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

  When I reported this dream in meticulous detail to Ursula, insisting that it was central to my life, since few men are privileged and courageous enough to undertake this journey, her only reply was that it was obviously someone else’s womb, not hers, that had become so inhospitable to my regressive drives. Her own womb, she answered me, was warm and receptive always, as I surely knew.

  “But I disagree with your cesspool metaphor,” I said, waiting for her to face me in the leather chair. “It’s simply that I am in love with Psyche. I have always been in love with Psyche. And I happen to know that whenever I express the need I can trust my Psyche to send me up a fresh bucket of slime. Unlike you,” I said, studying the level of water in my clear glass, “I am not afraid of Psyche’s slime. I do not find it distasteful. As a matter of fact, without my periodic buckets, I could not survive. Now tell me,” I said, feeling the cigar swimming toward my fingers through the semidarkness, “isn’t my metaphor preferable to yours? It is truer, Ursula, more just, more compassionate.”

  “Allert,” she said, “have you ever realized that you have the face of a fetus? The eyes, the jowls, the florid complexion are all deceiving. If you look closely enough you’ll see, as I have just seen, that actually you have the face of a fetus. Perhaps that is why you dream rather than live your life.”

  In my dream it is nighttime on the grounds of Peter’s hospital. My impression is that I have never seen this place before yet I know it well. Acres Wild, as it is called, extends without limit through the night, but also is carefully tended by capped and muffled gardeners and, sooner or later, stops at the perimeter of the high serpentine brick wall. All this I know somehow and even without letting the words come silently to mind. But now through the tall trees the rain is falling, in each of the small white cabins a single naked bulb is burning. And I am mobilized, I am worried, I have an urgent task requiring Peter’s help.

  “Peter,” I say in the dream, “I must talk with you.”

  We are in the main building and Peter, wearing his white coat, is surrounded by a group of young men and women. My face and clothes are wet, he does not wish to give me his attention. The young men and women are too attractive, too interested in what he is telling them in his musical and confidential tones.

  “Peter,” I say, and at last he stares at me over the shoulder of a slender blonde young woman. “Why is she here? She has no business here. She is different from all the rest, she is quite special. If you don’t help me, Peter, who knows what harm they may do her under the mistaken thought that she too is one of your patients?”

  It is raining, my white shirt smells as if it has been sprinkled with the juice of clams, my feet are bare. And I am agitated over the problem of Ursula’s welfare. But Peter removes a thick black professional fountain pen from the pocket of his long white coat and on a spongy paper napkin writes what I presume are instructions to those invisible attendants who will either set Ursula free or do her harm.

  I accept the instructions, I express my thanks, I see that Peter is returning the fat pen to the breast pocket of his long white coat. He appears quite unconcerned about Ursula or my own atypical need for haste. The voices of the young men and women are wet with admiration as if Peter is their celebrity as well as doctor. Instructions in hand I hurry again into the rain which has become a combination of white mist and dripping leaves.

  The light in Ursula’s cabin smells of tallow. The bulb is naked and yet casts an orange light over all the damp interior of that small screened-in white cabin into which Ursula is settling, making herself comfortable, as if the cabin were facing an empty beach instead of standing in the center of the grounds of Peter’s hospital. Inside the cabin there is no one but Ursula, who is spreading a sheet, removing the contents of her valise, only unwary Ursula and no one to whom I might show Peter’s lengthy handwritten instructions to send Ursula back to her home, her garden, her magazines, her husband. But even so, when I glance at the instructions I see that the paper napkin has absorbed the rain and that the ink has become hopelessly blurred.

  “Don’t you see where you are?” I say. “Don’t you understand?”

  But she only smiles and smoothes the sheet, while I in anxiety and frustration take full note of the fact that the cabin is half garage, half cabin, so that the ambulance may enter the cabin itself and deposit the unruly patient directly into the waiting bed. And I also take full note of the thickly padded straps attached to the bed, the enamel pan beneath a cheap table, the smell of some terrible drug that lingers on the damp air.

