Death, Sleep & the Traveler (27 page)

“Allert,” she said at last and into my puzzled and admiring silence, “how do you like my costume for the ship’s ball?”

Slowly I shook my head. The bikini made of bone and horn was the ultimate contrast to the hidden and vulnerable sex of my young friend. I now felt that the towel around my waist was a vain and undeniable irritant.

“Yes,” I said gently, “you are Schubert’s child. Who but my Ariane would fuse her own delicacy with the skull of the animal Eros? And the rose, the rose. It is a beautiful costume. Beautiful. But it is not for the ship’s ball.”

“But I promised the purser, Allert. What can I do?”

“You may cease your teasing right away.”

“Very well, my poor dear Allert. I have been teasing. I will attend the ball dressed as a ship’s officer. Are you satisfied?”

“Completely,” I said then, dropping my towel. “Completely.”

I sat beside her on the berth. I removed the rose. I seized the two horns and smelled the dark and living hair and the tangled sheets and the sea breeze. Gently I tugged on the horns until they came away from her with the faintest possible sound of suction. I could not believe what the goat’s cranial cavity now revealed. The goat’s partial skull fell to the floor but did not break. I smothered my small friend in my flesh, a huge old lover grateful for girl, generosity, desire, and the axe that long ago had split the skull.

To be wanted in such a way, what was there more?

Later, as Ariane knelt with head and shoulders thrusting through the porthole and as my spread fingers straddled her shining buttocks, like a thick starfish squeezing still to know the sensations of her youthful flesh, it was then that I begged Ariane not to attend the ship’s ball. I did not know why, I told her, changing my position and placing the great side of my face against her buttocks, but I felt a definite preference that she not attend the ball. Why dress, I asked, why leave her cabin? We would only become involved in a drunken frolic. Why not stay below and, if we wished, listen to the night’s music through the porthole?

But she insisted.

“Why? Why? Why?” she was saying. “Why must you always try to mythologize our sexual lives? Why don’t you come to my bed and have sex and stop dreaming?”

“But, Ursula,” I said, frowning and climbing up from the chair, “I am merely trying to articulate the sensual mind. I do not mean to offend you.”

“You are naive, Allert, naïve. If I punch your side I will smell only a puff of smoke from a cigar. You are the least sensual person I have ever known. There is a difference between size and sensuality.”

She left the room. Through the glass of the window I could smell the snow in the night. I regretted that I had offended Ursula.

The infant octopus hung like the carcass of a young girl in the sun.

“Allert,” she called, “will you come?”

It was then, while staring through the clear window glass at her small white English auto parked in the snow, that I realized that I was to be invited after all to share in the ritual of her departure. And nothing was as I had imagined it, since she was taking her own car and not Peter’s or our family sedan, and since it was dawn, and since there was no man behind the wheel of the waiting car, and since she was making no mystery of her departure.

“Allert? Will you come?”

When I climbed the stairs, corpulent and wrapped in my dressing gown, I found Ursula surveying for a final time the scene of her room. Her luggage, consisting only of a handbag, a small suitcase apparently made of the softest
lambskin, and something that looked like a soldier’s duffel bag and made of the same material, lay at her feet in the simplest order. She was wearing white slacks, a red knitted top, a red kerchief to protect her hair in the little open car, and driving gloves the same color as the luggage.

“Well,” I said, “why are you leaving? I mean, why are you not forcing me from the house and keeping the house and cars to yourself? Is that not the usual thing to do? You needn’t be generous on my account. I should think in this situation you would appreciate the reassurance of the familiar home.”

“If I need anything,” she said in a gentle voice, “I will telephone.”

I noticed that she had made up her fulsome lips and that her white pants were extremely tight and trim. I had known her in every way yet not at all. Now she was dressed as I had never seen her for traveling, and already she was distant, attractive, strange and busy in the very room that was still filled with the confusion of her dormant nature. Evidently she was indifferent to the unmade bed, the quilt and satin nightgown kicked to the floor.

She said that she had already eaten her roll and drunk her coffee. She was simply not the Ursula with whom I had lived so many years.

She slung the handbag from her shoulders, I took the luggage. Outside it was much too cold for an older man in his dressing gown, but I stood there until she drove from sight.

She sat behind the wheel with the red kerchief already blowing and her luggage in the small back seat.

“You will be cold,” I said. “Where’s your jacket?”

She shook her head, she started the engine which to me was suddenly familiar, terribly familiar, and sounded much too big for the little car.

“Where are you going? Please, you must write me a letter.”

She shook her head, she smiled, she put the car in gear.

“Don’t worry,” she said then, smiling up at me and speaking over the noise of the engine, “you will find someone. You will find some nice young thing to hear your dreams.”

And then she drove off. Perhaps she was simply trying to follow my own footsteps. But she would not return.

Perhaps I should commit myself to Acres Wild. Perhaps I should go in search of the village of my youth and childhood. Or I could ask the international telephone operator to locate Simone. Or I could lock myself in Peter’s frozen car and submit to asphyxiation, in which case I could no doubt join my departed friend on the island of imaginary goats. But I shall do none of these things.

Instead I shall simply think and dream, think and dream. I shall dream of she who guided me to the end of the journey, whoever she is, and I shall think of porridge, leeks, tobacco, white clay, and water coursing through a Roman aqueduct.

I am not guilty.

The Cannibal

The Beetle Leg

The Lime Twig

Second Skin

The Blood Oranges

Death, Sleep & The Traveler

Travesty

The Passion Artist

Humors of Blood and Skin

Virginie: Her Two Lives

Copyright © 1973, 1974 by John Hawkcs

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73–89481

All rights reserved. Exeept for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduecd in any form or by any means, eleetronie or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

Portions of this work appeared in somewhat different form in
American Review, Antaeus
, and
Fiction
, to the editors of whieh grateful aeknowledgment is made.

Death, Sleep & the Traveler
is titled after a work of sculpture by Aristedes Stavrolakes, who died in 1962 at the age of thirty-five.

ISBN: 978-0-811-22259-4 (e-book)

First published clothbound by New Direetions in 1974 (
ISBN:
0–8112–0522–3) and as New Direetions Paperbook 393 in 1975 (
ISBN:
0–8112–0569–x).

New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin by New Direetions Publishing Corporation, 80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011

Designed by Gertrude Huston: photographs by Dennis Martin.