That night she took him by motorcycle to the Ambassador Hotel, where he'd never been before (nor had he wanted to go); maybe it was where she worked now; and the lobby was massive, empty, gleaming and dark like the crypt of some inhuman giant not yet dead; and in the corner lay a subcrypt on either side of whose stairs a security guard stood, one man and one woman, and the woman patted his wife's body down coldly and degradingly and the man gazed upon him in silence; then he and Vanna went downstairs to that basement disco of almost total darkness where the music was loud and a woman was singing a song of terrifying shrillness. They sat down and Vanna ordered some food. The vast walls sucked up all light to such an extent that he could not even see what he was eating. After awhile the disco ball came on. Vanna gestured impatiently. She wanted him to go up and dance with her. He went. They were the only couple on the dance floor. Gazing around him into the bloodvessels of darkness corpuscled by people, he occasionally made out the flash of spectacles or a watch or a gold necklace, but mainly he knew the presence of others by their cruel and scornful laughter. The lights were dazzling and the song went on and on. He felt extremely naked and ashamed. At last the song ended, and at once a double line of dancing girls came to join them. The girls faced one another, trudging toward each other and away in a weary factory step to conserve themselves for the long night ahead, while Vanna danced on, never looking at him, and the girls giggled sneering over their shoulders and already he was getting tired. The song was a love-song with English words. It had already gone on for ten minutes (he looked over every time that Vanna checked her watch) and he was bursting out with sweat because he kept trying to ape the steps his wife made so that he wouldn't disgrace her any further; and finally the song was over and they went to sit down. A man in a necktie and a sickeningly pale shirt approached their table and said: I want to dance with her. — He looked at the man, looked back at his wife who sat apprais-ingly, and he said nothing. — The man shook him by the shoulder. — I want to take her my house and bed her now, you Mister understand? — He looked again at Vanna, then said to the man as calmly as he could: She's with me. If she wants to go with you, that's up to her. Vanna, do you want to go with him?
He made a gesture of her going with the man, and she nodded, started to get up, put her hand on the man's arm, and he looked away from them, choking with shame and bitterness and sadness; and then his wife had evidently taken pity upon him because the man was going away (and later he wondered: Had she begun to go with him because she'd wanted to or because she'd believed he was commanding her to?); but his wife was now dragging him nervously back to the dance floor; and suddenly he understood the rule, which was as brutal as life: As long as he could keep dancing with her (and paying to dance), she'd still be his. As soon as he became too tired to go on, she'd be compelled to dance with someone else. — This next dance, by the way, was a very strange and crowded one of men and women in nested circles moving very slowly around the floor, groping their arms and fingers like swimmers in a nightmare of cobwebbed jelly; and he was able to regain his strength. — The following dance was a fast one. He had to keep wiping his forehead as he danced. No other man was dancing all the dances; only Vanna and her troupe, those girls who continued to move so dreamily; Vanna, it seemed, was enjoying herself, because unlike the other women she danced with superb energy, practically leaping while they shuffled (but on the other hand she never looked anywhere but at her watch). An hour later he was gasping for breath, but he said to himself: If those girls can do this then so can I; and he watched carefully through his fog of sweat to learn how they shuffled and glided in such wise as to expend as little energy as possible; he began to copy them; but his wife continued as fresh as ever.
He hung on. At the end of the third hour it was over. He paid and paid and then they went back to the hotel. Even through an interpreter she refused to speak to him, and he never found out what he had done wrong.
In the morning she had to go to work. She and her friend were selling wine. She said that she would be back at two in the afternoon (so the ladies at the desk interpreted). Of course she was sometimes late. She hadn't come back after two days.
