She decided to pass once more by his house, although it was late, although she dreaded to see once more the empty dead face of his window.
His window was alight and open! Serena stood under it and whispered his name. She was hidden by a bush. She dreaded that anyone else in the house should hear her. She dreaded the eyes of the world upon a woman standing under a young man’s window.
“Morrison! Morrison!”
He leaned out of the window, his hair tousled, and even in the
moonlight she could see his face was burning and his eyes hazy.
“Who’s there?” he said, always with the tone of a man at war,
fearing ambush.
“Serena. I just wanted to know… Are you all right?”
“Of course I’m all right. I was in the hospital.”
“The hospital?”
“A bout of malaria, that’s all.”
“Malaria?”
“I get it, when I drink too much…”
“Will I see you tomorrow?”
He laughed softly: “My father is coming to stay with me.”
“We won’t be able to see each other then. I’d better return to New
York.”
“I’ll call you when I get back.”
“Will you come down and kiss me goodnight?”
He hesitated: “They will hear me. They will tell my father.”
“Goodbye, goodnight…”
“Goodbye,” he said, detached, cheerful.
But she could not leave Long Island. It was as if he had thrown a net around her by the pleasure she wanted again, by his creation of a Serena she wanted to erase, by a poison he alone had the cure for, of a mutual guilt which only an act of love could transmute into something else than a one-night encounter with a stranger. The moon mocked her as she walked back to her empty bed. The moon’s wide grin which Serena had never noticed before, never before its mockery of this quest of love which she influenced. I understand his madness, why does he run away from me? I feel close to him, why does he not feel close to me, why doesn’t he see the resemblance between us, between our madness. I want the impossible, I want to fly all the t, I destroy ordinary life, I run towards all the dangers of love as he ran towards all the dangers of war. He runs away, war is less terrifying to him than life…
Morrison and the moon left this madness unexorcised. No trace of it was revealed except when she was taunted:
“Aren’t you interested in war news, don’t you read the papers?”
“I know war, I know all about war.”
“You never seem very close to it.”
(I slept with war, all night I slept with war once. I received
deep war wounds into my body, as you never did, a feat of
arms for which I will never be decorated!)
In the multiple peregrinations of love, Serena was quick to recognize the echoes of larger loves and desires. The large ones, particularly if they had not died a natural death, never died completely and left reverberations. Once interrupted, broken artificially, suffocated accidentally, they continued to exist in separate fragments and endless smaller echoes.
A vague physical resemblance, an almost similar mouth, a slightly similar voice, some particle of the character of Philip, or Morrison, would emigrate to another, to whom she recognized immediately in a crowd, at a party, by the erotic resonance it reawakened.
The echoes struck at first through the mysterious instrumentation of the senses which retained sensations as instruments retain a sound after being touched. The body remained vulnerable to certain repetitions long after the mind believed it had made a clear, a final severance.
A similar design of a mouth was sufficient to retransmit the interrupted current of sensations, to recreate a contact by way of the past receptivity, like a channel conducting perfectly only a part of the former ecstasy through the channel of the senses arousing vibrations and sensibilities formerly awakened by a total love or total desire for the entire personality.
The senses created river beds of responses formed in part from the sediments, the waste, the overflow from the original experience. A partial resemblance could stir what remained of the imperfectly rooted-out love which had not died a natural death.
Whatever was torn out of the body, as out of the earth, cut, violently uprooted, left such deceptive, such lively roots below the surface, all ready to bloom again under an artificial association, by a grafting of sensation, given new life through this graft of memory.
Out of the loss of Morrison, Serena retained such musical vibration below visibility which made her insensitive to men totally different from Morrison and prepared her for a continuation of her interrupted desire for Morrison.
When she saw the slender body of Donald, the same small nose, the head carried on a long- temmed neck, the echo of the old violent emotions was strong enough to appear like a new desre.
She did not observe the differences, that Donald’s skin was even more transparent, his hair silkier, that he did not spring, but glided, dragging his feet a little, that his voice was passive, indolent, slightly whining.
At first Serena thought he was gently clowning by his parodies of women’s feathery gestures, by a smile so deliberately seductive imitating the corolla’s involutionary attractions.
She smiled indulgently when he lay down on the couch preparing such a floral arrangement of limbs, head, hands as to suggest a carnal banquet.
She laughed when he trailed his phrases like southern vines, or practiced sudden exaggerated severities as children do when they play charades of the father’s absurd arrogances, of the mother’s hot-house exudations of charm.
When Serena crossed the street, she nourished herself upon the gallant smile of the policeman who stopped the traffic for her, she culled the desire of the man who pushed the revolving door for her, she gathered the flash of adoration from the drug clerk: “Are you an actress?” She picked the bouquet of the shoe salesman trying on her shoes: “Are you a dancer?” As she sat in the bus she received the shafts of the sun as a personal, intimate visit. She felt a humorous connivance with the truck driver who had to pull the brakes violently before her impulsive passages, and who did so smiling because it was Serena and they were glad to see her crossing their vision.
But she considered this feminine sustenance like pollen. To her amazement, Donald, walking beside her, assumed these offerings were intended for him.
He passed what she believed to be from one mimicry to another: the pompous policeman, for which he filled his lungs with air, the sinuosities of the woman walking in front of them, for which he tangoed his hips.
Serena was still laughing, wondering when the charades would end and the true Donald appear.