Death, Sleep & the Traveler: Novel (New Directions Books) Page 4

  I sat on my bed, leaned forward, and took the edge of the aging photograph between my thumb and index finger. I held it as one might hold the wings of a submissive butterfly. Slowly I brought the photograph within range of my unemotional scrutiny. The two small white figures, like fading maggots, were apparently devouring each other sexually with carnivorous joy. I brought the picture closer to my quiet eye and stared at the crack that ran like a bolt of lightning across the glazed emulsion of the much-handled print. After a few more moments of study, I made up my mind that this was a different photograph from the one produced surreptitiously by the wireless officer in the dining saloon, though I could not be sure. It seemed to me that the figures were smaller now and more suggestive of another century.

  I decided against destroying the picture. I decided against searching immediately for the wireless operator and facing him down. Though it was true that the unexplained appearance of the old-fashioned photograph in my locked stateroom was somehow worse than receiving a poison-pen letter, nonetheless I decided not to return the picture to its owner. If the wireless operator was attempting to intimidate me through the photograph or tell me something about myself that I did not know, all for the purpose of preventing my friendship with the young woman in the blue halter, he would soon realize that I was more formidable than he had thought.

  No sooner had I made my decision and slipped the photograph into my jacket pocket than I leaned forward on impulse and unstrapped my valise, unlocked it, opened it wide. And though the articles inside were unfamiliar and appeared not to be mine, as if Ursula had determined that my transformation as a result of travel would be complete in every way, nonetheless I unpacked my valise at last and found an appropriate shelf or drawer for each of the articles I was so unaccustomed to see or touch. I felt as if I had violated the coffin of some unknown child. I stored the valise in the bottom of the closet, hooked open the cabin door with its brass hook, unscrewed the fat brass wing nuts of my single porthole and thrust it ajar, and then lay down on my unfamiliar bed to wait.

  The photograph is still in my possession. It is the last and in some ways an accidental addition to my extensive pornographic collection, though I have kept the fact of its existence hidden from Ursula all this time. I chose not to submit that photograph as evidence at the prolonged and sickening ordeal of the trial.

  “Mr. Vanderveenan,” she called as I reached the top of the ladder and rose head and shoulders into the wind and glare of the uppermost deck, “won’t you join me for a game of net ball? I can find no one at all to play with me.”

  She was wearing a blue halter, tight blue denim trousers, black dancing slippers, and her hair tied back in a knotted strip of orange velveteen. She was standing in the wind beside the high net and balancing in one hand a black leather ball six or eight inches in diameter. Her waist between the lower edge of the halter and the upper edge of the leather-belted blue pants was bare. I recognized that her costume was the standard one generally intended to cause the viewer to imagine the belt unbuckled and the pants unzippered and hanging loose and partly open from the hips, and yet the naked waist was as smooth and childlike as the expression on her guileless face.

  “I would like very much to play your net ball,” I said into the invisible wind. “But tell me, how did you know my name?”

  We were close together and partially concealed by the two pale blue smokestacks that were oval in cross section and leaning back at a wind-swept rakish angle in the thrust of our journey. The ball in her hand was a tight ripe sectioned fruit of black leather.

  “The purser, of course. Didn’t you know that he’s one of the officers at our table? He knows the names and faces of all the passengers on the cruise.”

  “I see. The purser. Apparently I have not been aware of him.”

  We were closer together and I was quite familiar with the implications of the belted pants, the lure of the naked midriff. It was a commonplace attire. So far she promised nothing that was not in fact commonplace, except that her nearest shoulder blade was bare and poignant and that the miniature features of her face were grouped together in distinctive harmony. Even if she was an adult instead of a child and was a person who had actually lived beyond her majority, as I assumed she had, still she could never have come even close to half my age, a notion that engaged my attention occasionally from this moment on.

  “You don’t know the purser? Really? He’s the one with the handlebar mustache. He’s a favorite of mine.”

  “And who is the young officer who has assigned himself the seat next to mine at our table?”

  “Oh, that’s the wireless operator. He’s another favorite of mine.”

  “You have many favorites.”

  She was smiling, I was closer than arm’s length to her naked shoulder, I told myself that she could not possibly wish me to kiss her lips or even to touch her small bare shoulder so soon despite the inviting way she balanced the black ball, and despite her smile, her steady eyes, her upturned face. And yet I could in fact imagine this young person readily unbuckling her tight pants here in the space for games and athletics between smokestacks fore and aft and two white lifeboats on either side. And yet the poles of sex and friendship, I told myself, did not always imply the bright spark leaping between the two, at least not immediately.

  “If you don’t know the purser,” she said, glancing down at the black leather ball, “then you don’t know that my name is Ariane.”

  I reached for the ball, I felt the heat from the nearest smokestack mingling with the chill of the invisible wind and the bright light of the sun. Far below us a steward was moving along the hidden deck playing the three impersonal notes of his luncheon gong. The young woman’s breathing was reflected in her bare navel as well as in the natural rhythm of the breasts supported only by the triangulation of the blue halter. Between her shoulder blades the halter was tied, I saw, in a crisp knot.

