Death, Sleep & the Traveler: Novel (New Directions Books)

by Hawkes, John

  “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 t
ight 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.