A Spy in the House of Love (3 page)

Alan never understood her eagerness to take a
bath, her immediate need to change her clothes, to wash off the old make up.

The pain of dislocation and division abated,
the shame dissolved as Sabina passed into Alan’s mood of contentment.

At this moment she feels impelled by a force
outside of herself to be the woman he demands, desires, and creates. Whatever
he says of her, about her, she will fulfill. She no longer feels responsibility
for what she has been. There is a modification of her face and body, of her
attitudes and her voice. She has become the woman Alan loves.

The feelings which flow through her and which
carry her along are of love, protection, devotion. These feelings create a
powerful current on which she floats. Because of their strength they have
engulfed all her doubts, as in the case of fanatic devotions to a country, a
science, an art, when all minor crimes are absolved by the unquestioned value
of the aim.

A light like a small diamond facet appeared in
her eyes, fixed in a narrower precision on her intent. At other times her
pupils were dilated, and did not seem to focus on the present, but now their
diamond precision was at work on this laborious weaving of life-giving, lies,
and it gave them a clarity which was even more transparent than that of truth.

Sabina wants to be the woman whom Alan wants
her to be. At times Alan is not certain of what he wishes. Then the stormy,
tumultuous Sabina waits in incredible stillness, alert and watchful for signs
of his wishes and fantasies.

The new self she offered him: created for him,
appeared intensely innocent, newer than any young girl could have been, because
it was like a pure abstraction of a woman, an idealized figure, not born of
what she was, but of his wish and hers. She even altered her rhythm for him,
surrendered her heavy restless gestures, her liking for large objects, large
rooms, for timelessness, for caprice and sudden actions. Even her hands which
were sturdy, for his sake rested more gently upon objects around her.

“You always wanted to be an actress, Sabina. It
makes me happy that you’re fulfilling this wish. It consoles me for your
absences.”

For his pleasure she began to reconstruct the
events of the last week of her absence: the trip to Provincetown, the behavior
of the cast, the problems in the play, directing errors, the reactions of the
public, the night when the fuses burnt out, the night when the sound track
broke down.

At the same time she wished she could tell him
what had actually happened; she wished she could rest her head upon his
shoulder as upon a protective force, a protective understanding not concerned
with possession of her but a complete knowledge of her which would include
absolution. Wishing he might judge her acts with the same detachment and wisdom
he applied to others’ acts, wishing he might absolve her as he absolved
strangers from a knowledge of their motivations.

Above all she wished for his
absolution
so
that she might sleep deeply. She knew what awaited her instead of sleep: an
anxious watch in the night. For after she had reconstructed the events of the
last week for Alan’s peace of mind, after he had kissed her with gratitude, and
with a hunger accumulated during her absence, he fell into a deep sleep in utter
abandon and confidence in the night which had brought Sabina back, while Sabina
lay awake wondering whether among her inventions there might be one which could
be exposed later, wondering whether her description of the Provincetown hotel
might be proved false, being based on hearsay. Wondering whether she would
remember what she had said about it, and what she had said about the other
members of the cast. Wondering if Alan might meet one of the actors in the cast
some day and discover Sabina had never worked with them at all.

The night came merely as a dark stage upon
which invented scenes took on a greater sharpness than by day. Scenes
surrounded by darkness were like the scenes in a dream, heightened, delineated
intensely, and all the while suggesting the abysses surrounding the circles of
light.

Outside of this room, this bed, there was a
black precipice. She had escaped danger for a day, that was all. Other dangers
awaited her tomorrow.

At night too she puzzled over the mystery of
her desperate need of kindness. As other girls prayed for handsomeness in a
lover, or for wealth, or for power, or for poetry, she had prayed fervently:
let him be kind.

Why should she have had such a need of
kindness? Was she a cripple? What if instead she had married
aan
of violence or a man of cruelty?

At the mere word “cruelty” her heart started to
beat feverishly. The enormity of the dangers she had averted was so great she
did not even dare picture them. She had desired and obtained kindness. And now
that she had found it she risked its loss every day, every hour, on other
quests!

Alan slept so peacefully. Even in sleep he
maintained a serenity of gesture. The firm design of his nose, mouth and chin,
the angular lines of the body, all sculptured from some material of rectitude
that would not slacken. In moments of desire even, he did not have the wildness
of the eyes, disordered hair of others. He would never grow almost delirious
with pleasure or utter sounds not quite human, from the jungle of man’s earlier
animalism.

Was it this quietism that inspired her trust?
He told no lies. What he felt and thought he could tell Sabina. At the thought
of confession, of confiding in him, she was almost asleep when out of the
darkness the image of Alan appeared vividly and he was sobbing, sobbing
desperately as he had at his father’s death. This image awakened her with
horror, with compassion, and again her feeling was: I must always be on guard,
to protect his happiness, always on guard to protect my guardian angel…

In the darkness she relived entirely the eight
days spent in Provincetown.

She had walked into the dunes in quest of
O’Neill’s house, and had lost her way. The sand dunes were so white in the sun,
so immaculate, that she felt like the first inhabitant at the top of a glacier.

The sea churned at the base as if struggling to
drag back the sand into its depths, carrying a little away each time only to
replace it at high tide in the form of geological designs, a static sea of
crystallized sand waves.

There she stopped and took off her bathing suit
to lie in the sun. Drifts of sand were lifted by the wind and deposited over
her skin like muslin. She wondered whether if she stayed there long enough it
would cover her, and would she disappear in a natural tomb. Immobility always
brought this image to her, the image of death, and it was this which impelled
her to rise and seek activity. Repose, to her, resembled death.

