The evening will be sweet if only Reginald does not appear, always unannounced in his dilapidated car. The physical resemblance between Reginald and Rupert is very startling, but Rupert is a more sensuous and healthier edition. Reginald was given a woman’s name at Cambridge, and his friendship with Rupert Brooke was suspect. Reginald has an aristocratic air, but now he wears glasses and he does not have Rupert’s full mouth. He is asthmatic, from the age of five. He has all the neurotic symptoms that have been classified: masochism in food, obsession with his health, completely self-centered, breathes with difficulty, gives himself insulin shots while he talks, monologues incessantly and plays a constant comedy of consulting us, asking for advice, confiding, planning, and then doing none of what is suggested. His activity is void of meaning, direction or usefulness. He travels from one place to another in quest of relief. Now it is Riverside where he feels better being near the desert. Endless monotonous monotone discourses, free associations of dead impressions. His recollections of people are uninteresting because he never knows them or sees them clearly. They only exist in a tenuous relation to himself. Martha Graham was a woman he trained to act in a play when she was a young student. Esther Winwood was a woman he once took a walk with and whom he did not kiss. Famous theatre directors were men who rejected or produced his version of The Idiot. Charles Chaplin is a man who invited him to dinner one night and asked him for auld lang zyne’s sake to coach his son on how to read Shakespeare.
Reginald wrote a play about Lincoln because with little makeup, he can easily look like him, and he can portray him easily because he has “Lincoln’s compassion.” His taste in literature is arrested at his contemporaries’ early stages of growth. His responses are merely echoes of his Cambridge enthusiasm. The zombie quality of his speech is fatal. A death-ray, death radiations emanate from him. The static, stagnant atmosphere kills one’s desire to give, help or talk because one knows it is a waste, a total waste. He will linger here, too long always, among the ashes he creates in the evening, get in his car that, like himself, seems incapable of reaching the next destination. He cannot be helped. He can only be served, washed, fed. He can only occupy a parasitic position in the family, whom he visits until people weary of his inordinate demands and escape from him. Now and then he arouses the protective instinct of a woman, and he feeds on it until the woman feels the zombie at her breast and that no life will come of this, only an existence as repulsive as a fish without eyes, with withered fins, who is less than a fish and only a little more than a stone, a static receiver of food who prowls the bottom of the aquarium.
At first I was devoted to Reginald out of an extension of my love for Rupert until his selfishness and madness frightened me, and I began to see him as a human tick. Now I live merely in dread of his appearing when I have friends of my own over and he reads them his play on Lincoln for two hours. Rupert repairs his car, gives him money and clothes, but I have stopped trying to get his writings published or even to get him to fill out his fellowship papers, which he could do impressively due to his Cambridge academic proficiencies. His blindness to others is complete. Decades after his divorce, he still goes to his former wife Helen for mail, for talks, while Lloyd stands there like a porcupine. To Reginald, I am a French writer who has too much sex in her work (as I am for Helen). But he likes my kindness to him, my warmth.
The choice combination of foresters (another sub-human form of life) and Reginald, or Kay and John or Alice and Eyvind Earle (Rupert’s friends)—Kay a mediocre June, John colorless and gentle, Alice prosaic, Eyvind a second-rate painter who was a childhood friend of Rupert’s—and the circle of a small, meaningless world is complete. I have to remind myself that if Rupert is thirty-one, I am living the life I led as a bride of twenty to twenty-five, before Paris widened and deepened and awakened me. Any woman could take my place and this life would satisfy her. But she could not satisfy Rupert because Rupert is not content with ordinary life. He has simply made me the luxury, the travel, the strange and infinitely varied flavor of his life. I am the possibility of other worlds.
One night, after the tumult and excess of lovemaking, I asked out of a lingering jealousy about an incident he had with a girl in the early days of our relationship after our first trip (which, naturally, was exposed by Kay), “You don’t have what we have with other women?” And Rupert answered with great feeling: “Oh darling, nothing approaching it, nothing compared to this, it’s all in another world, it doesn’t count. Nothing like this, as big, as big.” And he supplemented his words with an embrace so strong that it pained me. I know it is so, and I know this is the fusion I never reached with Hugo.
So the short, the lyrical, the intensely heightened moments of passion are isolated by a life altogether colorless, meaningless and limited, having no integration or connection with the nights. What I once considered an essential part of his character—the nomadic impulses, the quest of the marvelous and the strange—has weakened in him, and his main desire now is for a house built out of his own hands.
I wanted him to travel and see and know other lives before taking root in Los Angeles—I felt I would be a suitable guide to his other lives and that later I could relinquish him to the American girl who would match the American boy and read Time with him and fall asleep to the radio’s barbaric lullabies. But when he sees the mythical young woman in the movies, in stories, in other marriages, he observes mainly how selfish she is!
Ruth had warned me: “It will be good for a few years.” But four years have passed and we cannot be separated.
I was writing about the first week: one evening with Jim and George, one evening with Reginald, one evening with Kay drinking a bottle of gin, exposing her large legs up to her thighs with an ex-whore style, frequent references to her past lovers, and John, at twenty-six, hypnotized by Kay who is his first woman. During an evening at home alone I heard the train whistle and a pack of coyotes, with their thin, wailing cry, answering the train as if it were the call of another animal in the night. Tavi answers the coyotes with disquietude. The train and the howling coyotes gave me a feeling of loneliness and a hatred of the mountains and fields and trees that I cannot confess to Rupert, who delights in this space with its isolation and peace. Nature in Acapulco—sun, sea, jungle and warmth—seems festive and joyous, but in America it is the space of separation from life, it is the desert between human beings, it is a vacuum, an obstacle, an automobile route, that is all. It takes an hour to reach a movie, another hour to recover after being with people, weariness, when bed should be nearer. It is what has made Americans autistic, sub-human, unable to relate to other human beings, inarticulate. So the coyotes wail, and there is the awfulness of a nature that is melancholic and empty, monotonous and colorless, mistaking the train whistle for a lonely animal. Another evening of movies carefully chosen by Rupert, but usually a double fare, and to this he responds completely. The American boy responds to The Loves of Carmen of Rita Hayworth, laughs fully at the cartoons, but unlike any American boy, he is moved by the subtleties of La Ronde and La Folle de Chaillot. He is annihilated by deep tragedies of Italian war films. He is vulnerable, weeps over the death of The Lovers of Verona. And at this moment, I love him. No matter what limitations he has intellectually, he has emotional depth. So as we come out of the theatre, I am aware of his response to the desperate sufferings of Blanche, of his hatred of brutality and cruelty, of the fact that he refused to kill in the war.
In the movies sometimes I grow very cold, stiff and stupefied. I meditate on the art of writing becoming an obsolete art. Libraries are getting rid of books to make room for films. Publishers are failing one by one. The 25¢ books are succeeding but only because they are second-rate writing, ephemeral