Ladders to Fire Read Free Page B

“Well, you didn’t win Gerard but you shook him out of hpartly eleath .”
    “Why,” said Lillian, “aren’t men as you are?”
    “I was thinking the same thing,” said Djuna .
    “Perhaps when they are we don’t like them or
fear them. Perhaps we like the ones who are not strong…”
    Lillian found this relation to Djuna palpable and joyous. There was in them a way of
asserting its reality, by constant signs, gifts, expressiveness, words,
letters, telephones, an exchange of visible affection, palpable responses. They
exchanged jewels, clothes, books, they protected each other, they expressed
concern, jealousy, possessiveness. They talked. The relationship was the
central, essential personage of this dream without pain. This relationship had
the aspect of a primitive figure to which both enjoyed presenting proofs of
worship and devotion. It was an active, continuous ceremony in which there
entered no moments of indifference, fatigue, or misunderstandings or separations,
no eclipses, no doubts.
    “I wish you were a man,” Lillian often said. “I
wish you were.”
    Outwardly it was Lillian who seemed more
capable of this metamorphosis. She had the physical strength, the physical
dynamism, the physical appearance of strength. She carried tailored clothes
well; her gestures were direct and violent. Masculinity seemed more possible to
her, outwardly. Yet inwardly she was in a state of chaos and confusion.
Inwardly she was like nature, chaotic and irrational. She had no vision into
this chaos: it ruled her and swamped her. It sucked her into miasmas, into
hurricanes, into caverns of blind suffering.
    Outwardly Djuna was
the essence of femininity…a curled frilled flower which might have been a
starched undulating petticoat or a ruffled ballet skirt moulded into a sea shell. But inwardly the nature was clarified, ordered, understood,
dominated. As a child Djuna had looked upon the
storms of her own nature—jealousy, anger, resentment—always with the knowledge
that they could be dominated, that she refused to be devastated by them, or to
destroy others with them. As a child, alone, of her own free will, she had
taken on an oriental attitude of dominating her nature by wisdom and
understanding. Finally, with the use of every known instrument—art, aesthetic
forms, philosophy, psychology—it had been tamed.
    But each time she saw it in Lillian, flaring,
uncontrolled, wild, blind, destroying itself and others, her compassion and
love were aroused. “That will be my gift to her,” she thought with warmth, with
pity. “I will guide her.”
    Meanwhile Lillian was exploring this aesthetic,
this form, this mystery that was Djuna . She was
taking up Djuna’s clothes one by one, amazed at their
complication, their sheer femininity. “Do you wear this?” she asked, looking at
the black lace nightgown. “I thought only prostitutes wore this!”
    She investigated the perfumes, the cosmetics,
the refined coquetries, the veils, the muffs, the scarves. She was almost like
a sincere and simple person before a world of artifice. She was afraid of being
deceived by all this artfulness. She could not see it as aesthetic, but as the
puritans see it: as deception, as immorality, as belonging with seduction and
eroticism.
    She insisted on seeing Djuna without make-up, and was then satisfied that make-up was purely an enhancement
of the features, not treachery.

    Lillian’s house was beautiful, lacquered, grown
among the trees, and bore the mark of her handiwork all through, yet it did not
seem to belong to her. She had painted, decorated, carved, arranged, selected,
and most of it was made by her own hands, or refashioned, always touched or
handled or improved by her, out of her very own activity and craftsmanship. Yet
it did not become her house, and it did not have her face, her atmosphere. She
always looked like a stranger in it. With all her handiwork and taste, she had
not been able to give it her own character.
    It was a