A Spy in the House of Love (2 page)

She selected her cape which seemed more
protective, more enveloping.

Also the cape held within its folds something
of what she imagined was a quality possessed exclusively by man: some dash,
some audacity, some swagger of freedom denied to woman.

The toreador’s provocative flings, the medieval
horsemen’s floating flag of attack, a sail unfurled in full collision with the
wind, the warrior’s shield for his face in battle, all these she experienced
when she placed a cape around her shoulder.

A spread-out cape was the bed of nomads, a cape
unfurled was the flag of adventure.

Now she was dressed in a costume most
appropriate to flights, battles, tournaments.

The curtain of the night’s defenselessness was
rising to expose a personage prepared.

Prepared, said the mirror, prepared said the
shoes, prepared said the cape.

She stood contemplating herself arrayed for no
peaceful or trusting encounter with life.

She was not surprised when she looked out of
her window and saw the man who had been following her standing at the corner
pretending to be
readng
a newspaper.

It was not a surprise because it was a materialization
of a feeling she had known for many years: that of an Eye watching and
following her throughout her life.

She walked along 18th St. towards the river.
She walked slightly out of rhythm, like someone not breathing deeply, long
steps and inclined forward as if racing.

It was a street completely lined with truck
garages. At this hour they were sliding open the heavy iron doors and huge
trucks were rolling out, obscuring the sun. Their wheels were as tall as
Sabina.

They lined up so close together that she could
no longer see the street or the houses across the way. On her right they made a
wall of throbbing motors, and giant wheels starting to turn. On her left more
doors were opening, more trucks advanced slowly as if to engulf her. They loomed
threateningly, inhuman, so high she could not see the drivers.

Sabina felt a shrinking of her whole body, and
as she shrank from the noise the trucks seemed to enlarge in her eyes, their
scale becoming monstrous, the rolling of their wheels uncontrollable. She felt
as a child in an enormous world of menacing giants. She felt her bones fragile
in her sandals. She felt brittle and crushable. She felt overwhelmed by danger,
by a mechanized evil.

Her feeling of fragility was so strong that she
was startled by the appearance of a woman at her left, who walked in step with
her. Sabina glanced at her profile and was comforted by her tallness, the
assurance of her walk. She too was dressed in black, but walked without terror.

And then she vanished. The mirror had come to
an end. Sabina had been confronted with herself, the life size image walking
beside the shrunk inner self, proving to her once more the disproportion
between her feelings and external truth.

As many other times Sabina had experienced
smallness, a sense of gigantic dangers, but she faced in the mirror a tall,
strong, mature woman of thirty, equal to her surroundings. In the mirror was
the image of what she had become and the image she gave to the world, but her
secret inner self could be overwhelmed by a large truck wheel.

It was always at this precise moment of
diminished power that the image of her husband Alan appeared. It required a
mood of weakness in her, some inner unbalance, some exaggeration in her fears,
to summon the image of Alan. He appeared as a fixed point in space. A calm
face. A calm bearing. A tallness which made him visible in crowds and which
harmonized with her concept of his uniqueness. The image of Alan appeared in
her vision like a snap-shot. It did not reach her through tactile memory or any
of the senses but the eyes. She did not remember his touch, or his voice. He
was a photograph in her mind, with the static pose which characterized him:
either standing up above average tallness so that he must carry his head a
little bent, and something calm which gave the impression of a kind of
benediction. She could not see him playful, smiling, or reckless, or carefree.
He would never speak first, assert his mood, likes or dislikes, but wait, as
confessors do, to catch first of all the words or the moods of others. It gave
him the passive quality of a listener, a reflector. She could not imagine him
wanting anything badly (except that she should come home) or taking anything
for himself. In the two snap-shots she carried he showed two facets but no
contrasts: one listening and waiting, wise and detached, the other sitting in
meditation as a spectator.

Whatever event (in this case the trivial one of
the walk down 18th St.) caused in Sabina either a panic, a shrinking, these two
images of Alan would appear, and her desire to return home.

She walked back to the room in which she had
awakened that morning. She pulled her valise out from under the bed and began
to pack it.

The cashier at the desk of the hotel smiled at
her as she passed on her way out, a smile which appeared to Sabina as
expressing a question, a doubt. The man at the desk stared at her valise.
Sabina walked up to the desk and said haltingly: “Didn’t…my husband pay the
bill?”

