A Spy in the House of Love Read Free Page A

it a hard
trip? Was it a success?”
    He was only five years older than she was. He
was thirty-five and had gray hairs on his temples, and he talked to her as if
he were her father. Had he always talked in this tone to her? She tried to
remember Alan as a very young man. When she was twenty years old and he
twenty-five. But she could not picture him any differently than at this moment.
At twenty-five he stood the same way, he spoke the same way, and even then he
said: “My little one.”
    For a moment, because of the caressing voice,
the acceptance and the love he showed, she was tempted to say: “Alan, I am not
an actress. I was not playing a part on the road. I never left New York, it was
all an invention. I stayed in a hotel, with…”
    She held her breath. That was what she was
always doing, holding her breath so that the truth would never come out, at any
time, not here with Alan, and not in the hotel room with a lover who had asked
questions about Alan. She held her breath to choke the truth, made one more
effort to be the very actress she denied being, to act the part she denied
acting, to describe this trip she had not taken, to recreate the woman who had
been away for eight days, so that the smile would not vanish from Alan’s face,
so that his trustingness and happiness would not be
shattered.
    During the brief suspense of her breathing she
was able to make the transition. It was an actress who stood before Alan now,
re-enacting the past eight days.
    “The trip was tiring, but the play went well. I
hated the role at first, as you know. But I began to feel for Madame Bovary,
and the second night I played it well, I even understood her particular kind of
voice and gestures. I changed myself completely. You know how tension makes the
voice higher and thinner, and nervousness increases the number of gestures?”
    “What an actress you are,” said Alan. “You’re
still doing it! You’ve entered into this woman’s part so thoroughly you can’t
get out of it! You’re actually making so many more gestures than you ever did,
and your voice has changed. Why do you keep covering your mouth with your hand?
As if you were holding back something you were strongly tempted to say?”
    “Yes, that is what she was doing. I must
stop. I’m so tired, so tired, and I can’t stop…can’t stop being her.”
    “I want my own Sabina back.”
    Because Alan had said this was a part she had
been playing, because he had said this was not Sabina, not the genuine one, the
one he loved, Sabina began to feel that the woman who had been away eight days,
who had stayed at a small hotel with a lover, who had been disturbed by the
instability of that other relationship, the strangeness of it, into a mounting
anxiety expressed in multiple movements, wasted, unnecessary, like the tumult
of wind or water, was indeed another woman, a part she had played on the road.
The valise, the impermanency, the evanescent quality of the eight days were
thus explained. Nothing that had happened had any connection with Sabina
herself, only with her profession. She had returned home intact, able to answer
his loyalty with loyalty, his trust with trust, his single love with a single
love.
    “I want my own Sabina back, not this woman with
a new strange gesture she had never made before, of covering her face, her
mouth with her hand as if she were about to say something she did not want to
say or should not say.”
    He asked more questions. And now that she was
moving away from the description of the role she had played into descriptions
of a town, a hotel and other people in the cast, she felt this secret, this
anguishing constriction tightening her heart, an invisible flush of shame,
invisible to others but burning in her like a fever.
    It was this shame which dressed her suddenly,
permeated her gestures, clouded her beauty, her eyes with a sudden opaqueness.
She experienced it as a loss of beauty, an absence of quality.
    Every improvisation, every