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way to communicate by a secret code. All
our messages are colored with the violent colors of danger. What I find in this
devious way has a taste like no other object overtly obtained. Like the taste
of those dim and secret afternoons of our childhood when we performed forbidden
acts with great anxiety and terror of punishment. The exaltation of danger, I’m
used to it now, the fever of remorse. This society which condemns me…do you
know how I am revenging myself? I am seducing each one of its members slowly,
one by one…”
    He talked softly and exultantly, choosing the
silkiest words, not disguising his dream of triumphing over all those who had
dared to forbid certain acts, and certain forms of love.
    At the same time when he talked about Michael
there came to his face the same expression women have when they have seduced a
man, an expression of vain glee, a triumphant, uncontrollable celebration of
her power. And so Donald was celebrating the feminine wiles and ruses and
charms by which he had made Michael fall so deeply in love with him.
    In his flight from woman, it seemed to Djuna,
Michael had merely fled to one containing all the minor flaws of women.
    Donald stopped talking and there remained in
the air the feminine intonations of his voice, chanting and never falling into
deeper tones.
    Michael was back and sat between them offering
cigarettes.
    As soon as Michael returned Djuna saw Donald
change, become woman again, tantalizing and provocative. She saw Donald’s body
dilating into feminine undulations, his face open in all nakedness. His face
expressed a dissolution like that of a woman being taken. Everything revealed,
glee, the malice, the vanity, the childishness. His gestures like those of a
second-rate actress receiving flowers with a batting of the eyelashes, with an
oblique glance like the upturned cover of a bedspread, the edge of a petticoat.
    He had the stage bird’s turns of the head, the
little dance of alertness, the petulance of the mouth pursed for small kisses
that do not shatter the being, the flutter and perk of prize birds, all
adornment and change, a mockery of the evanescent darts of invitation, the
small gestures of alarm and promise made by minor women.
    Michael said: “You two resemble each other. I
am sure Donald’s suits would fit you, Djuna.”
    “But Donald is more truthful,” said Djuna,
thinking how openly Donald betrayed that he did not love Michael, whereas she
might have sought a hundred oblique routes to soften this truth.
    “Donald is more truthful because he loves
less,” said Michael.
    Warmth in the air. The spring foliage shivering
out of pure coquetry, not out of discomfort. Love flowing now between the
three, shared, transmitted, contagious, as if Michael were at last free to love
Djuna in the form of a boy, through the body of Donald to reach Djuna whom he
could never touch directly, and Djuna through the body of Donald reached Michael—and
the missing dimension of their love accomplished in space like an algebra of
imperfection, an abstract drama of incompleteness at last resolved for one
moment by this trinity of woman sitting between two incomplete men.
    She could look with Michael’s eyes at Donald’s
finely designed body, the narrow waist, the square shoulders, the stylized
gestures and dilated expression.
    She could see that Donald did not give his true
self to Michael. He acted for him a caricature of woman’s minor petulances and
caprices. He ordered a drink and then changed his mind, and when the drink came
he did not want it at all.
    Djuna thought: “He is like a woman without the
womb in which such great mysteries take place. He is a travesty of a marriage
that will never take place.”
    Donald rose, performed a little dance of
salutation and flight before them, eluding Michael’s pleading eyes, bowed, made
some whimsical gesture of apology and flight, and left them.
    This little dance reminded her of Michael’s
farewells on her doorsteps when she