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

  “Tomorrow,” said the girl as I got to my feet, “will you join us in one of the carriages?”

  “Thank you,” I answered in my thickest accent, “perhaps.”

  The ship was softly undulating, with knife and fork in hand the young officer was beginning to eat his luncheon. I spent the next day in my cabin waiting, listening to the noise of temporary disembarkation, feeling the heat of land, feeling the timbers of the pier through the ship’s steel, thinking that the thick yellow hawser visible beyond my porthole was to the stilled ship what a life preserver was to the floundering man. At least the hawser made sense of our immobility.

  There were gongs, there were whistles, there were blasts from high-pitched pipes, screams of compressed air. Even from where Ursula and I stood together on the crowded deck near the gangway I could see that the ship was high and sharp and clear, a paint-smelling flowered mirage of imminent departure over the lip of the earth.

  “You see,” said Ursula into my ear and laughing, nodding in the direction of the young woman leaning happily at the ship’s rail, “you will not be alone, Allert. Not for long.”

  I turned, I looked again at the young woman who was leaning on the rail and smiling at the crowd on the pier, at the loading shed, at the other ships in the harbor, at the smoke rising more swiftly and blackly now from the pale blue smokestacks above our heads. The girl was standing with no one, she waved but not to anyone in particular down on the pier. And when I turned back to Ursula our own ship’s whistle blew, its vibration filling deck, sea, sky, bones, breasts, and tearing us all loose from the familiar shore.

  “She’ll take care of you,” Ursula shouted into my waiting ear, “you’ll see.”

  In my dream there is a table of rough wooden planks, darkness, another person, light coming from nowhere, and in the center of the table a pile of shining wet blood-purple grapes in a clay bowl. We are outdoors and I feel no apprehension. And yet it seems to me that the grapes, which arc clearly at the center of this late-night timeless experience, arc somehow moving faintly of their own accord. The air is without wind, without stars. The grapes are waiting, massed in a curious faint motion. The other person, who is female and stands well beyond the edge of the table, is not inviting me to approach the grapes, though she is standing beyond the table only in expectation that I will do so. Yes, I am aware of the other person and pleased at the sight of the heap of grapes with their tight wet skins and reddening color. But then there is a change in mood, a change in perspective, because now I am standing beside the table in the warm night air and noticing that the grapes are unlike any I have ever seen, since each grape grows not from the single short tough stem which is part of the usual cluster, but is instead attached top and bottom by tender almost transparent tubes to its neighbor. Yes, the grapes are heaped in the bowl in a single tangled coil rather than in familiar bunches. And now I see that these grapes are larger than usual, that their slick skins are watery red, that they are definitely moving against each other, that they are stretched and twisted into oddly elongated shapes instead of the usual spheres, and all because each grape contains a tiny reddish fetus about the size of the tip of my thumb.

  The grapes are transparent, I see the fetuses, the other person has drawn appreciably closer to watch my reaction to the grapes which are wriggling now like a heap of worms. Despite their pale redness they are still purple. Despite their distorted shapes they are still glistening and large. But when a handful is separated wetly from the rest of the pile and is suddenly half crushed on the wooden surface of the table (by the other person who is clearly my wife), I am revolted and unable to eat.

  When I told this dream to Ursula she asked me how anyone could be so afraid of life as to dream such a disgusting dream.

  We sailed from Amsterdam, from Bremen, from Brest, from Marseilles, from farther north, from farther south, from Amsterdam. The brochure describing the voyage lay on the table beside my chair for weeks before the day of departure. I smelled the sweet smell of dust hours before we first sighted land when I went to my cabin. Ursula waved me off from the crowded pier. There was no one to wave off the girl at the rail. I had no interest in boarding that ship. I did not want to sit beside Ursula and drive to the pier. I was not attracted to severance, sun, sea, the geography of separation and islands and unexpected encounters in cabins like mausoleums. I did not want to float in the ship’s pool which was a parody of the sea it traveled on. I did not want to sail. But the return was worst of all since by then the girl was gone. I plan never again to look at the rough sea though I am filled with it, like a sewn-up skin with salt.

