Seduction of the Minotaur coti-5 Read online

  Lillian felt they would live out something new. They had first known each other in New York when Lillian was disconnected from Larry. Jay had left for Paris because he wanted to live near the painters he admired. Lillian’s engagement took her there for several months each year. New for her, this total acceptance of all life, ugliness, poverty, sensuality, Jay’s total acceptance, lack of selectivity or discrimination or withdrawals. Lillian thought him a gentle savage, a passionate cannibal. Motherhood prepared Lillian for this abdication of herself. Lillian adopted all his infatuations and enthusiasms: she sat with him contemplating from a cafe table the orange face of a clock, the prostitute with the wooden leg; played chess at the Cafe de La Regence at the very table where Napoleon and Robespierre had played chess. She helped him gather and note fifty ways of saying drunk.

  She abandoned classical music and became a jazz pianist. Classical music could not contain her improvisations, her tempo, her vehemences.

  She watched over Jay’s work, searched Paris shops for the best paint, even learned to make some from ancient crafts. She watched over his needs. She had his sketch book silk screened and carried the Portfolios to New York and sold them. People were asking questions about Jay. They laughed at his casual gifts to them, loved the freedom, the unbound pages, the surprises, which gave them the feeling they were sharing an intimate, private document, like a personal sketch book.

  His rooms remained the same everywhere: the plain iron bed, the hard pillows, the one glass. They were illumined by orgies: let us see how long we can make love, how long, how many hours, days, nights.

  When she went to New York to visit her children, he wrote to her: “Terribly alive but pained, and feeling absolutely that I need you. But I must see you soon. I see you bright and wonderful. I want to get more familiar with you. I love you. I loved you when you came and sat on the edge of the bed. All that afternoon like warm mist. Get closer to me, I promise you it will be beautiful. I like so much your frankness, your humility almost. I could never hurt that. It was to a woman like you I should have been married.”

  Small room, so shabby, like a deep-set alcove. Immediately there was the richness of Jay’s voice, the feeling of sinking into warm flesh, every twist of the body awakening new centers of pleasure. “Everything is good, good,” murmured Jay. “Have I been less brutal than you expected? Did the violence of my painting lead you to expect more?” Lillian was baffled by these questions. What was he measuring himself against? A myth in his own mind of what women expected?

  In his own work everything was larger than nature. Was he trying to match his own extravagances? If in his eyes he carried magnifying glasses, did he see himself in life as a smaller figure?

  In the same letter he wrote: “I don’t know what I expect of you, Lillian, but it is something in the way of a miracle. I am going to deman everything of you, even the impossible, because you are strong.”

  Lillian’s secret weakness then became the cause of pain. She had a need of a mirror in which she could see her image loved by Jay. Or perhaps a shrine, with herself in the place of honor. Unique and irreplaceable Lillian (as she had been for Larry). But with Jay this was impossible. The whole world flowed through his being in one day. Lillian was apt to find sitting in her place (or lying in her bed) the most unlovely of all women, undernourished, unkempt, anonymous, ordinary, he had picked up in a cafe, with nothing to explain her presence except that she was perhaps the opposite of Lillian. To her he gave the coat Lillian had left in his room. The visitor had even brought with her a little grey wilted dog and Jay who hated animals was even kind to this dusty mongrel that was molting.

  For Jay’s kindness was his greatest expression of anarchy. It was always an act of defiance to those one loved, to those one lived with. His was a mockery of the laws of devotion. He could not give to Lillian. He was always generous to outsiders, to those he owed nothing to, giving paints to those who did not paint, a drink to the man who was over-saturated with drink, his time to one who did not value it, the painting Lillian favored to anyone who came to the studio.

  His giving was a defiance of evaluation and selection. He wanted to assert the value of what others discarded or neglected. His favorite friend was not a great painter but the most mediocre of all painters, who reflected Jay like a caricature, a diminished echo, who hummed his words as Jay did, nodded his head as Jay did, laughed when Jay laughed. They practiced dadaism together: everything was absurd, everything was a joke. Jay would launch into frenzied praise of his paintings. (Lillian called him Sancho Panza.)

