The World Is the Home of Love and Death Read Online Free Page B

the kind that kill you.
    Ida is here for a lot of reasons. Ida is a nervous collector and judge, but she is in Momma’s shoes when she is in Paris: there
she
has to perform for the women she admires. She feels she attracts as many people there as Lila does—Ida will compete with anyone.
    That’s a high value to set on yourself
, Ma thinks. Ida seems to Momma to be beautiful in her holding back—women’s beauties and abilities seem fearsome and of prior interest to Momma.
    The sight and presence of Ida’s
“beauty”
(will and courage and freedom) excite Momma, who makes a mad offering of a devoted glance—Ma, who is painfully, flyingly awake with hope, and cynicism.
    Ida has gooseflesh.
    Ma says, “I’ll be frank; I’ll be brutally frank: I’m nervous, I’m nervous about you. You’re intelligent, you like books, but watch, I don’t have a yellow streak. If I make a fool of myself, I expect you to know you have only yourself to blame; you know where you stand in this town, you have genuine
stature
around here. It’s more than that: What you say counts. So, if I get tense, blame yourself … blame your own …
stature.
Will you do that for me?” She is being
Brave Like Ida.
    “Lila, are you someone who might be a good friend? I see that you might be that. Oh, it is unbearable.”
    “I am a good friend. Don’t let the way I look fool you. I have the soul of a good friend.”
    “You’re a darling!”
    But the world is unbearable: a chill goes through Momma: in Ida’s voice is a quality of unyielding announcement on the matter.
Ida is someone who has to run things—I wasn’t good enough for her to hold back and let me speak, too.
I think what Momma sees is that her seeing Ida as having a realer “beauty” is not triumph enough for Ida—Ida wants to hurt Momma, so that Ida can know more satisfactorily than in Momma’s being merely temporarily agreeable that she, Ida, is splendid, is the more splendid creature. You can’t call Momma “darling” unless you do it with a note of defeat, or conspiracy, without causing trouble with her. To Ma, what Ida does seems romantically naïve.
    This is what I think Momma saw:
Ida owns everyone in sight.
Momma is sexed
angrily and ignorantly
and is sexually fired by curiosity. And she did not marry for money. Ida sometimes to Momma seems only to have the shine and edginess and sharpness of calculation of money, and to be hardly flesh and blood at all. Momma feels that Ida is like her, like Momma, but is less well educated in love, that she is at an earlier and more dangerous stage: Ida is sexed ungenerously, like a schoolgirl.
    Momma’s romantic standing is not a
“safe”
thing for her.
A woman like me finds out love is a different kettle of fish—I should have been a prostitute.
This stuff boils in Momma; it is her sexual temper—it supplies the vivacity in Ma’s sultry, wanting-vengeance prettiness. Tempestuousness and mind—Ma suspects everyone of cheapness when it comes to love—
except S.L.
, her husband. Lila romanticizes his emotional extravagance, his carelessness—perhaps he is romantic.
    She is alive and reckless and glowing now and does not seem devoted to remaining at home and being respectable—but she has been that so far in her life; and she feels clever in her choices. I think she is as morally illiterate as Ida, and as unscathed so far: this is what she claims by being so willful—that she is usually right, unpunished. This is what her destructiveness comes from.
    Both women feel that women draw you in and are grotesquely lonely and grotesquely powerful in intimacies. Ida has a coarse look.
What it is is that Ida has to be the star.
Ida’s courage is self-denial and self-indulgence mixed.
    Momma’s performance is ill-mounted, since it rests on Ida’s
having a heart.
Ma has risen from the void of dailiness and nobodyhood to flutter in the midst of her whitish fire, but she flutters burningly in avoid of
heartlessness: it is worthless to