A Spy in the House of Love (4 page)

When he saw she did not share his laughter, he
became serious, lying at her side, but she was still offended and her heart
continued to beat loudly with stage fright.

“I have to go back,” she said, rising and
shaking the sand off with vehemence.

With immediate gallantry he rose, denoting a
long habit of submission to women’s whims. He rose and dressed himself, swung
his leather bag over his shoulder and walked beside her, ironically courteous,
impersonal, unaffected.

After a moment he said: “Would you like to meet
me for dinner at the Dragon?”

“Not for dinner but later, yes. About ten or
eleven.”

He again bowed, ironically, and walked with
cool eyes beside her. His nonchalance irritated her. He walked with such full
assurance that he ultimately always obtained his desire, and she hated this
assurance, she envied it.

When they reached the beach town everyone
turned to gaze at them. The Bright Messenger, she thought, from the Black
Forest of the fairy tales. Breathing deeply, expanding his wide chest, walking
very straight, and then this festive smile which made her feel gay and light.
She was proud of walking at his side, as if bearing a trophy. As a woman she
was proud in her feminine vanity, in her love of conquest. This vainglorious
walk gave her an illusion of strength and power: she had charmed, won, such a
man. She felt heightened in her own eyes, while knowing this sensation was not
different than drunkenness, and that it would vanish like the ecstasies of
drink, leaving her the next day even more shaky, even weaker at the core,
deflated, defeated, possessing nothing within herself.

The core, where she felt a constant
unsureness
, this structure always near collapse, which
could so easily be shattered by a harsh word, a slight, a criticism, which
floundered before obstacles, was haunted by the image of catastrophe, by the
same obsessional forebodings which she heard in Ravel’s Waltz.

The waltz leading to catastrophe: swirling in
spangled airy skirts, on polished floors, into an abyss, the minor notes
simulating lightness, a mock dance, the minor notes always recalling that man’s
destiny was ruled by ultimate darkness.

This core of Sabina’s was temporarily supported
by an artificial beam, the support of vanity’s satisfaction when this man so
obviously handsome walked by her side, and everyone who saw him envied the
woman who had charmed him.

When they separated he bowed over her hand in a
European manner, with mock respect, but his voice was warm when he repeated:
“You will come?” When none of his handsomeness, perfection and nonchalance had
touched her, this slight hesitation did. Because he was for a moment uncertain,
she felt him for a moment as a human being, a little closer to her when not
altogether invulnerable.

She said: “Friends are waiting for me.”

Then a slow to unfold but utterly dazzling
smile illumined his face as he stood to his full height and saluted: “Change of
guards at Buckingham Palace!”

By his tone of irony she knew he did not expect
her to be meeting friends but most probably another man, another lover.

He would not believe that she wanted to return
to her room to wash the sand out of her hair, to put oil over her sunburnt
skin, to paint a fresh layer of polish on her nails, to relive every step of
their encounter as she lay in the bath, in her habit of wanting to taste the
intoxications of experience not once but twice.

To the girl she shared the room with she owed
but a slight warning that she would be out that evening, but on this particular
evening there was a third person staying with them for just one night, and this
woman was a friend of Alan as well as hers; so her departure would be more
complicated. Once more she would have to steal ecstasy and rob the night of its
intoxications. She waited until they were both asleep and went silently out,
but did not go towards the main street where all her friends the artists would
be walking and who might offer to join her. She leaped over the wharf’s railing
and slid down the wooden pole, scratching her hands and her dress against the
barnacles, and leaped on to the beach. She walked along the wet sand towards
the most brightly lighted of the wharves where the Dragon offered its
neon-lighted body to the thirsty night explorers.

None of her friends could afford to come there,
where even the piano had discarded its modest covering and added the dance of
its bare inner mechanism to the other motions, extending the pianist’s realm
from abstract notes to a disciplined ballet of reclining chess figures on
agitated wires.

To reach the nightclub she had to climb large
iron ladders planted on the glistening poles, on which her dress caught and her
hair. She arrived out of breath as if she had been diving from there and were
returning after freeing herself from the clasp of the sea weeds. But no one
noticed her except Philip, the spotlight being on the singer of cajoling blues.

A flush of pleasure showed even through the
deep tan. He held a chair out for her and bent over to whisper: “I was afraid
you were not coming. When I passed by your studio at ten o’clock, I didn’t see
any light, so I walked up and knocked at the window, not too hard, because I
don’t see well at night, and I was afraid I had made a mistake. There was no
answer. I stumbled about in the dark…waited…”

At the terror that Philip might have awakened
her friends, at the danger that had barely been averted, she felt fever
mounting, the heat of the blood set off by danger. His handsomeness at night
became a drug, and the image of his night-blinded self seeking her, touched her
and disarmed her. Her eyes now turned dark and rimmed with coal dust like those
of oriental women. The eyelids had a bluish tint, and her eyebrows which she
did not pluck, threw shadows which made her eyes’ dark glints seem to come from
a deeper source than during the day.

Her eyes absorbed the vivid modeling of his
features, and the contrast between his strong head and the long fingered hands,
hairless, covered by the finest down. He not only caressed her skin along her
arm, but seemed to exert a subtle musician’s pressure on the concealed nerves
of an instrument he knew well, saying: “The beauty of your arm is exactly like
that of your body. If I didn’t know your body I would want it, just from seeing
the shape of your arm.”

