Death, Sleep & the Traveler (21 page)

“But of course,” Peter was saying, “of course the schizophrenic has his romantic nature like anyone else. No, my friend, which one of us would dare deny the schizophrenic his possibilities for romantic behavior?”

His long dark fingers were plucking the congealed feathers from the duck that was both dead and blue. I was well aware that inside his knee-high rubber boots the argyle
socks were freshly bought and warm, soft, closely knitted in two colors—red and green. I knew about the nature of Peter’s socks because they were mine. Above our heads the ice was suspended from the eaves like transparent teeth. The last sun was flowing across the snow.

“You should not be so hostile to Acres Wild,” he continued. “At Acres Wild we have numerous long-lived affairs. It is part of the cure, my friend. Part of the cure.”

That day his pipe smoke smelled like the dark forest which, only minutes or hours before, the dead duck in his hand had skimmed in swift flight. That day Peter’s smile belonged on the leather face of a conquistador. The fat of the cold duck fell like red speckled droplets of candle wax into the pure snow.

To me it has always been curious that Peter, who never married, should have lived a life that was unconditionally monogamous, thanks to the power of Ursula’s dark allure and her strength of mind, whereas I, who became married to Ursula one Sunday afternoon in a small stone country chapel that had hosted a funeral the same morning, have lived my life as sexually free as the arctic wind. To me it is curious that two friendly duck hunters should have been so different, and that Ursula should have thought of Peter as lover and of me as husband. I have often thought our situations should have been reversed.

Yesterday while stamping the snow with my rubber boots and burning a pile of scrub brush that I had dragged
from the wall of forest that lies dark and distant behind our house, and feeling the cold air thick and crystallizing in my lungs and a new beard fringing my chapped face, yesterday I realized that between the hour of my acquittal—an event I rarely allow to consciousness—and the very moment I was pausing to wipe the soot from my jaw, there lay eight or perhaps nine long years of companionship, solitude, winter life. And during all this time I have thought of myself as moderate, slow-paced, sensible, overly large, aging. But ordinary, always ordinary, merely the owner of a small but elegant estate (with a handsome wife, with a good friend, with girl friends, with several automobiles). And yet throughout these years, I told myself yesterday while tasting the charred smoke of the fire and watching the sparks dashing upward into a dead sky, Ursula must have thought of me as a Dutch husband who had been lobotomized—but imperfectly. The medical aspect of the metaphor was one she would have learned from Peter.

At that moment the intangible again gave birth to the tangible. And leaving the fire, which was now sending skyward a long plume of smudge as though some small aircraft had just crashed at the edge of my forest, I indeed felt lobotomized. My head was like a boulder encased with ice. My steps were slow. I knew that if I could have taken a hammer and cracked open my icy rock, my frozen head, I would have found inside the perfect memory: that it now has been three years since Peter’s death.

In the kitchen I found set out in the center of a stone dish my usual little clear glass of schnapps, which I seized and drank down even before removing my pullover or
washing the signs of the burning fire from my numbed and naked hands.

“Ursula,” I called, “arc you here?”

There was no answer.

“I do not mean to hurt your feelings,” Peter was saying, “but tell me, Allert, are you wearing a wig? This evening you look exactly as if you are wearing a wig.”

He swished the ice in his glass. He stretched his lean leg toward the smoldering fire. He laughed, Ursula laughed, I also laughed, because only moments before Peter uttered his unfortunate remark I had been guilty of wondering precisely the same thing about my well-groomed friend. A trick of the light? An offshoot from our undeniable proclivities toward a night of love? Perhaps, perhaps, since Peter’s hair gleamed thickly in the low light of the fire, while from where I sat on the other side of Ursula I could smell the scent he had applied lavishly, secretly, as part of his bathing ritual upstairs. But Peter’s remark was most unfortunate.

My hair has always been my own.

