A Spy in the House of Love Read online

  1959

  Book IV of CITIES OF THE INTERIOR

  THE LIE DETECTOR WAS ASLEEP when he heard the telephone ringing.

  At first he believed it was the clock ordering him to rise, but then he awakened completely and remembered his profession.

  The voice he heard was rusty, as if disguised. He could not distinguish what altered it: alcohol, drugs, anxiety or fear.

  It was a woman’s voice; but it could have been an adolescent imitating a woman, or a woman imitating an adolescent.

  “What is it?” he asked. “Hello. Hello. Hello.”

  “I had to talk to someone; I can’t sleep. I had to call someone.”

  “You have something to confess…”

  “To confess?” echoed the voice incredulously; this time, the ascending tonalities unmistakably feminine.

  “Don’t you know who I am?”

  “No, I just dialed blindly. I’ve done this before. It is good to hear a voice in the middle of the night, that’s all.”

  “Why a stranger? You could call a friend.”

  “A stranger doesn’t ask questions.”

  “But it’s my profession to ask questions.”

  “Who are you?”

  “A lie detector.”

  There was a long silence after his words. The lie detector expected her to hang up. But he heard her cough through the telephone.

  “Are you there?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you would hang up.”

  There was laughter through the telephone, a lax, spangled, spiraling laughter. “But you don’t practice your profession over the telephone!”

  “It’s true. Yet you wouldn’t have called me if you were innocent. Guilt is the one burden human beings can’t bear alone. As soon as a crime is committed, there is a telephone call, or a confession to strangers.”

  “There was no crime.”

  “There is only one relief: to confess, to be caught, tried, punished. That’s the ideal of every criminal. But it’s not quite so simple. Only half of the self wants to atone, to be freed of the torments of guilt. The other half of man wants to continue to be free. So only half of the self surrenders, calling out ‘catch me,’ while the other half creates obstacles, difficulties; seeks to escape. It’s a flirtation with justice. If justice is nimble, it will follow the clue with the criminal’s help. If not, the criminal will take care of his own atonement.”

  “Is that worse?”

  “I think so. I think we are more severe judges of our own acts than professional judges. We judge our thoughts, our intents, our secret curses, our secret hates, not only our acts.”

  She hung up.

  The lie detector called up the operator, gave orders to have the call traced. It came from a bar. Half an hour later, he was sitting there.

  He did not allow his eyes to roam or examine. He wanted his ears alone to be attentive, that he might recognize the voice.

  When she ordered a drink, he lifted his eyes from his newspaper.

  Dressed in red and silver, she evoked the sounds and imagery of fire engines as they tore through the streets of New York, alarming the heart with the violent gong of catastrophe; all dressed in red and silver, the tearing red and silver cutting a pathway through the flesh. The first time he looked at her he felt: everything will burn!

  Out of the red and silver and the long cry of alarm to the poet who survives in all human beings, as the child survives in him; to this poet she threw an unexpected ladder in the middle of the city and ordained, “Climb!”

  As she appeared, the orderly alignment of the city gave way before this ladder one was invited to climb, standing straight in space like the ladder of Baron Münchhausen which led to the sky.

  Only her ladder led to fire.

  He looked at her again with a professional frown.

  She could not sit still. She talked profusely and continuously with a feverish breathlessness like one in fear of silence. She sat as if she could not bear to sit for long; and, when she rose to buy cigarettes, she was equally eager to return to her seat. Impatient, alert, watchful, as if in dread of being attacked, restless and keen, she drank hurriedly; she smiled so swiftly that he was not even certain it had been a smile; she listened only partially to what was being said to her; and, even when someone in the bar leaned over and shouted a name in her direction, she did not respond at first, as if it were not her own.

  “Sabina!” shouted the man from the bar, leaning towards her perilously but not losing his grip on the back of his chair for fear of toppling.

  Someone nearer to her gallantly repeated the name for her, which she finally acknowledged as her own. At this moment, the lie detector threw off the iridescence which the night, the voice, the drug of sleep and her presence had created in him, and determined that she behaved like someone who had all the symptoms of guilt: her way of looking at the door of the bar, as if expecting the proper moment to make her escape; her unpremeditated talk, without continuity; her erratic and sudden gestures, unrelated to her talk; the chaos of her phrases; her sudden, sulky silences.

  As friends drifted towards her, sat with her, and then drifted away to other tables, she was forced to raise her voice, usually low, to be heard above the cajoling blues.

  She was talking about a party at which indistinct incidents had taken place, hazy scenes from which the lie detector could not distinguish the heroine or the victim; talking a broken dream, with spaces, reversals, retractions, and galloping fantasies. She was now in Morocco visiting the baths with the native women, sharing their pumice stone, and learning from the prostitutes how to paint her eyes with kohl from the market place. “It’s coal dust, and you place it right inside the eyes. It smarts at first, and you want to cry; but that spreads it out on the eyelids, and that is how they get that shiny, coal black rim around the eyes.”