Desire made a volcanic island on which they lay
in a trance, feeling the subterranean whirls lying beneath them, dance floor
and table and the magnetic blues uprooted by desire, the avalanches of the
body’s tremors. Beneath the delicate skin, the tendrils of secret hair, the
indentations and valleys of flesh, the volcanic lava flowed, desire
incandescent, and where it burned the voices of the blues being sung became a
harsh wilderness cry, bird and animal’s untamed cry of pleasure and cry of
danger and cry of fear and cry of childbirth and cry of wound pain from the
same hoarse delta of nature’s pits.

The trembling premonitions shaking the hand,
the body, made dancing unbearable, waiting unbearable, smoking and talking
unbearable. Soon would come the untamable seizure of sensual cannibalism, the
joyous epilepsies.

They fled from the eyes of the world, the
singer’s prophetic, harsh, ovarian prologues. Down the rusty bars of ladders to
the undergrounds of the night propitious to the first man and woman at the
beginning of the world, where there were no words by which to possess each
other, no music for serenades, no presents to court with, no tournaments to
impress and force a yielding, no secondary instruments, no adornments,
necklaces, crowns to subdue, but only one ritual, a joyous, joyous, joyous,
joyous impaling of woman on man’s sensual mast.

She reopened her eyes to find herself lying at
the bottom of a sail boat, lying over Philip’s coat gallantly protecting her
from sediments, water seepage and barnacles. Philip lies beside her, only his
head is above hers, and his feet extend further down than hers. He lies asleep,
content, breathing very deeply. She sits up in the moonlight, angry, restless,
defeated. The fever had reached its peak, and waned separately from her desire,
leaving it unfulfilled, stranded. High fever and no climax—Anger, Anger—at this
core which will not melt, while Sabina wills to be like man, free to possess
and desire in adventure, to enjoy a stranger. Her body will not melt, will not
obey her fantasy of freedom. It cheated her of the adventure she had pursued.
The fever, the hope, the mirage, the suspended desire, unfulfilled, would
remain with her all night and the next day, burn undimmed within her and make
others who saw her say: “How sensual she is!”

Philip awakened and smiled gratefully. He had
given and taken and was content.

Sabina lay thinking she would not see him
again, and wishing desperately she might. He was talking about his childhood
and his love of snow. He had loved to ski. Then without transition, some image
came to disturb this idyllic scene and he said: “Women will never leave me
alone.”

Sabina said: “If you ever want to be with a
woman who will not always expect you to make love, come to me. I will
understand.”

“
Youre
wonderful to
say that, Sabina. Women are so offended if you are not always ready and in the
mood to play the romantic lover, when you look the part.”

It was her words which brought him back the
next day when he had confessed to her that he never spent more than one evening
with a woman for: “After that she begins to demand too much, to lay claims…”

He came and they walked to the sand dunes. He
was talkative but always impersonal. Secretly Sabina hoped he might tell her
something that would melt the
unmeltable
sensual
core, that she might respond, that he might break through her resistance.

Then the absurdity of her expectation amazed
her: seeking another kind of fusion because she had failed to achieve the
sensual one, when what she wanted was only the sensual one, to reach man’s
freedom in adventure, to arrive at enjoyment without dependence which might
liberate her from all her anxieties connected with love.

For a moment she saw her love anxieties as
resembling those of a drug addict, of alcoholics, of gamblers. The same
irresistible impulse, tension, compulsion and then depression following the
yielding to the impulse, revulsion, bitterness, depression, and the compulsion
once more…

Three times the sea, the sun, and the moon
witnessed and mocked her efforts at truly possessing Philip, this adventure,
this man whom other women so envied her.

And now in the city, in autumn purple, she was
walking towards his apartment after a telephone call from him. The bells on the
Indian ring he had given her were tinkling merrily.

She remembered her fear that he would vanish
with the summer. He had not asked for her address. The day before he left, a
friend arrived. He had spoken of this woman with reserve. Sabina had divined
that she was the essential one. She was a singer, he had taught her, music
bound them. Sabina heard in his voice a tone of respect which she did not like
to inspire, but which was like Alan’s tone when he talked about her. For this
other woman Philip had the sympathy Alan had for Sabina. He spoke tenderly of
her health not being good, to Sabina who had kept so fiercely the secret of
being cold when they swam, or tired when they walked too long, or feverish in
too much sun.

Sabina invented a superstitious game: if this
woman were beautiful, then Sabina would not see him again. If not, if she was
the steadfastly loved one, then Sabina could be the whim, the caprice, the
drug, the fever.

When Sabina saw her she was amazed. The woman
was not beautiful. She was pale, self-effacing. But in her presence Philip
walked softly, happy, subdued in his happiness, less erect, less arrogant, but
gently serene. No streaks of lightning in his ice-blue eyes, but a soft early
morning glow.

And Sabina knew that when he would want fever
he would call her.

Whenever she felt lost in the endless deserts
of insomnia she would take up the
labyrinthian
thread
of her life again from the beginning to see if she could find at what moment
the paths had become
confus
friend
afont
>

Tonight she remembered the moon-baths, as if
this had marked the beginning of her life instead of the parents, school,
birthplace. As if they had determined the course of her life rather than
inheritance or imitation of the parents. In the moon-baths, perhaps, lay the
secret motivation of her acts.

At sixteen Sabina took moon-baths, first of all
because everyone else took sun-baths, and second, she admitted, because she had
been told it was dangerous. The effect of moon-baths was unknown, but it was
intimated that it might be the opposite of the sun’s effect.

The first time she exposed herself she was
frightened. What would the consequences be? There were many taboos against
gazing at the moon, many old legends about the evil effects of falling asleep
in moonlight. She knew that the insane found the full moon acutely disturbing,
that some of them regressed to animal habits of howling at the moon. She knew
that in astrology the moon ruled the night life of the unconscious, invisible
to consciousness.