He liked her to assume the burden of their life together, its material basis. Yet when she came to him, she must be all ready to discard this mantle of responsibilities, and become a child with him. His sense of humor took wayward forms.
His favorite prank: something that could be thrown away, which others valued; something that could be broken which others preserved. Traditions, habits, possessions. His greatest enjoyment was in demolition.
One of his most joyous experiences had been when a neighbor pianist who lived on the same quiet little street with him many years ago had been obliged to visit his mother at the hospital on the same day as the piano house had promised him an exchange of pianos. The man had been looking forward to this for many months. He begged Jay to attend to this. It was a complicated affair, getting the old piano out and the new one in. It was to be done by two different houses. One, a moving man, was to take the old piano out, then the piano house was to deliver the new. Jay had laughed it all off, and walked out unconcernedly, never remembering the promise he made. When he came home he found the two pianos in the street, before the entrance of the house, and the rain pouring down on them. The sight of the two pianos in the rain sent him into an absolute state of gaiety. “It was the most surrealistic sight I have ever seen.” His laughter was so contagious that Lillian laughed with him, at the same time as she felt, somehow, a kind of pain at the image of pianos drenched in rain, and a pain even for the unknown pianist’s feeling on his return home.
He seized only upon the comedy of the events.
At times Lillian asked herself: what will he make of me some day, when will he hurt me? And what if he does: I will try to love him gaily, more easily and loosely. To endure space and distance and betrayals. My courage is born today. Here lies Jay, breathing into my hair, over my neck. No hurt will come from me. No judgment. No woman ever judged the life stirring within her womb. I am too close to you. I will laugh with you even if it is against me.
Against me. Now the pain about the pianos left out in the rain suddenly touched her personally, and she understood why she had not been able to laugh freely. Those pianos were not only those of Jay’s friend in the past, but her own too, since she had given up playing in order to work for Jay’s support. She had surrendered any hope of becoming a concert pianist to attend better to their immediate needs. Jay’s mockery wounded her, for it exposed his insensitiveness to anyone’s loss, and to her loss too, his incapacity to feel for others, to understand that with the loss of her pianist self she had lost a very large part of herself, annihilated an entire portion of her personality, sacrificed it to him.
It was her piano Jay had left out in the rain, to be ruined…
He was wearing bedroom slippers and he was painting, with a bottle of red wine beside him. Circles of red wine on the floor. Stains. The edge of the table was burnt by cigarette stubs.
He didn’t care. He said that what he had painted today was not as good as yesterday, but he didn’t care. He was enjoying it just the same. He wasn’t worrying about art. Everything was good, hang perfection, and he was out of cigarettes and if she would give him one he might finish that watercolor. She had come to interrupt him, that was good too, that was life; life was more important than any painting, let the interruptions come, specially in the form of a woman; let people walk in, it was good, to paint was good, not to paint was just as good, and eating and love making were even better, and now he was finished and he was hungry, and he wished they might go to the movies, good or bad…
The room was black. Jay was asleep in her arms, now, heavily asleep. She heard the organ grinder grinding his music. It was Saturday night. Always a holiday with him, always Saturday night with the crowds laughing and shouting and the organ grinder playing.
“According to the Chinese,” said Jay, awakening, “there was a realm between heaven and earth…this must be it.”
Tornadoes of desire and exquisite calms. She felt heavy and burnt.
“I want to keep you under lock and key, Lillian.”
Suddenly he leaped up with a whiplike alacrity and exuberance and began to talk about his childhood, about his life in the streets, about the women he had loved and ditched, and the women who had ditched and bitched him, as he put it. He seemed to remember everything at once, as though it was a ball inside of him which unraveled of itself, and as it unraveled made new balls which he would unravel again another day. Had he actually done all these things he was relating to Lillian with such kaleidoscopic fury and passion? Had he really killed a boy in school with a snow ball? Had he really struck his first wife down when she was with child? Had he really butted his head against a wall in sudden anger because the woman he loved had rejected him? Had he really taken abortions and thrown them off the ferry boat in order to pick up a little extra change? Had he really stolen silver from a blind news vendor?
All the layers of his past he unraveled and laid before her, his masks, his buffooneries, and she saw him pretending, driven by obscure revenges, by fears, by weaknesses.
She saw him in the past and in the world, another man from the one she knew. And like all women in love she discarded this man of the past, holding others responsible for his behavior; and thinking: before me he sheds all his poses and defenses. The legend of hardness and callousness she did not believe. She saw him innocent, as we always see the loved one, innocent and even a victim.
She felt that she knew which was the rind and which the core of the man. “You always know,” he said, “what is to be laughed away.”
Then he rolled over and fell asleep. No noise, no care, no work undone, no imperfection unmastered, no love scene unresumed, no problem unsolved, ever kept him awake. He could roll over and forget. He could roll over with such grand indifference and let everything wait. When he rolled over the day ended. Nothing could be carried over into the next day. The next day would be absolutely new and clean. He just rolled over and extinguished everything. Just rolling over.
Djuna and Jay. For Djuna Jay does not look nonchalant but rather intent and listening, as if in quest of some revelation, as if he were questioning for the first time.
“I’ve lived so blindly… No time to think much. Tons and tons of experience. Lillian always creating trouble, misery, changes, flights, dramas. No time to digest anything. And then she says I die when she leaves, that pain and war are good for me.”
Djuna notices that although he is only forty years old, his hair is greying at the temple.
“Your eyes are full of wonder,” he said, “as if you expected a miracle every day. I can’t let you go now. I want to go places with you, obscure little places, just to be able to say: here I came with Djuna. I’m insatiable, you know. I’ll ask you for the impossible. What it is, I don’t know. You’ll tell me, probably. You’re quicker than I am. And you’re the first woman with whom I feel I can be absolutely sincere. You make me happy because I can talk with you. I feel at ease with you. This is a little drunken, but you know what I mean. You always seem to know what I mean.”
“You change from a wise old man to a savage. You’re both timid and cruel too, aren’t you?”
“There is something here it is impossible for Lillian to understand, or to break either. I feel we are friends. Don’t you see? Friends. Christ, have a man and woman ever been friends, beyond love and beyond desire, and beyond everything, friends? Well, this is what I feel with you.”
She hated the gaiety with which she received these words, for that condemnation of her body to be the pale watcher, the understanding one upon whom others laid their burdens, laying their heads on her lap to sleep, to be lulled from others’ wounds. And even as she hated her own goodness, she heard herself say quietly, out of the very core of this sense of justice: “The destroyers do not always destroy, Jay.”