Death, Sleep & the Traveler (13 page)

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, and 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.