Death, Sleep & the Traveler

Ursula is leaving. Dressed in her severe gray suit, her gardening hat, her girdle, her negligee, her sullen silk dress, her black blouse, her stockings, her red pumps, and carrying a carefully packed straw suitcase in either hand, thus she is leaving me.

She is going at last not because of what occurred on the ship or because of the trial, which has long since been swallowed into the wet coils of its own conclusion, but because I am, after all, a Hollander. With her skirts awry, her elegant tight black military coat draped to within inches of her ankles, and with her hair blowing, the black bun sculpted at the back of her head, a cigarette lighted between pale fingers, and with belted valises lightly in hand, thus she is leaving — because she does not like the Dutch. Yes, Ursula is going off to find somebody very different from myself. An African, she says, or a moody Greek. If she had not forced me to board the white ship alone, perhaps we would still be at peace with one another. But soon she will no longer exist for me, nor I for her, and when she passes through the front door I shall be standing alone in the kitchen with one hand motionless on an enameled tile and my broad soft face pressed to the window glass. For a moment I will glimpse her car, which she will be driving or which someone else will be driving, and then my wife will be gone.

Why did she come to my support at the trial only to desert me in the end? Why did she wait this long to tell me that I am incapable of emotional response and that she cannot bear my nationality? Why did she refuse to join me on the white ship and so abandon me to death, sleep, and the anguish of lonely travel? Surely it was more than her boredom and distaste for shipboard games. Perhaps there was another man. Perhaps he will soon be sitting at the wheel of my wife’s car.

For me there is only the taste of cold water, the sensation of glass against my heavy cheek, and the sound of waves.

In the darkness the ship was rolling like a bottle lying on its side in a sea of oil. Sweating in the night’s heat, feeling in the flesh of my forearms the warmth of the ship’s rail, and puffing on my small Dutch cigar and staring down at the phosphorescent messages breeding and rippling in the black waves, suddenly I knew the ship was making no forward progress whatsoever. The knowledge was startling. One moment I was sweating and smoking at the ship’s rail, the most reluctant voyager ever to depart on a cruise for pleasure, and the next I was leaning at the polished rail in sudden possession of the sure knowledge that the ship, though rolling, was otherwise standing still, or at best imperceptibly drifting. How could it be?

I smelled the salt that burdened the night sea air as well as the ocean in which we lay, I saw the shooting phosphorous below and, not far from my left shoulder, a thick skin of dew drawn to the contours of the prow of a white lifeboat. I heard the persistent rhythm of a tapping wireless key in the darkness. And yet I knew that the ship had stopped. But why? How? Even cruise ships, no matter how directionless, were under obligation to maintain steam and at least minimum forward motion on the high seas. To stop, to lose headway, could only put the vessel in gravest danger. And then a hand touched my sleeve, a voice spoke, and my freshly lighted cigar went sizzling down to quick extinction in the night sea.

“Allert,” the young woman said, “won’t you join me and the other passengers for dancing in the dining saloon?”

My Dutch name rendered in English is Alan. But in Dutch, and despite the accent on the first syllable, my name is clearly a repository for the English word “alert,” as if the name is a thousand-year-old clay receptacle with paranoia curled in the shape of a child’s skeleton inside. I myself have always been quietly alert.

“Peter,” I said to my oldest and closest friend, “I wish that now, after all these years, you would take her regularly to bed. She expects it of you, she expects it of all men, she wants you to make a strong and consistent overture. Force her to more than yielding. She spends her life pouting and smoldering and waiting for opportunities to yield. But once committed she is an extremely active lover, the kind of woman who causes suicide. And she likes you. We have both made that perfectly clear already.”

I placed my cigar in the glazed white earthen ash tray, looked at my friend and smiled. Behind his back and through the broad windows the late sun was streaking across the snow for miles. At that moment Ursula, my wife, entered the room and sprawled in a white leather chair in such a way as to reveal to my friend and me the tender fat of her upper thighs as well as the promise of her casually concealed mystery. It occurred to me then that my friend and wife were perhaps more intimately agreeable with each other than I had thought. But it did no harm to urge Peter toward the inevitable, even if he had long since discovered it.

“Ursula,” I said, “do you know what we have been talking about?”

She rested her cheek in the palm of her hand, allowed the other to fall against the full white barely visible crotch of her underpants, and looked across the room at me with heat in her eyes. Even from where I sat I could smell the soap and sourness between her heavy legs. The mere thought in my mind was making her moist.

Later she decided that I needed to embark alone on a quest for pleasure.

Around my navel there is concentrated a circular red rash. At first a few isolated splotchy areas of pebbled crimson, it now consists of a broad red welted ring completely encircling the little untouched island of the navel. The fungus, which is what it must be, surely, is textured like the outer livid flesh of a wet strawberry, and is spreading. Soon its faintly exuding and yet sensationless growth will blanket the entire surface of my global belly. Perhaps I contracted the infecting seed while lying almost naked on the lip of the ship’s pool and watching beneath the shield of my crossed arms the slowly tanning figure of the young woman who later confronted me once in her stateroom with a goat’s horned skull masking her sex.

The approaching extinction of what we have known together is unavoidable, not at all like an amputation, and certainly not a matter of morality. Ursula does not like my name, my large size, my self-control, my superficial national characteristics, my cigar smoking, my dreams, my affectionate attachment to a certain city in Holland, my preoccupation with the myths and actual practices of sexuality, my benevolence, my sense of humor which, like the more enticing elements of human anatomy, emerges only on the rarest occasion brightly and bedecked in green. She dislikes me most, she says, for my failure to respond to her emotionally. I, in my turn, resent and admire her constant smoldering, resent and admire her lassitude which is sexual invitation, and resent and admire her boredom which is denial. There are times when I dislike more than anything in the world the lazy fit of the top of her stocking around her upraised thigh as well as the thickness of her breasts, her small waist, the breadth of her stomach, the terrible harmony between her wandering body and her impregnable mind. I do not like her egocentricity, her psychological brutality, her soft voice, her harsh personal judgments, her awareness of sexual challenge, her habit of fondling her own rough nipples, her patience, her cleverness, her occasional smile, her weeks of depression. And yet we have given each other freedom, excitement, tenderness and comfort. We have shared a long marriage.

I awoke. The porthole was half open and, in the moonlight, was streaked with salt. But so too were my lips, the clothes piled on the nearby chair and flung on the floor, the sheet that was stiff and the color of silver on our two bodies. Salt-encrusted and bitter, all of it, as if we had slept through a violent storm with the porthole open.

I was awake, my left leg was bent in cramp, the body next to me was small, the cabin was not mine. The darkness, the glint of a brass hook near the louvered door, the girl whose naked sleep I could feel but not see, and the salt, the moonlight, all of it made me more than ever convinced that the small unfamiliar stateroom in which we lay had momentarily been emptied of black sea water. The pillow was damp. But what else? What else?

“Good God,” I whispered, “good God, we have stopped again. The ship is not moving.”

She murmured something and curled closer, her smallness and youth and nudity lay cradled in the darkness against my rigid and now sweating chest and thighs. I felt her tiny wet tongue licking my finger. But the ship was without lights, that much I knew, and was untended in a sea so calm that not the slightest tremor climbed the delicate white iron plates to suggest to me, the now conscious and alerted sleeper, even the minimal reality of the vast tide. No tapping of the wireless key, no messages from the ship’s half-drunken vibraphone player. Nothing. All around me I felt the empty decks, the empty lifeboats, the schism between the rising moon and the black tide. And I struggled unsuccessfully to comprehend a fear I had never known in my past life. No doubt the problem concerned two cosmic entities, I told myself: the sea, which was incomprehensible, and the ship, which was also incomprehensible in a mechanical fashion but which, further, was suddenly purposeless and hence meaningless in the potentially destructive night. Eliminate even the most arbitrary of purposes in such a situation, or from the confluence of two cosmic entities, I told myself, and the result is panic.

“Listen,” I whispered, “it’s happening again. The ship is not moving.”

In the darkness, lying bulky and naked in a strange bed, tasting the salt and feeling the stasis of the ship in my own large body, in these circumstances I knew it was unreasonable to speak as I had in fact just spoken to the girl at my side. And yet there was nothing I could do but pour my cigar-drenched breath across her small sleeping face. I felt exactly like one of those naval officers waiting, in former times, for the inevitable arrival of the torpedo speeding through the black night. The young woman had herself selected me from all the passengers, also she had already been more friendly to me than anyone I had ever known, and in her smallness appeared capable of bearing any amount of pain or fear my presence might inflict on her. Given all this I felt oddly justified in looking to the helpless girl for immediate and practical relief. But waiting, listening, suffering the cramp in my leg, and utterly conscious of my total identification with the dead ship, nothing could have prevented my urgent whispering in any case.

“We are becalmed,” I whispered. “I must go on deck.”

She curled still closer and spoke though she was quite asleep. Then she took nearly half of my finger into her mouth. Suddenly, marvelously, I understood what she had said and felt through all my weight and cold musculature the heavy slow rumble of the engines and the unmistakable revolutions of the great brass propeller blades in the depths below us. The distant vibrations were all around us, were inside me, as if my own intestinal center was pulsating with pure oceanic motion and the absolute certainty of the navigational mind doing its dependable work. Our arms were crossed, my fingers were tentative yet firm, the girl’s dreams were in my mouth. But the sea, I realized quite suddenly, was not calm, as I had thought, but rough.

“Allert,” Ursula was saying, “the trouble with you is that you are a psychic invalid. You have no feeling. I wish that just once you might become truly obsessional. If you were obsessed I might at least find you interesting.” But Ursula was wrong. I am not some kind of psychic casualty. It is simply that I want to please, want to exist, want others to exist with me, but find it difficult to believe in the set and characters on the stage. Then too I am extremely interested in failure.

But why is she leaving?

The sun was filling the dining saloon, the whiteness of the ship was everywhere. The enormous plate-glass windows that were sparkling, the white cloth on our table for eight, the broad green tiles of the floor of the dining saloon in which we waited at the second sitting for luncheon, the crystal and silverware and even the white dress uniform of the young wireless officer sitting coarsely beside me, in all this the whiteness of the ship and brilliance of the sun were evident. It was a period of perfect light, shortly after the second luncheon gong on a clear day, and beyond the frivolous yet pleasing insularity of the dining saloon the ship’s motion was remarkably measured in singing cables, a taut flag on the prow, the pleasingly uneven faint undulations of the sharp prow against the unmoving fictional horizon. And from our stern the froth of our unmistakable wake was purely devolving in the long white choppy path of our disappearing nautical speed, all of which at the moment I knew full well, since for exactly an hour prior to the second luncheon gong I had stood alone on the ship’s stern and drunk deep of the glare and wind and salty taste of our powerful but fading passage.

The menu announced consommé from shallow silver cups, and had it not been for the printed menu as well as for the recollection of my hour at the taffrail, I doubt that I could have sat a moment longer at my first impending meal at our table for eight. At the instant of this realization I imagined the consommé before us, each silver cup bearing its garnish of water cress like a green island drifting in an amber sea, and in that instant I took my florid face out of the menu, felt my armpits growing suddenly dry, and smiled in turn at most of the other members seated at our somewhat isolated table.

The girl whom Ursula had pointed out to me the previous day was, ironically enough, seated exactly opposite the young ship’s officer at my side, so hence almost exactly opposite from me. Like the rest of them she was studying her menu. Her long-stemmed water glass was empty; with a sudden mild intensity I noted that the coarse young wireless officer was fishing for the girl’s small sandaled foot with his poorly polished white shoe. I resented his action, I moved to rearrange the napkin spread in my lap. The water, like the consommé, had not yet appeared. The girl must have noticed my concern because in the next brief passage of time, as I broke through the frozen glassy crust of a roll with my two thumbs, she looked at me directly as if she were about to smile. Her eyelashes made me think of flies climbing a wall.

“I am Dutch, not Swiss,” I said in answer to someone’s question. “But in my case it is a common mistake.”

The ship veered slightly, the sun flashed, two black-jacketed men began setting before us the low flat silver tureens filled with the tepid consommé and green garnishes and puckering chunks of lemon. I admitted to myself that the soup deserved some sort of public comment.

