He was Paul’s age, but unlike Paul he did not appear to carry a little snail house around his personality, a place into which to retreat and vanish. He came out openly, eyes aware, smiling, expectant, in readiness for anything that might happen, He moved propelled by sheer impulse, and was never still.
He was carrying a cage which he laid in the middle of the room. He lifted its covering shaped like a miniature striped awning.
Djuna knelt on the rug to examine the contents of the cage and laughed to see a blue mouse nibbling at a cracker.
“Where did you find a turquoise mouse?” asked Djuna.
“I bathed her in dye,” said Lawrence. “Only she licks it all away in a few days and turns white again, so I had to bring her this time right after her bath.”
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 Pauclass="underline" 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.