  Lillian would ask with candor: “Do you really admire him so much, as much as all that? Is he truly greater than Gauguin? Greater than Picasso?”

  Jay would laugh at her gravity. “Oh no, I was carried away by my own words, just got going. I think I was talking about my own painting, really. I enjoy mystifying, confusing, contradicting. Deep down, you know, I don’t believe in anything.”

  “But people will believe you.”

  “They admire the wrong painters anyway.”

  “But you’re adding to the absurdities.”

  Lillian had the feeling that Sancho did not exist. True, he presented a Chinese face, but when she sought to know Sancho she found an evasive smile which was a reflection of Jay’s smile, a sympathy which was an act of politeness, an opinion which, at the slightest opposition, vanished, a head waiter at a banquet, a valet for your coat, a shadow at the top of the stairs. His eyes carried no messages. If her fingers touched him she felt his body was fluid, evasive, anonymous. What Jay asserted he did not deny. He imitated Jay’s adventures, but Lillian felt he had neither possessed life, nor lost it, neither devoured it nor spat it out. He was the wool in the bedroom slipper, the storm strip on the window, the felt stop on the piano key, the shock absorber on the car spring. He was the invisible man, and Lillian could not understand their fraternal bond. She suffed to see a reduced replica of Jay, his shrunken double.

  “Right after being with me,” Lillian said once, “did you have to take up with such an unlovely woman?”

  “Oh that,” said Jay. “Reichel believes me to be callous, amoral, ungrateful. He thinks because I have you I’m the luckiest man in the world, and it irritated me, his lecturing, so I launched into a role, to shock him. I talked to him about the whores, and had him gasping to think I might be callous about you. Can you understand that? I realize that it’s all childish, but don’t take it seriously.”

  “Eh? Sancho?” Sancho would laugh hysterically. It was what Lillian called the Village Idiot Act. Lillian laughed with them, but not with all of herself.

  “I’m finding my own world,” said Jay. “A certain condition of existence, a universe of mere BEING, where one lives like a plant, instinctively. No will. The great indifference, like that of the Hindu who lets himself be passive in order to let the seeds in him flower. Something between the will of the European and the karma of the Oriental. I want just the joy of illumination, the joy of what I see in the world. Just to receive vibrations. Susceptibility to all life. Acceptance. Taking it all in. Just BE. That was always the role of the artist: to reveal the joy, the ecstasy. My life has been one long opposition to will. I have practiced letting things happen. I have dodged jobs, responsibilities, and I want to express in painting the relaxing of will and straining for the sake of enjoyment.”

  This was the climate he created and to which Lillian responded, the yieldingness of the body, relaxed gestures, yielding to flow, seeking pleasure and being nourished with it, giving it to others. When something threatened his pleasure, how skillful he was at evasion. He had created something which on the surface seemed untainted by the anxiety of his time, yet Lillian felt there was a flaw in it. She did not know what it was.

  The flaw she was to discover was that his world was like a child’s world, depending on others’ care, others’ devotions, others’ taking on the burdens.

  He received a letter from his first wife, telling him about his daughter now fourteen years
old, and showing exceptional gifts for painting. At first Jay wept: “I cannot help her.” He remembered saying to her when she was five years old: “Now remember, I am your brother, not your father.” The idea of fatherhood repulsed him. It threatened his desire for everlasting freedom and youthfulness.

  “Let her come and share our life,” said Lillian.

  “No,” said Jay. “I want to be free. I have too much work to do. I have to take the frames off my paintings. I want them to become a part of the wall, a continuous frieze. My colors are about to fly off the edge, and I don’t want restraint. Let them fly!”

  While Lillian cooked dinner in the small kitchen off the studio, he fell asleep. When he awakened he had forgotten his daughter and his guilt. “Is dinner ready? Is the wine good?”

