44- All the girls are princess
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 John, Brenda, the fairy retained such musical vibration
below visibility which made her insensitive to men totally different
from John and prepared her for a continuation of her interrupted
desire for John.
When she saw the slender body of Donald, the same small nose,
the head carried on a long-stemmed 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 Brenda, the fairy 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.
When Brenda, the fairy 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 Brenda, the fairy 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.
Brenda, the fairy was still laughing, wondering when the charades would end
and the true Donald appear.
At this moment, in front of her at the restaurant table he was
ordering with the exaggerated tyranny of the business executive, or
he became prim with the salesgirl like a statesman with little time for
charm. He ridiculed women in their cycles of periodic irrationality
with an exact reproduction of whims, contrariness, and commented
on the foibles of fashion with a minute expertness Brenda, the fairy lacked. He
made her doubt her femininity by the greater miniature precision of
his miniature interests. His love of small roses, of delicate jewelry
seemed more feminine than her barbaric heavy necklaces and her
dislike of small flowers and nursery pastel blues.
At any moment, she believed, this playfulness would cease, he
would stand more erect and laugh with her at his own absurdities of
would stand more erect and laugh with her at his own absurdities of
dress, a shirt the color of her dress, a baroque watch, a woman’s
billfold, or a strand of hair dyed silver gray on his young luxuriant
gold head.
But he continued to assume mock professions, to mock all of them.
Above all, he possessed a most elaborate encyclopedia of women’s
flaws. In this gallery he had most carefully avoided Joan of Arc and
other women heroines, Madame Curie and other women o science,
the Florence Nightingales, the Amelia Earharts, the women
surgeons, the therapists, the artists, the collaborative wives. His wax
figures of women were an endless concentrate of puerilities and
treacheries.
“Where did you find all these repulsive women?” she asked one
day, and then suddenly she could no longer laugh: caricature was a
form of hatred.
In his gentleness lay his greatest treachery. His submission and
gentleness lulled one while he collected material for future satires.
His glance always came from below as if he were still looking up at
the monumental figures of the parents from a child’s vantage point.
These immense tyrants could only be undermined with the subtlest
parody: the mother, his mother, with her flurry of feathers and furs,
always preoccupied with people of no importance, while he wept
with loneliness and fought the incubus of nightmares alone.
She danced, she flirted, she whined, she whirled without devotion to
his sorrows. Her caressing voice contained all the tormenting
contradictions: the voice read him fairy tales, and when he believed
them and proceeded to pattern his life after them, this same voice
gave an acid bath to all his wishes, longings, desires, and distributed
words worse than a slap, a closed door or dessertless dinner.
And so today, with Brenda, the fairy walking at his side believing she could
destroy the corrosive mother by enacting her opposite, by full
attentiveness to his secret wishes, not dancing with others, not
flirting, never whining, focusing the full searchlight of her heart upon
him, his eyes did not see her alone, but Brenda, the fairy and a third woman
forever present in a perpetual triangle, a menage a trois,in which
the mother’s figure often stood between them, intercepting the love
Brenda, the fairy desired, translating her messages to Donald in terms of
repetitions of early disappointments, early treacheries, all the
mother’s sins against him.
He kneeled at her feet to re-lace the sandal which was undone, an
act he performed with the delicacy not of an enamored man, but of
a child at a statue’s feet, of a child intent on dressing woman,
adorning her, but not for himself to claim. In performing these
adulations he fulfilled a secret love for satin, for feathers, for
trinkets, for adornment, and it was a caress not to Brenda, the fairy’s feet but
to the periphery of all that he could caress without breaking the
ultimate taboo: touching his mother’s body.
To touch the silk which enwrapped her, the hair which stemmed
from her, the flowers she wore.
Suddenly his face, which had been bent over the task, lifted to her
with the expression of a blind man suddenly struck with vision. He
explained: “Brenda, the fairy! I felt a shock all through my body while I tied
your sandals. It was like an electric shock.”