Death, Sleep & the Traveler: Novel (New Directions Books) Read online

  Ursula is leaving. Dressed in her severe gray suit, her gardening hat, her girdle, her negligee, her sullen silk dress, her black blouse, her stockings, her red pumps, and carrying a carefully packed straw suitcase in either hand, thus she is leaving me.

  She is going at last not because of what occurred on the ship or because of the trial, which has long since been swallowed into the wet coils of its own conclusion, but because I am, after all, a Hollander. With her skirts awry, her elegant tight black military coat draped to within inches of her ankles, and with her hair blowing, the black bun sculpted at the back of her head, a cigarette lighted between pale fingers, and with belted valises lightly in hand, thus she is leaving—because she does not like the Dutch. Yes, Ursula is going off to find somebody very different from myself. An African, she says, or a moody Greek. If she had not forced me to board the white ship alone, perhaps we would still be at peace with one another. But soon she will no longer exist for me, nor I for her, and when she passes through the front door I shall be standing alone in the kitchen with one hand motionless on an enameled tile and my broad soft face pressed to the window glass. For a moment I will glimpse her car, which she will be driving or which someone else will be driving, and then my wife will be gone.

  Why did she come to my support at the trial only to desert me in the end? Why did she wait this long to tell me that I am incapable of emotional response and that she cannot bear my nationality? Why did she refuse to join me on the white ship and so abandon me to death, sleep, and the anguish of lonely travel? Surely it was more than her boredom and distaste for shipboard games. Perhaps there was another man. Perhaps he will soon be sitting at the wheel of my wife’s car.

  For me there is only the taste of cold water, the sensation of glass against my heavy cheek, and the sound of waves.

  In the darkness the ship was rolling like a bottle lying on its side in a sea of oil. Sweating in the night’s heat, feeling in the flesh of my forearms the warmth of the ship’s rail, and puffing on my small Dutch cigar and staring down at the phosphorescent messages breeding and rippling in the black waves, suddenly I knew the ship was making no forward progress whatsoever. The knowledge was startling. One moment I was sweating and smoking at the ship’s rail, the most reluctant voyager ever to depart on a cruise for pleasure, and the next I was leaning at the polished rail in sudden possession of the sure knowledge that the ship, though rolling, was otherwise standing still, or at best imperceptibly drifting. How could it be?

  I smelled the salt that burdened the night sea air as well as the ocean in which we lay, I saw the shooting phosphorous below and, not far from my left shoulder, a thick skin of dew drawn to the contours of the prow of a white lifeboat. I heard the persistent rhythm of a tapping wireless key in the darkness. And yet I knew that the ship had stopped. But why? How? Even cruise ships, no matter how directionless, were under obligation to maintain steam and at least minimum forward motion on the high seas. To stop, to lose headway, could only put the vessel in gravest danger. And then a hand touched my sleeve, a voice spoke, and my freshly lighted cigar went sizzling down to quick extinction in the night sea.

  “Allert,” the young woman said, “won’t you join me and the other passengers for dancing in the dining saloon?”

  My Dutch name rendered in English is Alan. But in Dutch, and despite the accent on the first syllable, my name is clearly a repository for the English word “alert,” as if the name is a thousand-year-old clay receptacle with paranoia curled in the shape of a child’s skeleton inside. I myself have always been quietly alert.

  “Peter,” I said to my oldest and closest friend, “I wish that now, after all these years, you would take her regularly to bed. She expects it of you, she expects it of all men, she wants you to make a strong and consistent overture. Force her to more than yielding. She spends her life pouting and smoldering and waiting for opportunities to yield. But once committed she is an extremely active lover, the kind of woman who causes suicide. And she likes you. We have both made that perfectly clear already.”

