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

  “Touch your little penis,” he whispers gently, “touch it with the tip of your finger, little boy.”

  I gasp, I blush, I wait, and then I do as he says. The girl is smiling at me in approval but the darkness inside my tent is soaking wet and between my legs a fierce pain lingers in the wake of the shock that was triggered by the tip of my finger and the whispering sounds of the barber’s voice.

  When I told this dream to Ursula she said that it was charming and that it well explained my collector’s interest in pornography. And yet it would have been better for me, she said, had I been the boy with the bicycle and had there been no photographer to interrupt the child’s encounter with the sun-bathing girl. But of course it was amusing, she went on to say, that apparently even the rich life of sexuality shared by the two of us was still not sufficient to make unnecessary the psychic siphoning, as she called it, evident in my nocturnal emissions. It was then that she commented laughingly that I was drenched in sex.

  I heard the tapping on the door. I heard excited voices and the sound of feet moving quickly across the deck outside. I heard the sound of her voice calling softly through the louvers of my cabin door.

  “Allert? Are you there? We are passing the island. Won’t you come and look?”

  I waited, stretched flat on the coverlet, and quite distinctly I felt some alteration in the position of our tonnage as it shifted in the deep sea, and could not prevent myself from hearing the hivelike excitement of those passengers who were gathering on the starboard rail. I could hear the wind in the straw hats, I could hear the bodies crowding each other at the mahogany rail.

  “Allert? Will you answer? I know you’re there.”

  I was of course thoroughly certain that she could not possibly know that I was lying tensely inside my cabin since I had taken care to draw the green curtain across my porthole. And yet the very ordinary sound of her voice as well as her faith in my whereabouts, prompted me to reply.

  “It is only an island, after all,” I said evenly. “It is not Atlantis.”

  “It’s important, Allert. Open the door.”

  “Very well,” I said then. “In a moment.”

  “If you don’t hurry we shall be past it and then there will be nothing to see.”

  I swung myself up from the bed and buttoned my shirt, drew on my trousers, opened the door. The intense light of midday, the ungainly binoculars on a strap around her neck, the now louder sounds of the expectant passengers, it was all exactly as I knew it would be, concreteness rotating toward illusion. And in my doorway, or nearly in my doorway, she was smiling and resting one small gentle hand on the binoculars.

  “And Allert,” she said in the voice that only I could hear, “have you been sleeping?”

  “No,” I said, closing and locking the door behind me and taking hold of one of her frail but well-proportioned arms, “no, I have not been sleeping. I have been meditating. As a matter of fact, Ariane, I have been wondering exactly who you are.”

  “But, Allert, you know who I am.”

  “More important, perhaps, I have been wondering exactly who I am.”

  “But I know who you are, Allert. And that’s enough.”

  “Perhaps you do,” I said, gazing to sea and thinking that her declaration was somehow more than an assertion of innocence, “perhaps you do indeed know after all. But where did you get that man-sized pair of binoculars?”

  “From one of my friends, of course. We’ll use them for looking at the island.”

  “Of course. From one of your friends. But tell me,” I said then, diverting us back to one of the subjects I had been considering in my cabin. “What is your age?”

  “Twenty-six, Allert. And yours?”

  “Oh, I am much too old to say,” I replied in a thicker, more milky voice. “Much too old to say.”

  “As you will, Allert. I really don’t care about your age.”

  “But then it’s probably true that in matters of shipboard romance, at least, the greater the disparity between the ages the better.”

  “You’re in a very difficult mood today. I wish you’d stop.”

  “In a moment,” I said then, and squeezing the thin arm, “in another moment I’ll growl at you in Dutch.”

  She laughed, we were walking in step together, she caused her little hip to fall against my big pillowed flank, she laughed again. And yet it seemed to me that even so she was still not completely reassured.

  At this moment we rounded the great glass front of the observation lounge and strode hand in hand into the windy open space of the forward deck where, precisely as I had envisioned the scene, the group of passengers was gathered birdlike at the starboard rail. I was interested to see that they were more bizarre and yet not so numerous as I had thought. In particular I noticed one man whose body was not unusually masculine but who was naked except for a pair of khaki-colored shorts and an enormous rouge-colored conical straw hat that went down to his shoulders. A woman, heavy set and bold, was holding a small wicker basket filled with fruit, as if preparing to drop it quickly over the side.

  “Allert,” Ariane whispered as we squeezed to the rail, “they’re all looking at you. They’re all jealous because your companion is so young and so attractive.”

  “Yes,” I whispered back, “they cannot imagine what we do together, but they have ideas.”

  “Oh, Allert,” she said then, suddenly putting her hand on top of mine, “surely the captain is going to crash into the island!”

  For a moment it seemed even to me that what Ariane had said was true. Because the island, a dry, treeless and apparently heart-shaped knoll, was rising out of the sea directly off our starboard bow. Considering the various angles of vision between masts, cables, diminishing horizon, approaching island, and considering the vast expanse of totally open sea in which the ship and island were the only two concrete points—one fixed, one free—and that the space between the two was disappearing as quickly as breath, given all these circumstances it did indeed appear true that the captain was subjecting us all to unnecessary risk by changing course and by aiming the prow of the ship directly toward the arid heart of volcanic land anchored so permanently in the deep sea. Then I recovered myself and realized that for the first time during the voyage I was out of sympathy with Ariane, who, after all, was quite as capable as I was of common sense.

