Ladders to Fire (18 page)

And now it was done. A complete house-wrecking
service. Every word, smile, act, silver jewel, lying on the floor, with the
emerald green dress, and even
Djuna’s
image of
Lillian to which she had often turned for comfort, that too lay shattered on
the ground. Nothing to salvage. A mere pile of flaws. A little pile of ashes
from a bonfire of self-criticism.

The Chess Player saw a woman crumpling down on
a couch as if her inner frame had collapsed, smiled at her drunkenness and took
no note of the internal suicide.

Came the grey-haired man who makes bottles,
Lawrence Vail, saying: “I still occasionally and quite frequently and very
perpetually empty a bottle. This is apt to give one a guilty feeling. Is it not
possible I moaned and mooned that I have neglected the exterior (of the bottle)
for the interior (of the bottle)? Why cast away empty bottles? The spirits in
the bottle are not necessarily the spirit of the bottle. The spirit of the
spirits of the bottle are potent, potential substances that should not
discarded, eliminated in spleen, plumbing and hangover. Why not exteriorize
these spirits on the body of the bottle…”

The Chess Player saw it was going to happen.

He saw
Djuna
slipping
off one of the squares and said: “Come here! Hold hands with Jay’s warm winey
white-trash friends. It is too early in the evening for you to be slipping
off.”

Djuna
gave him a
glance of despair, as one does before falling.

She knew it was now going to happen.

This dreaded mood which came, warning her by
dimming the lights, muffling the sounds, effacing the faces as in great
snowstorms.

She would be inside of the Party as inside a
colored ball, being swung by red ribbons, swayed by indigo music. All the
objects of the Fair around her—the red wheels, the swift chariots, the dancing
animals, the puppet shows, the swinging trapezes, words and faces swinging, red
suns bursting, birds singing, ribbons of laughter floating and catching her,
teasing hands rustling in her hair, the movements of the dance like all the
motions of love: taking, bending, yielding, welding and
unwelding
,
all the pleasures of collisions, every human being opening the cells of his
gaiety.

And then wires would be cut, lights grow dim,
sounds muffled, colors paled.

At this moment, like the last message received
through her inner wireless from the earth, she always remembered this scene:
she was sixteen years old. She stood in a dark room brushing her hair. It was a
summer night. She was wearing her nightgown. She leaned out of the window to
watch a party taking place across the way.

The men and women were dressed in
rutilant
festive colors she had never seen before, or was
she dressing them with the intense light of her own dreaming, for she saw their
gaiety, their relation to each other as something unparalleled in splendor.
That night she yearned so deeply for this unattainable party, fearing she would
never attend it, or else that if she did she would not be dressed in those
heightened colors, she would not be so shining, so free. She saw herself
attending but invisible, made invisible by timidity.

Now when she had reached this Party, where she
had been visible and desired, a new danger threatened her: a mood which came
and carried her off like an abductor, back into darkness.

This mood was always provoked by a phrase out
of a dream: “This is not the place.”

(What place? Was it the first party she wanted
and none other, the one painted out of the darkness of her solitude?)

The second phrase would follow: “He is not the
one.”

Fatal phrase, like a black magic potion which
annihilated the present. Instantly she was outside, locked out, thrust out by
no one but herself, by a mood which cut her off from fraternity.

Merely by wishing to be elsewhere, where it
might be more marvelous, made the near, the palpable seem then like an
obstruction, a delay to the more marvelous place awaiting her, the more
wonderful personage kept waiting. The present was murdered by this insistent,
whispering, interfering cream, this invisible map constantly pointing to
unexplored countries, a compass pointing to mirage.

But as quickly as she was deprived of ears,
eyes, touch and placed adrift in space, as quickly as warm contact broke, she
was granted another kind of ear, eye, touch, and contact.

She no longer saw the Chess Player as made of
wood directed by a delicate geometric inner apparatus, as everyone saw him. She
saw him before his crystallization, saw the incident which alchemized him into
wood, into a chess player of geometric patterns. There, where a blighted love
had made its first incision and the blood had turned to tree sap to become wood
and move with geometric carefulness, there she placed her words calling to his
warmth before it had congealed.

But the Chess Player was irritated. He
addressed a man he did not recognize.

From the glass bastions of her city of the
interior she could see all the excrescences, deformities, disguises, but as she
moved among their hidden selves she incurred great angers.

“You demand we shed our greatest protections!”

“I demand nothing. I wanted to attend a Party.
But the Party had dissolved in this strange acid of awareness which only
dissolves the calluses, and I see the beginning.”

“Stand on your square,” said the Chess Player.
“I shall bring you someone who will make you dance.”

“Bring me one who will rescue me! Am I dreaming
or dying? Bring me one who knows that between the dream and death there is only
one frail step, one who senses that between this murder of the present by a
dream, and death, there is only one shallow breath. Bring me one who knows that
the dream without exit, without explosion, without awakening, is the passageway
to the world of the dead! I want my dress torn and stained!”

A drunken man came up to her with a chair. Of
all the chairs in the entire house he had selected a gold one with a red
brocade top.

Why couldn’t he bring me an ordinary chair?

To single her out for this hierarchic offering
was to condemn her.

Now it was going to happen, inevitably.

The night and the Party had barely begun and
she was being whisked away on a gold chair with a red brocade top by an abductor
who would carry her back to the dark room of her adolescence, to the long white
nightgown and hair brush, and to dream of a Party that she could never attend.