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.