John Hawkes - Death, Sleep & the Traveler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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