Free Ladders to Fire by Anaïs Nin Page B

being, if Lillian told her this. If Lillian advised her to take the
first step, because he was a being perpetually waiting to be ignited, never set
off by himself, always seeking in women the explosion which swept him along.
    All around her there were signs, signs of
danger and loss. Without knowing consciously what she was doing, Lillian began
to assume the role she feared Jay might assume. She became like a lover. She
was full of attentiveness and thoughtfulness. She divined Helen’s needs
uncannily. She telephoned her at the moment Helen felt the deepest loneliness.
She said the gallant words Helen wanted to hear. She gave Helen such faith as
lovers give. She gave to the friendship an atmosphere of courtship which
accomplished the same miracles as love. Helen began to feel enthusiasm and
hunger again. She forgot her illness to take up painting, her singing, and
writing. She recreated, redecorated the place she was living in. She displayed
art in her dressing, care and fantasy. She ceased to feel alone.
    On a magnificent day of sun and warmth Lillian
said to her: “If I were a man, I would make love to you.”
    Whether she said this to help Helen bloom like
a flower in warmth and fervor, or to take the place of Jay and enact the
courtship she had imagined, which she felt she had perhaps deprived Helen of,
she did not know.
    But Helen felt as rich as a woman with a new
love.
    At times when Lillian rang Helen’s bell, she
imagined Jay ringing it. And she tried to divine what Jay might feel at the
sight of Helen’s face. Every time she fully conceded that Helen was beautiful.
She asked herself whether she was enhancing Helen’s beauty with her own
capacity for admiration. But then Jay too had this capacity for exalting all
that he admired.
    Lillian imagined him coming and looking at the
paintings. He would like the blue walls. It was true he would not like her
obsessions with disease, her fear of cancer. But then he would laugh at them,
and his laughter might dispel her fears.
    In Helen’s bathroom, where she went to powder
and comb her hair, she felt a greater anguish, because there she was nearer to
the intimacy of Helen’s life. Lillian looked at her kimono, her bedroom
slippers, her creams and medicines as if trying to divine with what feelings
Jay might look at them. She remembered how much he liked to go behind the
scenes of people’s lives. He liked to rummage among intimate belongings and
dispel illusions. It was his passion. He would come out triumphantly with a
jar: and this, what is this for? as if women were always seeking to delude him.
He doubted the most simple things. He had often pulled at her eyelashes to make
certain they were not artificial.
    What would he feel in Helen’s bathroom? Would
he feel tenderness for her bedroom slippers? Why were there objects which
inspired tenderness and others none? Helen’s slippers did not inspire
tenderness. Nothing about her inspired tenderness. But it might inspire desire,
passion, anything else—even if she remained outside of one, like a sculpture, a
painting, a form, not something which penetrated and enveloped one. But inhuman
figures could inspire passion. Even if she were the statue in a Chirico
painting, unable to mingle with human beings, even if she could not be
impregnated by others or live inside of another all tangled in threads of blood
and emotion.
    When they went out together Lillian always
expected the coincidence which would bring the three of them together to the
same concert, the same exhibit, the same play, But it never happened. They
always missed each other. All winter long the coincidences of city life did not
bring the three of them together. Lillian began to think that this meeting was
not destined, that it was not she who was keeping them apart.
    Helen’s eyes grew greener and sank more and
more into the myth. She could not feel. And Lillian felt as if she were keeping
from her the man who might bring her back to life. Felt almost as