Chapter 46: The most ardent frenzy of desire

Jay could not retain any sequence of the people she had loved,

hated, escaped from, any more than he could keep track of her

very personal appearance as she herself would say: “At that time I

was a blond, and I wore my hair very short,” or “This was before I

was married when I was only nineteen” (and once she had told him

she had been married at the age of eighteen). Impossible to know

who she had betrayed, forgotten, married, deserted, or clung to. It

was like her profession. The first time he had questioned her, she

had answered immediately: “I am an actress.” But when he pressed

her, he could not find in what play she had acted, whether she had

been a success or a failure, whether, perhaps, (as he decided later)

she had merely wished to be an actress but had never worked

persistently enough, seriously enough except in the way she was

working now, changing personalities with such rapidity that Jay was

reminded of a kaleidoscope.

He sought to capture the recurrence of certain words in her talk,

thinking they might be used as keys, but if the word “actress,”

“miraculous,” “travel,” “wandering,” “relationship” did occur

frequently, it remained impossible to know whether or not she used

them in their literal sense or symbolically, for they were the same to

her. He had heard her say once: “When you are hurt, you travel as

far as you can from the place of the hurt,” and when he examined

her meaning found she was referring to a change of quarters within

fifty blocks in the city of New York.

She was compelled by a confessional fever which forced her into

lifting the veil slightly, only a corner of it, and then frightened when

anyone listened too attentively, especially Jay whom she did not

trust, whom she knew found the truth only in the sense of exposure

of the flaws, the weaknesses, the foibles.

As soon as Jay listened too attentively, she took a giant sponge and

erased all she had said by an absolute denial as if this confusion

were in itself a mantle of protection.

At first she beckoned and lured one into her world, then she blurred

the passageways, confused all the images as if to elude detection.

“False mysteries,” said Jay savagely, baffled and irritated by her

elusiveness. “But what is she hiding behind these false mysteries?”

Her behavior always aroused in him (in the kind of mind he had with

an obsession for truth, for revelation, for openness, brutal exposure)

a desire which resembled the desire of a man to violate a woman

who resists him, to violate a virginity which creates a barrier to his

possession. Serena always incited him to a violent desire to rip all

her pretenses, her veils, and to discover the core of her self which,

by this perpetual change of face and mobility, escaped all detection.

How right he had been to paint Serena always as a mandrake with

fleshly roots, bearing a solitary purple flower in a purple-bellshaped

corolla of narcotic flesh. How right he had been to

paint her born with red-gold eyes always burning as from

caverns, from behind trees, as one of the luxuriant women, a

tropical growth, excommunicated from the bread line as too

rich a substance for everyday living, placing her there merely

as a denizen of the world of fire, and content with her

intermittent, parabolic appearances.

“Serena, do you remember our elevator ride in Paris?”

“Yes, I do remember.”

“We had no place to go. We wandered through the streets. I

remember it was your idea to take an elevator.”

(We were ravenous for e other, I remember, Serena. We got into

an elevator and I began to kiss her. First floor. Second floor. I

couldn’t let go of her. Third floor, and when the elevator came to a

standstill it was too late…I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t let go of her if

all Paris had been watching us. She pressed the button wildly, and

we went on kissing as the elevator came down. When we got to the

bottom it was worse, so she pressed the button again, and we went

bottom it was worse, so she pressed the button again, and we went

up and down, up and down, while people kept trying to stop it and

get on…)

Jay laughed uncontrollably at the memory, at Serena’s audacity. At

that moment Serena had been stripped of all mystery and Jay had

tasted what the mystery contained: the most ardent frenzy of desire.