But here in this moment of warmth and light
with her face towards the sky, the sea coiling and uncoiling violently at her
feet, she did not fear the image of death. She lay still watching the wind
forming sand drawings and felt a momentary suspense from anxiety and fever.
Happiness had been defined once as the absence of fever. Then what was it she
possessed which was the opposite of fever?

She was grateful that, hypnotized by the sun’s
reassuring splendor and the sea’s incurable restlessness, her own nerves did
not coil and spring within her to destroy this moment of repose.

It was at this moment that she heard a song. It
was not a casual song anyone might sing walking along the beach. It was a
powerful, developed voice with a firm core of gravity, accustomed to vast halls
and a large public. Neither the sand nor wind nor sea nor space could attenuate
it. It was flung out with assurance, in
defiane
of
them all, a vital hymn of strength equal to the elements.

The man who appeared had a body which was a
full match to his voice, a perfect case for this instrument. He had a strong
neck, a large head with high brow, wide shoulders and long legs. A full strong
box for the vocal cords, good for resonance, thought Sabina, who had not moved,
hoping he would walk by without seeing her and without interrupting this song
from
Tristan and
Isolde
.

As the song continued she found herself in the
Black Forest of the German fairy tales which she had read so avidly in her
childhood. Giant trees, castles, horsemen, all out of proportion in a child’s
eyes.

The song ascended, swelled, gathered together
all the turmoil of the sea, the
rutilant
gold
carnival of the sun, rivaled the wind and flung its highest notes into space
like the bridge span of a flamboyant rainbow. And then the incantation broke.

He had seen Sabina.

He hesitated.

Her silence as perfectly eloquent as his song,
her immobility as flowing an essence of her meaning as his voice had been.

(Later he told her: “If you had spoken then I
would have walked away. You had the talent of letting everything else speak for
you. It was because you were silent that I came up to you.”)

She allowed him to continue his dream.

She watched him walk freely and easily up the
sand dune, smiling. His eyes took their color from the sea. A moment ago she
had seen the sea as a million diamond eyes and now only two, bluer, colder,
approached her. If the sea and the sand and the sun had formed a man to
incarnate the joyousness of the afternoon they would have
spouted
a man like this.

He stood before her, blocking the sun, still
smiling as she covered herself. The silence continued to transmit messages
between them.

“
Tristan and
Isolde
sounded more beautiful here than at the Opera,” she said, and donned her
bathing suit and her necklace quietly, as if this were the end of a performance
of his voice and her body.

He sat down beside her. “There is only one
place where it sounds better: the Black Forest itself, where the song was
born.”

By his accent she knew that he came from there,
and that his physical resemblance to the Wagnerian hero was not accidental.

“I sang it there very often. There’s an echo
there, and I had the feeling the song was being preserved in hidden sources and
that it will spring up again long after I am dead.”

Sabina seemed to be listening to the echo of
his song, and of his description of a place where there was memory, where the
past itself was like a vast echo retaining experience; whereas here there was
this great determination to pose of memories and to live only in the present,
as if memory were but a cumbersome baggage. That was what he meant, and Sabina
understood.

Then her tidal movement caught her again, and
she said impatiently: “Let’s walk.”

“I’m thirsty,” he said. “Let’s walk back to
where I was sitting. I left a bag of oranges.”

They descended the sand dunes sliding as if it
were a hill of snow and they had been on skis. They walked along the wet sand.

“I saw a beach once where each step you took
made the phosphorous sparkle under the feet.”

“Look at the sand-
peekers
,”
said the singer inaccurately, but Sabina liked his invention, and laughed.

“I came here to rest before my opening at the
Opera.”

They ate the oranges, swam, and walked again.
Only at sundown did they lie on the sand.

She expected a violent gesture from him, in
keeping with his large body, heavy arms, muscular neck.

He turned his eyes, now a glacial blue, fully
upon her. They were impersonal and seemed to gaze beyond her at all women who
had dissolved into one, but who might at any moment again become dissolved into
all. This was the gaze Sabina had always encountered in Don Juan, everywhere;
it was the gaze she mistrusted. It was the alchemy of desire fixing itself upon
the incarnation of all women into Sabina for a moment but as easily by a second
process able to alchemize Sabina into many others.

Her identity as the “unique” Sabina loved by
Alan was threatened. Her mistrust of his glance made the blood flow cold within
her.

She examined his face to see if he divined that
she was nervous, that every moment of experience brought on this nervousness,
almost paralyzing her.

But instead of a violent gesture he took hold
of her finger tips with his smoothly designed hands, as if he were inviting her
for an airy waltz, and said: “Your hands are cold.”

He caressed the rest of her arm, kissing the
nook between the elbows, the shoulders, and said: “Your body is feverishly hot.
Have you had too much sun?”

To reassure him she said unguardedly: “Stage
fright.”

At this he laughed, mockingly, unbelieving, as
she had feared he would. (There was only one man who believed she was afraid
and at this moment she would have liked to run back to Alan, to run away from
this mocking stranger whom she had attempted to deceive by her poise, her
expert silences, her inviting eyes. This was too difficult to sustain and she
would fail. She was straining, and she was frightened. She did not know how to
regain prestige in his eyes, having admitted a weakness which the stranger
mockingly disbelieved and which was not in harmony with her provocative
behavior. This mocking laughter he was to hear once more when later he invited
her to meet his closest friend, his companion in adventure, his brother Don
Juan, as suave, as graceful and confident as himself. They had treated her
merrily as one of their own kind, the adventuress, the huntress, the
invulnerable woman, and it had offended her!)