Death, Sleep & the Traveler: Novel (New Directions Books) Page 11

  “But watch them,” Ariane was saying, “they are so agile!”

  As if in response to her words and to her girlish voice, in unison the two bats slowly rolled and stretched upward from mid-body until grotesquely, impossibly, the two eager heads were so positioned that in sudden spasms the vicious little mouths engulfed the tops of their respective penises. I understood immediately that this was how the two bats must have been engaged—in the slow jerky calisthenics of autofellatio—when Ariane first came upon the sight of them.

  Behind me Ariane made a sound of pleasure, disengaged herself from the wireless operator, and with both small hands took hold of the wire mesh. Her blouse was stained, her small and perfectly proportioned face was flushed as with some kind of rosy cream. On her head sat the offensive cap.

  “Allert,” she said then, “see how much pleasure they give themselves!”

  “Oh,” came the sudden voice behind our backs, “Vanderveenan knows all about that pleasure. You’re able to do what the bats do, aren’t you, Vanderveenan?”

  She turned. Her little nostrils flared. A small thick sun began to climb from the opening in her purple blouse. Her breath, for her, was heavy.

  “Olaf!” she said quickly, fiercely. “Olaf, you may not be cruel!”

  But already I had turned away from the still unsatisfied and still voraciously preoccupied winged vermin, already I had turned away from the insult of the wireless operator’s hostile voice. I smelled the dreams of the coiled snakes, in my slowness I contained the desperation of the two bats, in my mouth I tasted the oily residue of peanuts dropped accidentally and long ago by children who also would have been interested in the performance of the two bats. I exited. Ariane uttered a single faint cry inside the old building and called my name. But I did not answer and did not wait for her to join me, since I was not convinced that she wanted me to, and since she at any rate was no match for the young ship’s officer who had abandoned his empty bottle near the python’s cage and, clearly, had himself become uncontrollably aroused by the sight of the bats. In my mind I carried away the impression of Ariane wearing the white officer’s cap as would a sailor’s whore.

  The light was the color of dry pine. A faded hair-ribbon was snagged, I noticed, on the thorns of a dry and naked bush. Everywhere stretched the shadowy landscape of the cages—empty, untended. A marble water fountain yielded not one cool drop, despite my patience. Its bowl was impacted with dead leaves. On I went in my white linen suit which, only a few hours before, had been fresh and pleasing to the touch when I had removed it from my stateroom closet. The light made me think of the green and yellow suffusion associated with the ashen aftermath of a volcanic eruption. The cages I had passed with the wireless operator appeared to be empty.

  When I reached the carriage, which was now a piece of dreamlike statuary in the vast gloom, the old horse was unresponsive to my thick and well-intended caresses. I patted his nose, I stroked his withers, I spoke to him quietly in Dutch. But to no avail. As for the driver, the old man did not awake, though I put my full weight on the little iron step of the carriage, though the black carriage squeaked and tilted dangerously, though I resumed my former place on the cushioned seat with unintended clumsiness and noise. Clearly the old man and ancient animal were sleeping the same sleep in the depths of their age.

  Thus I sat waiting for the return of the lovers. I relaxed as best I could, I noted the straw bag on the floor beside my foot, I crossed my knees, I smoked a cigar—but too quickly, a little too quickly—and alone in the sleeping carriage and vast silent zoo I thought with mild bitterness that here was the reality of the “Paradise Isles” promised in the pages of the brochure describing the special delights of our endless cruise. Here, I thought, was the truth of our destined exoticism, the taste of our dreams.

  I nodded, I took a last puff on the cigar, I coughed, I saw Ariane approaching up the shadowed path. She was alone, she was bareheaded, she was walking briskly, she was still tucking in her purple blouse and adjusting her tight pants. It was a trivial but significant operation—the sum of those gestures—and without speaking, without changing my position in the carriage, without smiling, I read in the movement of her hands and fingers the message of what had obviously occurred on the dusty wooden floor of the reptile house. She was angry, she had dressed in haste, she did not wave to me or speak. It was only too apparent that she was indifferent to my perception of the whole long song so evident in the way she walked and the way she twisted and tugged at her clothing.

