The eye of the detective, the “lie detector,” was not only a projection of Sabina’s inner guilt, but also the eye of the world upon her acts, from which the guilt stems. She did not look upon herself with her own vision, but through the eyes of others, and this was also the secret of her disintegration. I do not believe such disintegration need always lead to madness. It can cause a shock of awareness, lead to a new vision into one’s behavior.

Sabina’s difficulties develop when she begins to act out her wishes, fantasies, and dreams. Sabina is a close study of the divided self seeking to maintain its own world in a vacuum. Testing it in relation to others is disastrous. She is faced with her impotence to love, but is clarified by Djuna, by confronting her fantasies.

In A Spy in the House of Love I showed only the aspects of the relationship which Sabina could see, no more. The men who played a role in her life were not treated as rounded characters, independently of her, because they did not exist in that total way for Sabina. Passion, I meant to say, and illusion, are an intense but narrow lens. At no time is Sabina’s husband Alan described otherwise than as Sabina sees him. There is no other way to make one experience Sabina from within, know her. In the poetic subjective novel you are inside the consciousness of the character, and you are Sabina.

A Spy in the House of Love finally achieved what I have been struggling to achieve, the level of depth analysis, the subterranean richness, but linked to a narrative, and the design of this narrative I have been faithful to, so that it has both a surface and a labyrinth, and anyone can get hold of it.

—Anaïs Nin, from The Novel of the Future, 1968; unpublished diaries of 1953 and 1955

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."