When they returned from the theatre or a dance and stood before the door of her room there was always a pause. The Voice would say: “Come and talk with me a while longer. I hate to surrender you to sleep.”
If she refused she would find a note under her door the next day: “You belong to the night. I have to give you up to the night, to your mystery.” She smiled. Her mystery was so amazingly simple, but he could not understand it.
The next day he wrote her a long letter and slipped it under her door. Tied to it was a diminutive frog. “This,” he wrote, “is my transformation, to permit my entrance through the closed door.”
But this diminutive frog she held in the palm of her hand resembled him so much that it made her weep. Indeed the frog had come just as in the fairy tales; and just as in the fairy tales, she must keep her faith and her inner vision of him, must keep on believing in what lay hidden within this frog’s body. She must pretend not to notice that the Voice was born disguised, to test her love. If she kept her inner vision the disguise might be destroyed, the metamorphosis might occur.
She sat on the floor with the letter in her lap and the frog in the palm of her hand, weeping over his ugliness and humility and the faith she must hold on to. She remembered Djuna’s words: if you fall in love with a mirage your body will revolt.
She was asking him questions about his childhood. He stopped in the middle of a story to weep. “Nobody ever asked me anything about myself. I have listened to the confessions of others for twenty-five years. No one has ever turned and asked me about myself, has ever let me talk. No one has ever tried to divine my moods or needs. There are times, Lilith, when I wanted so much to confess to some one. I was filled with preoccupations. Do you know what I most fear in the world? To be loved as a father, a doctor. And it is always so I am loved. I am like a man who fears to be loved for his money.”
She used his own formulas against him. When he complained that she left him alone she gave him mysterious explanations: that the reality of living always brought tragedy, that she preferred the dream which never culminated in tragedy. The Voice was forced to admit he preferred the dream. The explanations enchanted and deluded him, and saved her from saying: “I don’t want you near me because I don’t love you.”
His concern with the accuracy of the psychological was so tremendous that once, after the discovery that she had lied, he said: “Let me solve this thing alone. Don’t bother about details of any kind. What do our lives matter when the whole manmade world is at stake.”
The only joy she experienced was that of being completely understood, justified, absolved in all but her relationship to him. He always asked her what she had been doing. No matter what she told him, even about the trivial purchase of a bracelet, the Voice pounced upon it with excitement and raised the incident to a complete, dazzling symbolical act, a part of a legend. The little incident was all he needed to compose and complete this legend. The bracelet had a meaning—every thing had a meaning. Every act revealed more and more clearly this divine pattern by which she lived and of which the Voice alone knew the entire design. Now he could see. He repeated over and over again: You see? You see? Lilith had the feeling that she had been doing extraordinary things. When she stepped into a shop and bought a bracelet it was not, as she thought, because of the love of its color, or shape, or because of her love of adornment. She was carrying in herself at that moment the entire drama of woman’s slavery and dependence. In this obscure little theatre of her unconscious the denouement brought about by the purchase of the bracelet was a drama which had everlasting repercussions on her daily life. It signified the desire to be bound to some one, it expressed a yielding of some kind. She had voluntarily bound and enslaved herself. You see? You see? Not only was the bracelet or the lovely moment spent before the shop window magnified and brought into violent relief—as an act full of implications, of repercussions—but all she had done during the week seemed to open like a giant hot-house camelia whose growth had been forced by a travail of creation from the moment she first drew breath.
While the Voice tracked down each minor incident of her life to expose the relation between them, the fatality and importance of the link between them, the heavy destined power of each one, she felt like an actress who had never known how moving she had been, she felt like a creator who had prepared in some dim laboratory of her soul a life like a legend, and only to-day she was reading the legend itself out of an enormous book.
This was part of the legend, the little man brusquely deciphering each incident, marvelling always at the miracle which had never seemed a miracle before, her walkin heng and buying a bracelet, as miraculous to the Voice as liquid turning to gold in an alchemist’s bottle. She had not only covered the earth with a multitude of little spontaneous acts but these acts accomplished so slidingly, so swiftly, could all be illumined with spiritual significance, divine intentions, loved for their human quality or feared for their monstrous uniqueness. He worshipped them for the very act of their flowering.
He revolted now and then against her uncapturableness but she subtilized the situation. She did not want reality. She feared reality. She was really a flame. One could not possess a flame. She annulled the boundaries, confused the issues, effaced the black and whiteness. All the definite decisions, outlines, realities, she melted into a dream-like substance. She enchanted him with a sea of talk, hypnotized him with inventions and creations, so that he would cease his clutching, become cosmic again. She talked him out of the reality of her presence.
What he did not know was that at the same time she was losing her faith in all interpretations, since she saw how they could be manipulated to conceal the truth. She began to feel the illusory quality of all man’s interpretations, and to believe only in her feelings. Every day she found in mythology a new pretext for eluding his desire for her. First she needed time. She must become entirely herself and without need of him. She was waiting for the moment when she would have no more need of him as a doctor. She was waiting for the man and the doctor to become entirely separate, and never to be again confused in her. This he accepted.
But when he was not being the doctor, she discovered he was not a man but a child. He wept like a child, he raged, he was filled with fears, he was possessive, he invaded her room without delicacy, he complained and lamented about himself, his own life. He was desperately hungry and awkward in life, clutching rather than enjoying. The human being hidden in the healer was stunted, youthful, hysterical. As soon as he ceased to be a teacher and a guide, he lost all his strength and deftness. He was disoriented, chaotic, blind. As soon as he stepped out of his role he collapsed. Lilith found herself confronting a child, a child lamenting, regretting, impatient, fretful, lonely. He wrote inchoate love notes with ink blots, he leaped to meet her in the street, perspiring, nervous. He was jealous of the man who washed her hair. The child that she awakened in him was like the child in all those who had come to him for care, unsatisfied, lamenting, tearful, sickly.
He wanted to go to the sea shore with her. Lilith and the Voice then, walking along the boardwalk. Crowds. Discord between sea and voices, between wind and flags, between shop windows and sand. Grating. Or was it Lilith grating at the touch of the Voice’s hands, like sticks of wood falling on her.
The crowd walking, chewing, breathing, grunting. The wind slicing open dyed hair, teasing false feathers. The salt so bitter on this skirt of the sea’s dance trodden by bold houses with mangy-faced facades.