and mocking, annihilating the mouth in a daze of blue,
iced gaiety. The eyes always cold, the mouth warm, the eyes mocking and the
mouth always repairing the damage done. His eyes that would never turn inward
and look into the regions of deep events, the regions of personal explorations:
his eyes intent on not seeing discords or dissolutions, not seeing the missing
words, the lost treasures, the wasted hours, the shreds of the dispersed self,
the blind
mobilities
.

Not to see the dark night of the self his eyes
rose frenziedly to the surface seeking in fast-moving panoramas merely the
semblance of riches…

“Instead of love there is appetite,” thought
Lillian. “He does not say: ‘I love you,’ but ‘I need you.’ Our life is crowded
like a railroad station, like a circus. He does not feel things where I feel
them: the heart is definitely absent. That’s why mine is dying, it has ceased
to pound tonight, it is being slowly killed by his hardness.”

Away from him she could always say: he does not
feel. But as soon as he appeared she was baffled. His presence carried such a
physical glow that it passed for warmth. His voice was warm like the voice of
feeling. His gestures were warm, his hands liked touch. He laid his hands often
on human beings, and one might think it was love. But it was just a physical
warmth, like the summer. It gave off heat like a chemical, but no more.

“He will die of hardness, and I from feeling
too much. Even when people knock on the door I have a feeling they are not
knocking on wood but on my heart. All the blows fall directly on my heart.”

Even pleasure had its little stabs upon the
heart. The perpetual heart-murmur of the sensibilities.

“I wish I could learn his secret. I would love
to be able to go out for a whole night without feeling all the threads that
bind me to him, feeling my love for him all around me like a chastity belt.”

And now he was lying still on the breast of her
immutable love, and she had no immutable love upon which to lay her head, no
one to return to at dawn.

He sat up lightly saying: “Oh, Sabina has no
roots!”

“And I’m strangling in my roots,” thought
Lillian.

He had turned on the light to read now, and she
saw his coat hugging the back of the chair, revealing in the shape of its
shoulders the roguish spirit that had played in it. If she could only take the
joys he gave her, his soft swagger, the rough touch of his coat, the
effervescence of his voice when he said: that’s good. Even his coat seemed to
be stirring with his easy flowing life, even to his clothes he gave the imprint
of his liveliness.

To stem his outflowing would be like stemming a
river of life. She would not be the one to do it. When a man had decided within
himself to live out every whim, every fancy, every impulse, it was a flood for
which no Noah’s Ark had ever been provided.

Lillian and
Djuna
were walking together over dead autumn leaves that crackled like paper. Lillian
was weeping and
Djuna
was weeping with her and for
her.

They were walking through the city as it sank
into twilight and it was as if they were both going blind together with the
bitterness of their tears. Through this blurred city they walked hazily and
half lost, the light of a street lamp striking them now and then like a
spotlight throwing into relief Lillian’s distorted mouth and the broken line of
her neck where her head fell forward heavily.