  I placed my cigar in the glazed white earthen ash tray, looked at my friend and smiled. Behind his back and through the broad windows the late sun was streaking across the snow for miles. At that moment Ursula, my wife, entered the room and sprawled in a white leather chair in such a way as to reveal to my friend and me the tender fat of her upper thighs as well as the promise of her casually concealed mystery. It occurred to me then that my friend and wife were perhaps more intimately agreeable with each other than I had thought. But it did no harm to urge Peter toward the inevitable, even if he had long since discovered it.

  “Ursula,” I said, “do you know what we have been talking about?”

  She rested her cheek in the palm of her hand, allowed the other to fall against the full white barely visible crotch of her underpants, and looked across the room at me with heat in her eyes. Even from where I sat I could smell the soap and sourness between her heavy legs. The mere thought in my mind was making her moist.

  Later she decided that I needed to embark alone on a quest for pleasure.

  Around my navel there is concentrated a circular red rash. At first a few isolated splotchy areas of pebbled crimson, it now consists of a broad red welted ring completely encircling the little untouched island of the navel. The fungus, which is what it must be, surely, is textured like the outer livid flesh of a wet strawberry, and is spreading. Soon its faintly exuding and yet sensationless growth will blanket the entire surface of my global belly. Perhaps I contracted the infecting seed while lying almost naked on the lip of the ship’s pool and watching beneath the shield of my crossed arms the slowly tanning figure of the young woman who later confronted me once in her stateroom with a goat’s horned skull masking her sex.

  The approaching extinction of what we have known together is unavoidable, not at all like an amputation, and certainly not a matter of morality. Ursula does not like my name, my large size, my self-control, my superficial national characteristics, my cigar smoking, my dreams, my affectionate attachment to a certain city in Holland, my preoccupation with the myths and actual practices of sexuality, my benevolence, my sense of humor which, like the more enticing elements of human anatomy, emerges only on the rarest occasion brightly and bedecked in green. She dislikes me most, she says, for my failure to respond to her emotionally. I, in my turn, resent and admire her constant smoldering, resent and admire her lassitude which is sexual invitation, and resent and admire her boredom which is denial. There are times when I dislike more than anything in the world the lazy fit of the top of her stocking around her upraised thigh as well as the thickness of her breasts, her small waist, the breadth of her stomach, the terrible harmony between her wandering body and her impregnable mind. I do not like her egocentricity, her psychological brutality, her soft voice, her harsh personal judgments, her awareness of sexual challenge, her habit of fondling her own rough nipples, her patience, her cleverness, her occasional smile, her weeks of depression. And yet we have given each other freedom, excitement, tenderness and comfort. We have shared a long marriage.

  I awoke. The porthole was half open and, in the moonlight, was streaked with salt. But so too were my lips, the clothes piled on the nearby chair and flung on the floor, the sheet that was stiff and the color of silver on our two bodies. Salt-encrusted and bitter, all of it, as if we had slept through a violent storm with the porthole open.

  I was awake, my left leg was bent in cramp, the body next to me was small, the cabin was not mine. The darkness, the glint of a brass hook near the louvered door, the girl whose naked sleep I could feel but
not see, and the salt, the moonlight, all of it made me more than ever convinced that the small unfamiliar stateroom in which we lay had momentarily been emptied of black sea water. The pillow was damp. But what else? What else?

  “Good God,” I whispered, “good God, we have stopped again. The ship is not moving.”

  She murmured something and curled closer, her smallness and youth and nudity lay cradled in the darkness against my rigid and now sweating chest and thighs. I felt her tiny wet tongue licking my finger. But the ship was without lights, that much I knew, and was untended in a sea so calm that not the slightest tremor climbed the delicate white iron plates to suggest to me, the now conscious and alerted sleeper, even the minimal reality of the vast tide. No tapping of the wireless key, no messages from the ship’s half-drunken vibraphone player. Nothing. All around me I felt the empty decks, the empty lifeboats, the schism between the rising moon and the black tide. And I struggled unsuccessfully to comprehend a fear I had never known in my past life. No doubt the problem concerned two cosmic entities, I told myself: the sea, which was incomprehensible, and the ship, which was also incomprehensible in a mechanical fashion but which, further, was suddenly purposeless and hence meaningless in the potentially destructive night. Eliminate even the most arbitrary of purposes in such a situation, or from the confluence of two cosmic entities, I told myself, and the result is panic.

