Free In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje Page A

train.
    – Ummm. We left you a present from last night.
    – Yes?
    – She’ll explain it later.
    She stretches carefully without disturbing Clara.
    – Throw me a shirt, I’ll have breakfast with you.
    In the kitchen Patrick cuts open a grapefruit and hands her half. Alice shakes her head. She remains sitting on the stool in the long pink shirt and watches him move, efficient in her kitchen. He slides through company, she notices, as anonymously as possible. She points to certain drawers silently when he asks for spoons or a spatula.
    Patrick is not a breakfast talker and in fifteen minutes he is ready to leave. She holds his arm at the door. He kisses her accidentally too close to the eye.
    – Give her a kiss for me.
    – I will.
    – Tell her I’ll see her tonight at the hotel.
    – Okay.
    She closes the door firmly and watches him through the window on his walk to the train station, striding from one frame of glass to another.
    She climbs back into bed with Clara, puts her arm around her to accept the warmth she has lost by rising. Welcomes the sleepy haven of Monday morning.
    His mind remains against them, like an impress of his hand on their sleeping flesh, the cold train window at his cheek. Hungry for Clara, he thinks about Alice as if he has not focused on her before, as if Alice being touched by Clara has grown magically, fully formed.

    In the Arlington Hotel that night he studies the large drawing Clara has tacked to the door. He has come off well, Clara tells him, the soul is pliable. He does not believe her. Unless his soul expands during sleep, unless sleep somehow attaches the disparate elements of his character. Perhaps the portrait will teach him. He loves the closeness between the two women and he enjoys their gift of his supposedly guardless nature.
    – What did you think of her?
    – I liked her.
    – She’s a great actress.
    – On the radio?
    – No, on the stage.
    – Better than you, is she?
    – By a hundred miles.
    – Yes, I liked her.
    Later he will think of the seconds when he was almost asleep and they entered the dark room with candles. The approach of magicians. He feels more community remembering this than anything in his life. Patrick and the two women. A study for the New World. Judith and Holofernes. St. Jerome and the Lion. Patrick and the Two Women. He loves the tableau, even though being asleep he had not witnessed the ceremony.
    Sometimes when he is alone Patrick will blindfold himself and move around a room, slowly at first, then faster until he is immaculate and magical in it. He will parade, turn suddenly away from lampshades, duck under hanging plants, even run across the room and leap in his darkness over small tables.
    All night long Patrick and Clara have talked, the name of Ambrose like a drip of water in their conversation. All night they have talked about her plan to join her ‘beloved,’ the sound of his name like a poison, like the word
nicotine
. She will leave tomorrow. She will not tell him where Small is. She demands that he not try to follow her after they drive to Toronto to put her on the train. Patrick feels he knows nothing of most of Clara’s life. He keeps finding and losing parts of her, as if opening a drawer to discover another mask.
    They sit half-dressed on the bed on this last morning. All night long they have talked and he has felt inarticulate against the power of his unseen enemy, unable to persuade Clara out ofthis journey towards Ambrose. He offers to perform his trick for her, draws her long silk shawl from the sleeve of her coat, doubles it, and ties it around his eyes.
    He positions Clara on the bed and tells her not to move. Then he takes off into the room – at first using his hands for security then ignoring them, just throwing his body within an inch of the window swooping his head down parallel to shelves while he rushes across the room in straight lines, in curves, as if he has the mechanism of a bat in his human blood. He leaps