“Only when something hurts him. It’s when he gets hurt that he destroys. Has he caricatured you?”
“He painted me as a whore. And you know that isn’t me. He has such an interest in evil that I told him stories… I hate him.”
“I thought you loved him,” said Lillian simply.
All Sabina’s being sought to escape Lillian’s directness in a panic. Behind the mask a thousand smiles appeared, behind the eyelids ageless deceptions.
This was the moment. If only Sabina could bring herself to say what she felt: Lillian, do not trust me. I want Jay. Do not love me, Lillian, for I am like him. I take what I want no matter who is hurt.
“You want to unmask me, Lillian.”
“If I were to unmask you, Sabina, I would only be revealing myself: you act as I would act if I had the courage. I see you exactly as you are, and I love you. You should not fear exposure, not from me.”
This was the moment to turn away from Jay who was bringing her not love, but another false role of play, to turn towards Lillian with the truth, that a real love might take place.
Sabina’s face appeared to Lillian as that of a child drowning behind a window. She saw Sabina as a child struggling with her terror of the truth, considering before answering what might come closest to the best image of herself she might give Lillian. Sabina would not say the truth but whatever conformed to what she imagined Lillian expected of her, which was in reality not at all what Lillian wanted of her, but what she, Sabina, thought necessary to her idealized image of herself. What Sabina was feverishly creating always was the reverse of what she acted out: a woman of loyalty and faithfulness. To maintain this image at all costs she ceased responding to Lillian’s soft appeal to the child in need of a rest from pretenses.
“I don’t deny Jay is a caricaturist, but only out of revengefulness. What have you done to deserve his revenge?”
Again Sabina turned her face away.
“I know you’re not a femme fatale,Sabina. But didn’t you want him to think you were?”
With this peculiar flair she had for listening to the buried child in human beings, Lillian could hear the child within Sabina whining, tired of its inventions grown too cumbersome, weary of its adornments, of its disguises. Too many costumes, valances, gold, brocade, veils, to cover Sabina’s direct thrusts towards what she wanted, and meanwhile it was this audacity, this directness, this unfaltering knowledge of her wants which Lillian loved in her, wanted to learn from her.
But a smile of immeasurable distress appeared in Sabina, and then was instantly effaced by another smile: the smile of seduction. When Lillian was about to seize upon the distress, to enter the tender, vulnerable regions of her being, then Sabina concealed herself again behind the smile of a woman of seduction.
Pity, protection, solace, they all fell away from Lillian like gifts of trivial import, because with the smile of seduction Sabina assumed simultaneously the smile of an all-powerful enchantress.
Lillian forgot the face of the child in distress, hungrily demanding a truthful love, and yet, in terror that this very truth might destroy the love. The child face faded before this potent smile to which Lillian succumbed.
She no longer sought the meaning of Sabina’s words. She looked at Sabina’s blonde hair tumbling down, at her eyebrows peaked upward, at her smile slanting perfidiously, a gem-like smile which made a whirlpool of her feelings.
A man passed by and laughed at their absorption.
“Don’t mind, don’t mind,” said Sabina, as if she were familiar with this situation. “I won’t do you any harm.”
“You can’t do me any harm.”
Sabina smiled. “I destroy people without meaning to. Everywhere I go things become confused and terrifying. For you I would like to begin all over again, to go to New York and become a great actress, to become beautiful again. I won’t appear any more with clothes that are held together with safety pins! I’ve been living stupidly, blindly, doing nothing but drinking, smoking, talking. I’m afraid of disillusioning you, Lillian.”
They walked down the streets aimlessly, unconscious of their surroundings, arm in arm with a joy that was rising every moment, and with every word they uttered. A swelling joy that mounted with each step they took together and with the occasional brushing of their hips as they walked.
The traffic eddied around them but everything else, houses and trees were lost in a fog. Only their voices distinct, carrying such phrases as they could utter out of their female labyrinth of oblique perceptions.
Sabina said: “I wanted to telephone you last night. I wanted to tell you how sorry I was to have talked so much. I knew all the time I couldn’t say what I wanted to say.”
“You too have fears, although you seem so strong,” said Lillian.
“I do everything wrong. It’s good that you don’t ever ask questions about facts. Facts don’t matter. It’s the essence that matters. You never ask the kind of question I hate: what city? what man? what year? what time? Facts. I despise them.”
Bodies close, arm in arm, hands locked together over her breast. She had taken Lillian’s hand and held it over her breast as if to warm it.
The city had fallen away. They were walking into a world of their own for which neither could find a name.
They entered a softly lighted place, mauve and diffuse, which enveloped them in velvet closeness.
Sabina took off her silver bracelet and put it around Lillian’s wrist.
“It’s like having your warm hand around my wrist. It’s still warm, like your own hand. I’m your prisoner, Sabina.”
Lillian looked at Sabina’s face, the fevered profile taut, so taut that she shivered a little, knowing that when Sabina’s face turned towards her she could no longer see the details of it for its blazing quality. Sabina’s mouth always a little open, pouring forth that eddying voice which gave one vertigo.
Lillian caught an expression on her face of such knowingness that she was startled. Sabina’s whole body seemed suddenly charged with experience, as if discolored from it, filled with violet shadows, bowed down by weary eyelids. In one instant she looked marked by long fevers, by an unconquerable fatigue. Lillian could see all the charred traces of the fires she had traversed. She expected her eyes and hair to turn ashen.
But the next moment her eyes and hair gleamed more brilliantly than ever, her face became uncannily clear, completely innocent, an innocence which radiated like a gem. She could shed her whole life in one moment of forgetfulness, stand absolutely washed of it, as if she were standing at the very beginning of it.
So many questions rushed to Lillian’s mind, but now she knew Sabina hated questions. Sabina’s essence slipped out between the facts. So Lillian smiled and was silent, listening merely to Sabina’s voice, the way its hoarseness changed from rustiness to a whisper, a faint gasp, so that the hotness of her breath touched her face.
She watched her smoke hungrily, as if smoking, talking and moving were all desperately necessary to her, like breathing, and she did them all with such reckless intensuth afont>
When Lillian and Sabina met one night under the red light of the cafe they recognized in each other similar moods: they would laugh at him, the man.
“He’s working so hard, so hard he’s in a daze,” said Lillian.
“He talks about nothing but painting.”
She was lonely, deep down, to think that Jay had been at his work for two weeks without noticing either of them. And her loneliness drew her close to Sabina.
“He was glad we were going out together, he said it would give him a chance to work. He hasn’t any idea of time—he doesn’t even know what day of the week it is. He doesn’t give a damn about anybody or anything.”