When I think now of the ruse by which I was liberated, when I think that I was released from this prison because the one I loved wanted to get rid of me, what a sad, baffled, mystifying smile comes over my features. How confused and intricate everything is! We are grateful to those who stab us in the back; we run away from those who would help us; we congratulate ourselves on our good luck, never dreaming that our good luck may be a quagmire from which it will be impossible to extricate ourselves. We run forward with head turned; we rush blindly into the trap. We never escape, except into a cul de sac.
I am walking through the Bronx, five or six blocks, just time and space enough to twist myself into a corkscrew. Mona will be there waiting for me. She will embrace me warmly, as if we had never embraced before. We will have only a couple of hours together and then she will leave—to go to the dance hall where she still works as a taxi girl. I will be sound asleep when she returns at three or four in the morning. She will pout and fret if I don’t awaken, if I don’t throw my arms around her passionately and tell her I love her. She has so much to tell me each night and there is no time to tell it. Mornings, when I leave, she is sound asleep. We come and go like railroad trains. This is the beginning of our life together.
I love her, heart and soul. She is everything to me. And yet she is nothing like the women I dreamed of, like those ideal creatures whom I worshipped as a boy. She corresponds to nothing I had conceived out of my own depths. She is a totally new image, something foreign, something which Fate whirled across my path from some unknown sphere. As I look at her, as I get to love her morsel by morsel, I find that the totality of her escapes me. My love adds up like a sum, but she, the one I am seeking with desperate, hungry love, escapes like an elixir. She is completely mine, almost slavishly so, but I do not possess her. It is I who am possessed. I am possessed by a love such as was never offered me before—an engulfing love, a total love, a love of my very toe-nails and the dirt beneath them— and yet my hands are forever fluttering, forever grasping and clutching, seizing nothing.
Coming home one evening, I observed out of the corner of my eye of those soft, sensuous creatures of the ghetto who seem to emerge from the pages of the Old Testament. She was one of the Jewesses whose name must be Ruth or Esther. Or perhaps Miriam.
Miriam, yes! That was the name I was searching for. Why was that name so wonderful to me? How could such a simple appellation evoke such powerful emotions? I kept asking myself this question.
Miriam is the name of names. If I could mould all women into the perfect ideal, if I could give this ideal all the qualities I seek in woman, her name would be Miriam.
I had forgotten completely the lovely creature who inspired these reflections. I was on the track of something, and as my pace quickened, as my heart thumped more madly, I suddenly recalled the face, the voice, the figure, the gestures of the Miriam I knew as a boy of twelve. Miriam Painter, she called herself. Only fifteen or sixteen, but full-blown, radiantly alive, flagrant as a flower and—untouchable. She was not a Jewess, nor did she even remotely suggest the memory of those legendary creatures of the Old Testament. (Or perhaps I had not then read the Old Testament.) She was the young woman with long chestnut hair, with frank, open eyes and rather generous mouth who greeted me cordially whenever we met on the street. Always at ease, always giving herself, always radiant with health and good nature; withal wise, sympathetic, full of understanding. With her it was unnecessary to make awkward overtures: she always came towards me beaming with this secret inner joy, always welling over. She swallowed me up and carried me along; she enfolded me like a mother, warmed me like a mistress, dispatched me like a fairy. I never had an impure thought about her: never desired her, never craved for a caress. I loved her so deeply, so completely, that each time I met her it was like being born again. All I demanded was that she should remain alive, be of this earth, be somewhere, anywhere, in this world, and never die. I hoped for nothing, I wanted nothing of her. Her mere existence was all-sufficing. Yes, I used to run into the house, hide myself away, and thank God aloud for having sent Miriam to this earth of ours. What a miracle! And what a blessed thing to love like this! I don’t know how long this went on. I haven’t the slightest idea whether she was aware of my adoration or not. What matter? I was in love, with love. To love! To surrender absolutely, to prostrate oneself before the divine image, to die a thousand imaginary deaths, to annihilate every trace of self, to find the whole universe embodied and enshrined in the living image of another! Adolescent, we say. Rot! This is the germ of the future life, the seed which we hide away, which we bury deep within us, which we smother and stifle and do our utmost to destroy as we advance from one experience to another and flutter and flounder and lose our way.
By the time I meet the second ideal—Una Gifford —I am already diseased. Only fifteen years of age and the canker is gnawing at my vitals. How explain it? Miriam had dropped out of my life, not dramatically, but quietly, unostentatiously. She simply disappeared, was seen no more. I didn’t even realize what it meant. I didn’t think about it. People came and went; objects appeared and disappeared. I was in the flux, like the others, and it was all natural even if inexplicable. I was beginning to read, to read too much. I was turning inward, closing in on myself, as flowers close up in the night.
Una Gifford brings nothing but pain and anguish. I want her, I need her, I can’t live without her. She says neither Yes or No, for the simple reason that I have not the courage to put the question to her. I will be sixteen shortly and we are both still in school—we are only going to graduate next year. How can a girl your own age, to whom you only nod or stare at, be the woman without whom life is impossible? How can you dream of marriage before you have crossed the threshold of life? But if I had eloped with Una Gifford then, at the age of fifteen, if I had married her and had ten children by her, it would have been right, dead right. What matter if I became something utterly different, if I sank down to the bottom rung? What matter if it meant premature old age? I had a need for her which was never answered, and that need was like a wound which grew and grew until it became a gaping hole. As life went on, as that desperate need grew more intense, I dragged everything into the hole and murdered it.
I was not aware, when I first knew Mona, how much she needed me. Nor did I realize how great a transformation she had made of her life, her habits, her background, her antecedents, in order to offer me that ideal image of herself which she all too quickly suspected that I had created. She had changed everything—her name, her birthplace, her mother, her upbringing, her friends, her tastes, even her desires. It was characteristic of her that she should want to change my name too, which she did. I was now Val, the diminutive of Valentine which I had always been ashamed of—it seemed like a sissy’s name—but now that it issued from her lips it sounded like the name which suited me. Nobody else called me Val, though they heard Mona repeat it endlessly. To my friends I was what I always had been; they were not hypnotized by a mere change