  The orange light, the smell of a burning candle, the smell of the drug, the padding on the bedstraps as thick as my arm, it is a stage setting with which I am familiar and unfamiliar both, and in which I am more afraid than ever.

  “We must go,” I whisper, “we must leave at once.”

  But Ursula only smiles, leaning over the bed, and draws up the sleeve of her simple yellow dress that has fallen away to expose some of the fullness of her perfect shoulder, and speaks. As long as Peter is there, she tells me, we have nothing to fear.

  When I told this dream to Ursula she remarked that the drug in my dream was in all likelihood paraldehyde, which she remembered hearing about somewhere in the past. Then she walked across the room and stood looking down at me where I sat in the leather chair and said that never, never, would I be able to wrap her in the rubber sheet, as she expressed it, of my destructive unconscious and, further, that I should take this dream as a warning, not about the state of her psychic life but mine.

  At that moment it occurred to me once again that Ursula was quite capable of preserving herself psychologically at my expense. Then I began to search myself for the reason she had used the metaphor of the rubber sheet.

  “Did you do it?” she asked, cupping the roses against her breasts. “Did you, Allert? Did you? I want to know.”

  The smell of the raw sea beneath the pier, between the ship and pier, and the smell of wood, of tar, of fresh paint, of petrol, of salt, of engine oil lapping the insides of vast steel drums, and the smell of perfume and distant schools of dead fish and of thick new lengths of hawser across the crowded pier like fresh nets for the unwary, in the midst of it all I felt as if I were wearing the rubber suit of the skin diver beneath my clothes. In the grip of the steam whistle my body was drowning in its own breath. Inside the rubber skin I was a person generating his own unwanted lubricant of poisoned grease. Even as Ursula propelled me toward the gangplank I felt myself sinking. For a moment I longed for a quick slice of the surgeon’s knife as if I were my own ulcer and only the cold punctuating knife of the surgeon could bring relief.

  “It’s so exciting, Allert,” she said on tiptoe with her lips to my ear, “don’t you agree?”

  “Allert,” she said, “I wish you’d stop poeticizing my crotch. It’s only anatomy, after all. There’s nothing mysterious about it. It could hardly be more familiar, to you at least.”

  “It is quite true,” I murmured, feeling for the ash tray in the darkness, “that I am intimately aware of your anatomy. But you might as well try to persuade me that the conch shell, for instance, is not mysterious. You’ll never convince me, Ursula. Never. The conch shell and its human anatomical analogue are mysteries. The imagination cannot be denied.”

  Hollander, beast of the dream, head of the household, suddenly I awoke and pushed myself upright among the pillows. The air was of neutral temperature and yet the cold night was inside the house, it seemed, so that the carpeting smelled of dead leaves while the darkness was fusing itself with the night stars. I was unconscious of sexual inclinations, I wanted only to see the snow outside. So I swung clear of the softness and heat of my enormous bed, found my robe and stood by one of the windows tying my robe. Below me the snow was a thin unviolated white crust spread as with a trowel between the house and the black edge of the naked trees in the distance. In the starlight and at the edge of the house the frosty rear end of Peter’s car was barely visible. I took a deep breath, another, a
nd through the years, the darkness, the coldness of this drifting night I caught for a moment the fleeting telltale scent of the flowers that once filled my childhood.

  I pressed my cheek to the cold glass and decided to forgive Ursula for saying in Peter’s presence that I had the face of a fetus.

  Her door was closed. It was constructed of solid oak and closed with all the finality of unlighted houses, midnight rituals, silent rooms. But Ursula’s bedroom door was unlocked, as I discovered as soon as my warm hand closed on the cold sphere of solid brass that was the knob. I myself could not hear the door knob turning, I myself could not hear the sound of my breath or of my wrinkling robe or of my bare feet on Ursula’s white tufted rug. And yet Ursula must have heard my slightest movement and the tones of my very determination to make no noise, because as soon as I entered that room and closed the door behind me and approached her bed, which was thoroughly visible thanks to the cold stars and the crust of reflecting snow, she spoke to me, clearly but softly so as not to disturb Peter who was asleep at her side.

