A Spy in the House of Love (12 page)

“I knew your father so well!” Always the
handsome women bending over her, hateful with perfume one could not resist
smelling, with starched petticoats and provocative ankles. For all these
humiliations she would have wanted to punish her father, for all his
desecrations of multiple summer evenings of wanderings which gave these women
the right to admire her as another of his women. She was also angry at her
mother for not being angry, for preparing and dressing him for these intruders.

Was it Sabina now rushing into her own rituals
of pleasure, or was it her father within her, his blood guiding her into
amorousness, dictating her intrigues, he who was inexorably woven with her by
threads of inheritance she could never separate again to know which one was
Sabina, which one her father whose role she had assumed by alchemy of mimetic
love.

Where was Sabina?

She looked at the sky and she saw the face of
John speeding in the pursued clouds, his charm fading like smoke from celestial
pyres; she saw the soft night glow of Mambo’s eyes saying: “You don’t love me,”
while bearing down on her; and Philip laughing a conqueror’s laugh, bearing
down on her and his charm vanishing too before the thoughtful, withdrawn face
of Alan. The entire sky a warm blanket of eyes and mouths shining down on her,
the air full of voices now mucous from the sensual spasm, now gentle with
gratitude, now doubtful, and she was afraid because there was no Sabina, not
ONE, but a multitude of
Sabinas
lying down yielding
and being dismembered, constellating in all directions and breaking. A small
Sabina who felt weak at the center carried on a giant wave of dispersion. She
looked at the sky arched overhead but it was not a protective sky, not a
cathedral vault, not a haven; it was a limitless vastness to which she could
not cling, and she was weeping: “Someone hold me—hold me, so I will not
continue to race from one love to another, dispersing me, disrupting me…
Hold
me to one…
”

Leaning out of the window at dawn, pressing her
breasts upon the window sill, she still looked out of the window hoping to see
what she had failed to possess. She looked at the ending nights and the
passersby with the keen alertness of the voyager who can never reach
termination as ordinary people reach peaceful terminals at the end of each day,
accepting pauses, deserts, havens, as she could not accept them.

Sabina felt lost.

The wild compass whose fluctuations she had
always obeyed, making for tumult and motion in place of direction, was suddenly
fractured so that she no longer knew even the relief of ebbs and flows and
dispersions.

She felt lost. The dispersion had become too
vast, too extended. A shaft of pain cut through the nebulous pattern. Sabina
had always moved so fast that all pain had passed swiftly, as through a sieve,
leaving a sorrow like children’s sorrows, soon forgotten, soon replaced by another
interest. She had never known a pause.

Her cape, which was more than a cape, which was
a sail, which was the feelings she threw to the four winds to be swelled and
swept by the wind in motion, lay becalmed.

Her dress was becalmed.

It was as if now she were nothing that the wind
could catch, swell and propel.

For Sabina, to be becalmed meant to die.

Anxiety had entered her body and refused to run
through it. The silvery holes of her sieve against sorrow granted her at birth,
had clogged. Now the pain had lodged itself inside of her, inescapable.

She had lost herself somewhere along the
frontier between her inventions, her stories, her fantasies and her true self.
The boundaries had become effaced, the tracks lost; she had walked into pure
chaos, and not a chaos which carried her like the galloping of romantic riders
in operas and legends, but which suddenly revealed the stage props: A
papier-mache horse.

She had lost her sails, her cape, her horse,
her seven-league boots, and all of them at once. She was stranded in the
semidarkness of a winter evening.

Then, as if all the energy and warmth had been
drawn inward for the first time, killing the external body, blurring the eyes,
dulling the ears, thickening the palate and tongue, slowing the movements of
the body, she felt intensely cold and shivered with the same tremor as leaves,
feeling for the first time some withered leaves of her being detaching
themselves from her body.

As she entered Mambo’s Night Club she noticed
new paintings on the walls and for a moment imagined herself back in Paris,
seven years back, when she had first met Jay in Montparnasse.

She recognized his paintings instantly.