  “Listen,” I whispered, “it’s happening again. The ship is not moving.”

  In the darkness, lying bulky and naked in a strange bed, tasting the salt and feeling the stasis of the ship in my own large body, in these circumstances I knew it was unreasonable to speak as I had in fact just spoken to the girl at my side. And yet there was nothing I could do but pour my cigar-drenched breath across her small sleeping face. I felt exactly like one of those naval officers waiting, in former times, for the inevitable arrival of the torpedo speeding through the black night. The young woman had herself selected me from all the passengers, also she had already been more friendly to me than anyone I had ever known, and in her smallness appeared capable of bearing any amount of pain or fear my presence might inflict on her. Given all this I felt oddly justified in looking to the helpless girl for immediate and practical relief. But waiting, listening, suffering the cramp in my leg, and utterly conscious of my total identification with the dead ship, nothing could have prevented my urgent whispering in any case.

  “We are becalmed,” I whispered. “I must go on deck.”

  She curled still closer and spoke though she was quite asleep. Then she took nearly half of my finger into her mouth. Suddenly, marvelously, I understood what she had said and felt through all my weight and cold musculature the heavy slow rumble of the engines and the unmistakable revolutions of the great brass propeller blades in the depths below us. The distant vibrations were all around us, were inside me, as if my own intestinal center was pulsating with pure oceanic motion and the absolute certainty of the navigational mind doing its dependable work. Our arms were crossed, my fingers were tentative yet firm, the girl’s dreams were in my mouth. But the sea, I realized quite suddenly, was not calm, as I had thought, but rough.

  “Allert,” Ursula was saying, “the trouble with you is that you are a psychic invalid. You have no feeling. I wish that just once you might become truly obsessional. If you were obsessed I might at least find you interesting.” But Ursula was wrong. I am not some kind of psychic casualty. It is simply that I want to please, want to exist, want others to exist with me, but find it difficult to believe in the set and characters on the stage. Then too I am extremely interested in failure.

  But why is she leaving?

  The sun was filling the dining saloon, the whiteness of the ship was everywhere. The enormous plate-glass windows that were sparkling, the white cloth on our table for eight, the broad green tiles of the floor of the dining saloon in which we waited at the second sitting for luncheon, the crystal and silverware and even the white dress uniform of the young wireless officer sitting coarsely beside me, in all this the whiteness of the ship and brilliance of the sun were evident. It was a period of perfect light, shortly after the second luncheon gong on a clear day, and beyond the frivolous yet pleasing insularity of the dining saloon the ship’s motion was remarkably measured in singing cables, a taut flag on the prow, the pleasingly uneven faint undulations of the sharp prow against the unmoving fictional horizon. And from our stern the froth of our unmistakable wake was purely devolving in the long white choppy path of our disappearing nautical speed, all of which at the moment I knew full well, since for exactly an hour prior to the second luncheon gong I had stood alone on the ship’s stern and drunk deep of the glare and wind and salty taste of our powerful but fading passage.

  The menu announced consommé from shallow silver cups, and had it not been for the printed menu as well as for the recollection of my hour at the taffrail, I doubt that I could have sat a moment longer at my first impending meal at our table for eight. At the instant of this realization I imagined the consommé before us, each silver cup bearing its garnish of water cress like a green island drifting in an amber sea, and in that instant I took my florid face out of the menu, felt my armpits growing suddenly dry, and smiled in turn at most of the other members seated at our somewhat isolated table.

