An excerpt from this most beautiful of books:
I am standing on a corner in Monterey, waiting for the bus to come in, and all the muscles of my will are holding my terror to face the moment that I most desire. Apprehension, and the summer afternoon keep dying my lips, prepared at ten-minute intervals all through the five hour wait.
But then it is her eyes that come forward out of the vulgar disembarkers to reassure me that the bus has not disgorged disaster: her Madonna eyes, soft as the newly-born, trusting as the un-tempted. And, for a moment, at that gaze, I am happy to forgo my future, and postpone indefinitely the miracle hanging fire. Her eyes shower me with innocence and surprise. Was it for her, after all, for her whom I had never expected nor imagined that there had been compounded such ruses of convenience? Behind her he for whom I have waited so long, who has stalked so unbearably through my nightly dreams, fumbles with the tickets and the bags, and shuffles up to the event which too much anticipation has fingered to shreds.
For after all, it is all her. We sit in a café drinking coffee. He recounts their adventures and says, "It was like this, wasn't it, darling", "I did well then, didn't I, dearest heart?", and she smiles happily across the room with confidence that appals. How can she walk through the streets, so vulnerable, so unknowing, and not have people and dogs and perpetual calamity following her? But overhung with her vines of faith, she is protected from their gaze like the pools in Epping Forest. I see she can walk across the leering world and suffer injuries only from the ones she loves. But I love her and her silence is propaganda for sainthood.
So we drive along the Californian coast singing together, and I entirely renounce him only for her peace of mind. The wild road winds around ledges manufactured from the mountains and cliffs. The Pacific in blue spasms reaches its superlatives.
Why do I not jump off this cliff where I lie sickened by the moon? I know these days are offering me only murder for my future. It is not just the creeping fingers of the cold that dissuade me from action, and allow me to accept the hypocritical hope that there mat be some solution. Like Macbeth, I keep remembering that I am their host. So it is tomorrow's breakfast rather than the future's blood that dictates fatal forbearance. Nature, perpetual whore, distracts with the immediate. Shifty-eyed with this fallacy I plough back to my bed, up through the tickling grass. So, through the summer days, we sit on the Californian coast, drinking coffee on the wooden steps of our cottages.
Up the canyon the redwoods and the thick left-hands of the castor tree forebode disaster by their beauty, built on too grand a scale. The creek gushes over green boulders into pools no human ever uses, down canyons into the sea.
But poison oak grows over the path and over all the banks, and it is impossible even to go into the damp overhung valley without being poisoned. Later in the year it flushes scarlet, both warning of and recording fatality.
Between the canyons the hills slide steep and cropped to the cliffs that isolate the Pacific. They change from gold to silver, grow purple and massive from a distance, and disintegrate down-hill in avalanches of sand.
Round the doorways double-size flowers grow without encouragement: lilacs, nasturtiums in a bank down to the creek, roses, geraniums, fuchsias, bleeding-hearts, and hydrangeas. The sea blooms. The stream rushes loudly.
When the sea otters leave their playing under the cliff, the kelp in amorous coils appear to pin down the Pacific. There are rattlesnakes and widow-spiders and mists that rise from below. But the days leave the recollection of sun and flowers.
Day deceives, but at night no one is safe from hallucination. The legends here are all of blood-feuds and suicide, uncanny foresight and supernatural knowledge. Before the convict workers put up the road, loneliness drove women to jump in the sea. Tales were told of the convicts: how some went mad along the coast, while others became hypnotised to it, and, when they were released, returned to marry local girls.
The long days seduce all thoughts away, and we lie like lizards in the sun, postponing our lives indefinitely. But by the bathing pool, or on the sandhills by the beach, the Beginning lurks uncomfortable on the outskirts of the circle, like an unpopular person whom ignoring can keep away. The very silence, the very avoiding of any intimacy between us, when he, when he was only a word, was able to cause me sleepless nights and shivers of intimation, is more dangerous.