It was now as before in Paris exhibits, all the
methods of scientific splitting of the atom applied to the body and to the
emotions. His figures exploded and constellated into fragments, like spilled
puzzles, each piece having flown far enough away to seem irretrievable and yet
not far enough to be dissociated. One could, with an effort of the imagination,
reconstruct a human figure completely from these fragments kept from total
annihilation in space by an invisible tension.

By one effort of contraction at the core they
might still amalgamate to form the body of a woman.

No change in Jay’s painting, but a change in
Sabina who understood for the first time what they meant. She could see at this
moment on the wall
an exact portrait of herself as she felt inside.

Had he painted Sabina, or something happening
to all of them as it was happening in chemistry, in science? They had found all
the corrosive acids, all the disintegrations, all the alchemies of
separateness.

But when the painter exposed what took place
inside the body and emotions of man, they starved him, or gave him Fifth Avenue
shop windows to do, where Paris La
Nuit
in the
background allowed fashions to display hats and shoes and handbags and waists
floating in mid-air, and waiting to be assembled on one complete woman.

She stood before the paintings and she now
could see the very minute fragments of her acts, which she had believed
unimportant, causing minute incisions, erosions of the personality. A small
act, a kiss given at a party to a young man who benefited from his resemblance
to a lost John, a hand abandoned in a taxi to a man not desired but because the
other woman’s hand had been claimed and Sabina could not bear to have her hand
lie unclaimed on her lap: it seemed an affront to her powers of seduction. A
word of praise about a painting she had not liked but uttered out of fear that
the painter would say: “Oh, Sabina… Sabina doesn’t understand painting.”

All the small insincerities had seeped like
invisible rivulets of acid and caused profound damages. The erosions had sent
each fragment of Sabina rotating like separate pieces of colliding planets into
other spheres, yet not powerful enough to fly into space like a bird, not
organic enough to become another life, to rotate on its own core.

Jay’s painting was a dance of fragments to the
rhythm of debris. It was also a portrait of the present Sabina.

And all her seeking of fire to weld these
fragments together, seeking in the furnace of delight a welding of fragments
into one total love, one total woman, had failed!

When she turned away from the paintings she saw
Jay sitting at one of the tables, his face more than ever before resembling Lao
Tze
. His half-bald head rimmed now with frosty white
hair, his half-closed, narrow, small eyes laughing.

Someone standing between Sabina and Jay leaned
over to compliment him on his Fifth Avenue windows. Jay laughed merrily and
said: “I have the power to stun them, and while they are stunned by modern art
the advertisers can do their poisonous jobs.”

He waved at Sabina to sit down with him.

“You’ve been watching my atomic pile in which
men and women are bombarded to find the mysterious source of power in them, a
new source of strength.” He talked to her as if no years had intervened between
their last meeting at a cafe in Paris. He was always continuing the same
conversation begun no one knew when, perhaps in Brooklyn where he had been
born, everywhere and anywhere until he had reached the country of cafes where
he found an audience, so that he could paint and talk perpetually in one long
chain of dissertations.

“Have you found your power, your new strength?”
asked Sabina. “I haven’t.”

“I haven’t either,” said Jay, with mock
contrition. “I’ve just come home, because of the war. They asked us to leave.
Whoever couldn’t be drafted was only one more mouth to feed for France. The
consulate sent us a messenger: ‘Let all the useless ones leave Paris.’ In one
day all the artists deserted, as if the plague had come. I never knew the
artists occupied so much space! We, the international artists, were faced with
either hunger or concentration camps. Do you remember Hans, Sabina? They wanted
to send him back to Germany. A minor Paul Klee, that’s true, but still
deserving a better fate. And Suzanne was sent back to Spain; she had no papers.
Her Hungarian husband with the polio was put in a camp. Remember the corner of
Montparnasse and
Raspail
where we all stood for hours
saying good night? Because of the blackouts you’d have no time to say good
night, you’d be lost as soon as you were out of the cafe, you’d vanish in the
black night. Innocence was gone from all our acts. Our habitual state of
rebellion became a serious political crime. Djuna’s house boat was drafted for
the transportation of coal. Everything could undergo conversion except the
artists. How can you convert disorganizers of past and present order, the chronic
dissenters, those dispossessed of the present anyway, the atom bomb throwers of
the mind, of the emotions, seeking to generate new forces and a new order of
mind out of continuous upheavals?”