  “Didn’t you get an infection?” asked someone at her right whom the lie detector could not see clearly, an indistinct personage she disregarded even as she answered, “Oh, no, the prostitutes have the kohl blessed at the mosque.” And then, when everyone laughed at this which she did not consider humorous, she laughed with them; and now it was as if all she had said had been written on a huge blackboard, and she took a sponge and effaced it all by a phrase which left in suspense who had been at the baths; or, perhaps, this was a story she had read, or heard at a bar; and, as soon as it was erased in the mind of her listeners, she began another…

  The faces and the figures of her personages appeared only half drawn; and, when the lie detector had just begun to perceive them, another face and figure were interposed as in a dream. And when he believed she had been talking about a woman, it turned out that it was not a woman, but a man; and when the image of the man began to form, it turned out the lie detector had not heard aright:ies. She was a young man who resembled a woman who had once taken care of Sabina; and this young man was instantly metamorphosed into a group of people who had humiliated her one night.

  He could not retain a sequence of the people she had loved, hated, escaped from, any more than he could keep track of the changes in her personal appearance by phrases such as “at that time my hair was blond,” “at that time I was married,” and who it was that had been forgotten or betrayed; and when in desperation he clung to the recurrences of certain words, they formed no design by their repetition, but rather an absolute contradiction. The word “actress” recurred most persistently; and yet the lie detector could not, after hours of detection, tell whether she was an actress, or wanted to be one, or was pretending.

  She was compelled by a confessional fever which forced her into lifting a corner of the veil, and then frightened when anyone listened too attentively. She repeatedly took
a giant sponge and erased all she had said by absolute denial, as if this confusion were in itself a mantle of protection.

  At first she beckoned and lured one into her world; then she blurred the passageways, confused all the images, as if to elude detection.

  The dawn appearing at the door silenced her. She tightened her cape around her shoulders as if it were the final threat, the greatest enemy of all. To the dawn she would not even address a feverish speech. She stared at it angrily, and left the bar.

  The lie detector followed her.

  Before she awakened, Sabina’s dark eyes showed the hard light of precious stones through a slit in the eyelids, pure dark green beryl shining, not yet warmed by her feverishness.

  Then instantly she was awake, on guard.

  She did not awaken gradually, in abandon and trust to the new day. As soon as light or sound registered on her consciousness, danger was in the air and she sat up to meet its thrusts.

  Her first expression was one of tension, which was not beauty. Just as anxiety dispersed the strength of the body, it also gave to the face a wavering, tremulous vagueness, which was not beauty, like that of a drawing out of focus.

  Slowly what she composed with the new day was her own focus, to bring together body and mind. This was made with an effort, as if all the dissolutions and dispersions of herself the night before were difficult to reassemble. She was like an actress who must compose a face, an attitude to meet the day.

  The eyebrow pencil was no mere charcoal emphasis on blond eyebrows, but a design necessary to balance a chaotic asymmetry. Make up and powder were not simply applied to heighten a porcelain texture, to efface the uneven swellings caused by sleep, but to smooth out the sharp furrows designed by nightmares, to reform the contours and blurred surfaces of the cheeks, to erase the contradictions and conflicts which strained the clarity of the face’s lines, disturbing the purity of its forms.

  She must redesign the face, smooth the anxious brows, separate the crushed eyelashes, wash off the traces of secret interior tears, accentuate the mouth as upon a canvas, so it will hold its luxuriant smile.

  Inner chaos, like those secret volcanoes which suddenly lift the neat furrows of a peacefully ploughed field, awaited behind all disorders of face, hair and costume for a fissure through which to explode.

  What she saw in the mirror now was a flushed, clear-eyed face, smiling, smooth, beautiful. The multiple acts of composure and artifice had merely dissolved her anxieties; now that she felt prepared to meet the day, her true beauty, which had been frayed and marred by anxiety, emerged.

  She considered her clothes with the same weighing of possible external dangers as she had the new day which had entered through her closed windows and doors.

  Believing in the danger which sprang from objects as well as people, which dress, which shoes, which coat demanded less of her panicked heart and body? For a costume was a challenge too, a discipline, a trap which once adopted could influence the actor.

  She ended by choosing a dress with a hole in its sleeve. The last time she had worn it she had stood before a restaurant which was too luxurious, too ostentatious, which she was frightened to enter, but instead of saying: “I am afraid to enter here,” she had been able to say: “I can’t enter here with a hole in my sleeve.”

  She selected her cape which seemed more protective, more enveloping.

  Also the cape held within its folds something of what she imagined was a quality possessed exclusively by man: some dash, some audacity, some swagger of freedom denied to woman.

  The toreador’s provocative flings, the medieval horsemen’s floating flag of attack, a sail unfurled in full collision with the wind, the warrior’s shield for his face in battle, all these she experienced when she placed a cape around her shoulder.

  A spread-out cape was the bed of nomads, a cape unfurled was the flag of adventure.

  Now she was dressed in a costume most appropriate to flights, battles, tournaments.

  The curtain of the night’s defenselessness was rising to expose a personage prepared.

  Prepared, said the mirror, prepared said the shoes, prepared said the cape.