“This consommé,” I said quietly, “has been siphoned from the backs of lumbering tortoises whose pathetic shells have been drilled for the tubes.”

The silence, the singing of the crystal, the plash of water filling the goblets, the bent heads, the sun on the naked shoulders of the girl who was wearing pants and a halter, all this told me that I should not have spoken, should not have revealed in hyperbole my loneliness, my distaste for travel, my ambiguous feelings about the girl. Again I glanced beneath the table and saw that the carelessly daubed white shoe was now pressed against the girl’s very small and naked foot. The girl, in the motions of her arch and toes, was encouraging the attention of the young wireless officer and even responding to his touch.

The girl’s halter was tight, triangular and dark blue over what it covered of her childish chest. The cuff of the wireless officer’s white tunic sleeve was frayed, and not only frayed but unclean, stained by a smudge of some substance pertaining to his job as wireless operator. The girl was ordinary yet unfamiliar, while the officer was a common type, a careless black-haired young man who singled out one special girl for himself on each aimless cruise. I knew his type and was not surprised to see that the coarse fingers of his right hand were constantly shifting my silver fork or brushing the rim of my waiting plate. As his secreted right foot performed its seduction, so his visible right hand had to give offense, and both for the sake of the girl who was seated across from us and watching.

Spoon to lip, eyes meeting those of the young girl at an odd angle, conscious of a high wide transparent wave of spray beyond the nearest sheet of plate glass, and seeing the varied faint colors in the fine spray, and hearing a few notes of the vibraphone, suddenly I realized that the officer’s effrontery was going to be far more extensive than I had imagined. His hand left the table. His hand slipped from the table in such a way as to engage my attention but not that of anyone else. In order to thrust his hand into the pocket of the wrinkled white tunic, he moved so that his bent elbow touched my heavy unobtrusive arm. Intentionally. For an instant I speculated about the girl’s age, I heard a saxophone barking distantly, I thought of the two great ponderous black anchors wet and dripping where they hung bolted like monolithic torture instruments to the high prow of the ship.

“Tomorrow we reach land,” the officer said to the girl while continuing to feel about slowly in his pocket and to invade my luncheon hour with the deliberate tip of his elbow.

“So soon? I thought we wouldn’t see anything for days.”

“First port of call tomorrow. There’ll be horses and carriages for sightseeing.”

I felt again the insistent elbow. I glanced down. I saw the man’s hand cupped palm upward on his thigh, the hand crudely tilted in my direction, the small glossy faded yellow photograph cupped and shining in his hand. I frowned, the girl was smiling, I returned the spoon to the bowl. I glanced down at what was obviously an example of very old-fashioned pornography. The fissured celluloid and two small white gelatinous figures were cupped in the man’s hand, framed in his palm, and now the young man was laughing at the girl and twisting, winking his stubby little antique picture as if he expected me to take it in thumb and forefinger and transfer it surreptitiously to my own white pocket. He began to make a brushing motion with his rude thumb across the two small stilted nudes as if wiping away some invisible film of dust. I put down my napkin, pushed back my chair, excused myself.

“Tomorrow,” said the girl as I got to my feet, “will you join us in one of the carriages?”

“Thank you,” I answered in my thickest accent, “perhaps.”

The ship was softly undulating, with knife and fork in hand the young officer was beginning to eat his luncheon. I spent the next day in my cabin waiting, listening to the noise of temporary disembarkation, feeling the heat of land, feeling the timbers of the pier through the ship’s steel, thinking that the thick yellow hawser visible beyond my porthole was to the stilled ship what a life preserver was to the floundering man. At least the hawser made sense of our immobility.

There were gongs, there were whistles, there were blasts from high-pitched pipes, screams of compressed air. Even from where Ursula and I stood together on the crowded deck near the gangway I could see that the ship was high and sharp and clear, a paint-smelling flowered mirage of imminent departure over the lip of the earth.

“You see,” said Ursula into my ear and laughing, nodding in the direction of the young woman leaning happily at the ship’s rail, “you will not be alone, Allert. Not for long.”

I turned, I looked again at the young woman who was leaning on the rail and smiling at the crowd on the pier, at the loading shed, at the other ships in the harbor, at the smoke rising more swiftly and blackly now from the pale blue smokestacks above our heads. The girl was standing with no one, she waved but not to anyone in particular down on the pier. And when I turned back to Ursula our own ship’s whistle blew, its vibration filling deck, sea, sky, bones, breasts, and tearing us all loose from the familiar shore.

“She’ll take care of you,” Ursula shouted into my waiting ear, “you’ll see.”

In my dream there is a table of rough wooden planks, darkness, another person, light coming from nowhere, and in the center of the table a pile of shining wet blood-purple grapes in a clay bowl. We are outdoors and I feel no apprehension. And yet it seems to me that the grapes, which arc clearly at the center of this late-night timeless experience, arc somehow moving faintly of their own accord. The air is without wind, without stars. The grapes are waiting, massed in a curious faint motion. The other person, who is female and stands well beyond the edge of the table, is not inviting me to approach the grapes, though she is standing beyond the table only in expectation that I will do so. Yes, I am aware of the other person and pleased at the sight of the heap of grapes with their tight wet skins and reddening color. But then there is a change in mood, a change in perspective, because now I am standing beside the table in the warm night air and noticing that the grapes are unlike any I have ever seen, since each grape grows not from the single short tough stem which is part of the usual cluster, but is instead attached top and bottom by tender almost transparent tubes to its neighbor. Yes, the grapes are heaped in the bowl in a single tangled coil rather than in familiar bunches. And now I see that these grapes are larger than usual, that their slick skins are watery red, that they are definitely moving against each other, that they are stretched and twisted into oddly elongated shapes instead of the usual spheres, and all because each grape contains a tiny reddish fetus about the size of the tip of my thumb.

The grapes are transparent, I see the fetuses, the other person has drawn appreciably closer to watch my reaction to the grapes which are wriggling now like a heap of worms. Despite their pale redness they are still purple. Despite their distorted shapes they are still glistening and large. But when a handful is separated wetly from the rest of the pile and is suddenly half crushed on the wooden surface of the table (by the other person who is clearly my wife), I am revolted and unable to eat.

When I told this dream to Ursula she asked me how anyone could be so afraid of life as to dream such a disgusting dream.

We sailed from Amsterdam, from Bremen, from Brest, from Marseilles, from farther north, from farther south, from Amsterdam. The brochure describing the voyage lay on the table beside my chair for weeks before the day of departure. I smelled the sweet smell of dust hours before we first sighted land when I went to my cabin. Ursula waved me off from the crowded pier. There was no one to wave off the girl at the rail. I had no interest in boarding that ship. I did not want to sit beside Ursula and drive to the pier. I was not attracted to severance, sun, sea, the geography of separation and islands and unexpected encounters in cabins like mausoleums. I did not want to float in the ship’s pool which was a parody of the sea it traveled on. I did not want to sail. But the return was worst of all since by then the girl was gone. I plan never again to look at the rough sea though I am filled with it, like a sewn-up skin with salt.

In my dream I am somehow endowed with the rare North Penis, as if the points of the compass have become reliable indicators of sexual potency with north lying at the maximum end of the scale. First I see the phrase North Penis on a sign above the door of a shabby restaurant which I recognize as a place that serves good wine, and then I am seated at the single unsteady little table in front of the restaurant and am aware of the sudden ill-fit of my trousers and of the physical sensations of the rare North Penis between my legs. The waiter is scowling, there is no way to share my embarrassment and secret gratification, I am forced to drink a half glass of the excellent wine alone.

When I told this dream to Ursula she made no comment but instead leaned across to me enigmatically and put her hand on my thigh. Later in the day she said she found the explicit sexual insecurity of my dream surprising, but would tell me no more.

“Allert,” she said, “all men wish occasionally to be free of their wives. You really must go on this cruise. And go alone.”

She was facing away from me and toward the large expanding glass pane of the window, so that beyond her naked back and beyond the window the snow spread westward in a dazzling white crust for miles.

The third musician was playing his vibraphone with naked knuckles, with knuckles split to the bone and bleeding onto his sentimental percussive instrument. We were heading into a darkening choppy westward sunset. I went out on deck.

It was so cold that a skin of ice had already formed on the surface of Peter’s bright blue car that was still faintly steaming at the side door of his week-end house in the country. The setting sun was licking the hard bright machine like some great invisible beast on its knees.

“Ursula, for you,” he said, giving her the glass. “And for you, Allert. A quick drink and then we’ll try the new sauna.”

“Cheers,” I said in my native Dutch and saw the hard wet light of the sun, which was just beginning to set, in the frozen lacquer of the car beyond the window, in the metallic sheen of Peter’s gray hair, in the window glass itself and in our tumblers, our eyes, our breaths still visible even inside the essentially unused house. Peter lit the enormous fire, we drank, the three small valises — two of matching straw and one of stiffly shining hide — stood together in the entrance hall. The fireplace smelled of the damp soot of the wintry forest, Ursula was sipping from her glass and smiling.

“All right, my dears,” Peter said, “I have a treat for you.”

He refilled the tumblers, he brought the bottle, so that outside the cold and the fierce declining light leapt as one to tumblers and fingers, to bottle and fusing voices, so that the car and the house and the three of us were all cut from the same timeless stuff of light and ice. We laughed, we stumbled together in single file, Peter pointed the way with the bottle held out before him by its frozen neck, though the path was clear enough. The sun turned suddenly orange on the haunch of Ursula’s tight trousers, for some reason the sound of my own footsteps made me think of those of a lurching murderer. Unmarked, faintly visible, the path covered the short distance from the house above us to the cabin in the little cove below in spectacular fashion, skirting the bare birches and crusted snow to our right and hooking downward to the edge of the black and brackish sea on our left.

The cove was narrow in the mouth but deep, a perfect little fat pouch cut roundly into the rocks and snow of that frozen coast, and in the very center of the cove stood the cabin freshly built of stripped white logs and smelling of wood chips and tar and creosote. There were no windows, the large plank door was locked with an obviously new padlock, and yet greenish and highly scented smoke was drifting up from the chimney. The naked birches of the hillside crowded down the white incline to the cabin, which had been built only a few feet from the round rocks, the edge of ice, the brutally black salt water. It seemed to me that all the rocks, large and small, were the color and texture of a man’s skull long exposed to snow, sun, rain.

“Peter,” I called, smelling the green smoke, the fresh wood, and feeling the tension between the white trees and snow and the black water, “what a perfect spot for a sauna!”

The door closed behind us like the door of an ice-house, as if it were six or eight inches thick. Ursula and I commented on the sense of well-being that filled the little solidly built log cabin. The interior smelled of cedar, of ferns, of polished rocks, of water. Over everything drifted the scent of eucalyptus trees.

“Ursula,” Peter said, “why don’t you use the dressing room first? Then Allert and I will take our turn.”

She put down her tumbler and disappeared. She returned with her torso wrapped in a white towel. For only a moment or two Peter and I left her alone tilting the cold glass to her lips and watching fragile cords of flame binding themselves tightly about the log glowing in the enormous fireplace. It took us only a moment or two to strip down and hang our clothes on the wooden pegs as Ursula had done, and to wrap ourselves in the heavy terry cloth towels. One of Peter’s black socks dropped to the floor. Ursula’s clothes were bunched in silken shapelessness on the wooden peg.

“You look like a pair of old Romans,” she said, and the three of us clinked together our tumblers hard, with gusto. Ursula had removed her jewelry and, clearly enough, was pleased to be standing between Peter and me in her white towel. She was holding the upper edge of her towel with a soft hand.

“Yes, Peter,” I said, “it was clever of you to locate all this sensual isolation in the very midst of so much magnificent desolation.”

“But this is only the beginning, my friend. You’ll see.”

And then quietly, seriously, peacefully, we entered the sauna. The rose-colored light, the flagstone floor, the walls of cedar planking, the tranquility of the intense heat, the now heady smell of eucalyptus, suddenly the power of this kind of languid confinement was far more considerable than I had thought.

“Actually,” Peter said, “it is best to spread the towels on the benches and then to sit or lie on them.”

