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chimerical
visitations and from a tale more marvelous in every detail than the one taking
place at this moment marred by apprehension.
    Having created a dream beforehand which he
sought to preserve from destruction by reality, every movement in life became
more difficult for the dreamer, for Paul, his fear of errors being like the
opium dreamer’s fear of noise or daylight.
    And not only his dream of Djuna was he seeking
to preserve like some fragile essence easily dispelled but even more dangerous,
his own image of what was expected of him by Djuna, what he imagined Djuna
expected of him—a heavy demand upon a youthful Paul, his own ideal exigencies
which he did not know to be invented by himself creating a difficulty in every
act or word in which he was merely re-enacting scenes rehearsed in childhood in
whiche child’s naturalness was always defeated by the severity of the parents giving
him the perpetual feeling that no word and no act came up to this impossible
standard set for him. A more terrible compression than when the Chinese bound
the feet of their infants, bound them with yards of cloth to stunt the natural
growth. Such tyrannical cloth worn too long, unbroken, uncut, would in the end
turn one into a mummy…
    Djuna could see the image of the mother binding
Paul in the story he told her: He had a pet guinea pig, once, which he loved.
And his mother had forced him to kill it.
    She could see all the bindings when he added:
“I destroyed a diary I kept in school.”
    “Why?”
    “Now that I was home for a month, my parents
might have read it.”
    Were the punishments so great that he was
willing rather to annihilate living parts of himself, a loved pet, a diary
reflecting his inner self?
    “There are many sides of yourself you cannot
show your parents.”
    “Yes.” An expression of anxiety came to his
face. The effect of their severity was apparent in the way he sat, stood—even
in the tone of resignation in which he said: “I have to leave soon.”
    Djuna looked at him and saw him as the prisoner
he was—a prisoner of school, of parents.
    “But you have a whole month of freedom now.”
    “Yes,” said Paul, but the word freedom had no
echo in his being.
    “What will you do with it?”
    He smiled then. “I can’t do much with it. My
parents don’t want me to visit dancers.”
    “Did you tell them you were coming to visit
me?”
    “Yes.”
    “Do they know you want to be a dancer
yourself?”
    “Oh, no.” He smiled again, a distressed smile,
and then his eyes lost their direct, open frankness. They wavered, as if he had
suddenly lost his way.
    This was his most familiar expression: a
nebulous glance, sliding off people and objects.
    He had the fears of a child in the external world,
yet he gave at the same time the impression of living in a larger world. This
boy, thought Djuna tenderly, is lost. But he is lost in a large world. His
dreams are vague, infinite, formless. He loses himself in them. No one knows
what he is imagining and thinking. He does not know, he cannot say, but it is
not a simple world. It expands beyond his grasp, he senses more than he knows,
a bigger world which frightens him. He cannot confide or give himself. He must
have beyes o often harshly condemned.
    Waves of tenderness flowed out to him from her
eyes as they sat without talking. The cloud vanished from his face. It was as
if he sensed what she was thinking.
    Just as he was leaving Lawrence arrived
breathlessly, embraced Djuna effusively, pranced into the studio and turned on
the radio.
    He was Paul’s age, but unlike Paul he did not
appear to carry a little snail house around his personality, a place into which
to retreat and vanish. He came out openly, eyes aware, smiling, expectant, in
readiness for anything that might happen, He moved propelled by sheer impulse,
and was never still.
    He was carrying a cage which he laid in the
middle of the room. He lifted its covering shaped like a miniature