A Spy in the House of Love (9 page)

Always something in his eyes which she could
not read, something he had seen but would not talk about.

“I like you because you hate this place, and
because you don’t giggle,” he said taking her hand with gentleness.

They walked endlessly, tirelessly, along the
beach, until there were no more houses, no more cared-for gardens, no more
people, until the beach became wild and showed no footsteps, until the debris
from the sea lay “like a bombed museum,” he said.

I’m glad I found a woman who walks my stride as
you do,” he said. “And who hates what I hate.”

As they bicycled homeward he looked elated, his
smooth skin flushed with sun and pleasure. The slight trembling of his gestures
had vanished.

The fireflies were so numerous they flew into
their faces.

“In South America,” said Sabina, “the women
wear fireflies in their hair, but fireflies stop shining when they go to sleep
so now and then the women have to rub the fireflies to keep them awake.”

John laughed.

At the door of the cottage where she stayed, he
hesitated.

He could see it was a rooming house in a
private family’s jurisdiction. She made no movement but fixed her enlarged,
velvet-
pupiled
eyes on his and held them, as if to
subdue the panic in them.

He said in a very low voice: “I wish I could
stay with you.” And then bent over to kiss her with a fraternal kiss, missing
her mouth.

“You can if you wish.”

“
They
will hear me.”

“You know a great deal about war,” said Sabina,
“but I know a great deal about peace. There’s a way you can come in and they
will never hear you.”

“Is that true?” But he was not reassured and
she saw that he had merely shifted his mistrust of the critical family to
mistrust of her knowledge of intrigue which made her a redoubtable opponent.

She was silent and made a gesture of
abdication, starting to run towards the house. It was then he grasped her and
kissed her almost desperately, digging his nervous, lithe fingers into her
shoulders, into her hair, grasping her hair as if he were drowning, to hold her
head against his as if she might escape his grasp.

“Let me come in with you.”

“Then take off your shoes,” she whispered.

He followed her.

“My room is on the first floor. Keep in step
with me as we go up the stairs; they creak. But it will sound like one person.”
He smiled.

When they reached her room, and she closed the
door, he examined his surroundings as if to assure himself he had not fallen
into an enemy trap.

His caresses were so delicate that they were
almost like a teasing, an evanescent challenge which she feared to respond to
as it might vanish. His fingers teased her, and withdrew when they had aroused
her, his mouth teased her and then eluded hers, his face and body came so near,
espoused her every limb and then slid away into the darkness. He would seek
every curve and nook he could exert the pressure of his warm slender body
against and suddenly lie still, leaving her in suspense. When he took her mouth
he moved away from her hands, when she answered the pressure of his thighs, he
ceased to exert it. Nowhere would he allow a long enough fusion, but tasting
every embrace, every area of her body and then deserting it, as if to ignite
only and then elude the final welding. A teasing, warm, trembling, elusive
short circuit of the senses as mobile and restless as he had been all day, and
here at night, with the street lamp revealing their nudity but not his eyes,
she was aroused to an almost unbearable expectation of pleasure. He had made of
her body a bush of roses of Sharon, exfoliating pollen, each prepared for
delight.

So long delayed, so long teased that when
possession came it avenged the waiting by a long, prolonged, deep thrusting
ecstasy.

The trembling passed into her body. She had
amalgamated his anxieties, she had absorbed his delicate skin, his dazzling
eyes.

The moment of ecstasy had barely ended when he
moved away and he murmured: Life is flying, flying.

“This is flying,” said Sabina. But she saw his
body lying there no longer throbbing, and knew she was alone in her feeling,
that this moment contained all the speed, all the altitude, all the space she
wanted.

Almost immediately he began to talk in the
dark, about burning planes, about going out to find the fragments of the living
ones, to check on the dead.

“Some die silent,” he said. “You know by the
look in their eyes that they are going to die. Some die yelling, and you have
to turn your face away and not look into their eyes. When I was being trained,
you know, the first thing they told me: ‘Never look into a dying man’s eyes.’”

“But you did,” said Sabina.

“No, I didn’t, I didn’t.”

“But I know you did. I can see it in your eyes;
you did look into dying men’s eyes, the first time perhaps…”

She could see him so clearly, at seventeen, not
yet a man, with the delicate skin of a girl, the finely carved features, the
small straight nose, the mouth of a woman, a shy laugh, something very tender
about the whole face and body, looking into the eyes of the dying.

“The man who trained me said: ‘Never look into
the eyes of the dying or you’ll go mad.’ Do you think I’m mad? Is that what you
mean?”

“You’re not mad. You’re very hurt, and very
frightened, and very desperate, and you feel you have no right to live, to
enjoy, because your friends are dead or dying, or flying still. Isn’t that it?”

“I wish I were there now, drinking with them,
flying, seeing new countries, new faces, sleeping in the desert, feeling you
may die any moment and so you must drink fast, and fight hard, and laugh hard.
I wish I were there now, instead of here, being bad.”

“Being bad?”

“This is being bad, isn’t it? You can’t say it
isn’t, can you?” He slipped out of bed and dressed. His words had destroyed her
elation. She covered herself up to her chin with the sheet and lay silent.

When he was ready, before he gathered up his
shoes, he bent over her, and in the voice of a tender young man playing at
being a father he said: “Would you like me to tuck you in before I leave?”