Ursula loosened her towel, removed it, placed it on the hot wooden slats between Peter and me, and slowly leaned back against the cedar wall with her knees to her chin. Her knees were together only for comfort, just as her heels for the same reason were spread apart, and her eyes were open and level while her lips, her heavy lips, were agreeably relaxed. She did not intend to hide her breasts with her knees though she was doing so. Already there was appearing on the cellulous density of Ursula’s body a heat rash indistinguishable from the rough discoloration of the sex rash that was so periodically familiar on her chest and neck. I knew at once that Ursula was thinking and at the same time pleasantly daydreaming in the intense heat.

Peter and I spread our towels, he assuming a perfectly upright Yoga position to Ursula’s right, I reclining into a half-leaning position to her left. Already the rose-colored light had dimmed perceptibly, while time had disappeared completely in the intense heat. Back straight, abdominal muscles visibly tight, ankles crossed, hands on spread knees, in this way Peter had turned himself into a living religious artifact constructed only for the sake of the receptacle that was his lap. And in the receptacle of Peter’s lap lay the hunched conglomerate of his still dormant sexual organs.

My friend did not move except occasionally to lick his lips. Ursula was slack and motionless. I lay massively sprawled with my forearm on the towel, my hip against Ursula, my large smooth shoulder propped against the cedar wall. Our eyes were dry, our skin was dry, with all the clarity of a peaceful dream our immobility was giving way in slow motion to fragments of action: Peter ladling oil of eucalyptus onto hot rocks; Ursula smiling at the bland rear view of Peter’s nudity and thrusting a dry hand between her thighs; I shifting and rolling onto my back with knees raised and feet flat to the towel and hands clasped beneath my head; Peter turning with ladle in hand; Ursula reaching down more firmly, more gently, and pleasing herself with one finger, with several; Peter resuming his Yoga position; Peter ladling out the oil of distant trees; I placing the flat of my right foot against Ursula’s hip; Peter sitting again with his hands on his knees and his spine in a curve; Ursula placing her heels together and then spreading wide her knees and arms toward Peter, toward me.

“We must plunge into the water,” Peter said. “We must not wait too long.”

“The first naked man I ever saw,” Ursula said, “had a cock down to his knees.”

“We’ll cleanse the skin, finally,” Peter said, “with birch branches.”

“But the word is Dutch,” I heard myself saying, drunkenly, serenely, “not Latin.”

The room was dry. Our bodies were dry. The heat was high enough to stimulate visions, to bring death. The oil of eucalyptus was running, was forming a slick film on walls and floor, was greasing our nipples and turning to thick foam between our legs — though invisibly, silently. I lay again on my back and closed my eyes and listened. Of all the women I had known, only Ursula made that muted popping sound in the midst of all the other sounds of oral passion, and now in the timeless heat of Peter’s sauna I heard Ursula’s own sound and then, aware of Peter and Ursula tangling and untangling, the one rounding upward her sweet back, the other throwing high his chin as if to crack his trachea from within, and then aware of silence sliding among us like a pool of oil, suddenly I felt the muted fierce sensation of Ursula who had turned around quite naturally to me.

Felt and heard the tip of the tongue, the edge of the tongue, the flat of the tongue, the softness inside the lips, the resilience of the lips firmly compressed, the gusts of unsmiling breath, the passionate suction of the popping that was sensation as well as sound, the nick of a white tooth, the tip of her nose, the side of her cheek, the feeling of her head on its side with the mouth gripping me, carrying me, as a dog carries a sacred stick, until I felt that last moment of Ursula’s wet concentration — tender, vibrant, brokenly rhythmical — and then felt myself disgorging, disengaging, sinking, curling slowly into a gigantic ball like some enormous happy animal armed with quills.

It was Peter who saved us in time, who kissed Ursula’s roughened mouth just in time, who swatted her sharply on the flank just in time, who pulled me out of my stuporous imitation of the woodchuck just in time, who caught hold of Ursula’s nude body and mine and dragged us out of the sauna and into the frozen sunset and leaping and laughing into the shocking blackness of the salty choppy water just in time to prevent irreparable burns or internal damage or even death. And in time also to revive us, to wound us back to life in the bright light, the unbearable coldness, the crunching of the thin ice that made small bleeding cuts on our naked feet and ankles.

Heavy, lumbering, laughing, exposed in shock, down we crashed into the mid-winter tide and hurt our arches on the round rocks and even chased each other with handfuls of virgin snow. We revived, we shook, the rash on Ursula’s upper body was like a vivid red tapestry on a white field. Our fragments of speech, our sounds of choking laughter, our sounds of flesh slapping flesh all broke across the last light and last silence of the frozen day.

Back in the cabin to which we fled to escape the sea, the cold, the pure ominous light, and to retrieve our clothes, Ursula engaged in a prolonged sexual embrace first with Peter and then with me in front of the logs that were still burning as brightly as before. In front of the fire we redeemed each other’s scars and restored to cold bodies the comfort of familiar warmth. We were not in a mood for the birch branches.

It was later, when climbing up the crusted path in the darkness, that I received my all-too-accurate premonition that Peter’s life was going to end, when that moment came, in the sauna.

“Yes, Allert,” she said, “I am going to find somebody very different from you. An African, perhaps, or a moody Greek. And I shall never again submit to marriage.”

I went immediately to my own cabin, by tracking the numbers on the louvered doors. I would allow no one else to carry my new valise. I found the door, I entered and placed the valise on the little unsteady luggage stand. I shut the porthole, I locked the door, I sat down on the edge of the bed facing the valise and resting my forearms on my thighs. I waited, I stared at the valise, I listened. In the midst of motion I could not visualize, and the silence that followed the whistles, the shouts, the crush of human activity and the subliminal grinding of iron wheels and greasy gears, slowly I became aware of the stabilizing throb and purpose of the engines far below and knew that we were under way and sailing.

Nonetheless, I was unable to make myself open the valise. I was unable to open it, in fact, for several days, which no doubt accounted for my unshaven appearance at the earlier meals.

Strapped, locked, made of bright golden leather, my new valise sat untouched on its flimsy stand for several days, a pedestrian Pandora’s box filled, I thought, with the sentimental or useful objects of my traveling self. During those hours while I sat on the edge of the tightly made up bed and stared at the fattened valise, often I asked myself if Ursula had thought of a cruise deliberately, since long ago the two of us had shared this kind of cruise in celebration of our recent marriage.

Finally I unpacked the valise.

I am a person who drinks inordinate amounts of cold water. When I rise and stand on the warm tiles in my silk pajamas, or when I pause at our kitchen sink which lies like an enormous ceramic trough beneath the window facing the rear of the driveway down which Ursula will soon depart, or when I return to our house from feeding the geese on our small artificial pond, or when I wake in the night or turn away from the window with the western exposure or think of Ursula lying somewhere above me with her magazine and expanding plans, in each case inevitably and deliberately I pause and fill a thick clear glass with cold water which, slowly and fully, I drink down. I taste the water as it comes from under the black flat rocks, I taste the icy water flowing down a river of light, I am aware of it chilling my teeth and refreshing me. Each glass of water causes me to breathe deeply, to grow a shade more somber, to anticipate more keenly the taste of the little cigar with which I follow each pure glass of cold water. And I have insisted on my dozen or so glasses of water each day throughout all of the last ten years or so of our long marriage. I drink only water and an occasional schnapps whereas most of my fellow countrymen drink beer. And still, as Ursula says, I am forever bloated.

But there is no image or analogy with which to evoke the taste of water, which happens to correspond to the view I hold generally of life. The thought of salt water is unbearable to me. My desire for fresh water is increasing daily. I number myself among those few men who are able to admit that their thirst is unquenchable.

“Allert,” Peter said, “what do you think of my theory that a man remains a virgin until he has committed murder?”

There were two life jackets stored on the top shelf of the narrow closet in my cabin. Staring into the closet that was nearly empty except for the life jackets, and also staring into the mirror fastened to the inside of the closet door, in this way I saw myself in the mirror in my undershorts. I imagined myself strapped into one of the orange jackets, I thought of myself tying the white cords in the darkness of a night at sea. It pleased me to think that I had lost track of time.

And yet the sight of two life jackets caused me a certain uneasiness, as did the two pillows on the bed, the two chairs covered with flowered chintz, the smell of soap and sea air in the cabin, the absence of anything personal in this cabin that was obviously intended for two persons but occupied by only one. I did not wish the company of the other shipboard passengers, and yet I believed that I would never feel at home in a stateroom with so much false decoration and from which some second unknown person was forever missing.

I replaced one of the white cords that was dangling. I dropped my shorts, I felt the humming of the ship in the soles of my feet, I prepared myself in trunks, straw slippers, dark glasses and white terry cloth robe for a session at the edge of the ship’s pool. I drank from the plastic glass-lined flask of ice water. I studied myself through the large black lenses of the sunglasses.

Then I left my cabin. I took my towel, my straw hat, my book, and even as I detoured down to the deck below instead of walking directly to the pool that was situated on my own deck in the aft of the ship, I found myself distrusting what appeared to be the monotony of the ship’s steady course. The curious levitation I felt in the softly lit corridor was sure to give way to some abrupt shock or a sudden diminution of forward speed and then a pause and then the terrible pull of the propellers churning in reverse. A clear day was no guarantee against the diving and rising monsters of the deep.

The length of the corridor was spanned underfoot by a thin rubber mat and overhead by a series of muted light bulbs in steel cages. A fire axe was bolted to the bulkhead behind a sheet of glass. I could hear my slippers marking my solitary progress down the corridor. Through the thickly-smoked lenses of my dark glasses the details of the corridor were so darkly obliterated that it might have been leading me through some unfamiliar hotel or through the severe structure of a bad dream, except that the corridor was not level, following as it did the contours of the white hull, and in the very nuclear substance of its steel plates was filled with all the physical by-products of the stresses of what could be nothing other than a ship in motion on a flat sea.

Her cabin door was open. Hardly able to see my way, smelling fresh paint and the grease of electrical cables and the fresh lingering scent of my recent shower, I knew immediately that her cabin door was open, not hooked partially ajar with a brass hook as were many of the doors I passed, but standing fully open so that I could not help but see the partially opened porthole, the pen and loose sheets of paper on the writing desk, the archaic typewriter, the orange beach robe flung on a chair, the small and still dripping swim suit dangling from one of the thick brass ring-bolts around the porthole. I could not help but see the wireless officer half propped on the unmade bed in his tunic and undershorts, and see also the young woman who, dressed in a boy’s white undershirt and a pair of tight blue denim pants, was standing before a small ironing board and pressing what were obviously the wireless officer’s white trousers.

Her hair was still damp. Her rump was a little sectioned fruit in the tight blue pants, her feet were bare, her energetic upper body was like a child’s. The wireless officer was reading something, a book or magazine, on her unmade bed. She was ironing his white trousers as if to do so were a commonplace of both the past and present.

When I again reached the upper deck I reversed my direction, shunned the pool, and returned to my cabin where in robe and slippers and dark glasses I lay flat on the flowered bedspread that was stretching like a sterile skin across my empty bed.

I was unable to read. Only considerable inner concentration prevented me from donning one of the orange life jackets over my white robe.

He was at my side. The moonlight was on the rail, on the deck, on the waves and foam below us, and the wireless officer was at my side. One of his white shoes was hooked on a lower rung of the ship’s rail.

“Sometimes, when a man is in the winter of life,” he said, “he begins to find young women attractive. He begins to pursue younger and younger women. He intrudes where he is not wanted. He finds himself unable to seduce the girl away from the younger man. He attempts unsuccessfully to be their friend, burning all the while only to touch the girl. He makes a fool of himself.”

I thought of the moonlight turning the sea’s black salt to silver, for an instant I saw the crumpled white uniform streaked with algae. In the moonlight he was picking his fingernails with a small bone-colored cuticle stick.

“If you think I am in the winter of life, as you put it,” I said, suppressing my anger, “you are mistaken. Very much mistaken.”

“Allert,” Peter said, breathing his frozen breath into the silence between us, “I would like to take you up on your suggestion. Do you remember?”

In woolen socks and rubber boots cut off at the knee and with silver-barreled shotguns cradled in our arms that were bent and stuffed with warm padding like the arms of gigantic male dolls, thus Peter and I were walking across the pre-dawn snow, side by side. He was smoking his little curved white meerschaum pipe with the amber stem. The lines of elegance on his long face appeared to have been skillfully cut by a pointed instrument into Spanish leather.

