"The teacher floated through the day, vowels elongating, classes taking him from fifth-form science to third-form classical, the hordes in front of him docile, stammering out answers, at home in the conventions of their customary enemy camp."
"Later the teacher was unable to remember who made the decision, who first learned from the other that he would follow him through thick and thin, who suggested that they might go there, not meaning in a few days or right after school, but now, on the spur of the moment, before the cleaning women came in, before classes began."
Im a handwriting that I wonder at recognizing
Absorbed for hours on end by a childish pleasure that curled her tongue over her upper lip, she would clean the teeth of her comb with a needle, wiping off the gray grime on a white handkerchief, and as she gazed at her handi-work I could read in her face, Why aren't you somebody else? Why are you the double of someone who loves me passionately and would pull me through life?
When the red-haired sculptor sat down at the tea table and it slid back and forth and I was stuck between you, the room shrank into a cabin floating above Almout's vast grounds, and I was an astronaut, hunching, untrained, and you saw me floundering in the net of ropes that hung from the hooks of the round cabin and crisscrossed my body, dividing me into segments with no tangent plane so that I could swell and contract to sun and atom, and then your tennis hand squeezed my knuckles, and you were hunger and sweet satiety in one, you bitch, I could see your teeth and you shook your shirt hair.
