A Spy in the House of Love (5 page)

But then she had always preferred the night to
the day.

Moonlight fell directly over her bed in the
summer. She lay naked in it for hours before falling asleep, wondering what its
rays would do to her skin, her hair, her eyes, and then deeper, to her
feelings.

By this ritual it seemed to her that her skin
acquired a different glow, a night glow, an artificial luminousness which
showed its fullest effulgence only at night, in artificial light.

People noticed it and asked her what was
happening. Some suggested she was using drugs.

It accentuated her love of mystery. She
meditated on this planet which kept half of itself in darkness. She felt
related to it because it was the planet of lovers. Her attraction for it, her
desire to bathe in its rays, explained her repulsion for home, husband and
children. She began to imagine she knew the life which took place on the moon.
Homeless, childless, free lovers, not even tied to each other.

The moon-baths crystallized many of Sabina’s
desires and orientations. Up to that moment she had only experienced a simple
rebellion against the lives which surrounded her, but now she began to see the
forms and colors of other lives, realms much deeper and stranger and remote to
be discovered, and that her denial of ordinary life had a purpose: to send her
off like a rocket into other forms of existence. Rebellion was merely the
electric friction accumulating a charge of power that would launch her into
space.

She understood why it angered her when people
spoke of life as one life. She became certain of myriad lives within herself.
Her sense of time altered. She felt acutely and with grief the shortness of
life’s physical span. Death was terrifyingly near, and the journey towards it,
vertiginous; but only when she considered the lives around her, accepting their
time tables, clocks, measurements. Everything they did constricted time. They
spoke of one birth, one childhood, one adolescence, one romance, one marriage,
one maturity, one aging, one death, and then transmitted the monotonous cycle
to their children. But Sabina, activated by the moon-rays, felt germinating in
her the power to extend time in the ramification of myriad lives and loves, to
expand the journey to infinity, taking immense and luxurious detours as the
courtesan depositor of multiple desires. The seeds of many lives, places, of
many women in herself were fecundated by the moon-rays because they came from
that limitless night life which we usually perceive only in our dreams,
containing roots reaching for all the
magnificences
of the past, transmitting the rich sediments into the present, projecting them
into the future.

In watching the moon she acquired the certainty
of the expansion of time, by depth of emotion, range and infinite multiplicity
of experience.

It was this flame which began to burn in her,
in her eyes and skin, like a secret fever, and her mother looked at her in
anger and said: “You look like a consumptive.” The flame of accelerated living
by fever glowed in her and drew people to her as the lights of night life drew
passersby out of the darkness of empty streets.

When she did finally fall asleep it was the
restless sleep of the night watchman continuously aware of danger and of the
treacheries of time seeking to cheat her by permitting clocks to strike the
passing hours when she was not awake to grasp their contents.

She watched Alan closing the windows, watched
him light the lamps and fasten the lock on the door which led to the porch. All
the sweet enclosures, and yet Sabina, instead of slipping languorously into the
warmth and gentleness, felt a sudden restlessness like that of a ship pulling
against its moorings.

The image of the ship’s cracking, restless
bones arrived on the waves of Debussy’s “Ile
Joyeuse
”
which wove around her all the mists and dissolutions of remote islands. The
notes arrived charged like a caravan of spices, gold
mitres
,
ciboriums
and chalices bearing messages of delight
setting the honey flowing between the thighs, erecting sensual minarets on
men’s bodies as they lay flat on the sand. Debris of stained glass wafted up by
the seas, splintered by the radium shafts of the sun and the waves and tides of
sensuality covered their bodies, desires folding in every lapping wave like an
accordion of aurora borealis in the blood. She saw an unreachable dance at
which men and women were dressed in
rutilant
colors,
she saw their gaiety, their relations to each other as unparalleled in
splendor.

By wishing to be there where it was more
marvelous she made the near, the palpable seem like an obstruction, a delay to
the more luminous life awaiting her, the incandescent personages kept waiting.

The present—Alan, with his wrists hidden in
silky brown hair, his long neck always bending towards her like a very tree of
faithfulness—was murdered by the insistent, whispering, interfering dream, a
compass pointing to mirages flowing in the music of Debussy like an endless
beckoning, alluring, its voices growing fainter if she did not listen with her
whole being, its steps lighter if she did not follow, its promises, its sighs
of pleasure growing clearer as they penetrated deeper regions of her body
directly through the senses bearing on airy canopies all the fluttering banners
of gondolas and divertissements.

Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” shone on other
cities… She wanted to be in Paris, the city propitious to lovers, where
pcemen
smiled absolution and taxi drivers never interrupted
a kiss…

Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” shone upon many
stranger’s faces, upon many Iles
Joyeuses
, music
festivals in the Black Forest, marimbas praying at the feet of smoking
volcanoes, frenzied intoxicating dances in Haiti, and she was not there. She
was lying in a room with closed windows under a lamplight.

The music grew weary of calling her, the black
notes bowed to her inertia ironically in the form of a
pavanne
for a defunct
infanta
, and dissolved. All she could
hear now were the fog horns on the Hudson from ships she would never be able to
board.

Sabina emerged a week later dressed in purple
and waited for one of the Fifth Avenue buses which allowed smoking. Once seated
she opened an overfull handbag and brought out a Hindu ring with minuscule
bells on it, and slipped it on in place of her wedding ring. The wedding ring
was pushed to the bottom of the bag. Each gesture she made was now accompanied
by the tinkling of bells.

