A Spy in the House of Love (14 page)

This was the way criminals were shadowed, just
before being caught. Was he a detective? What did he suspect her of? Would he
report to Alan? Or to her parents? Or would he take his notes downtown to all
the awesome buildings in which they carried on investigations of one kind or
another, and would she receive one day a notice asking her to leave the United
States and return to her
pla
of birth, Hungary, because
the life of
Ninon
de
l’Enclos
,
or Madame Bovary was not permitted by the law?

If she told Alan that she had been followed by
a man, Alan would smile and say: “Why, of course, this isn’t the first time, is
it? That’s the penalty you pay for being a beautiful woman. You wouldn’t want
it not to happen, would you?”

For the first time, on this bleak early morning
walk through New York streets not yet cleaned of the night people’s cigarette
butts and empty liquor bottles, she understood Duchamp’s painting of a “Nude
Descending a Staircase.” Eight or ten outlines of the same woman, like many
multiple exposures of a woman’s personality, neatly divided into many layers,
walking down the stairs in unison.

If she went to Alan now it would be like
detaching one of these cut-outs of a woman, and forcing it to walk separately
from the rest, but once detached from the unison, it would reveal that it was a
mere outline of a woman, the figure design as the eye could see it, but empty
of substance, this substance having evaporated through the spaces between each
layer of the personality. A divided woman indeed, a woman divided into
numberless silhouettes, and she could see this apparent form of Sabina leaving
a desperate and a lonely one walking the streets in quest of hot coffee, being
greeted by Alan as a transparently innocent young girl he had married ten years
before and sworn to cherish, as he had, only he had continued to cherish the
same young girl he had married, the first exposure of Sabina, the first image delivered
into his hands, the first dimension, of this elaborated, complex and extended
series of
Sabinas
which had been born later and which
she had not been able to give him. Each year, just as a tree puts forth a new
ring of growth, she should have been able to say: “Alan, here is a new version
of Sabina. Add it to the rest, fuse them well, hold on to them when you embrace
her, hold them all at once in your arms, or else, divided, separated, each
image will live a life of its own, and it will not be one but six, or seven, or
eight
Sabinas
who will walk sometimes in unison, by a
great effort of synthesis, sometimes separately, one of them following a deep
drumming into forests of black hair and luxurious mouths, another visiting
Vienna-as-it-was-before-the-war, and still another lying beside an insane young
man, and still another opening maternal arms to a trembling frightened Donald.”
Was this the crime to have sought to marry each Sabina to another mate, to
match each one in turn by a different life?

Oh, she was tired, but it was not from loss of
sleep, or from talking too much in a smoke-filled room, or from eluding Jay’s
caricatures, or Mambo’s reproaches, or Philip’s distrust of her, or because
Donald by his behavior so much like a child had made her feel that her thirty
years were a grandmother’s age. She was tired of pulling these disparate
fragments together. She understood Jay’s paintings too. It was perhaps at such
a moment of isolation that Madame Bovary had taken the poison. It was the
moment when the hidden life is in danger of being exposed, and no woman could
bear the condemnation.

But why should she fear exposure? At this
moment Alan was deeply asleep, or quietly reading if he were not asleep.

Was it merely this figure of a lie detector
dogging her steps which caused her so acute an anxiety?

Guilt is the one burden human beings cannot
bear alone.

After taking a cup of coffee, she went to the
hotel where they knew her already, took a sleeping pill, and took refuge in
sleep.

When she awakened at ten o’clock that night she
could hear from her hotel room the music from Mambo’s Night Club across the
street.

She needed a confessor! Would she find it
there, in the world of the artists? All over the world they had their meeting
places, their affiliations, their rules of membership, their kingdoms, their
chiefs, their secret channels of communication. They established common beliefs
in certain painters, certain musicians, certain writers. They were the
misplaced persons too, unwanted at home usually, or repudiated by their
families. But they established new families, their own religions, their own
doctors, their own communities.

She remembered someone asking Jay: “Can I be
admitted if I show proofs of excellent taste?”

“That is not enough,” said Jay. “Are you also
willing to become an exile? Or a scapegoat? We are the notorious scapegoats,
for living as others live only in their dreams at night, for confessing openly
what others only confess to doctors under guarantee of professional secret. We
are also underpaid: people feel that we are in love with our work, and that one
should not be paid for doing what you most love to do.”

In this world they had criminals too. Gangsters
in the world of art, who produced corrosive works born of hatred, who killed and
poisoned with their art. You can kill with a painting or a book too.

Was Sabina one of them? What had she destroyed?

She entered Mambo’s Night Club. The artificial
palm trees seemed less green, the drums less violent. The floor, doors, walls
were slightly askew with age.

Djuna arrived at the same moment, her black
rehearsal tights showing under her raincoat, her hair bound in a ribbon like a
school-girl’s.

When such magical entrances and exits take
place in a ballet, when the dancers vanish behind columns or dense hills of
shadows, no one asks them for passports or identifications. Djuna arrived as a
true dancer does, walking as naturally from her ballet bar work a few floors
above the night club as she had in Paris when she studied with the Opera ballet
dancers. Sabina was not surprised to see her. But what she remembered of her
was not so much her skill in dancing, her smooth dancer’s legs, tense, but the
skill of her compassion, as if she exercised every day on an invisible bar of
pain, her understanding as well as her body.

Djuna would know who had stolen, who had
betrayed, and what had been stolen, what had been betrayed. And Sabina might
cease falling—falling from all her incandescent trapezes, from all her ladders
to fire.