  “Look,” I said brusquely, “anyone can see there will be no collision.”

  “But we arc very close to the island, Allert. Very close.”

  “Close,” I said then in a gentler tone, “but safe.”

  We veered to within perhaps a hundred meters or so of the island. The man in the rouge-colored hat cried out and in an instant trained on the burning island the telescope of his terrible motion-picture camera, a camera I had failed to see, cradled as it was against his eye inside the cone of his hat. Ariane and I stood quietly touching each other and sharing the black binoculars, in the process of which she allowed her fingers to slide unconsciously over my buttocks while I, in turn, wet the vulnerable spot behind her car with the tip of my tongue.

  “It’s so barren,” she whispered, “so beautifully barren.”

  “Yes. And notice how the goats apparently manage nonetheless to survive on an island without food.”

  “It’s because they’re unreal, Allert. That’s why.”

  But the goats were real enough for me, and though there did not appear to be a blade of grass or the slightest sign of fresh water on the island, still the community of goats stood ruffled and silhouetted atop the nearest hummock and stared at what to them must have been the specter of a white ship bearing down on their final garden. Through the binoculars I could see the spray crowning the tightly spiraled horns, could see how old and young alike crowded together haunch to haunch, horns among horns, posing in the certainty of survival in the midst of pure desolation. The animals were as still as rocks, though their horns were flashing and their coats of long hair were blowing and ruffling in the emptiness of
the ocean wind.

  “The goats arc real enough,” I said. “But they are a strange sight. Even a haunting sight, perhaps.”

  “Allert,” she said then, as if she had failed to hear my observation, “let’s not allow them to disappear so easily. Come, let’s watch until there’s nothing more of them to see.”

  But it was only too clear that she neither doubted nor required my acquiescence, since she had taken back the binoculars and was already making her way out of the crowd and toward the stern of the ship which appeared now to be coasting past the island at an ever-diminishing nautical speed. Ariane walked swiftly, then ran, then walked swiftly again until finally she stood at the last extremity of the slowly moving ship, motionless with the binoculars dwarfing her face and her hard shoulder braced against the slick white glistening surface of the ship’s flagpole.

  We were crossing the pointed tip of the island, the goats were fading, I was standing directly behind Ariane who was pressed against the rail and against the flagpole, her small bare shoulders hunched in the intensity of her gaze.

  I squinted at the disappearing island. I respected Ariane’s concentration and did not press the front of my body to the back of hers, but waited as she sighted across our wake toward the island blazing less and less brightly in the dark sea. The hair was blowing at the nape of her neck, the ends of her halter knot were blowing between the shoulder blades which my own two hands could have so easily cupped, concealed, shielded. However, it seemed to me that Ariane was elated but also desperate as she attempted to hold in view the brown earth and the remote and mournful goats, so that I did not press the front of my pants into the seat of hers, no matter how gently, or put my finger where the wind was stirring the fine hairs on her neck. At the stern where we were standing together but separated, it was impossible to hear the engines or any other sounds of the ship, because that was the area most engulfed by the crosscurrents of the wind, the singing of the dead wake, the thrashing of the great blades just below us and just beneath the frothing chaos of the surface.

  “Well,” I said at last, “Fm glad you roused me for this event. It was an interesting sight. The abandoned goats, an island as bare as that one.”

  Slowly, as if once more she had failed to hear me, or as if she could not admit that now there was nothing to see except the empty sky, the unbearable sunlight, the gun-metal gray reaches of the ocean that was both flat and tossing, slowly she turned around and revealed her face from behind the disfigurement of the black binoculars, and leaned back against the rail, looked up at me, smiled, spread her legs somewhat apart. Her expression was open, clear, inviting. I noted how dark her skin had become since the start of the journey.

  “But Allert,” she said then, and her eyes were large, her teeth white, “the island we just passed belongs to me. Didn’t you know?”

  “Do you wish to explain yourself?”

  “I do. Yes, I do. But another time.”

  Together we leaned on the rail and side by side stared at what we were leaving in our wake, which was nothing. But had I understood her meaning at that moment I would have bruised her in the agony of my desperate embrace.

