Ladders to Fire by Anaïs Nin Read Free Book Online Page B

man and pedaled too fast?

    Jay. The table at which he sat was stained with
wine. His blue eyes were inscrutable like those of a Chinese sage. He ended all
his phrases in a kind of hum, as if he put his foot on the pedal of his voice
and created an echo. In this way none of his phrases ended abruptly.
    Sitting at the bar he immediately created a
climate, a tropical day. In spite of the tension in her, Lillian felt it.
Sitting at a bar with his voice rolling over, he dissolved and liquefied the
hard click of silver on plates, the icy dissonances of glasses, the brittle
sound of money thrown on the counter.
    He was tall but he carried his tallness slackly
and easily, as easily as his coat and hat, as if all of it could be discarded
and sloughed off at any moment when he needed lightness or nimbleness. His body
large, shaggy, as if never definitely chiseled, never quite ultimately
finished, was as casually his as his passing moods and varying fancies and
fortunes.
    He opened his soft animal mouth a little, as if
in expectancy of a drink. But instead, he said (as if he had absorbed Lillian’s
face and voice in place of the drink), “I’m happy. I’m too happy.” Then he
began to laugh, to laugh, to laugh, with his head shaking like a bear, shaking
from right to left as if it were too heavy a head. “I can’t help it. I can’t
help laughing. I’m too happy. Last night I spent the night here. It was
Christmas and I didn’t have the money for a hotel room. And the night before I
slept at a movie house. They overlooked me, didn’t sweep where I lay. In the
morning I played the movie piano. In walked the furious manager, then he
listened, then he gave me a contract starting this evening. Christ, Lillian, I
never thought Christmas would bring me anything, yet it brought you.”
    How gently he had walked into her life, how
quietly he seemed to be living, while all the time he was drawing bitter
caricatures on the bar table, on the backs of envelopes. Drawing bums, drunks,
derelicts.
    “So you’re a pianist…that’s what I should have
been. I’m not bad, but I would never work hard enough. I wanted also to be a
painter. I might have been a writer too, if I had worked enough. I did a bit of
acting too, at one time. As it is, I guess I’m the last man on earth. Why did
you single me out?”
    This man who would not be distinguished in a
crowd, who could pass through it like an ordinary man, so quiet, so absorbed,
with his hat on one side, his steps dragging a little, like a lazy devil
enjoying everything, why did she see him hungry, thirsty, abandoned?
    Behind this Jay,with his southern roguishness, perpetually calling for drinks, why did she see a
lost man?
    He sat like a workman before his drinks, he
talked like a cart driver to the whores at the bar; they were all at ease with
him. His presence took all the straining and willing out of Lillian. He was
like the south wind: blowing when he came, melting and softening, bearing joy
and abundance.
    When they met, and she saw him walking towards
her, she felt he would never stop walking towards her and into her very being:
he would walk right into her being with his soft lazy walk and purring voice
and his mouth slightly open.
    She could not hear his voice. His voice rumbled
over the surface of her skin, like another caress. She had no power against his
voice. It came straight from him into her. She could stuff her ears and still
it would find its way into her blood and make it rise.
    All things were born anew when her dress fell
on the floor of his room.
    He said: “I feel humble, Lillian, but it is all
so good, so good.” He gave to the word good a mellowness which made the whole
room glow, which gave a warmer color to the bare window, to the woolen shirt
hung on a peg, to the single glass out of which they drank together.
    Behind the yellow curtain the sun seeped in:
everything was the color of a tropical afternoon.
    The small room was like a deep-set alcove. Wto the