For June is destruction.
We have never been as happy or as miserable. Our quarrels are portentous, tremendous, violent. We are both wrathful to the point of madness; we desire death. My face is ravaged by tears, the veins on my temple swell. Hugo’s mouth trembles. One cry from me brings him suddenly into my arms, sobbing. And then he desires me physically. We cry and kiss and come at the same moment. And the next moment we analyze and talk rationally. It is like the life of the Russians in The Idiot. It is hysteria. In cooler moments I wonder at the extravagance of our feelings. Dullness and peace are forever over.
I really believe that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife. I think highly of faithfulness. But my temperament belongs to the writer, not to the woman. Such a separation may seem childish, but it is possible. Subtract the overintensity, the sizzling of ideas, and you get a woman who loves perfection. And faithfulness is one of the perfections. It seems stupid and unintelligent to me now because I have bigger plans in mind.
A startlingly white face, burning eyes. June Mansfield, Henry’s wife. As she came towards me from the darkness of my garden into the light of the doorway I saw for the first time the most beautiful woman on earth.
Years ago, when I tried to imagine a true beauty, I had created an image in my mind of just that woman.
Her beauty drowned me. As I sat in front of her I felt that I would do anything mad for her, anything she asked of me. Henry faded. She was color, brilliance, strangeness.
I want to run out and kiss her fantastic beauty, kiss it and say, “You carry away with you a reflection of me, a part of me. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. You will always be part of my life. If I love you, it must be because we have shared at some time the same imaginings, the same madness, the same stage.
“You are the only woman who ever answered the demands of my imagination.” She answers, “It is a good thing that I am going away. You would soon unmask me. I am powerless before a woman. I do not know how to deal with a woman.”
In the café I see ashes under the skin of her face. Disintegration. What terrible anxiety I feel. I want to put my arms around her. I feel her receding into death and I am willing to enter death to follow her, to embrace her. She is dying before my eyes. Her tantalizing, somber beauty is dying. Her strange, manlike strength.
He has hurt her pride by desiring her opposite: ugly, common, passive women. He cannot endure her positivism, her strength. I hate Henry now, heartily. I hate men who are afraid of women’s strength. Probably Jean loved her strength, her destructive power. For June is destruction.
What, then, has she moved in me? I have wanted to possess her as if I were a man, but I have also wanted her to love me with the eyes, the hands, the senses that only women have. It is a soft and subtle penetration.
I said, “After all, if there is an explanation of the mystery it is this: The love between women is a refuge and an escape into harmony. In the love between man and woman there is resistance and conflict. Two women do not judge each other, brutalize each other, or find anything to ridicule. They surrender to sentimentality, mutual understanding, romanticism. Such love is death, I’ll admit.”
