Lillian had the feeling that Sancho did not exist. True, he presented a Chinese face, but when she sought to know Sancho she found an evasive smile which was a reflection of Jay's smile, a sympathy which was an act of politeness, an opinion which, at the slightest opposition, vanished, a head waiter at a banquet, a valet for your coat, a shadow at the top of the stairs. His eyes carried no messages. If her fingers touched him she felt his body was fluid, evasive, anonymous. What Jay asserted he did not deny. He imitated Jay's adventures, but Lillian felt he had neither possessed life, nor lost it, neither devoured it nor spat it out. He was the wool in the bedroom slipper, the storm strip on the window, the felt stop on the piano key, the shock absorber on the car spring. He was the invisible man, and Lillian could not understand their fraternal bond. She suffered to see a reduced replica of Jay, his shrunken double.

"Right after being with me," Lillian said once, "did you have to take up with such an unlovely woman?"

"Oh that," said Jay. "Reichel believes me to be callous, amoral, ungrateful. He thinks because I have you I'm the luckiest man in the world, and it irritated me, his lecturing, so I launched into a role, to shock him. I talked to him about the whores, and had him gasping to think I might be callous about you. Can you understand that? I realize that it's all childish, but don't take it seriously."

"Eh? Sancho?" Sancho would laugh hysterically. It was what Lillian called the Village Idiot Act. Lillian laughed with them, but not with all of herself.

"I'm finding my own world," said Jay. "A certain condition of existence, a universe of mere BEING, where one lives like a plant, instinctively. No will. The great indifference, like that of the Hindu who lets himself be passive in order to let the seeds in him flower. Something between the will of the European and the karma of the Oriental. I want just the joy of illumination, the joy of what I see in the world. Just to receive vibrations. Susceptibility to all life. Acceptance. Taking it all in. Just BE. That was always the role of the artist: to reveal the joy, the ecstasy. My life has been one long opposition to will. I have practiced letting things happen. I have dodged jobs, responsibilities, and I want to express in painting the relaxing of will and straining for the sake of enjoyment."