Small room, so shabby, like a deep-set alcove. Immediately there was the richness of Jay’s voice, the feeling of sinking into warm flesh, every twist of the body awakening new centers of pleasure. “Everything is good, good,” murmured Jay. “Have I been less brutal than you expected? Did the violence of my painting lead you to expect more?” Lillian was baffled by these questions. What was he measuring himself against? A myth in his own mind of what women expected?
In his own work everything was larger than nature. Was he trying to match his own extravagances? If in his eyes he carried magnifying glasses, did he see himself in life as a smaller figure?
In the same letter he wrote: “I don’t know what I expect of you, Lillian, but it is something in the way of a miracle. I am going to deman everything of you, even the impossible, because you are strong.”
Lillian’s secret weakness then became the cause of pain. She had a need of a mirror in which she could see her image loved by Jay. Or perhaps a shrine, with herself in the place of honor. Unique and irreplaceable Lillian (as she had been for Larry). But with Jay this was impossible. The whole world flowed through his being in one day. Lillian was apt to find sitting in her place (or lying in her bed) the most unlovely of all women, undernourished, unkempt, anonymous, ordinary, he had picked up in a cafe, with nothing to explain her presence except that she was perhaps the opposite of Lillian. To her he gave the coat Lillian had left in his room. The visitor had even brought with her a little grey wilted dog and Jay who hated animals was even kind to this dusty mongrel that was molting.
For Jay’s kindness was his greatest expression of anarchy. It was always an act of defiance to those one loved, to those one lived with. His was a mockery of the laws of devotion. He could not give to Lillian. He was always generous to outsiders, to those he owed nothing to, giving paints to those who did not paint, a drink to the man who was over-saturated with drink, his time to one who did not value it, the painting Lillian favored to anyone who came to the studio.
His giving was a defiance of evaluation and selection. He wanted to assert the value of what others discarded or neglected. His favorite friend was not a great painter but the most mediocre of all painters, who reflected Jay like a caricature, a diminished echo, who hummed his words as Jay did, nodded his head as Jay did, laughed when Jay laughed. They practiced dadaism together: everything was absurd, everything was a joke. Jay would launch into frenzied praise of his paintings. (Lillian called him Sancho Panza.)
Lillian would ask with candor: “Do you really admire him so much, as much as all that? Is he truly greater than Gauguin? Greater than Picasso?”
Jay would laugh at her gravity. “Oh no, I was carried away by my own words, just got going. I think I was talking about my own painting, really. I enjoy mystifying, confusing, contradicting. Deep down, you know, I don’t believe in anything.”
“But people will believe you.”
“They admire the wrong painters anyway.”
“But you’re adding to the absurdities.”
Lillian had the feeling that Sancho did not exist. True, he presented a Chinese face, but when she sought to know Sancho she found an evasive smile which was a reflection of Jay’s smile, a sympathy which was an act of politeness, an opinion which, at the slightest opposition, vanished, a head waiter at a banquet, a valet for your coat, a shadow at the top of the stairs. His eyes carried no messages. If her fingers touched him she felt his body was fluid, evasive, anonymous. What Jay asserted he did not deny. He imitated Jay’s adventures, but Lillian felt he had neither possessed life, nor lost it, neither devoured it nor spat it out. He was the wool in the bedroom slipper, the storm strip on the window, the felt stop on the piano key, the shock absorber on the car spring. He was the invisible man, and Lillian could not understand their fraternal bond. She suffed to see a reduced replica of Jay, his shrunken double.
“Right after being with me,” Lillian said once, “did you have to take up with such an unlovely woman?”
“Oh that,” said Jay. “Reichel believes me to be callous, amoral, ungrateful. He thinks because I have you I’m the luckiest man in the world, and it irritated me, his lecturing, so I launched into a role, to shock him. I talked to him about the whores, and had him gasping to think I might be callous about you. Can you understand that? I realize that it’s all childish, but don’t take it seriously.”
“Eh? Sancho?” Sancho would laugh hysterically. It was what Lillian called the Village Idiot Act. Lillian laughed with them, but not with all of herself.
“I’m finding my own world,” said Jay. “A certain condition of existence, a universe of mere BEING, where one lives like a plant, instinctively. No will. The great indifference, like that of the Hindu who lets himself be passive in order to let the seeds in him flower. Something between the will of the European and the karma of the Oriental. I want just the joy of illumination, the joy of what I see in the world. Just to receive vibrations. Susceptibility to all life. Acceptance. Taking it all in. Just BE. That was always the role of the artist: to reveal the joy, the ecstasy. My life has been one long opposition to will. I have practiced letting things happen. I have dodged jobs, responsibilities, and I want to express in painting the relaxing of will and straining for the sake of enjoyment.”
This was the climate he created and to which Lillian responded, the yieldingness of the body, relaxed gestures, yielding to flow, seeking pleasure and being nourished with it, giving it to others. When something threatened his pleasure, how skillful he was at evasion. He had created something which on the surface seemed untainted by the anxiety of his time, yet Lillian felt there was a flaw in it. She did not know what it was.
The flaw she was to discover was that his world was like a child’s world, depending on others’ care, others’ devotions, others’ taking on the burdens.
He received a letter from his first wife, telling him about his daughter now fourteen years old, and showing exceptional gifts for painting. At first Jay wept: “I cannot help her.” He remembered saying to her when she was five years old: “Now remember, I am your brother, not your father.” The idea of fatherhood repulsed him. It threatened his desire for everlasting freedom and youthfulness.
“Let her come and share our life,” said Lillian.
“No,” said Jay. “I want to be free. I have too much work to do. I have to take the frames off my paintings. I want them to become a part of the wall, a continuous frieze. My colors are about to fly off the edge, and I don’t want restraint. Let them fly!”
While Lillian cooked dinner in the small kitchen off the studio, he fell asleep. When he awakened he had forgotten his daughter and his guilt. “Is dinner ready? Is the wine good?”
How I wish his indifference were contagious, thought Lillian. He can forget his daughter, and I cannot forget my children. Every night I leave Jay’s side to go and say goodnight to my children across the ocean. I have to give Jay the same kind of love I gave my children. As if I knew no other expression of love outside of care and devotion.
She spent all her time consoling the friends he had misused, paying his debts, preventing him from paying too high a price for his rebellions.
When they first met he was proofreading in a newspaper office. His paintings were not selling yet. The work irritated his eyes. He would come to his room and the first thing he would do was to wash his inflamed eyelids. Lillian watched him, watched the red-rimmed eyes, usually laughing, and now withered by fatigue, and watering. These eyes which he needed for his work, wasted on proofreading under weak lights on greyish paper. These eyes he needed to drink in the world and all its profusion of images.