“Good, good, good,” said his palate, said his roseate cheeks, said his bowed assenting head, said his voice, all expanding in prodigious additions, as if he were pushing multiple buttons of delight, and colors burst from the vegetables, meat, salad, cheese and wine. Even the parsley assumed a festive air like a birthday candle on a cake. “Ah, ah, ah, the salad!” he said, pouring over it a voice like an unguent along with the olive oil.
His pleasure donned the white cap of the proud chef playing gay scales of flavors, festooning the bread and wine with the high taste of banquets.
The talk, too, burst its boundaries. He started a discussion, let it take fire and spread, but the moment it took too rigid a form he began to laugh, spraying it, liquefying it in a current of gaiety.
To laugh. To laugh. “I’m not laughing at you. I’m not laughing at anyone, at anybody. I just can’t help myself. I don’t care a bit, not a bit, who’s right.”
“But you must care,” said Faustin, speaking through a rigid mask of sadness which made his face completely static, and one was surprised that the words could come through the closed mouth. “You must care, you must hold on to something.”
“I never hold on,” said Jay. “Why hold on? Whatever you hold on to dies. There comes Colette. Sit here, Colette. How was the trade today? Colette, these people are talking about holding on. You must hold on, you must care, they say. Do you hold on, Colette? They pass like a stream, don’t they, and you’d be surprised if the same ones bobbed up continuously, surprised and maybe bored. It’s a good stream, isn’t it, just a stream that does not nestle into you to become an ulcer, a good washing stream that cleanses as it flows, and flows clean through.”
With this he drank fully from his Pernod, drank indeed as if the stream of absinthe, of ideas, feelings, talk, should pass and change every day guided only by thirst.
“You’redrunk,” said Colette. “You don’t make sense.”
“Only the drunks and the insane make sense, Colette, that’s where you’re wrong. Only the drunks and the insane have discarded the unessential for chaos, and only in chaos there is richness.”
“If you go on this way,” said Faustin, his finger pointing upward like a teacher of Sanskrit, “someone will have to take care of you while you spill in all directions recklessly. You’ll need taking care of, for yours is no real freedom but an illusion of freedom, or perhaps just rebellion. Chaos always turns out to be the greatest trap of all in which you’ll find yourself more securely imprisoned than anyone.”
At the words “taking care” Jay had turned automatically towards Lillian and read in her eyes that fixed, immutable love which was his compass.
When Faustin was there at the cafe conversation would always start at the top of a pyramid without any gradual ascension. It would start with the problems of form, being and becoming, physiognomics, destiny versus incident, the coming of the fungoid era, the middle brain and the tertiary moon!
Faustin talked to build. He insisted that each talk should be a complete brick to add to a careful construction. He always started to draw on the marble-top table or othe tablecloth: this is our first premise, this is our second premise, and now we will reach the third. No sooner had he made on the table the semblance of a construction than there would come into Jay’s eyes an absinthe glint which was not really the drink but some layer of his being which the drink had peeled away, which was hard, cruel, mischievous. His phrases would begin to break and scatter, to run wild like a machine without springs, gushing forth from the contradictory core of him which refused all crystallizations.
It happened every time the talk approached a definite conclusion, every time some meaning was about to be extracted from confusion. It was as if he felt that any attempt at understanding were a threat to the flow of life, to his enjoyment. As if understanding would threaten the tumultuous current or arrest it.
They were eating in a small cafe opposite the Gare St. Lazare, a restaurant wide open on the street. They were eating on the street and it was as if the street were full of people who were eating and drinking with them.
With each mouthful Lillian swallowed, she devoured the noises of the street, the voices and the echoes they dropped, the swift glances which fell on her like pieces of lighted wick from guttering candles. She was only the finger of a whole bigger body, a body hungry, thirsty, avid.
The wine running down her throat was passing through the throat of the world. The warmth of the day was like a man’s hand on her breast, the smell of the street like a man’s breath on her neck. Wide open to the street like a field washed by a river.
Shouts and laughter exploded near them from the art students on their way to the Quatz‘ ArtsBall. Egyptians and Africans in feather and jewelry, with the sweat shining on their brown painted bodies. They ran to catch the bus and it was like a heaving sea of glistening flesh shining between colored feathers and barbaric jewelry, with the muscles swelling when they laughed.
A few of them entered the restaurant, shouting and laughing. They circled around their table, like savages dancing around a stake.
The street organ was unwinding Carmen from its roll of tinfoil voices.
The same restaurant, another summer evening; but Jayis not there. The wine has ceased passing down Lillian’s throat. It has no taste. The food does not seem rich. The street is separated from the restaurant by little green bushes she had not noticed before; the noises seem far from her, and the faces remote. Everything now happens outside, and not within her own body. Everything is distant and separated. It does not flow inside of her and carry her away.
Because Jay is not there? Does it mean it was not she who had drunk the wine, eaten the food, but that she had eaten and drunk through the pores of his pleasure and his appetite? Did she receive her pleasure, her appetite, through his gusto, his lust, his throat?
That night she had a dream: Jaynt>had become her iron lung. She was lying inside of him and breathing through him. She felt a great anxiety, and thought: if he leaves me then I will die. When Jay laughed she laughed; when he enjoyed she enjoyed. But all the time there was this fear that if he left her she would no longer eat, laugh or breathe.
When he welcomed friends, was at ease in groups, accepted and included all of life, she experienced this openness, this total absence of retraction through him. When alone, she still carried some constriction which interfered with deep intakes of life and people. She had thought that by yielding to him, they would be removed.
She felt at times that she had fallen in love with Jay’s freedom, that she had dreamed he would set her free, but that somehow or other he had been unable to accomplish this.
At night she had the feeling that she was being possessed by a cannibal.
His appetite. The gifts she made him of her feelings. How he devoured the response of her flesh, her thoughts about him, her awareness of him. As he devoured new places, new people, new impressions. His gigantic devouring spirit in quest of substance.
Her fullness constantly absorbed by him, all the changes in her, her dissolutions and rebirths, all this could be thrown into the current of his life, his work, and be absorbed like twigs by a river.
He had the appetite of the age of giants.