  How I wish his indifference were contagious, thought Lillian. He can forget his daughter, and I cannot forget my children. Every night I leave Jay’s side to go and say goodnight to my children across the ocean. I have to give Jay the same kind of love I gave my children. As if I knew no other expression of love outside of care and devotion.

  She spent all her time consoling the friends he had misused, paying his debts, preventing him from paying too high a price for his rebellions.

  When they first met he was proofreading in a newspaper office. His paintings were not selling yet. The work irritated his eyes. He would come to his room and the first thing he would do was to wash his inflamed eyelids. Lillian watched him, watched the red-rimmed eyes, usually laughing, and now withered by fatigue, and watering. These eyes which he needed for his work, wasted on proofreading under weak lights on greyish paper. These eyes he needed to drink in the world and all its profusion of images.

  “Jay,” said Lillian, extending a glass of red wine. “Drink to the end of your job at the paper. You will never have to do it again. I earn enough for both of us when I play every night.”

  He had at times the air of a gnome, a satyr, or at other times the air of a serious scholar. His body appeared fragile in proportion to his exuberance. His appetite for life was enormous. His parents had given him money to go to college. He had put it in his pocket and gone to wander all over America, taking any job that came along, and sometimes none, traveling with hoboes, as a hitchhiker, a fruit picker, a dishwasher, seeking adventure, enriching his experience. He did not see his parents again for many years. In one blow, he had severed himself from his childhood, his adolescence, from all his past.

  What richness, Lillian felt, what a torrent. In a world chilled by the mind, his work poured out like a volcano and raised the surrounding temperature.

  “Lillian, let’s drink to my Pissoir Period. I have been painting the joys of urinating. It’s wonderful to urinate while looking up at the Sacre Coeur and thinking of Robinson Crusoe. Even better still in the urinoir of the Jardin des Plantes, while listening to the roar of the lions, and while the monkeys, high up in the trees, watch the performance and sometimes imitate me. Everything in nature is good.”

  He loved the boiling streets. While he walked the streets he was happy. He learned their names amorously as if they were the names of women. He knew them intimately, noted those which disappeared and those which were born. He took Lillian to the Rue d’Ulm which sounded like a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, to the Rue Feuillantine which sounded like a souffle of leaves, to the Quai de Valmy where the barges waited patiently in the locks for a change of level while the wives hung their laundry on the decks, watered their flower pots and ironed their lace curtains to make the barges seem more like cottages in the country. Rue de la Fourche, like the trident of Neptune or of the devil, Rue Dolent with its mournful wall encircling the prison. Impasse du Mont Tonnerre! How he loved the Impasse du Mont Tonnerre. It was guarded at the entrance by a small cafe, three round tables on the sidewalk. A rusted iron gate which once opened to the entrance of carriages, now left open. A hotel filled with Algerians who worked in a factory neaby. Rusty Algerian voices, monotone songs, shouts, spice smells, fatal quarrels, knife wounds.

  Once having walked past the iron gate, over the uneven cobblestones, they entered the Middle Ages. Dogs were eating garbage, women were going to market in their bedroom slippers. An old concierge stared through half-closed shutters, her skin the color of a mummy, a shriveled mouth munching words he could not hear. “Who do you want to see?” The classical words of concierges. Jay answered: “Marat, Voltaire, Mallarme, Rimbaud.”

  “Every time I see one of those concierges,” said Jay, “I am reminded of how in the Middle Ages they believed that a cat must be buried in the walls of a newly built house; it would bring luck. I feel that these are the cats come back to avenge themselves by losing your mail and misleading visitors.”

  Through an entrance as black and as narrow as the entrance to Mayan tombs, they entered gentle courtyards, with humble flower pots in bloom, a cracked window one expected to be opened by Ninon de L’Enclos. The smallness of the window, the askewness of the frame, the hood of the grey pointed slate roof overhanging it had been painted so many times on canvas that it receded into the past, fixed, eternal, like the sea-shell colored clouds suspended in time which could not be blown away by a change of wind.

