The image of Stefano appeared in her vision like a snapshot.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 Serena either a panic, a shrinking, these two images of Stefano 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 Serena as expressing a question, a doubt. The man at the desk stared at her valise. Serena 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. Serena 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 Stefano 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 Serena.
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 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 Stefano 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: “Stefano, 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…”