  The girl whom Ursula had pointed out to me the previous day was, ironically enough, seated exactly opposite the young ship’s officer at my side, so hence almost exactly opposite from me. Like the rest of them she was studying her menu. Her long-stemmed water glass was empty; with a sudden mild intensity I noted that the coarse young wireless officer was fishing for the girl’s small sandaled foot with his poorly polished white shoe. I resented his action, I moved to rearrange the napkin spread in my lap. The water, like the consommé, had not yet appeared. The girl must have noticed my concern because in the next brief passage of time, as I broke through the frozen glassy crust of a roll with my two thumbs, she looked at me directly as if she were about to smile. Her eyelashes made me think of flies climbing a wall.

  “I am Dutch, not Swiss,” I said in answer to someone’s question. “But in my case it is a common mistake.”

  The ship veered slightly, the sun flashed, two black-jacketed men began setting before us the low flat silver tureens filled with the tepid consommé and green garnishes and puckering chunks of lemon. I admitted to myself that the soup deserved some sort of public comment.

  “This consommé,” I said quietly, “has been siphoned from the backs of lumbering tortoises whose pathetic shells have been drilled for the tubes.”

  The silence, the singing of the crystal, the plash of water filling the goblets, the bent heads, the sun on the naked shoulders of the girl who was wearing pants and a halter, all this told me that I should not have spoken, should not have revealed in hyperbole my loneliness, my distaste for travel, my ambiguous feelings about the girl. Again I glanced beneath the table and saw that the carelessly daubed white shoe was now pressed against the girl’s very small and naked foot. The girl, in the motions of her arch and toes, was encouraging the attention of the young wireless officer and even responding to his touch.

  The girl’s halter was tight, triangular and dark blue over what it covered of her childish chest. The cuff of the wireless officer’s white tunic sleeve was frayed, and not only frayed but unclean, stained by a smudge of some substance pertaining to his job as wireless operator. The girl was ordinary yet unfamiliar, while the officer was a common type, a careless black-haired young man who singled out one special girl for himself on each aimless cruise. I knew his type and was not surprised to see that the coarse fingers of his right hand were constantly shifting my silver fork or brushing the rim of my waiting plate. As his secreted right foot performed its seduction, so his visible right hand had to give offense, and both for the sake of the girl who was seated across from us and watching.

  Spoon to lip, eyes meeting those of the young girl at an odd angle, conscious of a high wide transparent
wave of spray beyond the nearest sheet of plate glass, and seeing the varied faint colors in the fine spray, and hearing a few notes of the vibraphone, suddenly I realized that the officer’s effrontery was going to be far more extensive than I had imagined. His hand left the table. His hand slipped from the table in such a way as to engage my attention but not that of anyone else. In order to thrust his hand into the pocket of the wrinkled white tunic, he moved so that his bent elbow touched my heavy unobtrusive arm. Intentionally. For an instant I speculated about the girl’s age, I heard a saxophone barking distantly, I thought of the two great ponderous black anchors wet and dripping where they hung bolted like monolithic torture instruments to the high prow of the ship.

  “Tomorrow we reach land,” the officer said to the girl while continuing to feel about slowly in his pocket and to invade my luncheon hour with the deliberate tip of his elbow.

  “So soon? I thought we wouldn’t see anything for days.”

  “First port of call tomorrow. There’ll be horses and carriages for sightseeing.”

  I felt again the insistent elbow. I glanced down. I saw the man’s hand cupped palm upward on his thigh, the hand crudely tilted in my direction, the small glossy faded yellow photograph cupped and shining in his hand. I frowned, the girl was smiling, I returned the spoon to the bowl. I glanced down at what was obviously an example of very old-fashioned pornography. The fissured celluloid and two small white gelatinous figures were cupped in the man’s hand, framed in his palm, and now the young man was laughing at the girl and twisting, winking his stubby little antique picture as if he expected me to take it in thumb and forefinger and transfer it surreptitiously to my own white pocket. He began to make a brushing motion with his rude thumb across the two small stilted nudes as if wiping away some invisible film of dust. I put down my napkin, pushed back my chair, excused myself.