I took Arline home in a taxi. In the taxi, facing an Arline all dressed, I felt shy. The intimacy when we were naked and now the strangeness. Arline telephoned me and it was strange. I know nothing about her except her body, the feel and odor of her, and yet when she called up I felt less lonely, I felt a sort of body warmth, almost like love, just because I had touched her, and felt her. Arline’s voice was lax, and like the voice of a plant. She wanted to spend the night with me. She wanted to see me alone. Arline came as if she were dancing, displacing everything around her, she was terribly drunk. We had dinner together and hardly talked. Just smiled at each other, held each other’s hands, asked foolish questions. Whatever she told me was not part of her body at all. Her body suggested infinitely more, but everything in it was asleep.
Arline was blind. Her eyes said nothing, her mouth said nothing. Her eyes so blind, her speech drunken. When she talked she was just a little girl taking small parts in second rate shows, often out of work, not caring, yet not able to do anything but act. She was indifferent towards the part she acted, and indifferent to the actions of her body, as if she were separate from it. In my room she asked for another drink. She opened the drawers of the dressing table, looked at my clothes, pulled everything out, laughing. Then she said: Kiss me! She caressed me. The night we had been with Harold I felt that Arline did not respond ultimately, completely. I had not felt the violent, quick throbbing under my fingers. I wondered if Arline knew that I hadn’t. And then Arline asked me, asked me with a very slow, very implicit smile. I told her the truth. She said: “That’s why I loved you, you were making believe too. I knew it.” We laughed together, caressed each other into drowsiness; Arline fell asleep,h her body lying right across mine, so that I could not move. My hand was still resting on her leg. I lay there wishing violently to be hypnotized. I felt that if some one made me sleep like this and then took me something would happen to that unyielding part of me. I dreamed of some one caressing me until I fell asleep and then taking me. I remembered the time when I first began to feel with my body. I was in the bath tub. By mistake I turned on the water of the shower, and a jet came down on me and fell between my legs. Like a caress. I thought to be in love must be like this, this marvellous, warm water falling. And every night I fell asleep imagining these caresses falling over me like the water of the shower. Lying there, with the body of Arline asleep, her mouth a little open as if some dream would issue from it with a ribbon, as if she were about to tell me what extraordinary things she was seeing while asleep. There was so much space around her now, and her breathing changed tonalities, as if she were watching a spectacle.
I envied her her sleep, I thought if some one would force his desire upon me when I am asleep I would close around it like a plant. It would be so simple and soft, speckled with goldness. When Arline leaves me her gestures will fill my room. It is the only thing I believe in. The gestures! What a terrible need of the voice, of body warmth, what a need to put my head where the heart beats, to watch the palpitation of the throat. Afterwards Arline will recede and vanish. Something else will fill the room, some dream of her which will decompose her simplicity, which will disincarnate her, make smoke and fog and ribbons of her. Far away Arline will become a dream. It is that which gives me anguish. When she leaves she will sink into enormous space.
Lilith lying there, tangled, restless. Finding the absolute only in multiplicity, an absolute composed in space, an absolute in fragments. The smile of Arline, who laughs because she is making believe, as if by this she had escaped tragedy. The eagerness of the Voice, with his finger pointing: “You see? You see? That is what it means. You live in the myth.” Living in the myth. Perhaps. But she was lost in it. Even Arline did not remain Arline. Now, because she was asleep, she was bathing in a world much larger than she knew. Lilith touching Arline asleep, wishing she would remain Arline.
But the next instant she is caught in the whirl again, a quest, a continuous, incessant, diabolical quest of an absolute that does not flow serenely but is pursued and grasped by sheer wakefulness. In flight always, and she fearing to sleep for fear of its passing. Desire unexploded in her, but the cord lit and the little flames running up and down the cord with Dionysian joyousness: a dancing, the little flames running around the heart of the dynamite and never touching it. The little flames kept her breathless, nerves bristling with their heads up, necks stretched, thirsty eyes, peaked ears, all the little nerves waiting for the orgasm that will send the blood running through them like an anaesthetic and put them to sleep.
Lilith, lying sleepless, seeing in the yellow faces at the bar the faces of future crimes, drug fiends who with knife or poison would bring a kind of sleep, a pause, a rest from this pursuit of a fugitive absolute. Lilith wishing for the crime, the drug, the death, as deliverance. But the nerves are still awake, waiting for the pause of sleep or death, waiting for the dynamite to explode, for the past to crumble, waiting for an absolute uncapturable. Do all violent fires have a hundred flames pointing in all directions, was there ever one round flame with one tongue? Why did this force which did not erupt in quicksilver through the veins, why did it rush out in a typhoon whirl to round only the monsters walking through the streets, to question their intentions, to imagine their perversities, to slide between the foam of lust, between the most knotted and twisted desires? This man with his little girl, why were his eyes so wet, his mouth so wet, why were her eyes so tired, why was her dress so short, her glance so oblique? Why was that young man so white? There was scum on his lips—the scum of veronal. Why did that woman wait under the lamplight with a hand in her muff? This force which did not explode in Lilith was a poison; it spilled into the streets, ran into the gutters. She wanted to be dismembered, devoured, and she met always with wings, with eyes opening on the heavens, flames turning to the mystic blue of the night lamps in convents and hospitals.
Arline was still asleep. In Lilith the seed would not burst; the body left the earth, pulled upward by a string of nerves, and spilled its pollen only in space, because the fairy tale wore too light a gown, a gown that made a breeze, a space between the feet and earth. Lilith’s footsteps would soon not be heard, the blood would remain quicksilver, blue like the night flames of places where people weep.
Lilith entered Djuna’s room tumultuously, throwing her little serpent skin bag on the bed, her undulating scarf on the desk, her gloves on the book shelf, and talking with fever and excitement:
“I’m falling in love with the Voice. I feel he is like a soul detective, and that the day he captures me, I will love him.”
“It’s a mirage,” said Djuna.
She went to the window. There was snow and ice on the rim of it, like a window giving on Iceland. She tried to open it a little, but it was jammed with snow and ice. She had a feeling they were blocked in, snowed in with tremendous obstacles. She knew Lilith was pursuing another mirage. Adventures, a mirage. The love of the Voice for what the Voice said to her, because the Voice reached into the roots of her being.