Trapeze. Anais Nin
gave me in which I learned to drive. We had a fireplace in which Rupert liked to cook, to grill meat. Varda’s painting and Eyvind’s tree hung in the same room. We were very happy there in a different way.
I was deeply jealous and panicked by a very pretty girl who appeared. I felt uncertain of the future. I did not feel Rupert’s clutchingness, although it was there, and for the first time, he expressed the pain caused by my absence. But he did not seem as possessive. Our only difficulties were a few scenes of jealousy from me, once when he stared back at a girl at a concert who had come up and planted herself before him, staring at him, and another time when he asked Ruth for a typist to keep up with his typing while I was gone and asked that she be beautiful.
The only times I wept were at a defect he has that I cannot accept: he is a faultfinder. After always putting the car in the garage, one day I felt tired and left the old Ford outside. Rupert immediately commented: “You must not do that as it might get wet and be difficult to start later.” If I make the salad with lettuce leaves not cut as fine as some people do: “Salad must be cut small. Oh, you forgot the lime.” One day the car broke down. Rupert blamed me. The garage man said no one could be blamed, that it was worn and would have broken down sooner or later. He gets irrationally critical, but always shifts the blame. I do not understand the meaning of this. If he can’t find a book, someone has mixed them up—I have. This makes me nervous and causes me to lie when accused. He gets angry at the traffic. He gets angry at the movies if they advertise the wrong hour and speaks very loudly against the film—misplaced anger.
I do exactly the opposite. I seek to excuse or justify all he does. I never blame him. I know he carries an abnormal burden of guilt and the slightest addition makes it unbearable. I have tried to explain how I feel, but I’ve lost my confidence. Fearing criticism, I postpone discussions. He leaves the venetian blinds he took down on the floor. I wrap them up in an old curtain until we decide where to keep them. He says, “That’s not good. I will put them in the closet. The curtains will get dirty.” Of course, he also directs this perfectionism against himself. He treats himself as critically, as negatively. Hostility. To look for the flaw! My father did this. Hugo too. However, Hugo did not direct it at me, only at others, other women. Rupert loves me crazily, yet he also demolishes my self-confidence. When I left him at the airport, he noticed my low-heeled shoes. He said, “I like high heels with a fur coat.” I don’t feel free. I never feel free with him. “Your neckline is askew.” Yet I know he is suffering at my leaving.
Suddenly, while planning a Christmas party, he observes the mediocrity of our friends. But they are his.
It’s strange. Rupert’s passion does not make me feel free or valuable. As the month passed I felt diminished, shrunken almost. As if the only moment of fulfillment were in the sensual fusion, but outside of that, I am not happy. I do not enjoy racing nervously to a movie. I do not enjoy so many movies. I do not enjoy parties when we go together. I don’t know why. I don’t enjoy my lectures if he is there. When friends come, he is not carefree. He is bound up in dancing, rigid. Why?
Early in the morning he is desperately sleepy. He craves each minute more he can sleep, so I bring him what the Mexicans call a “cafécito,” a small cup of black coffee heralding a fuller breakfast.
When I leave him for New York, after the first stabbings of pain, after I master the deep impulse to return, then I begin to feel free and stronger. In New York I enter a larger life, and when I return I always return stronger, enriched, filled with confidence.
I am afraid to be ill with Rupert. The third week I wrenched my back helping him at gardening, and for several days found it hard to make the bed, empty the garbage pail, etc. One night I went to bed early after a hot bath. We had received chairs by mail order unassembled and therefore cheaper. Rupert was disappointed in the chairs (things are never as he imagined them). He spent the evening fretting. He turned the light on, awakened me to show me what was wrong. The word in Spanish is majadero. Ay, qué majadero, they always say about children. Fussing is the nearest equivalent—fretful. Fundamentally there is a great selfishness, which he recognizes. He only admits it when he speaks of children. On our first trip he talked about Bach’s nine children continuously. Finally I used that as a reason for not marrying him—I cannot give him children. But then he exclaimed, “I don’t really want children. I’m too selfish for that.” I think he talked about them because it made him feel manly. It was bad for Rupert’s manliness that a screen test revealed that he looked like an adolescent and could only play young boys’ roles. He had no “sex appeal,” they said. This made a lasting scar. Also, his New York stage notices emphasized his “boyish awkwardness.” When he smokes his pipe and speaks sententiously, he is playing a part. During our first trip I was disturbed by some of his attitudes until I understood he was playing the part of an older man. And yet I would turn the plane back if I could. For four years I have turned back, feeling elation, fever and delight at returning, impatient for his presence, to sit beside him in the car, with Tavi on my lap, to feel his strong hands. What I bring back is renewed faith in him, the passion to carry us farther. I return to my prison, understanding not only that it is a world in proportion to Rupert’s abilities, but knowing too that in the larger one I am not at ease. It was a strain to meet Maxwell Geismar and his wife because they were so brilliant and so mature. It is a strain to meet Anthony Tudor, to go to Charles Rolo’s parties and talk with representatives of Knopf, with older people of accomplishment.
Rupert’s eyes twinkled at me with his joyousness. “We are so fortunate, darling. We have each other. I would give anything up for our relationship: my parents, or forestry. One month apart is too long, too long. Make it only ten days. Do your job fast and come back for Christmas.”
Tavi wanted to climb into the plane. Tavi gets blue when I leave. They were driving on to see Rupert’s family. He would play the viola not too exactly, but with fervor and brilliance. He does not practice. He has the temperament for music, the bravado and the impetus. He can be defined and described as Joaquín defined romanticism: strangeness added to beauty.
The plane is an hour late. Beneath me, while I was writing, the mountains and plains lay blanketed white, this West Rupert took me to, where aside from the Grand Canyon, the desert, the South, there was nothing to discover but monotony. In one day I fly over all these roads we traveled the first time for eighteen days to a life more in harmony with my maturity, my physical age, my achievements, my development. Yet for four years I have surrendered the more brilliant friends, the greater recognition I get in New York than I do in antiquated, provincial California. I surrender the care of the best doctors, the comfort, the luxury, the freedom from housework, the power, the possessions, and above all the love to whom I owe my life, all I am, my existence, and my creation, to return to Rupert. How has he bound me, enslaved me? I see him sitting in his bath, his slender, freckled shoulders, his dark hair and his eyes illumined at the thought of my divorce from Hugo: “You will be all mine.”
A web of lies, lies, lies, necessary to this life. I am torn in two when I have to leave. Parting from Rupert, I always feel it is the last time, which I cannot bear again. Yesterday, listening to Joaquín delivering a witty lecture on Von Weber and Brahms, I felt the compulsion to return to Rupert. And then there is the fear if I return, I return without money. We have $200 a month to live on. I will have to take an ordinary job, which may bring us another $200 to save. I will not have the strength to work all day, to clean the house, shop, cook, iron, and live Rupert’s life, not the strength—the strength. I am forty-eight years old. In appearance, I deceive everyone. I am alive and keen and inspiring to others. But I get so tired, so deeply tired. I cannot return, powerless as I am, to earn what we need. Fear. Fears of illness, of loss of energy, of inadequacy. Rupert expects so much of me. He cannot understand my economies of strength. To shut the garage door, to pull the hand brake on the old Ford seems difficult at times, to carry the laundry to the laundromat, to garden in the summer. I feel humiliated, inadequate. My impulse to run back is stifled. I got up at seven o’clock and was driven by Joaquín to the airport.
I could be happy with Rupert in that core of fantasy and sensual fusion that we enter at night, but I know that only one life will ultimately destroy me. I must make a decision I have eluded after years of lies and games, of living on a trapeze, of fear of falling in between,