In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje Page B

old, unironed, the collar bent up.
    – What are you doing now? she asked.
    He moved himself away from her extended arm.
    – I’m working at a lumber yard.
    – Come and see the play some night. Meet me afterwards.
    – Yes, all right.
    The ‘yes’ was so he could get away. He had wanted to shake her to pieces, blame her for Clara. It seemed it was all a game of theatre the two of them had performed against him. A woman’s education, removing his cleverness, even his revenge. He had turned and walked away from her.
    Now, taking Alice’s smallest finger, he walked with her from the kitchen.
    – How long have you lived here?
    – Almost a year.
    – There’s just a bed!
    – There’s an iguana.
    – Oh
you’ve
got him.
    In bed her nature, her transparency, had startled him. As did her sudden animal growl onto his shoulder when she lay on top of him. They lay there in the blank room.
    – I think her mother knows where she is, Patrick.
    – Possibly.
    – You should look for her.
    – She told me not to.
    – You must remove her shadow from you.
    – I know that.
    – Then when we meet again we can talk … we can say hello.
    She said that so strangely he would later recall it differently – clothed in sarcasm or tentative love or sadness.
    She had lost an earring when she got up. She said it didn’t matter, that it was artificial.

    He went to see Clara’s mother in Paris and had a late dinner with her.
    – When she married she eloped. But that didn’t last long.
    – She
married
Stump Jones?
    – And divorced him. Anyway, too many people laughed at his name. It was a terrible thing to live with and he would not change it. She was only eighteen. He said he’d gotten used to it.
    – What was he like?
    – Stump was good-looking and bad-tempered. It was the snickering over hotel registers that got to her. Patrick Lewis, now, that’s a
brick
of a name. She told me a good deal about you.
    – What did she say?
    – That you were probably a romantic Bolshevik from southern Ontario.
    – Well, I’m an eastern Ontario boy. Go on.
    – She said she seduced you.
    – She said
that
 … she said things like
that
to you?
    – Yes.
    – Did she ever keep in touch with Stump?
    – I don’t think so.
    – Do you have a photograph of them?
    Mrs. Dickens got up from the sofa and went into the kitchen. He thought she was angry, felt him rude, so he followed her and started apologizing.
    – Forget her, Patrick, it’s been over two years.
    He laughed.
    She pulled open the cupboard drawer and handed him the honeymoon photograph. Both of them against some damn rocks. Stump looked okay, but it was her face he kept gazing at. So young, her hair almost blonde then, not dark as it was now. A fuller face, innocent.
    – It’s a foolish face, he said, not quite believing it was the same person.
    – Yes, said her mother, she was foolish then.
    – Where is she?
    – I don’t like him.
    – Nobody does. Do you know where she is?
    – In a place Small knows you will never look … in a place he knows you will never go back to.
    – What do you mean?
    But he knew then. Knew exactly where they were. He had been the searcher who had gazed across maps and seen every name except the one which was so well-known it had remained, like his childhood, invisible to him.

    Patrick stares at the thin layer of moonlight on the wall. His body feels like the shadow of someone in chains. He had awakened once to Clara whispering at the foot of his bed in this Paris hotel room. Soaking wet. Two in the morning. She’d slid the buttons through the damp holes of her dress.… And another time crawled from their bed to warm her hands on the radiator.… He undreams himself, remembers she has left him.Gets out of bed and walks to the wall beside the radiator against which she had leaned.
    He is standing in their old room at the Arlington Hotel. Without turning on any light he bends down and puts his face close to the wall at stomach level. Here they