Free Ladders to Fire by Anaïs Nin

like a water color.”
    She moved towards him and sat on the edge of
the couch: “You don’t quite believe in me as a woman,” she said, with an immense
distress quite out of proportion to his fancy.
    “This is a setting for Pelleas and Melisande ,” he said, “and I know that when you
leave me for that dinner I will never see you again. Those incidents last at
the most three hours, and the echoes of the music maybe a day. No more.”
    The color of the day, the color of Byzantine
paintings, that gold which did not have the firm surface of lacquer, that gold
made of a fine powder easily decomposed by time, a soft powdery gold which
seemed on the verge of decomposing, as if each grain of dust, held together
only by atoms, was ever ready to fall apart like a mist of perfume; that gold
so thin in substance that it allowed one to divine the canvas behind it, the
space in the painting, the presence of reality behind its thinness, the fibrous
space lying behind the illuson , the absence of color
and depth, the condition of emptiness and blackness underneath the gold powder.
This gold powder which had fallen now on the garden, on each leaf of the trees,
which was flowering inside the room, on her black hair, on the skin of his
wrists, on his frayed suit sleeve, on the green carpet, on her green dress, on
the bottle of perfume, on his voice, on her anxiety—the very breath of living,
the very breath he and she took in to live and breathed out to live—that very
breath could mow and blow it all down.
    The essence, the human essence always
evaporating where the dream installs itself.
    The air of that summer day, when the wind
itself had suspended its breathing, hung between the window and garden; the air
itself could displace a leaf, could displace a word, and a displaced leaf or
word might change the whole aspect of the day.
    The essence, the human essence always
evaporating where the dream installed itself and presided.
    Every time he said he had been out the night
before with friends and that he had met a woman, there was a suspense in
Lillian’s being, a moment of fear that he might add: I met the woman who will
replace you. This moment was repeated for many years with the same suspense,
the same sense of the fragility of love, without bringing any change in his
love. A kind of superstition haunted her, running crosscurrent to the strength
of the ties binding them, a sense of menace. At first because the love was all
expansion and did not show its roots; and later, when the roots were apparent,
because she expected a natural fading and death.
    This fear appeared at the peak of their deepest
moments, a precipice all around their ascensions. This fear appeared through
the days of their tranquility, as a sign of death rather than a sign of natural
repose. It marked every moment of silence with the seal of a fatal secret. The
greater the circle spanned by the attachment, the larger she saw the fissure
through which human beings fall again into solitude.
    The woman who personified this danger never
appeared. His description gave no clues. Jay made swift portraits which he
seemed to forget the next day. He was a man of many friends. His very
ebullience created a warm passage but an onward flowing one, forming no
grooves, fixing no image permanently. His enthusiasms were quickly burned out,
sometimes in one evening. She never sought out these passing images.
    Now and then he said with great simplicity:
“You are the only one. You are the only one.”
    And then one day he said: “The other day I met
a woman you would like. I was sorry you were not there. She is coming with
friends this evening. Do you want to stay? You will see. She has the most
extraordinary eyes.”
    “She has extraordinary eyes? I’ll stay. I want
to know her.”
    (Perhaps if I run fast enough ahead of the
present I will outdistance the shock. What is the difference between fear and
intuition? How clearly I have seen what I imagine, as clearly as a vision.