Anaïs Nin - Ladders to Fire

But Lillian knew, too, how quickly he could turn about and ridicule if he were cheated, as he often was, by his blind enthusiasms. How revengeful he became when the mysteries were false.

“If only Sabina would die,” thought Lillian, “if she would only die. She does not love him as I do.”

Anxiety oppressed her. Would he push everything into movement again, disperse her anxieties with his gaiety, carry her along in his reckless course?

Lillian’s secret he did not detect: that of her fear. Once her secret had almost pierced through, once when Jay had stayed out all night. From her room she could see the large lights of the Boulevard Montparnasse blinking maliciously, Montparnasse which he loved and those lights, and the places where he so easily abandoned himself as he gave himself to everything that glittered—rococo women, spluttering men in bars, anyone who smiled, beckoned, had a story to tell.

She had waited with the feeling that where her heart had been there was now a large hole; no heart or blood beating anymore but a drafty hole made by a precise and rather large bullet.

Merely because Jay was walking up and down Montparnasse in one of his high drunken moods which had nothing to do with drink but with his insatiable thirst for new people, new smiles, new words, new stories.

Each time the white lights blinked she saw his merry smile in his full mouth, each time the red lights blinked she saw his cold blue eyes detached and mocking, annihilating the mouth in a daze of blue, iced gaiety. The eyes always cold, the mouth warm, the eyes mocking and the mouth always repairing the damage done. His eyes that would never turn inward and look into the regions of deep events, the regions of personal explorations: his eyes intent on not seeing discords or dissolutions, not seeing the missing words, the lost treasures, the wasted hours, the shreds of the dispersed self, the blind mobilities.

Not to see the dark night of the self his eyes rose frenziedly to the surface seeking in fast-moving panoramas merely the semblance of riches…

“Instead of love there is appetite,” thought Lillian. “He does not say: ‘I love you,’ but ‘I need you.’ Our life is crowded like a railroad station, like a circus. He does not feel things where I feel them: the heart is definitely absent. That’s why mine is dying, it has ceased to pound tonight, it is being slowly killed by his hardness.”

Away from him she could always say: he does not feel. But as soon as he appeared she was baffled. His presence carried such a physical glow that it passed for warmth. His voice was warm like the voice of feeling. His gestures were warm, his hands liked touch. He laid his hands often on human beings, and one might think it was love. But it was just a physical warmth, like the summer. It gave off heat like a chemical, but no more.

“He will die of hardness, and I from feeling too much. Even when people knock on the door I have a feeling they are not knocking on wood but on my heart. All the blows fall directly on my heart.”

Even pleasure had its little stabs upon the heart. The perpetual heart-murmur of the sensibilities.

“I wish I could learn his secret. I would love to be able to go out for a whole night without feeling all the threads that bind me to him, feeling my love for him all around me like a chastity belt.”

And now he was lying still on the breast of her immutable love, and she had no immutable love upon which to lay her head, no one to return to at dawn.

He sat up lightly saying: “Oh, Sabina has no roots!”

“And I’m strangling in my roots,” thought Lillian.

He had turned on the light to read now, and she saw his coat hugging the back of the chair, revealing in the shape of its shoulders the roguish spirit that had played in it. If she could only take the joys he gave her, his soft swagger, the rough touch of his coat, the effervescence of his voice when he said: that’s good. Even his coat seemed to be stirring with his easy flowing life, even to his clothes he gave the imprint of his liveliness.

To stem his outflowing would be like stemming a river of life. She would not be the one to do it. When a man had decided within himself to live out every whim, every fancy, every impulse, it was a flood for which no Noah’s Ark had ever been provided.

Lillian and Djuna were walking together over dead autumn leaves that crackled like paper. Lillian was weeping and Djuna was weeping with her and for her.

They were walking through the city as it sank into twilight and it was as if they were both going blind together with the bitterness of their tears. Through this blurred city they walked hazily and half lost, the light of a street lamp striking them now and then like a spotlight throwing into relief Lillian’s distorted mouth and the broken line of her neck where her head fell forward heavily.

The buses came upon them out of the dark, violently with a deafening clatter, and they had to leap out of their way, only to continue stumbling through dark streets, crossing bridges, passing under heavy arcades, their feet unsteady on the uneven cobblestones as if they had both lost their sense of gravity.

Lillian’s voice was plaintive and monotonous, like a lamentation. Her blue eyes wavered but always fixed on the ground as if the whole structure of her life lay there and she were watching its consummation.

Djuna was looking straight before her through and beyond the dark, the lights, the traffic, beyond all the buildings. Eyes fixed, immobile like glass eyes, as if the curtain of tears had opened a new realm.

Lillian’s phrases surged and heaved like a turgid sea. Unformed, unfinished, dense, heavy with repetitions, with recapitulations, with a baffled, confused bitterness and anger.

Djuna found nothing to answer, because Lillian was talking about God, the God she had sought in Jay.

“Because he had the genius,” she said, “I wanted to serve him, I wanted to make him great. But he is treacherous, Djuna. I am more confused and lost now than before I knew him. It isn’t only his betrayals with women, Djuna, it’s that he sees no one as they are. He only adds to everyone’s confusions. I put myself wholly in his hands. I wanted to serve someone who would create something wonderful, and I also thought he would help me to create myself. But he is destructive, and he is destroying me.”

This seeking of man the guide in a dark city, this aimless wandering through the streets touching men and seeking the guide—this was a fear all women had known…seeking the guide in men, not in the past, or in mythology, but a guide with a living breath who might create one, help one to be born as a woman, a guide they wished to possess for themselves alone, in their own isolated woman’s soul. The guide for woman was still inextricably woven with man and with man’s creation.

Lillian had thought that Jay would create her because he was the artist, that he would be able to see her as clearly as she had seen in him the great painter, but Jay’s inconsistencies bewildered her. She had placed her own image in his hands for him to fashion: make of me a big woman, someone of value.

His own chaos had made this impossible.

“Lillian, no one should be entrusted with one’s image to fashion, with one’s self-creation. Women are moving from one circle to another, rising towards independence and self-creation. What you’re really suffering from is from the pain of parting with your faith, with your old love when you wish to renew this faith and preserve the passion. You’re being thrust out of one circle into another and it is this which causes you so much fear. You know you cannot lean on Jay, but you don’t know what awaits you, and you don’t trust your own awareness.”

Lillian thought that she was weeping because Jay had said: Leave me alone, or let me work, or let me sleep.