Children of the Albatross by Anaïs Nin

this
spectacle of Paul laughing like a released prisoner.

    Two days later Paul appeared at her door with
his valise. Djuna received him gaily as if this were the beginning of a
holiday, asked him to tie the velvet bows at her wrist, drove him to where
Lawrence lived with his parents and where there was an extra room.
    She would have liked to shelter him in her own
house, but she knew his parents would come there and find him.
    He wrote a letter to his parents. He reminded
them that he had only a month of freedom for himself before leaving for India
on the official post his father had arranged for him, that during this month he
felt he had a right to be with whatever friends he felt a kinship with. He had
found people with whom he had a great deal to share and since his parents had
been so extreme in their demands, forbidding him to see his friends at all, he
was being equally extreme in his assertion of his freedom. Not to be concerned
about him, that at the end of the month he would comply with his father’s plans
for him.
    He did not stay in his room. It had been
arranged that he would have his meals at Djuna’s house. An hour after he had
laid down his valise in Lawrence’s room he was at her house.
    In his presence she did not feel herself a
mature woman, but again a girl of seventeen at the beginning of her own life.
As if the girl of seventeen had remained undestroyed by experience—like some
deeper layer in a geological structure which had been pressed but not
obliterated by the new layers.
    (He seems hungry and thirsty for warmth, and
yet so fearful. We are arrested by each other’s elusiveness. Who will take
flight first? If we move too hastily fear will spring up and separate us. I am
fearful of his innocence, and he of what he believes to be my knowingness. But
neither one of us knows what the other wants, we are both arrested and ready to
vanish, with such a fear of being hurt. His oscillations are like mine, his
muteness like mine at his age, his fears like my fears.)
    She felt that as she came nearer there was a
vibration through his body. Through all the mists as her body approached to
greet him there was an echo of her movements within him.
    With his hand within hers, at rest, he said:
“Everyone is doing so much for me. Do you think that when I grow up I will be
able to do the same for someone else?”
    “Of course you will.” And because he had said
so gently “when I grow up” she saw him suddenly as a boy, and her hand went out
swiftly towards the strand of boyish hair which fell over his eyes and pulled
it.
    That she had done this with a half-frightened
lau as if she expected retaliation made him feel at ease with her.
    He did retaliate by trying jiujitsu on her arm
until she said: “You hurt me.” Then he stopped, but the discovery that her
bones were not as strong as the boys’ on whom he had tested his knowledge made
him feel powerful. He had more strength than he needed to handle her. He could
hurt her so easily, and now he was no longer afraid when her face came near his
and her eyes grew larger and more brilliant, or when she danced and her hair
accidentally swung across her face like a silk whip, or when she sat like an
Arab holding conversation over the telephone in answer to invitations which
might deprive him of her presence. No matter who called, she always refused,
and stayed at home to talk with him.
    The light in the room became intensely bright
and they were bathed in it, bright with the disappearance of his fear.
    He felt as ease to sit and draw, to read, to
paint, and to be silent. The light around them grew warm and dim and intimate.
    By shedding in his presence the ten years of
life which created distance between them, she felt herself re-entering a
smaller house of innocence and faith, and that what she shed was merely a role:
she played a role of woman, and this had been the torment, she had been
pretending to be a woman, and now she knew she had not been at ease in