Stanley reaches in, pinches the sleeve of a sweater, pulls it and lets it drop. He stands staring for a moment. Then his stomach flops—like something’s hatched inside him—and he turns and vomits into the pale granitewear bedpan. He gasps, seizes the pan, carries it down as he sinks to his knees. On the floor he catches the sour smell of his bandaged leg and vomits again. He hasn’t eaten since the fish last night, so nothing comes up but clear liquid and a few celery veins. His diaphragm pistons; he can’t breathe. He feels transformed: a fleshy cannon, a debased crawling thing. As if he’s expelling every human feature of himself.
Eventually he rocks back on his haunches, clears his throat and spits, cleans tears and acid and mucus from his face with a pair of Cynthia’s underdrawers. He should torch this place, he thinks. Plenty of stuff in Synn?ve’s workroom’ll burn. Turpentine. A flaming trail of it up the stairs, out the side door. Once those books catch this place will be cinders right down to the slab. But then where will he stash Claudio’s stuff?
A door slams downstairs; a faint voice calls. Hello? it says.
Stanley stiffens—a jolt like a plunge into cold water—and then forces himself to relax, to listen. Once his pulse has steadied he puts his palms on the floor and pushes, rising like a puff of smoke to his feet, weightless and smooth. As he crosses the big room back to the study he tries to stay close to the walls, to step on spots where the floor is firm and feet have rarely fallen. A few planks squeal—it can’t be helped—but he keeps calm and breathes easily. Fighting the urge to run like he’d fight off a sneeze. The intruder is a relief, actually. Seconds ago Stanley was lost, a stranger to himself. Now he’s on familiar ground: the burglar who didn’t get out in time.
Welles’s desk is finely made; its drawers open and close with no sound. Stanley figures the Wehrmacht pistol for war booty Welles never bothered to register, so that’s the gat he picks; the .45’s too big for his hand anyway. He puts his blackjack in his front pocket, lets his belt out a notch, and tucks the pistol into it where the blackjack was, at the small of his back. It’s not comfortable, but he doesn’t need it to be. He’s pretty confident the safety’s on, pretty sure he won’t shoot himself in the ass by mistake.
At the top of the stairs he pauses, listens. No noises in the house. The staircase is a dark empty tunnel with a splash of light at its bottom, fallen from the entryway window. Stanley glances at his feet for an instant as he starts his descent, fitting his steps to the stairs’ rhythm, and when he looks up again the girl is standing right there in front of him, hardly more than an arm’s-length away.
He freezes, knees bent, hand on the wall for balance. Cynthia’s shapely white fingers rest on the banister—his jacket hung a few feet behind—and her sandal-clad foot perches on the next step. Her sharp chin is tilted, her spine and shoulders beauty-pageant straight. She doesn’t look surprised to see him, or worried, either. Her caramel-cream eyes are bright, like they’re caught in a moonbeam, though no moonbeam reaches them here. She and Stanley stare at each other for a long time. Rainwater is dripping from Stanley’s jacket: a quiet tap counting the moment down.
The girl speaks. So, Betty Crocker, she half-whispers. What cooks?
Stanley opens his mouth to reply, but all that comes from his vomit-scoured throat is a mute rasp. He swallows, tries again. What, he says, the fuck goes on up here?
A wild ugliness flashes across Cynthia’s face, like she’s inhaled a wasp. Then she goes blank. It’s a blood-drained, million-watt blankness, a blankness like the downriver side of a hydroelectric dam. Stanley has seen this once or twice before: on a woman about to jump off the Williamsburg Bridge, on a guy about to shoot three people in an Alphabet City snackbar. A face turned to a burnt-out mask, no longer broadcasting, overloaded by something it can find no right expression for. Often Stanley has imagined himself to be alone in the world, but this is what alone really looks like, and it scares him. He takes an even breath, keeps his knees bent, adjusts his footing, moves his free hand a little closer to the grip of the pistol.
Have you been in my room? Cynthia says.
Stanley doesn’t answer. He could put his shoulder down and run her over—grab his pack and his jacket and scram—but now the house seems to be shrinking to trap him, or else the girl is expanding, swelling like a white balloon to fill the stairwell. Part of him wants to just shoot her. He imagines the jerk of the pistol, pictures her vanishing with a moist elastic pop.
But he’s out of danger now, or nearly so. Her eyes flit everywhere, everywhere but his face, and the color creeps back to her cheeks like schoolchildren returning after a bomb scare. She’s a little shaky; she keeps fidgeting to hide her jitters. Her tone, too, is shifty when she speaks again: apologetic at first, then accusatory. I guess you probably think, she says, and trails off. Listen, she snaps, don’t think for one hot minute you understand—