THE WOMAN WHO HAD TWO NAVELS
471
seat, and swooned and sweated from the effort while he tugged in
vain. They broke away from each other, weeping with frustration and
bewilderment, and he groped and started the car and blindly, angrily
drove through the moon-white streets, not knowing and not caring
where they went, but when the black tenements of the Chinese quarter
closed in about them he knew that they had been headed that way
all the time.
They came to the shuttered stores and she bought her doll; then
they drove on to the temple and she went inside; after a moment's
hesitation, he followed. The old Chinaman glanced up but did not
stop him. He walked down the long dark corridor and came to a den–
like chamber, strewn with straw mats, where guttering candles and a
sauceful of joss sticks smoked before a warrior god. Connie was no–
where to be seen-but a Hong Kong boy knows his way around Chinese
temples: he searched through the minor side-chapels until he found
the girl, standing before a candlelit altar. She did not look around as
he entered. The small room reeked of the wasting wax and the joss
sticks. He stood behind her and looked over her shoulder at the god
on the altar-an old fat god, with sagging udders, bald and white–
bearded and squatting like a Buddha; and the sly look in its eyes was
repeated by the two navels that winked from its gross belly. Connie
had laid her doll on the idol's lap. As she turned away from the altar,
Paco backed off from her contact, feeling a furriness at the pit of
his belly. Her bleak smile accepted his shrinking.
They went back to the car but did not drive away at once. The
warm moonlight felt fresh after the musky gloom of the temple. They
lighted cigarettes and his pointed silence prodded her to speak. When
she told him she had two navels he believed her at once, and felt–
not repulsion-but the heat-lightnings of a desire, feverish and electric,
that charged his hands with eyes and his eyes with mouths. While
she talked-her bowed head turned away; the cigarette glowing be–
tween her fingers-he imagined her in the posture of the
ido~
and he
stripped her and saw himself as the doll on her lap. Glancing up and
catching the look on his face, she asked, alarmed, to be taken home.
He smilingly informed her that she was coming back with him; that
she had played with him long enough; that he was determined to find
out that night what sort of a monster she was. When she darted up
in panic he started the car, and burst out laughing as she flopped
down across the seat. He continued to roar WIth laughter all the way
back to the hotel; Connie was quiet. When they arrived at the hotel
he grasped her arm but she asked to be released: she would come
quietly. Her eyes had slitted with the sly look of her god.
