But once in Paris, she strayed into an arcade and saw people watching penny movies with such delight and interest that she waited her turn and slipped a penny in a slot. A little movie scene appeared, awkward and jerky like the movies of the 1920s. A family sat at dinner, father (with a mustache), mother in a ruffled dress, and three children. The young and pretty maid was serving the soup. She was dressed in black. Her dress was very short. It revealed a white lace-edged petticoat, and she wore a butterfly of white lace on her hair. She spilled the soup on the father’s lap. The father rose in a fury and left the table to go and change his clothes. The maid had not only to help him change his clothes, but to atone for the accident.
Lillian was about to leave, unmoved, amused, when the machine clicked and a new film began. The scene this time took place in a classroom. The students were little girls of six or seven (Lillian’s age when she was receiving the spankings). They were dressed in old-fashioned frilly and bouffant dresses. The teacher was angered by their mockeries and laughter, and asked them to come up, one by one, to be spanked (just as Lillian and her sisters and brothers were lined up and made to march up the stairs). At this scene Lillian’s heart began to beat wildly. She thought she was about to relive the pain and humiliation caused by their father.
But when the teacher lifted up the little girl, stretched her across his knees, turned up her skirt, pulled down her panties, and began to spank her, what Lillian experienced after twenty years was not pain, but a flooding joy of sensual excitement. As if the spankings, while hurting her, had been at the same time the only caress she had known from her father. Pain had become inextricably mixed with joy at his presence, the distorted closeness had alchemized into pleasure. The rite, intended as a punishment, had become the only intimacy she had known, the only contact, a substitution of anger and tears in place of tenderness.
She wanted to be in the little girl’s place!
She hurried away from the arcade, trembling with joy, as if she were returning from an erotic adventure.
Thus the real dictator, the organizer and director of her life, had been this quest for a chemical compound—so many ounces of pain mixed with so many ounces of pleasure in a formula known only to the unconscious. The failure lay in the enormous difference between the relationship she had needed, and the one she had, on a deeper level, more deeply wanted. The need was created out of an aggregate of negativities and deformations. When Lillian thought that in her relationship to Jay she was only in bondage to a passion, she was also in bondage to a need. When she thought her stays in Paris were directed entirely by a desire for Jay, they were in fact predetermined on those days in Mexico when she was six or seven years old.
Not enough of that measure of pain had existed in her marriage to Larry.
In the laboratories the scientists were trying to isolate the virus which might be the cause of cancer. Djuna believed one could isolate the virus which destroys love. But then there were outcries: that this would be the end of illusion, when it was only the beginning! Lillian had learned from Djuna that each cell, once separated from the diseased one, was capable of new life.
Erasing the grooves. It was not that Lillian had remained attached to the father, and incapable of other attachments. It was that the form of the relationship, the mold, had become a groove, the groove itself was familiar, her footsteps followed it habitually, unquestioningly, the familiar groove of pain and pleasure, of closeness at the cost of pain.
Lillian remembered Djuna’s words: Man is not falling apart. He is undergoing a kind of fission, but I believe in those who are trying quietly to isolate the destructive cells, so that after fission each part is illumined and alive, waiting for a new fusion.
Was this why Lillian had always wept at weddings? Had she known obscurely that each human being might lie wrapped in his self-created myth, in the first plaster cast made by his emotions. Static and unchangeable, each could move only in the grooves etched by the past.
Jay had appeared at first as the bearer of joy. She had loved his complete union with the earth, his acceptance of the hungry, the greedy animal within himself. He lived with blinders on, seeking only pleasure, avoiding responsibilities and duties, swimming skillfully on the surface, enjoying, suspicious of depths, out in the world, preferring the many to the few, intoxication with life only, wherever it carried him, not faithful to individuals, or to ideas. Seeking the flow, the living moment only. Never looking back or looking into the future.
His talk of violence suited her tumultuous nature. But then he had made love without violence, and then asked her: “Did you expect more brutality?” She did not know this man. The first room he had taken her to was shabby. He had said: “Look how worn the carpet is.” But all she could see was the golden glow, the sun behind the curtain. All she could hear were his words: “Lillian, your eyes are full of wonder. You expect a miracle every day.” His brown shirt hung behind the door, there was only one glass to drink from and a mountain of sketches and notebooks she was to song iut later, silk screen, and arrange into the famous Portfolio. He had no time to stop. There was too much to see in the streets. He had just discovered the Algerian street, with its smell of saffron, and the Algerian melopee issuing from dark medieval doorways.
Lillian felt they would live out something new. They had first known each other in New York when Lillian was disconnected from Larry. Jay had left for Paris because he wanted to live near the painters he admired. Lillian’s engagement took her there for several months each year. New for her, this total acceptance of all life, ugliness, poverty, sensuality, Jay’s total acceptance, lack of selectivity or discrimination or withdrawals. Lillian thought him a gentle savage, a passionate cannibal. Motherhood prepared Lillian for this abdication of herself. Lillian adopted all his infatuations and enthusiasms: she sat with him contemplating from a cafe table the orange face of a clock, the prostitute with the wooden leg; played chess at the Cafe de La Regence at the very table where Napoleon and Robespierre had played chess. She helped him gather and note fifty ways of saying drunk.
She abandoned classical music and became a jazz pianist. Classical music could not contain her improvisations, her tempo, her vehemences.
She watched over Jay’s work, searched Paris shops for the best paint, even learned to make some from ancient crafts. She watched over his needs. She had his sketch book silk screened and carried the Portfolios to New York and sold them. People were asking questions about Jay. They laughed at his casual gifts to them, loved the freedom, the unbound pages, the surprises, which gave them the feeling they were sharing an intimate, private document, like a personal sketch book.
His rooms remained the same everywhere: the plain iron bed, the hard pillows, the one glass. They were illumined by orgies: let us see how long we can make love, how long, how many hours, days, nights.
When she went to New York to visit her children, he wrote to her: “Terribly alive but pained, and feeling absolutely that I need you. But I must see you soon. I see you bright and wonderful. I want to get more familiar with you. I love you. I loved you when you came and sat on the edge of the bed. All that afternoon like warm mist. Get closer to me, I promise you it will be beautiful. I like so much your frankness, your humility almost. I could never hurt that. It was to a woman like you I should have been married.”