In my dream I am once again a child tall and thickset though very young and alone in the large white chateau in the village of my childhood and youth. The day is mysteriously cast, the afternoon is indeterminate, the enormous sleeping chamber in which I stand is not mine, in a single slanted plane the late sun lights the room with a brightness that will never die. And I am alone, I am unable to hear the slightest sound, neither the ringing of cutlery from the kitchen far below nor the voices of women nor the sounds of our white geese gabbling outside. I am safe, or so I believe, safe and unaccountably standing in the center of a room that is large, warm, scented with dusting powder and a skin lotion distilled from the oil of pine. The room is familiar and unfamiliar both. I know it to be the room from which I am ordinarily excluded except by invitation. And yet alone and trembling in the midst of this serenity, with the door shut and sunlight penetrating my young life in a single plane, I also know that I have not seen before this bed, this dressing table, this chair as soft as a giant peach, this soft carpet which is like a field of snow. And yet I recognize the pair of black masculine hairbrushes on the dressing table.

I am precisely aware of why I have risked entry into this large and seductive and, yes, even precious room. I know what I want. I have known about it for days, for a month, for seasons of childish need. It is an agony, a thought of joy. And standing in the center of the room, my innocent fleshly body bisected by the plane of light, and glancing at the vast bed and at the icy full-length mirror affixed to what I assume to be a closet door, again I tell myself that it must be so, that I will not be denied, that once and for all I must know with certainty what a woman looks like without her clothes, or without most of her clothes.

I tremble, I am an impresario, the director of a magical actor on a secret stage because I am all too well aware that
I myself am my only access to what I want to know. I smell the feminine smell of some hidden powder puff, I feel the tension in the pale coverlet drawn so tightly across the enormous bed that this decorous piece of furniture now openly appeals to me as forbidden, lewd. Yes, I ask myself, how else am I going to discover what a woman looks like without her clothes? Since the actuality is quite impossible, since I am unknown to any woman except those who live in our house (mother, two maids, an old cook), since I am young and innocent and not given to spying, even though my urge is desperate—yes, how else will I ever see what I need to see, know what I must know, if not through myself and my own ingenuity?

I am aware of the bed, the sunlight, the silence, the undergarments on the bed, the mirror occupying the entire space of the closet door. My plan has leapt to me from the silence. The mystery will be revealed.

Quickly and with precision I squeeze out of my short pants, remove my underpants and square black shoes and wintry socks and my tie, shirt, undershirt, and then possessed of myself and my brilliant plan and in agonizing control of my desperate self, slowly I approach the bed and seize the delicate lilac-colored undergarment. With care and languor and excitement I manage to put my bare feet through the holes, clumsily, deftly, and to draw that flimsy garment tightly up my childish thighs, careful not to tear the silk, with each tug smoothing the thin delicious tissue against my skin. Finally that undergarment, fragrant and lilac-colored and clearly intended for an adult woman, has become the second skin perfectly fitted to my young boy’s substantial buttocks and yearning loins.

How did that intoxicating vulnerable undergarment appear so magically on the inviting bed? And whose body was it actually intended for? My mother’s? One of the maids? I do not know, I do not care, at last I am touching, feeling, actually wearing what I had only seen before fleetingly in the pages of slick and sumptuous magazines. I am filled with the breath of my commencing transformation. The warmth of all the world to come is about to be revealed. The sun’s plane is stationary, my rapid breath is clear.

Then I execute the final moment of my plan. I conclude my magical performance on the secret stage. Naked except for the lilac-colored underpants and smiling, calculating, swiftly I slide along the wall to the closet door, then seize the knob, and without once peering into the mirror turn the knob and maneuver the door to an angle of approximately forty-five degrees and turn, push the heavy peachlike chair to the edge of the field of vision inside the mirror. Then I steady myself against the chair and, with more care than ever, position myself so that my body from the waist down will lie entrapped but free to assume a quite different life in the silvery glass.

I open my eyes. I move my head as does a snake to his charmer’s pipe. I prevent my head or torso, or much of my torso, from appearing in the magic glass. And there it is, the belly and hips and thighs and calves of a smallish tight-skinned woman wearing only a pair of lilac-colored panties in the afternoon. She is alive. She is moving. Already the elastic bands in the legs and waist are leaving little red teeth marks in the flesh of the woman in the glass. Her skin is white, it is tight and smooth, the muscles with
which she is working her buttocks are entirely visible inside the transparent lilac flowers of her panties, and her thigh nearest the now ecstatic viewer is plumply raised, naturally concealing the most secret of all soft triangulations from the fixed and eager eyes of a viewer who would never have spied on a living woman but who spied with love and relish on himself.