She sat alone one day in their darkened room. She talked to the child inside of her.
“My little one not born yet, I feel your small feet kicking against my womb. My little one not born yet, it is very dark in the room you and I are sitting in, just as dark as it must be for you inside of me, but it must be sweeter for you to be lying in the warmth than it is for me to be seeking in this dark room the joy of not knowing, not feeling, not seeing; the joy of lying still in utter warmth and this darkness. All of us forever seeking this warmth and this darkness, this being alive without pain, this being alive without anxiety, fear or loneliness. You are impatient to live, you kick with your small feet, but you ought to die. You ought to die in warmth and darkness because you are a child without a father. You will not find on earth this father as large as the sky, big enough to hold your whole being and your fears, larger than house or church. You will not find a father who will lull you and cover you with his greatness and his warmth. It would be better if you died inside of me, quietly, in the warmth and in the darkness.”
Did the child hear her? At six months she had a miscarriage and lost it.
Lillian was giving a concert in a private home which was like a temple of treasures. Paintings and people had been collected with expert and exquisite taste. There was a concentration of beautiful women so that one was reminded of a hothouse exhibit.
The floor was so highly polished there were two Lillians, two white pianos, two audiences.
The piano under her strong hands became small like a child’s piano. She overwhelmed it, she tormented it, crushed it. She played with all her intensity, as if the piano must be possessed or possess her.
The women in the audience shivered before this corps a corps.
Lillian was pushing her vigor into the piano. Her face was full of vehemence and possessiveness. She turned her face upwards as if to direct the music upwards, but the music would not rise, volatilize itself. It was too heavily charged with passion.
She was not playing to throw music into the blue space, but to reach some climax, some impossible union with the piano, to reach that which men and women could reach together. A moment of pleasure, a moment of fusion. The passion and the blood in her rushed against the ivory notes and overloaded them. She pounded the coffer of the piano as she wanted her own body pounded and shattered. And the pain on her face was that of one who reached neither sainthood nor pleasure. No music rose and passed out of the window, but a sensual cry, heavy with unspent forces…
Lillian storming against her piano, using the music to tell all how she wanted to be stormed with equal strength and fervor.
This tidal power was still in her when the women moved towards her to tell her it was wonderful. She rose from the piano as if she would engulf them, the smaller women; she embraced them with all the fervor of unspent intensity that had not reached a climax—which the music, like too delicate a vessel, the piano with too delicate a frame, had not been able to contain.
It was while Lillian was struggling to tear from the piano what the piano could not possibly give her that Djuna’s attention was wafted towards the window.
In the golden salon, with the crystal lamps, the tapestries and the paintings there were immense bay windows, and Djuna’s chair had been placed in one of the recesses, so that she sat on the borderline between the perfumed crowd and the silent, static garden.
It was late in the afternoon, the music had fallen back upon the people like a heavy storm cloud which could not be dispersed to lighten and lift them, the air was growing heavy, when her eyes caught the garden as if in a secret exposure. As everyone was looking at Lillian, Djuna’s sudden glance seemed to have caught the garden unaware, in a dissolution of peace and greens. A light rain had washed the faces of the leaves, the knots in the tree trunks stared with aged eyes, the grass was drinking, there was a sensual humidity as if leaves, trees, grass and wind were all in a state of caress.
The garden had an air of nudity.
Djuna let her eyes melt into the garden. The garden had an air of nudity, of efflorescence, of abundance, of plenitude.
The salon was gilded, the people were costumed for false roles, the lights and the faces were attenuated, the gestures were starched—all but Lillian whose nature had not been stylized, compressed or gilded, and whose nature was warring with a piano.
Music did not open doors.
Nature flowered, caressed, spilled, relaxed, slept.
In the gilded frames, the ancestors were mummified forever, and descendants took the same poses. The women were candied in perfume, conserved in cosmetics, the men preserved in their elegance. All the violence of naked truths had evaporated, volatilized within gold frames.
And then, as Djuna’s eyes followed the path carpeted with detached leaves, her eyes encountered for the first time three full-length mirrors placed among the bushes and flowers as casually as in a boudoir. Three mirrors.
The eyes of the people inside could not bear the nudity of the garden, its exposure. The eyes of the people had needed the mirrors, delighted in the fragility of reflections. All the truth of the garden, the moisture, and the worms, the insects and the roots, the running sap and the rotting bark, had all to be reflected in the mirrors.
Lillian was playing among vast mirrrs. Lillian’s violence was attenuated by her reflection in the mirrors.
The garden in the mirror was polished with the mist of perfection. Art and artifice had breathed upon the garden and the garden had breathed upon the mirror, and all the danger of truth and revelation had been exorcised.
Under the house and under the garden there were subterranean passages and if no one heard the premonitory rumblings before the explosion, it would all erupt in the form of war and revolution.
The humiliated, the defeated, the oppressed, the enslaved. Woman’s misused and twisted strength…
BREAD AND THE WAFER
WHEN JAY WAS NOT TALKING or painting he sang. He sang under his breath or loudly according to his occupation. He dressed and ate to a rhythm, as if he were executing a primitive ritual with his big body that had not been quite chiseled off with the finish of a classical sculptor but whose outline had remained rugged as if it were not yet entirely separated from the wood or stone out of which it had been carved. One expected to feel the roughness of it as when one touched a clay figure before it had been thrust into the potter’s oven.
He had retained so much of the animal, a graceful awkwardness in his walk, strong rhythmic gestures in full accord with the pull of the muscles, an animal love of stretching, yawning, relaxing, of sleeping anywhere, of obeying every impulse of his body. A body without nerves or tensions.
When he stood upon his well-planted, well-separated feet it was as if like a tree he would immediately take root there. As he had taken roots lustily in Paris now, in the cafe, in his studio, in his life with Lillian.
Wherever he found himself he was well, as if the living roots of his body could sprout in any ground, at any time, under any sky. His preference went, however, to artificial lights, crowds, and he grew, talked, and laughed best in the center of a stream of people.
If he were waiting he would fill the waiting with explosions of song, or fall into enthusiastic observations. The spectacle of the street was enough for him; whatever was there was enough for him, for his boundless satisfaction.
Placed before a simple meal he would begin his prestidigitations: this steak is wonderful…how good it is. How awfully good! And the onions… He made sounds of delight. He poured his enthusiasm over the meal like a new condiment. The steak began to glow, to expand, to multiply under the warmth of his fervor. Every dish was wrapped in amorous appreciation, as if it had been brought to the table with a fire burning under it and was flaming in rum like a Christmas pudding.