Lillian was bewildered by the enormous discrepancy which existed between Jay's models and what he painted. Together they would walk along the same Seine river, she would see it silky grey, sinuous and glittering, he would draw it opaque with fermented mud, and a shoal of wine bottle corks and weeds caught in the stagnant edges.

He had discovered a woman hobo who slept every night in exactly the same place, in the middle of the sidewalk, in front of the Pantheon. She had found a subway ventilator from which a little heat arose and sometimes a pale grey smoke, so that she seemed to be burning. She lay in a tidy way, her head resting on her market bag packed with her few belongings, her brown dress pulled over her ankles, her shawl neatly tied under her chin. She slept calm and dignified as if she were in her own bed.

Jay had painted her soiled and scratched feet, the corns on her toes, the black nails. But he overlooked the story Lillian loved and remembered of her, that when they tried to remove her to an old woman's home she had refused saying: "I prefer to stay here where all the great men of France are buried. They keep me company. They watch over me."

Lillian was reminded of the Talmudic words: "We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are."

Lillian would become so confused by Jay's chaotic living, his dadaism, his contradictions, that she submitted to Djuna's clarifications. Jay's "realism," his need to expose, debunk, as he said, his need for reality, did not seem as real as Djuna's intuitive interpretations of their acts.

Lillian had no confidence in herself as a woman. She thought that it was because her father had wanted her to be a boy. She did not see herself as beautiful, and as a girl loved to put on her brother's clothes at first to please her father, and later because it gave her a feeling of strength to take flights from the problems of being a woman. In her brother's jeans, with short hair, with a heavy sweater and tennis shoes, she took on some of her brother's assurance, and reached the conviction that men determined their own destiny and women did not. She chose a man's costume as the primitives chose masks to frighten away the enemy. But the mystery play she had acted was too mysterious. Pretend to be a boy, when what she most wanted was to be loved by one. Act the active lover so the lover will understand she wished him to be active with her. She acted the active lover not because she was the aggressor but because she wanted to demonstrate...