  She stood contemplating herself arrayed for no peaceful or trusting encounter with life.

  She was not surprised when she looked out of her window and saw the man who had been following her standing at the corner pretending to be readng a newspaper.

  It was not a surprise because it was a materialization of a feeling she had known for many years: that of an Eye watching and following her throughout her life.

  She walked along 18th St. towards the river. She walked slightly out of rhythm, like someone not breathing deeply, long steps and inclined forward as if racing.

  It was a street completely lined with truck garages. At this hour they were sliding open the heavy iron doors and huge trucks were rolling out, obscuring the sun. Their wheels were as tall as Sabina.

  They lined up so close together that she could no longer see the street or the houses across the way. On her right they made a wall of throbbing motors, and giant wheels starting to turn. On her left more doors were opening, more trucks advanced slowly as if to engulf her. They loomed threateningly, inhuman, so high she could not see the drivers.

  Sabina felt a shrinking of her whole body, and as she shrank from the noise the trucks seemed to enlarge in her eyes, their scale becoming monstrous, the rolling of their wheels uncontrollable. She felt as a child in an enormous world of menacing giants. She felt her bones fragile in her sandals. She felt brittle and crushable. She felt overwhelmed by danger, by a mechanized evil.

  Her feeling of fragility was so strong that she was startled by the appearance of a woman at her left, who walked in step with her. Sabina glanced at her profile and was comforted by her tallness, the assurance of her walk. She too was dressed in black, but walked without terror.

  And then she vanished. The mirror had come to an end. Sabina had been confronted with herself, the life size image walking beside the shrunk inner self, proving to her once more the disproportion between her feelings and external truth.

  As many other times Sabina had experienced smallness, a sense of gigantic dangers, but she faced in the mirror a tall, strong, mature woman of thirty, equal to her surroundings. In the mirror was the image of what she had become and the image she gave to the world, but her secret inner self could be overwhelmed by a large truck wheel.

  It was always at this precise moment of diminished power that the image of her husband Alan appeared. It required a mood of weakness in her, some inner unbalance, some exaggeration in her fears, to summon the image of Alan. He appeared as a fixed point in space. A calm face. A calm bearing. A tallness which made him visible in crowds and which harmonized with her concept of his uniqueness. The image of Alan appeared in her vision like a snap-shot. It did not reach her through tactile memory or any of the senses but the eyes. She did not remember his touch, or his voice. He was a photograph in her mind, with the static pose which characterized him: either standing up above average tallness so that he must carry his head a little bent, and something calm which gave the impression of a kind of benediction. She could not see him playful, smiling, or reckless, or carefree. He would never speak first, assert his mood, likes or dislikes, but wait, as confessors do, to catch first of all the words or the moods of others. It gave him the passive quality of a listener, a reflector. She could not imagine him wanting anything badly (except that she should come home) or taking anything for himself. In the two snap-shots she carried he showed two facets but no contrasts: one listening and waiting, wise and detached, the other sitting in meditation as a spectator.

  Whatever event (in this case the trivial one of the walk down 18th St.) caused in Sabina either a panic, a shrinking, these two images of Alan would appear, and her desire to return home.

  She walked back to the room in which she had awakened that morning. She pulled her valise out from under the bed and began to pack it.

  The cashi
er at the desk of the hotel smiled at her as she passed on her way out, a smile which appeared to Sabina as expressing a question, a doubt. The man at the desk stared at her valise. Sabina walked up to the desk and said haltingly: “Didn’t…my husband pay the bill?”

  “Your husband took care of everything,” said the desk man.

  Sabina flushed angrily. She was about to say: Then why did you stare at me? And why the undertone of irony in your faces? And why had she herself hesitated at the word husband?

  The mockery of the hotel personnel added to her mood of weight and fatigue. Her valise seemed to grow heavier in her hand. In this mood of lostness every object became extraordinarily heavy, every room oppressive, every task overwhelming. Above all, the world seemed filled with condemning eyes. The cashier’s smile had been ironic and the desk man’s scrutiny not friendly.

  Haven was only two blocks away, yet distance seemed enormous, difficulties insuperable. She stopped a taxi and said: “55 Fifth Avenue.”

  The taxi driver said rebelliously: “Why, lady, that’s only two blocks away, you can walk it. You look strong enough.” And he sped away.

  She walked slowly. The house she reached was luxurious, but as many houses in the village, without elevators. There was no one around to carry her bag. The two floors she had to climb appeared like the endless stairways in a nightmare. They would drain the very last of her strength.

  But I am safe. He will be asleep. He will be happy at my coming. He will be there. He will open his arms. He will make room for me. I will no longer have to struggle.

  Just before she reached the last floor she could see a thin ray of light under his door and she felt a warm joy permeate her entire body. He is there. He is awake.

  As if everything else she had experienced were but ordeals and this the shelter, the place of happiness.

  I can’t understand what impels me to leave this, this is happiness.

  When his door opened it always seemed to open upon an unchanging room. The furniture was never displaced, the lights were always diffused and gentle like sanctuary lam