At Sixty-Fourth Street she leaped out of the
bus before it had entirely stopped and her walk had changed. She now walked
swiftly, directly, with a power and vigor to her hips. She walked with her
whole foot flat on the ground as the
Latins
and the
Negroes do. Whereas on her way to Alan’s her shoulders had been bowed, now they
were vigorously thrown back and she was breathing deeply, feeling her breasts
pushing against the purple dress.

The ripples of her walk started from the pelvis
and hips, a strong undulation like waves of muscles flowing from the feet to
the knees, to the hips and back to the waist. She walked with her entire body
as if to gain momentum for an event in which her entire body would participate.
On her face there was no longer any bewilderment, but a vehemence which caused
people to stop and glance at her face as if they had been touched by a magnet.

The evening lights were being turned on, and at
this hour Sabina felt like the city, as if all the lights were turned on at
once causing a vast illumination. There were lights on her hair, in her eyes,
on her nails, on the ripples of her purple dress now turning black.

When she finally reached the apartment, she
realized she still did not know whether he lived alone.

He guided her into a room which looked like him
and had been arranged for him alone. His skiing trophies hung on the walls: on
a Viennese curtain of damask hung a whole army of tin soldiers in army
formation. On the piano lay stacks of music in disorder, and in the center of
the room, under an umbrella hung open from the ceiling, a partly constructed
telescope.

“I want to see the stars with my own handmade
telescope. I’m now polishing the glass. It takes a long, long time and a great
deal of patience.”

“But the umbrella!” exclaimed Sabina laughing.

“The children in the apartment above mine jump
around and fine particles of plaster kept falling over my glass, scratching it.
The finest grain of dust can spoil a whole day’s polishing.”

She understood his desire to observe the
planets through an instrument made by his own hands. She was eager to see it
finished and wanted to know how long it would take. Absorbed by the telescope
they behaved like friends, and for a moment abandoned the tense challenges and
teasings
of conquest.

In this mood they undressed. Philip was
playfully inventing endless grimaces, as children do. He loved to make himself
grotesque as if he were tired of being always flawlessly handsome. He could
turn himself into Frankenstein.

Sabina laughed, but uneasily, fearful that if
his handsomeness truly vanished she would no longer desire him, aware of the
evanescence and fragility of this desire. If the singer of
Tristan and
Isolde
singing in the Black Forest of the fairy tales
disappeared, whom would she desire then?

Then his cool eyes became aware of the
intensity of her eyes and they stirred him. His detachment was ignited by the
smoldering violence in her. He did not want fires or explosions of feeling in a
woman, but he wanted to know it was there. He wanted the danger of touching it
off only in the dark depths of her flesh, but without rousing a heart that
would bind him. He often had fantasies of taking a woman whose arms were bound
behind her back.

Once he had seen a heavy storm cloud settle
over a twin-
nippled
mountain, so closely knit, like
an embrace and he had said: “Wonderful copulation; the mountain has no arms!”

Now he grew tired of making faces, and having
resumed the perfectly modeled features, he bent over her to pay homage to her
body.

And then it happened like a miracle, this
pulsation of pleasure unequalled by the most exalted musicians, the summits of
perfection in art or science or wars, unequalled by the most regal beauties of
nature, this pleasure which transformed the body into a high tower of fireworks
gradually exploding into fountains of delight through the senses.

She opened her eyes to contemplate the piercing
joy of her liberation: she was free, free as man was, to enjoy without love.

Without any warmth of the heart, as a man
could, she had enjoyed a stranger.

And then she remembered what she had heard men
say: “Then I wanted to leave.”

She gazed at the stranger lying naked beside
her and saw him as a statue she did not want to touch again. As a statue he lay
far from her, strange to her, and there welled in her something resembling
anger, regret, almost a desire to take this gift of herself back, to efface all
traces of it, to banish it from her body. She wanted to become swiftly and
cleanly detached from him, to disentangle and unmingle what had been fused for
a moment, their breaths, skins, exhalations, and body’s essences.

She slid very softly out of the bed, dressed
with adroit soundlessness while he slept. She tiptoed to the bathroom.

On the shelf she found face powder, comb
lipstick in shell rose wrappings. She smiled at them. Wife? Mistress? How good
it was to contemplate these objects without the lightest tremor of regret, envy
or jealousy. That was the meaning of freedom. Free of attachment, dependency
and the capacity for pain. She breathed deeply and felt she had found this
source of pleasure for good. Why had it been so difficult? So difficult that
she had often simulated this pleasure?

While combing her hair and repainting her
eyelashes, she enjoyed this bathroom, this neutral zone of safety. While moving
between men, lovers, she always entered with pleasure a natural safety zone (in
the bus, in the taxi, on the way from one to another, at this moment the
bathroom) safe from grief. If she had loved Philip, how each one of these
objects—face powder, hair pins, comb—each one would have hurt her!

(He is not to be trusted. I am only passing by.
I am on my way to another place, another life, where he cannot even find me,
claim me. How good not to love; I remember the eyes of the woman who met Philip
at the beach. Her eyes were in a panic as she looked at me. She wondered if I
were the one who would take him away. And how this panic disappeared at the
tone of Philip’s voice as he introduced her: “Meet Dona Juana.” The woman had
understood the tone of his voice and the fear had vanished from her eyes.)

What new reassurance Sabina felt as she laced
her sandals, swirled her cape and smoothed her long, straight hair. She was not
only free from danger but free for a quick get-away. That is what she called
it. (Philip had observed he had never seen a woman dress so quickly, never seen
a woman gather up her belongings as quickly and never forgetting a single one!)

How she had learned to flush love letters down
the toilet, to leave no hairs on the borrowed comb, to gather up hair pins, to
erase traces of lipstick anywhere, to brush off clouds of face powder.