Ladders to Fire (5 page)

It was as if someone had proclaimed: I need
oxygen, and therefore I will lock some oxygen in my room and live on it.

So Lillian began her courtship.

She brought gifts. She pulled out perfume, and
jewelry and clothes. She almost covered the bed with gifts. She wanted
Djuna
to put all the jewelry on, to smell all the perfumes
at once, to wear all her clothes.
Djuna
was showered
with gifts as in a fairy tale, but she could not find in them the fairy tale
pleasure. She felt that to each gift was tied a little invisible cord or
demand, of exactingness, of debt, of domination. She felt she could not wear
all these things and walk away, freely. She felt that with the gifts, a golden
spider wove a golden web of possession. Lillian was not only giving away
objects, but golden threads woven out of her very own substance to fix and to
hold. They were not the fairy tale gifts which
Djuna
had dreamed of receiving. (She had many dreams of receiving perfume, or
receiving fur, or being given blue bottles,
lames
,
etc.) In the fairy tale the giver laid out the presents and then became
invisible. In the fairy tales and in the dreams there was no debt, and there was
no giver.

Lillian did not become invisible. Lillian
became more and more present. Lillian became the mother who wanted to dress her
child out of her own substance, Lillian became the lover who wanted to slip the
shoes and slippers on the beloved’s feet so she could contain these feet. The
dresses were not chosen as
Djuna’s
dresses, but as
Lillian’s choice and taste to cover
Djuna
.

The night of gifts, begun in gaiety and
magnificence, began to thicken. Lillian had put too much of herself into the
gifts. It was a lovely
night,ttles
,
lamthe
gifts scattered through the room like fragments of
Miro’s
circus paintings, flickering and leaping, but not
free.
Djuna
wanted to enjoy and she could not. She
loved Lillian’s generosity, Lillian’s largeness, Lillian’s opulence and
magnificence, but she felt anxiety. She remembered as a child receiving gifts
for Christmas, and among them a closed mysterious box gaily festooned with
multicolored ribbons. She remembered that the mystery of this box affected her
more than the open, exposed, familiar gifts of tea cups, dolls, etc. She opened
the box and out of it jumped a grotesque devil who, propelled by taut springs,
almost hit her face.

In these gifts, there is a demon somewhere; a
demon who is hurting Lillian, and will hurt me, and I don’t know where he is
hiding. I haven’t seen him yet, but he is here.

She thought of the old legends, of the knights
who had to kill monsters before they could enjoy their love.

No demon here, thought
Djuna
,
nothing but a woman drowning, who is clutching at me… I love her.

When Lillian dressed up in the evening in vivid
colors with her ever tinkling jewelry, her face wildly alive,
Djuna
said to her, “You’re made for a passionate life of
some kind.”

She looked like a white negress, a body made
for rolling in natural undulations of pleasure and desire. Her vivid face, her
avid mouth, her provocative, teasing glances proclaimed sensuality. She had
rings under her eyes. She looked often as if she had just come from the arms of
a lover. An energy smoked from her whole body.

But sensuality was paralyzed in her. When
Djuna
sought to show Lillian her face in the mirror, she
found Lillian paralyzed with fear. She was impaled on a rigid pole of
puritanism. One felt it, like a heavy silver chastity belt, around her soft,
rounded body.

She bought a black lace gown like
Djuna’s
. Then she wanted to own all the objects which
carried
Djuna’s
personality or spirit. She wanted to
be clasped at the wrists by
Djuna’s
bracelet watch,
dressed in
Djuna’s
kind of clothes.

(
Djuna
thought of the
primitives eating the liver of the strong man of the tribe to acquire his
strength, wearing the teeth of the elephant to acquire his durability, donning
the lion’s head and mane to appropriate his courage, gluing feathers on
themselves to become as free as the bird.)

Lillian knew no mystery. Everything was open
with her. Even the most ordinary mysteries of women she did not guard. She was
open like a man, frank, direct. Her eyes shed lightning but no shadows.

One night
Djuna
and
Lillian went to a night club together to watch the cancan. At such a moment
Djuna
forgot that she was a woman and looked at the women
dancing with the eyes of an artist and the eyes of a man. She admired them,
reveled in their beauty, in their seductions, in the interplay of black garters
and black stockings and the snow-white frills of petticoats.

Lillian’s face clouded. The storm gathered in
her eyes. The lightning struck. She lashed out in anger: “If I were a man I
would murder you.”

Djuna
was bewildered.
Then Lillian’s anger dissolved in lamentations: “Oh, the poor people, the poor
people who love you. You love these women!”

She began to weep.
Djuna
put her arms around her and consoled her. The people around them looked
baffled, as passers-by look up suddenly at an unexpected, freakish windstorm.
Here it was, chaotically upsetting the universe, coming from right and left,
great fury and velocity—and why?

Two women were looking at beautiful women
dancing. One enjoyed it, and the other made a scene.

Lillian went home and wrote stuttering phrases
on the back of a box of writing paper:
Djuna
, don’t
abandon me; if you abandon me, I am lost.

When
Djuna
came the
next day, still angry from the inexplicable storm of the night before, she
wanted to say: are you the woman I chose for a friend? Are you the egotistical,
devouring child, all caprice and confusion who is always crossing my path? She
could not say it, not before this chaotic helpless writing on the back of the
box, a writing which could not stand alone, but wavered from left to right,
from right to left, inclining, falling, spilling, retreating, ascending on the
line as if for flight off the edge of the paper as if it were an airfield, or
plummeting on the paper like a falling elevator.

