A Spy in the House of Love (10 page)

But she could not leave Long Island. It was as
if he had thrown a net around her by the pleasure she wanted again, by his
creation of a Sabina she wanted to erase, by a poison he alone had the cure
for, of a mutual guilt which only an act of love could transmute into something
else than a one-night encounter with a stranger.

The moon mocked her as she walked back to her
empty bed. The moon’s wide grin which Sabina had never noticed before, never
before its mockery of this quest of love which she influenced.
I understand
his madness, why does he run away from me? I feel close to him, why does he not
feel close to me, why doesn’t he see the resemblance between us, between our
madness. I want the impossible, I want to fly all the t, I destroy ordinary
life, I run towards all the dangers of love as he ran towards all the dangers
of war. He runs away, war is less terrifying to him than life…

John and the moon left this madness
unexorcised
. No trace of it was revealed except when she
was taunted:

“Aren’t you interested in war news, don’t you
read the papers?”

“I
know
war, I know all about war.”

“You never seem very close to it.”

(I slept with war, all night I slept with
war once. I received deep war wounds into my body, as you never did, a feat of
arms for which I will never be decorated!)

In the multiple peregrinations of love, Sabina
was quick to recognize the echoes of larger loves and desires. The large ones,
particularly if they had not died a natural death, never died completely and
left reverberations. Once interrupted, broken artificially, suffocated
accidentally, they continued to exist in separate fragments and endless smaller
echoes.

A vague physical resemblance, an almost similar
mouth, a slightly similar voice, some particle of the character of Philip, or
John, would emigrate to another, to whom she recognized immediately in a crowd,
at a party, by the erotic resonance it reawakened.

The echoes struck at first through the
mysterious instrumentation of the senses which retained sensations as
instruments retain a sound after being touched. The body remained vulnerable to
certain repetitions long after the mind believed it had made a clear, a final
severance.

A similar design of a mouth was sufficient to
retransmit the interrupted current of sensations, to recreate a contact by way
of the past receptivity, like a channel conducting perfectly only a part of the
former ecstasy through the channel of the senses arousing vibrations and
sensibilities formerly awakened by a total love or total desire for the entire
personality.

The senses created river beds of responses
formed in part from the sediments, the waste, the overflow from the original
experience. A partial resemblance could stir what remained of the imperfectly
rooted-out love which had not died a natural death.

Whatever was torn out of the body, as out of
the earth, cut, violently uprooted, left such deceptive, such lively roots
below the surface, all ready to bloom again under an artificial association, by
a grafting of sensation, given new life through this graft of memory.

Out of the loss of John, Sabina retained such
musical vibration below visibility which made her insensitive to men totally
different from John and prepared her for a continuation of her interrupted
desire for John.

When she saw the slender body of Donald, the
same small nose, the head carried on a long-stemmed neck, the echo of the old
violent emotions was strong enough to appear like a new
desre
.

She did not observe the differences, that
Donald’s skin was even more transparent, his hair silkier, that he did not
spring, but glided, dragging his feet a little, that his voice was passive,
indolent, slightly whining.

At first Sabina thought he was gently clowning
by his parodies of women’s feathery gestures, by a smile so deliberately
seductive imitating the corolla’s
involutionary
attractions.

She smiled indulgently when he lay down on the
couch preparing such a floral arrangement of limbs, head, hands as to suggest a
carnal banquet.

She laughed when he trailed his phrases like
southern vines, or practiced sudden exaggerated severities as children do when
they play charades of the father’s absurd arrogances, of the mother’s hot-house
exudations of charm.

When Sabina crossed the street, she nourished
herself upon the gallant smile of the policeman who stopped the traffic for
her, she culled the desire of the man who pushed the revolving door for her,
she gathered the flash of adoration from the drug clerk: “Are you an actress?”
She picked the bouquet of the shoe salesman trying on her shoes: “Are you a
dancer?” As she sat in the bus she received the shafts of the sun as a
personal, intimate visit. She felt a humorous connivance with the truck driver
who had to pull the brakes violently before her impulsive passages, and who did
so smiling because it was Sabina and they were glad to see her crossing their
vision.

But she considered this feminine sustenance like
pollen. To her amazement, Donald, walking beside her, assumed these offerings
were intended for him.

He passed what she believed to be from one
mimicry to another: the pompous policeman, for which he filled his lungs with
air, the
sinuosities
of the woman walking in front of
them, for which he tangoed his hips.

Sabina was still laughing, wondering when the
charades would end and the true Donald appear.

At this moment, in front of her at the
restaurant table he was ordering with the exaggerated tyranny of the business
executive, or he became prim with the salesgirl like a statesman with little
time for charm. He ridiculed women in their cycles of periodic irrationality
with an exact reproduction of whims, contrariness, and commented on the foibles
of fashion with a minute expertness Sabina lacked. He made her doubt her
femininity by the greater miniature precision of his miniature interests. His
love of small roses, of delicate jewelry seemed more feminine than her barbaric
heavy necklaces and her dislike of small flowers and nursery pastel blues.

At any moment, she believed, this playfulness
would cease, he would stand more erect and laugh with her at his own
absurdities of dress, a shirt the color of her dress, a baroque watch, a
woman’s billfold, or a strand of hair dyed silver gray on his young luxuriant
gold head.

But he continued to assume mock professions, to
mock all of them. Above all, he possessed a most elaborate encyclopedia of
women’s flaws. In this gallery he had most carefully avoided Joan of Arc and
other women heroines, Madame Curie and other women o science, the Florence
Nightingales, the Amelia
Earharts
, the women
surgeons, the therapists, the artists, the collaborative wives. His wax figures
of women were an endless concentrate of puerilities and treacheries.

