Death, Sleep & the Traveler (10 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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