  She climbed into the carriage and sat beside the Dutch corpse, as I thought of myself at that moment, and leaned forward and roughly shook the old driver’s arm.

  “We shall go back to the ship alone,” she said aloud. “We shall go without him.”

  The startled old man took up his reins. We rode in silence. From the crest of the hills, with the umbrella pines behind us and the little silvery city stretched out below, I noted that the sun was setting like a fiery cargo on the deck of the ship. And later, after Ariane had softened, after we had dismissed the carriage, after she had followed me wordlessly to my dark cabin—it was then that she faced me and seized my arms and ran her hands up and down my arms, touching and squeezing them as if to reassure herself of what she felt for me and that I was there and real. She was small, she was standing as straight as possible and searching my eyes, her features were sponged with dark shadows.

  “Allert,” she said at long last and in a whisper, “please....”

  I heard the tenderness of her appeal, I smelled the depths of the evening sea, I deliberated, I thought of the reptile house in total darkness. And then I relented.

  That night the drunken wireless operator returned to the ship supported by the two women members of the ship’s band. The next day he and Ariane spent half the afternoon in the warm wind on the volleyball court.

  “Allert,” she said, turning to me abruptly in the act of dressing, “I want to ask you a simple question.” She rested her hand on the back of the leather chair and then, watching me, moving across the room, she stepped into a pair of underpants which once in place looked less like a silken garment than like a faint hue that might have been spread long ago by a bearded painter. Again she paused, again she stared in my direction. I knocked the ash from my cigar. “Allert,” she said then, “why are you here? Why exactly are you here? Do you know?”

  But if Ursula was capable of asking me such a question, how could I possibly have been capable of finding the answer?

  On a morning as clear and dense with the cold as any I had ever seen, and while Ursula and I were driving down the snow-covered road in Peter’s car on our way to the village, she remarked that during the trial she had had sex every night with my attorney. It was her way of rewarding herself, as she expressed it, for her loyalty. At that moment I was tempted to tell her that they had greeted me in my cabin with black handcuffs the night we docked. But I controlled the temptation then and thereafter.

  I awoke. I was wet. The sheets were double thick and stretched beneath me like some enormous scab peeled from the wound of the night. I could see nothing, I could feel nothing except my weight and the sensation of my own sweat laving and filming the sheets. But where had I been? What had I dreamt? Why was I so wet and stricken in clear paralysis? From what depths had I fought my way to this dead surface? Flat on my back, lips parted, waiting, body slack on the sheets and wet with sweat—thus I lay alone, though next to Ursula, and thus I gave consciousness to the agony of true thirst, though my mouth itself felt thick and warm. But what had I dreamt?

  Later, after I had returned to the moonlit bedroom from the blackened lavatory, to which I had carried myself like some wounded animal to the midnight water hole, and where in the tiled darkness I had turned on the tap and listened to the flow of cold water and drunk my fill, it was then that I stood in the doorway and saw that Ursula was sprawled in the moonlight with her nightdress high and her right hand undulating in the considerable erogenous zone between he
r spread and partially lifted legs. The heat from her body reached me in waves across the moonlit room. Even in sleep Ursula’s active erotic life was not to be stilled.

  But where had I been? What had I dreamt?

  “Well,” I said, “why rock the ship? Why must you rock the ship?”

  “The word is boat. I wish you would speak like anyone else. I do not find your verbal affectations amusing.”

  “But really it would be better if you did not rock the ship. After all, Peter had the consolation of dying in the presence of both of us. Surely one of us deserves to die in the presence of the other. Perhaps you would like to change your mind and stay. Why not?”

  “You are already dead, Allert. You do not need me. I have mourned at your funeral far too long already.”

