Ladders to Fire by Anaïs Nin

woman
listening to a child and looking at his smallness without herself changing
stature. At this moment, like Jay, she could have slipped out of her maturity,
of her woman’s body, and exposed her child’s face, eyes, movements, and then
Jay would have seen it, known that he had communicated with it, touched it by
way of his own childhood, and the child might have met the child and become
aware of its similar needs.
    By her attitude she did not become one with him
in this return to his past self. What she overtly extended to him was one who
seemed done with her child self and who would replace the harsh mother, extend
the muff and the warm naked hands.
    She became, at that instant, indelibly fixed in
his eyes not as another child with possibly equal needs, but as the stronger
one in possession of the power to dispense to all hisneeds .
    From now on was established an inequality in
power: he was the cold and hungry one, she the muff and the warm naked hands.
    From now on her needs, concealed and buried as
mere interferences with the accomplishment of this role, were condemned to
permanent muteness. Strong direction was given to her activity as the muff, as
the provider of innumerable battleships in compensation for the one he had been
cheated of. Giving to him on all levels, from book to blanket to phonograph to
fountain pen to food, was always and forever the battleship he had dreamed and
not seen. It was the paying off of a debt to the cheated child.
    Lillian did not know then that the one who
believes he can pay this early debt meets a bottomless well. Because the first
denial has set off a fatality of revenge which no amount of giving can placate.
Present in every child and criminal is this conviction that no retribution will
repair the injury done. The man who was once starved may revenge himself upon
the world not by stealing just once, or by stealing only what he needs, but by
taking from the world an endless toll in payment of something irreplaceable,
which i the lost faith.
    This diminutive Jay who appeared in the darkness
when he evoked his childhood was also a personage who could come nearer to her
own frightened self without hurting her than the assertive, rather ruthless Jay
who appeared in the daytime when he resumed his man’s life. When he described
his smallness and how he could entersaloons to call
for his father without having to swing the doors open, it seemed to Lillian
that she could encompass this small figure better in the range of her vision
than the reckless, amorphous, protean Jay whose personality flowed into so many
channels like swift mercury.
    When Jay described the vehemence, the wildness,
the hunger with which he went out into the streets to play, it seemed to her
that he was simultaneously describing and explaining the vehemence, the hunger,
the wildness with which he went out at night now and left her alone, so that
the present became strangely innocent in her mind.
    When he talked about his impulses towards other
women he took on the expression not of a man who had enjoyed another woman
sensually, but of a gay, irrepressible child whose acts were absolutely
uncontrollable; it became no longer infidelity but a childish, desperate
eagerness to “go to the street and play.”
    She saw him in the present as the same child
needing to boast of his conquests out of a feeling of helplessness, needing to
be admired, to win many friends, and thus she attenuated in herself the anxiety
she experienced at his many far-flung departures from her.
    When she rebelled at times he looked completely
baffled by her rebellions, as if there were nothing in his acts which could
harm her. She always ended by feeling guilty: he had given her his entire self
to love, including the child, and now, out of noblesse oblige, she could not
possibly act…like his harsh mother!
    He looked at the sulphur-colored Pernod and drank it.
    He was in the mood to paint his self-portrait
for anyone who wanted to listen: this