Death, Sleep & the Traveler

“And now,” Ursula said, clutching her red pillow with one hand and thrusting the other hand up the leg of Peter’s corduroy trousers, “now you are drinking too much.”

“But one thing is certain,” Peter said, laughing behind the leather mask of his elongated face, “and that is that Allert can always hold his schnapps.”

“Any way you drink it,” I whispered, “it is pure gold.”

I heard the drifting snow, the poignant harmonics of the baroque recorders, Peter moving about on his hands and knees. I heard the birds collecting in their white flocks, heard Ursula humming in the random suffusion of both her comfort and her discontent. I smiled and closed my eyes. Ursula’s doglike shadow was crouching above me among the beams of the ceiling. Peter was crouching at the hearth and smoking his pipe.

“But Peter,” Ursula said, as I opened my eyes, “what are you doing?”

“Peter,” I said in my deep and quiet voice, “are you smearing body lotion on her underpants and not on the skin? A novel idea. I would not have thought of it.”

“But it’s sticky, Peter. It feels peculiar!”

Ursula laughed, Peter said nothing. Ursula made no attempt to defend herself against the handfuls of heavy lotion which Peter, as I could now clearly see, was smearing across the tight rounded surfaces of Ursula’s translucent underpants.

I knelt clumsily on my hands and knees, sat back on my heels, raised the half-drained glass to my teeth. I became the willing witness of Peter’s labors, since by now Ursula had returned her face to the crimson pillow while Peter, rising upward from his spread knees, had positioned himself directly in front of her, so that by leaning forward he could grip her buttocks in his two determined hands. Her eyes were closed, her head was lying beneath the apex of Peter’s crotch. In his own turn Peter was wreathing his head with the smoke from his pipe and kneading Ursula’s backside with his expert hands.

“It’s lovely, Peter,” Ursula whispered, with her eyes closed, “it feels so lovely. Like going into the bath with your panties on.”

She sighed, she laughed, Peter shifted his position, I shifted mine, Peter inched forward so that he was straddling the small of Ursula’s broad back.

“More,” Ursula whispered, “do it some more.”

One of the plastic containers lay spilled on the hearth, slowly I dropped my empty glass into the burnished depths of the water buffalo hide. The schnapps had done its night’s work, reminding me of the white chateau in the village where I was born, and now I smelled the schnapps in my nose, the desert-blossom scent of the body lotion, the aromatic smell of Peter’s pipe, the ice in the eaves of the uninhabited house. And now I felt too large, too sick, too purposeless, too awakened, too much in need of the lavatory to sustain my presence in our triad sprawling in the luxury of blanket, pillows, rugs, in the smoky light of Peter’s fire.

The recorders faded. The darkness became to the coldness as light to the fire. Swaying, unsteady on my stocking feet, aware that my breathing was rhythmically focused not on the inhalation but the exhalation, slowly I groped my way down the frozen corridor toward the door not of the lavatory as I expected, but outside and into the night. My stocking feet made deep impressions in the dry snow, the flakes were settling, and all around me the winter night was invisible, a mere sensation of trees, decreasing temperature, falling snow. I stood still, I felt the snow on my head, I breathed in as much as I could of the winter night.

I thought to myself that I was in the midst of a dream that I could not remember, though my head was clear now and though off to the right I was able to see without difficulty the shape of Peter’s parked ear humped high with snow. For a moment I saw myself as a child traveling through a clear night in the straw in the back of a little blue sleigh drawn by a black and white pony and driven by a man in a muffler and heavy gloves. For a moment longer, there in the dry snow, I contemplated what I suddenly identified as my own benevolence. And then I turned and once more felt my way into Peter’s house and down the cold corridor and into that vast dark room where Peter and Ursula knelt facing each other before the fire.

They had stripped off each other’s clothes and from top to bottom had smeared each other’s bodies with the glistening cream. They were wet and shining, they were kneeling with their knees apart and were kissing each other and laughing. Ursula’s underpants lay like a sodden handkerchief on the hearth. Their bodies were slick and moving and fire-lit as if in the emulsion of a photograph still hanging wet and glossy in the darkroom.

“Allert,” she called over her shoulder to where I stood dripping and smiling beyond the light and the heat of the fire, “we’ve been waiting for you. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and come here and take off your clothes.”

“The trouble with you Dutch,” Peter was saying, “is that for you even normality is a perversion.”

“You and I are fortunate indeed,” Peter was saying, “to be able to rely on Ursula’s sustaining sanity. She is never lost in the sacred wood as you and I sometimes are, my friend.”

His voice was urgent in the darkness of the night behind her cabin door, which was hooked ajar. And recognizing his young uncultured voice from the corridor through which I was passing on my way to the ship’s pool, and hearing his angry supplications and pathetic argument, it was then that I understood that all was not well with the wireless operator. With uncustomary swiftness I proceeded then to the pool where I smoked five small Dutch cigars by the light of the cold constellations.

But how could I have remained unawakened by our descending anchors? How could I have allowed myself to sleep through the actuality of my own worst dream? After all, Ariane had forewarned me that we would be reaching the shores of the island in the darkest part of the night and would be dropping anchor. And it was indeed so because now the sun was rising in the lowest quadrant of my porthole like blood in a bottle, and I was wide-awake and nursing my premonitions. The ship was at anchor.

I climbed to my knees on the wet bed and opened the porthole. I saw that the sun was flooding the horizon but that the island was nowhere in sight. And kneeling with my head in the porthole and the sun in my eyes, I recalled how the night before I had refused Ariane’s invitation to go ashore on the island of nudists. And squinting into the ominous and bloody sun, once more I determined to prevent our exposure to the boredom and distaste of bodies bared merely for the sake of health or naturalness.

And yet with unaccustomed haste I dressed, seized my straw hat and went out on deck in search of my young friend. The ship was silent, the gulls were gone, the hot deck might have been embedded in concrete. I tapped insistently on the door to her cabin, I assured myself that no one was enjoying the use of the pool, I understood that it would be several hours at least before juice and coffee and rolls were served in the dining saloon. The locked cabins, the empty bridge, the damp blankets heaped up in the peeling deck chairs, the silence — this, the death of the ship, was what I had always feared.

I crossed from the starboard side to the port and there against the rail were a half dozen passengers and, in the dreamlike distance beyond them, the low brown sandy island that so appealed to Ariane. I joined the passengers who did not intend to visit the island, I gathered, but who nonetheless were determined to look at those who did and, further, were hoping for a glimpse of the distant nudists. With them I stared across at the hazy island and down at the white motorboat now moored to the foot of the gangway lowered against the ship’s white side.

Except for Ariane and the wireless operator seated hip to hip in the forward portion of the white launch, and except for the young crewman slouching in the stern with a rope in his hand, the long white motor launch was empty, occupied as it was by only three persons instead of sixty. I decided to become the fourth.

I descended the gangway at precisely the moment the crewman was preparing to cast off. I took my seat behind my young friend as the motor began its muffled bubbling. I glanced up at the remaining passengers propped like wax figures against the rail and under the hot sun. There was no waving, in a half circle we moved away from the high side of the anchored ship.

“Allert,” she said, smiling, reaching out for my hand, “you’ve changed your mind.”

“Yes,” I said, “I too will visit your nudists.”

“Without you it would not be the same.”

“Well,” I said, accepting and squeezing her proffered hand, “Allert also can be a good sport, as my wife would say.”

We picked up speed, there was a dawn wind blowing, Ariane smiled and tilted back her head as if to take deep breaths of the burning sun. The wireless officer and I exchanged no greeting. Behind us lay the white ship, diminishing but stationary, while ahead of us lay the scorched island that was expanding minute by minute for our watchful eyes.

“I did not sleep well last night,” I said. “I had intolerable dreams.”

“Poor Allert. You will be able to sleep on the beach.”

The sea, on which there was not the smallest wave, was now changing from opaque blackness to a turquoise transparency. Twenty or thirty feet below us shelves of white sand were reflecting the light of the sun back up through the soundless medium of the clear sea. I was relieved to notice, over my shoulder, that no smoke was visible from the blue smokestacks of the anchored ship. Ariane’s hair was blowing in the wind, the long black sideburns of the wireless officer contradicted in some disturbing way the rakish angle of his white black-visored cap. My young friend in her blue jeans and a halter of orange silk, through which the shape of her small breasts was entirely visible, was an antidote to the wireless officer’s unusual mood of sullen reserve.

“Your island appears to be uninhabited,” I said, clutching the brim of my straw hat against the wind, “since there is not even one nudist to greet the eye.”

“Allert,” she said, “don’t be skeptical. Please. There is a village on the other side of the island. The beach is momentarily concealed from our view inside its protective cove. The village and beach are connected by a dirt road which is excellent for bicycling. You must remember, Allert, that I have been here before.”

I touched her cool arm and again I saw over my shoulder that our diminishing white ship lay unchanged, unmoving. I disliked the way the wireless operator sat with one foot on the gunwhale and his tunic thrown open to display the unwashed undershirt, the cross on a chain. Also I disliked his sideburns, his bad complexion, the angle of his white cap, the hand he was hiding in the pocket of the white tunic.

“My wife persuaded me, against my better judgment, to take this cruise,” I said, smiling into the girl’s dark eyes, “and I am not sorry. Now you have persuaded me, also against my better judgment, to journey off in a mere motorboat. And though I distrust open motorboats even more than I distrust large ships, perhaps I will not be sorry. But I am not skeptical, Ariane. I am never skeptical. I know you will take us directly to the beach of the nudists and then return us safely to our waiting ship.”

But even while my heavily accented voice hung on the air, causing Ariane to laugh and the wireless operator to scowl behind an unclean hand, our motorboat veered slowly around a finger of dark sand and headed directly into a small cove that was clearly the entrance to the hidden beach of Ariane’s description. The strip of pure white sand, water of the palest blue, the row of weather-beaten bathhouses like upended coffins — it was all exactly as I had pictured it from my young friend’s words. The sky was an infinitude of burning phosphorus, the sand was as soft as facial powder, surely the empty bathhouses would smell of urine. The vision of the cove was familiar yet unfamiliar, I was drawn toward the listing bathhouses and yet repelled by them.

“Hurry,” Ariane called the moment after our prow had touched the sand and she, in childish haste, had leapt ashore, “we really must not lose a moment of this joyous place!”

The wireless operator, in open tunic and rakish cap, was the next to jump to the dry sand where, quite unavoidable, he turned and faced me. His greasy sideburns appeared to be pasted down the sides of his jawbone. He was not smiling.

“What have you done with my photograph?” he said, with his feet spread wide apart and his hands in his tunic pockets and his hat pushed in slovenly aggressive fashion to the back of his head. Obviously he was the kind of young officer who would get drunk with ordinary sailors, abandon a ship in distress, commit strange psychopathetic acts of violence.

“I do not know what you are talking about,” I said. “But I do not like the tone of your voice.”

