Body: that was a word she did not like, the sound of it, the bubbled b, the d's soft thud, the nasal, whining y.Vander at the end had spoken something in her ear, a hoarse grunt, ugly and urgent. He could break her in his arms, crush the life out of her. She supposed she should be afraid of him. He had sucked at her breast like a child, his eyes closed and his face almost smiling.
She shivered in her thin dress; the night was turning chill at last. So silent, all around, as if the entire building were submerged in the dark deeps of a silent sea. She imagined the other people staying here, dozens of them, hundreds, maybe, all laid out in their beds like so many warm corpses, asleep, dreaming, or tossing and muttering, perhaps, or perhaps sleepless, like her, as some of them must be, surely. She pictured the couples amorously clasped in each other's arms, or lying at opposite edges of the bed, rigid with wordless fury, as so often she had seen her parents, after another of their fights. There might be someone about to die at this very moment, or someone giving birth, it was not impossible, nothing is impossible. All over the world at any instant people are dying or being born, crying out in passion or in pain. Terrifying to think of, terrifying. When she was a child she would lie awake listening to the life of the house around her winding down. Her father would come in late, after a performance, she would hear him below in the kitchen rattling the crockery, or trawling across the radio stations, the volume turned loud, making a great din, for a silent house worried him, or so he said. She would track him in her mind as he prowled from room to room, switching on all the lights, pouring himself a drink, listening to a snatch of music and abruptly turning it off: she could never hear the screech of a needle across a vinyl record without thinking of her father. Or he would talk out loud to himself, or to a phantom audience, practising dialogue, trying it at different speeds and different rhythms, or, if the play was bad, making fun of the lines, declaiming them in a booming bass voice that made her grin into the dark even though she could not make out the words, only their lugubrious cadences. He would sing, too, tunelessly; he knew only silly things, songs from when he was young, or jingles from the radio. Sometimes her mother, annoyed to be woken, or perhaps feeling sorry for him, would get out of bed and go down in her night-gown and sit with him, but never for long. For all that he said about hating silence and solitude, secretly he preferred to be alone. "Oh, Cass Cass Cassy, I'm a solitary boy," he would croon, striking a tragic pose with hands clutched to his heart. Always, last thing, he would open her door an inch or two and look in, and always she would pretend to be asleep, she was not sure why. At other times she liked to have his company, especially after she had suffered a seizure, when they would sit together, at the kitchen table, or in front of the television set with the sound turned down, not saying anything, just being together. But there were times too when she would feel shy of him, or it would be more than shyness, it would be almost revulsion, and more even than that, something for which there was no word. When he had gone on to his and her mother's room and was getting into bed she would hear the bedsprings creak, and the funny, fluting sigh he always heaved; then there would be an interval, and then she would feel a change in the atmosphere, a sort of loosening, or lapsing, that signified his consciousness slipping out of gear, and she would be left to set out on her journey into the night alone.
From far off now she heard a church bell mark the hour, a dark and leaden tolling. Three o'clock. How long had she been sitting here, on this couch? Time always became elastic after one of her attacks. And it was an attack she had suffered in Vander's arms, when her father had appeared to her, holding the razor. Probably Vander would flatter himself that it was he who had brought her to this pitch of passion, as she shook and writhed under him, her head thrown back and her teeth bared and those shaming, constricted little squeals she could not suppress coming up out of her throat. The paroxysm as always lasted no more than seconds, and when the worst of it was over she had drifted into the usual brief doze or daze, curled on her side with the joint of her thumb pressed to her front teeth, shivering a little now and then, shuddering, like a dog that has been dragged out of the sea. Vander was lying on his back beside her, asleep already, mouth jutting open and his lizard's eyelids fluttering. She knew she would not sleep. She lay motionless for a long time, afraid she might wake him, smelling the ammonia smell of their love-making, hearing the hiss and liquid rattlings of the ineffective air-conditioner that squatted behind a grille under the window. Then came the hollow sensation that was the thing she dreaded most; it was as if a huge hand had thrust itself into her irresistibly and scooped out her insides, leaving her an empty cage of bone and flaccid skin. Once she had seen Granny Cleave do that to a chicken, disembowel the bird like that, pushing her fist through the slack hole underneath and with a quick turn of her wrist bringing out the guts intact in their parcel of opalescent membrane. The old woman had shown her the glistening eggs, pale as pearls, that had been growing in the bird, a string of them, increasing in size from a gelatinous speck to one that was almost fully formed.
Smell of almonds, always the smell of almonds. Then her father in slow motion lifting her from the floor and folding her in his arms. There there. Mr. Mandelbaum has been paying a visit. Mandeclass="underline" almond. So strange, how things strike echoes everywhere. As if…
The old porter appeared again out of the shadows, bearing a bucket and mop. He seemed not at all surprised to find her still here. He gave her his sweetly sad, apologetic smile. He held the mop and bucket with an air of pained fastidiousness, as if, although he had brought them, he did not quite know what they were, or what their exact use might be. She stood up, wincing as she felt her thighs peeling away from the tacky leather of the couch. Her dress at the back was damp; she hoped she had not left a sticky patch where she had been sitting. The porter said something to her, and although she did not catch what he said she smiled and nodded anyway, as if she had understood. As she was going up the stairs she paused and looked back; he was mopping the marble floor beside the pond, in long, unhurried strokes, still with that air of reluctance and vague puzzlement; he had not even taken off his jacket for the task.