Jay had painted her soiled and scratched feet, the corns on her toes, the black nails. But he overlooked the story Lillian loved and remembered of her, that when they tried to remove her to an old woman’s home she had refused saying: “I prefer to stay here where all the great men of France are buried. They keep me company. They watch over me.”
Lillian was reminded of the Talmudic words: “We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
Lillian would become so confused by Jay’s chaotic living, his dadaism, his contradictions, that she submitted to Djuna’s clarifications. Jay’s “realism,” his need to expose, debunk, as he said, his need for reality, did not seem as real as Djuna’s intuitive interpretations of their acts.
Lillian had no confidence in herself as a woman. She thought that it was because her father had wanted her to be a boy. She did not see herself as beautiful, and as a girl loved to put on her brother’s clothes at first to please her father, and later because it gave her a feeling of strength to take flights from the problems of being a woman. In her brother’s jeans, with short hair, with a heavy sweater and tennis shoes, she took on some of her brother’s assurance, and reached the conviction that men determined their own destiny and women did not. She chose a man’s costume as the primitives chose masks to frighten away the enemy. But the mystery play she had acted was too mysterious. Pretend to be a boy, when what she most wanted was to be loved by one. Act the active lover so the lover will understand she wished him to be active with her. She acted the active lover not because she was the aggressor but because she wanted to demonstrate…
Because her father had wanted her to be a boy she felt she had acquired some masculine traits: courage, activity. When she shifted her ground she felt greater confidence. She thought a woman might love her some day for other qualities as they loved men for their strength, or genius, or wit.
Sabina’s appearance, first as a model for Jay’s paintings, then more and more into their intimate life, her chaotic and irresistible flow swept Lillian along into what seemed like a passion. But Lillian, with Djuna’s help, had discovered the real nature of the relationship. It was a desire for an impossible union: she wanted to lose herself in Sabina and BECOME Sabina. This wanting to BE Sabina she had mistaken for love of Sabina’s night beauty. She wanted to lie beside her and become her and be one with her and both arise as ONE woman; she wanted to add herself to Sabina, re-enforce the woman in herself, the submerged woman, intensify this woman Lillian she could not liberate fully. She wanted to merge with Sabina’s freedom, her capacity for impulsive action, her indifference to consequences. She wanted to smooth her rebellious hair with Sabina’s clinging hair, smooth her own denser skin by the touch of Sabina’s silkier one, set her own blue eyes on fire with Sabina’s fawn eyes, drink Sabina’s voice in place of her own, and, disguised as Sabina, out of her own body for good, to become one of the women so loved by her father.
She had loved in Sabina an unborn Lillian. By adding herself to Sabina she would become a more potent woman. In the presence of Sabina she existed more vividly. She chose a body she could love (being critical of her own), a freedom she could obey (which she could never possess), a face she could worship (not being pleased with her own). She believed love quite capable of such metamorphosis.
These feelings had been obscure, unformulated until the night the three of them had gone out together and Sabina had drunk a whole bottle of Pernod. She had become violently ill. Jay and Lillian had nursed her. Sabina was almost delirious. She was easily prone to fever and Lillian was alarmed by the way her face seemed to be consumed from within. She stretched out beside her to watch over her and Jay had gone to sleep in the studio.
In the first version of that night, gathered from Sabina’s smoky talk and Lillian’s evasions. Jay had believed that jealousy of him had sprung between them and separated them. But this was only on the surface. Later Lillian saw another drama.
Both Sabina and Lillian, faced with a woman, realized they felt closeness but not desire. They had kissed, and that was all.
Sabina wanted something of Lillian: her inexperience, her newness, as if she wanted to begin her own life anew. They both wanted intangible things. Impossible to explain to Jay who made everything so simple, and reduced to acts. He could not understand atmosphere, moods, mysteries.
The true bridge of fascination was the recognition that in Sabina lay a dormant Lillian. A Lillian Jay had not been able to awaken, a liberated Lillian. For he had needed the devoted Lillian.
Sabina was a drought of freedom. Every gesture she made, every word she uttered. She was free of faithfulness, loyalty, gratitude, devotion, duties, responsibilities, guilts. Even the roles she played were chosen by herself.
Faced with the culmination of their fantasies of a possible closeness to woman, neither one wanted to go further. They both realized the comedy of their pretenses. Something so absurd in their bravado towards all experience, in their arrogance about playing Jay’s role. They could not escape their femininity, their woman’s role, no matter how difficult or complex.
The story which had filtered out had become wrapped in poetry, myth, and drama. It became more and more difficult to reveal the truth, for it was so much more simple, so much more human. Lillian kept the secret because she felt it would make Jay love Sabina more. Jay thought Sabina loved women and that this would explain her water-tight compartments.
What would Jay have thought of their hesitations, awkwardnesses, their own bewilderment. He might have laughed at them. They had both played roles: Sabina in a theatrical way, with capes, make up, late arrivals, dramatic effects, disappearances, mysteries; Lillian the one dictated by her outward appearance of naturalness and honesty. “From you I expect honesty,” said Jay. Everyone knew Sabina was an actress. Everyone believed Lillian sincere.
Lillian loved Sabina’s fluidity, because she wanted it for herself. When she thought she was courting a woman, she was courting Sabina’s gift for escape from whatever interrupted the course of passion, whatever interfered with life as an adventure.
They kissed once. It was soft and lovely, but like touching your own flesh. All this was on the edge of their bodies, not at the core. Sabina was touched to see Lillian’s bedazzlement. She smiled a triumphant smile.
Lillian had imagined that by loving Sabina a miraculous alchemy would take place. What took place that night was not love of woman. It was a hope of an exchange of selves.
It was Sabina’s feelings Jay was curious about.
But there were so many things Lillian could not tell Jay. So many things he did not want to hear. Jay thought he could arrive at a dissolution of Sabina’s potency by an acid bath of truth. He was seeking to exorcise her power.
He would never believe that they had contemplated allying themselves because they felt incomplete and exposed and less strong than he imagined them. Jay was tone deaf to such secret weaknesses, needs, moments of helplessness.
He would not believe that they both wanted to be consoled as by a sister, or a mother, for his erratic behavior, his multitude of treacheries.
Antiphonal music of desires at cross currents repeated to infinity. Jay the gate-crasher seeking a truth too black and white. And the key lay in prefabricated myths which appeared in dreams with veiled faces, mute, undecipherable.
Until Djuna took up each strand, delicately separating each one from pain and blindness, the pain of blindness. Strange how in this light, high above the earth, flying through the regions of awareness which Djuna had taken her into by a method of ascension she had finally learned from her. Djuna’s words, Djuna the aviator of language, air force for grounded lives.