For awhile Lillian had been devoted to both Jay and Sabina. And what had Jay wanted? To own them both? She remembered his letter to her: “You are really strong. I warn you. I am no angel. I am insatiable. I will ask the impossible of you. What it is I don’t know.”
And a few years later he demanded of her that she understand the presence of Sabina at first only in his paintings…and then later in their lives. He even wanted Lillian to help him know Sabina.
Just before she left Paris for the last time, abdicating, Lillian said to Jay: “Now the time has come for me to tell you of the Sabina I know, because it will make you love her more. You see, what I was given to see was a glimpse of Sabina’s innocence. That night…we had both dreamed of escaping from our bodies, our molds. At a certain stage of exaltation all the boundaries are lost, identity too. Sabina was awkward too; she did not know how to behave before a woman. She kept repeating: ‘I’d like to be at the beginning of everything, when I could believe, I’d like to be at the beginning of all experience, as you are, able to give yourself, trusting.’ She wanted my innocence, and what we want is what we are. And I…all my life I could hardly live or breathe for fear of hurting anyone, I had seen Sabina take what she wanted and being loved for it. And I wanted to catch from her by contagion that irresponsibility. Now you will love her more.”
“No,” said Jay, “much less. Because she would never tell me what you have told me. What you describe—I could not hate that. There’s some beauty to it. I have just realized that what I gave you was something coarse and plain compared with that.”
“No, Jay, you made me a woman. Sabina would have thrust me back into being a half woman, as I was before I met you.”
“Beyond the love,” said Jay, “we were friends. Sabina and I will never be friends. I hate her unnecessary complications.”
“But they interest you. They are your drugs. I could not give you that. It is I who gave you something plain. I am not a drug.”
She looked at the grey blond hair on the nape of his neck, and felt almost capable of staying at his side while he experienced his passion for Sabina. But she was too certain that the body of Sabina would triumph. They were better matched in violence. But what would become of the tender Jay she had known?
So she said: “I must go and see my children. Adele is ill.”
“Whatever you do is right. For the first time I see some beauty in it.”
The plane was flying into the night now. At times it shivered as from too great an effort to gain altitude.
Jay had been concerned with being the lover of the world, naming all it contained, caressing it with his short and stocky hands, appropriating it, exploring it. And Djuna concerned only with the longitude and latitude and altitude of human beings in relation to each other.
For a while it seemed as if Lillian were flying into a storm. Luminous signs informed her she must strap herself to her chair. Other passengers slept, confident that strapped to their chairs they would safely reach earth again. Lillian slid the curtain open and through the porthole watched the immensity of space in which sorrows seemed to lose their weight. She looked at the moon, as if to communicate with it, as if it would assure her that the storms of earth could not reach her. Looking at the moon intently it seemed to her that the plane flew more steadily.
It was the year when everyone’s attention was focused on the moon. “The first terrestrial body to be explored will undoubtedly be the moon.” Yet how little we know about human beings, thought Lillian. All the telescopes are focused on the distant. No one is willing to turn his vision inward.
What she had seen of Larry during their marriage was only what he allowed her to see, giant albatross wings, the wings of his goodness. She had been unable to see above or beyond the rim of them. Larry had collaborated in this. He only offered his goodness. He never said: “I want, I like, I take,” but “What do you want? What do you like?” He deliberately obscured any vision into his being.
“The moon is the earth’s nearest neighbor.”
They had slept side by side. In the night, or at dawn, his body had been there. She had felt its radiations. In his voice there were caresses. In his sympathy, a tropical balm. In his goodness, a universe. His attentiveness blinded her. If he had another life, other selves, he turned like a planet, only one face towards Lillian.
“A rocket that would take months to reach one of the planets can travel to the moon in a day or two.”
“An instrument station on the moon could communicate with the earth with greater ease than one on Mars or Venus.” It was not necessary to circumnavigate around Larry or go to Paris, to Mexico. At last she was a receptor for Larry’s messages!
“To investigators preoccupied with the remarkable developments in contemporary astronomy and physics the moon had seemed a dead and changeless world.”
But only because she had not looked beyond the mask. The rim of density around Larry had been his goodness. It was selfless, almost anonymous. He was present only when summoned, and summoned only by distress. Lillian had fixed the distorted image, but Larry had contributed the mask.
“The moon is an astronomical stone. Because its surface has preserved the record of ancient events, it holds the key to the solar system.”
The key to the marriage? Larry had achieved changelessness.
Whereas Lillian was created “out of the air and water that support life on earth which continuously wear away the surface of our planets. Processes in the interior of the earth heave up chains of mountains for demolition by the forces of erosion, and the cycles of building and erosion from one epoch to the next erase the records of the past.” That was a portrait of Lillian’s turbulences in planetary terms! And of Larry’s conservation of the past, of their life together.
“The moon, on the other hand, has neither atmosphere nor oceans, and has never been eroded by wind and water. Furthermore, the circular formations that dominate the moon’s topography indicate that its crust has never undergone the violent changes which are involved in mountain-building processes on earth. “
Larry had sought to present such an undisturbed surface to Lillian’s investigations. But this evenness had been as much a mask as Sabina’s more theatrical disguises. What do you feel? Where are you? Will you share my enthusiasms? My friendships?
What had sent Larry so far away from human life into the position of a spectator, so far away from earth? What had made him wrap himself in an unbreathable atmosphere of selflessness and then be absent from his own body? There were incidents she knew. But she had never coordinated them. She was landing for the first time on this new planet, Larry. “In any case, a planet would be cool at birth.” His mother had not wanted him to be born. This was the first denial. He had arrived unsummoned by love and jealously resented by his father.
“A cool birth does not exclude the later heating and melting of planetary bodies by radioactive elements they contain.”
The child, inhibited by such “a cool birth,” sought warmth by running away from home to the huts of the Negroes living and working nearby for his father. His father was drilling oil wells in Brazil for an American firm.
His pale mother had faded blue eyes, and wore white dresses which covered her neck and arms, and on which the sewing machine, as if in fear the material would undulate, swell, or fly off like a parachute, had criss-crossed a thousand stitches, tight and overlapping, controlling every inch in a stifling design called “shirring.”