  In my dream I am somehow endowed with the rare North Penis, as if the points of the compass have become reliable indicators of sexual potency with north lying at the maximum end of the scale. First I see the phrase North Penis on a sign above the door of a shabby restaurant which I recognize as a place that serves good wine, and then I am seated at the single unsteady little table in front of the restaurant and am aware of the sudden ill-fit of my trousers and of the physical sensations of the rare North Penis between my legs. The waiter is scowling, there is no way to share my embarrassment and secret gratification, I am forced to drink a half glass of the excellent wine alone.

  When I told this dream to Ursula she made no comment but instead leaned across to me enigmatically and put her hand on my thigh. Later in the day she said she found the explicit sexual insecurity of my dream surprising, but would tell me no more.

  “Allert,” she said, “all men wish occasionally to be free of their wives. You really must go on this cruise. And go alone.”

  She was facing away from me and toward the large expanding glass pane of the window, so that beyond her naked back and beyond the window the snow spread westward in a dazzling white crust for miles.

  The third musician was playing his vibraphone with naked knuckles, with knuckles split to the bone and bleeding onto his sentimental percussive instrument. We were heading into a darkening choppy westward sunset. I went out on deck.

  It was so cold that a skin of ice had already formed on the surface of Peter’s bright blue car that was still faintly steaming at the side door of his week-end house in the country. The setting sun was licking the hard bright machine like some great invisible beast on its knees.

  “Ursula, for you,” he said, giving her the glass. “And for you, Allert. A quick drink and then we’ll try the new sauna.”

  “Cheers,” I said in my native Dutch and saw the hard wet light of the sun, which was just beginning to set, in the frozen lacquer of the car beyond the window, in the metallic sheen of Peter’s gray hair, in the window glass itself and in our tumblers, our eyes, our breaths still visible even inside the essentially unused house. Peter lit the enormous fire, we drank, the three small valises—two of matching straw and one of stiffly shining hide—stood together in the entrance hall. The fireplace smelled of the damp soot of the wintry forest, Ursula was sipping from her glass and smiling.

  “All right, my dears,” Peter said, “I have a treat for you.”

  He refilled the tumblers, he brought the bottle, so that outside the cold and the fierce declining light leapt as one to tumblers and fingers, to bottle and fusing voices, so that the car and the house and the three of us were all cut from the same timeless stuff of light and ice. We laughed, we stumbled together in single file, Peter pointed the way with the bottle held out before him by its frozen neck, though the path was clear enough. The sun turned suddenly orange on the haunch of Ursula’s tight trousers, for some reason the sound of my own footsteps made me think of those of a lurching murderer. Unmarked, faintly visible, the path covered the short distance from the house above us to the cabin in the little cove below in spectacular fashion, skirting the bare birches and crusted snow to our right and hooking downward to the edge of the black and brackish sea on our left.

  The cove was narrow in the mouth but deep, a perfect little fat pouch cut roundly into the rocks and snow of that frozen coast, and in t
he very center of the cove stood the cabin freshly built of stripped white logs and smelling of wood chips and tar and creosote. There were no windows, the large plank door was locked with an obviously new padlock, and yet greenish and highly scented smoke was drifting up from the chimney. The naked birches of the hillside crowded down the white incline to the cabin, which had been built only a few feet from the round rocks, the edge of ice, the brutally black salt water. It seemed to me that all the rocks, large and small, were the color and texture of a man’s skull long exposed to snow, sun, rain.

  “Peter,” I called, smelling the green smoke, the fresh wood, and feeling the tension between the white trees and snow and the black water, “what a perfect spot for a sauna!”

  The door closed behind us like the door of an ice-house, as if it were six or eight inches thick. Ursula and I commented on the sense of well-being that filled the little solidly built log cabin. The interior smelled of cedar, of ferns, of polished rocks, of water. Over everything drifted the scent of eucalyptus trees.

  “Ursula,” Peter said, “why don’t you use the dressing room first? Then Allert and I will take our turn.”

  She put down her tumbler and disappeared. She returned with her torso wrapped in a white towel. For only a moment or two Peter and I left her alone tilting the cold glass to her lips and watching fragile cords of flame binding themselves tightly about the log glowing in the enormous fireplace. It took us only a moment or two to strip down and hang our clothes on the wooden pegs as Ursula had done, and to wrap ourselves in the heavy terry cloth towels. One of Peter’s black socks dropped to the floor. Ursula’s clothes were bunched in silken shapelessness on the wooden peg.