  “So,” I said, giving the ball a small toss, “so you are Ariane. It’s a lovely name.”

  My tie was struggling in its clip, my hair was blowing, the dead white net was high above my head, I thought of the young woman’s name and saw the brothers, the sisters, the anonymous girl in the luncheonette, the shabby baptism of the first-born and female child receiving the elevated name she would so often discover in cheap magazines in the offices of social welfare.

  “Whatever you’re thinking right now,” she said, slipping her hand inside my jacket and her arm part way around my waist, “is unworthy of you. You shouldn’t think such things, Mr. Vanderveenan.”

  “But your name is indeed lovely. You must remember that I mean what I say—always.”

  Her arm was around my waist, the slightness of her entire body was brushing against all the bulk of mine, I could feel her small ringless hand playing with the folds of my damp shirt in the area of the small of my back. Had anyone discovered us standing there together between the smokestacks, he would not have been able to detect her arm and hand concealed inside the formal drapery of my unbuttoned jacket. But I could feel the slight pressure on my waist, the faint tugging and stroking motions of the fingers of her left hand, by leaning down was able even to catch a smell of her breath which was fleeting and natural in the context of the ocean wind. Her gesture was a surprise of course, and for an instant caused me to experience another one of those rare pangs of anxiety and anticipation in the face of the first hint of sudden attraction. I thought she was being friendly, I thought that her physical gesture expressed warmth and playfulness without intention. And yet we were indeed leaning together on the uppermost deck and one of her fingers had become somehow lodged between my belted trousers and my damp shirt. Already her entire manner should have told me plainly enough about her firmness of mind and her directness.

  “Well,” she said, raising her face toward mine and smiling, “you can’t play net ball in your jacket.”

  “Just so,” I said and drew my body away from hers, gave her the ball, removed my jacket, turned and wa
lked into playing position on the other side of the net. The steadiness of the ship, the syllables murmuring in the wires overhead, the honed whiteness of the wooden deck, the symmetrical web of the high net, the sound of a ventilating machine, the wind at my back and the sun directly overhead so that time and direction were obliterated, these circumstances could not have been more concrete, more neutral, more devoid of meaning, more appropriate to the surprise and simplicity of the occasion at hand, when an unknown young woman was offering me something beyond innocence, companionship, flirtation. She was watching me as closely as I was watching her, and in both hands had raised the ball to chest level.

  “You’re traveling alone,” she called, while I waited, raised my own hands in anticipation of her girlish throw.

  “And you,” I called back, squinting and waiting for the game to commence, “you too are traveling alone.”

  “But I’m different. I’m not married.”

  “Well,” I called, laughing and wondering what had become of the desperate gulls, “I am married and I am nonetheless alone on this cruise. There’s no more to say.”

  She raised the ball above her head. I took a step backward, I cupped my hands in the shape of the suspended ball. The ship was carrying us not toward any place but away.

  “Often I go on these cruises,” she called. “Often.”

  “Excellent,” I called back. “Are you going to throw?”

  She waited, this small anonymous female figure in an athletic pose. And then staring at me through the remarkable vibrations of the taut white net, slowly she lowered her arms until the ball, still gripped in her two hands, came to rest in the upper triangulation of her thighs, which were slightly spread. Her halter and tight pants appeared untouched by the wind, while on my back and shoulders and heavy legs my shirt and trousers were flattening like sails.

  “I don’t think so,” she called without moving. “I think not.”

  I understood. Suddenly I began to understand the absolute presence of the girl who was waiting on the other side of the net and whose name was periodically carried on the passenger lists of ships such as ours. So I nodded and ducked under the net; she dropped the ball which, moving in accordance with the wind and slope of the deck, drifted under one of the lifeboats and disappeared over the starboard side of the ship.

  We embraced. The skin of her naked back and shoulders was as smooth and glossy as the skin that has replaced burned skin on a human body. Her kissing was wet and confident, prolonged and wordless, and included even my nose, which she sucked into her small entirely serious mouth.

  “You must never pity me,’ she said when we were ready once more to descend the ladder. “That’s what I ask.”

  How could I possibly have done harm to such a person?

  “Allert,” Ursula was saying, “my reason for leaving you is not sexual. Not at all sexual. It’s just that you don’t know yourself, that you have no idea of what you are, that in my opinion you are an open cesspool. Your jowls, your eyes like lenses for the treatment of myopia, your little cigars, your ungainly person, your perverse sense of humor, all this is nothing to me. But you have long since emotionally annihilated yourself, Allert, and I can no longer tolerate your silences, your silence in the throes of passion, the accounts of your dreams, the stink from the cesspool that is yourself.”

  During this monologue a large white perfectly smooth ceramic bowl filled with fresh fat purple grapes stood coolly dripping on the table between us, which to me was either especially thoughtless of Ursula or especially cruel.

  The knuckles of the vibraphone player were round and white and minutely smeared with small wet stains of fresh blood. He was playing the metal bars of his silly instrument with his knuckles which were split and bleeding. The bars of the instrument were greased with the musician’s blood. The drummer and the saxophone player were women.

