Children of the Albatross (4 page)

Secretive and silent in relation to the world,
she became exalted and intense once placed inde of this inner circle of light.

This light which enclosed two was familiar and
natural to her.

Because of their youth, and their moving still
outside of the center of their own desires blindly, what they danced together
was not a dance in which either took possession of the other, but a kind of
minuet, where the aim consisted in
not
appropriating,
not
grasping,
not
touching, but allowing the maximum space and distance to flow
between the two figures. To move in accord without collisions, without merging.
To encircle, to bow in worship, to laugh at the same absurdities, to mock their
own movements, to throw upon the walls twin shadows which will never become
one. To dance around this danger: the danger of becoming one! To dance keeping
each to his own path. To allow parallelism, but no loss of the self into the
other. To play at marriage, step by step, to read the same book together, to
dance a dance of elusiveness on the rim of desire, to remain within circles of
heightened lighting without touching the core that would set the circle on
fire.

A deft dance of unpossession.

They met once at a party, imprinted on each
other forever the first physical image: she saw him tall, with an easy bearing,
an easily flowing laughter. She saw all: the ivory color of the skin, the gold
metal sheen of the hair, the lean body carved with meticulous economy as for
racing, running, leaping; tender fingers touching objects as if all the world
were fragile; tender inflections of the voice without malice or mockery;
eyelashes always ready to fall over the eyes when people spoke harshly around
him.

He absorbed her dark, long, swinging hair, the
blue eyes never at rest, a little slanted, quick to close their curtains too,
quick to laugh, but more often thirsty, absorbing like a mirror. She allowed
the pupil to receive these images of others but one felt they did not vanish
altogether as they would on a mirror: one felt a thirsty being absorbing
reflections and drinking words and faces into herself for a deep communion with
them.

She never took up the art of words, the art of
talk. She remained always as Michael had first seen her: a woman who talked
with her Naiad hair, her winged eyelashes, her tilted head, her fluent waist
and rhetorical feet.

She never said: I have a pain. But laid her two
arms over the painful area as if to quiet a rebellious child, rocking and
cradling this angry nerve. She never said: I am afraid. But entered the room on
tiptoes, her eyes watching for ambushes.

She was already the dancer she was to become,
eloquent with her body.

They met once and then Michael began to write
her letters as soon as he returned to college.

In these letters he appointed her Isis and
Arethusa, Iseult and the Seven Muses.

Djuna became the woman with the face of all
women.

With strange omissions: he was neither Osiris
nor Tristram, nor any of the mates or pursuers.

He became uneasy when she tried to clothe
him
in the costume of myth figures.

When he came to see her during vacations they
never touched humanly, not even by a handclasp. It was as if they had found the
most intricate way of communicating with each other by way of historical
personages, literary passions, and that any direct touch even of finger tips
would explode this world.

With each substitution they increased the
distance between their human selves.

Djuna was not alarmed. She regarded this with
feminine eyes: in creating this world Michael was merely constructing a huge,
superior, magnificent nest in some mythological tree, and one day he would ask
her to step into it with him, carrying her over the threshold all costumed in
the trappings of his fantasy, and he would say: this is our home!

All this to Djuna was an infinitely superior
way of wooing her, and she never doubted its ultimate purpose, or climax, for
in this the most subtle women are basically simple and do not consider
mythology or symbolism as a substitute for the climaxes of nature, merely as
adornments!

The mist of adolescence, prolonging and
expanding the wooing, was merely an elaboration of the courtship. His
imagination continued to create endless detours as if they had to live first of
all through all the loves of history and fiction before they could focus on
their own.

But the peace in his moss-green eyes disturbed
her, for in her eyes there now glowed a fever. Her breasts hurt her at night,
as if from overfullness.

His eyes continued to focus on the most distant
points of all, but hers began to focus on the near, the present. She would
dwell on a detail of his face. On his ears for instance. On the movements of
his lips when he talked. She failed to hear some of his words because she was
following with her eyes and her feelings the contours of his lips moving as if
they were moving on the surface of her skin.

She began to understand for the first time the
carnation in Carmen’s mouth. Carmen was eating the mock orange of love: the
white blossoms which she bit were like skin. Her lips had pressed around the
mock orange petals of desire.

In Djuna all the moats were annihilated: she
stood perilously near to Michael glowing with her own natural warmth. Days of
clear visibility which Michael did not share. His compass still pointed to the
remote, the unknown.

Djuna was a woman being dreamed.

But Djuna had ceased to dream: she had tasted
the mock orange of desire.

More baffling still to Djuna grown warm and
near, with her aching breasts, was that the moss-green serenity of Michael’s
eyes was going to dissolve into jealousy without pausing at desire.

He tok her to a dance. His friends eagerly
appropriated her. From across the room full of dancers, for the first time he
saw not her eyes but her mouth, as vividly as she had seen him. Very clear and
very near, and he felt the taste of it upon his lips.

For the first time, as she danced away from
him, encircled by young men’s arms, he measured the great space they had been
swimming through, measured it exactly as others measure the distance between
planets.

The mileage of space he had put between himself
and Djuna. The lighthouse of the eyes alone could traverse such immensity!

And now, after such elaborations in space, so
many figures interposed between them, the white face of Iseult, the burning
face of Catherine, all of which he had interpreted as mere elaborations of his
enjoyment of her, now suddenly appeared not as ornaments but as obstructions to
his possession of her.