“Your husband took care of everything,” said the
desk man.

Sabina flushed angrily. She was about to say:
Then why did you stare at me? And why the undertone of irony in your faces? And
why had she herself hesitated at the word husband?

The mockery of the hotel personnel added to her
mood of weight and fatigue. Her valise seemed to grow heavier in her hand. In
this mood of
lostness
every object became
extraordinarily heavy, every room oppressive, every task overwhelming. Above
all, the world seemed filled with condemning eyes. The cashier’s smile had been
ironic and the desk man’s scrutiny not friendly.

Haven was only two blocks away, yet distance
seemed enormous, difficulties insuperable. She stopped a taxi and said: “55
Fifth Avenue.”

The taxi driver said rebelliously: “Why, lady,
that’s only two blocks away, you can walk it. You look strong enough.” And he
sped away.

She walked slowly. The house she reached was
luxurious, but as many houses in the village, without elevators. There was no
one around to carry her bag. The two floors she had to climb appeared like the
endless stairways in a nightmare. They would drain the very last of her
strength.

But I am safe. He will be asleep. He will be
happy at my coming. He will be there. He will open his arms. He will make room
for me. I will no longer have to struggle.

Just before she reached the last floor she
could see a thin ray of light under his door and she felt a warm joy permeate
her entire body.
He is there. He is awake.

As if everything else she had experienced were
but ordeals and this the shelter, the place of happiness.

I can’t understand what impels me to leave
this, this is happiness.

When his door opened it always seemed to open
upon an unchanging room. The furniture was never displaced, the lights were
always diffused and gentle like sanctuary lam

Alan stood at the door and what she saw first
of all was his smile. He had strong, very even teeth in a long and narrow head.
The smile almost closed his eyes which were narrow and shed a soft fawn light.
He stood very erect with an almost military bearing, and being very tall his
head bent down as if from its own weight to look down upon Sabina.

He always greeted her with a tenderness which
seemed to assume she had always been in great trouble. He automatically rushed
to comfort and to shelter. The way he opened his arms and the tone in which he
greeted her implied: “First of all I will comfort and console you, first of all
I will gather you together again, you’re always so battered by the world
outside.”

The strange, continuous, almost painful tension
she felt away from him always dissolved in his presence, at his very door.

He took her valise, moving with deliberate
gestures, and deposited it with care in her closet. There was a rock-like
center to his movements, a sense of perfect gravitation. His emotions, his
thoughts revolved around a fixed center like a well-organized planetary system.

The trust she felt in his evenly modulated
voice, both warm and light, in his harmonious manners never sudden or violent,
in his thoughts which he weighed before articulating, in his insights which
were moderate, was so great that it resembled a total abandon of herself to
him, a total giving.

In trust she flowed out to him, grateful and
warm.

She placed him apart from other men, distinct
and unique. He held the only fixed position in the fluctuations of her
feelings.

“Tired, my little one?” he said. “Was it a hard
trip? Was it a success?”

He was only five years older than she was. He
was thirty-five and had gray hairs on his temples, and he talked to her as if
he were her father. Had he always talked in this tone to her? She tried to
remember Alan as a very young man. When she was twenty years old and he
twenty-five. But she could not picture him any differently than at this moment.
At twenty-five he stood the same way, he spoke the same way, and even then he
said: “My little one.”

For a moment, because of the caressing voice,
the acceptance and the love he showed, she was tempted to say: “Alan, I am not
an actress. I was not playing a part on the road. I never left New York, it was
all an invention. I stayed in a hotel, with…”

She held her breath. That was what she was
always doing, holding her breath so that the truth would never come out, at any
time, not here with Alan, and not in the hotel room with a lover who had asked
questions about Alan. She held her breath to choke the truth, made one more
effort to be the very actress she denied being, to act the part she denied
acting, to describe this trip she had not taken, to recreate the woman who had
been away for eight days, so that the smile would not vanish from Alan’s face,
so that his
trustingness
and happiness would not be
shattered.

During the brief suspense of her breathing she
was able to make the transition. It was an actress who stood before Alan now,
re-enacting the past eight days.