“After all, you are not the only one who needs the stimulation of an illicit photograph.”

“I refuse to listen!”

“Return it tonight,” he said and stuffed his hands deeper into the tunic pockets, and lunged off through the sand like a crazed survivor of a wreck at sea.

“And you, Allert,” my young unsuspecting friend called from the bathhouses, “won’t you hurry?”

I wiped my hot face on my sleeve, I began to walk slowly up the beach toward the row of narrow listing wooden structures where I, like my companions, was to divest myself of all clothing. But physical nudity was one thing, I thought, whereas psychological nudity was quite another, especially when the self was being stripped to psychological nudity by a man as ruthless and devious as the young man on whom the entire ship depended. My need was for self-control against the brutal clawing of that young man’s repellent hands.

“But no, Allert, no!” she cried when I emerged from the bathhouse, “you may not wear your straw hat on the beach of the nudists!”

She laughed, standing quite naked in the hot sand. The wireless operator also laughed, though now his concentration was suddenly and unwillingly fixed on the gentle nudity of Ariane.

“What,” I said, “not even an old straw hat?”

“Nothing, Allert, nothing. Not even a hat.”

“Very well. But sunstroke is a serious problem, Ariane.”

“But you must trust me, Allert. You said you would.”

The sunlight was as intense and diffuse as any I had ever seen, the kind of sunlight that would bake alive infant tortoises buried though they might be in their thick shells deep in the sand. In the midst of this directionless glare Ariane’s nude body was of the size and weight of a young child’s yet it was not childlike. She was plump but at the same time thin, curvaceous but at the same time compact, and in the glare of the sunlight, which decomposed all colors to white and hence made of the island landscape a brilliant unreality, Ariane was shrouded, softened, protected in her own emanations of mauve-colored light. In the midst of our frightening white scene she alone was desirable and real. She had allowed her black hair to fall down her narrow back, her eyes were large, her small calves were shapely, there was a curious dignity in the plumpness of the small naked belly exposed without embarrassment to the wireless operator’s watching eyes and mine. Her little familiar scar was hooked into the bottom of the belly like a gleaming barb, the small modest breasts and sex made me think of some overdressed Flemish child preserved on dark canvas.

Though the wireless operator was lean and muscular, while I was large and poorly shaped, still the chemical horror of the gleaming sun reduced us equally to the dead white quality of the beach itself, exposed quite equally our blemishes, our black hair curling from white skin, our genitals which in this light appeared to have been molded from cold butter. I was not pleased to find myself as unattractive as the wireless operator.

“Ariane,” I said, when the three of us emerged from the path between the dunes and onto the beach, “I hope you do not find my weight entirely offensive.”

“Allert,” she said, and her throat was as thin and tender as a child’s, “you are a handsome man.”

“But tell me,” I said, raising my voice and filling it with the disarming resonance of the kindly Hollander, “if a man is not used to nudism, if he is not used to being among members of the opposite sex without his clothes, in such a situation might he not display quite suddenly all the awkward aspects of sexual desire? If so, would not this lack of control be embarrassing?”

The sand was hot, my eyes felt sewn together with invisible sutures, the beach ahead of us was a glaring crescent. Behind us the wireless operator was shielding himself with Ariane’s purple satchel and grunting in discomfort and disapproval.

“Allert,” she said, interrupting our walk across the sand to touch my hip, to stare up openly into my wet face, “what you describe is entirely possible. But it is also natural. To me it would not be at all embarrassing. In fact,” she said, more slowly and gently but also more clearly, “if such a thing occurred in my presence, I should be flattered. I should be warmly pleased.”

“Thank you,” I said, glancing over my shoulder at the stricken eyes, the body bent sharply forward at the waist. “Your sympathy for that situation is most beautiful. But were I in your place, for instance, and in the presence of a man who could not control himself, I would be far less charitable. In fact, toward such a man, I would show no charity at all.”

“But, Allert,” she said, smiling and pressing her fingers against my wet forearm, “you are a good-hearted person, Allert. I know you are.”

I saw the blue of her eyes against the white of the sand, the white of the sun. And despite the fire flickering already to and fro on the tops of my shoulders, for another moment I endured with pleasure the uninhibited inspection of Ariane’s soft eyes which, when they met mine, were bluer, moister for what they had seen.

“Every man is an island,” I said. “I am like the rest.”

“But Allert,” she whispered, “you are a very special person. You are the talk of the ship.”

But before I could object and point out the obvious untruth of this curious remark, Ariane reached up and covered my mouth with the smallness of her cool hand, then embraced me by flinging her arms around the enfolded fat of my naked waist and resting her head on my chest. Then she turned and with unexpected swiftness walked to the water’s edge where, ankle deep in the clear undulating sea, she proceeded brightly up the white crescent of beach followed, as she knew full well, by her two naked companions, one of whom was already the color of sickening red.

“You ought to see yourself,” came the voice at my back, “if you could see yourself you’d leave Ariane and me alone. A man like you shouldn’t go around without his clothes. She just doesn’t want to hurt your feelings. Couldn’t you tell?”

I did not reply. Instead I concentrated on the sensation of the pale water against my skin and on the sight of the young woman who had thick black hair to the small of her back and who now was standing beneath the leaves of a tropical tree and waving. The island, or what I could see of it, was empty except for the eager girl beneath the tree and a far-off cluster of golden figures who, in their various sizes, suggested one of those stable families who respect the old and cherish the young and divest themselves of clothes for moral purposes. Even from this distance I noted the sweep of a patriarchal beard, the flash of a cherubic body. I looked away, I realized again that the sand of the beach was like white ash. But it was the naked wireless operator, not I, who was turning red.

“Come,” called Ariane, “the shade is lovely.”

Even here in the shade of the lone tree, only Ariane among the three of us looked real. Only her skin retained its natural color, only her black hair remained alive in the breeze. On either side of Ariane, where she sat upright and smiling against the tree, the wireless operator and I were merely white, except for the florid sunburn spreading like some poisoned solution across the young officer’s shoulders, chest, and listless arm. The wireless operator’s sallow face was wet with sweat, his head was hanging.

I held out my hand for one of the peaches which Ariane had extracted from the satchel. My hands were wet with the juice of the peach, the warm sweetness was dripping down my chin. In the distance a golden old man was tossing a golden infant into the air. And I noted in a casual glance that the wireless operator was drooping, dehydrating faster than ever, burning. If Ariane was aware of the seriousness of his condition, she gave no sign.

“Allert,” she said, biting into the wet yellow fruit and unconsciously touching her left nipple as if to induce new sensation or confirm its size, “isn’t that naked family beautiful? They have no shame.”

I licked my fingers, I nodded. Her eyes were bright, her armpit was slick with perspiration, on her other side the wireless operator was staring at me speechless and with dead white eyes. Portions of his slumped naked body were assuming the complexion of a fatal plum.

Suddenly I heard a thin distant voice crying, “Papa! Papa!” and at the same time heard a single fragment of the far-off mother’s laughter, and at this moment Ariane and I, in perfect accord, rose to our feet and, holding hands, walked slowly to the water’s edge. I knew that behind us the wireless operator was helpless and that his lips were cracked, his shoulders blistering.

The light was the color of merciless pearl, the sand was a sheet of white flame, together we rolled in clear shallow water.

“Allert,” she said, stretching her little flat body beneath the water and raising her face, extending her arms and clasping both my stolid ankles, “you are so good a lover, Allert. Maybe because your mouth is so large and says so many sweet things to me.”

We rose, we walked outward from the shore of the island that was as dry and livid as a glimpse of paradise preserved in a hostile photograph, walked outward until I stood waist deep in the placid water and Ariane stood facing me sunk up to her little shining breasts. The air was white, the sea was pale, all around us the air now smelled of invisible dead ash.

“We do not want the ship to sail without us,” I said in a whisper.

Later, after we had performed, as I thought of it, like two unshelled creatures risen together from the white sandy floor of the sea, and after we had immersed ourselves totally in the calming waters, and after we had quit the nudist island and regained the ship, it was then that we faced the condition of the wireless operator. We eased him into Ariane’s cabin and stripped him bare, discovered that the entire burned surface of his body was patterned with the clearly visible shapes of tropical leaves. Thus the wireless operator became the sick occupant of Ariane’s narrow bed, and thus Ariane became his eager conscience-stricken nurse. For days the wireless operator filled her cabin with the smells of his chills and fever. For days the smell of a strong unguent filled that cabin in which there was no place for me.

The sleep of reason produces demons, as Ursula once said. But I love my demons.

Ursula and Peter were in the nude. Ursula and Peter were facing in opposite directions, she kneeling head down on the orange rug, he straddling her slender yet slightly aged waist and playing her buttocks, slapping and beating on her buttocks like a lean African pounding his drums. Ursula and Peter were both laughing without restraint. I also began to laugh.

The lights fell on the black water as from a sinking ship. I was leaning forward, looking down, watching as the lights, which ran the entire length of the ship, began to disintegrate and sink. I heard a splash.

“Peter,” I said, risking an idea I had long considered, “how is it you never married? Even now the sirens must call to you in chorus wherever you turn. Is it not so?”

He removed the pipe from between his teeth. He held the small hot meerschaum bowl in three fingers. He looked at me. And then he turned his head toward Ursula and raised his eyebrows, aimed the pipe stem in her direction, parted his lips. Then he turned again to me.

“But the question,” he said softly, “is why you married. You of all people.”

“No offense, Peter. I was only asking.”

Again he looked at Ursula, and suddenly replaced the bit of the amber pipe stem between his teeth. Thanks to the smoke from Peter’s pipe, the room smelled like a rose garden in fuming decay.

“There exists somewhere a man who wishes to amuse me, Allert, for the rest of his life. I ask only for amusement. And when I find my amusing man, I shall follow him to the ends of the earth. But we’ll never marry. Never.”

In my dream I am standing alone in an open second-story window on a warm day. There is not a person in sight, the trees are still, I am troubled by the fact that in all the surrounding trees and heavy foliage there exists not a single bird. But I am alone in the window and basking in the atmosphere of the tender midday sun and the slant of an exterior brown beam and an expanse of powdery tiled roof that juts into my sight above a structure that is either a carriage house or a barn. Though empty, still, even desolate, it is a peaceful scene. For a while longer I resist the temptation to look down and instead concentrate on every other portion of the warmly lighted courtyard where I find no life. Apparently the courtyard belongs to a farm complete and real except for the total absence of animals and human beings. Ahead of me stands a fragment of mustard-colored wall, the trees are green, there are motes in the sunlit air. Behind me the empty room in which I stand is dark with shadows. I am wearing a gold watch chain across my vest, I am standing in full view of anyone who might suddenly walk into the cobbled area below or who might already be watching me from some concealed doorway or crevice in the yellow wall.