  The water comes down the surface of the glass, melting all vision. The water is an invisibly moving veneer of light on the black shale. The water is rearranging the pebbles that are so firm and white that they appear edible. The cold water spouts from the cleft in the rock, fills the tumbler, produces liquid weight in the earthen jar, emerges in cold bubbles from the bed of clay, sucks and gurgles through the moss, flows and drips and collects in the trees, the stream, the tall glass in my hand. And I drink it as I would breathe, letting it fill my oral cavity as it might a pool in the rocks, or I suck its freezing clarity against my teeth so that teeth and forehead ache with the cold. Or I hold it in the heavy pouch of my mouth and gulp it down, feel the clear cold water delivering itself to me drop by drop or in a steady transparent curve from silver spigot, brass tap, clay orifice with milky lips, and from the depths of frozen black trees. I wait, I drink, I consume the cold water beyond my usual capacity, making of myself a spongy reservoir, and teeth and gums and tongue and palate ache from the painful joy of this natural anesthetic. I feel that a spike has been driven into the back of my throat, my mouth is filled with the taste of white rocks and green ferns, I watch two large drops conforming to the laws of physics down the inside vertical space of the glass. And then I strike the match, grip the antithetical cigar between my front teeth, complete the cigar-lighting ritual—puffing, working the flame in slow wheels of light—and then at last the whitened tissues of my rinsed and empty mouth arc bathed in smoke, are bathed and flooded with the thick gray smoke that tastes stronger than ever, more than ever like rich manure dug in bright golden gobs from a deep bed. That foul but cherished smoke is to the vanished water as Caliban was to Ariel, both of whom existed but in the mind.

  Sometimes I hear myself saying Ja-Ja-Ja quickly, silently, so as to put a little spunk—to use Ursula’s word—into my ponderousness. Ja-Ja-Ja I say to myself, and not even in Dutch.

  “Allert,” she said, “I do not mind your girl friends. I do not mind their visits in our household. I do not mind when one of them spends a few hours or the night sharing with you the pleasures of the guest room bed. That’s all very well. In a way it’s enjoyable even for me. But I tell you, Allert, I refuse to have your friend Simone sitting on my handbag. How on earth could you fail to see? How could you fail to feel my mortification, my anger, and fail to pull her off by one of her innocent arms? I tell you, when I saw that woman sitting so ignorantly on all the intimacies of my own handbag, like a stupid chicken giving anal birth to my own uterine baggage, I tell you I began to question your judgment, your taste, even your motivations. I simply cannot have any woman putting her buttocks on my handbag. That she used her buttocks that way unconsciously is only the more insulting. So I trust we agree, Allert—no more Simone.”

  While hearing out this monologue I found that I was generally in agreement with Ursula, since I had indeed noted the episode in question but had reacted to its symbolic message with inward pleasure and amusement, rather than with Ursula’s rage, for which I felt a certain additional shame while listening. But on the other hand, why did she have no sense of humor? And why did she leave her soft smooth leather handbag lying in the broad hollow of one of the sofa cushions precisely where poor Simone might be drawn unwittingly and might settle down upon it like some gentle victim on a land mine?

  It was a trivial episode. And yet I was careful thereafter to make no jokes about Ursula’s handbag, while poor Simone never again lay naked and bathed in candlelight on our guest room bed.

  Ursula was to me one woman and every woman. I was more than forty years old when we married, quite experienced enough to realize early in our relationship that Ursula was practical, physical, mythical, and that all the multiplicities of her natural power were not merely products of my own projections or even of the culture into which she was born—like a muted wind, a fist through glass—but to start with were engendered most explicitly in her name alone. Uterine, ugly, odorous, earthen, vulval, convolvulaceous, saline, mutable, seductive—the words, the qualities kept issuing without cessation from the round and beautiful sound of her name like bees from a hive or little fish from a tube. She has always been one woman and every woman to me because her attitudes have never been predictable, while minute by minute throughout the long years of our marriage her physical qualities have undergone constant metamorphosis from fat to lean, soft to hard, smooth to rough, lean to fat—languid urgent Ursula, who is leaving me.

  “Allert,” she said, while masking her face with the smooth nightly glaze of thick white cream, “tell me the truth. Did you push her through the porthole as they accused you of doing?”

  I could not bear the question. I could not believe the question. I could not answer the question. I could not believe that my wife could ever ask me that question. I could not bring myself to answer that question.


  For me Ursula’s eyes continued their lively movement inside the holes in the white mask and in the darkness until long after she had returned for another one of her dreamless nights.

  Together Ursula and I attended the funeral of the man who, not so long ago, shot himself in the mouth for her. Which makes me think that were he living, Peter might well be driving Ursula’s car when she leaves. But he is not. Somewhere I have preserved the note written to Ursula by the man who allowed her life to prompt him into becoming a successful suicide. At least Peter knew better than to shoot himself in the mouth for Ursula.

  “Allert,” she asked me once, “how can you tell the difference between your life and your dreams? It seems to me that they are identical.”

  “Mr. Vanderveenan,” she said, “will you come to my cabin for a moment? I have something to show you.”

  At the edge of the pool and in utter privacy she straddled the upper diving board like a child at play while I lounged upright and draped in my towel against the ladder. She had mounted to the upper diving board and now sat straddling the board backward so that I, holding the aluminum rail and she, hunching and leaning down with her hands braced forward between her spread wet thighs, were able to look at each other and to speak to each other as we wished. How long we had posed together in this tableau I could not have said, though at the sound of her invitation I felt on the one hand that we had never existed except together and in our tableau of mutual anticipation, but on the other that we had only moments before arrived at the pool’s edge and that she had still to dive and I had still to help her dripping and laughing from the pool.