Children of the Albatross (6 page)

The blue mouse was nibbling eagerly. The music
was playing. They were sitting on the rug. The room began to glitter and
sparkle.

Paul looked on with amazement.

(This pet, his eyes said, need not be killed.
Nothing is forbidden here.)

Lawrence was painting the cage with
phosphorescent paint so that it would shine in the dark.

“That way she won’t be afraid when I leave her
alone at night!”

While the paint dried Lawrence began to dance.

Djuna was laughing behind her veil of long
hair.

Paul looked at them yearningly and then said in
a toneless voice: “I have to leave now.” And he left precipitately. “Who is the
beautiful boy?” asked Lawrence.

“The son of tyrannical parents who are very
worried he should visit a dancer.”

“Will he come again?”

“He made no promise. Only if he can get away.”

“We’ll go and visit him.”

Djuna smiled. She could imagine Lawrence
arriving at Paul’s formal home with a cage with a blue mouse in it and Paul’s
mother saying: “You get rid of that pet!”

Or Lawrence taking a ballet leap to th the tip
of a chandelier, or singing some delicate obscenity.

“
C’est une jeune fille en fleur
,” he
said now, clairvoyantly divining Djuna’s fear of never escaping from the echoes
and descendants of Michael.

Lawrence shrugged his shoulders. Then he looked
at her with his red-gold eyes, under his red-gold hair. Whenever he looked at
her it was contagious: that eager, ardent glance falling amorously on everyone
and everything, dissolving the darkest moods.

No sadness could resist this frenzied carnival
of affection he dispensed every day, beginning with his enthusiasm for his
first cup of coffee, joy at the day’s beginning, an immediate fancy for the
first person he saw, a passion at the least provocation for man, woman, child
or animal. A warmth even in his collisions with misfortunes, troubles and
difficulties.

He received them smiling. Without money in his
pocket he rushed to help. With generous excess he rushed to love, to desire, to
possess, to lose, to suffer, to die the multiple little deaths everyone dies
each day. He would even die and weep and suffer and lose with enthusiasm, with
ardor. He was prodigal in poverty, rich and abundant in some invisible chemical
equivalent to gold and sun.

Any event would send him leaping and prancing
with gusto: a concert, a play, a ballet, a person. Yes, yes, yes, cried his
young firm body every morning. No retractions, no hesitations, no fears, no
caution, no economy. He accepted every invitation.

His joy was in movement, in assenting, in
consenting, in expansion.

Whenever he came he lured Djuna into a swirl.
Even in sadness they smiled at each other, expanding in sadness with dilated
eyes and dilated hearts.

“Drop every sorrow and dance!”

Thus they healed each other by dancing,
perfectly mated in enthusiasm and fire.

The waves which carried him forward never
dropped him on the rocks. He would always come back smiling: “Oh, Djuna, you
remember Hilda? I was so crazy about her. Do you know what she did? She tried
to palm off some false money on me. Yes, with all her lovely eyes, manners,
sensitiveness, she came to me and said so tenderly: let me have change for this
ten-dollar bill. And it was a bad one. And then she tried to hide some drugs in
my room, and to say I was the culprit. I nearly went to jail. She pawned my
typewriter, my box of paints. She finally took over my room and I had to sleep
for the night on a park bench.”

But the next morning he was again full of
faith, love, trust, impulses.

Dancing and believing.

In his presence she was again ready to believe.

To believe in Paul’s eyes, the mystery and the
depth in them, the sense of some vast dream lying coiled there, undeciphered.

Lawrence had finished the phosphorescent
painting. He closed the curtains and the cage shone in the dark. Now he decided
to paint with phosphorescence everything paintable in the room.

The next day Lawrence appeared with a large pot
of paint and he was stirring it with a stick when Paul telephoned: “I can get
away for a while. May I come?”

“Oh, come, come,” said Djuna.

“I can’t stay very late…” His voice was
muffled, like that of a sick person. There was a plaintiveness in it so plainly
audible to Djuna’s heart.

“The prisoner is allowed an hour’s freedom,”
she said.

When Paul came Lawrence handed him a paintbrush
and in silence the two of them worked at touching up everything paintable in
the room. They turned off the lights. A new room appeared.

Luminous faces appeared on the walls, new
flowers, new jewels, new castles, new jungles, new animals, all in filaments of
light.

Mysterious translucence like their unmeasured
words, their impulsive acts, wishes, enthusiasms. Darkness was excluded from
their world, the darkness of loss of faith. It was now the room with a
perpetual sparkle, even in darkness.

(They are making a new world for me, felt
Djuna, a world of greater lightness. It is perhaps a dream and I may not be
allowed to stay. They treat me as one of their own, because I believe what they
believe, I feel as they do. I hate the father, authority, men of power, men of
wealth, all tyranny, all authority, all crystallizations. I feel as Lawrence
and Paul: outside there lies a bigger world full of cruelties, dangers and
corruptions, where one sells out one’s charms, one’s playfulness, and enters a
rigid world of discipline, duty, contracts, accountings. A thick opaque world
without phosphorescence. I want to stay in this room forever not with man the
father but with man the son, carving, painting, dancing, dreaming, and always
beginning, born anew every day, never aging; full of faith and impulse, turning
and changing to every wind like the mobiles. I do not love those who have
ceased to flow, to believe, to feel. Those who can no longer melt, exult, who
cannot let themselves be cheated, laugh at loss, those who are bound and
frozen. )

She laid her head on Lawrence’s shoulder with a
kind of gratitude.

