Seduction of the Minotaur (18 page)

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.

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.”

The father believed in unremitting work, and no
idleness or dreaming. He clocked the universe, constantly pulling out his watch
like a judge at a running match. His mother was beset with fear. Every pleasure
was dangerous. Swimming led to drowning, fireworks could blow your finger off,
hunting fireflies could anger a rattlesnake, associating with native children
would turn you into a “savage.”