  Throughout this brief exchange, which was one of several, Peter’s dusty pipe lay in my ash tray and Peter’s automobile stood empty, locked, covered with a glaze of frost and cobwebs in our old garage. Ursula was smoking a fragrant cigarette.

  In my pajamas and bare feet I entered the bathroom which was wet with steam and filled with Ursula’s perfume and with another still richer smell that made me imagine Ursula milking herself into the bathroom sink. I sniffed the humidity. I gripped the edge of the sink and smelled her hair. I did not know the hour and had not even glanced out the bedroom window at the world of white snow, as was my habit. The bathroom was dark and wet and smelled of Ursula—her hair, her skin, her soap, her scent of flowers, her thin passionate jets of milk.

  I turned on the tap. Nothing. I turned on the other tap. Nothing. I flushed the toilet. In a kind of fever I turned the chromium fixtures in the deep tub and beneath the goose-necked shower. Nothing, nothing at all. I trembled. I stepped into the corridor that was packed with the stillness of the morning sun.

  “Ursula,” I cried at last, “there is no water! What has happened to the water?”

  And then I heard the sound of a car engine, and behind me the sudden furious rumbling and gushing of water in the toilet, the sink, the tub, the shower, as if my cries for peace and purification had been answered by some watery monster of indiscretion. I hurried back into the bathroom to turn off the taps.

  In endless discovery of the musical imagination, I told myself, as stretched out in the stern of the ship in the folds of my canvas deck chair I listened to the syncopated late afternoon tinkling of the ship’s trio. Had it been some other ship, a different journey, no doubt I would have been wrapped in a coarse blanket in my canvas chair, and the sky would have been gray, the sea rough, the air cold, our approaching destination defining without question the time of day, the nautical miles. As it was I needed no blanket and lay stretched out in the wood and canvas chair on the fantail, for no other reason than to bask in the glare of the day that had no hour and listen to the shouts of the bathers in the ship’s pool and to the unstructured melodic background music of the ship’s band. The music was appropriate to the day, the ship, the voyage, since it gave no indication of purpose or cessation. Without turning my head or opening my eyes I could nonetheless visualize the three musicians, and on this occasion found myself indifferent to the vibraphone player’s two hands loosely wrapped in bloody bandages, and indifferent as well to the two middle-aged women, drummer and saxophonist respectively, who looked so much alike they might have been sisters.

  My eyes were closed, my terry cloth robe was flung wide to the sun, our course was level, I was well aware of the tender waxed composure of my face, my cigar was aglow—and I told myself that for once I was indifferent to that foreboding trio.

  At that precise instant in time, when the moment was intact but the hour gone, I heard the reedy sentimental percussive music stop in mid-bar. I opened my eyes. The swimmers were playing porpoise in the ship’s pool, the sky was dear, the bathers were shouting, far below us the engines were roughly and serenely functioning, the ship appeared real, my skin was protected from the rays of the sun by a comforting lotion that smelled powerfully of one of the sweeter spices grown on the little islands we passed in the night. But behind my back there was no music.

  I raised myself forward in the deck chair. I heard the crash and clatter of what was unmistakably the sound of someone knocking over a brass cymbal loosely mounted on a long and spindly tripod. This spidery apparatus crashed to the deck. I heard several erratic beats of the bass drum. The male musician cursed—unmistakably it was his voice I heard. And then the sound of a bare hand smacking flatly against a flaming cheek, and since both of the vibraphone player’s hands were swathed in his filthy bandages he, I realized, was not the aggressor. Now one of the women—drummer? saxophonist?—was declaiming some injurious message in a foreign language which to me was incomprehensible. Another crash, an odd partial scale on the vibra-phone, then the woman’s brutish voice also stopped in mid-breath.

  At that moment, which was also unmarked in the sea of time, Ariane appeared suddenly beside my chair. As I was straining to lean around to my right and peer in the direction of the ship’s trio now disbanded, silent, Ariane appeared on my left and leaned down, gripped the wooden armrest, and spoke to me softly, urgently, in a tone I had not heard before.