“Yes,” he said, “I accept your proposal. Ursula and I will welcome the regularity.”

A single compact bird flew low over our heads and away in a long curving trajectory of great speed. Peter’s breath was like snow that had undergone sudden transformation, the little round white bowl of his pipe reminded me of the gonad of some child god, a second bird skimmed by in pursuit of the first. And still he and I walked on together, contemplating the closeness achieved by certain psychic ties.

It was then, after we had walked perhaps another hundred yards, that I had my vision of Peter sealed at last in his lead box but with his penis bursting through the roof of the box like an angry asphodel.

On my way to the pool, which was small but deep and constructed in the shape of a slippery amoeba, I steadied myself against the pitch and roll of the bone-colored wooden deck and glanced up toward the projecting wing of the ship’s bridge, where I saw him, hatless, black hair curling in the bright wind, arms on the rail, foot raised and resting on the white rung, tunic unbuttoned at the throat, bitter young eyes directed toward some invisible point off the prow of the ship, the kind of young wireless operator who would one day soon deserve the severest sentence of some maritime tribunal. I wondered what pocket in his tunic, left or right, contained one of the famous photographs. Clearly he was enjoying himself and not on duty.

But we dipped into another trough, the ship rolled to recover, the spray climbed high, I stumbled on toward the blue water gyrating now in the pool at the stern.

I staggered and dropped my book. The spray was sliding down the dark lenses of my sunglasses, today there could be no doubt of our motion and our direction. I was willing to suffer any amount of motion sickness, which actually I did not anticipate at the moment, for the sake of just such comprehensible turbulence under a clear sun. I had only to balance myself at the edge of the pool, one hand on my belly and the other clutching the aluminum upright of the diving board, in order to perceive the reassuring concreteness of waves, foam, spray, persistent escort of gray gulls, a few orange rinds brightening our wake, the sudden dangerous angle of the bright blue water in the ship’s pool. Our propellers, great pieces of underwater brass statuary, were today functioning with purpose, with power. There was no one in sight. I swayed, lifted my protected eyes toward the nearest gull, and then I felt the pool water — blue only because the inside of the pool itself was painted blue — rising and rolling upward to meet the flying spray.

“Allert,” she called, precisely as my extended hands and head and puffy shoulders struck the blue water and I, with lungs distended and eyes open, began to descend. I took the small and feminine sound of her voice with me on my way to the bottom. As I dove down, a huge man in blue trunks upended in a small deep body of water that was pitching and sliding in counter-violence to the afternoon’s heavy seas, the faint clear welcome voice remained afloat in my ear, like a second swimmer undulating downward with violent strokes. My name was submerged in the sound of her voice, her voice in my name, while I myself was deeply submerged in the pool of captive sea water that was thoroughly still now and of a darker blue than before. My eyes were open and I was working my arms and pectoral muscles in the slow rhythm of some luminous under-water butterfly. The nearest wall of the pool was driven into the water like a blue knife at a steep angle. A ladder-like series of empty holes for the hands and feet climbed sharply to the surface on which the shadows of spray and foam and the girl’s outstretched leg were falling. I knew I was quite alone in the pool.

The invigorating pain of held breath, the black and white tiles like those of a lavatory floor, a drain hole covered with wire mesh, body more sensitive than ever to the weight of the water and the exertion of flotation, suddenly I had in fact achieved the bottom, as I was not always able to do on such occasions, and I put the flat of one hand on the tiles, concentrated on remaining down there as if anchored by a chunk of rusted iron, waited until I had surely propitiated the god of all those in fear of drowning at sea, and then pushed off, rolling onto my back, and prolonged the ritualized agony of the return to the surface by forcing my stiffened body to rise of its own accord, unaided by the use of either stroking hands or kicking feet.

“Allert,” she called only moments after I re-emerged head and shoulders into the random forces of that bright day, “it’s dangerous to swim when the sea is so rough!”

With a laugh and one upraised slippery arm I acknowledged her concern for my welfare and also conveyed my appreciation of her presence at the edge of the pool where she sat in splendid girlish near-nudity with one childish leg thrust over the water and dripping. I waved again, I snorted, I shook off the water, my shoulders heaved, I struck out to cover the short choppy distance to the glare of the fiery ladder. Gasping repeatedly and voraciously for breath, and feeling the dead flow of all my returning weight, and managing to catch hold of the hot aluminum that was curled like the horns of some great artificial goat, slowly I dragged myself back to the deck of the pitching ship and to the heat of the white towel which, while I was on the bottom of the pool, she had spread out behind her.

“Allert,” she said as I collapsed face down on the towel, “I am not going into the pool today. It’s too rough. I am not as strong as you are.”

I grunted and rested my cheek on my soft pinkish hands, one of which was pillowing the other, and felt the upper portion of the small seated buttocks fitting tightly into my hollow side while the water trickled slowly from my ears and mouth. I did not need to open my eyes to know she was there, since I could see her with my eyes quite shut: scant and pale blue halter and bikini bottom indistinguishable from underwear, small nubile body hairless and unmarked except for a scar in the shape of a fishhook below her navel, small face whose weight and shape I could contain nicely in one hand, soft intensely black hair concealed now beneath her bathing cap, little white rubber bathing cap with the flaps upraised like those of a pilot’s old-fashioned leather helmet after an arduous flight. Even with the warm water trickling from one of my ears and the pain subsiding from my lungs and the ship pitching and rolling in a ring of bright spray, still in the darkness I could see her perfectly because, as I had long since decided, she was the only other person on the ship I was willing to know.

“Allert,” she said more softly, though we were alone on the stern of the rising and falling ship and alone in the wind and sun, “how does it happen that you are such a smooth lover?”

“You seem to be speaking about oil,” I replied, humming and mouthing the words with pleasure, “and not at all speaking about a man. Shame on you!”

But of course she responded at once to the kindly tone of my chiding by leaning down and placing her lips against the loose fat along my left shoulder and suddenly creating with her mouth, as small as it was, a sensation of extreme and pointed suction. Then she rested her cheek where her mouth had been and sighed, stretched out beside me and began gently stroking me in the rolls of fat along my ribs. Her cheek on my shoulder was like a wafer in a field of snow.

“Allert,” she whispered, as we lay there under a curving sheet of bright spray, “let’s go down to my cabin right now and strip off our clothes. Shall we?”

Her name, as I learned inevitably and fairly soon in the voyage, was Ariane. I thought that the name Ariane was quite typical of those elegant names bestowed so often on female children in poor families. At once I recognized the name for the type it was, and recognized its purpose, its poor taste, its pathos. At once I found the name extremely appealing because of its simplicity and sentimentality).

Ariane was the name of the young woman I knew so emotionally and so briefly on the cruise. I do not find the name appealing now.

“Allert,” Peter said, “I have a request. I would like to give you and Ursula an in-depth psychological test. Ursula agrees. And, after all, there is no reason why our friendship should not further my line of work. You must admit that the two of you would be excellent subjects. What do you say?”

He was smoking his pipe. I was smoking my cigar. Peter’s darkened study smelled as if everything in it was constructed not of wood and leather, which was actually the case, but of compressed blocks of rich and acrid tobacco. Green tobacco, I thought, searching for my friend’s profile in the unlighted room, remarkable green tobacco evocative of the time when I myself was a helpless boy.

“You know what I think of psychiatrists,” I said with the cigar not inches from my waiting lips. “But for you, my friend, anything. In the right company I have nothing to hide.”

Unfortunately Peter was not able to administer the test before his death.

My life has always been uncensored, overexposed. Each event, each situation, each image stands before me like a piece of film blackened from overexposure to intense light. The figures within my photographic frames are slick but charred. In the middle of the dark wood I am a golden horse lying dead on its side across the path and rotting.

“Why do I have the impression that we two are the only people on board this ship?”

“Perhaps because you are not in general friendly, Allert.”

“But I am remarkably friendly as you well know.” “Besides, you are certainly aware of the officers and crew. You are aware of them all the time.”

“Perhaps after all these years I am jealous.”

“Poor Allert, there is no need to be.”

Peter, who was lean and naked, bent his knees and clasped his ankles and arched his spine and drew himself into his favorite Yoga position. His lap formed a broad and angular receptacle bearing his genitals which, I noted, lay there like some kind of excreted pile of waste fired in a blazing kiln and then varnished.

“The one thing you ought to know, Peter,” Ursula was saying, “is that Allert and I go very well together in bed. We always have.”

Ursula’s honesty was quite enough to shatter the glaze on Peter’s genitals.

My cheeks were burning from the wind and sun, my lungs were filled with the smell of the sea. It was dusk and I was returning from my newly discovered place of utter privacy, a position on the bow of the ship concealed by the wheels and plates of a great winch painted with thick and glistening black paint. I had watched the sun lowering in the western quadrant, I had detected no clue of approaching land. Was I free or lost, exhilarated or merely flushed with grief? I did not know. I did not know what to make of myself or of all these elements, these details, this fresh but oddly traumatic moment of sunset, except to intuit that I was more youthful and yet closer to death than I had ever been. At least my feelings were mixed, to say the least, when I inserted the brass key in the lock of my cabin door. The porthole, which gave only onto the deck, was sealed.

I saw immediately the small photograph lying undisturbed on the flat leather surface of my locked and as yet unpacked valise. Each object was in itself quite ordinary, the valise, the photograph, though taken together, the one on top of the other, each diminished in some small way the reality of the other, or at least altered it. With my hand on the brass door handle, and my hair and figure still disheveled from the touch of the now vanished wind, standing in this way just inside my cabin and seeing the photograph on the valise which in its turn lay on its stand, it was then that a new dictum passed slowly through my mind to the effect that the smallest alteration in the world of physical objects produces the severest and most frightening transformation of reality. Compared with the sight of the photograph curling slightly at the edges and lying somewhat off-center in the field of golden leather — ordinary, improbable, inexplicable, ringed with invisible chains of unanswerable questions — actual vandalism of my silent cabin, had it in fact occurred, would have been nothing.

I sat on my bed, leaned forward, and took the edge of the aging photograph between my thumb and index finger. I held it as one might hold the wings of a submissive butterfly. Slowly I brought the photograph within range of my unemotional scrutiny. The two small white figures, like fading maggots, were apparently devouring each other sexually with carnivorous joy. I brought the picture closer to my quiet eye and stared at the crack that ran like a bolt of lightning across the glazed emulsion of the much-handled print. After a few more moments of study, I made up my mind that this was a different photograph from the one produced surreptitiously by the wireless officer in the dining saloon, though I could not be sure. It seemed to me that the figures were smaller now and more suggestive of another century.

I decided against destroying the picture. I decided against searching immediately for the wireless operator and facing him down. Though it was true that the unexplained appearance of the old-fashioned photograph in my locked stateroom was somehow worse than receiving a poison-pen letter, nonetheless I decided not to return the picture to its owner. If the wireless operator was attempting to intimidate me through the photograph or tell me something about myself that I did not know, all for the purpose of preventing my friendship with the young woman in the blue halter, he would soon realize that I was more formidable than he had thought.

No sooner had I made my decision and slipped the photograph into my jacket pocket than I leaned forward on impulse and unstrapped my valise, unlocked it, opened it wide. And though the articles inside were unfamiliar and appeared not to be mine, as if Ursula had determined that my transformation as a result of travel would be complete in every way, nonetheless I unpacked my valise at last and found an appropriate shelf or drawer for each of the articles I was so unaccustomed to see or touch. I felt as if I had violated the coffin of some unknown child. I stored the valise in the bottom of the closet, hooked open the cabin door with its brass hook, unscrewed the fat brass wing nuts of my single porthole and thrust it ajar, and then lay down on my unfamiliar bed to wait.

The photograph is still in my possession. It is the last and in some ways an accidental addition to my extensive pornographic collection, though I have kept the fact of its existence hidden from Ursula all this time. I chose not to submit that photograph as evidence at the prolonged and sickening ordeal of the trial.

“Mr. Vanderveenan,” she called as I reached the top of the ladder and rose head and shoulders into the wind and glare of the uppermost deck, “won’t you join me for a game of net ball? I can find no one at all to play with me.”

