Ladders to Fire (9 page)

Lillian felt no longer any jealousy, but a
curiosity as in a dream. She did not feel any danger or fear in the meeting,
only an enormous blue space in which a woman stood waiting. This space and
grandeur around Helen drew Lillian to her.

Helen was describing a dream she often had of
being carried away by a Centaur, and Lillian could see the Centaur holding
Helen’s head, the head of a woman in a myth. People in myths were larger than
human beings.

Helen’s dreams took place in an enormous desert
where she was lost among the prisons. She was tearing her hands to get free.
The columns of these prisons were human beings all bound in bandages. Her own
draperies were of sackcloth, the woolen robes of punishment.

And then came her questions to Lillian: “Why am
I not free? I ran away from my husband and my two little girls many years ago.
I did not know it then, but I didn’t want to be a mother, the mother of
children. I wanted to be the mother of creations and dreams, the mother of
artists, the muse and the mistress. In my marriage I was buried alive. My
husband was a man without courage for life. We lived as if he were a cripple,
and I a nurse. His presence killed the life in me so completely that I could
hardly feel the birth of my children. I became afraid of nature, of being
swallowed by the mountains, stifled by the forest, absorbed by the sea. I
rebelled so violently against my married life that in one day I destroyed
everything and ran away, abandoning my children, my home and my native country.
But I never attained the life I had struggled to reach. My escape brought me no
liberation. Every night I dream the same dream of prisons and struggles to
escape. It is as if only my body escaped, and not my feelings. My feelings were
left over there like roots dangling when you tear a plant too violently.
Violence means nothing. And it does not free one. Part of my being remained
with my children, imprisoned in the past. Now I have to liberate myself wholly,
body and soul, and I don’t know how. The violent gestures I make only tighten
the knot of resistance around me. How can one liquidate the past? Guilt and
regrets can’t be shed like an old coat.”

Then she saw that Lillian was affected by her
story and she added: “I am grateful to Jay for having met you.”

Only then Lillian remembered her painful
secret. For a moment she wanted to lay her head on
Hlen’s
shoulder and confess to her: “I only came because I was afraid of you. I came
because I thought you were going to take Jay away from me.” But now that Helen
had revealed her innermost dreams and pains, Lillian felt: perhaps she needs me
more than she needs Jay. For he cannot console. He can only make her laugh.

At the same time she thought that this was
equally effective. And she remembered how much Jay liked audacity in women, how
some feminine part of him liked to yield, liked to be chosen, courted. Deep
down he was timid, and he liked audacity in women. Helen could be given the key
to his being, if Lillian told her this. If Lillian advised her to take the
first step, because he was a being perpetually waiting to be ignited, never set
off by himself, always seeking in women the explosion which swept him along.

All around her there were signs, signs of
danger and loss. Without knowing consciously what she was doing, Lillian began
to assume the role she feared Jay might assume. She became like a lover. She
was full of attentiveness and thoughtfulness. She divined Helen’s needs
uncannily. She telephoned her at the moment Helen felt the deepest loneliness.
She said the gallant words Helen wanted to hear. She gave Helen such faith as
lovers give. She gave to the friendship an atmosphere of courtship which
accomplished the same miracles as love. Helen began to feel enthusiasm and
hunger again. She forgot her illness to take up painting, her singing, and
writing. She recreated, redecorated the place she was living in. She displayed
art in her dressing, care and fantasy. She ceased to feel alone.

On a magnificent day of sun and warmth Lillian
said to her: “If I were a man, I would make love to you.”

Whether she said this to help Helen bloom like
a flower in warmth and fervor, or to take the place of Jay and enact the
courtship she had imagined, which she felt she had perhaps deprived Helen of,
she did not know.

But Helen felt as rich as a woman with a new
love.

At times when Lillian rang Helen’s bell, she
imagined Jay ringing it. And she tried to divine what Jay might feel at the
sight of Helen’s face. Every time she fully conceded that Helen was beautiful.
She asked herself whether she was enhancing Helen’s beauty with her own
capacity for admiration. But then Jay too had this capacity for exalting all
that he admired.

Lillian imagined him coming and looking at the
paintings. He would like the blue walls. It was true he would not like her
obsessions with disease, her fear of cancer. But then he would laugh at them,
and his laughter might dispel her fears.

In Helen’s bathroom, where she went to powder
and comb her hair, she felt a greater anguish, because there she was nearer to
the intimacy of Helen’s life. Lillian looked at her kimono, her bedroom
slippers, her creams and medicines as if trying to divine with what feelings
Jay might look at them. She remembered how much he liked to go behind the
scenes of people’s lives. He liked to rummage among intimate belongings and
dispel illusions. It was his passion. He would come out triumphantly with a
jar: and this, what is this for? as if women were always seeking to delude him.
He doubted the most simple things. He had often pulled at her eyelashes to make
certain they were not artificial.

What would he feel in Helen’s bathroom? Would
he feel tenderness for her bedroom slippers? Why were there objects which
inspired tenderness and others none? Helen’s slippers did not inspire
tenderness. Nothing about her inspired tenderness. But it might inspire desire,
passion, anything else—even if she remained outside of one, like a sculpture, a
painting, a form, not something which penetrated and enveloped one. But inhuman
figures could inspire passion. Even if she were the statue in a Chirico
painting, unable to mingle with human beings, even if she could not be
impregnated by others or live inside of another all tangled in threads of blood
and emotion.

When they went out together Lillian always
expected the coincidence which would bring the three of them together to the
same concert, the same exhibit, the same play, But it never happened. They
always missed each other. All winter long the coincidences of city life did not
bring the three of them together. Lillian began to think that this meeting was
not destined, that it was not she who was keeping them apart.

