Trapeze. Anais Nin
to hold my place, to assert myself. Hugo thought he had married a woman. I can be chic. I can look aristocratic. I have beautiful manners. But I am unhappy and strained.
I left the one doll on the mantelpiece and returned to the others. In my life with Rupert, they are not out of place. Rupert and I seek our pleasures, more humble ones; we avoid ordeals, we live by our wishes, we go alone to ski, we go to the movies, we seek those we like. But it is Hugo who bought me the dolls.
Around, around, around a circle of madness. Dependence. Rebellion. Rejection. Guilt. A childlike dependency.
I cannot grow in that direction. I cannot grow in arrogance, in a hard finish, in a gold-plated irony, impertinence or cynicism. With Dr. Staff I obsessively fought to be just to Hugo, to eliminate the neurotic obstacles to our marriage, to save Rupert from the tragedy of an impossible marriage.
“It is a most difficult decision to make,” Staff acknowledged. I sat in the same room where I first came to weep over Bill’s lack of feeling.
Back to Staff again, because once in Hollywood after Rupert left me, I sat on my bed weeping, and kneading and pummeling the pillows, repeating: “This is an illusion, this is an illusion.” But when he came to live with me it ceased to be an illusion, it ceased to be a necklace of intense moments, and we fell into deeper and deeper layers. Daily living.
Our rhythm.
Hugo could endure monotony, discipline, daily repetitions, meals at the same hour. Every unpredictable change, every variation, disturbed him. After I cook and wash dishes with regularity for a week, if I hint lightly to Rupert: “I am tired of dishes. Let’s go out to dinner,” he is not only eager for a change, but more often it is he who will suddenly drop his work and say to me: “We’re off.” I have barely time to don my coat, the car is already pulsating, there is a mood of freedom, a breaking of bonds, of halters and harnesses, a sudden influx of speed and lightness. Rupert and I leap out. No obstacles.
Poor Hugo. I am hoping that he is now learning to live more happily without me.
The dolls dance, contorted by extreme stylization. In the mirror I see the bed that sheltered me in Louveciennes with Hugo, with Henry, with Gonzalo. One of the woolen sheets I used in the cold houseboat was stained with red wine, Gonzalo’s red wine. But that has ceased to hurt me.
The present.
Rupert sighs over his endless calculations in his own room. He comes to mine to hear Brahms’ double concerto. Or I help him disentangle his rebellions. If he wants to go to a movie he does not enter boldly to tell me, but stands at the door, ashamed, guilty, suggesting a movie as if it were a crime.
He responds deeply to tragic, human movies, the Italians’ naturalness. He responds like an ordinary American boy to the charms of Rita Hayworth. He loves Westerns. In music he has infallible taste, but not in women.
SAN FRANCISCO, MAY 15, 1949
Que ma tête est lourde et fatiguée. No rest for me anywhere from awareness, insight, fantasy writing, analogies, associations. Writing becomes imperative for this surcharged head. I was happy when Hugo was in Brazil and there was no conflict. The day he returned and telephoned me from New York, tension again. Games and lies to gain time, to gain another month with Rupert. Two weeks left now, left to us. Rupert must take a job (dictated by his conscience), earn money and learn to fight forest fires during three summer months.
Hugo expects me in New York. He has planted flower boxes on the terrace of the apartment for my arrival.
Last days in San Francisco. Intense joys at night, in Rupert’s strong arms, an electric orgasm, a caress that kneads the flesh, sharp, keen pleasures given by his active, fresh-skinned, fragrant sex. The smell of an adolescent. Nothing aged, faisandé, sour, and all of it light, readily evaporated, like a perfume. The mercurial silk of the body, it slips between your fingers for its aliveness. I never tire of feeling his neck, his shoulders, his physical perfections, the shape of his back, his stylized backside, so neat, so amazingly compact, so amazingly chiseled for vigor and speed. Such finesse in his profile, the shape and carriage of his head. All form and lines. Nothing has been carelessly designed. There is no imperfection. During his severe bronchitis he allowed himself to speak like a child at times, requesting, yearning, complaining. But once well again he recovered his role of authority.
He was born in the fantasy house of Lloyd Wright. He was raised with unorthodox people. He does not like conventionality. But above all, he speaks of the closeness we have and makes plans for a lifetime together.
Drugs. When it is intolerable, I reach for my French books again, saturate myself with the delectable Giraudoux, with the poetic analysis of Jouve. I rediscover a world so infinitely superior to America that I lose hope for it, for its crude literature, its crude life, its barbarism.
We are back from botanizing, just up the hill across the street. Rupert carries the shovel; I carry a basket for the flowers and a trowel. He sits analyzing and classifying the flowers. I have prepared Spanish rice. The back yard is wistful with the persistence of the drizzle. The flowers hang their heads. Some of them adopt the raindrops like dazzling bastard children, and up the hill with Rupert I found one that made me exclaim: “Chiquito, come and look at the unusual flower; do you want it?” The flower melted in my fingers. It was a raindrop, pretending, expanding in a bridal costume reflected from the clouds, spreading false illusory tentacles of white lace on the heart of the leaves.
The ballet of Japanese dolls dancing on the shelves looks down at me lying on the bed. At times I think of death. I can believe in the disintegration of my body, but cannot imagine how all I have learned, experienced, accumulated, can be wasted; surely it cannot disappear. Like a river it must flow elsewhere. For example, for days I received the entire flood of Proust’s life and feelings, which has truly penetrated me, three times now, but each time more deeply—this is immortality, this is continuity.
The mockingbirds, the birds of California sing lightly, intermittently. At six o’clock the Spanish rice will be ready. Rupert will have finished placing his flowers in his scrapbook.
Once he confessed at night, two years after we met: “At first I thought you were impetuous and fickle, and that as soon as you had my love you’d go off. I was afraid of you.”
Another time he said, “I was never altogether satisfied sexually until I met you. With the others it required an effort to adjust rhythms. With Janie it did not go at all. This is the first time that it is perfect.”
Another time: “It’s so good when it is with the whole self.”
These statements give me confidence, but I lose it again when at the movies he raves over the cheap and obvious heroines, or when he meets Varda’s girl of eighteen, and when I said, “Would you exchange me for Varda’s girl?” he answered: “Only for one night and then I would forget her.” I have allowed my hair to grow long, as he likes it, soft and barely curled, très jeune fille. He likes gay and sensual blouses. He likes to see my shoulders. He likes that I love nature while not being just a healthy, dull, stupid or insensitive girl.
He is proud of my writing, even if at times it causes him embarrassment with the uncultured foresters.
In his small bedroom next to mine, I hear him sigh. He is bored and tired of forestry studies. He wears glasses. I remember the first time I saw him outside of his lover’s role. In love he was illuminated, resplendent. I saw him at the printing room where he was printing Christmas cards and was so surprised to find him serious, concentrated, shy and without luminosity. Sensuality illuminates him. But when he isn’t all aglow with either desire or gayety, then he is anxious, strained, haggard (so much alike we are in this). At the foresters’ dance, it was he who was out of breath from the folk dances, not I.
His only flaw: his temper. His tensions often become bad humor, and then he becomes critical, harsh. I can only use words applied to women for what he becomes: nagging, persnickety, finicky, and fussy.
Then he is the complaining wife and I the one rebelling against “details.” He wants me to save 13¢ on gasoline. He