Then I look down. I lean forward to rest my spread hands on the broad sill and, thrusting myself partway out the window, stare down at the tableau intended for no one else’s sight but mine. I am perfectly aware that what I am looking at I must never forget, so that if my scrutiny is unemotional it is nonetheless slow and intense. I am also aware that I am making no sound, though I am momentarily moving my lips as if for speech, and that I am comfortable but quite unable to feel the slightest sensation of my own breathing.

What stands directly below my window is a large box-like wooden wagon that rides on two high wheels with wooden spokes and iron rims and is equipped not with the usual shafts for horse or donkey but with a wooden crossbar clearly intended for human use. The splintered and high-sided old vehicle remains horizontal below my window. I observe the gray wood, the heavy wooden hubs of the wheels, a wisp of dry hay caught in a joint. And what I see, what fills my mind, is the sharp-seamed and extremely narrow tin coffin which the cart contains and which is angular and unadorned except for a long single strip of fading white flowers — carnations, perhaps, or roses — stretched as on a piece of cord from the head of the tin coffin to its angled foot. The wood that absorbs the light, the cheap bright metal that reflects it, the string of near-dead collapsing flowers that divides the lid of the coffin from head to foot, instead of lying conventionally in a rich full bunch above the breast of the dead person concealed within — these are the details that make me realize that eventually the coffin must be carted away and that death is the true poverty.

But there is something still more unusual about the sight below. Feeling my brow tightening in a single crease, it is then that I see that the poor tin coffin rests not on the bottom of the old cart but rather floats in perhaps a foot of dark water. Yes, I see now that the cart is partially filled with water in which the coffin is gently rocking. And then I understand. I stare at the shining tin coffin and at the standing water and listen to my own breath and understand the reason for the water in the old wooden cart: originally the coffin was packed in ice, a great quantity of ice, which has melted.

Am I the person to pull the slow cart out of the courtyard and, lodging my stomach against the wooden bar and hearing the coffin bumping like a small boat against the wood at my back, drag this inexplicably grief-ridden assemblage to whatever resting place awaits it?

I do not know. I stand in the window. I hear the buzzing of a single fly.

When I finished reporting this dream to Ursula, who had listened with more than her usual lassitude, she made two quite toneless comments while rising, as she did so, to leave the room. She said that obviously the coffin contained the body not of a man but a woman, and that this was the telltale dream of the only son.

I sat alone for an hour, two hours, hearing the fly and contemplating Ursula’s remarks.

I stood in the twilight of our smoothly plastered white hallway, alert yet immobilized on my way from parlor to den or den to living room, where I had lighted a fire in the fireplace some minutes before. And in this stationary moment, caught in one of the trivial paths of domesticity in the light of late afternoon, suddenly I understood completely the nature of the atmosphere in which I was so keenly suspended. What else could it be if not the air of private catastrophe? The silence was gathering into a secret voice. The light inside the house was soft and clear with the muted quality of the frozen snow outside.

So, I told myself, our separation was no longer impending but now was upon me or even ahead of me, like a road that changes direction until suddenly it doubles back upon itself. Yes, our separation was now a fact. It was all in the silence and muted light. And just as I had expected I felt nothing, I anticipated no approaching pain, but was aware only of the perception of the event rather than of the event itself. I was aware of the silence. I was aware of the faded light.

It was possible that she had departed without farewells. Perhaps she had decided to spare me a final admonition, a final smile. Perhaps she had not wanted me watching as she tied the sash of her fur coat and drew on her driving gloves. Perhaps I had slumped into the folds of my newspaper, slipping away, dreaming of the goose that long ago had struck repeatedly at my bare childish calf, and so dozed through Ursula’s disappearance from the long life of our marriage. Or perhaps she was even now taking her place in the front seat of her car alone or beside a new companion, and even now was preparing to play out all my speculations, all the texture of this fading day, in the unmistakable sound of a car engine.

I turned, I saw Peter’s meerschaum pipe in an ash tray where Ursula had decided to leave it. In passing I thought the pipe was covered with a skin of dust, as if it were lying in Peter’s empty house instead of ours, and in that moment and even as I was walking down the hallway toward the kitchen, I remembered what had occurred to me at the time of his death: that grief is only another form of derangement and that my innocent childhood had been filled with it.

I saw the two cold Dutch ovens, I heard my footsteps on the tiles, I saw the snow beyond the kitchen window, I saw the bright knives in their rack. Carefully, with eyebrows raised, with hands steady, I poured the schnapps into the little glass and held it up to the light. I felt that my face was expressionless, I knew that my actions were deliberate. I poured and then drank the schnapps. I leaned my cheek against the white tiles, each of which bore its glazed blue abstraction of an ancient Norse ship on a sea that might have been drawn by a child. I drank and waited for the sight and perhaps sound of Ursula’s car. But there was nothing. The tiles grew warm beneath my cheek.

I put down my glass. I saw the glass sitting alone on the flat expanse of thick white tiles, I saw how the light revealed the invisible film of liquor that still coated the inside of the glass and that smelled so beautifully like yellow kerosene.

I turned, I waited. Then carefully I raised my fingers to the heavy mask of flesh that was my face. But then 1 lowered my hands, trembled, detected the first far-off indications of a sound which, in the next moment, defined itself as the sound of water in motion, running, increasing in volume somewhere on the floor above. I exhaled. I wiped my spectacles. I refilled the glass with schnapps. Because now I knew that the sound I heard was that of Ursula in the shower, and I distinctly heard the muffled torrents of steaming water that were already turning her wet skin pink and filling the shower stall with clouds of steam rich in the scent of Ursula’s lilac soap. I tasted the schnapps. The little glass was wet in my fingers. Now I knew exactly what was lying in wait for me somewhere ahead on the cold calendar.

“I care very little about your ‘victim,’ Allert. She was much too young to engage my serious attention. But I do care about what you did. And if they acquitted you unjustly and only because you happened to have at your side a handsome wife, I can say nothing but that your next trial will be different. Very different.” By the time she had completed her last sentence I was through the doorway and feeling my way up the darkened stairs.

‘‘Go to her, Peter,” I said in the dark silence in which the two of us were lounging, “go to her and fill an old friend with enjoyment.”

“That is another poor joke,” he said, rising like a familiar and benevolent specter in the light of the fire, “but a good idea.”

“Ja, ja, ja,” I said to myself as I heard him fumbling his way toward the stairs.

“Allert,” she said, thrusting her soft face close to mine, “have you any idea of what you are doing? I suppose you do not. But you are destroying my romance with Peter. How dare you destroy the sweetness and secrecy of my romance with Peter? How can you be so vulgar as to read my mail?”

“I do not deserve so much condemnation. It was only a love letter. And the envelope was already open.”

“And now Peter’s beautiful phrases about love and friendship are lodged in your head as well as mine.”

“I shall forget them all too soon, Ursula. All too soon.”

But she was not appeased, and the clear snow continued to pile high on Peter’s car.

“Allert,” Peter was saying, “has it ever occurred to you that perhaps you were once a patient in Acres Wild? Before my time, before we were friends? Perhaps in your distant and flaming youth you were once restrained in Acres Wild. What do you say, my friend, shall I look up the records?”

In answer I said I found it difficult to recall my youth. I was quite capable of recalling occasional fragments of my childhood, but of my youth it appeared that nothing much survived. But it was just as well, I said to Peter, and requested him to undertake no bookkeeper’s search for what might well prove to be the notations of my obliterated violence. Nonetheless, when we next met, Peter asserted that despite my prohibition he had gone ahead and attempted to search out documentation of my unpredictable youth. But if I had ever been a patient at Acres Wild, he said, the records of that fact had been destroyed — conveniently destroyed.

“But, Peter,” I said, and laughed, “Acres Wild is not the only psychiatric institution in this small country of ours.”

For answer he simply trusted his gloved hands on the wheel and turned his eyes from the snowy road and looked for a long warm moment into my own clear candid eyes and smiled his knowing smile.

“Why don’t you get something on the radio?” he said. “Some nice dance music, perhaps.”

Obviously Peter was disappointed that his search had proved futile.

The road that climbed the hill to the zoo was lined at every turn with bougainvillea, with succulents, with small religious way stations pink or blue, with palm trees that cast their rubbery shadows on horse, driver, carriage, and we three silent passengers squeezed together on the narrow rear seat of the black carriage. I smelled the comforting drowsy smell of the old horse, I felt Ariane’s small perspiring thigh against my own thigh. I was aware of the sound of the horse’s hooves and the turning wheels, of the erotic plant life that bedecked our ascent and of the white tiles and silver bells of the little uncorrupted city below. But most of all I saw the white ship anchored and looming down there like some nautical monstrosity in a painted bay. The long line of the hull, the tilt of the smokestacks, the empty decks, the sweep of dazzling whiteness, here and there the flash of some microscopic piece of machinery — it was a shocking unconvincing sight that justified the discomfort of the disinterested traveler in his white linen suit. I could not decide which was less real, the ship or the plodding horse. And yet with every turn of the iron-rimmed wheels and every slow lurch of the carriage, my only urge was to return to the desolation of the ship. So I leaned forward, stared away to the east, shaded my eyes, did my best to keep our ship in sight.

We passed behind a high box hedge. The bay was concealed behind a wall of cypresses each of which was strangled in a thick climbing growth of roses. The shadows of palm fronds swept before my face like cobwebs. We emerged from our moment of gloom, the hearselike carriage canted upward. The ship was still there.

“Give me a handkerchief or something,” said the wireless operator, “I’ve spilled the wine.”

I watched the wireless officer holding the opened bottle of wine at arm’s length while Ariane brushed and dabbed at the long wet crimson stain that dribbled down the full length of his tunic. One brass button was an island of gold in the vivid stain. Slowly he returned the mouth of the bottle to his narrow lips.

For the occasion of this day’s excursion Ariane was wearing a purple and oddly ruffled silk shirt tucked snugly into her familiar blue denim pants. She was also wearing a pair of inexpensive dark glasses with black lenses and thick white frames that masked the small upper portion of her face and skull and hid her eyes. Between the ruffles of the partially opened blouse the tops of the naked breasts were more than usually visible, and now, as she stuffed the straw bag once more between her feet and put her hand on my knee, again I noted the tightness of her skin and the little field of freckles spread childishly across her breasts.

“Allert,” she murmured above the sound of the shaggy hooves, “so silent, Allert?”

“Yes, today I am silent.”

“You are displeased. But why this displeasure, Allert?”

“I dislike sight-seeing. I dislike captive animals. Today I’m a reluctant companion.”

“But this is a famous, beautiful zoo filled with the softest, loveliest creatures in the entire world. Don’t you take your children to the zoo?”

“We are without children, Ariane. It is one of the things I appreciate about our cruise, the absence of children.”

“That is a sad thought, Allert. Very sad.”

“If I had my way,” said the wireless operator all at once, and passing the wine bottle to Ariane, “I’d pack the cruise with children. Hundreds of children. I love the little tykes myself.”

