interior, but themselves reflected; and, not knowing they were observed from inside, sometimes stopped to adjust their clothing, or admire themselves. Sylvie's strictures on the common run of people were harsher than his; she had a great taste for all eccentricities and oddities, but stern standards of physical beauty and a finely-honed sense of the ridiculous. "Oh, papo, check this one out, check him out. . . . That's what I meant by a soft-boiled egg, you see what I mean?" And he did see, and she dissolved in her sweet raucous laughter. Without ever knowing he did so, he adopted for life her standards of beauty, could even feel himself drawn to the lean, brown, soft-eyed, strong-wristed men she favored, like Leon the caf茅-cr猫me-colored waiter who had brought their drinks. It was a relief to him when she decided (after long thought) that their children would be beautiful.
The Seventh Saint was preparing for the dinner hour. The bus-boys glanced at their messy table. "You ready?" Auberon said.
"I'm ready," she said. "Let's blow this joint." A phrase of George's, full of aged double-entendres more reminiscent of wit than exactly funny. They bundled themselves up.
"Train or walk?" he asked. "Train."
"Hell yes," she said.
Whispering Gallery
In their rush to the warmth they leapt by mistake onto the express, which (full of sheeplike, sheep-smelling riders bound for the Bronx) didn't stop before it reached the old Terminus, mixing it up there with twenty other trains bound in all directions.
"Oh hey wait a sec," she said as they were changing trains. "There's something here I want to show you. Oh yeah! You gotta see this. Come on!"
They went down along passages and up ramps, the same complex Fred Savage had first threaded him through, though whether in the same direction he had no idea. "What," he said.
"You'll love it," she said. She paused at a turning. "Now if I can only find it . . . There!"
What she pointed to was an empty space: a vaulted intersection where four corridors met in a cross.
"What," he said.
"C'mere." She took him by the shoulders and steered him into a corner of the place, where the ribbed vaulting descended to the floor, making what seemed to be a slot or narrow opening but which was only joined bricks. She faced him into this joint. "Just stand there," she said, and she went away. He waited, obediently facing into the corner.
Then, startling him profoundly, her voice, distinct yet hollow and ghostly, sounded from directly in front of him: "Hi there."
"What," he said, "where . . ."
"Sh," her voice said. "Don't turn around. Talk real soft: whisper."
"What is it?" he whispered.
"I don't know," she said. "But if I stand over here in this corner, and whisper, you can hear me over there. Don't ask me how."
Weird! It sounded as though Sylvie were speaking to him from some realm within the corner, through a crack in an impossibly narrow door. A whispering gallery: hadn't there been some speculation about whispering galleries in the Architecture? Probably. There wasn't much that book didn't speculate about.
"Now," she said. "Tell me a secret."
He paused a moment. There was a privacy about the corner, the disembodied whispering, that tempted confidences. He felt bared, or barable, though he could see nothing: the opposite of a voyeur. He said: "I love you."
"Aw," she said, touched. "But that's not a secret."
A new fierce heat flew up his spine and erected his hair as a notion came to him. "Okay," he said, and told her of a secret desire he'd had but hadn't dared express to her before.
"Oh, hey, wow," she said. "You devil."
He said it again, adding a few details. It was just as though he were whispering the words into her ear in the darkest privacy of bed, but more abstract, more perfectly intimate even than that: right into her mind's ear. Someone walked past between them; Auberon could hear the footsteps. But the someone couldn't hear his words: he felt a shiver of glee. He said more.
"Mm," she said, as at the prospect of great comfort or satisfaction, a small sound that he couldn't help answering with a sound of his own. "Hey, what are you doing over there," her whisper said, insinuatingly. "Bad boy."
"Sylvie," he whispered. "Let's go home."
"Yah."
They turned away from their corners (each appearing to the other very small and bright and far away after the dark intimacy of their whispers) and came to meet in the center, laughing now, pressing into each other