Endless accounting, endless revising of accounts.
But what had Larry wanted? It was true that Larry had accepted this abdication from life and seemed fulfilled when she lived for him in the musicians’ world (because he had first wanted to be a musician, and had not fulfilled this wish). It was true that he seemed content in his silences, content to let her and her jazz musicians play and talk. This peripheral life seemed natural to him. But this division of labor had become a charade. When they grew tired of it (Lillian tired of Larry’s indirect spectatorships, and Larry tired of Lillian’s predominant role) they had not known how to exchange roles! Larry began to crystallize, not having any direct flow into life, not having his own aqualungs, his own oxygen. They were like twins with one set of lungs. And all Lillian knew was to sustain the flow by escaping into other lives, a movement which gave her the illusion of a completed circle. No other relationship could complete her, for it was Larry she had wanted to share life with, and ultimately she was seeking Larry in the other personages.
This last voyage without him had confronted her with her own incompleteness. She had deluded herself that the lungs, the capacity to live, were hers alone. How much of Larry she had carried within herself and enacted as soon as he was not there to act it for her. It was she who did not talk then, who let the Mexicans talk nimbly and flowingly, as she let Doctor Hernandez monologue. It was she who had remained at a distance from the life of Golconda except for the moment of abandon to the lulling drugs of nature. She had behaved as Larry would have behaved. Her courage, her flow in life had only existed in relation to Larry, by comparison with his withdrawals. What had he done while deprived of her presence? Probably had lived out the Lillian he carried within himself, her traits. Toward what Larry was she voyaging now?
Was it not an act of love to impersonate the loved one? Was it not like the strange “possessions” which take place at the loss of a parent by death? When her mother died, Lillian became her mother for at least a long year of mourning. It had been an imperceptible possession, for Lillian did not belong to the race who had rituals at which these truths were dramatized, rituals at which the spirit of the “departed” entered the body of the living, at which the spirit of the dead parent was acknowledged to be capable of entering the body of the son or daughter and inhabit until driven, or prayed, or chased away. To all appearances these primitive beliefs and what happened to Lillian were not related. Yet the spirit of her mother had passed into her. When she died, leaving Lillian a thimble and a sewing machine (when Lillian could not sew), Lillian did not know that she took some of her moods, characteristics, attitudes. She once thought it was that as one grew older one had less resistance to the influences of the family and one surrendered to family resemblances.
Lillian laughed at the primitive rituals of “possession” she had seen in Haiti. But there was a primitive Lillian who had combated the total loss of her mother by a willingness to take into herself some of her mannerisms and traits (the very ones she had rebelled against while her mother was alive, the very ones which had injured her own growth). It was not only that she began to sew, to use the thimble and the sewing machine, but that she began to whistle when her children strayed from the house, she scolded her children for the very traits her mother had censured in her: neglect in dress, impulsive, chaotic behavior. A strange way to erect a monument to the memory of her mother, a monument to her continuity.
Thus she had also been “possessed” by Larry, and it was his selectivity in people which spoke against Diana’s lack of discrimination. For the first time, in Golconda, she had practiced Larry’s choice of withdrawing if the people were not of quality. Of preferring solitude to the effort of pretending he was interested in them.
Nearing home, she wondered if both of them had not accepted roles handed to them by others’ needs as conditions of the marriage. It was the need which had dictated the role. And roles dictated by a need and not the whole self caused a withering in time. They had been married to parts of themselves only. Just as Dr. Hernandez had married a woman who loved only the Doctor, and who never knew the man who had tried to shed the role by entering the violent world of the smugglers, to feel himself in the heart of life, even at the cost of death.
Lillian had felt responsible for the Doctor’s death, but now she knew it was not a personal responsibility; it was because she too had lived with only a part of Larry, and when you live with only a part of a person, you symbolically condemn the rest of it to indifference, to oblivion.
She knew it was not a bullet which had killed Dr. Hernandez. He had placed himself in the bullet’s path. Certainly at times his intelligence and knowledge of human nature must have warned him that he was courting sudden death when he refused to surrender his supply of drugs or to underwrite fake permits to obtain more.
She knew that by similar detours of the labyrinth, it was not the absence of love or the death of it which had estranged her from Larry, but the absence of communication between all the parts of themselves, the sides of their character which each one feared to uncover in the other. The channels of emotions were just like the passageways running through our physical body which some illness congests, and renders narrower and narrower until the supply of oxygen and blood is diminished and brings on death. The passageways of their communication with each other had shrunk. They had singled out their first image of each other as if they had selected the first photograph of each other to live with forever, regardless of change or growth. They had set it upon their desks, and within their hearts, a photograph of Larry as he had first appeared behind the garden gate, mute and hungry, and a photograph of Lillian in distress because her faith in herself had been killed by her parents.
If they had been flowing together in life, they would not reated these areas of vacuum into which other relationships had penetrated, just as if Doctor Hernandez had been loved and happy in Golconda, he would have found a way to escape his enemies. (Diana had proofs that he had been warned, offered help, and recklessly disregarded both.)
The manner in which Lillian had finally immured herself against the life in Golconda betrayed how she, as well as Larry, often closed doors against experience, and lived by patterns.
Diana had said: “People only called him when they were in distress. When they gave parties they never thought of him. I knew that what he gave to others was what he deeply wanted for himself. This sympathy…for those in trouble. I do believe he was in greater trouble than any of us.”
His death set in motion a chain of disappearances, an awareness of the dangers of disappearances. And this fear fecundated Lillian, stirred all life and feeling into bloom again. Sudden death had exposed the preciousness of human love and human life. All the negations, withdrawals, indifferences seemed like the precursors of absolute death, and were to be condemned. She had a vision of a world without Larry and without her children, and then she knew that her love of Golconda had only been possible because of the knowledge that her absence was temporary.
And now the words spoken by Doctor Hernandez were clear to her, their meaning reached her. “We may seem to forget a person, a place, a state of being, a past life, but meanwhile what we are doing is selecting new actors, seeking the closest reproduction to the friend, the lover, the husband we are trying to forget, in order to re-enact the drama with understudies. And one day we open our eyes and there we are, repeating the same story. How could it be otherwise? The design comes from within us. It is internal. It is what the old mystics described as karma, repeated until the spiritual or emotional experience was understood, liquidated, achieved.”