“So do I,” whispered Ariane, apparently choosing to ignore the obvious truthlessness of the young man now managing to put his arm around her slight damp silken shoulders.

“Perhaps the two of you will be able to study some infant animals while I eat an ice.”

“Allert,” Ariane said then, “be kind.”

So I accepted the proffered wine bottle, drew my shoulder away from the young officer’s intrusive hand which, I knew only too well, was applying insistent pressure on the upper portion of Ariane’s arm. He was dressed in white, as usual he was slouched in the carriage with one foot propped high and his free hand lolling on the shiny black tin fender. Ariane was sitting stiffly between us with her eyes downcast and her slender wet back primly distant from the uncomfortable texture of the old leather seat. Yes, she was sitting primly and silently between us but nonetheless was succumbing breath by breath to the pressure of the wireless operator’s seductive hand. I shifted again, I smelled the dust and leather of the hired carriage and the heavy aroma of the old unkempt horse.

Again the ship appeared, framed suddenly in a mass of rich mimosa. The wireless operator began to drum his fingers on the tin fender. His wine was swelling inside me like a red cloud.

And then we arrived, we reached the top of the hill, we clattered through the faded painted gates of the famous zoo. We rolled to a stop in the vast spotted shade of an army of diseased umbrella pines, and now even the unfamiliar worlds of impersonal ship and nameless little tourist city were gone. We descended from the carriage, we instructed the old driver to await our return. Ariane recovered some of her earlier glee and sped off in her tight blue denim pants and her passionate purple blouse toward the nearest cages. There was no one else in sight. There was not one child in that entire zoo, only the winding paths, the heavy shade, the dust, the smells of animal waste, the cages that always appeared empty until, after a moment or two of patient scrutiny, some small face would emerge pressed to the mesh, or some strange little body would stagger out of a heap of wet straw on gemlike feet. And overhead there was always the high roof of the diseased umbrella pines.

Ariane was fully recovered. She could not move quickly enough from cage to cage. She laughed, she sighed, she exclaimed over the curve of some pathetically small pair of dusty horns, she pressed her little tight freckled breasts to the bars. And at each cage I stooped and read aloud the Latin inscription concerning the little mangy malformed animal within.

“Well,” said the wireless operator under his breath as we trailed behind our delighted Ariane down a cracked clay path beneath the pines, “well, it’s just the place for an old colonialist like you. We ought to lock you up with that frigate bird over there.”

I did not reply. I did not challenge the belligerence of the wireless operator. Ears flickered in the shadows, I heard the sudden hiss of urine, a small red naked face appeared ready to burst. And the straw, the rust, the scatterings of gray feathers, the piles of bare bones, the droppings, the distant cry of some furry animal, the great round luminous eyes of an old stag collapsing and sinking rear end first into a pool of slime — here, I thought, was the true world of the aimless traveler, and in this hot garden of captivity the disreputable young man at my side was at home, it seemed to me, and harmless.

“Allert,” called Ariane, who was now out of sight around a curve in the path, “come and see what I have discovered!”

In another moment or two the wireless operator and I rounded a curve in the path, emerged from a sheltering screen of scaly pine tree trunks, and entered a long unpainted single-storied building of weathered wood. It was the reptile house, a fact which prompted from the sauntering young ship’s officer a few more unpleasant remarks about men who assumed reptilian roles in their old age. From the entrance at one end to the exit at the other, it consisted of a single rectangular room that to me suggested an old dance hall lined on either wall with unimaginative displays. The light was poor, the place was empty except for the three of us, on the dead air was a smell that I recognized at once as belonging only to the reptile houses in the zoos of childhood and, further, as having been secreted through the waste ducts of rodents and cold-blooded creatures lying in dry coils. The smell was like that of venom or urine or black ink in a context of crushed peanuts.

“Hurry,” called Ariane, who was standing alone and small at the far end of the building, and who was calling to us and waving us on, “hurry, Allert, and see what I have found!”

The wireless operator joined our happily exercised companion immediately, while I in my worsening mood, angry at Ariane’s unexpected display of bad taste, proceeded slowly down the length of the right-hand side of the reptile house, pausing from time to time as if seriously interested in a pair of discolored fangs or as if intrigued by the injury apparently sustained by the python.

“Come on, Vanderveenan,” called the wireless operator, who was now encircling Ariane’s waist with his arm and squeezing her slight laughing body against his crumpled uniform, “here’s a special sight just for you!”

The approaching encounter in the reptile house was unavoidable, I knew, and so to proceed beyond discomfort or humiliation with the least possible delay, I turned from the all but inaudible piping of some desert animal no larger than my hand and rising on its hind legs like an emaciated miniature kangaroo, and took my place on the other side of Ariane, who was still laughing and still caught in the partial embrace of the young man with whom, in my presence at least, she had never been so familiar.

“Well, Ariane,” I said in my heaviest tone and once again aware of the seams in her tight pants, “what have you found that is so amusing?”

“Bats, Vanderveenan, bats,” said the wireless operator, laughing and jerking Ariane against his side.

“Aren’t they strange, Allert? And beautiful?”

I took a step forward, I put my hands in the pockets of my linen jacket. I gave myself over completely to the lonely and unavoidable study of the bats in their cage. For the most part they were hanging black and folded in long wet clusters behind the wire mesh of their filthy cubicle, and not until now had I seen the demons of old barns and caves so large, so ominous, so ripe with latent disfigurement. For the most part the heads, bodies, and limbs were wrapped away from view inside the long stiff folds of those black ribbed wings, and yet in all their terrible bunches they were fluttering with hidden life. They stank with what I took to be a kind of anal ejecta. Without turning around, without glancing explicitly at Ariane and the young and slightly drunken ship’s officer, still I detected his clumsy movement and knew that now Ariane herself was wearing the white and visored cap which, much too large for her, had only moments before been cocked at a lurid angle on the back of the wireless operator’s bony head.

“Take a better look, Vanderveenan. Do you see them?”

I stood directly in front of the wire mesh. I attempted to hold my breath, as I had often done as a child in just this situation. I stared directly into the colony of sleeping bats, and did so with such intensity that I was hardly aware of Ariane, who was still off balance, stretching out her hand and touching my sleeve. How could I possibly not see what the wireless operator wished me to see? After all, the two waking bats were among the largest of that black horde. Furthermore, they were hanging head down and frontward and side by side and with their wings drawn apart and at eye level and in the precise center of that black clotted curtain that was hung in crude illusory fashion across the entire rear of the cubicle. Yes, the two waking bats, like a pair of old exhibitionists, were holding open their black capes and exposing themselves. I saw the pointed ears, the claws, the elastic muscles, the sickening faces as large as an infant’s fist. Even upside down the two pairs of tiny unblinking eyes were fixed on mine. And the penis of each bat was in a state of erection.

“There you are, Vanderveenan. Two new friends.”

“But they do not look unclean as they are supposed to, Allert. Isn’t it strange? Don’t you too find those little male creatures interesting and attractive?”

I did not answer. I did not move. Instead I watched a few sudden waves of unrest clicking and whispering through the dormant rows, and exhaled and then drew in unavoidably a deep breath. The faces of the two aroused and wakeful bats were grinning. Their penises, each one perhaps the size of a child’s little finger, looked like slender overlong black mushrooms, leaping out of all proportion from the tiny loins.

“But watch them,” Ariane was saying, “they are so agile!”

As if in response to her words and to her girlish voice, in unison the two bats slowly rolled and stretched upward from mid-body until grotesquely, impossibly, the two eager heads were so positioned that in sudden spasms the vicious little mouths engulfed the tops of their respective penises. I understood immediately that this was how the two bats must have been engaged — in the slow jerky calisthenics of autofellatio — when Ariane first came upon the sight of them.

Behind me Ariane made a sound of pleasure, disengaged herself from the wireless operator, and with both small hands took hold of the wire mesh. Her blouse was stained, her small and perfectly proportioned face was flushed as with some kind of rosy cream. On her head sat the offensive cap.

“Allert,” she said then, “see how much pleasure they give themselves!”

“Oh,” came the sudden voice behind our backs, “Vanderveenan knows all about that pleasure. You’re able to do what the bats do, aren’t you, Vanderveenan?”

She turned. Her little nostrils flared. A small thick sun began to climb from the opening in her purple blouse. Her breath, for her, was heavy.

“Olaf!” she said quickly, fiercely. “Olaf, you may not be cruel!”

But already I had turned away from the still unsatisfied and still voraciously preoccupied winged vermin, already I had turned away from the insult of the wireless operator’s hostile voice. I smelled the dreams of the coiled snakes, in my slowness I contained the desperation of the two bats, in my mouth I tasted the oily residue of peanuts dropped accidentally and long ago by children who also would have been interested in the performance of the two bats. I exited. Ariane uttered a single faint cry inside the old building and called my name. But I did not answer and did not wait for her to join me, since I was not convinced that she wanted me to, and since she at any rate was no match for the young ship’s officer who had abandoned his empty bottle near the python’s cage and, clearly, had himself become uncontrollably aroused by the sight of the bats. In my mind I carried away the impression of Ariane wearing the white officer’s cap as would a sailor’s whore.

The light was the color of dry pine. A faded hair-ribbon was snagged, I noticed, on the thorns of a dry and naked bush. Everywhere stretched the shadowy landscape of the cages — empty, untended. A marble water fountain yielded not one cool drop, despite my patience. Its bowl was impacted with dead leaves. On I went in my white linen suit which, only a few hours before, had been fresh and pleasing to the touch when I had removed it from my stateroom closet. The light made me think of the green and yellow suffusion associated with the ashen aftermath of a volcanic eruption. The cages I had passed with the wireless operator appeared to be empty.

When I reached the carriage, which was now a piece of dreamlike statuary in the vast gloom, the old horse was unresponsive to my thick and well-intended caresses. I patted his nose, I stroked his withers, I spoke to him quietly in Dutch. But to no avail. As for the driver, the old man did not awake, though I put my full weight on the little iron step of the carriage, though the black carriage squeaked and tilted dangerously, though I resumed my former place on the cushioned seat with unintended clumsiness and noise. Clearly the old man and ancient animal were sleeping the same sleep in the depths of their age.

Thus I sat waiting for the return of the lovers. I relaxed as best I could, I noted the straw bag on the floor beside my foot, I crossed my knees, I smoked a cigar — but too quickly, a little too quickly — and alone in the sleeping carriage and vast silent zoo I thought with mild bitterness that here was the reality of the “Paradise Isles” promised in the pages of the brochure describing the special delights of our endless cruise. Here, I thought, was the truth of our destined exoticism, the taste of our dreams.

I nodded, I took a last puff on the cigar, I coughed, I saw Ariane approaching up the shadowed path. She was alone, she was bareheaded, she was walking briskly, she was still tucking in her purple blouse and adjusting her tight pants. It was a trivial but significant operation — the sum of those gestures — and without speaking, without changing my position in the carriage, without smiling, I read in the movement of her hands and fingers the message of what had obviously occurred on the dusty wooden floor of the reptile house. She was angry, she had dressed in haste, she did not wave to me or speak. It was only too apparent that she was indifferent to my perception of the whole long song so evident in the way she walked and the way she twisted and tugged at her clothing.