She was wearing a blue halter, tight blue denim trousers, black dancing slippers, and her hair tied back in a knotted strip of orange velveteen. She was standing in the wind beside the high net and balancing in one hand a black leather ball six or eight inches in diameter. Her waist between the lower edge of the halter and the upper edge of the leather-belted blue pants was bare. I recognized that her costume was the standard one generally intended to cause the viewer to imagine the belt unbuckled and the pants unzippered and hanging loose and partly open from the hips, and yet the naked waist was as smooth and childlike as the expression on her guileless face.

“I would like very much to play your net ball,” I said into the invisible wind. “But tell me, how did you know my name?”

We were close together and partially concealed by the two pale blue smokestacks that were oval in cross section and leaning back at a wind-swept rakish angle in the thrust of our journey. The ball in her hand was a tight ripe sectioned fruit of black leather.

“The purser, of course. Didn’t you know that he’s one of the officers at our table? He knows the names and faces of all the passengers on the cruise.”

“I see. The purser. Apparently I have not been aware of him.”

We were closer together and I was quite familiar with the implications of the belted pants, the lure of the naked midriff. It was a commonplace attire. So far she promised nothing that was not in fact commonplace, except that her nearest shoulder blade was bare and poignant and that the miniature features of her face were grouped together in distinctive harmony. Even if she was an adult instead of a child and was a person who had actually lived beyond her majority, as I assumed she had, still she could never have come even close to half my age, a notion that engaged my attention occasionally from this moment on.

“You don’t know the purser? Really? He’s the one with the handlebar mustache. He’s a favorite of mine.”

“And who is the young officer who has assigned himself the seat next to mine at our table?”

“Oh, that’s the wireless operator. He’s another favorite of mine.”

“You have many favorites.”

She was smiling, I was closer than arm’s length to her naked shoulder, I told myself that she could not possibly wish me to kiss her lips or even to touch her small bare shoulder so soon despite the inviting way she balanced the black ball, and despite her smile, her steady eyes, her upturned face. And yet I could in fact imagine this young person readily unbuckling her tight pants here in the space for games and athletics between smokestacks fore and aft and two white lifeboats on either side. And yet the poles of sex and friendship, I told myself, did not always imply the bright spark leaping between the two, at least not immediately.

“If you don’t know the purser,” she said, glancing down at the black leather ball, “then you don’t know that my name is Ariane.”

I reached for the ball, I felt the heat from the nearest smokestack mingling with the chill of the invisible wind and the bright light of the sun. Far below us a steward was moving along the hidden deck playing the three impersonal notes of his luncheon gong. The young woman’s breathing was reflected in her bare navel as well as in the natural rhythm of the breasts supported only by the triangulation of the blue halter. Between her shoulder blades the halter was tied, I saw, in a crisp knot.

“So,” I said, giving the ball a small toss, “so you are Ariane. It’s a lovely name.”

My tie was struggling in its clip, my hair was blowing, the dead white net was high above my head, I thought of the young woman’s name and saw the brothers, the sisters, the anonymous girl in the luncheonette, the shabby baptism of the first-born and female child receiving the elevated name she would so often discover in cheap magazines in the offices of social welfare.

“Whatever you’re thinking right now,” she said, slipping her hand inside my jacket and her arm part way around my waist, “is unworthy of you. You shouldn’t think such things, Mr. Vanderveenan.”

“But your name is indeed lovely. You must remember that I mean what I say — always.”

Her arm was around my waist, the slightness of her entire body was brushing against all the bulk of mine, I could feel her small ringless hand playing with the folds of my damp shirt in the area of the small of my back. Had anyone discovered us standing there together between the smokestacks, he would not have been able to detect her arm and hand concealed inside the formal drapery of my unbuttoned jacket. But I could feel the slight pressure on my waist, the faint tugging and stroking motions of the fingers of her left hand, by leaning down was able even to catch a smell of her breath which was fleeting and natural in the context of the ocean wind. Her gesture was a surprise of course, and for an instant caused me to experience another one of those rare pangs of anxiety and anticipation in the face of the first hint of sudden attraction. I thought she was being friendly, I thought that her physical gesture expressed warmth and playfulness without intention. And yet we were indeed leaning together on the uppermost deck and one of her fingers had become somehow lodged between my belted trousers and my damp shirt. Already her entire manner should have told me plainly enough about her firmness of mind and her directness.

“Well,” she said, raising her face toward mine and smiling, “you can’t play net ball in your jacket.”

“Just so,” I said and drew my body away from hers, gave her the ball, removed my jacket, turned and walked into playing position on the other side of the net. The steadiness of the ship, the syllables murmuring in the wires overhead, the honed whiteness of the wooden deck, the symmetrical web of the high net, the sound of a ventilating machine, the wind at my back and the sun directly overhead so that time and direction were obliterated, these circumstances could not have been more concrete, more neutral, more devoid of meaning, more appropriate to the surprise and simplicity of the occasion at hand, when an unknown young woman was offering me something beyond innocence, companionship, flirtation. She was watching me as closely as I was watching her, and in both hands had raised the ball to chest level.

“You’re traveling alone,” she called, while I waited, raised my own hands in anticipation of her girlish throw.

“And you,” I called back, squinting and waiting for the game to commence, “you too are traveling alone.”

“But I’m different. I’m not married.”

“Well,” I called, laughing and wondering what had become of the desperate gulls, “I am married and I am nonetheless alone on this cruise. There’s no more to say.”

She raised the ball above her head. I took a step backward, I cupped my hands in the shape of the suspended ball. The ship was carrying us not toward any place but away.

“Often I go on these cruises,” she called. “Often.”

“Excellent,” I called back. “Are you going to throw?”

She waited, this small anonymous female figure in an athletic pose. And then staring at me through the remarkable vibrations of the taut white net, slowly she lowered her arms until the ball, still gripped in her two hands, came to rest in the upper triangulation of her thighs, which were slightly spread. Her halter and tight pants appeared untouched by the wind, while on my back and shoulders and heavy legs my shirt and trousers were flattening like sails.

“I don’t think so,” she called without moving. “I think not.”

I understood. Suddenly I began to understand the absolute presence of the girl who was waiting on the other side of the net and whose name was periodically carried on the passenger lists of ships such as ours. So I nodded and ducked under the net; she dropped the ball which, moving in accordance with the wind and slope of the deck, drifted under one of the lifeboats and disappeared over the starboard side of the ship.

We embraced. The skin of her naked back and shoulders was as smooth and glossy as the skin that has replaced burned skin on a human body. Her kissing was wet and confident, prolonged and wordless, and included even my nose, which she sucked into her small entirely serious mouth.

“You must never pity me,’ she said when we were ready once more to descend the ladder. “That’s what I ask.”

How could I possibly have done harm to such a person?

“Allert,” Ursula was saying, “my reason for leaving you is not sexual. Not at all sexual. It’s just that you don’t know yourself, that you have no idea of what you are, that in my opinion you are an open cesspool. Your jowls, your eyes like lenses for the treatment of myopia, your little cigars, your ungainly person, your perverse sense of humor, all this is nothing to me. But you have long since emotionally annihilated yourself, Allert, and I can no longer tolerate your silences, your silence in the throes of passion, the accounts of your dreams, the stink from the cesspool that is yourself.”

During this monologue a large white perfectly smooth ceramic bowl filled with fresh fat purple grapes stood coolly dripping on the table between us, which to me was either especially thoughtless of Ursula or especially cruel.

The knuckles of the vibraphone player were round and white and minutely smeared with small wet stains of fresh blood. He was playing the metal bars of his silly instrument with his knuckles which were split and bleeding. The bars of the instrument were greased with the musician’s blood. The drummer and the saxophone player were women.

In my dream the nighttime village, which is poor and not at all the village of my birth, consists of no more than a dusty road flanked on one side by a candle-lit cathedral and on the other by a small unoccupied petrol station. The road is blanketed with dust and emerges from the darkness, the pitch darkness of empty night, into the brief space illuminated by the flickering light of the enormous anomaly of the cathedral — gothic, candle-lit in every crevice within and without, active with the breath of spirits, but empty — and illuminated also by the single unshaded bulb that glows beside the single outdoor pump of the petrol station. The road emerges into the light of the opposition between the palace for dead men and the hovel for dead autos, then disappears again into the night which to me is oddly familiar. I am not surprised to be alone in the barbaric village in this illuminated space within the context of the familiar night. I perceive and yet do not perceive the monstrous incongruity between the empty cathedral and abandoned petrol station, which consists of the pump and a doorless whitewashed hovel smelling of urine. Nor am I surprised at the silent appearance of the funeral procession, nor surprised to find myself a part of that procession as it too emerges into the light, a procession unattended by any person except myself and bearing in its slow midst only a high humpbacked black coffin. Nor surprised finally to discover myself identified with the coffin, as if it is my own body that lies dressed for death inside. But when the coffin turns away into the great flickering panorama of the waiting cathedral, I turn in the opposite direction and pass through the unlighted and doorless entrance of the petrol station.

When I told this dream to Ursula, saying that it was one of my more important dreams, she laughed and said that I had not yet run out of gas, as she put it, despite my obvious fears. She picked up her magazine and remarked that I was actually fortunate not to have made my way already into the cathedral of death, reminding me of that other man who had died not so long ago and no matter how foolishly for her. Then she added that apparently I had not yet gotten over the religious hopes of my childhood after all, which was unfortunate since until I did those hopes would always be a screen between myself and the world in which I existed.

For some reason I chose that moment to ask Ursula if she ever discussed my dreams with Peter, but she did not reply.

“If you manage to destroy your guilt, my friend,” Peter said, “you will destroy yourself. You are quite different from Ursula and even from me, for instance, since all your generosity and even your strength depend on unfathomable guilt, which is part of your charm.”

While he stood there with pipe in mouth and the sun greasing the dead ducks at his feet, I told him in good-natured tones that I thought he was wrong.

“We’ll see, my friend,” he said. “We’ll see.”

In my dream I have become once more the silent little boy of my childhood, a plump and rather long-faced child in whom the features and temperament of the man to be are already evident, and I am securely situated in the village of my birth and, though it is clearly the darkest time of night and the village sleeps, nonetheless I am seated bibbed and powdered under a brightly shining light in the shop of the village barber. I hear running water, I hear the clicking of the shears, because the barber is wide-awake and at work on me. He smells of spice, and some kind of unguent that makes me quiver in pleasure and apprehension. We are alone, I am wearing my short trousers, my hiking boots, my monogrammed shirt with the broad white flowing collar. And from toes to neck my body is tented in the voluminous white bib which the barber has draped about me gently and pinned at my neck. I am drowsy, but I am totally aware of the night, the darkened streets and houses beyond the barber shop, the single electric light that smells like tallow, the movements of the barber who is clicking his steel shears between the slopes of my skull and the growth that is my childishly unattractive ear. But most of all I am aware of the barber’s mirror.

Within the mirror’s soft transparency I see myself, my slow eyes, and the blades of the steel shears. But into one edge of the rose-colored strips of wood that frame the mirror the barber has thrust a very large black and white photograph of a smiling girl who wears no clothes. She is seated on what appears to be the flowered bank of a canal for barges, and she is sitting with her legs to one side and a slender arm propping up her thin and tender torso. Her clothes are piled at her side and in the right-hand portion of the photograph is plainly visible a small boy who is holding his bicycle and staring down at the naked girl posing so naturally for her photograph. Whenever I allow myself to stare into the soft white world of the mirror, watching the puffs of powder rising from the barber’s great fluffy brush with which he sweeps my tingling neck, I cannot help but stare also at the girl whose naked breasts are to me totally unfamiliar. I stare at the girl’s breasts, I cannot understand how they protrude as they do, nipped apparently by the spring and swollen.

The mirror and the photograph are drawing closer, the light sways, the barber turns my chair professionally, or so I think, but with the result that my view of the photograph is even more vivid than before. And I am aware of the tightness of the pants around my thighs, the smell of tallow, the girl’s nakedness, my breath that has become swallowed somewhere inside me, a terrible and delightful sensation as of a little finger stiffening inside my pants. The girl is watching, the girl understands what is happening while I do not and can only attempt to control my breath and prevent the barber from discovering what strange metamorphosis is occurring inside my tent. I am aware of the smell of alcohol, the scent of lilacs, in the picture the boy’s face is pained while I see in the mirror that my own face is pained as well. I find that I am spreading my plump thighs in a stealth quite unknown to me and that I am grinning in the unbearable pain of my boyish joy. And then I notice that the shears have stopped, that the light bulb no longer sways, that the barber’s face is suddenly close to my naked ear.

