Rupert, who had been slightly taken aback by the smallness of the tea house, took one look at the new apartment and decided very simply and without romanticism that it was a far better place to live in and for him to come to on weekends. That was the end of the tea house.
We live quietly. Ruth comes to tell me I owe it to the community to go to gatherings, parties, etc., but I feel when going out that I enter a colder world in which I am not at home. I only want to be with Rupert. On weekends we drive to the beach, which is cold, to the mountains, which are foggy.
Then came the ordeal of the poison ivy. Rupert was gathering leaves and flowers for his botanical studies, right in the hills surrounding us. That evening we went to a movie. The virulent poison ivy broke out on his face and hands. It was as frightening as leprosy. In one night the beautiful face was the face of Frankenstein’s monster. He could not sleep. I had to cover him with balm, clean the suppurations. He was inflamed beyond recognition. He was humiliated, cowered. We saw the doctor. He did not want to be seen. His eyes would be closed by crusts in the morning and had to be carefully washed. It was a nightmare for him. He suffered physically and in his pride. Once while he was taking a bath I saw his desire and bathed with him, a proof of love, a proof that it was not only his beauty I loved.
Recovery. I could not believe his face would return to normal—the delicacy of the skin, the delicacy of the ears. It slowly emerged unspoilt—a miracle.
We went sailing with Jean Varda, but it was bitterly cold and I dressed like an Eskimo. And we were becalmed and stayed in one spot almost all the time.
Varda is living in a loft. He gave a party. We arrived early and Varda was showering under a contraption used in the army, a pail of water pulled by a string, pouring water over him. Rupert played his guitar and sang. I was filled with anxiety. I felt Rupert was like the Crown Jewels and that would be stolen from me, that he could not continue to be mine.
On his trip west, Hugo had met the young filmmaker Kenneth Anger. Hugo bought a bargain movie camera and began to film. Kenneth encouraged him to film and not to study with anyone, to become self-taught. In Mexico he began to film whatever he liked, without plan. With time, adding a little with each trip, he finally edited and finished Ai-Ye (mankind), his first real film.
He impulsively resigned from the bank. He was free. He was living on his capital. It was a period of freedom and recklessness, economically and emotionally.
He left the 13th Street studio and moved to 9th Street, a furnished apartment that had to be transformed.
SAN FRANCISCO, APRIL 15, 1949
Rupert left the International House, where he was staying, and began to live in the apartment, going to Berkeley from there.
At six-thirty the alarm clock buzzes and makes me jump. In the long, wide bed, I turn to the right where I can see through a slit in the venetian blinds the little garden stretching uphill, flowers, the reflection of a ceiling of fog, and to the left where I look at Rupert asleep. His face causes me a surprise each time. How could a face be assigned with such finesse, so close to the bones, the bones so delicate that it might represent the essence of a face rather than a face of flesh? His tousled black hair: boy and man. His features have a generous, bold proportion. They were designed for a rich, full nature, on a face so delicate that they portray instantly the duality of his nature: a generous, expansive, full nature blooming on a vulnerable, fragile structure, in danger of injury, the full flower of sensuality and imagination on an oscillating stem of adolescence. He turns towards me, still half asleep, and kisses me on the cheek. Only later will the kiss of hunger turn into the possessiveness of desire, not on the cold mornings of duty tearing us both out of the warmth, cutting the sleep and the embrace short, sending me first out of bed so that I can wash my face and comb my hair and button on my slacks and sweater. I start the coffee and light the oven for the rolls. I push the button that gives heat. I open the venetian blinds. The fog has lifted and the sun dapples the breakfast table, the San Francisco Chronicle sign, the other houses, other windows, children starting off for school, other garage doors opening, men going to work, women waiting for the bus.
While I set the table Rupert goes to the bathroom. On school days he does not sing. On early mornings he is like a newborn kitten and not yet awake or aware. His blue eyes are without recognition of human beings. He has been wrenched out of the depths of sleep and he is still swimming in it. On other days, Saturday and Sunday, when he can sleep, he comes out with clear, open eyes and embraces me, rocking me, whispering, or inserting his tongue in my ear like a direct message from his desire, and I know that this signal comes from his manhood, by the kiss that is not tender, not adolescent, but hungry and aggressive.
When he is dressed I have to remind him of all he forgets: “Do you have your keys? Change? Handkerchief?”
“Will you make me a sandwich?”
If he is late, or if the gas has leaked out of old and tired Cleo who waits outside in the rain while Perseus stands sheltered in the garage, I drive him down the hill to the bus, like a typical American wife. We never talk very much. When I return I finish my coffee. I wash the dishes. Out of the window of the kitchen I look down upon a wing of San Francisco, white houses on hillsides, upon a span of the Bridge, on a stretch of the Bay, and beyond, where there is fog, Berkeley where Rupert is going to study forestry. In his room I have to empty the scrap basket of the dried flowers he did not paste in his botany scrapbook, pick up his clothes and hang them.
At eleven o’clock or eleven-thirty the mailman comes. It is a lone letter from Hugo, a very long one, describing his trip to Brazil. Our relationship is, for me, a playing for time, an edifice of lies, a postponement. I won the last game. He returned to New York on April 1st and I expected to have to go to see him but managed by infinite intricacies to postpone homecoming until June because he is going to France in May. In June Rupert will have a summer job where I can’t be with him. I can’t desert Hugo altogether and I can’t leave Rupert.
I await news from Dutton. I sent them The Four-Chambered Heart a few days ago, the story of Gonzalo without its sordid, degrading end, for Gonzalo, like June, had the power to descend to the greatest vulgarities,