Death, Sleep & the Traveler (23 page)

Our white chateau was bedecked with wooden shutters painted with triangular or sail-like shapes of bright purple and blue. There were geese, the remnants of a moat, a few cypress trees and a stable that smelled of ammonia and straw and roses in full bloom. Most of the cottages in the village carried our family colors on shutters and doors out of lingering sentimental deference to the time in history when the owner of the chateau was owner of the village as well. Our tulips, waxy and fat enough to fill a hand, were the pride of our old pipe-smoking coachman, who wore
leather puttees summer and winter and was the driver of a small blue horse-drawn sled in which I often and happily suffered the winter cold in my childhood. It was in that sled, wrapped in a fur robe, and staring at the old man’s gnomish back and at the flat snow bright with the sun, snuffling and trying to move my frozen feet, fearing the swift pace at which the pony was pulling us, that I experienced the first ejaculation of my childhood. Today I find myself hearing some of the whistled tunes with which the old coachman kept the pony alert.

When I am able to exercise my memory of the distant past, which is not often, I am able to do so with the precision of a stamp collector.

I clung to the rail. I was in the grip of the wind. The ship plunged like an abandoned freighter. The day was without light, the noise of the sea was deafening. And suddenly I felt his arm holding me tightly about the shoulder and felt his cold wet mouth close to my ear.

“Landfall tomorrow, Vanderveenan,” he was shouting, “landfall and island whores, Vanderveenan. Plenty of them. Just what you need....”

He tore himself loose from me and staggered off against the wind. And there at the rail, spread-legged and drenched in spray, I stood hearing again and again the echo of his hard young voice as the afternoon died away and the troughs between the waves grew deeper and the sea became vaster and blacker and louder than anything I had ever known.

I waited. I licked off the spray. I waited. In the
darkness and in passing I acknowledged to myself that the ship’s orchestra was warming up, faintly, beyond reach of the sea.

I listened.

Deep in one of the leather chairs, feet resting on a leather hassock, half a dozen bound volumes on the rug-covered floor at my side and a single volume from the same set propped in my lap, thus I sat in complete absorption and yet also exposing myself to the fair light that always accompanies the waning day. I studied my elegant volume. Ursula and Peter sat side by side on the small white leather love seat half surrounded by some of Ursula’s green plants. The plants were thriving and intensely green, Ursula was writing a letter, Peter’s arm was around Ursula’s waist. His eyes were closed, his hand lay with evident tenderness on Ursula’s hip. The last sunlight in the room was turning the color of the stem of Peter’s pipe.

“Allert,” he said, without opening his eyes, “what are you reading? Why so studious?”

Hearing the sound of Peter’s voice and Ursula’s pen, telling myself that Peter had spoken and to me as well, I looked over the top of my large leather-bound volume in the direction of the love seat where Peter and Ursula were sitting as if for a large revealing photographic portrait in black and white. I smiled in order to acknowledge Peter’s question within the silence of my concentration. In this way I was on the verge of answering when Ursula, still
composing her letter with the swiftly moving black pen, spoke up ahead of me and in my stead. The snow had been falling since before dawn, but now the darkening sky was cloudless and filled with the color of burnished gold. Beyond the window the earth and pines and birches, already crusted with the frozen accumulation of other storms, were now several inches thicker with a pure illusory powder of bright snow.

“Allert is looking at his pornography,” Ursula said. “At such times he is always distracted.”

Peter’s head was tilted backward and resting on the curved white leather surface of the love seat. His smiling face appeared to be scanning the ceiling. He appeared unconscious of the fact that he had thrust his dark fingers into the waistband of Ursula’s tight slacks. He was sitting low in the seat with his legs stretched out before him and slightly spread, quite unaware apparently of the sensation of Ursula’s warm thigh against his own. Ursula was sitting with her legs crossed knee-to-ankle like a man. Today the gold point of her pen was precise and furious. Her tight slacks were the brushed warm sandy color of the doe freshly shot in some wooded glen.

“Pornography,” Peter said, musing as if to himself but addressing me, “does it not become boring, unutterably boring, my friend? Please be honest. I want to know.”

“What a shocking thing to say to Allert,” Ursula replied immediately, once more speaking for me though still concentrating on her letter. “After all, Allert covets sexual representations of any kind. For Allert almost anything representing the female or female form is pornographic.”

“So,” murmured Peter after a brief thoughtful pause, “so your collection of pornography is extensive.”

“The work of a lifetime,” Ursula answered simply. “An entire lifetime.”

“And you do not find your collection boring.”

“For you and me,” Ursula said quickly, though in a mild and somewhat unthinking voice, “Allert’s pornography would be intolerable. You and I do not filter life through fantasy. But it is otherwise with Allert. You cannot tear him away from a picture of a bare arm, let alone an entire and explicit scene of eroticism.”

I rested the heavy volume flat on my knees. I valued the calmness evident in Ursula’s soft face, which was broad and shadowed with golden light and turned slightly downward toward the handwritten sheets of paper gathered on the large and stylish magazine spread on her lap, and evident also in Peter’s dark face which, smiling through the guise of sleep, was quietly and comfortably awake. The thickening golden light harmonized the soft white face and the face that was wrinkled, dark. Ursula had changed her position and folded her legs beneath her, as might a young girl, and she was wearing a soft tight shirt knitted from yarn my favorite color, the palest of all shades of purple. Even from where I sat I could smell her skin, her garments, her hair, her black ink. Peter was pressing his flat hand deep inside the waistband of Ursula’s tight pants and had never looked more at ease, more at home.

