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.