Children of the Albatross (5 page)

Donald was talking against Michael’s paradise
as it would destroy the bittersweet, intense flavor he sought.

He bent closer to Djuna, whispering now like a
conspirator. It was his conspiracy against simplicity, against Michael’s desire
for a peaceful life together.

“If you only knew, Djuna, the first time it
happened! I expected the whole world to change its face, be utterly
transformed, turned upside down. I expected the room to become inclined,as
after an earthquake, to find that the door no longer led to a stairway but into
space, and the windows overlooked the sea. Such excitement; such anxiety, and
such a fear of not achieving s tlment. At other times I have the feeling that I
am escaping a prison, I have a fear of being caught again and punished. When I
signal to another like myself in a cafe I have the feeling that we are two
prisoners who have found a laborious way to communicate by a secret code. All
our messages are colored with the violent colors of danger. What I find in this
devious way has a taste like no other object overtly obtained. Like the taste
of those dim and secret afternoons of our childhood when we performed forbidden
acts with great anxiety and terror of punishment. The exaltation of danger, I’m
used to it now, the fever of remorse. This society which condemns me…do you
know how I am revenging myself? I am seducing each one of its members slowly,
one by one…”

He talked softly and exultantly, choosing the
silkiest words, not disguising his dream of triumphing over all those who had
dared to forbid certain acts, and certain forms of love.

At the same time when he talked about Michael
there came to his face the same expression women have when they have seduced a
man, an expression of vain glee, a triumphant, uncontrollable celebration of
her power. And so Donald was celebrating the feminine wiles and ruses and
charms by which he had made Michael fall so deeply in love with him.

In his flight from woman, it seemed to Djuna,
Michael had merely fled to one containing all the minor flaws of women.

Donald stopped talking and there remained in
the air the feminine intonations of his voice, chanting and never falling into
deeper tones.

Michael was back and sat between them offering
cigarettes.

As soon as Michael returned Djuna saw Donald
change, become woman again, tantalizing and provocative. She saw Donald’s body
dilating into feminine undulations, his face open in all nakedness. His face
expressed a dissolution like that of a woman being taken. Everything revealed,
glee, the malice, the vanity, the childishness. His gestures like those of a
second-rate actress receiving flowers with a batting of the eyelashes, with an
oblique glance like the upturned cover of a bedspread, the edge of a petticoat.

He had the stage bird’s turns of the head, the
little dance of alertness, the petulance of the mouth pursed for small kisses
that do not shatter the being, the flutter and perk of prize birds, all
adornment and change, a mockery of the evanescent darts of invitation, the
small gestures of alarm and promise made by minor women.

Michael said: “You two resemble each other. I
am sure Donald’s suits would fit you, Djuna.”

“But Donald is more truthful,” said Djuna,
thinking how openly Donald betrayed that he did not love Michael, whereas she
might have sought a hundred oblique routes to soften this truth.

“Donald is more truthful because he loves
less,” said Michael.

Warmth in the air. The spring foliage shivering
out of pure coquetry, not out of discomfort. Love flowing now between the
three, shared, transmitted, contagious, as if Michael were at last free to love
Djuna in the form of a boy, through the body of Donald to reach Djuna whom he
could never touch directly, and Djuna through the body of Donald reached Michael—and
the missing dimension of their love accomplished in space like an algebra of
imperfection, an abstract drama of incompleteness at last resolved for one
moment by this trinity of woman sitting between two incomplete men.

She could look with Michael’s eyes at Donald’s
finely designed body, the narrow waist, the square shoulders, the stylized
gestures and dilated expression.

She could see that Donald did not give his true
self to Michael. He acted for him a caricature of woman’s minor petulances and
caprices. He ordered a drink and then changed his mind, and when the drink came
he did not want it at all.

Djuna thought: “He is like a woman without the
womb in which such great mysteries take place. He is a travesty of a marriage
that will never take place.”

Donald rose, performed a little dance of
salutation and flight before them, eluding Michael’s pleading eyes, bowed, made
some whimsical gesture of apology and flight, and left them.

This little dance reminded her of Michael’s
farewells on her doorsteps when she was sixteen.

And suddenly she saw all their movements, hers
with Michael, and Michael’s with Donald, as a ballet of unreality and
unpossession.

“Their greatest form of activity is flight!”
she said to Michael.

To the tune of Debussy’s “
Ile Joyeuse
,”
they gracefully made all the steps which lead to no possession.

(When will I stop loving these airy young men
who move in a realm like the realm of the birds, always a little quicker than
most human beings, always a little above, or beyond humanity, always in flight,
out of some great fear of human beings, always seeking the open space, wary of
enclosures, anxious for their freedom, vibrating with a multitude of alarms,
always sensing danger all around them…)

“Birds,” said a research scientist, “live their
lives with an intensity as extreme as their brilliant colors and their vivid
songs. Their body temperatures are regularly as high as 105 to 110 degrees, and
anyone who has watched a bird at close range must have seen how its whole body
vibrates with the furious pounding of its pulse. Such engines must operate at
forced draft: and that is exactly what a bird does. The bird’s indrawn breath
not only fills its lungs, but also passes on through myriads of tiny tubules
into air sacs that fill every space in the bird’s body not occupied by vital
organs. Furthermore the air sacs connect with many of the bird’s bones, which
are not filled with marrow as animals’ bones are, but are hollow. These reserve
air tanks provide fuel for the bird’s intensive life, and at the same time add
to its buoyancy in flight.”