(Nowhere else as here with Lawrence and with
Paul was there such an iridescence in the air; nowhere else so far from the
threat of hardening and crystallizing. Everything flowing…)

Djuna was brushing her hair with her fingers,
in long pensive strokes, and Lawrence was talking about the recurrent big
problem of a job. He had tried so many. How to work without losing one’s color,
one’s ardor, personal possessions and freedom. He was very much like a delicate
Egyptian scarab who dreaded to lose his iridescence in routine, in duty, in
monotony. The job could kill one, or maim one, make one a robot, an opaque
personage, a future undertaker, a man of power with gouty limbs and a hardening
of the arteries of faith!

Lawrence lived and breathed color and there was
no danger of his dying of drabness, for even accidents took on a most vivid
shade and a spilled pot of
gouache
was still a delight to the eyes.

He brought Djuna gifts of chokers, headdresses,
earrings made of painted clay which crumbled quickly like the trappings for a
costume play.

She had always liked objects without solidity.
The solid ones bound her to permanency. She had never wanted a solid house,
enduring furniture. All these were traps. Then you belonged to them forever.
She preferred stage trappings which she could move into and out of easily,
without regret. Soon after they fell apart and nothing was lost. The vividness
alone survived.

She remembered once hearing a woman complain
that armchairs no longer lasted twenty years, and Djuna answered: “But I
couldn’t love an armchair for twenty years!”

And so change, mutations like the rainbow, and
she preferred Lawrence’s gifts from which the colored powder and crystals fell
like the colors on the wings of butterflies after yielding their maximum of
charm.

Paul was carving a piece of copper, making such
fine incisions with the scissors that the bird which finally appeared between
his slender fingers bristled with filament feathers.

He stood on the table and hung it by a thread
to the ceiling. The slightest breath caused it to turn slowly.

Paul had the skin of a child that had never
been touched by anything of this earth: no soap, no wash rag, no brush, no
human kiss could have touched his skin! Never scrubbed, rubbed, scratched, or
wrinkled by a pillow. The transparency of the child skin, of the adolescent
later to turn opaque. What do children nourish themselves with that their skin
has this transparency, and what do they eat of later which brings on
opaqueness?

The mothers who kiss them are eating light.

There is a phosphorescence which comes from the
magic world of childhood.

Where does this illumination go later? Is it
the substance of faith which shines from their bodies like phosphorescence from
the albatross, and what kills it?

Now Lawrence had discovered a coiled measuring
tape of steel in Djuna’s closet while delving for objects useful for charades.

When entirely pulled out of its snail covering
it stretched like a long snake of steel which under certain manipulations could
stand rigid like a sword or undulate like silver-tped waves, or flash like
lightning.

Lawrence and Paul stood like expert swordsmen
facing each other for a duel of light and steel.

The steel band flexed, then hardened between
them like a bridge, and at each forward movement by one it seemed as if the
sword had pierced the body of the other.

At other moments it wilted, wavered like a
frightened snake, and then it looked bedraggled and absurd and they both
laughed.

But soon they learned never to let it break or
waver and it became like a thunderbolt in their hands. Paul attacked with
audacity and Lawrence parried with swiftness.

At midnight Paul began to look anxious. His
luminosity clouded, he resumed his hesitant manner. He ceased to occupy the
center of the room and moved out of the focus of light and laughter. Like a
sleepwalker, he moved away from gaiety.

Djuna walked with him towards the door. They
were alone and then he said: “My parents have forbidden me to come here.”

“But you were happy here, weren’t you?”

“Yes, I was happy.”

“This is where you belong.”

“Why do you think I belong here?”

“You’re gifted for dancing, for painting, for
writing. And this is your month of freedom.”

“Yes, I know. I wish… I wish I were free…”

“If you wish it deeply enough you will find a
way.”

“I would like to run away, but I have no
money.”

“If you run away we’ll all take care of you.”

“Why?”

“Because we believe in you, because you’re
worth helping.”

“I have nowhere to go.”

“We’ll find you a room somewhere, and we will
adopt you. And you will have your month of life.”

“Of life!” he repeated with docility.

“But I don’t want you to do it unless you feel
ready, unless you want it so much that you’re willing to sacrifice everything
else. I only want you to know you can count on us, but it must be your
decision, or it will not mean anything.”

“Thank you.” This time he did not clasp her
hand, he laid his hand within hers as if nestling it there, folded, ivory
smooth and gentle at rest, in an act of trustingness.

Then before leaving the place he looked once
more at the room as if to retain its enfolding warmth. At one moment he had
laughed so much that he had slid from his chair. Djuna had made him laugh. At
that moment many of his chains must have broken, for nothing breaks chains like
laughter, and Djuna could not remember in all her life a greater joy than this
spectacle of Paul laughing like a released prisoner.

Two days later Paul appeared at her door with
his valise. Djuna received him gaily as if this were the beginning of a
holiday, asked him to tie the velvet bows at her wrist, drove him to where
Lawrence lived with his parents and where there was an extra room.

She would have liked to shelter him in her own
house, but she knew his parents would come there and find him.

He wrote a letter to his parents. He reminded
them that he had only a month of freedom for himself before leaving for India
on the official post his father had arranged for him, that during this month he
felt he had a right to be with whatever friends he felt a kinship with. He had
found people with whom he had a great deal to share and since his parents had
been so extreme in their demands, forbidding him to see his friends at all, he
was being equally extreme in his assertion of his freedom. Not to be concerned
about him, that at the end of the month he would comply with his father’s plans
for him.

He did not stay in his room. It had been
arranged that he would have his meals at Djuna’s house. An hour after he had
laid down his valise in Lawrence’s room he was at her house.