“Touch your little penis,” he whispers gently, “touch it with the tip of your finger, little boy.”

I gasp, I blush, I wait, and then I do as he says. The girl is smiling at me in approval but the darkness inside my tent is soaking wet and between my legs a fierce pain lingers in the wake of the shock that was triggered by the tip of my finger and the whispering sounds of the barber’s voice.

When I told this dream to Ursula she said that it was charming and that it well explained my collector’s interest in pornography. And yet it would have been better for me, she said, had I been the boy with the bicycle and had there been no photographer to interrupt the child’s encounter with the sun-bathing girl. But of course it was amusing, she went on to say, that apparently even the rich life of sexuality shared by the two of us was still not sufficient to make unnecessary the psychic siphoning, as she called it, evident in my nocturnal emissions. It was then that she commented laughingly that I was drenched in sex.

I heard the tapping on the door. I heard excited voices and the sound of feet moving quickly across the deck outside. I heard the sound of her voice calling softly through the louvers of my cabin door.

“Allert? Are you there? We are passing the island. Won’t you come and look?”

I waited, stretched flat on the coverlet, and quite distinctly I felt some alteration in the position of our tonnage as it shifted in the deep sea, and could not prevent myself from hearing the hivelike excitement of those passengers who were gathering on the starboard rail. I could hear the wind in the straw hats, I could hear the bodies crowding each other at the mahogany rail.

“Allert? Will you answer? I know you’re there.”

I was of course thoroughly certain that she could not possibly know that I was lying tensely inside my cabin since I had taken care to draw the green curtain across my porthole. And yet the very ordinary sound of her voice as well as her faith in my whereabouts, prompted me to reply.

“It is only an island, after all,” I said evenly. “It is not Atlantis.”

“It’s important, Allert. Open the door.”

“Very well,” I said then. “In a moment.”

“If you don’t hurry we shall be past it and then there will be nothing to see.”

I swung myself up from the bed and buttoned my shirt, drew on my trousers, opened the door. The intense light of midday, the ungainly binoculars on a strap around her neck, the now louder sounds of the expectant passengers, it was all exactly as I knew it would be, concreteness rotating toward illusion. And in my doorway, or nearly in my doorway, she was smiling and resting one small gentle hand on the binoculars.

“And Allert,” she said in the voice that only I could hear, “have you been sleeping?”

“No,” I said, closing and locking the door behind me and taking hold of one of her frail but well-proportioned arms, “no, I have not been sleeping. I have been meditating. As a matter of fact, Ariane, I have been wondering exactly who you are.”

“But, Allert, you know who I am.”

“More important, perhaps, I have been wondering exactly who I am.”

“But I know who you are, Allert. And that’s enough.”

“Perhaps you do,” I said, gazing to sea and thinking that her declaration was somehow more than an assertion of innocence, “perhaps you do indeed know after all. But where did you get that man-sized pair of binoculars?”

“From one of my friends, of course. We’ll use them for looking at the island.”

“Of course. From one of your friends. But tell me,” I said then, diverting us back to one of the subjects I had been considering in my cabin. “What is your age?”

“Twenty-six, Allert. And yours?”

“Oh, I am much too old to say,” I replied in a thicker, more milky voice. “Much too old to say.”

“As you will, Allert. I really don’t care about your age.”

“But then it’s probably true that in matters of shipboard romance, at least, the greater the disparity between the ages the better.”

“You’re in a very difficult mood today. I wish you’d stop.”

“In a moment,” I said then, and squeezing the thin arm, “in another moment I’ll growl at you in Dutch.”

She laughed, we were walking in step together, she caused her little hip to fall against my big pillowed flank, she laughed again. And yet it seemed to me that even so she was still not completely reassured.

At this moment we rounded the great glass front of the observation lounge and strode hand in hand into the windy open space of the forward deck where, precisely as I had envisioned the scene, the group of passengers was gathered birdlike at the starboard rail. I was interested to see that they were more bizarre and yet not so numerous as I had thought. In particular I noticed one man whose body was not unusually masculine but who was naked except for a pair of khaki-colored shorts and an enormous rouge-colored conical straw hat that went down to his shoulders. A woman, heavy set and bold, was holding a small wicker basket filled with fruit, as if preparing to drop it quickly over the side.

“Allert,” Ariane whispered as we squeezed to the rail, “they’re all looking at you. They’re all jealous because your companion is so young and so attractive.”

“Yes,” I whispered back, “they cannot imagine what we do together, but they have ideas.”

“Oh, Allert,” she said then, suddenly putting her hand on top of mine, “surely the captain is going to crash into the island!”

For a moment it seemed even to me that what Ariane had said was true. Because the island, a dry, treeless and apparently heart-shaped knoll, was rising out of the sea directly off our starboard bow. Considering the various angles of vision between masts, cables, diminishing horizon, approaching island, and considering the vast expanse of totally open sea in which the ship and island were the only two concrete points — one fixed, one free — and that the space between the two was disappearing as quickly as breath, given all these circumstances it did indeed appear true that the captain was subjecting us all to unnecessary risk by changing course and by aiming the prow of the ship directly toward the arid heart of volcanic land anchored so permanently in the deep sea. Then I recovered myself and realized that for the first time during the voyage I was out of sympathy with Ariane, who, after all, was quite as capable as I was of common sense.

“Look,” I said brusquely, “anyone can see there will be no collision.”

“But we arc very close to the island, Allert. Very close.”

“Close,” I said then in a gentler tone, “but safe.”

We veered to within perhaps a hundred meters or so of the island. The man in the rouge-colored hat cried out and in an instant trained on the burning island the telescope of his terrible motion-picture camera, a camera I had failed to see, cradled as it was against his eye inside the cone of his hat. Ariane and I stood quietly touching each other and sharing the black binoculars, in the process of which she allowed her fingers to slide unconsciously over my buttocks while I, in turn, wet the vulnerable spot behind her car with the tip of my tongue.

“It’s so barren,” she whispered, “so beautifully barren.”

“Yes. And notice how the goats apparently manage nonetheless to survive on an island without food.”

“It’s because they’re unreal, Allert. That’s why.”

But the goats were real enough for me, and though there did not appear to be a blade of grass or the slightest sign of fresh water on the island, still the community of goats stood ruffled and silhouetted atop the nearest hummock and stared at what to them must have been the specter of a white ship bearing down on their final garden. Through the binoculars I could see the spray crowning the tightly spiraled horns, could see how old and young alike crowded together haunch to haunch, horns among horns, posing in the certainty of survival in the midst of pure desolation. The animals were as still as rocks, though their horns were flashing and their coats of long hair were blowing and ruffling in the emptiness of the ocean wind.

“The goats arc real enough,” I said. “But they are a strange sight. Even a haunting sight, perhaps.”

“Allert,” she said then, as if she had failed to hear my observation, “let’s not allow them to disappear so easily. Come, let’s watch until there’s nothing more of them to see.”

But it was only too clear that she neither doubted nor required my acquiescence, since she had taken back the binoculars and was already making her way out of the crowd and toward the stern of the ship which appeared now to be coasting past the island at an ever-diminishing nautical speed. Ariane walked swiftly, then ran, then walked swiftly again until finally she stood at the last extremity of the slowly moving ship, motionless with the binoculars dwarfing her face and her hard shoulder braced against the slick white glistening surface of the ship’s flagpole.

We were crossing the pointed tip of the island, the goats were fading, I was standing directly behind Ariane who was pressed against the rail and against the flagpole, her small bare shoulders hunched in the intensity of her gaze.

I squinted at the disappearing island. I respected Ariane’s concentration and did not press the front of my body to the back of hers, but waited as she sighted across our wake toward the island blazing less and less brightly in the dark sea. The hair was blowing at the nape of her neck, the ends of her halter knot were blowing between the shoulder blades which my own two hands could have so easily cupped, concealed, shielded. However, it seemed to me that Ariane was elated but also desperate as she attempted to hold in view the brown earth and the remote and mournful goats, so that I did not press the front of my pants into the seat of hers, no matter how gently, or put my finger where the wind was stirring the fine hairs on her neck. At the stern where we were standing together but separated, it was impossible to hear the engines or any other sounds of the ship, because that was the area most engulfed by the crosscurrents of the wind, the singing of the dead wake, the thrashing of the great blades just below us and just beneath the frothing chaos of the surface.

“Well,” I said at last, “Fm glad you roused me for this event. It was an interesting sight. The abandoned goats, an island as bare as that one.”

Slowly, as if once more she had failed to hear me, or as if she could not admit that now there was nothing to see except the empty sky, the unbearable sunlight, the gun-metal gray reaches of the ocean that was both flat and tossing, slowly she turned around and revealed her face from behind the disfigurement of the black binoculars, and leaned back against the rail, looked up at me, smiled, spread her legs somewhat apart. Her expression was open, clear, inviting. I noted how dark her skin had become since the start of the journey.

“But Allert,” she said then, and her eyes were large, her teeth white, “the island we just passed belongs to me. Didn’t you know?”

“Do you wish to explain yourself?”

“I do. Yes, I do. But another time.”

Together we leaned on the rail and side by side stared at what we were leaving in our wake, which was nothing. But had I understood her meaning at that moment I would have bruised her in the agony of my desperate embrace.

The water comes down the surface of the glass, melting all vision. The water is an invisibly moving veneer of light on the black shale. The water is rearranging the pebbles that are so firm and white that they appear edible. The cold water spouts from the cleft in the rock, fills the tumbler, produces liquid weight in the earthen jar, emerges in cold bubbles from the bed of clay, sucks and gurgles through the moss, flows and drips and collects in the trees, the stream, the tall glass in my hand. And I drink it as I would breathe, letting it fill my oral cavity as it might a pool in the rocks, or I suck its freezing clarity against my teeth so that teeth and forehead ache with the cold. Or I hold it in the heavy pouch of my mouth and gulp it down, feel the clear cold water delivering itself to me drop by drop or in a steady transparent curve from silver spigot, brass tap, clay orifice with milky lips, and from the depths of frozen black trees. I wait, I drink, I consume the cold water beyond my usual capacity, making of myself a spongy reservoir, and teeth and gums and tongue and palate ache from the painful joy of this natural anesthetic. I feel that a spike has been driven into the back of my throat, my mouth is filled with the taste of white rocks and green ferns, I watch two large drops conforming to the laws of physics down the inside vertical space of the glass. And then I strike the match, grip the antithetical cigar between my front teeth, complete the cigar-lighting ritual — puffing, working the flame in slow wheels of light — and then at last the whitened tissues of my rinsed and empty mouth arc bathed in smoke, are bathed and flooded with the thick gray smoke that tastes stronger than ever, more than ever like rich manure dug in bright golden gobs from a deep bed. That foul but cherished smoke is to the vanished water as Caliban was to Ariel, both of whom existed but in the mind.

Sometimes I hear myself saying Ja-Ja-Ja quickly, silently, so as to put a little spunk — to use Ursula’s word — into my ponderousness. Ja-Ja-Ja I say to myself, and not even in Dutch.

“Allert,” she said, “I do not mind your girl friends. I do not mind their visits in our household. I do not mind when one of them spends a few hours or the night sharing with you the pleasures of the guest room bed. That’s all very well. In a way it’s enjoyable even for me. But I tell you, Allert, I refuse to have your friend Simone sitting on my handbag. How on earth could you fail to see? How could you fail to feel my mortification, my anger, and fail to pull her off by one of her innocent arms? I tell you, when I saw that woman sitting so ignorantly on all the intimacies of my own handbag, like a stupid chicken giving anal birth to my own uterine baggage, I tell you I began to question your judgment, your taste, even your motivations. I simply cannot have any woman putting her buttocks on my handbag. That she used her buttocks that way unconsciously is only the more insulting. So I trust we agree, Allert — no more Simone.”