  Jay was sitting at the small coffee-stained table like a hunter on the watch for adventure. Lillian said: “The painters and the writers heightened these places and those people so well that they seem more alive than today’s houses, today’s people. I can remember the words spoken by Leon Paul Fargue more than the words I hear today. I can hear the very sound of his restless cane on the pavement better than I can hear my own footsteps. Was their life as rich, as intense? Was it the artist who touched it up?”

  Time and art had done for Suzanne Valadon, the mother of Utrillo, what Jay would never do for Sabina. Flavor by accretion, poetry by decantation. The artists of that time had placed their subject in a light which would forever entrance us, their love re-infected us. By the opposite process which he did not understand, but which he shared with many other artists of his time, he was conveying his inability to love. It was his hatred he was painting.

  Jay once said: “I arrived by the same boat that takes the prisoners to Devil’s Island. And I was thinking how strange it would be if I sailed back with them as a murderer. It was in Marseilles. I had picked up two girls in a cafe, and we were returning by taxi after a night of night clubs. One of the girls kept after me not to let myself get cheated. When we arrived at the hotel the taxi driver asked me for a ridiculously high sum. I argued with him. I was very angry, and yet during that moment I was conscious that I was looking at his face with terrific intensity, as if I were going to kill him, but it was not that; my hatred was like a magnifying glass, taking in all the details, his porous meaty face, his moles with hair growing out of them, his soggy hair falling over his forehead, his cloudy eyes the color of Pernod. Finally we came to an agreement. That night I dreamed that I strangled him. The next day I painted him as I saw him in my dream. It was as if I had done it in reality. People will hate this painting.”

  “No, they will probably love it,” said Lillian. “Djuna says that the criminal relieves others of their wish to commit murder. He acts out the crimes of the world. In your painting you depict the desire of thousands. In your erotic drawings you do the same. They will love your freedom.”

  At dawn they stood on the Place du Tertre, among houses which seemed about to crumble, to slide away, having been for so long the facades of Utrillo’s houses.

  Three policemen were strolling, watching. A street telephone rang hysterically in the vaporous dawn. The policemen began to run towards it.

  “Someone committed your murder,” said Lillian.

  Two waiters and a woman began to run after the policemen.

  The loud ringing continued. One of the policemen picked up the telephone and to a question put to him he answered: “No, not at all, not at all. Don’t worry. Everything is absolutely calm. A very calm night.”

  Lillian and Jay had sat on the curb and la
ughed.

  But whatever Jay’s secret of freedom was, it could not be imparted to Lillian. She could not gain it by contagion. All she could feel were Jay’s secret needs: “Lillian, I need you. Lillian, be my guardian angel. Lillian, I need peace in which to work.” Love, faithfulness, attentiveness, devotion, always created the same barriers around Lillian, the same limitations, the same taboos.

  Jay avoided the moments of beauty in human beings. He stressed their analogies with animals. He added inert flesh, warts, oil to the hair, claws to the nails. He was suspicious of beauty. It was like a puritan’s suspicion of make-up, a crowd’s suspicion of prestidigitators. He had divorced nature from beauty. Nature was neglect, unbuttoned clothes, uncombed hair, homeliness.

  Lillian was bewildered by the enormous discrepancy which existed between Jay’s models and what he painted. Together they would walk along the same Seine river, she would see it silky grey, sinuous and glittering, he would draw it opaque with fermented mud, and a shoal of wine bottle corks and weeds caught in the stagnant edges.

  He had discovered a woman hobo who slept every night in exactly the same place, in the middle of the sidewalk, in front of the Pantheon. She had found a subway ventilator from which a little heat arose and sometimes a pale grey smoke, so that she seemed to be burning. She lay in a tidy way, her head resting on her market bag packed with her few belongings, her brown dress pulled over her ankles, her shawl neatly tied under her chin. She slept calm and dignified as if she were in her own bed.