Death, Sleep & the Traveler (4 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally I unpacked the valise.

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

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