  In my dream the nighttime village, which is poor and not at all the village of my birth, consists of no more than a dusty road flanked on one side by a candle-lit cathedral and on the other by a small unoccupied petrol station. The road is blanketed with dust and emerges from the darkness, the pitch darkness of empty night, into the brief space illuminated by the flickering light of the enormous anomaly of the cathedral—gothic, candle-lit in every crevice within and without, active with the breath of spirits, but empty—and illuminated also by the single unshaded bulb that glows beside the single outdoor pump of the petrol station. The road emerges into the light of the opposition between the palace for dead men and the hovel for dead autos, then disappears again into the night which to me is oddly familiar. I am not surprised to be alone in the barbaric village in this illuminated space within the context of the familiar night. I perceive and yet do not perceive the monstrous incongruity between the empty cathedral and abandoned petrol station, which consists of the pump and a doorless whitewashed hovel smelling of urine. Nor am I surprised at the silent appearance of the funeral procession, nor surprised to find myself a part of that procession as it too emerges into the light, a procession unattended by any person except myself and bearing in its slow midst only a high humpbacked black coffin. Nor surprised finally to discover myself identified with the coffin, as if it is my own body that lies dressed for death inside. But when the coffin turns away into the great flickering panorama of the waiting cathedral, I turn in the opposite direction and pass through the unlighted and doorless entrance of the petrol station.

  When I told this dream to Ursula, saying that it was one of my more important dreams, she laughed and said that I had not yet run out of gas, as she put it, despite my obvious fears. She picked up her magazine and remarked that I was actually fortunate not to have made my way already into the cathedral of death, reminding me of that other man who had died not so long ago and no matter how foolishly for her. Then she added that apparently I had not yet gotten over the religious hopes of my childhood after all, which was unfortunate since until I did those hopes would always be a screen between myself and the world in which I existed.

  For some reason I chose that moment to ask Ursula if she ever discussed my dreams with Peter, but she did not reply.

  “If you manage to destroy your guilt, my friend,” Peter said, “you will destroy yourself. You are quite different from Ursula and even from me, for instance, since all your generosity and even your strength depend on unfathomable guilt, which is part of your charm.”

  While he stood there with pipe in mouth and the sun greasing the dead ducks at his feet, I told him in good-natured tones that I thought he was wrong.

  “We’ll see, my friend,” he said. “We’ll see.”

  In my dream I have become once more the silent little boy of my childhood, a plump and rather long-faced child in whom the features and temperament of the man to be are already evident, and I am securely situated in the village of my birth and, though it is clearly the darkest time of night and the village sleeps, nonetheless I am seated bibbed and powdered under a brightly shining light in the shop of the village barber. I hear running water, I hear the clicking of the shears, because the barber is wide-awake and at work on me. He smells of spice, and some kind of unguent that makes me quiver in pleasure and apprehension. We are alone, I am wearing my short trousers, my hiking boots, my monogrammed shirt with the broad white flowing collar. And from toes to neck my body is tented in the voluminous white bib which the barber has draped about me gently and pinned at my neck. I am drowsy, but I am totally aware of the night, the darkened streets and houses beyond the barber shop, the single electric light that smells like tallow, the movements of the barber who is clicking his steel shears between the slopes of my skull and the growth that is my childishly unattractive ear. But most of all I am aware of the barber’s mirror.

  Within the mirror’s soft transparency I see myself, my slow eyes, and the blades of the steel shears. But into one edge of the rose-colored strips of wood that frame the mirror the barber has thrust a very large black and white photograph of a smiling girl who w
ears no clothes. She is seated on what appears to be the flowered bank of a canal for barges, and she is sitting with her legs to one side and a slender arm propping up her thin and tender torso. Her clothes are piled at her side and in the right-hand portion of the photograph is plainly visible a small boy who is holding his bicycle and staring down at the naked girl posing so naturally for her photograph. Whenever I allow myself to stare into the soft white world of the mirror, watching the puffs of powder rising from the barber’s great fluffy brush with which he sweeps my tingling neck, I cannot help but stare also at the girl whose naked breasts are to me totally unfamiliar. I stare at the girl’s breasts, I cannot understand how they protrude as they do, nipped apparently by the spring and swollen.

  The mirror and the photograph are drawing closer, the light sways, the barber turns my chair professionally, or so I think, but with the result that my view of the photograph is even more vivid than before. And I am aware of the tightness of the pants around my thighs, the smell of tallow, the girl’s nakedness, my breath that has become swallowed somewhere inside me, a terrible and delightful sensation as of a little finger stiffening inside my pants. The girl is watching, the girl understands what is happening while I do not and can only attempt to control my breath and prevent the barber from discovering what strange metamorphosis is occurring inside my tent. I am aware of the smell of alcohol, the scent of lilacs, in the picture the boy’s face is pained while I see in the mirror that my own face is pained as well. I find that I am spreading my plump thighs in a stealth quite unknown to me and that I am grinning in the unbearable pain of my boyish joy. And then I notice that the shears have stopped, that the light bulb no longer sways, that the barber’s face is suddenly close to my naked ear.