A Spy in the House of Love (13 page)

Then with unexpected swiftness, he pulled an
automobile horn out of his pocket, affixed it to his buttonhole and pressed it with
the exuberance of a woman squeezing perfume from an atomizer and said: “Listen
to the language of the future. The word will disappear altogether and that is
how human beings will talk to each other!”

And bowing with infinite control of the raging
waters of alcohol which were pressing against the dam of his politeness, Cold
Cuts prepared to leave for his duties at the morgue.

Mambo began his drumming and Sabina began to
look feverish and trapped as she had looked the first time Jay had seen her.

Dressed in red and silver, she evoked the
sounds and imagery of fire engines as they tore through the streets of New York,
alarming the heart with the violent accelerations of catastrophes.

All dressed in red and silver, she evoked
the tearing red and silver siren cutting a pathway through the flesh.

The first time he had looked at her he had
felt: “Everything will burn!”

Out of the red and silver and the long cry
of alarm to the poet who survives (even if secretly and invisibly) in every
human being as the child survives in him (denied and disguised), to this poet
she threw an unexpected challenge, a ladder in the middle of the city and
ordained: “Climb!”

As she appeared, all orderly alignment of
the city gave way before this ladder one was invited to climb, standing
straight in space like the ladder of Baron
Munchhausen
which led to the sky.

Only her ladders led to fire.

Jay laughed and shook his head from side to
side at the persistence of the image he had of Sabina. After seven years she
still
had not learned to sit still. She talked profusely and continuously with a
feverish breathlessness like one in fear of silence. She sat as if she could
not bear to sit for long and when she rose to buy cigarettes she was equally
eager to return to her seat. Impatient, alert, watchful, as if in dread of
being attacked, restless and keen. She drank hurriedly, she smiled so swiftly
that he was never certain it had been a smile, she listened only partially to
what was being said to her, and even when someone in the bar leaned over and
shouted out her name in her direction she did not respond at first, as if it
were not her own.

Her way of looking at the door of the bar as
if expecting the proper moment to make her escape, her erratic and sudden
gestures, her sudden sulky silences. She behaved like someone who had all the
symptoms of guilt.

Above the iridescence of the candles, above the
mists of cigarette smoke and the echoes of the cajoling blues, Sabina was aware
that Jay was meditating on her. But it would be too dangerous to question him;
he was a satirist, and all she would obtain from him at this moment was a
caricature which she could not take lightly or dismiss, and which would, in her
present mood, add heavily to the weights pulling her downward.

Whenever Jay shook his head kindly, with the
slow heavy playfulness of a bear, he was about to say something devastating,
which he called his brutal honesty. And Sabina would not challenge this. So she
began a swift, spiraling, circuitous story about a party at which indistinct
incidents had taken place, hazy scenes from which no one could distinguish the
heroine or the victim. By the time Jay felt he recognized the place
(Montparnasse, seven years ago, a party at which Sabina had actually been
jealous of the strong bond between Jay and Lillian which she was seeking to
break), Sabina was already gone from there, and talking as in a broken dream,
with spaces, reversals, retractions and galloping fantasies.

She was now in Morocco, visiting the Arabian
baths with the native women, sharing their pumice stone, and learning from the
prostitutes how to paint her eyes with kohl from the market place.

“
It’s coal
dust,
“explained
Sabina, “
and you
place it right inside of the eyes. It smarts at first, and it makes you cry,
but that spreads it out on the edge of the eyelids and that is how they get
that shiny, coal black rim around the eyes.
”

“
Didn’t you get an infection?
“asked Jay.

“
Oh, no, the prostitutes are very careful to
have the kohl blessed at the mosque.
”

Everyone laughed at this—Mambo who had been
standing near, Jay, and two indistinct personages who had been sitting at the
next table but who had been sliding their chairs to listen to Sabina. Sabina
did not laugh; she was invaded by another memory of Morocco. Jay could see the
images passing through her eyes like a film being censored. He knew she was
busy eliminating other stories she was about to tell; she might even be
regretting the story about the bath, and now it was as if all she had said had
been written on a huge blackboard and she took a sponge and effaced it all by
adding: “Actually, this did not happen to me. It was told to me by someone who
went to Morocco,” and before anyone could ask: “Do you mean that you never went
to Morocco at all” she continued to confuse the threads by adding that this was
a story she had read somewhere or heard at a bar, and as soon as she had erased
in the minds of her listeners any face which could be directly attributed to
her own responsibility, she began another story…

The faces and the figures of her personages
appeared only half-drawn, and when Jay had barely begun to reconstruct the
missing fragment (when she told about the man who was polishing his own
telescope glass she did not want to say too much for fear Jay would recognize
Philip whom he had known in Vienna and whom they all called playfully in Paris:
“Vienna-as-it-was-before-the-war”), when Sabina would interpose another face
and figure as one does in dreams, and when Jay had laboriously decided she was
talking about Philip (with whom he was sure now she had had an affair), it
turned out that she was no longer talking about a man polishing a telescope
glass with the umbrella hung up in the middle of the room above his work, but
about a woman who continued to play the harp at a concert in Mexico City during
the revolution when someone had shot at the lights of the concert hall, and she
had felt that if she continued to play she would prevent a panic; and as Jay
knew this story had been told of Lillian, and that it was not as a harpist but
as a pianist that Lillian had continued to play, Sabina became aware that she
did not want to remind Jay about Lillian as the memory would be painful to him,
for Sabina’s seduction of Jay in Paris had been in part responsible for
Lillian’s desertion of him, and so she quickly reversed her story, and it was
Jay who wondered whether he was not hearing right, whether perhaps he had been
drinking too much and had imagined she was talking about Lillian, because
actually at this very moment she was talking about a young man, an aviator, who
had been told not to look into the eyes of the dead.

