She listened outside the door of the room but could hear no sound. For a moment she was convinced that the door was locked, that Vander had got up and locked it against her, had locked her out of her own room and gone back to sleep, and that she would not be able to wake him, or that if she did he would not let her in, and she would be left here, barefoot, in her stained dress, a shivering spectacle for the other guests to see when they began to get up and go down to breakfast. They would think she was drunk and had lost her key. They would think she was a whore that a dissatisfied client had thrown out of his room. Her hands had begun to shake. To her surprise but not relief, although she did not know why not relief, the doorknob turned suavely under her trembling touch. She stepped inside quickly. The bedside lamp was still burning but the bed was empty. Had he got up and gone away to his own room? Perhaps he had left altogether, had gone to his room and packed his bags and checked out. But no, she had been in the lobby all this time, so how could he have gone without her seeing him? Perhaps he had dodged out by a back way, leaving her to deal with the hotel people, leaving her to pay the bill, or bills, his own as well as hers, that she had no money to pay. But no, his clothes were still there in a heap at the foot of the bed where he had shed them, his shirt and trousers, his expensive shoes, that ugly tie. The bathroom door, white and blank, had a look of sullen admonition. She pulled off her dress and rolled it into a ball and stuffed it in the recesses of her bag. At that moment Vander came out of the bathroom. She straightened quickly, pressing a slip against her nakedness. He was naked too; he had been in the shower, drops of water glinted in the tangled bush below his belly, and the long, jagged scar on the inside of his thigh glared redly. He looked her up and down, lips pursed, one eyebrow cocked. Quickly she put on the slip, a blouse, skirt, sandals. He watched her, leaning against the door jamb, coldly smiling. "Going out?" he asked. She did not answer. He was just like any other, all supercilious bravado after the act, a little boy who has stolen a treat and is unsure he will not be punished for it, but not sorry, either. He stood there, displaying himself to her, daring her to turn aside from the sight of that gnarled leg, that crazily skewed dead eye, and all that sagging flesh, the pot belly and the shrunken acorn below and its bag suspended by an attenuated string of yellowed skin like a head of garlic on its stalk. But yes, why had she put on these clothes, where did she think she might be going? It was still the middle of the night. She had dressed only in order to be dressed; it was not the sight of his naked flesh that had made her flinch, but the consciousness of her own; not shame, but simply the being conscious. He had sat down on the side of the bed and was smiling up at her slyly, sidewise. "Venus in fig leaves," he said, writing it with a fingertip on the air, as if it were the title under a picture. He had read her mind; people always seemed to be able to read her mind. Perhaps the voices that spoke in her head spoke in theirs, too, telling them what she was thinking. Now he was buttoning his shirt and saying well, why not, yes, they should go out for a stroll. She looked up at the black shard of night showing between the curtains at the window. "For me it is still afternoon," he said. He showed her the face of his watch and for some reason laughed. "Pacific time." The watch was an ancient piece, perhaps an antique, with a scratched case and a crimson second hand in a little dial of its own; it was too small for him, a lady's watch; she did not know why it should, but it made her think of railway sidings, with abandoned carriages, their windows greyed over with grime, and poppies nodding in misty sunshine among the stones between the tracks. All right, she said, they would go for a walk. How flat and neutral and slowed down everything had become. Hard to think now of what had been happening between them on that bed only a few hours before. What had struck her, as always, was the discontinuity afterwards, the inap-propriateness of everything that followed. When she was younger she had thought that in time she would surely learn to make the smooth transition between that frantic concumbence and its upright, throat-clearing, eye-avoiding aftermath, just as, when she was a child in dance class, she had been taught to rise more or less gracefully from a squatting position on to the quivering tips of her toes. But this bigger trick she had never learned, and there was no one to teach it to her. Vander was leaning far out over his stiff leg, tying his shoelace, with awkward effort. She looked down at his fumbling hands and bent big head with its fright of silver hair that was all tangled and knotted at the nape and saw herself stepping forward and touching him with her hand. She blinked. She had not moved.
They went downstairs. The silence, a kind of miasma, was more oppressive than ever, weighted with the inaudible breathing of so many anonymous sleepers, and she picked her steps gingerly, as if someone might suddenly jump out and chastise her for disturbing the quiet of the place. Vander however clanged his stick deliberately against the brass handrail on the wall and at every other step brought down the heel of his shoe so hard on the edge of the marble stair she was surprised that sparks did not strike from the stone. In the lobby there was no sign of the old porter. The night, glossy and black, stood pressing itself against the glass door that at first would not open for them, but then abruptly did, shuddering, the big pane giving off a deep bell-tone: barang! The air outside was cool and soft and fresh, and the sky, starless, fully dark still, seemed to glisten, and she felt vertiginously as if she were looking up through a shell of crystal, invisible and immensely high. Her fingers brushed the polished leaves of the laurel bush in its pot on the pavement outside the door. Vander was already lurching away up the street. She lingered a moment, then followed. She sniffed her fingers, smelling faintly the sharp, fading leaf-stink. She caught him up and for a time they went on without speaking. The tall, unlighted buildings teetered close on either side. She tried to fit her pace to the syncopations of Vander's gait: step of good leg, stamp of bad, thump of stick. In his way he was almost graceful, stooping and swinging and throwing a shoulder back before leaning into the next long lope. She wondered what she might call him, how to address him. Axel was a metallic bark, and Vander sounded as if a final syllable had fallen off the end. A name is hard to speak. To name another is somehow to unname oneself. Is this true, she asked herself, is this really so? She pondered, feeling the cool night breathing on her face, the deep, wide stillness burring in her ears. So often the train of her thoughts carried her far beyond herself, or went off on its own way, without her. Did she think, or was she thought? She could get no steady hold on things. An idea would occur to her, some notion or theory, with all the ring of Tightness about it, then its opposite would come and that too would seem right, and how was she to judge between the two, not to speak of the myriad other contrary possibilities jostling for consideration?
And anyway, Axel Vander was not his real name. She put a hand to the pocket of her blouse and felt the fountain pen. Her little gun, with its loaded chamber.
They came out into a long, cobbled piazza. A bronze horseman strode motionless above them in the dark air, with a light from somewhere gleaming on his brow. She thought of the night porter and his black book, his silver tray; she thought of the glass of water with air bubbles like tiny beads of mercury clinging to the sides inside, below the water-line; she thought of herself lifting the glass and drinking deep. The rubber tip of Vander's stick squealed on the dew-damp cobblestones. They were walking beside the arcades, each archway an identical domed vault of blackness. A dog detached itself from the shapeless mound of rags that she supposed was its slumbering master and came forward and looked at them, wagging its tail in wan hopefulness. "Who was it that betrayed me?" Vander said to her. Betrayed. She asked him why he asked; what did it matter who, after all? This he greeted with a snort. "How did you know where to go?" he said, persisting. "Why Antwerp?Why those old newspapers?" She recalled, she could not think why, a line from the dust jacket of After Words that a critic had written in envious emulation of Vander's style – "all the glints and flashes of a grand and faintly shivering chandelier" – and she could not keep from uttering a low laugh. He stared at her. "I met," she said, "a man in a bar."