She climbed into the carriage and sat beside the Dutch corpse, as I thought of myself at that moment, and leaned forward and roughly shook the old driver’s arm.

“We shall go back to the ship alone,” she said aloud. “We shall go without him.”

The startled old man took up his reins. We rode in silence. From the crest of the hills, with the umbrella pines behind us and the little silvery city stretched out below, I noted that the sun was setting like a fiery cargo on the deck of the ship. And later, after Ariane had softened, after we had dismissed the carriage, after she had followed me wordlessly to my dark cabin — it was then that she faced me and seized my arms and ran her hands up and down my arms, touching and squeezing them as if to reassure herself of what she felt for me and that I was there and real. She was small, she was standing as straight as possible and searching my eyes, her features were sponged with dark shadows.

“Allert,” she said at long last and in a whisper, “please….”

I heard the tenderness of her appeal, I smelled the depths of the evening sea, I deliberated, I thought of the reptile house in total darkness. And then I relented.

That night the drunken wireless operator returned to the ship supported by the two women members of the ship’s band. The next day he and Ariane spent half the afternoon in the warm wind on the volleyball court.

“Allert,” she said, turning to me abruptly in the act of dressing, “I want to ask you a simple question.” She rested her hand on the back of the leather chair and then, watching me, moving across the room, she stepped into a pair of underpants which once in place looked less like a silken garment than like a faint hue that might have been spread long ago by a bearded painter. Again she paused, again she stared in my direction. I knocked the ash from my cigar. “Allert,” she said then, “why are you here? Why exactly are you here? Do you know?”

But if Ursula was capable of asking me such a question, how could I possibly have been capable of finding the answer?

On a morning as clear and dense with the cold as any I had ever seen, and while Ursula and I were driving down the snow-covered road in Peter’s car on our way to the village, she remarked that during the trial she had had sex every night with my attorney. It was her way of rewarding herself, as she expressed it, for her loyalty. At that moment I was tempted to tell her that they had greeted me in my cabin with black handcuffs the night we docked. But I controlled the temptation then and thereafter.

I awoke. I was wet. The sheets were double thick and stretched beneath me like some enormous scab peeled from the wound of the night. I could see nothing, I could feel nothing except my weight and the sensation of my own sweat laving and filming the sheets. But where had I been? What had I dreamt? Why was I so wet and stricken in clear paralysis? From what depths had I fought my way to this dead surface? Flat on my back, lips parted, waiting, body slack on the sheets and wet with sweat — thus I lay alone, though next to Ursula, and thus I gave consciousness to the agony of true thirst, though my mouth itself felt thick and warm. But what had I dreamt?

Later, after I had returned to the moonlit bedroom from the blackened lavatory, to which I had carried myself like some wounded animal to the midnight water hole, and where in the tiled darkness I had turned on the tap and listened to the flow of cold water and drunk my fill, it was then that I stood in the doorway and saw that Ursula was sprawled in the moonlight with her nightdress high and her right hand undulating in the considerable erogenous zone between her spread and partially lifted legs. The heat from her body reached me in waves across the moonlit room. Even in sleep Ursula’s active erotic life was not to be stilled.

But where had I been? What had I dreamt?

“Well,” I said, “why rock the ship? Why must you rock the ship?”

“The word is boat. I wish you would speak like anyone else. I do not find your verbal affectations amusing.”

“But really it would be better if you did not rock the ship. After all, Peter had the consolation of dying in the presence of both of us. Surely one of us deserves to die in the presence of the other. Perhaps you would like to change your mind and stay. Why not?”

“You are already dead, Allert. You do not need me. I have mourned at your funeral far too long already.”

Throughout this brief exchange, which was one of several, Peter’s dusty pipe lay in my ash tray and Peter’s automobile stood empty, locked, covered with a glaze of frost and cobwebs in our old garage. Ursula was smoking a fragrant cigarette.

In my pajamas and bare feet I entered the bathroom which was wet with steam and filled with Ursula’s perfume and with another still richer smell that made me imagine Ursula milking herself into the bathroom sink. I sniffed the humidity. I gripped the edge of the sink and smelled her hair. I did not know the hour and had not even glanced out the bedroom window at the world of white snow, as was my habit. The bathroom was dark and wet and smelled of Ursula — her hair, her skin, her soap, her scent of flowers, her thin passionate jets of milk.

I turned on the tap. Nothing. I turned on the other tap. Nothing. I flushed the toilet. In a kind of fever I turned the chromium fixtures in the deep tub and beneath the goose-necked shower. Nothing, nothing at all. I trembled. I stepped into the corridor that was packed with the stillness of the morning sun.

“Ursula,” I cried at last, “there is no water! What has happened to the water?”

And then I heard the sound of a car engine, and behind me the sudden furious rumbling and gushing of water in the toilet, the sink, the tub, the shower, as if my cries for peace and purification had been answered by some watery monster of indiscretion. I hurried back into the bathroom to turn off the taps.

In endless discovery of the musical imagination, I told myself, as stretched out in the stern of the ship in the folds of my canvas deck chair I listened to the syncopated late afternoon tinkling of the ship’s trio. Had it been some other ship, a different journey, no doubt I would have been wrapped in a coarse blanket in my canvas chair, and the sky would have been gray, the sea rough, the air cold, our approaching destination defining without question the time of day, the nautical miles. As it was I needed no blanket and lay stretched out in the wood and canvas chair on the fantail, for no other reason than to bask in the glare of the day that had no hour and listen to the shouts of the bathers in the ship’s pool and to the unstructured melodic background music of the ship’s band. The music was appropriate to the day, the ship, the voyage, since it gave no indication of purpose or cessation. Without turning my head or opening my eyes I could nonetheless visualize the three musicians, and on this occasion found myself indifferent to the vibraphone player’s two hands loosely wrapped in bloody bandages, and indifferent as well to the two middle-aged women, drummer and saxophonist respectively, who looked so much alike they might have been sisters.

My eyes were closed, my terry cloth robe was flung wide to the sun, our course was level, I was well aware of the tender waxed composure of my face, my cigar was aglow — and I told myself that for once I was indifferent to that foreboding trio.

At that precise instant in time, when the moment was intact but the hour gone, I heard the reedy sentimental percussive music stop in mid-bar. I opened my eyes. The swimmers were playing porpoise in the ship’s pool, the sky was dear, the bathers were shouting, far below us the engines were roughly and serenely functioning, the ship appeared real, my skin was protected from the rays of the sun by a comforting lotion that smelled powerfully of one of the sweeter spices grown on the little islands we passed in the night. But behind my back there was no music.

I raised myself forward in the deck chair. I heard the crash and clatter of what was unmistakably the sound of someone knocking over a brass cymbal loosely mounted on a long and spindly tripod. This spidery apparatus crashed to the deck. I heard several erratic beats of the bass drum. The male musician cursed — unmistakably it was his voice I heard. And then the sound of a bare hand smacking flatly against a flaming cheek, and since both of the vibraphone player’s hands were swathed in his filthy bandages he, I realized, was not the aggressor. Now one of the women — drummer? saxophonist? — was declaiming some injurious message in a foreign language which to me was incomprehensible. Another crash, an odd partial scale on the vibra-phone, then the woman’s brutish voice also stopped in mid-breath.

At that moment, which was also unmarked in the sea of time, Ariane appeared suddenly beside my chair. As I was straining to lean around to my right and peer in the direction of the ship’s trio now disbanded, silent, Ariane appeared on my left and leaned down, gripped the wooden armrest, and spoke to me softly, urgently, in a tone I had not heard before.

“Allert,” she said, “the ship’s orchestra is quarreling. It’s dreadful. Dreadful.”

Later, as the path of the ship was crossing the path of a black buoy that had been cut adrift from some unknown anchorage, and after Ariane and I had risen from the deck chair and, holding hands, were preparing to go below to her cabin or mine, it was then that I noticed the abandoned vibraphone, the silent drum, the saxophone like a golden bird strangled on the hook from which it hung, and in a heap on the deck the cymbal and its thin but ungainly stand.

“Allert,” she said, “don’t you think it is a sign? I could not bear a voyage that was not harmonious.”

I reassured Ariane that the vibraphone player and his two ugly women were no doubt already kissing in their dark quarters below the water line. It occurred to me that Ariane had ambitions of joining the ship’s trio when on the fantail they began to play their last long number as our white ship rounded the breakwater and once more entered home port — gaily, with whistles steaming and the sun in the eyes of all those jubilant travelers crowding the rail. But we returned in the night.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ursula,” I called, “arc you here?”

There was no answer.

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

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

My hair has always been my own.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An arm appears, a limp foot flexes into a tempting arc, the calf of the raised leg dangles in the lovely glass, the left hand travels up the calf and down the raised thigh in a tender stroking motion as if in a long tactile appreciation of a bolt of rare silk. The plane of sunlight bisects the plump waist. The small hand rests on the hip, then snaps the elastic, and then slowly appears over the top of the thigh and down to the concealed thirsting front of the underpants.

I gasp, I look away, the room goes dark in a single subdued shadow, and young boy once again, and wet with the strain of imagining, quickly I pull aside the crotch of the underpants and resting my limp back against the chair, watch as a long thin phosphorescent string shoots from the tip of my small red panicky penis and in slow motion coils sinuously across the room and floats, wafts, rises to the high ceiling where endlessly it gathers itself up in vast wet stringy loops and masses.

My little performance is over. I have seen it all. In countless forms I will see it all again. And as I sink into darkness I hear behind me the opening door and the cool comforting voice of a woman saying, “Tomorrow you must get a haircut. For a fine young man like you, my dear, your hair has gotten much too long.”

One of the maids? Mother? In my new-found serenity I do not need to know.

When I recounted this dream to Ursula, she told me that if only I had had a sister I would not have had to ingest within myself the explosive Oedipal ingredients of the boy-child’s life. If I had had a sister, she said, I would have been happier and would not have had to become my own mother, as well as her admiring little voyeur, in my earliest dreams. Or perhaps I should have been a girl. But then again perhaps such a spectacular ejaculation, she said, was worth any price.

At this moment the tone of Ursula’s voice was a typically soothing, and in the dark it was no doubt the tone of her own voice in her ears that precipitated the tender but deliberate movement of Ursula’s hand in quest of the rumpled front of my trousers. When she might have hurt me worst she pleased me most.

But how was Ursula so quick to recognize that the woman I became in my dream was my mother? And how unfortunate that Ursula could not have been always so perceptive and so humane.

“Allert,” Peter was saying, “do you remember our conversation about a course of treatment I finally persuaded my staff to abolish at Acres Wild some years ago?”

