Ladders to Fire (7 page)

It was as if he smelled the climate: was it
good? Was there the odor of pleasure, the colors of pleasure? Expansion,
forgetfulness, abandon, enjoyment? Then he stayed. Difficulties? Then he
vanished.

Lillian and Jay.

It was a merciless winter day. The wind
persecuted them around the corners of the street. The snow slid into their
collars. They could not talk to each other. They took a taxi.

The windows of the taxi had frosted, so they
seemed completely shut
ofom
the rest of the world. It
was small and dark and warm. Jay buried his face in her fur. He made himself
small. He had a way of becoming so passive and soft that he seemed to lose his
height and weight. He did this now, his face in her fur, and she felt as if she
were the darkness, the smallness of the taxi, and were hiding him, protecting
him from the elements. Here the cold could not reach him, the snow, the wind,
the daylight. He sheltered himself, she carried his head on her breast, she
carried his body become limp, his hands nestling in her pocket. She was the
fur, the pocket, the warmth that sheltered him. She felt immense, and strong,
and illimitable, the boundless mother opening her arms and her wings, flying to
carry him somewhere; she his shelter and refuge, his secret hiding place, his
tent, his sky, his blanket.

The soundproof mother, the shockproof mother of
man!

This passion warmer, stronger than the other
passion, annihilating desire and becoming the desire, a boundless passion to
surround, envelop, sustain, strengthen, uphold, to answer all needs. He closed
his eyes. He almost slept in her warmth and furriness. He caressed the fur, he
feared no claws, he abandoned himself, and the waves of passion inspired by his
abandon intoxicated her.

He usually wore colored shirts to suit his
fancy. Once he wore a white one, because it had been given to him. It did not
suit him. Whiteness and blackness did not suit him. Only the intermediate
colors.

Lillian was standing near him and they had just
been discussing their life together. Jay had admitted that he would not work.
He could not bear repetition, he could not bear a “boss,” he could not bear
regular hours. He could not bear the seriousness.

“Then you will have to be a hobo.”

“I’ll be a hobo, then.”

“A hobo has no wife,” said Lillian.

“No,” he said. And added nothing: If she became
part of the effort, he would not cling to her either.

“I will have to work, then,” she said. “One of
us has to work.”

He said nothing.

Lillian was doubly disturbed by the
unfamiliarity of the scene, the portentousness of it, and by the familiarity of
the white shirt. The white shirt disturbed her more than his words. And then
she knew. The white shirt reminded her of her husband. Just before he put on
his coat she had always seen him and obscurely felt: how straight and rigid he
stands in his white shirt. Black and white. Definite and starched, and always
the same. But there it was. She was not sure she had liked the white shirt.
From it came authority, a firm guidance, a firm construction. And now she was
again facing a white shirt but with a strange feeling that there was nothing in
it: no rigidity, no straight shoulders, no man. If she approached she would feel
something fragile, soft and wavering: the shirt was not upheld by the body of
the man. If she broke suddenly at the idea of assuming the responsibility, if
she broke against this shirt it would collapse,
trn
to sand, trickle sand and soft laughter and elusive flickering love.

Against this white shirt of the husband she had
lain her head once and heard a strong heart beat evenly, and now it was as if
it were empty, and she were in a dream of falling down soft sand dunes to
softer and more sliding shifty sand dunes… Her head turned.

She kept herself on this new equilibrium by a
great effort, fearing to touch the white shirt of weakness and to feel the
yielding, the softness and the sand.

When she sewed on buttons for him she was
sewing not only buttons but also sewing together the sparse, disconnected
fragments of his ideas, of his inventions, of his unfinished dreams. She was
weaving and sewing and mending because he carried in himself no thread of
connection, no knowledge of mending, no thread of continuity or repair. If he
allowed a word to pass that was poisoned like a primitive arrow, he never
sought the counter-poison, he never measured its fatal consequences. She was
sewing on a button and the broken pieces of his waywardness; sewing a button
and his words too loosely strung; sewing their days together to make a
tapestry; their words together, their moods together, which he dispersed and
tore. As he tore his clothes with his precipitations towards his wishes, his
wanderings, his rambles, his peripheral journeys. She was sewing together the
little proofs of his devotion out of which to make a garment for her tattered
love and faith. He cut into the faith with negligent scissors, and she mended
and sewed and rewove and patched. He wasted, and threw away, and could not
evaluate or preserve, or contain, or keep his treasures. Like his ever torn
pockets, everything slipped through and was lost, as he lost gifts,
mementos—all the objects from the past. She sewed his pockets that he might
keep some of their days together, hold together the key to the house, to their
room, to their bed. She sewed the sleeve so he could reach out his arm and hold
her, when loneliness dissolved her. She sewed the lining so that the warmth
would not seep out of their days together, the soft inner skin of their
relationship.

He always admitted and conceded to his own
wishes first, before she admitted hers. Because he was sleepy, she had to
become the panoply on which he rested. Her love must fan him if he were warm
and be the fire if he were cold. In illness he required day and night nursing,
one for the illness, the other for the pleasure he took in her attentiveness.

His helplessness made him the “
homme
fatal
“for
such a woman. He reached
without sureness or nimbleness for the cup, for the food. Her hand flew to
finish off the uncertain gesture, to supply the missing object. His hunger for
anything metamorphosed her into an Aladdin’s lamp: even his dreams must be
fulfilled.

Towards the greater obstacles he assumed a
definitely noncombatant attitude. Rather than claim his due, or face an angry
landlord, or obtain a rightful privilege, his first impulse was to surrender.
Move out of the house that could not be repaired, move out of the country if
his papers were not in order, move out of a woman’s way if another man stalked
too near. Retreat, surrender.