Helen’s eyes grew greener and sank more and
more into the myth. She could not feel. And Lillian felt as if she were keeping
from her the man who might bring her back to life. Felt almost as if she were
burying her alive by not giving her Jay.

Perhaps Lillian was imagining too much.

Meanwhile Helen’s need of Lillian grew immense.
She was not contented with Lillian’s occasional visits. She wanted to fill the
entire void of her life with Lillian. She wanted Lillian to stay over night
when she was lonely. The burden grew heavier and heavier.

Lillian became frightened. In wanting to amuse
and draw Helen away from her first interest in Jay, she had surpassed herself
and become this interest.

Helen dramatized the smallest incident,
suffered from insomnia, said her bedroom was haunted at night, sent for Lillian
on every possible occasion.

Lillian was punished for playing the lover. Now
she must be the husband, too. Helen had forgotten Jay but the exchange had left
Lillian as a hostage.

Not knowing how to lighten the burden she said
one day: “You ought to travel again. This city cannot be good for you. A place
where you have been lonely and unhappy for so long must be the wrong place.”

That very night there was a fire in Helen’s
house, in the apartment next to hers. She interpreted this as a sign that
Lillian’s intuitions for her were wise. She decided to travel again.

They parted at the corner of a street, gaily,
as if for a short separation. Gaily, with green eyes flashing at one another.
They lost each other’s address. It all dissolved very quickly, like a dream.

And then Lillian felt free again. Once again
she had worn the warrior armor to protect a core of love. Once again she had
worn the man’s costume.

Jay had not made her woman, but the husband and
mother of his weakness.

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Lillian confessed to Jay that she was pregnant.
He said: “We must find the money for an abortion.” He looked irritated. She
waited. She thought he might slowly evince interest in the possibility of a
child. He revealed only an increased irritation. It disturbed his plans, his
enjoyment. The mere idea of a child was an intrusion. He let her go alone to
the doctor. He expressed resentment. And then she understood.

She sat alone one day in their darkened room.
She talked to the child inside of her.

“My little one not born yet, I feel your small
feet kicking against my womb. My little one not born yet, it is very dark in
the room you and I are sitting in, just as dark as it must be for you inside of
me, but it must be sweeter for you to be lying in the warmth than it is for me
to be seeking in this dark room the joy of not knowing, not feeling, not
seeing; the joy of lying still in utter warmth and this darkness. All of us
forever seeking this warmth and this darkness, this being alive without pain,
this being alive without anxiety, fear or loneliness. You are impatient to
live, you kick with your small feet, but you ought to die. You ought to die in
warmth and darkness because you are a child without a father. You will not find
on earth this father as large as the sky, big enough to hold your whole being
and your fears, larger than house or church. You will not find a father who
will lull you and cover you with his greatness and his warmth. It would be
better if you died inside of me, quietly, in the warmth and in the darkness.”

Did the child hear her? At six months she had a
miscarriage and lost it.

Lillian was giving a concert in a private home
which was like a temple of treasures. Paintings and people had been collected
with expert and exquisite taste. There was a concentration of beautiful women
so that one was reminded of a hothouse exhibit.

The floor was so highly polished there were two
Lillians
, two white pianos, two audiences.

The piano under her strong hands became small
like a child’s piano. She overwhelmed it, she tormented it, crushed it. She
played with all her intensity, as if the piano must be possessed or possess
her.

The women in the audience shivered before this
corps
a corps.

Lillian was pushing her vigor into the piano.
Her face was full of vehemence and possessiveness. She turned her face upwards
as if to direct the music upwards, but the music would not rise, volatilize
itself. It was too heavily charged with passion.

She was not playing to throw music into the
blue space, but to reach some climax, some impossible union with the piano, to
reach that which men and women could reach together. A moment of pleasure, a
moment of fusion. The passion and the blood in her rushed against the ivory
notes and overloaded them. She pounded the coffer of the piano as she wanted
her own body pounded and shattered. And the pain on her face was that of one
who reached neither sainthood nor pleasure. No music rose and passed out of the
window, but a sensual cry, heavy with unspent forces…

Lillian storming against her piano, using the
music to tell all how she wanted to be stormed with equal strength and fervor.

This tidal power was still in her when the
women moved towards her to tell her it was wonderful. She rose from the piano
as if she would engulf them, the smaller women; she embraced them with all the
fervor of unspent intensity that had not reached a climax—which the music, like
too delicate a vessel, the piano with too delicate a frame, had not been able
to contain.

It was while Lillian was struggling to tear
from the piano what the piano could not possibly give her that
Djuna’s
attention was wafted towards the window.

In the golden salon, with the crystal lamps,
the tapestries and the paintings there were immense bay windows, and
Djuna’s
chair had been placed in one of the recesses, so
that she sat on the borderline between the perfumed crowd and the silent,
static garden.

It was late in the afternoon, the music had fallen
back upon the people like a heavy storm cloud which could not be dispersed to
lighten and lift them, the air was growing heavy, when her eyes caught the
garden as if in a secret exposure. As everyone was looking at Lillian,
Djuna’s
sudden glance seemed to have caught the garden
unaware, in a dissolution of peace and greens. A light rain had washed the
faces of the leaves, the knots in the tree trunks stared with aged eyes, the
grass was drinking, there was a sensual humidity as if leaves, trees, grass and
wind were all in a state of caress.

The garden had an air of nudity.

Djuna
let her eyes
melt into the garden. The garden had an air of nudity, of efflorescence, of
abundance, of plenitude.