I smiled my heavy meaningless smile. I tapped my temple, I tried to reconstruct some faded conversation about psychiatric treatment, though why should I care, I thought, what was it to me? I leaned down, tugged at my fallen brightly colored sock, nodded my head. My study was white, attractive, well ordered but oddly filled with the overpowering stench of schnapps, though only one small glass gleamed within easy reach of my swollen and slowly drumming fingers. I struck a match and slowly puffed on my cigar. I was well aware that Peter was watching my eyes closely. I recollected with utter clarity that he had remarked repeatedly that my eyes were much too small to be trusted. In my study we were alone and facing each other in twin chairs.

“Yes,” I said, exhaling, using my hands to cross one knee upon the other, “yes, I believe I do remember something of the sort. For you it was quite a victory, was it not?”

“Yes, my friend, it was a victory. Even your brightest young clinician can be fixated on the old barbaric ways. And yet recently I’ve been thinking that perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps that treatment should not have been abolished.”

“But it was dangerous. If I remember, you said it was dangerous.”

His blue eyes were watching mine. One of his knees was crossed upon the other, as was mine, and his long dark fingers were prayerfully joined at the tips. His leathery face was a mask of expressionless concentration and dead nerves, his angular elegance was a mockery of my own shapeless size. It was obvious that Peter would never know the sensation of fine blue veins treading the whiteness of a fat arm. I waited, puffing the cigar, thinking of a bay horse harnessed to a gleaming carriage behind a white chateau and recognizing the familiar seriousness, even condescension, of Peter’s talk. Once again he was trapping me, I knew, in one of his dramatic pauses.

“Yes, Allert,” he said at last, “you’re right. The treatment was dangerous.”

He paused. I could resist no longer the little glass of schnapps. I found myself imagining some hostile patient who, in a mad stroke of understanding, snatches from the pocket of Peter’s long white coat a cheap paperbound work of fiction concerning a pair of young nurses who set about using their sexuality as a cure for maniacs. Another dangerous treatment, I told myself.

“The problem with that archaic cure,” he said at last, as if lecturing some of his students in the warm light of my study, “was that by subjecting the patient to deeper and deeper states of coma we brought him increasingly close to death’s door. The patient descended within himself and, while we, the worried staff, hovered at his side, always waiting to administer the antidote or undertake the rescue mission, so to speak, the patient was traveling inside himself and in a kind of sexual agony was sinking into the depths of psychic darkness, drowning in the sea of the self, submerging into the long slow chaos of the dreamer on the edge of extinction. The closer such a patient came to death the greater his cure. The whiter and wetter he became in his grave of rubber sheets, my friend, and the deeper his breathing, the slower his pulse, the more he felt himself consumed as in liquid lead, the greater the agony with which he approached oblivion, then the greater and more profound and more joyous his recovery, his rebirth. The cure, when it occurred, was remarkable. The only trouble was the possibility of the patient’s death. On the other hand, coma and myth are inseparable. True myth can only be experienced in the coma. Perhaps such an experience is worth the necessary risk of death.”

He stopped, paused, frowned. His dark elongated face assumed an expression of grief and profundity. But I knew that he was not yet done, that there was something further he wished to say, which caused my own breath to grow more shallow. So I myself said nothing, but, well-intended and helpless as always, merely glanced at him with my usual openness as if to beckon him on to his conclusion, his familiar bitterness. I found myself wishing for gray light and falling snow.

“Allert,” he said then, as the sweat came out on the back of my neck, “has it ever occurred to you that your life is a coma? That you live your entire life in a coma? Sometimes I cannot help but think that you never entirely emerge from your flickering cave. You must know things the rest of us can never know, except by inference. But I do not envy you the darkness and suffering of your coma, my friend. I hope you do not die in it.”

Silence. More silence. He was through at last. And I raised my hand, I took three puffs on the cigar, I raised my head, the glass of schnapps was empty, the room was warm. Peter was standing, preparing to stroll out of my study in search of Ursula. If pity could kill, as Ursula was fond of saying, I would have died in his glance.

“I am fond of you,” I said. “Ursula and I are both fond of you. But there are certain days when I do not enjoy your company.”

As he passed me he allowed his hand to rest for a moment on my slumping shoulders.

“What do you think of my theory,” Peter was saying, “that past a certain age it becomes quite impossible to make new friends? The avenue of the unexpected friend is simply obliterated. No enjoyment of sudden recognition, no new faces, no prolonged sharing of secret confidences never heard before, no thrill of a new voice in the open air. None of this for those of us who are beyond a certain age. We simply live as best we can with the old friends we have already made, until there is one offense too many or some silly eruption of sexual conflict, or one of us dies and thus even the old friends disappear. It is a desolate situation, my friend. Quite desolate.”

“But, Peter,” I said, laughing and in slow motion thrusting my hand through the clear pane of glass toward the falling snow of my childhood, “at least our mistresses tend to retain their allure, their interest. Is it not so?”

But I myself have never had a mistress, of course. Only my eager young girls and friendly women. Only a wife.

“What do you think of my theory,” Peter was saying, “that a man remains a virgin until he commits murder? The destruction of unwanted purity depends not on sexual experience but only on the commission of what is generally called the most heinous of crimes. What do you think?”

My rash is now an unremovable undergarment that covers and contains my belly and buttocks and genitalia in a wet palpable flush of color like a tincture of blood in warm water. Thus it has spread. But this flush, this color, is thicker than skin. It is a growth that has totally enveloped the mid-portion of my body and, in the process, has lost its pebbled texture that once brought to my mind the flesh of the pink-lipped strawberry. Now it is smooth, velvety, thick and, throughout most of the day, glistening and moist with its own secretion. I have never known such a rash and could not have imagined any skin condition capable of so much change and such determined growth. It is as if I am girdled day and night with the velvet, as it is called, that covers the antlers of those northern horned creatures (elk and so forth) in the period immediately preceding the season of sexual aggression and mating. But the sight is not entirely unattractive. And my rash does not itch. Of course the question is whether or not it will continue to expand its dominion until it covers my entire body, or whether it will be contented merely to have consumed the bulging erogenous center of my physical life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I listened.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And you do not find your collection boring.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outside, where I remained for a considerable time without my pullover or fleece-lined hat, the dark golden color was suffusing the frozen air with the splendor of the end of day and the approach of night, and the geese, which had become aware of my presence even from their distant vantage point at the edge of the forest, had waddled all that long way in a frenzy of ugly noise and innocence, and were pleased enough to do their waddling dance for the sake of the rich bread crumbs I flung time and again across the golden snow. Even in the darkness I stepped among them. I felt the cold in the depths of my lungs, in circles I flung the handfuls of stale crumbs and chunks of bread as far as I could. Out there in the frozen darkness, how long did the poor geese await my return?

When at last I re-entered the house and felt my way across the vast unlighted kitchen and down the hallway, and once more into the central room, where I intended to resume my reading, as Peter called it, there I discovered Peter sitting in my chair beneath the brilliant light of my chromium-plated lamp and with my rarest volume propped on his lap. Except for the illuminated seated figure of Peter, who appeared to be made of wax, the room was otherwise as dark as it usually was in the middle of the night in winter. The house was silent.

Peter glanced up from the open book. He did not smile. He was still in his stocking feet.

“Your collection is excellent,” he said. “Excellent.”

“But a man without memory, a man who remembers not even the date of his own wife’s birth, is simply a man without identity. Is it not so, Peter? And Allert remembers nothing, nothing. Not even the date of my birth.”

Peter sighed, I assumed an expression of exaggerated sadness on my pudgy lips, as Ursula called them in her less pleasant moods, while Ursula again insisted that she was serious and that I had no identity. And now she walked on ahead of us, with her hair down and her hands on her broad hips.

“But, Ursula,” Peter called, “why must Allert have identity? If he is kind to you, is that not enough? But of course the problem is simply that you do not always appreciate Allert’s identity, which in fact is quite undeniable.”

“I remember more than she thinks,” I murmured then. “But I am probably too old for her. What can I do?”

“I have no idea, my friend. But you ought to remember that you and I are the same age, and I am not at all too old for Ursula.”

At that moment my sulky wife was walking on the balls of her bare feet and into the sun. Peter was humming under his breath.

I began to doubt my identity. But I still had my self-esteem, which was not diminished.

“Now, my friends,” called Peter from the lip of the green hill, “now we shall have our feast of the sea!”

The birch trees were slender and girlish in the evening light, the hillside was muffled in green’ leaves, the birds in the wood were singing to the fish at sea, the smell of the flowers beyond the hill was mingling with the smell of dead crabs at our feet. And down the path came Peter, dressed in his undershirt and athletic shorts and burdened with a charcoal burner which he carried laboriously but with evident pleasure. Over his shoulder were slung a pair of long hip boots, fastened together by a rubber strap for carrying and here and there patched with red patches. He was being energetic, his calves were bulging, his face was damp. Down he came.

“But, Peter,” I said, “why not let me help?”

“It’s nothing, nothing. This is the last of it. We may begin. But as a matter of fact, my friend,” he said, dropping the boots, hoisting the iron burner to the top of the large black rock where he intended to cook, “you are really going to do the hardest work. All right?”

“My happiness,” I said, “as always.”

“Yes, you’ve enjoyed your moments of repose. You’ve been sitting on the blanket with your wife, whereas I have no wife. But you and I shall prepare our meal for Ursula, for the goddess.”

“Well, as you can see,” I said, “she is dressed for the occasion. ”

Peter and I turned as one and smiled approvingly at Ursula where she sat on a blue blanket in a large space cleared of stones. A coil of golden kelp was reaching toward her bare feet, she was dressed in a simple yellow garment that was ankle length, that had no sleeves, that revealed with gauzy and intended clarity all the details of Ursula’s thick but shapely body.

“You see,” I said, “she is wearing her yellow nightgown. She is trying to provoke us, Peter.”

“Beautiful,” he cried, “beautiful! It is the dress of the goddess.”

We leaned against the black rock that was like a small iron steamer run aground. We smiled at Ursula propping herself on the blue blanket with her seductive arms.

“Please,” she smiled, “don’t make fun of me. Either one of you.”

“Never, never!” cried Peter. “We are simply going to make you drunk and give you a romantic time here on my rocky beach! But first we must have our little feast of the sea. Do you approve, my dear?”

For answer Ursula merely leaned back her head, stretched her legs, arched her back, spread wide her hands, closed her eyes. She was discreet, she was indifferent, she was in repose, she was ready, in near-nudity she had become the obviously contented and waiting naiad of Peter’s cove. She who was perpetually moist was now reclining in the full warmth of her languor. Slowly she shifted her naked thighs, and then allowed her head to sink back even farther, exposing still more the fulsome curve of her bare throat.

“But in the meantime, Peter, I may have some cold wine, may I not?”