Jay could not retain any sequence of the people
she had loved, hated, escaped from, any more than he could keep track of her
very personal appearance as she herself would say: “At that time I was a blond,
and I wore my hair very short,” or “This was before I was married when I was
only nineteen” (and once she had told him she had been married at the age of
eighteen). Impossible to know who she had betrayed, forgotten, married,
deserted, or clung to. It was like her profession. The first time he had
questioned her, she had answered immediately: “I am an actress.” But when he
pressed her, he could not find in what play she had acted, whether she had been
a success or a failure, whether, perhaps, (as he decided later) she had merely
wished
to be an actress but had never worked persistently enough, seriously enough
except in the way she was working now, changing personalities with such
rapidity that Jay was reminded of a kaleidoscope.

He sought to capture the recurrence of certain
words in her talk, thinking they might be used as keys, but if the word
“actress,” “miraculous,” “travel,” “wandering,” “relationship” did occur
frequently, it remained impossible to know whether or not she used them in
their literal sense or symbolically, for they were the same to her. He had
heard her say once: “When you are hurt, you travel as far as you can from the
place of the hurt,” and when he examined her meaning found she was referring to
a change of quarters within fifty blocks in the city of New York.

She was compelled by a confessional fever which
forced her into lifting the veil slightly, only a corner of it, and then
frightened when anyone listened too attentively, especially Jay whom she did
not trust, whom she knew found the truth only in the sense of exposure of the
flaws, the weaknesses, the foibles.

As soon as Jay listened too attentively, she
took a giant sponge and erased all she had said by an absolute denial as if
this confusion were in itself a mantle of protection.

At first she beckoned and lured one into her
world, then she blurred the passageways, confused all the images
as if to
elude detection.

“False mysteries,” said Jay savagely, baffled
and irritated by her elusiveness. “But what is she hiding behind these false
mysteries?”

Her behavior always aroused in him (in the kind
of mind he had with an obsession for truth, for revelation, for openness,
brutal exposure) a desire which resembled the desire of a man to violate a
woman who resists him, to violate a virginity which creates a barrier to his
possession. Sabina always incited him to a violent desire to rip all her
pretenses, her veils, and to discover the core of
her self
which, by this perpetual change of face and mobility, escaped all detection.

How right he had been to paint Sabina always as
a mandrake with fleshly roots, bearing a solitary purple flower in a
purple-bell-shaped corolla of narcotic flesh. How right he had been to paint
her born with red-gold eyes always burning as from caverns, from behind trees,
as one of the luxuriant women, a tropical growth, excommunicated from the bread
line as too rich a substance for everyday living, placing her there merely as a
denizen of the world of fire, and content with her intermittent, parabolic
appearances.

“Sabina, do you remember our elevator ride in
Paris?”

“Yes, I do remember.”

“We had no place to go. We wandered through the
streets. I remember it was your idea to take an elevator.”

(We were ravenous for e other, I remember,
Sabina. We got into an elevator and I began to kiss her. First floor. Second
floor. I couldn’t let go of her. Third floor, and when the elevator came to a
standstill it was too late…I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t let go of her if all Paris
had been watching us. She pressed the button wildly, and we went on kissing as
the elevator came down. When we got to the bottom it was worse, so she pressed
the button again, and we went up and down, up and down, while people kept
trying to stop it and get on…)

Jay laughed uncontrollably at the memory, at
Sabina’s audacity. At that moment Sabina had been stripped of all mystery and
Jay had tasted what the mystery contained: the most ardent frenzy of desire.

The dawn appearing weakly at the door silenced
them. The music had ceased long ago and they had not noticed. They had
continued their own drumming in talk.

Sabina tightened her cape around her shoulders
as if daylight were the greatest enemy of all. To the dawn she would not even
address a feverish speech. She stared at it angrily, and left the bar.

There is no bleaker moment in the life of the
city than that one which crosses the boundary lines between those who have not
slept all night and those who are going to work. It was for Sabina as if two
races of men and women lived on earth, the night people and the day people,
never meeting face to face except at this moment. Whatever Sabina had worn
which seemed to glitter during the night, lost its colors in the dawn. The
determined expressions of those going to work appeared to her like a reproach.
Her fatigue was not like theirs. Hers marked her face like a long fever, left
purple shadows under her eyes. She wanted to conceal her face from them. She
hung her head so that her hair would partly cover it.

The mood of
lostness
persisted. For the first time she felt she could not go to Alan. She carried
too great a weight of untold stories, too heavy a weight of memories, she was
followed by too many ghosts of personages unsolved, of experiences not yet
understood, of blows and humiliations not yet dissolved. She might return and
plead extreme tiredness, and fall asleep, but her sleep would be restive, and
she might talk in her dreams.

This time Alan would not have the power to
exorcise her mood. Nor could she tell him about the event which most tormented
her: the man she had first seen some months ago from the window of her hotel
room, standing under her very window reading a newspaper, as if waiting for her
to come out. Once more she had seen him on her way to visit Philip. She had
encountered him in the subway station, and he had let several subway cars pass
by in order to take the one she was taking.

It was not a flirtation. He made no effort to
speak to her. He seemed engaged in an impersonal observation of her. In Mambo’s
Night Club he had sat a few tables away and he was writing in a notebook.