Children of the Albatross (7 page)

In his presence she did not feel herself a
mature woman, but again a girl of seventeen at the beginning of her own life.
As if the girl of seventeen had remained undestroyed by experience—like some
deeper layer in a geological structure which had been pressed but not
obliterated by the new layers.

(He seems hungry and thirsty for warmth, and
yet so fearful. We are arrested by each other’s elusiveness. Who will take
flight first? If we move too hastily fear will spring up and separate us. I am
fearful of his innocence, and he of what he believes to be my knowingness. But
neither one of us knows what the other wants, we are both arrested and ready to
vanish, with such a fear of being hurt. His oscillations are like mine, his
muteness like mine at his age, his fears like my fears.)

She felt that as she came nearer there was a
vibration through his body. Through all the mists as her body approached to
greet him there was an echo of her movements within him.

With his hand within hers, at rest, he said:
“Everyone is doing so much for me. Do you think that when I grow up I will be
able to do the same for someone else?”

“Of course you will.” And because he had said
so gently “when I grow up” she saw him suddenly as a boy, and her hand went out
swiftly towards the strand of boyish hair which fell over his eyes and pulled
it.

That she had done this with a half-frightened
lau as if she expected retaliation made him feel at ease with her.

He did retaliate by trying jiujitsu on her arm
until she said: “You hurt me.” Then he stopped, but the discovery that her
bones were not as strong as the boys’ on whom he had tested his knowledge made
him feel powerful. He had more strength than he needed to handle her. He could
hurt her so easily, and now he was no longer afraid when her face came near his
and her eyes grew larger and more brilliant, or when she danced and her hair
accidentally swung across her face like a silk whip, or when she sat like an
Arab holding conversation over the telephone in answer to invitations which
might deprive him of her presence. No matter who called, she always refused,
and stayed at home to talk with him.

The light in the room became intensely bright
and they were bathed in it, bright with the disappearance of his fear.

He felt as ease to sit and draw, to read, to
paint, and to be silent. The light around them grew warm and dim and intimate.

By shedding in his presence the ten years of
life which created distance between them, she felt herself re-entering a
smaller house of innocence and faith, and that what she shed was merely a role:
she played a role of woman, and this had been the torment, she had been
pretending to be a woman, and now she knew she had not been at ease in this
role, and now with Paul she felt she was being transformed into a stature and
substance nearer to her true state.

With Paul she was passing from an insincere
pretense at maturity into a more vulnerable world, escaping from the more
difficult role of tormented woman to a smaller room of warmth.

For one moment, sitting there with Paul,
listening to the Symphony in D Minor of Cesar Franck, through his eyes she was
allowed behind the mirror into a smaller silk-lined house of faith.

In art, in history, man fights his fears, he
wants to live forever, he is afraid of death, he wants to work with other men,
he wants to live forever. He is like a child afraid of death. The child is afraid
of death, of darkness, of solitude. Such simple fears behind all the elaborate
constructions. Such simple fears as hunger for light, warmth, love. Such simple
fears behind the elaborate constructions of art. Examine them all gently and
quietly through the eyes of a boy. There is always a human being lonely, a
human being afraid, a human being lost, a human being confused. Concealing and
disguising his dependence, his needs, ashamed to say: I am a simple human being
in too vast and too complex a world. Because of all we have discovered about a
leaf…it is still a leaf. Can we relate to a leaf, on a tree, in a park, a
simple leaf: green, glistening, sun-bathed or wet, or turning white because the
storm is coming. Like the savage, let us look at the leaf wet or shining with
sun, or white with fear of the storm, or silvery in the fog, or listless in too
great heat, or falling in the autumn, drying, reborn each year anew. Learn from
the leaf: simplicity. In spite of all we know about the leaf: its nerve structure
phyllome cellular papilla parenchyma stomata venation. Keep a human
relation—leaf, man, woman, child. In tenderness. No matter how immense the
world, how elaborate, how contradictory, there is always man, woman, child, and
the leaf. Humanity makes everything warm and simple. Humanity. Let the waters
of humanity flow through the abstract city, through abstract art, weeping like
riets, cracking rocky mountains, melting icebergs. The frozen worlds in empty
cages of mobiles where hearts lie exposed like wires in an electric bulb. Let
them burst at the tender touch of a leaf.

The next morning Djuna was having breakfast in
bed when Lawrence appeared.

“I’m broke and I’d like to have breakfast with
you.”

He had begun to eat his toast when the maid
came and said: “There’s a gentleman at the door who won’t give his name.”

“Find out what he wants. I don’t want to dress
yet.”

But the visitor had followed the servant to the
door and stood now in the bedroom.

Before anyone could utter a protest he said in
the most classically villainous tone: “Ha, ha, having breakfast, eh?”

“Who are you? What right have you to come in
here,” said Djuna.

“I have every right: I’m a detective.”

“A detective!”

Lawrence’s eyes began to sparkle with
amusement.

The detective said to him; “And what are you
doing here, young man?”

“I’m having breakfast.” He said this in the
most cheerful and natural manner, continuing to drink his coffee and buttering
a piece of toast which he offered Djuna.

“Wonderful!” said the detective. “So I’ve
caught you. Having breakfast, eh? While your parents are breaking their hearts
over your disappearance. Having breakfast, eh? When you’re not eighteen yet and
they can force you to return home and never let you out again.” And turning to
Djuna he added: “And what may your interest in this young man be?”