They were all brothers and sisters, moving on
the revolving stages of the unconscious, never intentionally mystifying others
as much as themselves, caught in a ballet of errors and impersonations, but
Djuna could distinguish between illusion and living and loving. She could detect
the s
hil
of a crime which others could not bring to
trial. She would know the identity of the criminal.

Sabina had only to wait now.

The drums ceased to play as if they were
muffled by several forests of intricate impenetrable vegetation. Sabina’s anxiety
had ceased to beat against her temples and deafen her to outer sounds. Rhythm
was restored to her blood and her hands lay still on her lap.

While she waited for Djuna to be free she
thought about the lie detector who had been watching her actions. He was there
in the cafe again, sitting alone, and writing in a notebook. She prepared
herself mentally for the interview.

She leaned over and called him: “How do you do?
Have you come to arrest me?”

He closed his notebook, walked over to her
table, sat down beside her. She said:
I knew it would happen, but not quite
so soon. Sit down. I know exactly what you think of me. You are saying to
yourself: here is the notorious imposter, the international spy in the house of
love. (Or should I specify: in the house of many loves?) I must warn you, you
must handle me delicately: I am covered with a mantle of iridescence as easily
destroyed as a dust flower, and although I am quite willing to be arrested, if
you handle me roughly you will lose much of the evidence. I don’t want you to
taint that fragile coat of astonishing colors created by my illusions, which no
painter has ever been able to reproduce. Strange, isn’t it, that no chemical
will give a human being the iridescence that illusions give them? Give me your
hat. You look so formal and uncomfortable! And so you finally tracked down my
impersonations! But are you aware of the courage, the audacity which my
profession requires? Very few people are gifted for it. I had the vocation. It
showed very early in my capacity for deluding myself. I was one who could call
a backyard a garden, a tenement apartment a house, and if I were late when I
came home, to avoid a scolding I could imagine and recreate instantly such
interesting obstacles, adventures, that it would take my parents several
minutes before they could shake off the spell and return to reality. I could
step out of my ordinary self or my ordinary life into multiple selves and lives
without attracting attention. I mean that my first crime, as you may be surprised
to hear, was committed against myself. I was then a corrupter of minors, and
this minor was myself
.
What I corrupted was what is called the truth in
favor of a more marvelous world. I could always improve on the facts. I was
never arrested for this: it concerned only myself. My parents were not wise
enough to see that such
prestigitation
of facts might
produce a great artist, or at least a great actress. They beat me, to shake out
the dust of delusions. But strangely enough, the more my father beat me, the
more abundantly did this dust gather again, and it was not gray or brown dust
as you find it in its daily form, but what is known to adventurers as fool’s
gold. Give me your coat. As an investigator you may be more interested to know
that in self-defense, I accuse the writers of fairy tales. Not hunger, not
cruelty, not my parents, but these tales which promised that sleeping in the
snow never caused pneumonia, that bread never turned stale, that trees
blossomed out of season, that dragons could be killed with courage, that
intense wishing would be followed immediately by fulfillment of the wish.
Intrepid wishing, said the fairytales, was more effective than labor. The smoke
issuing from Aladdin’s lamp was my first smokescreen, and the lies learned from
fairy tales were my first perjuries. Let us say I had perverted tendencies: I
believed everything I read.

Sabina laughed at her own words. Djuna thought
she was drinking too much and looked at her.

“What made you laugh, Sabina?”

“Meet the lie detector, Djuna. He may arrest
me.”

“Oh, Sabina. You’ve never done anything to be
arrested for!”

Djuna gazed at Sabina’s face. The intentness of
it, the feverishness she had always seen on it was no longer that of burning
aliveness. There was a tightness to the features, and fear in the eyes.

“I have to talk to you, Djuna… I can’t sleep…”

“I tried to find you when I came from Paris.
You change your address so often, and even your name.”

“You know I’ve always wanted to break the molds
which life forms around one if one lets them.”

“Why?”

“I want to trespass boundaries, erase all
identifications, anything which fixes one permanently into one mold, one place,
without hope of change.”

“This is the opposite of what everyone usually
wants, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I used to say that I had housing
problems: mine was that I didn’t want a house. I wanted a boat, a trailer,
anything that moved freely. I feel safest of all when no one knows where I am,
when for instance, I’m in a hotel room where even the number is scratched off
the door.”

“But safe from what?”

“I don’t know what I’m saving from detection,
except perhaps that I’m guilty of several loves, of many loves instead of one.”

“That’s no crime. Merely a case of divided
loves!”

“But the lies, the lies I have to tell… You
know, just as some criminals tell you: ‘I never found a way to get what I
wanted except by robbery,’ I often feel like saying: ‘I have never found a way
to get what I wanted except by lies.’”

“Are you ashamed of it?”

Sabina grew frightened again. “There comes a
moment with each man, in each relationship, when I feel lonely.”

“Because of the lies?”

“But if I told the truth I would be not only
lonely but also alone, and I would cause each one great harm. How can I tell A
that for me he is like a father.”

“That’s why you deserted him over and over
again as one must desert the parent, it’s a law of maturity.”

“You seem to exonerate me.”

“I’m only exonerating you in relationship to
Alan, toward whom you acted like a child.”

“He is the only one I trust, the only one whose
love is infinite, tireless, all-forgiving.”

“That’s not a man’s love you are describing,
and not even a father’s love. It’s a fantasy-father, an idealized father once
invented by a needy child. This love you need, Alan has given you. In this form
of love you are right to trust him. But you will lose him one day, for there
are other
Alans
exactly as there are other
Sabinas
, and they too demand to live and to be matched. The
enemy of a love is never outside, it’s not a man or woman, it’s what we lack in
ourselves.”