And when all the gestures and talk seemed lulled, suddenly he sprang up again with a new mood, a fanatic philosopher who walked up and down the studio punctuating the torrent of his ideas with fist blows on the tables. A nervous lithe walk, while he churned ideas like leaves on a pyre which never turned to ash.
Then all the words, the ideas, the memories, were drawn together like the cords of a hundred kites and he said:
“I’d like to work now.”
Lillian watched the transformation in him. She watched the half open mouth close musingly, the scattered talk crystallizing. This man so easily swayed, caught, moved, now collecting his strength again. At that moment she saw the big man in him, the man who appeared to be merely enjoying recklessly, idling, roaming, but deep down set upon a terribly earnest goaclass="underline" to hand back to life all the wealth of material he had collected, intent on making restitution to the world for what he had absorbed with his enormous creator’s appetite.
There remained in the air only the echoes of his resonant voice, the hot breath of his words, the vibration of his pounding gestures.
She rose to lock the door of the studio upon the world. She drew in long invisible bolts. She pulled in rustless shutters. Silence. She imprisoned within herself that mood and texture of Jay which would never go into his work, or be given or exposed to the world, that which she alone could see and know./font>
While Lillian slept Jay reassembled his dispersed selves. At this moment the flow in him became purposeful.
In his very manner of pressing the paint tube there was intensity; often it spurted like a geyser, was wasted, stained his clothes and the floor. The paint, having appeared in a minor explosion, proceeded to cause a major one on the canvas.
The explosion caused not a whole world to appear, but a shattered world of fragments. Bodies, objects, cities, trees, animals were all splintered, pierced, impaled.
It was actually a spectacle of carnage.
The bodies were dismembered and every part of them misplaced. In the vast dislocation eyes were placed where they had never visited a body, the hands and feet were substituted for the face, the faces bore four simultaneous facets with one empty void between. Gravity was lost, all relation between the figures were like those of acrobats. Flesh became rubber, trees flesh, bones became plumage, and all the life of the interior, cells, nerves, sinew lay exposed as by a merely curious surgeon not concerned with closing the incisions. All his painter’s thrusts opening, exposing, dismembering in the violent colors of reality.
The vitality with which he exploded, painted dissolution and disintegration, with which his energy broke familiar objects into unfamiliar components, was such that people who walked into a room full of his painting were struck only with the power and force of these brilliant fragments as by an act of birth. That they were struck only by broken pieces of an exploded world, they did not see. The force of the explosion, the weight, density and brilliance was compelling.
To each lost, straying piece of body or animal was often added the growth and excrescences of illness, choking moss on southern trees, cocoons of the unborn, barnacles and parasites.
It was Jay’s own particular jungle in which the blind warfare of insects and animals was carried on by human beings. The violence of the conflicts distorted the human body. Fear became muscular twistings like the tangled roots of trees, dualities sundered them in two separate pieces seeking separate lives. The entire drama took place at times in stagnant marshes, in petrified forests where every human being was a threat to the other.
The substance that could weld them together again was absent. Through the bodies irretrievable holes had been drilled and in place of a heart there was a rubber pump or a watch.
The mild, smiling Jay who stepped out of these infernos always experienced a slight tremor of uneasiness when he passed from the world of his painting to Lillian’s room. If she was awake she would want to see what he had been doing. And she was always inevitably shocked. To see the image of her inner nightmares exposed affected her as the sight of a mirror affects a cat or a child. There was always a moment of strained silence.
This underground of hostility she carried in her being, of which her body felt only the blind impacts, the shocks, was now clearly projected./font>
Jay was always surprised at her recoil, for he could see how Lillian was a prolongation of this warfare on canvas, how at the point where he left violence and became a simple, anonymous, mild-mannered man, it was she who took up the thread and enacted the violence directly upon people.
But Lillian had never seen herself doing it.
Jay would say: “I wish you wouldn’t quarrel with everyone, Lillian.”
“I wish you wouldn’t paint such horrors. Why did you paint Faustin without a head? That’s what he’s proudest of—his head.”
“Because that’s what he should lose, to come alive. You hate him too. Why did you hand him his coat the other night in such a way that he was forced to leave?”
In the daylight they repudiated each other. At night their bodies recognized a familiar substance: gunpowder, and they made their peace together.
In the morning it was he who went out for bread, butter and milk for breakfast, while she made the coffee.
When she locked the studio for the night, she locked out anxiety. But when Jay got into his slack morning working clothes and stepped out jauntily, whistling, he had a habit of locking the door again—and in between, anxiety slipped in again.
He locks the door, he has forgotten that I am here.
Thus she interpreted it, because of her feeling that once he had taken her, he deserted her each time anew. No contact was ever continuous with him. So he locked the door, forgot she was there, deserted her.
When she confessed this to Djuna, Djuna who had continued to write for Lillian the Chinese dictionary of counter-interpretations, she laughed: “Lillian, have you ever thought that he might be locking you in to keep you for himself?”
Lillian was accurate in her feeling that when Jay left the studio he was disassociated from her, and not from her alone, but from himself.
He walked out in the street and became one with the street. His mood became the mood of the street. He dissolved and became eye, ear, smile.
There are days when the city exposes only its cripples, days when the bus must stop close to the curb to permit a one-legged man to board it, days when a man without legs rests his torso on a rolling stand and propels himself with his hands; days when a head is held up by a pink metal truss, days when blind men ask to be guided, and Jay knew as he looked, absorbing every detail, that he would paint them, even though had he been consulted all the cripples of the world would be destroyed excepting the smiling old men who sat on benches beatifically drunk, because they were his father. He had so many fathers, for he was one to see the many. I believe we have a hundred fathers and mothers and loversll interchangeable, and that’s the flaw in Lillian, for her there is only one mother, one father, one husband, one lover, one son, one daughter, irreplaceable, unique—her world is too small. The young girl who just passed me with lightning in her eyes is my daughter. I could take her home as my daughter in place of the one I lost. The world is full of fathers, whenever I need one I only need to stop and talk to one…this one sitting there with a white beard and a captain’s cap…
“Do you want a cigarette, Captain?”
“I’m no captain, Monsieur, I was a Legionnaire, as you can see by my beard. Are yousure you haven’t a butt or two? I’d rather have a butt. I like my independence, youknow, I collect butts. A cigarette is charity. I’m a hobo, youknow, not a beggar.”