Atimes
Lillian
remembered her husband, and now that he was no longer the husband she could see
that he had been, as much as the other men she liked; handsome and desirable,
and she could not understand why he had never been able to enter her being and
her feelings as a lover. She had truly liked every aspect of him except the
aspect of lover. When she saw him, with the clarity of distance and separation,
she saw him quite outside of herself. He stood erect, and self-sufficient, and
manly. He always retained his normal male largeness and upstanding
protectiveness.

But Jay…came towards her almost as a man who
limps and whom one instinctively wishes to sustain. He came as the man who did
not see very well, slightly awkward, slightly stumbling. In this helplessness,
in spite of his actual stature (he was the same height as her husband) he gave
the air of being smaller, more fragile, more vulnerable. It was this fear in
the man, who seemed inadequate in regard to life, trapped in it, the victim of
it, which somehow affected her. In a smaller, weaker dimension he seemed to
reach the right proportion for his being to enter into hers. He entered by the
route of her compassion. She opened as the refuge opens; not conscious that it
was a man who entered (man of whom she had a certain suspicion) but a child in
need. Because he knocked as a beggar begging for a retreat, as a victim seeking
solace, as a weakling seeking sustenance, she opened the door without
suspicion.

It was in her frenzy to shelter, cover, defend
him that she laid her strength over his head like an enormous starry roof, and
the stretching immensity of the boundless mother was substituted for the normal
image of the man covering the woman.

Jay came and he had a cold. And though he at
first pretended it was of no importance, he slowly melted entirely into her,
became soft and tender, waiting to be pampered, exaggerating his cough. And
they wandered through the city like two lazy southerners, he said, like two
convalescents. And she pampered him laughingly, ignoring time, eating when they
were hungry, and seeing a radium sunlight lighting up the rain, seeing only the
shimmer of the wet streets and not the greyness. He confessed that he craved a
phonograph, and they shopped together and brought it back in a taxi. They slept
soundly inside the warmth of this closeness, in the luxury of their
contentment. It was Jay who touched everything with the magic of his
contentment. It was Jay who said: isn’t this ham good, isn’t this salad good,
isn’t this wine good. Everything was good and savory, palatable and expansive.

He gave her the savor of the present, and let
her care for the morrow.

This moment of utter and absolute tasting of
food, of color, this moment of human breathing. No fragment detached, errant,
disconnected or lost. Because as Jay gathered the food on the table, the
phonograph to his room, he gathered her into the present moment.

His taking her was not to take her or master
her. He was the lover inside of the woman, as the child is inside of the woman.
His caresses were as if he yearned and craved to be taken in not only as a
lover; not merely to satisfy his desire but to remain within her. And her
yearning answered this, by her desire to be filled. She never felt him outside
of herself. Her husband had stood outside of her, and had come to visit her as
a man, sensually. But he had not lodged himself as Jay had done, by reposing in
her, by losing
hielf
in her, by melting within her,
with such feeling of physical intermingling as she had had with her child. Her
husband had come to be renewed, to emerge again, to leave her and go to his
male activities, to his struggles with the world.

The maternal and the feminine cravings were all
confused in her, and all she felt was that it was through this softening and
through this maternal yieldingness that Jay had penetrated where she had not
allowed her husband’s manliness to enter, only to visit her.

He liked prostitutes. “Because one does not
have to make love to them, one does not have to write them beautiful letters.”
He liked them, and he liked to tell Lillian how much he liked them. He had to
share all this with Lillian. He could not conceal any part of it from her, even
if it hurt her. He could retain and hold nothing back from her. She was his
confessor and his companion, his collaborator and his guardian angel. He did
not see her weep when he launched into descriptions. At this moment he treated
her as if she were a man (or the mother). As if the spectacle of his life could
amuse her. “I even think if you had seen me that time, you could have enjoyed
it.”

He liked her to assume the burden of their life
together, its material basis. Yet when she came to him, she must be all ready
to discard this mantle of responsibilities, and become a child with him. His
sense of humor took wayward forms.

His favorite prank: something that could be
thrown away, which others valued; something that could be broken which others
preserved. Traditions, habits, possessions. His greatest enjoyment was in
demolition.

One of his most joyous experiences had been
when a neighbor pianist who lived on the same quiet little street with him many
years ago had been obliged to visit his mother at the hospital on the same day
as the piano house had promised him an exchange of pianos. The man had been
looking forward to this for many months. He begged Jay to attend to this. It
was a complicated affair, getting the old piano out and the new one in. It was
to be done by two different houses. One, a moving man, was to take the old
piano out, then the piano house was to deliver the new. Jay had laughed it all
off, and walked out unconcernedly, never remembering the promise he made. When
he came home he found the two pianos in the street, before the entrance of the
house, and the rain pouring down on them. The sight of the two pianos in the
rain sent him into an absolute state of gaiety. “It was the most surrealistic
sight I have ever seen.” His laughter was so contagious that Lillian laughed
with him, at the same time as she felt, somehow, a kind of pain at the image of
pianos drenched in rain, and a pain even for the unknown pianist’s feeling on
his return home.

He seized only upon the comedy of the events.

At times Lillian asked herself: what will he
make of me some day, when will he hurt me? And what if he does: I will try to
love him gaily, more easily and loosely. To endure space and distance and
betrayals. My courage is born today. Here lies Jay, breathing into my hair,
over my neck. No hurt will come from me. No judgment. No woman ever judged the
life stirring within her womb. I am too close to you. I will laugh with you
even if it is against me.