Luise does not believe in pretenses, playing roles, because she thinks it leads to disaster. I said I had done this often and without catastrophes. My deceptions! But it is true it requires alertness and tension. To answer in front of Hugo when thoughtless people ask me over the telephone: “How is Henry?” To prevent Hugo from receiving the telephone bill on which are noted telegrams to Chicago (when I haven’t the money I am forced to telephone the telegrams to Henry). For my mail: care. When I was in Provincetown I had to send a check for the “corner” on MacDougal. When I signed as Mrs. Moré, I said with infinite care: “Mrs. Moré, care of Mrs. Guiler, 437 Commercial Street,” so the receipt could be returned to me. But the postman, knowing everybody in Provincetown, took it upon himself to deliver it to Helba. Fortunately Helba does not read English. When I wrote fifty pages for Ruder in the summer, and Henry needed the money, Ruder asked me not to mail the pages, but to send them with somebody. Hugo was leaving for New York, but if I gave them to him he would know there was fifty dollars coming to him, and Ruder had already telegraphed the money to Henry. I told Hugo they were pages written by Virginia, and I sealed the envelope (when someone else writes for Ruder he does not pay cash but makes them wait three weeks for the answer).
OCTOBER 9, 1941
Feeling very exalted and inspired, I tried to work on the Jean story, but all the time it is Luise I feel and see. My friendship with women are like love affairs, and such a fervor takes me, such vividness, that it inspires me like love and haunts me like love.
Chinchilito telephones me from a life charged with singing, rehearsals, mysterious trips (the Lady? a floating personage, growing vaguer in me). Yet the thought that he is coming Monday afternoon gives me the suspense of a high perilous trapeze leap. The long intervals between our meetings, the absence of sensual connection, makes it like some brilliant trapeze incident, spangled, accompanied by music, in which I can admire his deftness and my accuracy. I sense he too is keeping himself outside the circle of pain, and the little poison of jealousy to which he is so vulnerable has germinated, and my image becomes inseparable from the black shadow of Othello. (Even over the telephone he asks: “What is the motorized Inca doing?”) And the tone of his voice, the kind of fatigue and discouragement of the person faced again with his fatal pattern of recurrence (the rival) when he said: “He lives so near to you!” As if he had said: “Too near!” And I, I do not again want the man with a wife (Gonzalo), who belongs to the public (Henry), or the fêted singer-idol (my father, who received applause and the flowers of all women’s tribute, the flowers of their sex with the fern garnishing of multi-colored pubic hairs, pistils of desire, the corolla of the orgasm that is given to the interpreter of music, to all the figures on the stage where the illusion we need for love is already prepared). Those who fall in love with performers are like those who fall in love with magicians—they are the ones who cannot create the illusion with love alone. The mise en scène, the producer, the music, the role, will surround the personage with that which love needs: the myth. In this love Edward will receive, in the bouquets of women that will rain upon his voice, I would find again the pain my father gave me, and I do not want it. But because we touched the ring around the planet of love, we touched the aura of it, the long beautiful leaps we take together in space, leaps of grace and beauty, across visitless weeks, are marvelous, like demonstrations of the agility our souls are practicing to escape from the prisons of tragedy, the incarcerations of jealousy, the caverns of deep love’s tortures…
I lie here awaiting Henry’s telephone call and my being is against his return. I no longer feel him. It seems to me that I am struggling to free myself from the burdens, too heavy now, which threaten my existence.
Evening: What defenses against Henry! Luise telling me I should break with him, be free, live for myself, seeing Gonzalo while I awaited Henry’s telephone call, all to prepare myself to say: I feel separated from you, it is time to separate. I added in my mind the proofs of his detachment so that I could reveal them to him. He stayed months in Hollywood when it was not necessary for the book, he showed reluctance at returning to New York because he would have to see his mother and face the problem of the rejection of his book on America, and feel again the association of New York to his past (it was then I decided to go to Provincetown and no longer wait for him). And it took him a month to return.
When I arrived Henry himself was timid and nervous. He sought my mouth and I turned it away. I was tense, quiet. I looked at him, feeling: “I am free of him.” I looked at what I never liked, the coldness of his little eyes. He was shaky, from the long trip, the tension. I thought: perhaps he is free too. We talked. It was he who softened first, came to my chair and kissed me with passion. I did not desire him, but I did not feel any distaste either, like something sweet and familiar. He made me undress, but once in bed he was impotent. Then I was tender and at the same time I began to talk and to say what I felt, but he was merely humoring me as one might a sick person, humoring my doubts, laughing even, absolutely confident that nothing was broken, unbelieving. All this in a quiet tone. I said: “Since freeing you was my obsession perhaps the time has come to also free you of me. You were happier out west, liberated of restrictions brought about by my marriage.”
Henry was soft, tender, and listened to me as a man listens to a woman who is complaining of some little defect, and he loves her, and sees her doubts and knows it is not serious. We lay there. He repeated how nervous he felt. I said: “Let us get very quiet.” We put out the light, we talked. After a while he took me. Then he laughed: “You won’t believe me, but I have only gone with one woman once in all the six months, and she was a prostitute. I was almost atrophied!” And we went back to our old “scenes,” of his merely reassuring me of his love while never for one moment doubting mine or fearing its loss! By this time I was completely disarmed and I could not see the separation, as if the mystical law by which we live created the kind of bond that survives the death of the body, and created a continuity such as we know will happen only to our highest thoughts and feelings. On certain days I know clearly what in me will survive, that highest moment of illumination that comes from effort and courage—so that the highest peaks of my relationship partake of the same immortality.
So it was the same hotel room of six months ago, the same dinner at El Pezzo… In one moment Henry made the most confused statements. I realized anew his weakness and softness. In one moment he asserted that he had no needs and would live on nothing, that he would never live as Eduardo did, on one dollar a day, that he felt so good he could even take a job, that his integrity prevented him from doing scenario writing in Hollywood.
At last I said: “And what of my integrity, doing the writing for Ruder all last winter?”
Henry laughed, admitted the paradox, the contradictions, the injustice, laughed again and dismissed it.
In this entire scene what affected me most was his trembling, his weakness, his childlike confidence. What is lifted, distilled from ordinary life, by the one who has the creator’s eyes. My pattern is the dream. I seek to approximate it—when I do not get drowned in the depths of my too-human loves.
OCTOBER 13, 1941
Chinchilito came, lay back on the couch looking at the colored windows, caressing me, and said: “This is the place where I am happiest…” He stands apart, observing the inflated idiocy of singers and severely watching himself, ready to ridicule himself if “I talk like a dramatic tenor.” He said my book on my father was tremendous, that he could not believe little Chinchilita had done it. He quoted lines from it.
He murmured: “How beautiful it is here. I would like to come and stay here for a whole day. We have not enough time together. We should have a whole day together.” Delicately, closing his eyes as if he were smelling a bouquet, he kissed my fingertips, laid his brow against my temples, against my cheek. There is dissonance in him, from crude phrases to tender ones, constant contradictions, or is it between the Chinchilito I see and the one I hear? It is lovely, this dance we have together in space…
OCTOBER 17, 1941
Henry took me with hunger and I did not want it. But something remains of the old sensuality so that, in contrast to my complete closing against Hugo, after a moment with Henry I can yield even if I began without desire. His desire has outlived mine. Everything externally is the same as before