She opened the door to the right rear bedroom and went in, shutting the di or quietly behind her. “Now there’s a fascinating girl,” William said to Arnold, including him in connoisseurship. “She creates secret languages, whole poems, without knowing what she is doing.” “Do you speak any secret languages?” Arnold asked, suddenly feeling that this man was a fool. What was lanthe doing with this person anyway? He felt belittled by his follower. “Oh,” William continued, “I fancy myself a speaker of secret languages. When I was little I used to pretend that I understood French, Spanish, the whole lot. If I heard someone speaking Italian on the street corner, I would nod my head knowingly. This may be because a phrenologist read my head and said that, like Schlei- mann, I would know many tongues before I died.” Arnold felt suddenly dizzy. The white tiles of the old bathroom leapt up to him. As he began to lose consciousness he thought that, yes, this was the sort of place where people were supposed to faint, that it smelled clean and of hospitals, that it at one and the same time beckoned and repelled death. In only seconds of real time he thought of asking William for help, but it seemed so ridiculous. William, after all, was the reason he was dizzy. It was emotionally de trop. The open, affable man standing in a towel, telling him ludicrous things about himself. And lanthe, standing somewhere just out of the field of this drama, somewhere out of this photograph, this tableau. Perhaps she was the photographer waiting to still them forever, lanthe, who had willingly and with few cries of anger or dismay, passed between them, walking like a sleepwalker from one to the other. And here they were, one with a secret language and the other with a fainting spell. His weakness, first brought on by the sight of blood when he was in grade school, had plagued him all of his life. Always at moments like these, moments past understanding, were moments he left, traveling out of his body in a way. “Hey, are you all right?” “No.” “Come here.” William guided Arnold to the edge of the bathtub and, without any ado, pushed his head between his legs, like a good football Arnold felt suddenly dizzy. The white tiles of the old bathroom leapt up to him. As he began to lose consciousness he thought that, yes, this was the sort of place where people were supposed to faint, that it smelled clean and of hospitals. coach or a father. He patted Arnold on the back. “Make sure you never faint in a standing position. You could have a stroke. The blood doesn’t make it to the brain and, presto, the brain is gone. You must be careful.” His head clearing a little, the tiles becoming what-not grey, he asked in a mumble, “How in God’s name could anyone faint in a standing position?” As happened in these situations, Arnold had a picture of himself in his mind’s eye, a picture of a thin, ephemeral self diving out of his body like a- good swimmer, a prayer boy. The doorbell rang. William grasped Arnold’s shoulder. “Will you be all right?” “Yes, I’m all right now." William ran down the stairs and then Arnold could hear male voices in the hallway. There was the sound of little steps on the stairs and lanthe’s little girl, Leslie, poked her head into the doorway. “Hi, Arnold.” “Hi,” Arnold said weakly. Leslie disappeared again. Then Porky stuck his head in. “Porky, my good man, how are you doing?” Without answer, the little boy disappeared and Arnold could hear his door closing, the door to the attic, where the nautical child slept. Richard, lanthe’s ex-husband, must be dropping off the children. Arnold, with some remaining feeling for form, forced himself to get up. He was trembling a little. He didn’t know why exactly, why these fits hit him the way they did. As he went out into the upper hall, Porky was just coming out of his door with an armload of books. He still wore the life jacket. This caused lanthe endless amounts of grief. There was no way that she was able to remove it from the body of her son. “We don’t even sail,” she would wail, as she threaded first the overshirt and then the T-shirt of her son through the armholes of the canvas jacket before the little boy would fall asleep under the eaves of the roof, so very far from water. “It rains a lot, I know, but why is he so afraid of drowning?” Arnold had suggested one day that she simply cut the jacket off and burn it, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. It might, after all, be the only thing that kept the child afloat. Arnold stepped carefully down the hall, keeping his head over his body as if it were an egg. Of course he could faint on the stairs, his head higher than his feet, and then what William had warned him about might happen. Richard stood in the hall, affecting the position that Arnold had seen him in so often, always reminding him of one of the saints in the drawings of the old masters. There were arrows somewhere, unseen to the naked eye, sticking out of this man. He was so wounded, so muted, like a note ready to be played and yet not played. Richard stood with his eyes to the ground, trying to subdue his inner light for these others. Arnold grasped the fine artistic hand of Richard. “Hello, Richard.” Richard just looked up and smiled into his eyes. “Are you dropping off the children? I’ll be happy to watch them. I’m just packing up my books.” There was no need to apologize with this man because Richard understood everything. He took it all in and gave nothing back. “I'm bringing her wood,” he smiled briefly. “It won’t take long. 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