If they met a couple along the street who were
kissing, Lillian became equally unhinged.

If they talked about her children and
Djuna
said: I never liked real children, only the child in
the grown-up, Lillian answered: you should have had children.

“But I lack the maternal feeling for children,
Lillian, though I haven’t lacked the maternal experience. There are plenty of
children, abandoned children right in the so-called grown-ups. While you, well
you are a real mother, you have a real maternal capacity. You are the mother
type. I am not. I only like being the mistress. I don’t even like being a
wife.”

Then Lillian’s entire universe turned a
somersault again, crashed, and
Djuna
was amazed to
see the devastating results of an innocent phrase: “I am not a maternal woman,”
she said, as if it were an accusation. (Everything was an accusation.)

Then
Djuna
kissed her
and said playfully: “Well, then, you’re a
femme fatale
!”

But this was like fanning an already enormous
flame. This aroused Lillian to despair: “No, no, I never destroyed or hurt
anybody,” she protested.

“You know, Lillian, someday I will sit down and
write a little dictionary for you, a little Chinese dictionary. In it I will
put down all the interpretations of what is said to you, the right interpretation,
that is: the one that is not meant to injure, not meant to humiliate or accuse
or doubt. And whenever something is said to you, you will look in my little
dictionary to make sure, before you get desperate, that you have understood
what is said to you.”

The idea of the little Chinese dictionary made
Lillian
laughe
storm passed.

But if they walked the streets together her
obsession was to see who was looking at them or following them. In the shops
she was obsessed about her plumpness and considered it not an attribute but a
defect. In the movies it was emotionalism and tears. If they sat in a
restaurant by a large window and saw the people passing it was denigration and
dissection. The universe hinged and turned on her defeated self.

She was aggressive with people who waited on
her, and then was hurt by their defensive abandon of her. When they did not
wait on her she was personally injured, but could not see the injury she had
inflicted by her demanding ways. Her commands bristled everyone’s hair, raised
obstacles and retaliations. As soon as she appeared she brought dissonance.

But she blamed the others, the world.

She could not bear to see lovers together,
absorbed in each other.

She harassed the quiet men and lured them to an
argument and she hated the aggressive men who held their own against her.

Her shame. She could not carry off gallantly a
run in her stocking. She was overwhelmed by a lost button.

When
Djuna
was too
swamped by other occupations or other people to pay attention to her, Lillian
became ill. But she would not be ill at home surrounded by her family. She was
ill alone, in a hotel room, so that
Djuna
ran in and
out with medicines, with chicken soup, stayed with her day and night chained to
her antics, and then Lillian clapped her hands and confessed: “I’m so happy!
Now I’ve got you all to myself!”

The summer nights were passing outside like gay
whores, with tinkles of cheap jewelry, opened and emollient like a vast bed.
The summer nights were passing but not Lillian’s tension with the world.

She read erotic memoirs avidly, she was
obsessed with the lives and loves of others. But she herself could not yield,
she was ashamed, she throttled her own nature, and all this desire, lust,
became twisted inside of her and churned a poison of envy and jealousy.
Whenever sensuality showed its flower head, Lillian would have liked to
decapitate it, so it would cease troubling and haunting her.

At the same time she wanted to seduce the
world,
Djuna
, everybody. She would want to be kissed
on the lips and more warmly and then violently block herself. She thrived on
this hysterical undercurrent without culmination. This throbbing sensual
obsession and the blocking of it; this rapacious love without polarity, like a
blind womb appetite; delighting in making the temperature rise and then
clamping down the lid.

In her drowning she was like one constantly
choking those around her, bringing them down with her into darkness.

Djuna
felt caught in
a sirocco.

She had lived once on a Spanish island and
experienced exactly this impression.

The island had been calm, silvery and dormant
until one morning when a strange wind began to blow from Africa, blowing in
circles. It swept over the island charged with torpid warmth, charged with
flower smells, with sandalwood and patchouli and incense, and turning in
whirlpools, gathered up the nerves and swinging with them into whirlpools of
dry enervating warmth and smells, reached no climax, no explosion. Blowing
persistently, continuously, hour after hour, gathering every nerve in every
human being, the nerves alone, and tangling them in this fatal waltz; drugging
them and pulling them, and
whirlpooling
them, until
the body shook with restlessness—all polarity and sense of gravity lost.
Because of this insane waltz of the wind, its emollient warmth, its perfumes,
the being lost its guidance, its clarity, its integrity. Hour after hour, all
day and all night, the body was subjected to this insidious whirling rhythm, in
which polarity was lost, and only the nerves and desires throbbed, tense and
weary of movement—all in a void, with no respite, no climax, no great loosening
as in other storms. A tension that gathered force but had no release. It abated
not once in forty-eight hours, promising, arousing, caressing, destroying
sleep, rest, repose, and then vanished without releasing, without culmination…

This violence which
Djuna
had loved so much! It had become a mere sirocco wind, burning and shriveling.
This violence which
Djuna
had applauded, enjoyed,
because she could not possess it in herself. It was now burning her, and their
friendship. Because it was not attached to anything, it was not creating
anything, it was a trap of negation.

“You will save me,” said Lillian always,
clinging.

Lillian was the large foundering ship, yes, and
Djuna
the small lifeboat. But now the big ship had
been moored to the small lifeboat and was pitching too fast and furiously and
the lifeboat was being swamped.

(She wants something of me that only a man can
give her. But first of all she wants to become me, so that she can communicate
with man. She has lost her ways of communicating with man. She is doing it
through me!)