Seduction of the Minotaur (16 page)

But once in Paris, she strayed into an arcade
and saw people watching penny movies with such delight and interest that she
waited her turn and slipped a penny in a slot. A little movie scene appeared,
awkward and jerky like the movies of the 1920s. A family sat at dinner, father
(with a mustache), mother in a ruffled dress, and three children. The young and
pretty maid was serving the soup. She was dressed in black. Her dress was very
short. It revealed a white lace-edged petticoat, and she wore a butterfly of
white lace on her hair. She spilled the soup on the father’s lap. The father
rose in a fury and left the table to go and change his clothes. The maid had
not only to help him change his clothes, but to atone for the accident.

Lillian was about to leave, unmoved, amused,
when the machine clicked and a new film began. The scene this time took place
in a classroom. The students were little girls of six or seven (Lillian’s age
when she was receiving the spankings). They were dressed in old-fashioned
frilly and bouffant dresses. The teacher was angered by their mockeries and
laughter, and asked them to come up, one by one, to be spanked (just as Lillian
and her sisters and brothers were lined up and made to march up the stairs). At
this scene Lillian’s heart began to beat wildly. She thought she was about to
relive the pain and humiliation caused by their father.

But when the teacher lifted up the little girl,
stretched her across his knees, turned up her skirt, pulled down her panties,
and began to spank her, what Lillian experienced after twenty years was not
pain, but a flooding joy of sensual excitement. As if the spankings, while
hurting her, had been at the same time the only caress she had known from her
father. Pain had become inextricably mixed with joy at his presence, the
distorted closeness had alchemized into pleasure. The rite, intended as a
punishment, had become the only intimacy she had known, the only contact, a
substitution of anger and tears in place of tenderness.

She wanted to be in the little girl’s place!

She hurried away from the arcade, trembling
with joy, as if she were returning from an erotic adventure.

Thus the real dictator, the organizer and
director of her life, had been this quest for a chemical compound—so many
ounces of pain mixed with so many ounces of pleasure in a formula known only to
the unconscious. The failure lay in the enormous difference between the
relationship she had needed, and the one she had, on a deeper level, more
deeply wanted. The need was created out of an aggregate of negativities and
deformations. When Lillian thought that in her relationship to Jay she was only
in bondage to a passion, she was also in bondage to a need. When she thought her
stays in Paris were directed entirely by a desire for Jay, they were in fact
predetermined on those days in Mexico when she was six or seven years old.

Not enough of that measure of pain had existed
in her marriage to Larry.

In the laboratories the scientists were trying
to isolate the virus which might be the cause of cancer. Djuna believed one
could isolate the virus which destroys love. But then there were outcries: that
this would be the end of illusion, when it was only the beginning! Lillian had learned
from Djuna that each cell, once separated from the diseased one, was capable of
new life.

Erasing the grooves. It was not that Lillian
had remained attached to the father, and incapable of other attachments. It was
that the form of the relationship, the mold, had become a groove, the groove
itself was familiar, her footsteps followed it habitually, unquestioningly, the
familiar groove of pain and pleasure, of closeness at the cost of pain.

Lillian remembered Djuna’s words: Man is not
falling apart. He
is
undergoing a kind of fission, but I believe in
those who are trying quietly to isolate the destructive cells, so that after
fission each part is illumined and alive, waiting for a new fusion.

Was this why Lillian had always wept at
weddings? Had she known obscurely that each human being might lie wrapped in
his self-created myth, in the first plaster cast made by his emotions. Static
and unchangeable, each could move only in the grooves etched by the past.

Jay had appeared at first as the bearer of joy.
She had loved his complete union with the earth, his acceptance of the hungry,
the greedy animal within himself. He lived with blinders on, seeking only
pleasure, avoiding responsibilities and duties, swimming skillfully on the
surface, enjoying, suspicious of depths, out in the world, preferring the many
to the few, intoxication with life only, wherever it carried him, not faithful
to individuals, or to ideas. Seeking the flow, the living moment only. Never
looking back or looking into the future.

His talk of violence suited her tumultuous
nature. But then he had made love without violence, and then asked her: “Did
you expect more brutality?” She did not know this man. The first room he had
taken her to was shabby. He had said: “Look how worn the carpet is.” But all
she could see was the golden glow, the sun behind the curtain. All she could
hear were his words: “Lillian, your eyes are full of wonder. You expect a
miracle every day.” His brown shirt hung behind the door, there was only one
glass to drink from and a mountain of sketches and notebooks she was to song
iut
later, silk screen, and arrange into the famous
Portfolio. He had no time to stop. There was too much to see in the streets. He
had just discovered the Algerian street, with its smell of saffron, and the
Algerian
melopee
issuing from dark
medieval doorways.

Lillian felt they would live out something new.
They had first known each other in New York when Lillian was disconnected from
Larry. Jay had left for Paris because he wanted to live near the painters he
admired. Lillian’s engagement took her there for several months each year. New
for her, this total acceptance of all life, ugliness, poverty, sensuality,
Jay’s total acceptance, lack of selectivity or discrimination or withdrawals.
Lillian thought him a gentle savage, a passionate cannibal. Motherhood prepared
Lillian for this abdication of herself. Lillian adopted all his infatuations
and enthusiasms: she sat with him contemplating from a cafe table the orange
face of a clock, the prostitute with the wooden leg; played chess at the Cafe
de La
Regence
at the very table where Napoleon and
Robespierre had played chess. She helped him gather and note fifty ways of
saying drunk.

She abandoned classical music and became a jazz
pianist. Classical music could not contain her improvisations, her tempo, her
vehemences
.

