Chapter 20 She is bad for you

  I met Fred Perlés today. He is timid, sad-eyed, a sad clown. He echoes Henry, mimics him.

   We were sitting in the kitchen of their new home. Fred works for the Tribune and he took this small workman’s apartment in a workman’s quarter, Clichy, next door to Montmartre and the Place Blanche. It is a plain, bare house. One walks up the uncarpeted stairs, and the thin walls let all the noises through. Fred and Henry have two rooms and a kitchen. It is barely furnished, with only essentials, beds, tables, chairs. In the kitchen there is a round table. Once we are sitting down there is no room to walk around.

   This is a sort of housewarming. Henry is opening a bottle of wine. Fred is tossing a salad. Fred seems pale beside Henry, pale and sickly.

   Henry said, “Here is the first woman with whom I can be absolutely sincere.”

   “Laugh, Anaïs,” said Fred. “Henry says he loves to hear you laugh, that you are the only woman who has a sense of gaiety, a wise tolerance.”

   A few pans, unmatched dishes from the flea market, old shirts for kitchen towels. Tacked on the walls, a list of books to get, a list of menus to eat in the future, clippings, reproductions, and water colors of Henry’s. Henry keeps house like a Dutch housekeeper. He is very neat and clean. No dirty dishes about. It is all monastic, really, with no trimmings, no decorations. Plainness. The white and light grey walls.

Yesterday Henry came to Louveciennes. A new Henry, or, rather, the Henry I sensed behind the one generally known, the Henry behind the one he has written down. This Henry can understand: he is sentient.

   He looked so serious. His violence has burnt itself out. The coarseness, in the alchemy, became strength. He had received a letter from June, in pencil, irregular, mad, like a child’s moving, simple cries, of her love for him. “Such a letter blots out everything.” I felt the moment had come to expose the June I knew, to give him June, “because it will make you love her more. It’s a beautiful June. Other days I felt you might laugh at my portrait, jeer at its naïveté. Today I know you won’t.”

   I let him read all I had written about June.

   What is happening? He is deeply moved, torn apart. He believes.

   “It is in this way that I should have written about June,” he says. “The other is incomplete, superficial. You have got her.”

   “You leave softness, tenderness out of your work, you write down only the hatred, the rebellions, the violence. I have only inserted what you leave out. What you leave out is not because you don’t feel it, or know it, or understand, as you think. It is left out only because it is more difficult to express, and so far, your writing has come out of violence and anger.”

   I confide in him completely, in the profound Henry. He is won over. He says, “Such love is wonderful. I do not hate or despise that. I see what you give each other. I see it so well. Let me read on. This is a revelation to me.” I tremble while he is reading. He understands too well. Suddenly he says, “Anaïs, I have just realized that what I give is something coarse and plain, compared to that. I realize that when June returns . . .”

   I stop him. “You don’t know what you have given me! It is not coarse and plain.” And then I add, “You see a beautiful June now.”

   “No, I hate her.”

   “You hate her?”

   “Yes, I hate her,” Henry says, “because I see by your notes that we are her dupes, that you are duped, that there is a pernicious, destructive direction to her lies. Insidiously, they are meant to deform me in your eyes, and you in my eyes. If June returns, she will poison us against each other. I fear that.”

   “There is a friendship between us, Henry, which is not possible for June to understand.”

   “For that she will hate us, and she will combat us with her own tools.”

   “What can she use against our understanding of each other?”

   “Lies,” said Henry.

   We were both so aware of her power over both of us, of the which bound Henry and me, of the friendship which bound me to June. When Henry realized that I had trusted him because I understood him, he said, “What penetration you have, Anaïs, how wise you are.”

   It was I who defended June against one of Fred’s remarks to Henry.

   “June is evil,” Fred said. “June is bad for you.”“She is not bad for you, Henry,” I said. “Her lies, her unnecessary complications as you call them, interest the writer in you. Novels are born out of conflict. She was so busy living that she never took time to listen to you, to understand you. June will be good for your novels, and I will be good for you.”

   Henry was in a subdued mood.

   “If I had the means to help you get June back to Paris, would you want me to do it?”

   Henry winced.