Lilith

by J. R. Salamanca

  “It’s going to rain!” I exclaim with wretched exultation. “We’ll have to go back. We’ll get soaked!”

  But this day’s gods are in league with her, of course, or she has conjured up the storm herself.

  “Oh, no, it’s much too far! But we can make the barn, I think.”

  She is right, of course. The barn is only one third of the distance that we have already come. It has a look of sinister isolation, standing at the edge of the forest; but there is nothing to do but run toward it. We hurry across the field where thistles bend in the gathering wind, along the embanked footpath that circles the darkening water of the lake, raindrops pattering about us in the dust. I am aware of a growing savage resignation. I hardly care, now—I care, that is; but I have almost lost all hope of forestalling it. Even nature has conspired against me. I feel my will to oppose her waning, my mind assuming a kind of desolate composure. What does it matter? It has been a strange enough adventure; let it be even stranger. Perhaps something will be salvaged. She says she loves me still. At least I will not lose her utterly.

  We have reached the shelter of the eaves, which overhang broadly. Her white silk blouse is spattered with raindrops which make it stick to her skin. It clings moistly to her breasts, stippled with pink spots, swelling softly with her breath. Only two days ago she bared them to me. I close my eyes.

  “We barely made it! Oh, look how hard it’s falling now!” She shakes out her moist hair, still panting with exertion. “Are you wet, Yvonne?”

  “Only a little. I must confess I found it rather exhilarating.”

  The woman’s eyes are glowing with a fresh, somber excitement. Her face, too, has a feverish flush which makes me realize suddenly and bitterly how handsome she really is. I note with a kind of revolted admiration the delicate modeling of her lips, the sensitive, sorrowful cast of features which many Latin women have. I turn away quickly, looking out at the rain-lashed fields. A pair of ragged crows go hobbling and flapping, their wings lifted, in a hasty comic scuttle into the shelter of the woods.

  “Look, the barn is open,” Lilith says. I follow her eyes to the great dark door which breathes out its warm dry incense of hay and leather. Secret in there, dark and fragrant, with the soft seductive thunder of rain on the iron roof. A joy I was not to know.

  “Vincent.” She touches my arm rather timidly. “Can we go in there—Yvonne and I? There’s something she’d like to talk to me about, privately. You won’t mind, will you?”

  I stare at her in cold despair, saying hoarsely, “You know it’s forbidden. It’s very dangerous. If anyone should find out—”

  “No one will find out. You must stay here and watch, in case anyone should come. It would be very kind of you. We would be very grateful, wouldn’t we, Yvonne?”

  “Yes, very.” Mrs. Meaghan turns her eyes to me with a look of grave sardonic courtesy. “I’m sure you realize, Mr. Bruce, what a luxury it is for two women to have a quiet confidential talk together, without open doors, or bars, or monitors. We are such weak creatures. I’m sure we shall find some way of repaying you.”

  “Yes, I know we shall,” Lilith murmurs.

  “You mustn’t be too long,” I mutter in a ruined, ravenlike voice. “They’ll send a car for us if this rain keeps up.”

  “We won’t. Oh, thank you, Vincent.” She turns back for a moment, as they move away, to take my hand in a quick tender clasp and to whisper,

  “I love you.” I stare at her with horror. They walk along the barn wall to the open door, holding their shoulders obliquely to keep within the curtain of water from the streaming eaves. I watch with helpless torment while they disappear into the dim wide arch of darkness.

  There is a moment when the hideous delight of which I have written in my journal touches my heart with little filthy elfin fingers, and I find myself standing with averted head, listening, in an attitude of tense voluptuous attention. Then I drop my head, and after a moment, lifting it, stare out beyond the streaming eaves at the wet fields, listening to the roar of rain on the iron roof and crying quietly, like a child, my face contorted, remembering for some reason a summer afternoon long ago, before the war, when Laura and I ran for shelter under the wistaria arbor in her mother’s garden in a sudden thunderstorm.

  I do not know how long I have been standing thus—it has stopped raining, for the silver sheaths of water are no longer sliding from the eaves; only a gentle dripping, which pocks the red soil in a long pitted trench. The cloud-shadow has passed beyond the lake and the wet fields are glittering greenly in the sun—when I feel Lilith’s hand on my sleeve and hear her murmured greeting: “Vincent, you’re crying. Don’t cry, dear.” I turn suddenly and clutch her by the hair, shaking her savagely from side to side and shrieking in her face, “Slut, whore, dirty shameless bitch!” I fling her from me with all my strength against the barn wall. Her head and shoulders jar against it with a brutal thudding sound. She slides down, stunned, and settles limply on the damp ground. In a moment she lifts her hand and brushes back her scattered hair, staring at me with burning eyes. In a soft stark voice which seems both to bless and to condemn me she asks, “If you discovered that your beastly God loved others as greatly as he loved you, would you hate him for it? He shows love for none of you, and you worship him. I show my love for all of you, and you despise me.”

