"You see more, you just see more, and what you see is there all right. You get at the core of everything."

And now she was caught between them, to be the witch of words, a silent swift shadow darkened by uncanny knowledge, forgetting herself, her human needs, in the unfolding of this choking blind relationship: Lillian and Jay lacerating each other because of their different needs.

Pale beauty of the watcher shining in the dark.

Both of them now, Jay and Lillian, entered Djuna's life by gusts, and left by gusts, as they lived.

She sat for hours afterwards sailing her lingering mind like a slow river boat down the feelings they had dispensed with prodigality.

"In my case," said Jay, alone with her, "what's difficult is to keep any image of myself clear. I have never thought about myself much. The first time I saw myself full length, as it were, was in you. I have grown used to considering your image of me as the correct one. Probably because it makes me feel good. I was like a wheel without a hub."

"And I'm the hub, now," said Djuna, laughing.

Jay was lying on the couch in the parlor, and she had left him to dress for an evening party. When she was dressed she opened the door and then stood before her long mirror perfuming herself.

The window was open on the garden and he said: "This is like a setting for Pelleas and Melisande. It is all a dream."

The perfume made a silky sound as she squirted it with the atomizer, touching her ear lobes, her neck. "Your dress is green like a princess," he said, "I could swear it is a green I have never seen before and will never see again. I could swear the garden is made of cardboard, that the trembling of the light behind you comes from the footlights, that the sounds are music. You are almost transparent there, like the mist of perfume you are throwing on yourself. Throw more perfume on yourself, like a fixative on a water color. Let me have the atomizer. Let me put perfume all over you so that you won't disappear and fade like a water color."

She moved towards him and sat on the edge of the couch: "You don't quite believe in me as a woman," she said, with an immense distress quite out of proportion to his fancy.

"This is a setting for Pelleas and Melisande," he said, "and I know that when you leave me for that dinner I will never see you again. Those incidents last at the most three hours, and the echoes of the music maybe a day. No more."

The color of the day, the color of Byzantine paintings, that gold which did not have the firm surface of lacquer, that gold made of a fine powder easily decomposed by time, a soft powdery gold which seemed on the verge of decomposing, as if each grain of dust, held together only by atoms, was ever ready to fall apart like a mist of perfume; that gold so thin in substance that it allowed one to divine the canvas behind it, the space in the painting, the presence of reality behind its thinness, the fibrous space lying behind the illusion, the absence of color and depth, the condition of emptiness and blackness underneath the gold powder. This gold powder which had fallen now on the garden, on each leaf of the trees, which was flowering inside the room, on her black hair, on the skin of his wrists, on his frayed suit sleeve, on the green carpet, on her green dress, on the bottle of perfume, on his voice, on her anxiety—the very breath of living, the very breath he and she took in to live and breathed out to live—that very breath could mow and blow it all down.