As he looked at Sabina his eyes seemed to say
that she had not changed, that she was still, for him, the very symbol of this
fever and restlessness and upheaval and anarchy in life which he had applauded
in Paris seven years ago.

At this moment another personage sat down next
to Jay. “Meet Cold Cuts, Sabina. Cold Cuts is our best friend here. When people
get transplanted, it’s exactly like plants; at first there’s a wilting, a
withering; some die of it. We’re all at the critical stage, suffering from a
change of soil. Cold Cuts works at the morgue. His constant familiarity with
suicides and terrifying description of them keeps us from committing it. He
speaks sixteen languages and thus he’s the only one who can talk to all the
artists, at least early in the evening. Later he’ll be drunk in extremis and
will only be able to speak the
esperanto
of
alcoholics, which is a language full of
stutterings
from the geological layers of our animal ancestors.”

Satisfied with this introduction, Cold Cuts
left the table and busied himself with the microphone. But Jay was wrong.
Although it was only nine o’clock, Cold Cuts was already in difficulties with
the microphone. He was struggling to maintain an upright relationship, but the
microphone would yield, bend, sway under his embrace like a flexible young
reed. In his desperate embraces, it seemed as if the instrument and Cold Cuts
would finally lie on the floor entangled like uncontrollable lovers.

When a momentary equilibrium was established,
Cold Cuts became voluble and sang in sixteen various languages (including
alcoholic
esperanto
), becoming in quick succession a
French street singer, a German opera singer, a Viennese organ grinder singer,
etc.

Then he returned to sit with Jay and Sabina.

“Tonight Mambo cut off my food supply earlier
than usual. Why, do you think? I shouldn’t be so loyal to him. But he doesn’t
want me to lose my job. At midnight I must be fit to receive the dead politely.
I mustn’t stutter or bungle anything. The dead are sensitive. Oh, I have a
perfect suicide to
rept
to the exiles: a European
singer who was spoiled and pampered in her own country. She strangled herself
with all her colored scarves tied together. Do you think she wanted to imitate
the death of Isadora Duncan?”

“I don’t believe that,” said Jay. “I can
reconstruct the scene. She was a failure as a singer here. Her present life was
gray, she was forgotten and not young enough to conquer a second time perhaps…
She opened her trunk full of programs of past triumphs, full of newspaper
clippings praising her voice and her beauty, full of dried flowers which had
been given to her, full of love letters grown yellow, full of colored scarves
which brought back the perfumes and the colors of her past successes, and by
contrast her life today became unbearable.”

“You’re absolutely right,” said Cold Cuts. “I’m
sure that’s the way it happened. She hung herself on the umbilical cord of the
past.” He sputtered as if all the alcohol he contained had begun to bubble
within him, and he said to Sabina: “Do you know why I’m so loyal to Mambo? I’ll
tell you. In my profession people would rather forget me. No one wants to be
reminded of death. Maybe they don’t want to ignore
me
, but the company I
keep. Now I don’t mind this the rest of the year, but I do mind it at
Christmas. Christmas comes and I’m the only one who never gets a Christmas
card. And that’s the one thing about my work at the morgue which I can’t stand.
So a few days before Christmas I said to Mambo: ‘Be sure and send me a
Christmas card. I’ve got to receive at least
one
Christmas card. I’ve
got to feel one person at least thinks of me at Christmas time, as if I were a
human being like any other.’ But you know Mambo… He promised, he smiled, and
then once he starts drumming it’s like a jag of some kind, and you can’t sober
him up. I couldn’t sleep for a week thinking he might forget and how I would
feel on Christmas day to be forgotten
as if I were dead…
Well, he didn’t
forget.”