While hearing out this monologue I found that I was generally in agreement with Ursula, since I had indeed noted the episode in question but had reacted to its symbolic message with inward pleasure and amusement, rather than with Ursula’s rage, for which I felt a certain additional shame while listening. But on the other hand, why did she have no sense of humor? And why did she leave her soft smooth leather handbag lying in the broad hollow of one of the sofa cushions precisely where poor Simone might be drawn unwittingly and might settle down upon it like some gentle victim on a land mine?

It was a trivial episode. And yet I was careful thereafter to make no jokes about Ursula’s handbag, while poor Simone never again lay naked and bathed in candlelight on our guest room bed.

Ursula was to me one woman and every woman. I was more than forty years old when we married, quite experienced enough to realize early in our relationship that Ursula was practical, physical, mythical, and that all the multiplicities of her natural power were not merely products of my own projections or even of the culture into which she was born — like a muted wind, a fist through glass — but to start with were engendered most explicitly in her name alone. Uterine, ugly, odorous, earthen, vulval, convolvulaceous, saline, mutable, seductive — the words, the qualities kept issuing without cessation from the round and beautiful sound of her name like bees from a hive or little fish from a tube. She has always been one woman and every woman to me because her attitudes have never been predictable, while minute by minute throughout the long years of our marriage her physical qualities have undergone constant metamorphosis from fat to lean, soft to hard, smooth to rough, lean to fat — languid urgent Ursula, who is leaving me.

“Allert,” she said, while masking her face with the smooth nightly glaze of thick white cream, “tell me the truth. Did you push her through the porthole as they accused you of doing?”

I could not bear the question. I could not believe the question. I could not answer the question. I could not believe that my wife could ever ask me that question. I could not bring myself to answer that question.

For me Ursula’s eyes continued their lively movement inside the holes in the white mask and in the darkness until long after she had returned for another one of her dreamless nights.

Together Ursula and I attended the funeral of the man who, not so long ago, shot himself in the mouth for her. Which makes me think that were he living, Peter might well be driving Ursula’s car when she leaves. But he is not. Somewhere I have preserved the note written to Ursula by the man who allowed her life to prompt him into becoming a successful suicide. At least Peter knew better than to shoot himself in the mouth for Ursula.

“Allert,” she asked me once, “how can you tell the difference between your life and your dreams? It seems to me that they are identical.”

“Mr. Vanderveenan,” she said, “will you come to my cabin for a moment? I have something to show you.”

At the edge of the pool and in utter privacy she straddled the upper diving board like a child at play while I lounged upright and draped in my towel against the ladder. She had mounted to the upper diving board and now sat straddling the board backward so that I, holding the aluminum rail and she, hunching and leaning down with her hands braced forward between her spread wet thighs, were able to look at each other and to speak to each other as we wished. How long we had posed together in this tableau I could not have said, though at the sound of her invitation I felt on the one hand that we had never existed except together and in our tableau of mutual anticipation, but on the other that we had only moments before arrived at the pool’s edge and that she had still to dive and I had still to help her dripping and laughing from the pool.

“By all means,” I said, squinting up through the cocoa-colored lenses of my dark glasses, “let’s go to your cabin.”

She descended. I lifted her from the ladder. Hastily we used our towels, silently we collected our straw slippers, our books, our towels, our lotions, our straw hats for the sun. Her skin was brushed with lightlike pollen, I decided that the two little flesh-colored latex garments in which she swam had come from a cheap and crowded department store. The energy of her preparations, doffing the rubber cap and so forth, caused me to hurry.

“Not now, Mr. Larzar,” she called to a broad-shouldered man dressed like the rest of the ship’s officers in the somehow disreputable white uniform, and waving, “I have an engagement with Mr. Vanderveenan.” And then, to me: “He wants his trousers pressed.”

“But you are joking,” I said as we descended to the dark corridor, “only joking.”

“Whenever I am on a cruise I press the trousers of the ship’s officers. I am not joking at all.”

“I see,” I answered. “But at least I would not want you to press my trousers.”

“But of course you are not one of the ship’s officers,” she said in the darkness of the corridor below and laughed, shifted the things in her arms, unhooked the brass hook, stood aside so as to allow me to enter first, then closed the door.

Blue jeans flung on the bed in the attitude of some invisible female wearer suffering rape, underclothes ravaged from an invisible clothesline and flung about the room, a second two-piece bathing costume exactly like the first but hanging from one of the ringbolts loose and protruding from the porthole, and cosmetics and pieces of crumpled tissue and a single stocking that might have fit the small shape of her naked leg, and magazines and sheets of writing paper and mismatched pieces of underclothing — in a glance I saw that the context in which her personal trimness nested, so to speak, was extreme girlish chaos of which she herself was apparently unaware.

“You may sit on the bed,” she said, noting the antique typewriter in the upholstered chair, and without hesitation dropping towel and robe and slippers and so forth into the plump impersonal chair with the old machine. “Just clear a place for yourself. It doesn’t matter if you’re a little wet. Do you like my cabin? Is it as nice as yours?”

“Tell me,” I said then, deliberately and gently, “why are we here?”

“I’ll show you,” she said, kneeling on the unmade bed where I was propped, “but I like this cabin because the porthole opens directly in the side of the ship. Whenever I wish to, I simply kneel on my bed and lean in my open porthole and smell the night or watch the sunlight in the waves. Do you see?”

While talking she had knelt on a pillow and pushed wide open the porthole and now was leaning out head and shoulders with sunlight falling on her little narrow back and tension concentrated in her nearly naked buttocks made firm by the bending of her legs.

“That’s a very agreeable demonstration,” I said, “but for me it produces a certain anxiety.”

“Why is that?” she asked, drawing in her head from the wind, the spray, “are you afraid I’ll fall?”

“You are not very large, whereas in comparison to you the porthole is big and round. So I do not like you to lean out of it. My feelings are simple.”

She knelt beside me, she studied my eyes, with both hands she better situated one of her small breasts in the little flesh-colored latex halter, the sun was a bright ball of light on the opposite wall.

“Mr. Vanderveenan,” she said, “you are an old maid. I would not have believed it.”

“I am not a man generally teased by women,” I said slowly, filling the sentence with the white cadences of my native speech, and extending my hand which for a moment she lightly held, “and I do not enjoy the prospect of open portholes.”

She was sitting on her heels, her knees were spread, I could see the outline of a label sewn inside her bikini pants as well as a little pubic darkness protruding like natural lace at the edges of the crotch. The sensation of her two hands on my extended hand was light and natural.

“Very well,” she said, “I don’t wish to cause you anxiety.”

She smiled, I noted just below her navel a small scar in the nasty shape of a fishhook, for a moment she raised my hand and touched it with her two dry lips. And then she drew back from me, got off the bed, rummaged about in an open drawer from which whole fistfuls of cheap underthings had already been half pulled, as if by some aggressive fetishist, until she found what she wanted and rose from where she had squatted, displaying to best advantage the roundness and symmetry of her little backside, and returned to me with the battered oblong ease clutched to her chest. I rolled up from my slouching position. I sat on the edge of the bed. She sat beside me with the ease on her knees and her shining skin smelling of talcum powder.

“So,” I said as she opened the ease, “so you play the flute.”

She nodded, she smiled into the ease at the sections of the silver instrument tarnished, I saw, with the myriad sentimental stains of a poor childhood focused at least in part on music. Then slowly and expertly she began to fit together the sections of the aged instrument which already reminded me of a silver snake suffering paralysis. It could not have been more clear to me that the poverty of her childhood had been forced to make way, finally, for the flute, as if the musical instrument, like a fancy name, would prove to be one of the avenues away from broken fences and a poor home. It was typical, it seemed to me, and the assembled anomalous instrument was proportionately much longer than I had thought.

“But this is a surprise,” I said. “I did not know you were musical. Did you learn as a child?”

She nodded, she tapped the little metallic keys, she arranged her arms and elbows in the contorted position all flutists assume when they commence to play. She tested the broad silver lip of the flute against her own small lip that was smooth and dry.

“I learned as a girl,’ she said, without lowering the old and battered flute from her childish mouth. “I was one of those fortunate schoolgirls to play in the local orchestra.” “And since that time,’ I said, and laughed, “you have continued to play your flute. It’s a surprising accomplishment. It’s quite wonderful.”

“I think it is. And I want to play for you right now.”

“By all means,” I exclaimed, filling my words with whitewash and ducks and potato soup, “a little concert. Excellent, excellent.”

“I know what you’re thinking. But you’ll see that my flute playing is not what you expect.”

“Come, come, I’m listening,” I said, laughing and attempting to strike the condescension from my heavy voice. “Let me hear what you can do with your flute.”

“Very well,” she answered then. “But it may not be as easy as you think. You see, I play in the nude.”

And there in the little pathetic chaotic stateroom she did just that. With the door locked and the porthole wide to the menacing trident of the god of holidays, and standing within easy reach of my two clasped hands, slowly she removed her latex halter, stripped down the little latex bikini bottom, seated herself cross-legged on the end of the bed, picked up the instrument, puckered her lips, stared directly at me with soft eyes, and began to play. The first several notes moved me and surprised me even more than her nudity, since the notes were deep prolongd contralto notes, sustained with a throaty power and intention that suggested some mournful Pan rather than a small and ordinary young woman on a pleasure cruise.

“Forgive my banter,” I whispered, allowing myself to slouch back again on the unmade bed and listen and to stare into the eyes of the naked flutist. “Your talent is serious.”

From lonely little girl among stupid old men lewdly picking their strings and blowing their dented horns, from school orchestra composed of indifferent unskilled children, from days of practicing in an empty room smelling of beer and damp plaster, from all that to nudity and self-confidence and the ability to set into motion sinuous low notes loud enough and plaintive enough to calm the waves. And I had expected none of it, none of it. So I lay there propped on a heavy elbow. I was sexually aroused in the depths of my damp swimming trunks as I had not been since long before the disappearance of the ship’s home port, and yet at the same time I was thoroughly absorbed in the shocking contralto sounds and the body bared as if for the music itself. I listened, I heard the reedy undulations, I noted the hair like a little dense furry tongue in the fork of her canted thighs, I saw the flickering of the little pallid scar and realized that she was taking no breaths, that the sound of the flute was continuous.

“Please,” I said in a low voice, and momentarily allowing my free hand to cup the mound of my sex, “please do not stop.”

Her mouth was wet, her eyes were on mine constantly, except when occasionally she glanced out of the porthole or at the heavy helpless grip of my hand that was now the fulcrum on which I was minutely rocking, though still on my side. And throughout this improbable experience, simultaneously gift and ordeal, she was apparently unaware of the incongruity of all she was giving me behind the locked and louvered door.

And then in mid-phrase she stopped. She removed the flute several inches from her small chafed reddened mouth. Wet armpits, steady eyes, no smile, small breasts never exactly motionless, old flute held calmly in a horizontal silver line, the song quite gone, thus she abruptly stopped her performance and spoke to me as if nothing at all had happened.

“I’d like to relieve you now quickly,” she said. “And will you spend the night here in my cabin?”

Then she moved, and in the silence of the disheveled cabin I could hear that all the low notes of the silver flute were still making their serpentine way beyond the porthole and in the transitory wastes of sea and sky.

I was standing in the bow with my feet apart, my hands gripping the wet iron, my collar open and tie loose, my shape defined by the steady pressure of the invisible wind. It was dawn, the sun was bright, my face was wet, the sharp prow was rising and falling steeply, slowly, as if in some slow-motion field of monstrous magnetism. I heard what sounded like a city of distant voices and smelled the faint smells of a landfall, though on the horizon there was no indication whatsoever of ship, shore, island, volcanic cone. Directly beneath my spread feet I felt the rumble of the anchor chain. I heard that terrible noise distinctly and felt the black chains descending link by mammoth link as if we were going to drop both anchors and remain forever in the midst of that natural desolation known only to birds.

But we continued to move up and down and forward in the dawn sea. I composed myself and took deep breaths. I thought of my young friend. And on we sailed.