“But my interest in pornography is not compulsive,” I said then. “I am afraid it is not nearly as compulsive as Ursula tries to make it sound. Of course my interest in the
entire range of depicted sexuality is genuine, quite genuine, as Ursula says.”

The pen moved, it seemed to me that there was a certain tightening in the corners of my friend’s closed eyes, though he continued to smile as if for the benefit of some admiring creature concealed behind the flat whiteness of our ceiling, and now I noticed Ursula’s two shoes on the rug, dark brown plastic-coated shoes with silver buckles, and noticed that without turning his head Peter was clearly breathing in the scent of her purple shirt slowly and with immense pleasure.

“If you were still a boy,” he said then, and not at all as if he had heard my own declaration of a moment before, “or if you were one of those poor devils always hiding a picture of some sad nude woman under his pillow, I would understand. Pornography has its purposes. I am not a psychiatrist for nothing, my friend. But your own interest is to me perplexing. But tell me, Allert,” he said then, using an apparently unconscious toe-to-heel motion in order to remove his shoes which, I noticed, were made to be worn without laces, “tell me, what are your favorites? I suppose you enjoy favorite poses and activities, favorite kinds of pornography?”

“Couples rather than singles,” Ursula said at once in a quick voice that was amused but serious as well. “Western rather than Eastern, photographs rather than drawings, black and white rather than color, an occasional series of women without men. Contemporary narrative, but illustrated. As for animals and women,” she said then, smiling at Peter and capping her pen and removing Peter’s hand
from inside the waistband of her slacks, and then standing and putting aside her finished letter and reaching for Peter’s warm hand, “in that situation Allert prefers dogs. Large, affectionate, but short-haired dogs.”

This remark caused the two of them to laugh, as Peter raised his arm and accepted Ursula’s proffered hand, though his eyes were still firmly closed, while in her own turn Ursula looked over her shoulder and gave me a glance that was both kindly, I thought, and vacant. Obviously Ursula was applying pressure to Peter’s hand and arm, while Peter, without exactly resisting that pressure, nonetheless remained in the same position he had been assuming all afternoon—head back, eyes closed, legs stretched before him and slightly spread. At this moment I found myself admiring his chocolate-colored trousers and yellow shirt, which were surely a match for Ursula’s beige-colored trousers and purple top. Ursula’s green plants, so fresh and pale in hue and intensely green, framed them in a miniature bower that was increasingly romantic in the deepening light.

“Dogs,” Peter said at last, as I myself leaned forward toward their group of two, “short-haired dogs. And the homosexuals? Have you no place for the homosexuals?”

“Allert,” Ursula replied at once, “is not interested in homosexuals. Unless they are women.”

“Which of course raises the question of whether or not we can put our faith in our taste. Perhaps taste is deceiving. Perhaps you have not given the partners of the same sex a fair chance.”

“In these matters,” came Ursula’s immediate reply, “Allert can be quite rigid.”

“So it is really true, my friend, that you think only of sex.”

“Of nothing else,” Ursula said quickly, laughing with curious gentleness in my direction, “of nothing else at all!”

“Oh, but you exaggerate,” I said then, interrupting their exclusive dialogue and returning Ursula’s teasing smile and noting the two empty pairs of buffed and glistening shoes on the white rug. “The truth is that I indulge myself only occasionally with my collection, which is an excellent one, if I may say. I would show it to you, Peter. Happily.”

It was not my invitation that prompted Peter to laugh, to open his eyes, to respond with vigor to the pull of Ursula’s strong hand, and to stand up at last and yawn, wipe his dark face with his free hand, and to stare down at me where I sat once more reclining and with the open volume tenting my belly, though he did these things at the very moment I spoke.

“But why, my friend, tell me why? What is this interest in the sexual concoctions of other people? Do they arouse you? Do they amuse you? But my friend, they are not even real.”

“Allert’s theory,” said Ursula in the long pause during which she and Peter stood looking down at me hand in hand and heads together, shoulders together, bare feet and stocking feet pushing aside the empty shoes, “Allert’s theory is that the ordinary man becomes an artist only in sex. In which case pornography is the true field of the ordinary man’s imagination.”

“Splendid, splendid,” cried Peter, “you have thought it all out. But Ursula,” he said then, turning and frowning
at her with mock savagery, “why do you not allow Allert to speak for himself? It is a habit you must break at once.”

“But Peter,” she said in her softest voice, while smiling at me and drawing Peter through the door and toward the stairs, “Allert may always speak for himself when he wishes.”

Carefully I laid the volume, which was one of my most valuable, among the others arranged like fallen monuments on the silken pile of the gray rug. The light in the room was now so darkly golden that sight was difficult and I was not able to read Ursula’s bold hand nor distinguish their lovers’ footprints in the thick pile of the rug. The leaves of Ursula’s plants were sharp and black, the house was still.