  “You look like a pair of old Romans,” she said, and the three of us clinked together our tumblers hard, with gusto. Ursula had removed her jewelry and, clearly enough, was pleased to be standing between Peter and me in her white towel. She was holding the upper edge of her towel with a soft hand.

  “Yes, Peter,” I said, “it was clever of you to locate all this sensual isolation in the very midst of so much magnificent desolation.”

  “But this is only the beginning, my friend. You’ll see.”

  And then quietly, seriously, peacefully, we entered the sauna. The rose-colored light, the flagstone floor, the walls of cedar planking, the tranquility of the intense heat, the now heady smell of eucalyptus, suddenly the power of this kind of languid confinement was far more considerable than I had thought.

  “Actually,” Peter said, “it is best to spread the towels on the benches and then to sit or lie on them.”

  Ursula loosened her towel, removed it, placed it on the hot wooden slats between Peter and me, and slowly leaned back against the cedar wall with her knees to her chin. Her knees were together only for comfort, just as her heels for the same reason were spread apart, and her eyes were open and level while her lips, her heavy lips, were agreeably relaxed. She did not intend to hide her breasts with her knees though she was doing so. Already there was appearing on the cellulous density of Ursula’s body a heat rash indistinguishable from the rough discoloration of the sex rash that was so periodically familiar on her chest and neck. I knew at once that Ursula was thinking and at the same time pleasantly daydreaming in the intense heat.

  Peter and I spread our towels, he assuming a perfectly upright Yoga position to Ursula’s right, I reclining into a half-leaning position to her left. Already the rose-colored light had dimmed perceptibly, while time had disappeared completely in the intense heat. Back straight, abdominal muscles visibly tight, ankles crossed, hands on spread knees, in this way Peter had turned himself into a living religious artifact constructed only for the sake of the receptacle that was his lap. And in the receptacle of Peter’s lap lay the hunched conglomerate of his still dormant sexual organs.

  My friend did not move except occasionally to lick his lips. Ursula was slack and motionless. I lay massively sprawled with my forearm on the towel, my hip against Ursula, my large smooth shoulder propped against the cedar wall. Our eyes were dry, our skin was dry, with all the clarity of a peaceful dream our immobility was giving way in slow motion to fragments of action: Peter ladling oil of eucalyptus onto hot rocks; Ursula smiling at the bland rear view of Peter’s nudity and thrusting a dry hand between her thighs; I shifting and rolling onto my back with knees raised and feet flat to the towel and hands clasped beneath my head; Peter turning with ladle in hand; Ursula reaching down more firmly, more gently, and pleasing herself with one finger, with several; Peter resuming his Yoga position; Peter ladling out the oil of distant trees; I placing the flat of my right foot against Ursula’s hip; Peter sitting again with his hands on his knees and his spine in a curve; Ursula placing her heels together and then spreading wide her knees and arms toward Peter, toward me.

  “We must plunge into the water,” Peter said. “We must not wait too long.”

  “The first naked man I ever saw,” Ursula said, “had a cock down to his knees.”

  “We’ll cleanse the skin, finally,” Peter said, “with birch branches.”

  “But the word is Dutch,” I heard myself saying, drunkenly, serenely, “not Latin.”

  The room was dry. Our bodies were dry. The heat was high enough to stimulate visions, to bring death. The oil of eucalyptus was running, was forming a slick film on walls and floor, was greasing our nipples and turning to thick foam between our legs—though invisibly, silently. I lay again on my back and closed my eyes and listened. Of all the women I had known, only Ursula made that muted popping sound in the midst of all the other sounds of oral passion, and now in the timeless heat of Peter’s sauna I heard Ursula’s own sound and then, aware of Peter and Ursula tangling and untangling, the one rounding upward her sweet back, the other throwing high his chin as if to crack his trachea from within, and then aware of silence sliding among us like a pool of oil, suddenly I felt the muted fierce sensation of Ursula who had turned around quite naturally to me.