  Her words shock me profoundly—as much, I think, as what she has done. I stare at her in stupefaction, watching Mrs. Meaghan approach fearfully from where she has been standing against the wall and bend down, murmuring compassionately, to help Lilith to her feet. I offer no assistance; I do not want to touch them. Slowly, without speaking, we walk back through the bowed and dripping meadow grass toward the Lodge, my heart like a piece of carrion in my breast.

  THREE days later, in a cove of rocks, with the Potomac thundering beyond us and a fine spray of river-mist blowing over our bruised bodies, she paid me well for my ignominy:

  THURS., AUG. 12:

  . . .I have never known such passion, such absolute abandon in her before. It was as if she were trying to redress the terrible humiliation she had forced upon me, or as if out of the monstrous service I had done her there had come a new intensity of love for me, a fantastic and triumphant joy which she must express with this wild, rapturous largess. It was the same with me. I never knew I was capable of such frenzied desire. It is very strange, it is terrible, that such a vile thing as that which happened last week could generate in us such a prodigy of passion. I can’t think about this. I can’t understand it. But I can submit to it, I can be a witness to it—like a beastly miracle. Afterward I could only touch her face, wide-eyed, in a kind of bewilderment, saying over and over, “Oh, Lilith, oh, my darling.” She could not hear me because of the booming of the falls, but she watched my moving lips so strangely, laying her finger tips upon them as a blind person does, her face holding an almost afflicted look of bliss. Then I said to myself that I loved her utterly, that I would do whatever she asked of me, forever. And all the while those tons of water roaring down around us with dreadful, ungovernable power, like a renegade, deluging ocean. I could feel the ground trembling with their weight.

  We bicycled home along the Old Falls Road, and she stopped sometimes to pick milkweed pods from the tall bushes that grow along the fences, splitting the brittle brown husks open with her thumbnails and blowing clouds of silver flax out of them. Some of the little silken puffs of gossamer caught in her hair and clung there, trembling, like clouds of frozen breath, but I did not tell her. . . .

  TUES., AUG. 17:

  How exciting it is to see her so openly contemptuous! This evening when we were walking home along Montgomery Avenue a woman came down the steps of St. Jude’s, untying the scarf she had worn to cover her hair while she was praying. She looked very tired—a tired, anxious woman with some problem she could not solve, hurrying home to fix dinner for her family. Things of this kind always move me. I think I must have shown this in my eyes, for Lilith said, “You look as
if you loved her, Vincent.”

  “It’s very moving,” I said. “Other people’s faith is always very moving, I think.” She did not reply, and I added rather abstractedly after a moment, “My mother believed in God, you know. She named me after a saint—the kindest of all the saints, she said. He gave his life to the miserable. She wanted me to be like him.”

  Lilith turned to follow with her eyes the retreating figure of the woman in the street, saying with sudden savage scorn, “Perverts, brute-lovers, worshipers of pain! The more he beats them, the more he lashes and scourges them, the more they worship him! Flagellants, race of degenerates! Haters of love!”

  This, from her! Yet it was thrilling—and frightening, too—to see her eyes. She was silent the rest of the way back to the Lodge, but when I said goodbye to her in her room she smiled sleepily and collapsed onto her bed with a great ridiculous commotion, her arms and legs spread out—plop!—like a rowdy, cheerful child, turning her head to peer at me through the tangle of her hair and murmuring foolishly, “Good night, my saint.”

  FRI., AUG. 20:

  . . . I knew it would happen again, of course. There was no reason to believe she would stop at one such piece of infamy.

  Last night they both signed for the movies in Stonemont—but we did not go, of course. In a moonlit field beyond the railyards I stood sentinel for them again, with some hideous stray dog licking about my ankles all the while. I finally kicked it, in shameful, raging despair.

  Those awful, fraught, degrading silences, when I have to walk back with them! And that woman’s eyes, whenever I pass her on the floor—that unholy irony! It is more than I can bear. But I must learn to bear it, of course, because it will go on. There is nothing I can do. Some nights I lie awake until it is light, wondering what she will do next. I feel it moving toward some horrible, consummate piece of degradation which I shall be equally powerless to stop.

  If I go on like this they will certainly begin to suspect on the staff. They have already noticed how haggard and preoccupied I am. Today Bea said she thought I had been working too hard, and asked if I would like to do shop duty for a week or two. A fine thing that would be—I should not be able to escort her, then! I must say I get a little sick sometimes of Bea’s constant patronizing air. All the same, she is very shrewd, and I must make a greater effort to conceal my anxiety. And I must somehow try to sleep. I can never sleep any more; it is beginning to affect my health. Yesterday, for example, I distinctly heard that music—a thin, shrill sound, something like her flute—when I was playing croquet with Morrison. I set my mallet down and stood there, listening, like an idiot. It is only nerves, of course—the nervous strain I am under—but it’s alarming, all the same. It can’t be allowed to go on. And then there was that business about the soup, when I was having lunch in the cafeteria the other day. I knew suddenly, without any doubt whatever, that I must not eat it. It was unclean. Still, I am not convinced that my nerves were altogether responsible for this conviction; it is strange how intuitively one understands such things. Bob is a fool. Let him eat all he wants of it. No matter what state my nerves are in, I am sure there is someone on the staff who is not to be trusted. Nerves do not account for everything! It remains now to discover who it is.