  “Allert,” she said in the silver light, “what do you want?”

  Her voice was low, clear, soft, feline, neither charitable nor uncharitable, neither kind nor cruel. In the midst of the scented sheets, the pillows in their satin skins, the peach-colored comforter filled with the fuzz of ducklings, there she lay with her head turned in my direction and Peter’s jaw thrust against her left shoulder like the point of a hook. Ursula’s eyes were fixed on mine. Peter was snoring.

  “Go away, Allert,” she said then, quietly, simply. “Peter needs his sleep.”

  Peter’s white pajamas on the floor, Ursula’s short transparent Roman toga at the foot of the bed, the heat of the two nude bodies beneath the soft bedclothes drawn up to their chests, the feeling of Ursula’s eyes on mine and the sight of Peter’s neck and shoulder muscles that appeared shrunken and cast in sinuous silver, the moment was so familiar, peaceful, even alluring, that I felt in no way the intruder and took no offence at the harshness of what Ursula was saying.

  I removed my robe, I dropped my pajama trousers, I scrubbed the hair on my chest and around my nipples with stubby fingers.

  “All right,” she said, as I drew back the covers, as the snoring stopped, as she raised herself on one elbow, as I thought of Peter’s automobile waiting below in the night’s frost, “all right, we’ll go to your room.”

  “No, Ursula,” I said in return and sliding under the bedclothes like a ship in the dark and stretching out against the heat and smoothness of her naked length, “tonight I prefer your room, not mine.”

  She said nothing. The snoring recommenced. Gently I pushed away Peter’s hand from where I encountered it on Ursula’s belly that was tawny and filled with the morning sun, the evening cream.

  “If you control yourself,” I said in a low voice appropriate to lavish beds and nocturnal games, “he will not wake. Believe me.”

  “Allert,” she whispered, “you are not amusing.”

  “But it is just as I suspected,” I whispered, “you have never been readier. Never.”

  “But have you forgotten Peter?”

  “Let Peter sleep.”

  “But it’s impossible. It makes no sense.”

  “Except to me, Ursula, to me. And I want it so.”

  In the morning we sat together in the alcove and ate the goose eggs boiled by Ursula, who was still wearing only her Roman toga through which the morning sun shone as through the clear windowpanes. The morning light, the goblets of cold water, the cubes of butter sinking into the centers of each of the great white eggs with their untamed flavor and decapitated shells, and the aroma of coffee and the contrast between Ursula in her usual near-nudity and Peter and me in our plaid robes, the deep peace and clarity of the moment—all of it made me more securely aware than ever of the relationship between the coldness outside, where the geese were honking, and the warmth within.

  “I see now, Allert,” he said, lifting his clear glass, lifting his spoon, “that you too are capable of deception. It is not a pleasing thought, my friend. Not at all.”

  “But, Peter,” I objected pleasantly, “you must not forget that I am the husband.”

  “Nor must you forget, my friend, that I am the lover.”

  “But Peter,” Ursula said, interrupting us and thrusting a bare hand inside Peter’s robe, “let’s forgive Allert. I think we should.”

  “Of course we’ll forgive him,” Peter said, smiling and paying no attention to Ursula’s hand, “in due time.”

  Beneath the table Ursula’s bare foot was probing mine. In the sunlight Peter had the long thin face of a Spanish inquisitor.

  “The trouble with you, Allert,” she said, pulling off her firebird bikini and standing thick and soft and naked on Peter’s beach, “is that you think you’re Casanova. What you do is one thing, what you think of yourself is another. And you think of yourself as Casanova. But all the amours in the world do not mean that you are attractive to women. Don’t you see?”

  But the idea, like so many of Ursula’s ideas, was completely invalid. Never did I for a moment form such a self-image. Never did I think of myself pridefully. I am not interested in the long thread of golden hair hanging from the tower window.

