THEY DO NOT SEE ME! Claude rejoices, silently. For everything about him now is silent: his thoughts, his beating heart, his footfalls in the underbrush. He can tiptoe past all sorts of doors and nobody inside would know it. He seems to be mastering invisibility as well, for look: how close to the girls he crouches! So close that if he were to sneeze and not cover his mouth, they would each of them feel, on their necks and their cheeks, a satiny mist, like one coming off the sea. Claude is that close to them. He has crept there silently. His invisible body trembles in its joy and proximity.
It will be his at last, the secret. He alone will know what happens when the girls all disappear. For a moment, in the underbrush, he imagines how he will raise his hand, and stand, and issue a statement, or file a report. He imagines the magisterial weight of approval, the heaviness of men's palms clapping him on the shoulder. But then, easing a ticklish branch to one side, he pictures another possibility: that of nursing his secret, hiding it from sight, taking it out in the dark and stroking it, keeping it for the enjoyment of Claude alone.
But how to get that meaty one to move—her hips now occupy the whole of his view. As she sways back and forth in her eagerness, he catches only slivers of what he wants to see, which is maybe more maddening than not being able to see at all, and certainly more exciting than being able to see everything at once. He glimpses a pair of tentative hands, reaching out; a scattering, on pale skin, of petals; the flash of a mirror in the sunlight; the pucker of a navel. Could that be right? Naked skin? A belly button?