Then Djuna and Lawrence broke into
irrepressible laughter, “I’m not the only one,” said Lawrence.

At this the detective looked like a man who had
not expected his task to be so easy, almost grateful for the collaboration.

“So you’re not the only one!”

Djuna stopped laughing. “He means anyone who is
broke can have breakfast here.”

“Will you have a cup of coffee?” said Lawrence
with an impudent smile.

“That’s enough talk from you,” said the
detective. “You’d better come along with me, Paul.”

“But I’m not Paul.”

“Who are you?”

“My name is Lawrence.”

“Do you know Paul—? Have you seen him
recently?”

“He was here last night for a party.”

“A party? And where did he go after that?”

“I don’t know,” said Lawrence. “I thought he
was staying with his parents.”

“What kind of a party was this?” asked the
detective. But now Djuna had stopped laughing and was becoming angry. “Leave
this place immediately,” she said.

The detective took a photograph out of his pocket,
compared it with Lawrence’s face, saw there was no resemblance, looked once
more at Djuna’s face, read the anger in it, and left.

As soon as he left her anger vanished and they
laughed again. Suddenly Djuna’s playfulness turned into anxiety. “But this may
become serious, Lawrence. Paul won’t be able to come to my house any more. And
suppose it had been Paul who had come for breakfast!”

And then another aspect of the situation struck
her and her face became sorrowful. “What kind of parents has Paul that they can
consider using force to bring him home.”

She took up the telephone and called Paul. Paul
said in a shocked voice: “They can’t take me home by force!”

“I don’t know about the law, Paul. You’d better
stay away from my house. I will meet you somewhere—say at the ballet
theater—until we find out.”

For a few days they met at concerts, galleries,
ballets. But no one seemed to follow them.

Djuna lived in constant fear that he would be
whisked away and that she might never see him again. Their meetings took on the
anxiety of repeated farewells. They always looked at each other as if it were
for the last time.

Through this fear of loss she took longer
glances at his face, and every facet of it, every gesture, every inflection of
his voice thus sank deeper into her, to be stored away against future
loss—deeper and deeper it penetrated, impregnated her more as she fought
against its vanishing.

She felt that she not only saw Paul vividly in
the present but Paul in the future. Every expression she could read as an
indication of future power, future discernment, future completion. Her vision
of the future Paul illumined the present. Others could see a young man
experiencing his first drunkenness, taking his first steps in the world,
oscillating or contradicting himself. But she felt herself living with a Paul
no one had seen yet, the man of the future, willful, and with a power in him
which appeared intermittently.

When the clouds and mists of adolescence would
vanish, what a complete and rich man he would become, with this mixture of
sensibility and intelligence motivating his choices, discarding shallowness,
never taking a step into mediocrity, with an unerring instinct for the
extraordinary.

To send a detective to bring him home by force,
how little his parents must know this Paul of the future, possessed of that
deep-seated mine of tenderness hidden below access but visible to her.

She was living with a Paul no one knew as yet,
in a secret relationship far from the reach of the subtlest detectives, beyond
the reach of the entire world.

Under the veiled voice she felt the hidden
warmth, under the hesitancies a hidden strength, under the fears a vaster dream
more difficult to seize and to fulfill.

Alone, after an afternoon with him, she lay on
her bed and while the bird he had carved gyrated lightly in the center of the
room, tears came to her eyes so slowly she did not feel them at first until
they slid down her cheeks.

Tears from this unbearable melting of her heart
and body—a complete melting before the face of Paul, and the muted way his body
spoke, the gentle way he was hungering, reaching, groping, like a prisoner
escaping slowly and gradually, door by door, room by room, hallway by hallway,
towards the light. The prison that had been built around him had been of
darkness: darkness about himself, about his needs, about his true nature.

The solitary cell created by the parents.

He knew nothing, nothing about his true self.
And such blindness was as good as binding him with chains. His parents and his
teachers had merely imposed upon him a false self that seemed right to them.

This boy they did not know.

But this melting, it must not be. She turned
her face away, to the right now, as if to turn away from the vision of his
face, and murmured: “I must not love him, I must not love him.”

The bell rang. Before she could sit up Paul had
come in.

“Oh, Paul, this is dangerous for you!”

“I had to come.”

As he stopped in his walking towards her his
body sought to convey a message. What was his body saying? What were his eyes
saying?

He was too near, she felt his eyes possessing
her and she rushed away to make tea, to place a tray and food between them,
like some very fragile wall made of sand, in games of childhood, which the sea
could so easily wash away!

She talked, but he was not listening, nor was
she listening to her own words, for his smile penetrated her, and she wanted to
run away from him.

“I would like to know…” he said, and the words
remained suspended.

He sat too near. She felt the unbearable
melting, the loss of herself, and she struggled to close some door against him.
“I must not love him, I must not love him!”

She moved slightly away, but his hair was so
near her hand that her fingers were drawn magnetically to touch it lightly,
playfully.

“What do you want to know?”

Had he noticed her own trembling? He did not
answer her.

He leaned over swiftly and took her whole mouth
in his, the whole man in him coming out in a direct thrust, firm, willful,
hungry. With one kiss he appropriated her, asserted his possessiveness.

When he had taken her mouth and kissed her
until they were both breathless they lay side by side and she felt his body
strong and warm against hers, his passion inflexible.

He laid his hand over her with hesitations. Everything
was new to him, a woman’s neck, a shoulder, a woman’s hooks and buttons.