  Naked and resting on all fours on the leather divan in the darkness, wrapped in her tawny nakedness as another woman might partially cover herself in the skin of a lion, and resting on her knees and elbows with her buttocks thrust high and glazed as with melted butter, thus she swayed and waited in the darkness for either Peter or me to rise and approach and take advantage of her position on the divan. In a low voice she was crooning an unmistakably serious invitation to Peter and me.

  I was the first to move.

  When she leaves, when she is finally gone, when she terminates all the processes of leaving and disappears at last, in all this will there be some kind of gain for me? I anticipate no loss, no hours of stunned grief. But what of the possibility of gain? Ursula is leaving me deliberately. Ursula intends to spare herself my distasteful presence, to neutralize my acid with her departure. But Ursula also anticipates enrichment in the unknown life she plans to pursue. Will I also find enrichment when I am left alone? In emptiness will I discover freedom? Will I cry out once again for Simone? Will I write letters and make long distance telephone calls until at least a few of the women I have known in the past return to me? But more than likely I will write no letters, make no telephone calls, do nothing. More than likely I will leave the enrichment to Ursula. But whatever I do or however long I stand at the window, never again will I commit my life to marriage. On the subject of marriage I share completely Ursula’s sultry vehemence. I am happy to admit our total agreement on the subject of the burning bridal gown, the cigar in the dark.

  When I again glanced down to the crowd on the pier, I saw that she was no longer waving but was swinging her handbag back and forth on its leather strap and staring up at me, where I stood at the rail, with a face that was merely fleshly and quite drained of expression. Then she was gone, as though that white ship would never again return to its home port. The baskets of flowers heaped on the deck reminded me of the banks of living flowers in a crematorium. The flames from the engine room glowed on the deck. The first blast of the whistle cut back and forth through my body like an invisible beam. We began to move.

  In the darkness and through the open porthole I smelled the scent of orange blossoms, the aroma of dead dust, the smell of lemons flickering on some distant hillside, even a few faint traces of eucalyptus oil floating just beyond the reach of the waves. But when I struggled into my trousers and went out on deck to investigate, exposing myself once more to the darkness and the wet night air, I realized that we were still two or three days from our next port of call. I stood at the rail only a moment, yet long enough to be discovered by Ariane and to arouse her fear. She emerged from the shadows, she hesitated, she approached, she clung to my arm.

  “So you too have those feelings,” she
whispered. “I thought you did.”

  For answer I drew her abruptly into my dark stateroom, thrust her roughly down onto the disheveled bed and bruised her in the agony of my desperate embrace.

  It was dusk when we glided out from among the trees and across the last white slope toward Peter’s house in the country. I heard the sibilance of our skis on the snow, I smelled the resin on the cold air, I heard their laughter as Peter and Ursula made playful stabbing gestures at each other with their bamboo poles. The light of the first stars purled impossibly through the last light of the day, so that in the cold gray atmosphere there was a hint of pink. Ursula lost her balance, thrust out her rump, spread wide her skis, recovered. A single small bell tolled in some distant village where no doubt the cold sexton stood alone pulling the rope, and Peter made clacking noises with his skis on the snow.

  “Well, Allert,” Peter said, divesting himself of skis, mittens, ski poles and the bulky knitted sweater that portrayed two angular black deer on a field of white yarn, “it was a good way to spend an afternoon, don’t you think?”

  “I enjoyed myself,” I said, recalling the playful shouts, the flat white hours, the black trees bleeding at the edge of our path. “Going cross-country with you is always a pleasure. Even Ursula becomes animated on these occasions. Is it not so, Ursula?”

  She was smiling, our faces were florid, our boots were creaking, our skis were properly upright in the rack against the white wall of the house. We stamped off the snow, we laughed, we put our arms across each other’s shoulders, Peter favored Ursula with a prolonged kiss. When they pulled apart, cold and at the same time tingling, the first few white flakes began to come down.