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.