Children of the Albatross by Anaïs Nin Page A

warned
her senses that this small difference indicated a wider one, a difference of
elements, by which the relationship would ultimately be destroyed.
    In one of his cheerful human moods Jay had
said: “If my friends bother you so much, we shall put them all against a wall
and shoot them.”
    But Lillian knew that if today Jay surrendered
today’s set of friends, he would renew the same kind of relationships with a
new set, for they reflected the part of him she did not feel close to, the part
in fact she was at war with.
    Lillian’s disproportionate weeping had seemed
childish to Jay who saw only the immediate difference, but Lillian was weeping
blindly with a fear of death of the relationship, with her loss of faith
sensing the first fissure as the first symbol of future dissolution, and
knowing from that moment on that the passion between them would no longer be an
affirmation of marriage but a struggle against death and separation.
    (Djuna said: You can’t bear to let this
relationship die. But why must it die, Djuna? Do you believe all passion must
die? Is there nothing I can do to avoid failure? Passion doesn’t die of natural
death. Everyone says passion dies, love dies, but it’s we who kill it. Djuna
believes this. Djuna said: You can fight all the symptoms of divorce when they
first appear, you can be on your guard against distortions, against the way
people wound each other and instill doubt, you can fight for the life and
continuity of this passion, there is a knowledge which postpones the
death of a relationship, death is not natural, but, Lillian, you cannot do it
alone, there are seeds of death in his character. One cannot fight alone for a
living relationship. It takes the effort of two. Effort, effort. The word most
foreign to Jay. Jay would never make an effort. Djuna, Djuna, couldn’t you talk
to him? Djuna, will you talk to him? No, it’s useless, he does not want
anything that is difficult to reach. He does not like effort or struggles. He
wants only his pleasure. It isn’t possessiveness, Djuna, but I want to feel at
the center so that I can allow him the maximum freedom without feeling each
time that he betrays everything, destroys everything. )
    She would run away.
    When Jay saw her dressing, powdering her face,
pulling up her stockings, combing her hair, he noticed no change in her
gestures to alarm him, for did she not always comb her hair and powder and
dress with the flurry of a runaway. Wasn’t she always so uneasy and overquick,
as if she had been frightened?
    He went to his studio and Lillian locked the
door of the bedroom and sat at her piano, to seek in music that wholeness which
she could not find in love…
    Just as the sea often carries bodies, wrecks,
shells, lost objects carved by the sea itself in its own private studio of
sculpture to unexpected places, led by irrational currents, just so did the
current of music eject fragments of the self believed drowned and deposited
them on the shore altered, recarved, rendered anonymous in shape. Each
backwash, each cross-current, throwing up new material formed out of the old,
from the ocean of memories.
    Driftwood figures that had been patiently
recarved by the sea with rhythms broken by anger, patiently remolding forms to
the contours of knotted nightmares, woods stunted and distorted by torments of
doubts.
    She played until this flood of debris rose from
the music to choke her, closed the piano with anger, and rose to plan her
escape.
    Escape. Escape.
    Her first instinctive, blind gesture of escape
was to don the black cape copied from Sabina’s at the time of their
relationship.
    She wrapped Sabina’s cape around her, and put
two heavy bracelets around her wrist (one for each wrist, not wanting any more
to be in bondage to one, never to one; she would split the desire in two, to
rescue one half of herself from destruction).
    And for the first time since her marriage to
Jay, she climbed the worn stairs of a very old hotel in