Lillian felt they would live out something new. They had first known each other in New York when Lillian was disconnected from Larry. Jay had left for Paris because he wanted to live near the painters he admired. Lillian's engagement took her there for several months each year. New for her, this total acceptance of all life, ugliness, poverty, sensuality, Jay's total acceptance, lack of selectivity or discrimination or withdrawals. Lillian thought him a gentle savage, a passionate cannibal. Motherhood prepared Lillian for this abdication of herself. Lillian adopted all his infatuations and enthusiasms: she sat with him contemplating from a café table the orange face of a clock, the prostitute with the wooden leg; played chess at the Café de La Régence at the very table where Napoleon and Robespierre had played chess. She helped him gather and note fifty ways of saying drunk.

She abandoned classical music and became a jazz pianist. Classical music could not contain her improvisations, her tempo, her vehemences.

She watched over Jay's work, searched Paris shops for the best paint, even learned to make some from ancient crafts. She watched over his needs. She had his sketch book silk screened and carried the Portfolios to New York and sold them. People were asking questions about Jay. They laughed at his casual gifts to them, loved the freedom, the unbound pages, the surprises, which gave them the feeling they were sharing an intimate, private document, like a personal sketch book.

His rooms remained the same everywhere: the plain iron bed, the hard pillows, the one glass. They were illumined by orgies: let us see how long we can make love, how long, how many hours, days, nights.

When she went to New York to visit her children, he wrote to her: "Terribly alive but pained, and feeling absolutely that I need you. But I must see you soon. I see you bright and wonderful. I want to get more familiar with you. I love you. I loved you when you came and sat on the edge of the bed. All that afternoon like warm mist. Get closer to me, I promise you it will be beautiful. I like so much your frankness, your humility almost. I could never hurt that. It was to a woman like you I should have been married."

Small room, so shabby, like a deep-set alcove. Immediately there was the richness of Jay's voice, the feeling of sinking into warm flesh, every twist of the body awakening new centers of pleasure. "Everything is good, good," murmured Jay. "Have I been less brutal than you expected? Did the violence of my painting lead you to expect more?" Lillian was baffled by these questions. What was he measuring himself against? A myth in his own mind of what women expected?

In his own work everything was larger than nature. Was he trying to match his own extravagances? If in his eyes he carried magnifying glasses, did he see himself in life as a smaller figure?