Incoherent words: “Two years ago we could have been so happy together, Anaïs.”
“But now you’re happily married to Nancy.”
“Yes.”
“I love to work with you, Carter.”
“I love to work with you. Let’s be close friends.”
“Yes, yes.”
He was gentle.
It was I who asked him to kiss me.
He is gentle . . . gentle.
He is not as good for me as Rupert, but he affects me emotionally, deeply.
Oh, Anaïs . . .
That was Monday.
Then Tuesday he came again.
It is hard to work—the air is charged with desire. We sit on the couch. I write down what we agree on. He lies near. When he is too near, I tremble inwardly. I want violence. I feel his turmoil.
Again we talked. He told me: “Before my marriage I was in the army; I was so lonely. What I most wanted when I returned was to be married. Now, after two years, this is the first time I have been tempted. You are dangerous for me. I am afraid that someday I will have to live as you do. But now I couldn’t.”
“I know. That is why I’m leaving New York.”
At the door he says, “Aren’t you going to kiss me?”
Then we kiss longer. He is not violent, but sensual in a melting way. It is not electricity, but a flowing together that is piercingly sweet.
When he leaves, I feel lost.
This is not at all the way I feel with Rupert. With Carter I feel this sickness, this hauntingness. I’m afraid because Carter has the intense blue eyes of Bill (Rupert has eyes like mine, chameleon, now gold, now green, now blue, now grey), the fair skin. My desire for him is like my desire for Bill. I feel dissolved. It is painful.
That evening Carter, Nancy, Hugo and I went out together to see Lincoln Kirstein of the Ballet Society.
I felt depressed. I longed for Rupert to come and rescue me. The next day he came and kissed me but did not take me. Instead he drove me out to the East River to contemplate a red birch tree. It had a beautiful bark the color and texture of a chestnut. I tried to invest this one tree with all possible symbolizations: the tree of life, manly, not a tree of genealogy, but the mystical tree in Hindu mythology occupied by gods and dancers. This was the tree Rupert wanted to protect from devastation, fire, lumberjacks, the tree he wanted to help reproduce, nourish, house, shade.
He says, “Cleo is our houseboat.”
He returns home with me. I dress for a formal dinner and he drives me to Peter Wreden’s house on Park Avenue. He says, “You look pure and Grecian, all in white.” Mariposa blanca, Princesita.
But he was annoyed by my preface to Tropic of Cancer and horrified by the book itself.
He is volatile.
I fought the anxiety I felt at his not making love. Anaïs, Anaïs. Confiance. On the East River he kissed me. He noticed I had no gloves. He wanted me to wear his. He asked: “Are you cold? Do you like my driving?” He took one of my photographs of me: “In this one your eyes are like jewels, and your mouth I love.”
I love . . .
“To live like this,” I said, “to dare to live without knowledge of tomorrow.”
But Anaïs has angoisse, angoisse. I still add up the kisses, I still register the words; I fear it is all unreal. I do not believe.
At the Wredens’, homeliness, comfort, bourgeois solidity. I am bored. Gore is there. He takes me home, and in the taxi we hold hands, or rather I take his hands and nestle them. I rest my head on his shoulder. He kisses me as warmly as one can kiss without sex.
I am lost in three loves (Rupert, Carter, Gore) that are orchestrations of my love and desire for Bill Pinckard.
Sad today.
But I am shopping and delighting in new cotton dresses.
Carter is twenty-eight. He is not tall; he is my height. He has light brown hair. He is very slender. Blond-skinned. His face has great beauty, emotion. He has large, very blue, very brilliant eyes, a bird’s profile, a rich, full mouth. He has an irresistible grin. When he is not smiling fully he looks sad. Above all, he looks sensitive and frail. Yet he went to India during the war, flew a helicopter.
I don’t know if it is my obsession with Bill or reality, but Carter has, as I imagine, physical traits like Bill’s.
But why, why do I have with him this drugged state, fever, illness of love?
Rupert awakens wildness.
Carter comes humbly, almost, with his score in a valise, the metronome.
He and Nancy have music in common. She plays the piano and can copy music for him. Now I wish I had studied with my father. Why did I have this obstinate refusal to study music with my father?
The subtle, the sad, the terrible thing that happens in my life with Hugo. I cannot describe it clearly, only in terms of climate. As soon as he returned from Cuba I felt it. I feel I lose the sun. I feel the climate change to heaviness, greyness, death. I hear his voice. So many times he is like a zombie. He is absent; he is almost invariably depressed.
His analyst speaks of an old childhood sulkiness, resentment. He is full of negative reactions: forgetfulness, absent-mindedness, automatism in talking.
He behaves like an old man. After dinner he falls asleep. Saturdays he wants to sleep. Sundays too. I feel my life clogged, slowed down. I feel oppressed by his face, the solemnity of it. His conversation all factual, his constant budgeting, his total absence of playfulness.
At fifty, he moves slowly, deliberately, without buoyancy. Never has a quick reflex. Our rhythm is discordant. He goes to sleep early, and then at dawn he awakens and reads.
I feel caged, trapped, weighed down. All his good qualities cannot balance this climate in which I cannot live.
Even when I give him my individual attention and we spend an evening together—we went to Chinatown last night—he has pleasure in terms of taking me down in a taxi, but nothing comes out of him to illuminate the evening.
Poor Hugo.
I miss Rupert. I want him to possess me this minute, to keep me. It is only the fears I have that keep me unstable, escaping towards Carter because I feel that Rupert is not for me.
I feel the attraction between Rupert and me is unconscious. He is not fully aware of it as I am now.
APRIL 15, 1947
Staff fights the anxiety. Anxiety is dispersing, splitting the loves. Anxiety because Rupert is the adventure I want, and I fear the instability of it, the unknown.
Staff points out the fears: my own duality between security and freedom—Hugo and Rupert.
When Hugo is absent I feel I could live without him. When he returns the dependency begins again.
After talking with Staff about my fear of giving to Rupert because there is no permanency, I flow again. And when Rupert came I was exuberant and joyous. He always responds to this. I tease him. I say I am going to spend our trip investigating whether he is taking up the study of trees because he loves them or because people have hurt him.
We sit on the couch, and again he becomes the burning lover, his tongue possessing my ear, his mouth on my mouth . . .
Oh, my diary, I am out of hell, I have known happiness.
Our lovemaking is all I want. He has my temperament. He teases me with caresses so much that I have to beg him: “Oh take me,