He had already made three trips from the house to the cove, once interrupting a long kiss I was sharing with Ursula on the blanket, and now had accumulated all we needed for the meal. Six bottles of cold white wine in an enormous steel container covered and filled with great cakes of ice, several bottle openers, butter and herbs and olive oil, wooden spoons and sharp knives, and silverware, hot plate holders and a folded white tablecloth and the iron burner filled with coals now lighted and live — all this he had arranged on and about the shipwrecked rock so that in a mere instant he was able to put into Ursula’s hand the requested crystal glass of chilled wine. She accepted it without opening her eyes. He turned, squatted, waved one of the wooden spoons over his array of culinary lyricism spread out by the sea.

“Allert,” he said, “let’s begin.”

But it was a familiar ritual and I had already drawn on the rubber boots, which were too small for me, and waded up to my knees in the cold current. The day was warm, the sea was colder than Ursula’s wine. Somewhere a dog was barking while above my head circled an enormous white gull that was meticulously cleansed and sparkling. With great rusted bucket in hand, and legs moving stiffly through the current, and bent almost double, slowly I proceeded forward like some great fleshly crane. Thrusting down my arm even to the shoulder, I clawed up handful after handful of large mussels glued together in clumps and swathed in mud. Yes, Peter’s cove was famous for its mussels which were sweet and grew to maturity in large hard shells that were blue and black. Now in my clumsy way I was moving across a bed of mussels as large as some farmer’s garden. I could feel the tight masses of the boat-shaped shells beneath the soles of the rubber boots and, as I wobbled forward against the current, pushing down my red and dripping arm, I was filled with the sensation of walking across the bones and shells of the earth’s cemetery beneath the sea. I took deep breaths, the mud-covered clumps of mussels rattled into my sea-washed bucket. Out and back I went, with the horizon at eye level, the occasional wave against my thigh, elbow, cheek, and even chest, crossing and recrossing the hard living bed under the tide, until I clambered ashore dripping, cold, flushed with the pleasure of this accomplishment, and bearing the enormous crusted bucket into which not another mussel could be packed. It thrilled my entire self to emerge the wet ungainly harvester of what Peter called our feast of the sea.

At the shore’s dark edge I washed the mussels. I sat on the rocks and wet the seat of my pants and scrubbed each shell, watched the mud flow off, polished each shell with the old scrubbing brush and, tasting salt on my lips and smelling the summer light on the air, became once more conscious of the affinity every sturdy and middle-aged Dutchman is expected to feel with the moving sea. Behind me Peter was tending the glowing coals, I was beginning to feel intoxicated on the wine in Ursula’s cold glass.

How long then the feast? Hours, it seemed to me, a gift of time. Almost immediately I myself drank the entire contents of one of the cold bottles without intending to. I savored a few cigars. Once while the great blue pot was steaming on the whitening coals Ursula asked for my hand, climbed to her feet and unsteady but laughing walked to Peter, who was wreathed in the steam, and kissed him, while Peter put down his wooden spoon, reached his hands behind Ursula’s back and raised her yellow skirt until in the rear it was bunched into the small of her back while in front it still grazed her ankles. In that position Peter fondled Ursula’s nudity until she returned to the blanket and he, drenched in the best of humors, returned to the preparation of the meal.

He steamed the mussels, he seasoned them, I heard the clatter of a wire whip, I smelled the aroma of cold tide and aromatic herbs, and the day began to dissolve in butter, wine, steam, laughter, the clanging of the abandoned blue kettle rolling down the rocks, the hiss of the coals, the showering light of the wine as it fell in an are from the mouth of another opened bottle to a waiting glass. Together we sat on the blue blanket, dipping each opened shell into the little tubs of melted butter and sucking in the golden mussels and licking our fingers, smearing our cheeks with the rich butter, tossing empty shells and now and then a limpid mussel or chunk of bread to the white gull that was standing on a nearby rock like the fourth in our party.

Minute by minute the day dissolved into its bright shadows. Ursula insisted upon feeding us, first Peter and then me, by holding a slippery mussel between thumb and first two fingers and then thrusting it against our lips and into our waiting mouths. The mussels were sweet and flavored with the depths of the sea. Peter remarked that they were ovular. The gull stalked along the top of the shipwrecked rock amidst cloves of garlic, crushed barnacles, flakes of the rusty iron, kernels of pepper. Below him we were lying in the wash of our own debris.

“Where’s my romantic time, Peter? Is this all I get?”

Ursula lay on her back with her arms drawn loosely upward like those of a ballerina. One knee was raised, the lower edge of the yellow skirt was gathered so as to barely drape the pubic shadows. Her eyes were open and to me her stomach looked invitingly rounded as a result of her unstinting meal. Peter had provided chocolates and even these she had eaten.

“Peter? Is this all?”

I leaned forward and with my handkerchief wiped a large oily smear from Ursula’s cheek. The gull stood still, no longer pacing in stiff dignity the top of the rock. Peter rolled to his knees and unbuckled his belt. I smiled and climbed to my feet.

“Allert,” Ursula said then, “where are you going? Don’t leave us. I want you to stay.”

I smiled down at her where her soft lower body was already in motion though Peter had not yet removed his athletic shorts and though she was looking not at him but at me.

“But I must relieve myself,” I said in my heaviest accent. “But I will not be far off. And I will return soon. Besides,” I added, preparing to step carefully between the stones, “I have already witnessed this scene a good many times, my dear. Have I not?”

“But you enjoy it, Allert. I know you do.”

And so I did ordinarily. But for now my interest lay only in the narrow sun-struck path that climbed along the edge of the birches and then among the birches, and in another instant I was ascending the path in a stride that was slow and free, though now and then interrupted by a gentle stagger. My modesty was always amusing to Peter and Ursula, but I had no recourse but to follow my own inclinations and withdraw from time to time into a dark corner, a closet of green ferns. So midway up the hill I relieved myself, peered toward the island that long ago had broken free of Peter’s shore, and then sat down, lay down, rolled over, dozed. When I regained consciousness, sitting with my back against one of the tilting birches, I was fully aware that I had dreamt a short concise dream about Ursula exposing her breasts at a party. It was a fleeting dream and not worth reporting to Ursula.

When I returned to the scene of the meal, a scene now cast in the warmest of shadows, I found Ursula lying in the center of the white tablecloth we had spread on the blanket and Peter sitting cross-legged on top of the black rock. Ursula’s yellow gown had become her pillow, Peter was naked and sitting with his eyes closed and holding in his lap one of the sweating unopened bottles of cold wine. The gull was perched defiantly on Peter’s castoff athletic shorts. Ursula’s eyes were also closed and she and Peter were smiling.

“Come,” I said quietly, “let me open the wine.”

Some kind of telepathic understanding rippled down the length of Peter’s bare side and with effort he raised his arm and extended the bottle. I drew the cork and, filling a much-used glass, carefully placed the brimming glass in Peter’s listless hand. He nodded. He did not open his eyes.

“Drink it, Peter,” I said. “The party is not done.”

He nodded, he made no move to raise the glass from his loins to his lips. So I shrugged and removed my shirt and trousers, took a few puffs on one of the little cigars, standing for those moments with my forearm resting in the small of my back and a foot raised on a boulder of quartz, and eyes looking down at Ursula. Then I threw away the cigar, in the process offending the brave gull, and walked to the blanket.

Later, much later, she pushed me off with brusque but loving hands. We lay on our backs, side by side. I smelled the golden snake of kelp, without looking I knew that the little black islands were knocking against each other and moving in our direction.

“I hurt,” she murmured, casing the crumpled yellow gown between her legs. “Thanks to my two selfish friends I hurt in my crotch.”

But she was smiling. A moment later, when Peter called my name, I used my elbows and raised my head and shoulders and saw that his eyes were open and filled with light.

“I tell you, Allert,” he called, “your sexual organs reminded me of the armored bulge of one of the better-endowed British kings. How’s that for a compliment, my friend?”

“I thought you were dozing,” I answered. “I did not know you were watching.”

“But yes, indeed,” he answered and raised his glass, “indeed I was watching.”

For our return to his home, Peter draped himself in the white tablecloth on which we had feasted. A mere ten days later Ursula was planning my trip in her crudest mood.

We spend most of our lives attempting in small ways to know someone else. And we hope that someone else will care to peek into our darkest corners, without shock or condemnation. We even hope to catch a glimpse of ourselves, and in this furtive pursuit we hope for courage. But on the brink of success, precisely when a moment of understanding seems nearest at hand, and even if the moment is a small thing and not particularly consequential, it is then that the eyes close, the head turns away, the voice dies, the surface of the bright ocean becomes a sea of lead, and from the very shape we know to be our own there leaps a man-sized batlike shadow that flees or crouches to attack, to drive us away. Who is safe? Who knows what he will do next? Who has the courage to make endless acquaintance with the various unfamiliar shadows that comprise wife, girl friend, or friend? Who can confront his own psychic sores in the clear glass? Who knows even where he is or where in another moment he may find himself? Who can believe in the smoke from the long clay pipe, the beer in the tankard?

Who then is safe? I wish I had known my wife and friend. I wish they had known me. I wish we had been only dark figures within a gilded frame. Like a child I wish we had found each other tolerable. I used to wish that I could have cleaved Peter down the length of his back and pulled the halves apart as though they had belonged to a gutted dummy and then climbed inside. If I had been able to enact this fantasy when I wanted to, I would now be dead. All speculations, like loose phosphorescent threads shot dreamily into a cold night, would be at an end.

Who is safe?

In my arms she was like a small child struck by an auto. Together in the dark we swayed on the deck as if I had just dragged her from a wreck at sea. I was holding her horizontally in both my arms. Her eyes were glazed, she refused to speak. The white officer’s cap had fallen from her head only a moment before, the white tunic fell open from her nude body like the remnant of some outlandish costume for a masquerade, which indeed it was. She was limp but watching me, though the eyes were glazed, and she refused to speak. The moon was a streak of fat in the night sky. I could not feel her weight. I heard a shout. I turned. I heard a splash. The deck was a hard crust of salt. The night was cold. I heard the splash. I could not feel her weight. And then along the entire length of that bitter ship I saw the lights sliding and blurring beneath the waves. Clumsily, insanely I wrestled with a white life ring that bore the name of the ship and that refused to come free. I saw the ship’s fading lighted silhouette beneath the waves.

Who is safe?

“Look,” cried the purser, “the horse has two rumps and six legs! Shall we give the prize to this happy monster?”

The crowd, which packed the midnight saloon, dancing and tangling themselves in clouds of confetti and streamers of bright paper, cheered in a polyglot of affirmation. I recognized the drunken purser with distaste, in my arms my little partner was wearing her bikini, the white officer’s cap at a rakish angle and, with sleeves rolled to her fragile wrists, the official white tunic with its gold buttons and lightning bolt at the collar. Her small dark face looked like a child’s. The dance floor was awash with gin. My partner was impersonating a wireless operator, while I (with distaste, with severity, with self-consciousness) was impersonating a heavy-set and class-conscious burgher from Amsterdam. I wanted to slip my wet hands inside the tunic.