Paul arrived as the dawn arrives, mist-laden,
uncertain of his gestures. The sun was hidden until he smiled. Then the blue of
his eyes, the shadows under his eyes, the sleepy eyelids, were all illuminated
by the wide, brilliant e. Mist, dew, the uncertain hoverings of his gestures
were dispelled by the full, firmmouth, the strong even teeth.

Then the smile vanished again, as quickly as it
had come. When he entered her room he brought with him this climate of
adolescence which is neither sun nor full moon but the intermediate regions.

Again she noticed the shadows under his eyes,
which made a soft violet-tinted halo around the intense blue of the pupils.

He was mantled in shyness, and his eyelids were
heavy as if from too much dreaming. His dreaming lay like the edges of a deep
slumber on the rim of his eyelids. One expected them to close in a hypnosis of
interior fantasy as mysterious as a drugged state.

This constant passing from cloudedness to brilliance
took place within a few instants. His body would sit absolutely still, and then
would suddenly leap into gaiety and lightness. Then once again his face would
close hermetically.

He passed in the same quick way between phrases
uttered with profound maturity to sudden innocent inaccuracies.

It was difficult to remember he was seventeen.

He seemed more preoccupied with uncertainty as
to how to carry himself through this unfamiliar experience than with absorbing
or enjoying it.

Uncertainty spoiled his pleasure in the
present, but Djuna felt he was one to carry away his treasures into secret
chambers of remembrance and there he would lay them all out like the contents
of an opium pipe being prepared, these treasures no longer endangered by
uneasiness in living, the treasures becoming the past, and there he would touch
and caress every word, every image, and make them his own.

In solitude and remembrance his real life would
begin. Everything that was happening now was merely the preparation of the
opium pipe that would later send volutes into space to enchant his solitude,
when he would be lying down away from danger and unfamiliarity, lying down to
taste of an experience washed of the dross of anxiety.

He would lie down and nothing more would be
demanded of the dreamer, no longer expected to participate, to speak, to act,
to decide. He would lie down and the images would rise in chimerical
visitations and from a tale more marvelous in every detail than the one taking
place at this moment marred by apprehension.

Having created a dream beforehand which he
sought to preserve from destruction by reality, every movement in life became
more difficult for the dreamer, for Paul, his fear of errors being like the
opium dreamer’s fear of noise or daylight.

And not only his dream of Djuna was he seeking
to preserve like some fragile essence easily dispelled but even more dangerous,
his own image of what was expected of him by Djuna, what he imagined Djuna
expected of him—a heavy demand upon a youthful Paul, his own ideal exigencies
which he did not know to be invented by himself creating a difficulty in every
act or word in which he was merely re-enacting scenes rehearsed in childhood in
whiche child’s naturalness was always defeated by the severity of the parents giving
him the perpetual feeling that no word and no act came up to this impossible
standard set for him. A more terrible compression than when the Chinese bound
the feet of their infants, bound them with yards of cloth to stunt the natural
growth. Such tyrannical cloth worn too long, unbroken, uncut, would in the end
turn one into a mummy…

Djuna could see the image of the mother binding
Paul in the story he told her: He had a pet guinea pig, once, which he loved.
And his mother had forced him to kill it.

She could see all the bindings when he added:
“I destroyed a diary I kept in school.”

“Why?”

“Now that I was home for a month, my parents
might have read it.”

Were the punishments so great that he was
willing rather to annihilate living parts of himself, a loved pet, a diary
reflecting his inner self?

“There are many sides of yourself you cannot
show your parents.”

“Yes.” An expression of anxiety came to his
face. The effect of their severity was apparent in the way he sat, stood—even
in the tone of resignation in which he said: “I have to leave soon.”

Djuna looked at him and saw him as the prisoner
he was—a prisoner of school, of parents.

“But you have a whole month of freedom now.”

“Yes,” said Paul, but the word freedom had no
echo in his being.

“What will you do with it?”

He smiled then. “I can’t do much with it. My
parents don’t want me to visit dancers.”

“Did you tell them you were coming to visit
me?”

“Yes.”

“Do they know you want to be a dancer
yourself?”

“Oh, no.” He smiled again, a distressed smile,
and then his eyes lost their direct, open frankness. They wavered, as if he had
suddenly lost his way.

This was his most familiar expression: a
nebulous glance, sliding off people and objects.

He had the fears of a child in the external world,
yet he gave at the same time the impression of living in a larger world. This
boy, thought Djuna tenderly, is lost. But he is lost in a large world. His
dreams are vague, infinite, formless. He loses himself in them. No one knows
what he is imagining and thinking. He does not know, he cannot say, but it is
not a simple world. It expands beyond his grasp, he senses more than he knows,
a bigger world which frightens him. He cannot confide or give himself. He must
have beyes o often harshly condemned.

Waves of tenderness flowed out to him from her
eyes as they sat without talking. The cloud vanished from his face. It was as
if he sensed what she was thinking.

Just as he was leaving Lawrence arrived
breathlessly, embraced Djuna effusively, pranced into the studio and turned on
the radio.

He was Paul’s age, but unlike Paul he did not
appear to carry a little snail house around his personality, a place into which
to retreat and vanish. He came out openly, eyes aware, smiling, expectant, in
readiness for anything that might happen, He moved propelled by sheer impulse,
and was never still.

He was carrying a cage which he laid in the
middle of the room. He lifted its covering shaped like a miniature striped
awning.

Djuna knelt on the rug to examine the contents
of the cage and laughed to see a blue mouse nibbling at a cracker.

“Where did you find a turquoise mouse?” asked
Djuna.

“I bathed her in dye,” said Lawrence. “Only she
licks it all away in a few days and turns white again, so I had to bring her
this time right after her bath.”