“Jay,” said Lillian, extending a glass of red wine. “Drink to the end of your job at the paper. You will never have to do it again. I earn enough for both of us when I play every night.”
He had at times the air of a gnome, a satyr, or at other times the air of a serious scholar. His body appeared fragile in proportion to his exuberance. His appetite for life was enormous. His parents had given him money to go to college. He had put it in his pocket and gone to wander all over America, taking any job that came along, and sometimes none, traveling with hoboes, as a hitchhiker, a fruit picker, a dishwasher, seeking adventure, enriching his experience. He did not see his parents again for many years. In one blow, he had severed himself from his childhood, his adolescence, from all his past.
What richness, Lillian felt, what a torrent. In a world chilled by the mind, his work poured out like a volcano and raised the surrounding temperature.
“Lillian, let’s drink to my Pissoir Period. I have been painting the joys of urinating. It’s wonderful to urinate while looking up at the Sacre Coeur and thinking of Robinson Crusoe. Even better still in the urinoir of the Jardin des Plantes, while listening to the roar of the lions, and while the monkeys, high up in the trees, watch the performance and sometimes imitate me. Everything in nature is good.”
He loved the boiling streets. While he walked the streets he was happy. He learned their names amorously as if they were the names of women. He knew them intimately, noted those which disappeared and those which were born. He took Lillian to the Rue d’Ulm which sounded like a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, to the Rue Feuillantine which sounded like a souffle of leaves, to the Quai de Valmy where the barges waited patiently in the locks for a change of level while the wives hung their laundry on the decks, watered their flower pots and ironed their lace curtains to make the barges seem more like cottages in the country. Rue de la Fourche, like the trident of Neptune or of the devil, Rue Dolent with its mournful wall encircling the prison. Impasse du Mont Tonnerre! How he loved the Impasse du Mont Tonnerre. It was guarded at the entrance by a small cafe, three round tables on the sidewalk. A rusted iron gate which once opened to the entrance of carriages, now left open. A hotel filled with Algerians who worked in a factory neaby. Rusty Algerian voices, monotone songs, shouts, spice smells, fatal quarrels, knife wounds.
Once having walked past the iron gate, over the uneven cobblestones, they entered the Middle Ages. Dogs were eating garbage, women were going to market in their bedroom slippers. An old concierge stared through half-closed shutters, her skin the color of a mummy, a shriveled mouth munching words he could not hear. “Who do you want to see?” The classical words of concierges. Jay answered: “Marat, Voltaire, Mallarme, Rimbaud.”
“Every time I see one of those concierges,” said Jay, “I am reminded of how in the Middle Ages they believed that a cat must be buried in the walls of a newly built house; it would bring luck. I feel that these are the cats come back to avenge themselves by losing your mail and misleading visitors.”
Through an entrance as black and as narrow as the entrance to Mayan tombs, they entered gentle courtyards, with humble flower pots in bloom, a cracked window one expected to be opened by Ninon de L’Enclos. The smallness of the window, the askewness of the frame, the hood of the grey pointed slate roof overhanging it had been painted so many times on canvas that it receded into the past, fixed, eternal, like the sea-shell colored clouds suspended in time which could not be blown away by a change of wind.
Jay was sitting at the small coffee-stained table like a hunter on the watch for adventure. Lillian said: “The painters and the writers heightened these places and those people so well that they seem more alive than today’s houses, today’s people. I can remember the words spoken by Leon Paul Fargue more than the words I hear today. I can hear the very sound of his restless cane on the pavement better than I can hear my own footsteps. Was their life as rich, as intense? Was it the artist who touched it up?”
Time and art had done for Suzanne Valadon, the mother of Utrillo, what Jay would never do for Sabina. Flavor by accretion, poetry by decantation. The artists of that time had placed their subject in a light which would forever entrance us, their love re-infected us. By the opposite process which he did not understand, but which he shared with many other artists of his time, he was conveying his inability to love. It was his hatred he was painting.
Jay once said: “I arrived by the same boat that takes the prisoners to Devil’s Island. And I was thinking how strange it would be if I sailed back with them as a murderer. It was in Marseilles. I had picked up two girls in a cafe, and we were returning by taxi after a night of night clubs. One of the girls kept after me not to let myself get cheated. When we arrived at the hotel the taxi driver asked me for a ridiculously high sum. I argued with him. I was very angry, and yet during that moment I was conscious that I was looking at his face with terrific intensity, as if I were going to kill him, but it was not that; my hatred was like a magnifying glass, taking in all the details, his porous meaty face, his moles with hair growing out of them, his soggy hair falling over his forehead, his cloudy eyes the color of Pernod. Finally we came to an agreement. That night I dreamed that I strangled him. The next day I painted him as I saw him in my dream. It was as if I had done it in reality. People will hate this painting.”
“No, they will probably love it,” said Lillian. “Djuna says that the criminal relieves others of their wish to commit murder. He acts out the crimes of the world. In your painting you depict the desire of thousands. In your erotic drawings you do the same. They will love your freedom.”
At dawn they stood on the Place du Tertre, among houses which seemed about to crumble, to slide away, having been for so long the facades of Utrillo’s houses.
Three policemen were strolling, watching. A street telephone rang hysterically in the vaporous dawn. The policemen began to run towards it.
“Someone committed your murder,” said Lillian.
Two waiters and a woman began to run after the policemen.
The loud ringing continued. One of the policemen picked up the telephone and to a question put to him he answered: “No, not at all, not at all. Don’t worry. Everything is absolutely calm. A very calm night.”
Lillian and Jay had sat on the curb and laughed.
But whatever Jay’s secret of freedom was, it could not be imparted to Lillian. She could not gain it by contagion. All she could feel were Jay’s secret needs: “Lillian, I need you. Lillian, be my guardian angel. Lillian, I need peace in which to work.” Love, faithfulness, attentiveness, devotion, always created the same barriers around Lillian, the same limitations, the same taboos.
Jay avoided the moments of beauty in human beings. He stressed their analogies with animals. He added inert flesh, warts, oil to the hair, claws to the nails. He was suspicious of beauty. It was like a puritan’s suspicion of make-up, a crowd’s suspicion of prestidigitators. He had divorced nature from beauty. Nature was neglect, unbuttoned clothes, uncombed hair, homeliness.
Lillian was bewildered by the enormous discrepancy which existed between Jay’s models and what he painted. Together they would walk along the same Seine river, she would see it silky grey, sinuous and glittering, he would draw it opaque with fermented mud, and a shoal of wine bottle corks and weeds caught in the stagnant edges.
He had discovered a woman hobo who slept every night in exactly the same place, in the middle of the sidewalk, in front of the Pantheon. She had found a subway ventilator from which a little heat arose and sometimes a pale grey smoke, so that she seemed to be burning. She lay in a tidy way, her head resting on her market bag packed with her few belongings, her brown dress pulled over her ankles, her shawl neatly tied under her chin. She slept calm and dignified as if she were in her own bed.