She was lost to him now. She was carried away
by other young men, turning with them. They had taken her waist as he never
had, they bent her, plied her to the movements of the dance, and she answered
and responded: they were mated by the dance.

As she passed him he called out her name
severely, reproachfully, and Djuna saw the green of his eyes turned to violet
with jealousy.

“Djuna! I’m taking you home.”

For the first time he was willful, and she
liked it.

“Djuna!” He called again, angrily, his eyes
darkening with anger.

She had to stop dancing. She came gently
towards him, thinking: “He wants me all to himself,” and she was happy to yield
to him.

He was only a little taller than she was, but
he held himself very erect and commanding.

On the way home he was silent.

The design of her mouth had vanished again, his
journey towards her mouth had ceased the moment it came so near in reality to his
own. It was as if he dared to experience a possibility of communion only while
the obstacle to it was insurmountable, but as the obstacle was removed and she
walked clinging to his arm, then he could only commune with her eyes, and the
distance was again reinstated.

He left her at her door without a sign of
tenderness, with only the last violet shadows of jealousy lurking reproachfully
in his eyes. That was all.

Djuna sobbed all night before the mystery of
his jealousy, his anger, his remoteness.

She would not question him. He confided
nothing. They barred all means of communication with each other. He would not
tell her that at this very dance he had discovered an intermediate world from
which all the figures of women were absent. A world of boys like himself in
flight away from woman, mother, sister, wife or mistress.

Iher ignorance and innocence then, she could
not have pierced with the greatest divination where Michael, in his flight from
her, gave his desire.

In their youthful blindness they wounded each
other. He excused his coldness towards her: “You’re too slender. I like plump
women.” Or again: “You’re too intelligent. I feel better with stupid women.” Or
another time he said: “You’re too impulsive, and that frightens me.”

Being innocent, she readily accepted the blame.

Strange scenes took place between them. She
subdued her intelligence and became passive to please him. But it was a game,
and they both knew it. Her ebullience broke through all her pretenses at
quietism.

She swallowed countless fattening pills, but
could only gain a pound or two. When she proudly asked him to note the
improvements, his eyes turned away.

One day he said: “I feel your clever head
watching me, and you would look down on me if I failed.”

Failed?

She could not understand.

With time, her marriage to another, her dancing
which took her to many countries, the image of Michael was effaced.

But she continued to relate to other Michaels
in the world. Some part of her being continued to recognize the same gentleness,
the same elusiveness, the same mystery.

Michael reappeared under different bodies,
guises, and each time she responded to him, discovering each time a little more
until she pierced the entire mystery open.

But the same little dance took place each time,
a little dance of insolence, a dance which said to the woman: “I dance alone, I
will not be possessed by a woman.”

The kind of dance tradition had taught woman as
a ritual to provoke aggression! But this dance made by young men before the
women left them at a loss for it was not intended to be answered.

Years later she sat at a cafe table in Paris
between Michael and Donald.

Why should she be sitting between Michael and
Donald?

Why were not all cords cut between herself and
Michael when she married and when he gave himself to a succession of Donalds?

When they met in Paris again, he had this need
to invent a trinity: to establish a connecting link between Djuna and all the
changing, fluctuating Donalds.

As if some element were lacking in his relation
to Donald.

Donald had a slender body, like an Egyptian
boy. Dark hair wild like that of a child who had been running. At momentshe
extreme softness of his gestures made him appear small, at others when he stood
stylized and pure in line, erect, he seemed tall and firm.

His eyes were large and entranced, and he
talked flowingly like a medium. His eyelids fell heavily over his eyes like a
woman’s, with a sweep of the eyelashes. He had a small straight nose, small
ears, and strong boyish hands.

When Michael left for cigarettes they looked at
each other, and immediately Donald ceased to be a woman. He straightened his
body and looked at Djuna unflinchingly.

With her he asserted his strength. Was it her
being a woman which challenged his strength? He was now like a grave child in
the stage of becoming a man.

With the smile of a conspirator he said:
“Michael treats me as if I were a woman or a child. He wants me not to work and
to depend on him. He wants to go and live down south in a kind of paradise.”

“And what do you want?”

“I am not sure I love Michael…”

That was exactly what she expected to hear.
Always this admission of incompleteness. Always one in flight or the three
sitting together, always one complaining or one loving less than the other.

All this accompanied by the most complicated
harmonization of expressions Djuna had ever seen. The eyes and mouth of Donald
suggesting an excitement familiar to drug addicts, only in Donald it did not
derive from any artificial drugs but from the strange flavor he extracted from
difficulties, from the maze and detours and unfulfillments of his loves.

In Donald’s eyes shone the fever of futile
watches in the night, intrigue, pursuits of the forbidden, all the rhythms and
moods unknown to ordinary living. There was a quest for the forbidden and it
was this flavor he sought, as well as the strange lighting which fell on all
the unknown, the unfamiliar, the tabooed, all that could remind him of those
secret moments of childhood when he sought the very experiences most forbidden
by the parents.

But when it came to the selection of one, to
giving one’s self to one, to an open simplicity and an effort at completeness,
some mysterious impulse always intervened and destroyed the relationship. A
hatred of permanency, of anything resembling marnage.