“The trip was tiring, but the play went well. I
hated the role at first, as you know. But I began to feel for Madame Bovary,
and the second night I played it well, I even understood her particular kind of
voice and gestures. I changed myself completely. You know how tension makes the
voice higher and thinner, and nervousness increases the number of gestures?”

“What an actress you are,” said Alan. “You’re
still doing it! You’ve entered into this woman’s part so thoroughly you can’t
get out of it! You’re actually making so many more gestures than you ever did,
and your voice has changed. Why do you keep covering your mouth with your hand?
As if you were holding back something you were strongly tempted to say?”

“Yes, that is what
she
was doing. I must
stop. I’m so tired, so tired, and I can’t stop…can’t stop being her.”

“I want my own Sabina back.”

Because Alan had said this was a part she had
been playing, because he had said this was not Sabina, not the genuine one, the
one he loved, Sabina began to feel that the woman who had been away eight days,
who had stayed at a small hotel with a lover, who had been disturbed by the
instability of that other relationship, the strangeness of it, into a mounting
anxiety expressed in multiple movements, wasted, unnecessary, like the tumult
of wind or water, was indeed another woman, a part she had played on the road.
The valise, the impermanency, the evanescent quality of the eight days were
thus explained. Nothing that had happened had any connection with Sabina
herself, only with her profession. She had returned home intact, able to answer
his loyalty with loyalty, his trust with trust, his single love with a single
love.

“I want my own Sabina back, not this woman with
a new strange gesture she had never made before, of covering her face, her
mouth with her hand as if she were about to say something she did not want to
say or should not say.”

He asked more questions. And now that she was
moving away from the description of the role she had played into descriptions
of a town, a hotel and other people in the cast, she felt this secret, this
anguishing constriction tightening her heart, an invisible flush of shame,
invisible to others but burning in her like a fever.

It was this shame which dressed her suddenly,
permeated her gestures, clouded her beauty, her eyes with a sudden opaqueness.
She experienced it as a loss of beauty, an absence of quality.

Every improvisation, every invention to Alan
was always followed not by any direct knowledge of this shame, but by a
substitution: almost as soon as she had talked, she felt as if her dress had
faded, her eyes dimmed, she felt unlovely, unlovable, not beautiful enough, not
of a quality deserving to be loved.

Why am I loved by him? Will he continue to
love me? His love is for something I am not. I am not beautiful enough, I am
not good, I am not good for him, he should not love me, I do not deserve it,
shame
shame
shame
for not
being beautiful enough, there are other women so much more beautiful, with
radiant faces and clear eyes. Alan says my eyes are beautiful, but I cannot see
them, to me they are lying eyes, my mouth lies, only a few hours ago it was
kissed by another… He is kissing the mouth kissed by another, he is kissing
eyes which adored another…shame…shame…shame…the lies, the lies… The clothes he
is hanging up for me with such care were caressed and crushed by another, the
other was so impatient he crushed and tore at my dress. I had no time to
undress. It is this dress he is hanging up lovingly… Can I forget yesterday,
forget the vertigo, this wildness, can I come home and stay home? Sometimes I
cannot bear the quick changes of scene, the quick transitions, I cannot make
the changes smoothly, from one relationship to another. Some parts of me tear
off like a fragment, fly here and there. I lose vital parts of myself, some
part of me stays in that hotel room, a part of me is walking away from this
place of haven, a part of me is following another as he walks down the street
alone, or perhaps not alone: someone may take my place at his side while I am
here, that will be my punishment, and someone will take my place here when I
leave. I feel guilty for leaving each one alone, I feel responsible for their
being alone, and I feel guilty twice over, towards both men. Wherever I am, I
am in many pieces, not daring to bring them all together, anymore than I would
dare to bring the two men together. Now I am here where I will not be hurt, for
a few days at least I will not be hurt in any way, by any word or gesture…but I
am not all of me here, only half of me is being sheltered. Well, Sabina, you
failed as an actress. You rejected the discipline, the routine, the monotony,
the repetitions, any sustained effort, and now you have a role which must be
changed every day, to protect one human being from sorrow. Wash your lying eyes
and lying face, wear the clothes which stayed in the house, which are his,
baptized by his hands, play the role of a whole woman, at least you have always
wished to be that, it is not altogether a lie…