In the earlier stages of my voyage I contracted a rash. At first nothing more than a constellation of a few blemishes or pimples circling the navel, slowly it reproduced itself on the front of my belly until, months later, it had grown into a thick circular bed of inflammation surrounding the navel like a graft made from the livid flesh of ripe strawberries. No doubt my skin played host to the first spores while from beneath bare arms I watched the small figure of the young woman sitting alone at the pool. The first seed must have lodged in my eye. Or was the rash sexual in nature and intended to affect the organs of the loins, and had it somehow become displaced instead to my receptive belly? What began as a pimple or two has flowered into a large circular field with the navel as the undamaged hub. Soon it will become a constant and faintly breathing girdle of wet contagion.

The two small naked figures were crawling and squirming in the palm of my hand. Though the photograph was in fact safely concealed in my jacket pocket, still the two white figures were clearly there, small and fiercely wriggling on the smooth glossy skin of the palm of my right hand, as if the pink living skin of my palm had become a little bed of photographic emulsion developed and hardened and translucent.

But when I reminded myself of the similar plight of Macbeth’s poor queen, and then rubbed the offending palm against the fruit of my own genitalia, the little image of the old-fashioned naked lovers faded and fled completely away for once and for all.

Her cabin door was wide. She was at her ironing. Wearing only her frayed tight denim pants so that her feet and torso were quite bare, thus she stood with her back to me and her hair pinned up and her iron traveling down a crease in the white pants. I hardly paused but it was enough for me to see the finger marks down the length of her spine, the shadows moving at the edges of the little shoulder blades and in the nape of her neck, the red teeth marks where the elastic band of her underpants had been, the new skin of the upper buttocks shining against the tightness of the leather belt, the fleeting impression of one small naked breast flung partially into view in the exertion of her girlish labor. And my accidental passing was enough to reveal to me that the large and hairy shank of the man stretched out on her unmade bed and reading, waiting for the return of his trousers with his face concealed behind an open magazine and one brutal and hairy leg raised and bent at the knee, belonged not at all to the wireless operator as I had expected but instead to some other ship’s officer newly favored with my young friend’s generosity.

I forced myself to continue on to the ship’s pool where immediately I dove to the bottom and competed for breath, for time, for anguish, for peace, with the other shadows I found lurking there.

In my dream the night is as pure and dark as a blackened negative, and yet I am well aware of the field at the edge of which I stand and of the chatcau which is somehow silhouetted on the opposite side of the field, though the horizon itself is not visible. I stand there, realizing that nothing whatsoever exists in the world except the night, the stone chateau, the waiting field, myself. The chateau and field are thick with significance, though I have seen neither in my past life.

As I cross the field, taking slow careful steps but determined to reach the ominous yet familiar stone building at any cost, I become aware that the entire sloping field has been blanketed with enormous soft round pads of cow manure. They are round as flagstones, thick as the width of a man’s hand on edge, spongy within and thickly encrusted without, soft and resilient and yet able to bear the full weight of a heavy man, though there is always the possibility of piercing the crust and sinking into the slime within. I am picking my way with care and yet also treading on the uncertain field with excitement because no one has ever crossed this field before. But suddenly I know that the shapes lying like dark and spongy land mines beneath my feet are composed not of cow dung, as I had thought, but of congealed blood. With awe and a certain elation I realize that I am walking across a field of blood. And I know too that though I am proceeding toward the chateau, I am also walking somehow backward in time.

I step carefully. I do not want to pierce the crusts and sink to my ankles in coagulated blood, and yet it is necessary to walk across the field, and I do so with pleasure as well as fear. The pads of blood have been arranged on the field’s dark acreage with their edges touching, symmetrically, and to me they seem on the one hand fresh and moist and on the other old and long-ripened like cheese or manure.

Between the far edge of the field and the dark stone facing of the baronial hall there is a ditch. I am positive that the ditch is there and yet I fail to see it and spend no energy crossing it, though I am conscious that I have in fact passed beyond the empty ditch in the middle of the unchanging night.

I approach the cold chateau from the side, moving as if by perfect instinct not to the main gate but to another and smaller entrance in the thick side wall. I know where I am going, I am in possession of myself, and yet I know too that I have no history, no recollection of the past, so that my life, which is specific, depends only on the field, the ditch, the night, and what I am about to experience within the chateau. I know the way. There is nothing else.

The chateau is empty. I enter as if by plan, and I find that the great stone hall consists only of a single vast room that is empty, dusty, cold, from floor to roof windowless and desolate except for one small structure standing altarlike and frightening in the center of the stone floor. I approach, I am breathing deeply. Erect and with hands at my sides I face the sacred structure which is twice my height and circular at the base and pointed on top — like some prehistoric tribal tent — and covered entirely with dry and hairless animal skins.

The skins are hard, scaly, wrinkled, and completely without hair. The light in the vast stone room is gray, the air is cold, the construction of dead skins is familiar and unfamiliar as well. Slowly and conscious only of myself as neutral and of the action as charged, slowly I descend to my knees, insert my fingers in the scam where two large bottom skins are joined, and slowly pull them apart until the darkness will accommodate my entry on all fours. So I, a man fully grown and yet also reduced to my simple and now curiously unemotional intention, on all fours work my way head and shoulders and hips and heavy legs inside the second structure where in a meaningless crouch I survey the desolation of my own beginning. The circular and conical space inside the dead skins contains nothing at all except a dusty floor and a small iron hearth partially heaped with ashes which are both dry and moist. The fire is gone, the ashes have stood so long that here and there they have become crystalline, I see a few bones and feathers embedded like Norse relics in the dead ashes. Now I realize that I had hoped for more, had expected more, and yet in the midst of such silence and immobility I also realize that my disappointment is nothing compared with the journey I have just taken and the barren actuality I have at last discovered.

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, 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.

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.

“So,” I said, glancing into the approaching night, “tomorrow there will be no sign of where we have been today.”

“That’s an oddly mordant remark, my friend,” Peter said. “Come, let’s enjoy some black rum and a roaring fire.”

“Peter’s nice,” Ursula said then, with nothing but internal whim to justify her indulgent non sequitur. “Isn’t he nice, Allert?”

“A little old,” I murmured, thinking of a white chateau, a dark field, a night of ice, “but an excellent friend.”

“But Peter’s in his prime, Allert. That’s what I mean.”

“Well, then, it sounds to me as if Peter deserves another one of your wet kisses.”

“Exactly,” Peter said then, squeezing Ursula’s waist, “but in front of the fire. In front of the fire.”

The animal skins were heaped before the hearth as usual and the fire was high. The jaws of the polar bear into which Ursula had flung a stein of beer one steaming night, the hide of the tiger that was worn and smooth like a map composed of dust and sand, the long dark silken hair of a water buffalo long dead and headless, there they lay, adorned as usual with small soft brightly colored pillows and the light of the fire. In the large room totally dark except for the fire, the skins and pillows were an island of sensuality in a cold sea, and as usual it was Ursula, rather than Peter or I, who became the waiting castaway on that floating island. She sank into the fur of the water buffalo, she yawned, on her stomach she propped her pelvis on the head of the bear, like a child she smiled into the light of the fire, she sat up in order to accept the thick glass from Peter.

“Schnapps for Allert, rum for you and me,” she said. “But you forgot your wet kiss,” she said, and drew Peter’s mouth down to her own. And I, stretched out on the edge of the polar bear skin, took a few rapid sips from my glass and noted the rough texture of Peter’s amber-colored corduroy pants and the roll of warm flesh between the waistband of Ursula’s ski pants and the lower edge of her black turtleneck sweater. My stocking feet were crossed at the ankles, I wriggled my toes, I saw for a moment the little familiar plug of gold in Ursula’s left incisor when Peter pulled his mouth away in a simulated playful need for breath.

“More schnapps, my friend? Please help yourself.”

All around us the house was empty, filled with shadows and cold beds, drawn blinds, and from the dusty high-fidelity equipment in one of the darkened corners of the cold room in which we lay came the sound of half a dozen baroque recorders singing with the austerity of artificial birds. I heard the music, I tasted the cold night, I smelled the steam of our outdoor clothing and hairy socks. In the fireplace, which was extremely wide and constructed of stones hauled laboriously from a nearby field, the logs were as large as the bodies of young children and were burning as in the aftermath of some prehistoric fire. Ursula was smoking one of her infrequent cigarettes, the schnapps was strong. I heard Peter’s footsteps in the hallway, above our heads, behind me, and then Peter returned to us and dumped the soft Nordic blanket between Ursula and me and placed the several plastic containers of body lotion on the hearth to warm.

“More schnapps, my friend? Please help yourself.”

Gently Ursula freed herself from Peter’s hand and stood up between us and pulled off her ski pants. Our clothes were steaming. The snow was banking up on the darkened windows, the sprawling fire was casting its hot patina on the skin of Ursula’s bare legs between her woolen socks and the tightness of her scanty beige-colored translucent underpants.

“Well,” Ursula said, tossing her half-smoked cigarette to the waiting flames, “now you see what you have done with your rum and fire.”

She turned and pushed up the sleeves of her knitted sweater. In the shadows the fat crotch of her elasticized underpants looked as if it had just been roughly cupped in the wet grip of an anxious hand. And smiling, pushing up her sleeves, patting her broad stomach beneath the sweater, down Ursula sank to her elbows and knees, lowering her face to the touch of the buffalo hair and raising her wide tight buttocks to the glow of the fire. She was contracting and loosening the small of her back, thrusting high her shining rump, stretching her fingers, smiling and rubbing her face to and fro on the buffalo hair.

“I don’t know about you, my friend,” Peter said in a low voice with his eyes on Ursula and his head tilted toward the sound of the recorders, “but I find this scene extremely attractive.”

“And I too, Peter. But Ursula should be surrounded by golden tumbling cubs, should she not?”

“You are always jocular, my friend. Always so jocular when it comes to the life of the sexual being.”

“It is true. You have your psychiatric patients, I have Ursula and my sense of humor.”

“But Allert has never been possessive,” Ursula said, filling our pause with the sound of her throaty words and the sight of her backside rotating closer and closer to the heat of the fire, “that at least can be said for him.”

“Tell me,” I said then, changing the subject and feeling Ursula’s strong fingers picking tufts of hair from my right-hand sock, “what is your professional opinion on the inability to believe in the reality of the human self?”

“It is a familiar question. And a familiar condition as well.”

“Sooner or later,” I said, aware of Ursula’s fingers and seeing Ursula’s honey-colored eyes in the flickering shadows and noting the red silk pillow on which she was now propping her chin, “sooner or later the young child discovers that he cannot account for himself. As soon as he becomes inexplicable he becomes unreal. Immediately everything else becomes unreal as one might expect. The rest is puzzlement. Or terror.”

Everything about our present condition-the cold house, the snow falling invisibly outside, the rugs and pillows and fire, the chorus of blokfluiten reminding me for some reason of the time when, as a child, I was taken on a trip to Breda — all of it was conducive to wandering ideas, to a slow and unmistakable drift toward sensuality. Peter was filling our glasses, his brow was aglow with perspiration, to me the musty animal smell of the old polar bear rug evoked images of faceless hunters stalking the ice floes in search of death. Ursula had abandoned my thick sock and was holding Peter’s ankle in a tight grip. In the faintest possible rhythm her backside was undulating now in the greasy heat of the fire.

“So, Peter,” I murmured, “you have no thoughts on my query?”

“If you insist, I can only say that you and I are too old for this conversation. Much too old.”

“But it’s quite true,” Ursula said slowly, drowsily, “Allert is not real.”

“On religious questions,” Peter said, with his scarred face long and dark and composed in the light of the fire, “I am afraid I cannot be of any help. No help at all.”

“But if I disagree with you,” I said quietly, “and if you are wrong, and if the problem is not religious but is in fact psychological, what then?”

“Please, my friend. It is not like you to become aggressive.”

“Allert aggressive! What a nice idea.”

“Ursula,” I murmured then, “perhaps you would like to take off your heavy sweater. For Peter and me.”

“You’d have me bare-breasted, is that it?”

“Yes. Play with your nipples, Ursula. For Peter and me.”

“You’re trying to arouse me, Allert! But I’m sorry, you’ll have to wait.”

“Jocular, philosophical, impatient,” Peter said. “What is the matter with you tonight, my friend?”

“Today on the skis,” I murmured and closed my eyes, raised my head, “I felt pleasantly athletic. But also that I did not exist.”