In the same letter he wrote: "I don't know what I expect of you, Lillian, but it is something in the way of a miracle. I am going to demand everything of you, even the impossible, because you are strong."

Lillian's secret weakness then became the cause of pain. She had a need of a mirror in which she could see her image loved by Jay. Or perhaps a shrine, with herself in the place of honor. Unique and irreplaceable Lillian (as she had been for Larry). But with Jay this was impossible. The whole world flowed through his being in one day. Lillian was apt to find sitting in her place (or lying in her bed) the most unlovely of all women, undernourished, unkempt, anonymous, ordinary, he had picked up in a café, with nothing to explain her presence except that she was perhaps the opposite of Lillian. To her he gave the coat Lillian had left in his room. The visitor had even brought with her a little grey wilted dog and Jay who hated animals was even kind to this dusty mongrel that was molting.

For Jay's kindness was his greatest expression of anarchy. It was always an act of defiance to those one loved, to those one lived with. His was a mockery of the laws of devotion. He could not give to Lillian. He was always generous to outsiders, to those he owed nothing to, giving paints to those who did not paint, a drink to the man who was over-saturated with drink, his time to one who did not value it, the painting Lillian favored to anyone who came to the studio.

His giving was a defiance of evaluation and selection. He wanted to assert the value of what others discarded or neglected. His favorite friend was not a great painter but the most mediocre of all painters, who reflected Jay like a caricature, a diminished echo, who hummed his words as Jay did, nodded his head as Jay did, laughed when Jay laughed. They practiced dadaism together: everything was absurd, everything was a joke. Jay would launch into frenzied praise of his paintings. (Lillian called him Sancho Panza.)

Lillian would ask with candor: "Do you really admire him so much, as much as all that? Is he truly greater than Gauguin? Greater than Picasso?"

Jay would laugh at her gravity. "Oh no, I was carried away by my own words, just got going. I think I was talking about my own painting, really. I enjoy mystifying, confusing, contradicting. Deep down, you know, I don't believe in anything."

"But people will believe you."

"They admire the wrong painters anyway."

"But you're adding to the absurdities."