“Allert,” she cried, dragging me to the edge of the crowd where the purser was hanging a lopsided floral wreath around the horse’s neck, “look, it’s Olaf!”

And there he stood, now holding the horse’s head in his arms and grinning. And there too stood the ship’s drummer and the ship’s saxophonist, two coarse and grinning women exposed now from the deformed horse’s unzippered double rump. For a moment longer they demonstrated how they had crouched and swayed and danced, one bony woman to each rump. At the purser’s insistence the wireless operator, now wearing the ring of flowers around his own naked neck, lavishly and drunkenly kissed them both. The crowd cheered, my partner clapped her hands, the vibraphone player smeared his silvery instrument with congealed blood.

“Kiss me, Allert,” she whispered, wiping my brow and fixing my tie. “I am enjoying this party so much. I want you to kiss me. Right here. Right now.”

Who is safe?

When the divers descend and open up this unfortunate ship, I thought, they will find all the drunken passengers packed in confetti and paper streamers tangled like dead rainbows. The ship will be rusting, but the travelers will still be packed together in silent joy. All of them will be preserved in kelp and seaweed and bright paper — a dense and soggy conglomerate which will be to the sunken ship as the marrow is to the broken bone.

Who is safe?

I now think without doubt that I, the old Dutchman dispossessed of the helm, am the living proof of all of Peter’s theories. Or almost all. Yes, I tell myself that I am the legacy of my friend, my wife’s lover, our psychiatrist. Yes, I am that dead man’s only legacy. But unwanted legacy, I suddenly correct myself, unwanted legacy. Of my friend Peter but also of the women I have known.

In the darkness I am their entire legacy, the filthy sack of their past and mine. And unwanted, every drop of it.

“Ursula’s complaints are meaningless,” Peter was saying, “quite meaningless. You must simply ignore them. Most wives complain about their husbands. As a matter of fact, my friend, if you were not as emotionally strange as you arc, Ursula would not like you at all. A curious paradox but true. And you will note,” he said, smiling up at me with the wind in his face, “you will note that I did not say ‘sick’ but merely ‘strange.’ I will not pin you down, to use a vulgarism, until you request me to do so, professionally.”

His long dark fingers continued to stuff the little white bowl of his pipe with shredded tobacco, the sun was a cold ray in a dark sky, his smile belonged not on his weathered and sardonic face but rather on the little round sculpted face of some clever cupid. He continued to stuff the white pipe. I removed the shells from my gun.

“But what is so wonderful and so hard to believe,” Peter said then through the clarity of the fierce wind, “is that she cares for us equally. To her all our differences are nothing. And what a capacity it is to be able to elevate two such different men to the same level of acceptability. She has the gift of love, my friend. The gift of love.”

Cupped in his two dark bony hands, the flame of the match was pale beside the intense red color of his hunting shirt. Then the pipe was lit and the two of us, side by side and thinking in our different ways about Ursula’s love, were heading home.

He bolted forward from the bench. In the dry and desperate heat, in which the three of us had been reposing as if in a dream, naked and white and at our ease, suddenly Peter bolted forward from the wooden bench and, in complete silence, flung his hands to his chest and looked around him with eyes filled with the joy of extreme pain. His chest was a network of small bones, every hairy filament in his pubic growth appeared electrified, his white legs and arms were long and oddly muscular, his nipples were dark, his loins were a nest of blue veins.

“Peter,” Ursula said in alarm, “what’s wrong? What is the matter?”

Her sentence was the only one spoken from that moment forward in the sauna. And yet throughout that terrible ensuing time, during which Peter pantomimed his death and Ursula and I our helplessness, through all that time, which on the clock was nothing, I heard Peter’s voice (jocular, lofty, confidential) inside my head. As we watched, moved, tried to assist him, and while he lurched and staggered about in the small circle of his dying, I thought I was listening to every word he had ever said, and I did not know which was worse, the brief and wordless struggle of our performance there in the sauna, or the confidence and unbroken flow of that silent voice. There he was, talking away at the moment of his own painful death (which was from his heart, I realized at once) and in complete ignorance of the advice, the pronouncements, the elocutions of middle age, the sparkling tones. He talked to me even after he lay dead on the floor. I could not bear to listen.

When he fell, tall white fishlike man I no longer recognized, I could hear his nose breaking on the slats. He lay on his stomach lurching and trying to crawl after the trail of bright blood that flowed from his nose. A moment before, and in shock and ignorance, I had seized his arm and attempted to steady him. But as he collapsed he tore loose from my grip. Now we could hear the very sound of the pain inside his chest.

Ursula was kneeling at his head with her face constricted, her breasts in a chaos of motion, her breathing heavy, and had somehow managed to lift his head and was now holding his bleeding head in her two hands. At his mid-section I too was kneeling, one knee raised, the other burning on the wooden slats, and I heard the faint popping sound of the tubes that were parting inside Peter’s chest.

His body looked like dry fat and cartilage. He looked like a creature that had been skinned. He was still flicking with movement. But then that awful movement ceased. He was dead.

And then he defecated. Yes, even while Ursula rocked his head and tried to soothe the contorted face, and even while I knelt helplessly at his side, listening to my friend’s silent voice, suddenly Ursula and I knew simultaneously what had happened and together stared in shock and grief at this last indignity.

He was dead. The smell was strong. We could not move. We did not know what to do. The fecal smell of Peter’s death was overpowering the smell of eucalyptus that was filling the small room. I thought that Ursula and I would soon die like Peter there in the heat. But I could not allow my friend’s body to remain unclean, that much I knew.

In another moment or so I acted on that lingering knowledge, and using my flat hand as a trowel, slowly scooped the terrible offending excrement from Peter’s corpse. And bearing in my hand the last evidence of Peter’s life, I managed to gain my feet, open wide the door and stumble to the edge of the cold and brackish sea.

As I hurried up the path toward the house and telephone, naked and stumbling and in my own way deranged, I thought that my hand would be forever stained with the death of my friend.

Moments later, and after I had placed the useless telephone call, I was joined at the house by Ursula, who, draped in a towel, looked at me with an expression of terror and fury and collapsed in my arms.

They fished aboard an infant octopus that was already dead. The sea was in steady motion beyond my porthole as if someone had at last discovered our destination. A sailor hung the infant octopus outside my door. The motion of the passing sea was swifter than at any time during our journey. The sea was dark, the sky was exactly right for a holiday. I could hear the swishing of a few dumpy women still playing their deek-board game with sticks and pucks. Now we were on course to a destination. The impartial sky was chilly, bright. But they told me I was confined to my cabin, as if I were an officer instead of mere passenger, and accused of a crime. They told me the wireless operator had been relieved of duty and was under sedation. They told me they had spent the entire day searching the ship from top to bottom, fore and aft. But to no avail. They had looked in the cabins, the lifeboats, the engine room, the companionways, the lockers, the wireless shack, the crevices beneath the flywheels of great machines. But to no avail.

The purser was sitting on a wooden chair outside my door. His trousers were freshly pressed. We were a mere speck in the empire of that dark sea. The purser called to the attention of strolling passengers the baby octopus white and swaying on its length of cord.

They assured me that the search throughout the ship was continuing.

The islands became more numerous. They were small and golden, each one a perfect bright sphere for exploring. But I was confined and he was heavily sedated.

Even inside my cabin I could hear the rumors. And a few dumpy women with wooden sticks and pucks.

“Allert,” she said quietly and behind my back, “it is not necessary to wash my underpants. You are always kind to me. But you shouldn’t bother to rinse my panties.”

“Oh, but it is nothing,” I said, and felt the life of the ship in the soles of my naked feet. “It is an unfamiliar chore for me and one I like. But surely if you can press the clothing of the ship’s crew it is somehow appropriate that I rinse your panties.”

Sitting as she was on the far end of her rumpled berth, small, indifferent to the hour of the day, Ariane was not within range of the small mirror fastened above the porcelain sink. I could see the familiar disorder of the little stateroom whenever I glanced from the frothy sink to the mirror, and even had a splendid reflected view of the opened porthole above the berth, but I could not see Ariane and could only assume that she had already removed her bathing suit as I had mine. At the sink I stood with a towel knotted around my waist but assumed that Ariane would not care to wrap herself in towels.

“Well, you are doing a very thorough job, Allert,” she said behind my back. “But don’t you want to hurry a little?”

“Two more pairs to go,” I said into the empty mirror that was quivering slightly with the pulse of the ship. “Only two pairs. And do you see? They look as if they belong to a child.”

“But, Allert, I think you have become a fetishist!”

“Oh yes,” I said heavily and raised my face to the glass. “Yes, I am a deliberate fetishist.”

I nodded to myself, I submerged my hands to the wrists and scrubbed the little shrunken garment that felt as slippery as satin on a perspiring thigh. I was enjoying myself, half naked before the sink and rinsing Ariane’s six pairs of off-white panties. They were not new, those panties, and the crotch of each pair bore an unremovable and, to me, endearing stain.

“There. You see? I am done. Now we shall hang them to dry.”

But that day Ariane’s wet undergarments on which I had worked with such prolonged and gentle satisfaction, remained in a damp heap in the porcelain sink. In a single instant I forgot all about Ariane’s damp panties (reminding me of the clothing shop windows into which I used to peer as a youth in Breda), because in that instant I turned from the sink to find that she had not resorted to a warm towel, as I was convinced she would not, but also that there on the other end of the rumpled bed, with the wind in her hair and her legs drawn up and crossed at the ankles, she was far from that complete state of nudity in which I had thought, even hoped, to find her. But I was not disappointed.

I did not know how to respond, I felt a certain disbelief and breathless respect. But I was not disappointed. Because Ariane sat before me girdled only in what appeared to be the split skull and horns of a smallish and long-dead goat. It was as if some ancient artisan had taken an axe and neatly cleaved off the topmost portion of the skull of a small goat, that portion including the sloping forehead, the eye sockets, a part of the nose, and of even the curling horns, and on a distant and legendary beach had dried the skull and horns in the sun, in herbs, in a nest of thorns, on a white rock, preparing and polishing this trophy for the day it would become the mythical and only garment of a young girl. What was left of the forehead and nose, which was triangular and polished and ended in a few slivers of white bone, lay tightly wedged in my small friend’s bare loins. The goat’s skull was a shield that could not have afforded her greater sexual protection, while at the same time the length of bone that once comprised the goat’s nose and hence part of its mouth gave silent urgent voice to the living orifice it now concealed. The horns were curled around her hips. On her right hip and held in place between the curve of the slender horn and curve of her body Ariane was wearing a dark red rose. I recognized it as one she must have taken from the cut-glass vase of roses that had adorned our table for the noon meal.

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

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

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

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

“You may cease your teasing right away.”

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

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

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

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

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

But she insisted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Allert? Will you come?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am not guilty.