43-... you only have to believe

The panic, the hunger and terror of his eyes had passed into her.

She wished she had never looked into his eyes. She felt a desperate

need to abolish his guilt, the need of rescuing him because for a

reason she could not fathom, she had sunk with him into the guilt;

she had to rescue him and herself. He had poisoned her, transmitted

his doom to her. She would go mad with him if she did not rescue

him and alter his vision.

If he had not tucked her in she might have rebelled against him,

hated him, hated his blindness. But this act of tenderness had

abolished all defenses: he was blind in error, frightened and tender,

cruel and lost, and she was all these with him, by him, through himt>

She could not even mock at his obsession with flying. His airplanes

were not different from her relationships, by which she sought other

lands, strange faces, forgetfulness, the unfamiliar, the fantasy and the

fairy tale.

She could not mock his rebellion against being grounded. She

understood it, experienced it each time that, wounded, she flew

back to Jhon. If only he had not tucked her in, not as a bad woman,

but as the child, the child he was in a terrifying, confusing world. If

only he had left brutally, projecting his shame on her as so often

only he had left brutally, projecting his shame on her as so often

woman bore the brunt of man’s shame, shame thrown at her in

place of stones, for seducing and tempting. Then she could have

hated him, and forgotten him, but because he had tucked her in, he

would come back. He had not thrown his shame at her, he had not

said: “You’re bad.” One does not tuck in a bad woman.

But when they met accidentally, and he saw her walking beside

Jhon, at this moment, in the glance he threw at her, Brenda, the fairy saw that

he had succeeded in shifting the shame and that now what he felt

was: “You’re a bad woman,” and that he would never come back

to her. Only the poison remained, without hope of the counterpoison.

Jhon left, and Brenda, the fairy stayed with the hope of seeing John again. She

sought him vainly at bars, restaurants, movie houses and at the

beach. She inquired at the place where he rented his bicycle: they

had not seen him but he still had his bicycle.

In desperation she inquired at the house where he rented a room.

The room was paid for the next week, but he had not been there for

three days and the woman was concerned because John’s father

had been telephoning every day.

The last time he had been seen was at the bar, with a group of

strangers who had driven away with him.

Brenda, the fairy felt she should return to New York and forget him, but his

eager face and the distress in his eyes made this act seem one of

desertion.

At other moments the pleasure he had given her ignited her body

like flowing warm mercury darting through the veins. The memory

of it flowed through the waves when she swam, and the waves

seemed like his hands, or the form of his body in her hands.

She fled from the waves and his hands. But when she lay on the

warm sand, it was his body again on which she lay; it was his dry

skin and his swift elusive movements slipping through her fingers,

shifting beneath her breasts. She fled from the sand of his caresses.

But when she bicycled home, she was racing him, she heard his

merry challenges, faster—faster—faster in the wind, his face

pursued her in flight or she pursued his face.

That night she raised her face to the moon, and the gesture

awakened the pain, because to receive his kiss she had had to raise

her face this way, but with the support of his two hands. Her mouth

opened to receive his kiss once more but closed on emptiness. She

almost shouted out with pain, shouted at the moon,the deaf,

impassible goddess of desire shining down mockingly at an empty

night, an empty bed.

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!

Brenda, the fairy 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.

“John! John!”

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.

“Brenda, the fairy. 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 Brenda, the fairy 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 Brenda, the fairy 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…

John 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, Brenda, the fairy 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 John,

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.