“Where did you find all these repulsive women?”
she asked one day, and then suddenly she could no longer laugh: caricature was
a form of hatred.

In his gentleness lay his greatest treachery.
His submission and gentleness lulled one while he collected material for future
satires. His glance always came from below as if he were still looking up at
the monumental figures of the parents from a child’s vantage point. These
immense tyrants could only be undermined with the subtlest parody: the mother,
his mother, with her flurry of feathers and furs, always preoccupied with
people of no importance, while he wept with loneliness and fought the incubus
of nightmares alone.

She danced, she flirted, she whined, she
whirled without devotion to his sorrows. Her caressing voice contained all the
tormenting contradictions: the voice read him fairy tales, and when he believed
them and proceeded to pattern his life after them, this same voice gave an acid
bath to all his wishes, longings, desires, and distributed words worse than a
slap, a closed door or
dessertless
dinner.

And so today, with Sabina walking at his side
believing she could destroy the corrosive mother by enacting her opposite, by
full attentiveness to his secret wishes, not dancing with others, not flirting,
never whining, focusing the full searchlight of her heart upon him, his eyes
did not see her alone, but Sabina and a third woman forever present in a
perpetual triangle, a
menage a
trois
,in
which the mother’s figure often
stood between them, intercepting the love Sabina desired, translating her
messages to Donald in terms of repetitions of early disappointments, early
treacheries, all the mother’s sins against him.

He kneeled at her feet to re-lace the sandal
which was undone, an act he performed with the delicacy not of an enamored man,
but of a child at a statue’s feet, of a child intent on dressing woman,
adorning her, but not for himself to claim. In performing these adulations he
fulfilled a secret love for satin, for feathers, for trinkets, for adornment,
and it was a caress not to Sabina’s feet but to the periphery of all that he
could caress without breaking the ultimate taboo: touching his mother’s body.

To touch the silk which enwrapped her, the hair
which stemmed from her, the flowers she wore.

Suddenly his face, which had been bent over the
task, lifted to her with the expression of a blind man suddenly struck with
vision. He explained: “Sabina! I felt a shock all through my body while I tied
your sandals. It was like an electric shock.”

And then as quickly, his face clouded with the
subdued light of filtered emotions, and he returned to his neutral zone: some
early, pre-man fin-knowledge of woman, indirect, enveloping, but without any
trace of a passageway for erotic penetration. Brushings, silken radiations,
homage of eyes alone, possession of a little finger, of a sleeve, never a full
hand on a bare shoulder but a flight from touch, wavelets and rivulets of
delicate incense, that was all that flowed from hi her.

The electric shock sank beneath his
consciousness.

By touching her naked foot he had felt a unity
resembling the first unity of the world, unity with nature, unity with the
mother, early memories of an existence within the silk, warmth and
effortlessness of a vast love. By touching her foot this empty desert which lay
between him and other human beings, bristling with all the plants of defenses,
the cactus varieties of emotional repellents, grown impenetrable between
himself and other young men, even when they lay body to body, was annihilated.
There were sensual acts in which he had not felt this sudden flowing together
which had happened between her naked foot and his hands, between the heart of
her and the core of himself. This heart of Sabina’s, which he imagined
panoplied
for refuge, and the core of himself, which he had
never felt before except as the crystal structure of his young man’s body which
he knew, in her presence, he discovered to be soft and vulnerable.

He became aware of all his fragilities at once,
his dependence, his need. Nearer she came, her face growing larger as she bent
over him, her eyes brighter and warmer, nearer and nearer, melting his
hostilities.

It was terribly sweet to be so naked in her
presence. As in all the tropical climates of love, his skin softened, his hair
felt silkier on his skin, his nerves untangled from their sharp wiry
contortions. All the tensions of pretenses ceased. He felt himself growing
smaller, back to his natural size, as in tales of magic, shrinking painlessly
in order to enter this refuge of her heart, relinquishing the straining for
maturity. But with this came all the corresponding moods of childhood: the
agonized helplessness, the early defenselessness, the anguish at being at
others’ complete mercy.

It was necessary to arrest this invasion of her
warmth which drugged his will, his uprightness in anger, to arrest this
dissolution and flowing of one being into another which had already taken place
once between his mother and then been violently shattered with the greatest
shock and pain by her fickleness and frivolities. It was necessary to destroy
this fluid warmth in which he felt himself absorbed, drowning as within the sea
itself, her body a chalice, a ciborium, a niche of shadows. Her gray cotton dress
folded like an accordion around her feet, with the gold dust of secrecy between
each rivulet of tissue, a journey of infinite detours in which his manhood
would be trapped, captured.

He dropped her naked foot and rose stiffly. He
took up where he had left off, took up the adolescent charades. His gentleness
turned to limpness, the hand he extended to take the cape off her shoulders was
as if severed from the rest of his body.

He took up following her, carrying her cape. He
incensed her with words, he sat in the closest proximity, in her shadow, always
near enough to bask in the warmth emanating from her body, always within reach
of her hand, always with his shirt open at the throat in an oblique challenge
to her hands, but the mouth in flight. Wearing around his waist the most unique
belts so that her eyes would admire his waist, but the body in flight.

This design in space was a continuation of
John’s way of caressing her, the echo of his
teasings
.
The tantalizing night spent in seeking the sources of pleasure but avoiding all
possible dangers
ofwelding
their bodies into any
semblance of marriage. It aroused in Sabina a similar suspense, all the erotic
nerves awakened, throwing off futile, wasted sparks in space.