  WED., AUG. 25:

  More and more, water fascinates me. I have always had a love of water, but I have never before realized its great beauty and mystery. It is a much more compassionate element than air. Air does not properly cherish the things that have chosen to live in it. It is indifferent, even hostile, to them, I think. If you step off a ladder, or lose your footing on a cliff, for example, it lets you fall and be broken, or crushed. It does not swarm around you and sustain you, as water does, letting you down with so gentle, so solicitous, an embrace. And air does not have those wonderful rhythms; it blows fitfully and oppressively, disturbing and dislocating the things that dwell in it, all out of rhyme with their pulses and murmurings and metabolisms. It does not have that sweet ancient surge and withdrawal, that long comforting flow and ebb, like the blood’s music, that lulls and ceaselessly, darkly rhapsodizes. It limits you, too—it lets you live in only two dimensions; if you are an air-thing you are condemned to stand with your feet on the earth, staring upward. You cannot take a great buoyant stride to the ceiling of the room in which you stand, or to the top of the tree above you, pausing there for a moment in a lingering, weightless escape from gravity. Birds can do this, of course—I think they are the only things that are truly at home in it—birds and angels, perhaps; not men. I think men are water creatures, really, who have somehow wandered out of their element.

  I have a yearning to return and live in water. I would like to lounge and drift in it all night, assuaged, dreaming water-dreams. I would like to breathe it in cool delicious draughts and feel its ceaseless, volatile caress upon my body. And I would like to dart through it with long silver friends, and visit coral castles, and stand swaying softly in their secret chambers. I would like to learn its languor and tranquillity—to endure the strange conversion of all things which it claims. I would live in the throat of a silent, chastened cannon, and study the transfiguration of rotting casks whose staves had fallen open like petals in a flower of resignation, and learn the beautiful apostasy of crumbling cutlasses and pious, shriven spears and gently, eternally, serenely rocking helmets, and still ships, and horizontal bones. I would understand and share their deep, grave beatitude, rolling and writhing forever in gentle epilepsies of devotion in the unending baptism of the sea. I would put on my green velvet mantle of renunciation and be redeemed with all the wrack and jetsam of the world. I would have the peace of things that have been evangelized by water.

  I am going to buy an aquarium—one of those big oblate ones that they have in the ten-cent store—and fill it with little bright-colored stones and aquatic grasses and some of those tiny fishes—those slender vivid Siamese ones—and put it on my window sill. I think I will enjoy that enormously. Perhaps I will get some peace from looking into it. Perhaps it will help to still this dread I feel.

  THURS., AUG. 26:

  I knew, as soon as the rocks and the fish and grasses were in, that I needed one thing more. A figure—a sovereign of some kind—for my water-world! And I knew immediately what it must be: the china fairy that we won at the carnival. I had to steal it, of course; she would never give it to me. She keeps it there on that shelf above her bookcase, in that weird little museum she has of my mementos: the skull, the red rosette, the china fairy. I had to be very stealthy, because she is so unnaturally observant; I think sometimes she is aware of every move I make, every breath I draw, every gesture, even when she is turned away from me. So yesterday evening, just before I left her room, I invented this device:

  “Did you know there was a tanager nesting by your window?”

  “A tanager! Where, Vincent?” (Moving swiftly to the window seat.)

  “Just a little above and to the right. I saw it this morning when I was coming up.”

  “Oh, where? I can’t see anything.” (Pressing her face against the wire netting.)

  “Do you see where the water pipe is joined?” (Backing against the bookcase, giving a swift upward glance.) “There’s a kind of hollow there, in the vines. If you look carefully you can see some wisps of straw.”

  I reached up quickly, clutched the doll and plunged it into the pocket of my jacket, moving hastily toward her.

  She turned to face me, frowning. “I can’t see anything. I think you are fooling me.”

  “Of course I am. It’s almost September. The tanagers aren’t nesting.”

  “Then why did you say that?”

  “Because I love to see you get so excited.”

  “But you disappointed me. How silly you are. What a foolish kind of playing.”

  “Are you angry?”

  “I am disappointed.”

  “But I invented it for you. If you can invent a world for me, won’t you let me invent a little red bird for you?”


  She stares at me somberly. “You are hateful, sometimes. Sometimes I don’t like you at all.”