  Felt and heard the tip of the tongue, the edge of the tongue, the flat of the tongue, the softness inside the lips, the resilience of the lips firmly compressed, the gusts of unsmiling breath, the passionate suction of the popping that was sensation as well as sound, the nick of a white tooth, the tip of her nose, the side of her cheek, the feeling of her head on its side with the mouth gripping me, carrying me, as a dog carries a sacred stick, until I felt that last moment of Ursula’s wet concentration—tender, vibrant, brokenly rhythmical—and then felt myself disgorging, disengaging, sinking, curling slowly into a gigantic ball like some enormous happy animal armed with quills.

  It was Peter who saved us in time, who kissed Ursula’s roughened mouth just in time, who swatted her sharply on the flank just in time, who pulled me out of my stuporous imitation of the woodchuck just in time, who caught hold of Ursula’s nude body and mine and dragged us out of the sauna and into the frozen sunset and leaping and laughing into the shocking blackness of the salty choppy water just in time to prevent irreparable burns or internal damage or even death. And in time also to revive us, to wound us back to life in the bright light, the unbearable coldness, the crunching of the thin ice that made small bleeding cuts on our naked feet and ankles.

  Heavy, lumbering, laughing, exposed in shock, down we crashed into the mid-winter tide and hurt our arches on the round rocks and even chased each other with handfuls of virgin snow. We revived, we shook, the rash on Ursula’s upper body was like a vivid red tapestry on a white field. Our fragments of speech, our sounds of choking laughter, our sounds of flesh slapping flesh all broke across the last light and last silence of the frozen day.

  Back in the cabin to which we fled to escape the sea, the cold, the pure ominous light, and to retrieve our clothes, Ursula engaged in a prolonged sexual embrace first with Peter and then with me in front of the logs that were still burning as brightly as before. In front of the fire we redeemed each other’s scars and restored to cold bodies the comfort of familiar warmth. We were not in a mood for the bir
ch branches.

  It was later, when climbing up the crusted path in the darkness, that I received my all-too-accurate premonition that Peter’s life was going to end, when that moment came, in the sauna.

  “Yes, Allert,” she said, “I am going to find somebody very different from you. An African, perhaps, or a moody Greek. And I shall never again submit to marriage.”

  I went immediately to my own cabin, by tracking the numbers on the louvered doors. I would allow no one else to carry my new valise. I found the door, I entered and placed the valise on the little unsteady luggage stand. I shut the porthole, I locked the door, I sat down on the edge of the bed facing the valise and resting my forearms on my thighs. I waited, I stared at the valise, I listened. In the midst of motion I could not visualize, and the silence that followed the whistles, the shouts, the crush of human activity and the subliminal grinding of iron wheels and greasy gears, slowly I became aware of the stabilizing throb and purpose of the engines far below and knew that we were under way and sailing.

  Nonetheless, I was unable to make myself open the valise. I was unable to open it, in fact, for several days, which no doubt accounted for my unshaven appearance at the earlier meals.

  Strapped, locked, made of bright golden leather, my new valise sat untouched on its flimsy stand for several days, a pedestrian Pandora’s box filled, I thought, with the sentimental or useful objects of my traveling self. During those hours while I sat on the edge of the tightly made up bed and stared at the fattened valise, often I asked myself if Ursula had thought of a cruise deliberately, since long ago the two of us had shared this kind of cruise in celebration of our recent marriage.

  Finally I unpacked the valise.

  I am a person who drinks inordinate amounts of cold water. When I rise and stand on the warm tiles in my silk pajamas, or when I pause at our kitchen sink which lies like an enormous ceramic trough beneath the window facing the rear of the driveway down which Ursula will soon depart, or when I return to our house from feeding the geese on our small artificial pond, or when I wake in the night or turn away from the window with the western exposure or think of Ursula lying somewhere above me with her magazine and expanding plans, in each case inevitably and deliberately I pause and fill a thick clear glass with cold water which, slowly and fully, I drink down. I taste the water as it comes from under the black flat rocks, I taste the icy water flowing down a river of light, I am aware of it chilling my teeth and refreshing me. Each glass of water causes me to breathe deeply, to grow a shade more somber, to anticipate more keenly the taste of the little cigar with which I follow each pure glass of cold water. And I have insisted on my dozen or so glasses of water each day throughout all of the last ten years or so of our long marriage. I drink only water and an occasional schnapps whereas most of my fellow countrymen drink beer. And still, as Ursula says, I am forever bloated.