“Yes, yes,” said Sabina, her distress melting.
“Yes,” she said, with gratitude not for the gesture of protectiveness, but
because if he considered her bad in his own vision, he would not have tucked
her in.
One does not tuck in a bad woman.
And surely this gesture meant that
perhaps he would see her again.

He tucked her in gently and with all the
neatness of a flyer’s training, using the deftness of long experience with
camping. She lay back accepting this, but what he tucked in so gently was not a
night of pleasure, a body satiated, but a body in which he had injected the
poison which was killing him, the madness of hunger, guilt and death by proxy
which tormented him. He had injected into her body his own venomous guilt for
living and desiring. He had mingled poison with every drop of pleasure, a drop
of poison in every kiss, every thrust of sensual pleasure the thrust of a knife
killing what he desired, killing with guilt.

The following day Alan arrived, his equable
smile and equable temper unchanged. His vision of Sabina unchanged. Sabina had
hoped he would exorcise the obsession which had enslaved her the night before,
but he was too removed from her chaotic despair, and his extended hand, his
extended love was unequal to the power of what was dragging her down.

The sharp, the intense moment of pleasure which
had taken possession of her body, and the sharp intense poison amalgamated with
it.

She wanted to rescue John from a distortion she
knew led to madness. She wanted to prove to him that his guilt was a distortion,
that his vision of her and desire as bad, and of his hunger as bad, was a
sickness.

The panic, the hunger and terror of his eyes
had passed into her. She wished she had never looked into his eyes. She felt a
desperate need to abolish his guilt, the need of rescuing him because for a
reason she could not fathom, she had sunk with him into the guilt; she had to
rescue him and herself. He had poisoned her, transmitted his doom to her. She
would go mad with him if she did not rescue him and alter his vision.

If he had not tucked her in she might have
rebelled against him, hated him, hated his blindness. But this act of
tenderness had abolished all defenses: he was blind in error, frightened and
tender, cruel and lost, and she was all these with him, by him, through
himt
>

She could not even mock at his obsession with
flying. His airplanes were not different from her relationships, by which she
sought other lands, strange faces, forgetfulness, the unfamiliar, the fantasy
and the fairy tale.

She could not mock his rebellion against being
grounded. She understood it, experienced it each time that, wounded, she flew
back to Alan. If only he had not tucked her in, not as a bad woman, but as the
child, the child he was in a terrifying, confusing world. If only he had left
brutally, projecting his shame on her as so often woman bore the brunt of man’s
shame, shame thrown at her in place of stones, for seducing and tempting. Then
she could have hated him, and forgotten him, but because he had tucked her in,
he would come back. He had not thrown his shame at her, he had not said:
“You’re bad.” One does not tuck in a bad woman.

But when they met accidentally, and he saw her
walking beside Alan, at this moment, in the glance he threw at her, Sabina saw
that he had succeeded in shifting the shame and that now what he felt was: “
You’re
a bad woman,” and that he would never come back to her. Only the poison
remained, without hope of the counter-poison.

Alan left, and Sabina stayed with the hope of
seeing John again. She sought him vainly at bars, restaurants, movie houses and
at the beach. She inquired at the place where he rented his bicycle: they had
not seen him but he still had his bicycle.

In desperation she inquired at the house where
he rented a room. The room was paid for the next week, but he had not been
there for three days and the woman was concerned because John’s father had been
telephoning every day.

The last time he had been seen was at the bar,
with a group of strangers who had driven away with him.

Sabina felt she should return to New York and
forget him, but his eager face and the distress in his eyes made this act seem
one of desertion.

At other moments the pleasure he had given her
ignited her body like flowing warm mercury darting through the veins. The
memory of it flowed through the waves when she swam, and the waves seemed like
his hands, or the form of his body in her hands.

She fled from the waves and his hands. But when
she lay on the warm sand, it was his body again on which she lay; it was his
dry skin and his swift elusive movements slipping through her fingers, shifting
beneath her breasts. She fled from the sand of his caresses.

But when she bicycled home, she was racing him,
she heard his merry challenges, faster—faster—faster in the wind, his face
pursued her in flight or she pursued his face.

That night she raised her face to the moon, and
the gesture awakened the pain, because to receive his kiss she had had to raise
her face this way, but with the support of his two hands. Her mouth opened to
receive his kiss once more but closed on emptiness. She almost shouted out with
pain, shouted at the
moon,the
deaf, impassible
goddess of desire shining down mockingly at an empty night, an empty bed.

She decided to pass once more by his house,
although it was late, although she dreaded to see once more the empty dead face
of his window.

His window was alight and open!

Sabina stood under it and whispered his name.
She was hidden by a bush. She dreaded that anyone else in the house should hear
her. She dreaded the eyes of the world upon a woman standing under a young
man’s window.

“John! John!”

He leaned out of the window, his hair tousled,
and even in the moonlight she could see his face was burning and his eyes hazy.

“Who’s there?” he said, always with the tone of
a man at war, fearing ambush.

“Sabina. I just wanted to know… Are you all
right?”

“Of course I’m all right. I was in the
hospital.”

“The hospital?”

“A bout of malaria, that’s all.”

“Malaria?”

“I get it, when I drink too much…”

“Will I see you tomorrow?”

He laughed softly: “My father is coming to stay
with me.”

“We won’t be able to see each other then. I’d
better return to New York.”

“I’ll call you when I get back.”

“Will you come down and kiss me goodnight?”

He hesitated: “They will hear me. They will
tell my father.”

“Goodbye, goodnight…”

“Goodbye,” he said, detached, cheerful.