She watched over Jay’s work, searched Paris
shops for the best paint, even learned to make some from ancient crafts. She
watched over his needs. She had his sketch book silk screened and carried the
Portfolios to New York and sold them. People were asking questions about Jay.
They laughed at his casual gifts to them, loved the freedom, the unbound pages,
the surprises, which gave them the feeling they were sharing an intimate, private
document, like a personal sketch book.

His rooms remained the same everywhere: the
plain iron bed, the hard pillows, the one glass. They were illumined by orgies:
let us see how long we can make love, how long, how many hours, days, nights.

When she went to New York to visit her
children, he wrote to her: “Terribly alive but pained, and feeling absolutely
that I need you. But I must see you soon. I see you bright and wonderful. I
want to get more familiar with you. I love you. I loved you when you came and
sat on the edge of the bed. All that afternoon like warm mist. Get closer to
me, I promise you it will be beautiful. I like so much your frankness, your
humility almost. I could never hurt that. It was to a woman like you I should
have been married.”

Small room, so shabby, like a deep-set alcove.
Immediately there was the richness of Jay’s voice, the feeling of sinking into
warm flesh, every twist of the body awakening new centers of pleasure.
“Everything is good, good,” murmured Jay. “Have I been less brutal than you
expected? Did the violence of my painting lead you to expect more?” Lillian was
baffled by these questions. What was he measuring himself against? A myth in
his own mind of what women expected?

In his own work everything was larger than nature.
Was he trying to match his own extravagances? If in his eyes he carried
magnifying glasses, did he see himself in life as a smaller figure?

In the same letter he wrote: “I don’t know what
I expect of you, Lillian, but it is something in the way of a miracle. I am
going to
deman
everything of you, even the
impossible, because you are strong.”

Lillian’s secret weakness then became the cause
of pain. She had a need of a mirror in which she could see her image loved by
Jay. Or perhaps a shrine, with herself in the place of honor. Unique and
irreplaceable Lillian (as she had been for Larry). But with Jay this was
impossible. The whole world flowed through his being in one day. Lillian was
apt to find sitting in her place (or lying in her bed) the most unlovely of all
women, undernourished, unkempt, anonymous, ordinary, he had picked up in a
cafe, with nothing to explain her presence except that she was perhaps the
opposite of Lillian. To her he gave the coat Lillian had left in his room. The
visitor had even brought with her a little grey wilted dog and Jay who hated
animals was even kind to this dusty mongrel that was molting.

For Jay’s kindness was his greatest expression
of anarchy. It was always an act of defiance to those one loved, to those one
lived with. His was a mockery of the laws of devotion. He could not give to
Lillian. He was always generous to outsiders, to those he owed nothing to,
giving paints to those who did not paint, a drink to the man who was
over-saturated with drink, his time to one who did not value it, the painting
Lillian favored to anyone who came to the studio.

His giving was a defiance of evaluation and
selection. He wanted to assert the value of what others discarded or neglected.
His favorite friend was not a great painter but the most mediocre of all
painters, who reflected Jay like a caricature, a diminished echo, who hummed
his words as Jay did, nodded his head as Jay did, laughed when Jay laughed.
They practiced
dadaism
together: everything was
absurd, everything was a joke. Jay would launch into frenzied praise of his
paintings. (Lillian called him Sancho
Panza
.)

Lillian would ask with candor: “Do you really
admire him so much, as much as all that? Is he truly greater than Gauguin?
Greater than Picasso?”

Jay would laugh at her gravity. “Oh no, I was
carried away by my own words, just got going. I think I was talking about my
own painting, really. I enjoy mystifying, confusing, contradicting. Deep down,
you know, I don’t believe in anything.”

“But people will believe you.”

“They admire the wrong painters anyway.”

“But you’re adding to the absurdities.”

Lillian had the feeling that Sancho did not
exist. True, he presented a Chinese face, but when she sought to know Sancho
she found an evasive smile which was a reflection of Jay’s smile, a sympathy
which was an act of politeness, an opinion which, at the slightest opposition,
vanished, a head waiter at a banquet, a valet for your coat, a shadow at the
top of the stairs. His eyes carried no messages. If her fingers touched him she
felt his body was fluid, evasive, anonymous. What Jay asserted he did not deny.
He imitated Jay’s adventures, but Lillian felt he had neither possessed life,
nor lost it, neither devoured it nor spat it out. He was the wool in the
bedroom slipper, the storm strip on the window, the felt stop on the piano key,
the shock absorber on the car spring. He was the invisible man, and Lillian
could not understand their fraternal bond. She
suffed
to see a reduced replica of Jay, his shrunken double.

“Right after being with me,” Lillian said once,
“did you have to take up with such an unlovely woman?”

“Oh that,” said Jay. “
Reichel
believes me to be callous, amoral, ungrateful. He thinks because I have you I’m
the luckiest man in the world, and it irritated me, his lecturing, so I
launched into a role, to shock him. I talked to him about the whores, and had
him gasping to think I might be callous about you. Can you understand that? I
realize that it’s all childish, but don’t take it seriously.”

“Eh? Sancho?” Sancho would laugh hysterically.
It was what Lillian called the Village Idiot Act. Lillian laughed with them,
but not with all of herself.

“I’m finding my own world,” said Jay. “A
certain condition of existence, a universe of mere BEING, where one lives like
a plant, instinctively. No will. The great indifference, like that of the Hindu
who lets himself be passive in order to let the seeds in him flower. Something
between the will of the European and the karma of the Oriental. I want just the
joy of illumination, the joy of what I see in the world. Just to receive
vibrations. Susceptibility to all life. Acceptance. Taking it all in. Just BE.
That was always the role of the artist: to reveal the joy, the ecstasy. My life
has been one long opposition to will. I have practiced letting things happen. I
have dodged jobs, responsibilities, and I want to express in painting the
relaxing of will and straining for the sake of enjoyment.”