Children of the Albatross by Anaïs Nin Page B

Montparnasse,
experiencing the exaltation familiar to runaways.
    The more she could see of the worn carpet and
its bare skeleton, the more acrid the smell of poverty, the more bare the room,
this which might have lowered the diapason of another’s mood only increased the
elation of hers, becoming transfigured by her conviction that she was making a
voyage which would forever take her away from the prison of anxiety, the pain
of dependence on a human being she could not trust. Her mood of liberation
spangled and dappled shabbiness with fight like an impressionist painting.
    Her sense of familiarity with this scene did
not touch her at first: a lover was waiting for her in one of the rooms of this
hotel.
    Could anyone help her to forget Jay for a
moment? Could Edgar help her, Edgar with his astonished eyes saying to her: You
are wonderful, you are wonderful! Drunkenly repeating you are wonderful! as
they danced under Jay’s very eyes not seeing, not seeing her dancing with Edgar
in the luminous spotlight of a night club, but when her dress opened a little
at the throat she could smell the mixed odor of herself and Jay.
    She was taking revenge now for his effusive
confessions as to the pleasures he had taken with other women.
    She had been made woman by Jay, he alone held
in his hands all the roots of her being, and when he had pulled them, in his
own limitless motions outward and far, he had inflicted such torture that he
had destroyed the roots all at once and sent her into space, sent her listening
to Edgar’s words gratefully, grateful for wo hands on her pulling her away from
Jay, grateful for his foolish gift of flowers in silver paper (because Jay gave
her no gifts at all), and she would imagine Jay watching this scene, watching
her go up the stairs to Edgar’s room, wearing flowers in a silver paper, and
she enjoyed imagining his pain, as he witnessed the shedding of her clothes,
witnessed her lying down beside Edgar. (You are the man of the crowd, Jay, and
so I lie here beside a stranger. What makes me lonely, Jay, are the cheap and
gaudy people you are friendly with, and I lie here with a stranger who is only
caressing you inside of me. He is complaining like a woman: you are not
thinking of me, you are not filled with me.)
    But no sooner had she shed her cape copied from
Sabina’s than she recognized the room, the man, the scene, and the feelings as
not belonging to her, not having been selected by her, but as having been
borrowed from Sabina’s repertoire of stories of adventures.
    Lillian was not free of Jay since she had
invited him to witness the scene enacted solely to punish his unfaithfulness.
She was not free, she was being Sabina, with the kind of man Sabina would have
chosen. All the words and gestures prescribed by Sabina in her feverish
descriptions, for thus was much experience transmitted by contagion, and
Lillian, not yet free, had been more than others predisposed to the contagion
by lowered resistance!
    She was ashamed, not of the sensual meeting,
but for having acted in disguise, and eluded responsibility.
    When the stranger asked her for her name she
did not say Lillian, but Sabina.
    She returned home to shed her cape and her
acts, pretending not to know this woman who had spent hours with a stranger.
    To put the responsibility on Sabina.
    Escape escape escape—into what? Into borrowing
the self of Sabina for an hour. She had donned the recklessness of Sabina,
borrowed her cape for a shy masquerade, pretending freedom.
    The clothes had not fitted very well.
    But after a while, would this cease to be a
role and did the borrowing reveal Lillian’s true desires?
    The possibility of being this that she
borrowed.
    Blindly ashamed of what she termed
unfaithfulness (when actually she was still so tied to Jay it was merely within
the precincts of their relationship that she could act, with his presence, and
therefore unsevered from him), she discarded all the elements of this charade,
cape,