A Spy in the House of Love Read Online Free PDF

where all her friends the artists would
be walking and who might offer to join her. She leaped over the wharf’s railing
and slid down the wooden pole, scratching her hands and her dress against the
barnacles, and leaped on to the beach. She walked along the wet sand towards
the most brightly lighted of the wharves where the Dragon offered its
neon-lighted body to the thirsty night explorers.
    None of her friends could afford to come there,
where even the piano had discarded its modest covering and added the dance of
its bare inner mechanism to the other motions, extending the pianist’s realm
from abstract notes to a disciplined ballet of reclining chess figures on
agitated wires.
    To reach the nightclub she had to climb large
iron ladders planted on the glistening poles, on which her dress caught and her
hair. She arrived out of breath as if she had been diving from there and were
returning after freeing herself from the clasp of the sea weeds. But no one
noticed her except Philip, the spotlight being on the singer of cajoling blues.
    A flush of pleasure showed even through the
deep tan. He held a chair out for her and bent over to whisper: “I was afraid
you were not coming. When I passed by your studio at ten o’clock, I didn’t see
any light, so I walked up and knocked at the window, not too hard, because I
don’t see well at night, and I was afraid I had made a mistake. There was no
answer. I stumbled about in the dark…waited…”
    At the terror that Philip might have awakened
her friends, at the danger that had barely been averted, she felt fever
mounting, the heat of the blood set off by danger. His handsomeness at night
became a drug, and the image of his night-blinded self seeking her, touched her
and disarmed her. Her eyes now turned dark and rimmed with coal dust like those
of oriental women. The eyelids had a bluish tint, and her eyebrows which she
did not pluck, threw shadows which made her eyes’ dark glints seem to come from
a deeper source than during the day.
    Her eyes absorbed the vivid modeling of his
features, and the contrast between his strong head and the long fingered hands,
hairless, covered by the finest down. He not only caressed her skin along her
arm, but seemed to exert a subtle musician’s pressure on the concealed nerves
of an instrument he knew well, saying: “The beauty of your arm is exactly like
that of your body. If I didn’t know your body I would want it, just from seeing
the shape of your arm.”
    Desire made a volcanic island on which they lay
in a trance, feeling the subterranean whirls lying beneath them, dance floor
and table and the magnetic blues uprooted by desire, the avalanches of the
body’s tremors. Beneath the delicate skin, the tendrils of secret hair, the
indentations and valleys of flesh, the volcanic lava flowed, desire
incandescent, and where it burned the voices of the blues being sung became a
harsh wilderness cry, bird and animal’s untamed cry of pleasure and cry of
danger and cry of fear and cry of childbirth and cry of wound pain from the
same hoarse delta of nature’s pits.
    The trembling premonitions shaking the hand,
the body, made dancing unbearable, waiting unbearable, smoking and talking
unbearable. Soon would come the untamable seizure of sensual cannibalism, the
joyous epilepsies.
    They fled from the eyes of the world, the
singer’s prophetic, harsh, ovarian prologues. Down the rusty bars of ladders to
the undergrounds of the night propitious to the first man and woman at the
beginning of the world, where there were no words by which to possess each
other, no music for serenades, no presents to court with, no tournaments to
impress and force a yielding, no secondary instruments, no adornments,
necklaces, crowns to subdue, but only one ritual, a joyous, joyous, joyous,
joyous impaling of woman on man’s sensual mast.

    She reopened her eyes to find herself lying at
the bottom of a sail boat, lying over Philip’s coat gallantly protecting