Our seeming detachment gathers strength. I sit back and impersonally say, I see human vanity, or feel myself full of gladness because there is a gentleness between him or her, or even feel irritation because he lets her do too much of the work, sits lolling while she chops wood for the stove.
But he never passes anywhere near me without every drop of my blood springing to attention. My mind may reason that the terseness only registers neutrality, but my heart knows no true neutrality was ever so full of passion. One day along the pass he brushed my breast in passing, and I though, does this Efflorescence offend him? And I went into the redwoods brooding and blushing with rage, to be stamped so obviously with femininity and liable to humiliation worse than Venus's with Adonis, purely by reason of my accidental but flaunting sex.
Alas, I know that he is the hermaphrodite whose love looks up through the appletree with a golden indeterminate face. While we drive along the road in the evening, talking as impersonally as a radio discussion, he tells me, "A boy with green eyes and long lashes, whom I had never seen before, took me into the back of a printshop and made love to me, and for two weeks I went around remembering the numbers on bus conductors' hats."
"One should love beings whatever their sex," I reply, but withdraw into the dark with my obstreperous shape of shame, offended with my own flesh which cannot metamorphose into a printshop boy with arms like chalices.
Then days go by without even this much exchange of metaphor, and my tongue seems to wither in my throat from the unhappy silence, and the moons that rise and set unused, and the sun that melts into the Pacific uselessly, drive me to tears and my cliff of vigil at the end of the peninsula. I do not beacon to the Beginning, whose advent will surely strew our world with blood, but I weep for such a waste of life lying under my thumb.
His foreshortened face appears in profile on the car window like an irregular graph of my doom, merciless as a mathematician, leering accompaniment to all my good resolves. There is no medicinal to be obtained from the dried herbs of any natural hill, for when I tread those upward paths, the lowest vines conspire to abet my plot, and the poison oak thrusts its insinuation under my foot.
From the corners where the hill turns from the sea and goes into the secrecy and damp air of forbidden things, I stand disinterestedly examining the instruments and the pattern of my fate. It is a slow motion process of the guillotine in action, and I see plainly that no miracle can avert the imminent deaths. I see the time, regarding equably the appearance, but I am as detached as the statistician is when he lists his thousand dead.
When his soft shadow, which yet in the night comes barbed with all the weapons of guilt, is cast hugely upon the pane, I watch it as from a loge in the theatre, the continually vibrating I in darkness. Swearing invulnerability, I measure mercilessly his shortcomings, and with luxurious scorn, ask who could be ensnared there.
But what huge shadow is more than my only moon, even more than my destruction: it has the innocently slipping advent of the next generation, which enters in one night of joy, and leaves a meadowful of lamenting milkmaids when its purpose is grown to fruit.
Also, smoothed away from all detail, I see, not the face of a lover to arouse my coquetry or defiance, but the gentle outline of a young girl. And this, though shocking, enables me to understand, and myself rise virile as a cobra, out of my loge, to assume control.
He kissed my forehead driving along the coast in evening, and now, wherever I go, like the sword of Damocles, that greater never-to-be-given kiss hangs above my doomed head. He took my hand between the two shabby front seats of the Ford, and it was dark, and I was looking the other way, but now that hand casts everywhere an octopus shadow from which I can never escape. The tremendous gentleness of that moment smothers me under; all through the night it is centaurs hoofed and galloping over my heart; the poison has got into my blood. I stand on the edge of the cliff, but the future is already done.
It is written. Nothing can escape. Floating through the waves with seaweed in my hair, or being washed up battered on the inaccessible rocks, cannot undo the event to which there were never any alternatives. O lucky Daphne, motion-less and green to avoid the touch of a god! Lucky Syrinx, who chose a legend instead of too much blood! For me there was no choice. There was no crossroads at all
I am jealous of the hawk because he can get so far out of the world, or I would follow with passionate envy the seagull swooping to possible cessation.