  “Allert,” she said, “the ship’s orchestra is quarreling. It’s dreadful. Dreadful.”

  Later, as the path of the ship was crossing the path of a black buoy that had been cut adrift from some unknown anchorage, and after Ariane and I had risen from the deck chair and, holding hands, were preparing to go below to her cabin or mine, it was then that I noticed the abandoned vibraphone, the silent drum, the saxophone like a golden bird strangled on the hook from which it hung, and in a heap on the deck the cymbal and its thin but ungainly stand.

  “Allert,” she said, “don’t you think it is a sign? I could not bear a voyage that was not harmonious.”

  I reassured Ariane that the vibraphone player and his two ugly women were no doubt already kissing in their dark quarters below the water line. It occurred to me that Ariane had ambitions of joining the ship’s trio when on the fantail they began to play their last long number as our white ship rounded the breakwater and once more entered home port—gaily, with whistles steaming and the sun in the eyes of all those jubilant travelers crowding the rail. But we returned in the night.

  “But of course,” Peter was saying, “of course the schizophrenic has his romantic nature like anyone else. No, my friend, which one of us would dare deny the schizophrenic his possibilities for romantic behavior?”

  His long dark fingers were plucking the congealed feathers from the duck that was both dead and blue. I was well aware that inside his knee-high rubber boots the argyle socks were freshly bought and warm, soft, closely knitted in two colors—red and green. I knew about the nature of Peter’s socks because they were mine. Above our heads the ice was suspended from the eaves like transparent teeth. The last sun was flowing across the snow.

  “You should not be so hostile to Acres Wild,” he continued. “At Acres Wild we have numerous long-lived affairs. It is part of the cure, my friend. Part of the cure.”

  That day his pipe smoke smelled like the dark forest which, only minutes or hours before, the dead duck in his hand had skimmed in swift flight. That day Peter’s smile belonged on the leather face of a conquistador. The fat of the cold duck fell like red speckled droplets of candle wax into the pure snow.

  To me it has always been curious that Peter, who never married, should have lived a life that was unconditionally monogamous, thanks to the power of Ursula’s dark allure and her strength of mind, whereas I, who became married to Ursula one Sunday afternoon in a small stone country chapel that had hosted a funeral the same morning, have lived my life as sexually free as the arctic wind. To me it is curious that two friendly duck hunters should have been so different, and that Ursula should have thought of Peter as lover and of me as husband. I have often thought our situations should have been reversed.

  Yesterday while stamping the snow with my rubber boots and burning a pile of s
crub brush that I had dragged from the wall of forest that lies dark and distant behind our house, and feeling the cold air thick and crystallizing in my lungs and a new beard fringing my chapped face, yesterday I realized that between the hour of my acquittal—an event I rarely allow to consciousness—and the very moment I was pausing to wipe the soot from my jaw, there lay eight or perhaps nine long years of companionship, solitude, winter life. And during all this time I have thought of myself as moderate, slow-paced, sensible, overly large, aging. But ordinary, always ordinary, merely the owner of a small but elegant estate (with a handsome wife, with a good friend, with girl friends, with several automobiles). And yet throughout these years, I told myself yesterday while tasting the charred smoke of the fire and watching the sparks dashing upward into a dead sky, Ursula must have thought of me as a Dutch husband who had been lobotomized—but imperfectly. The medical aspect of the metaphor was one she would have learned from Peter.

  At that moment the intangible again gave birth to the tangible. And leaving the fire, which was now sending skyward a long plume of smudge as though some small aircraft had just crashed at the edge of my forest, I indeed felt lobotomized. My head was like a boulder encased with ice. My steps were slow. I knew that if I could have taken a hammer and cracked open my icy rock, my frozen head, I would have found inside the perfect memory: that it now has been three years since Peter’s death.

  In the kitchen I found set out in the center of a stone dish my usual little clear glass of schnapps, which I seized and drank down even before removing my pullover or washing the signs of the burning fire from my numbed and naked hands.