A Spy in the House of Love Read Free

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 cashier 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
    Alan stood at the door and what she saw first
of all was his smile. He had strong, very even teeth in a long and narrow head.
The smile almost closed his eyes which were narrow and shed a soft fawn light.
He stood very erect with an almost military bearing, and being very tall his
head bent down as if from its own weight to look down upon Sabina.
    He always greeted her with a tenderness which
seemed to assume she had always been in great trouble. He automatically rushed
to comfort and to shelter. The way he opened his arms and the tone in which he
greeted her implied: “First of all I will comfort and console you, first of all
I will gather you together again, you’re always so battered by the world
outside.”
    The strange, continuous, almost painful tension
she felt away from him always dissolved in his presence, at his very door.
    He took her valise, moving with deliberate
gestures, and deposited it with care in her closet. There was a rock-like
center to his movements, a sense of perfect gravitation. His emotions, his
thoughts revolved around a fixed center like a well-organized planetary system.
    The trust she felt in his evenly modulated
voice, both warm and light, in his harmonious manners never sudden or violent,
in his thoughts which he weighed before articulating, in his insights which
were moderate, was so great that it resembled a total abandon of herself to
him, a total giving.
    In trust she flowed out to him, grateful and
warm.
    She placed him apart from other men, distinct
and unique. He held the only fixed position in the fluctuations of her
feelings.
    “Tired, my little one?” he said. “Was