John Hawkes: Death, Sleep & the Traveler

Ursula is leaving. Dressed in her severe gray suit, her gardening hat, her girdle, her negligee, her sullen silk dress, her black blouse, her stockings, her red pumps, and carrying a carefully packed straw suitcase in either hand, thus she is leaving me.

She is going at last not because of what occurred on the ship or because of the trial, which has long since been swallowed into the wet coils of its own conclusion, but because I am, after all, a Hollander. With her skirts awry, her elegant tight black military coat draped to within inches of her ankles, and with her hair blowing, the black bun sculpted at the back of her head, a cigarette lighted between pale fingers, and with belted valises lightly in hand, thus she is leaving — because she does not like the Dutch. Yes, Ursula is going off to find somebody very different from myself. An African, she says, or a moody Greek. If she had not forced me to board the white ship alone, perhaps we would still be at peace with one another. But soon she will no longer exist for me, nor I for her, and when she passes through the front door I shall be standing alone in the kitchen with one hand motionless on an enameled tile and my broad soft face pressed to the window glass. For a moment I will glimpse her car, which she will be driving or which someone else will be driving, and then my wife will be gone.

Why did she come to my support at the trial only to desert me in the end? Why did she wait this long to tell me that I am incapable of emotional response and that she cannot bear my nationality? Why did she refuse to join me on the white ship and so abandon me to death, sleep, and the anguish of lonely travel? Surely it was more than her boredom and distaste for shipboard games. Perhaps there was another man. Perhaps he will soon be sitting at the wheel of my wife’s car.

For me there is only the taste of cold water, the sensation of glass against my heavy cheek, and the sound of waves.

In the darkness the ship was rolling like a bottle lying on its side in a sea of oil. Sweating in the night’s heat, feeling in the flesh of my forearms the warmth of the ship’s rail, and puffing on my small Dutch cigar and staring down at the phosphorescent messages breeding and rippling in the black waves, suddenly I knew the ship was making no forward progress whatsoever. The knowledge was startling. One moment I was sweating and smoking at the ship’s rail, the most reluctant voyager ever to depart on a cruise for pleasure, and the next I was leaning at the polished rail in sudden possession of the sure knowledge that the ship, though rolling, was otherwise standing still, or at best imperceptibly drifting. How could it be?

I smelled the salt that burdened the night sea air as well as the ocean in which we lay, I saw the shooting phosphorous below and, not far from my left shoulder, a thick skin of dew drawn to the contours of the prow of a white lifeboat. I heard the persistent rhythm of a tapping wireless key in the darkness. And yet I knew that the ship had stopped. But why? How? Even cruise ships, no matter how directionless, were under obligation to maintain steam and at least minimum forward motion on the high seas. To stop, to lose headway, could only put the vessel in gravest danger. And then a hand touched my sleeve, a voice spoke, and my freshly lighted cigar went sizzling down to quick extinction in the night sea.

“Allert,” the young woman said, “won’t you join me and the other passengers for dancing in the dining saloon?”

My Dutch name rendered in English is Alan. But in Dutch, and despite the accent on the first syllable, my name is clearly a repository for the English word “alert,” as if the name is a thousand-year-old clay receptacle with paranoia curled in the shape of a child’s skeleton inside. I myself have always been quietly alert.

“Peter,” I said to my oldest and closest friend, “I wish that now, after all these years, you would take her regularly to bed. She expects it of you, she expects it of all men, she wants you to make a strong and consistent overture. Force her to more than yielding. She spends her life pouting and smoldering and waiting for opportunities to yield. But once committed she is an extremely active lover, the kind of woman who causes suicide. And she likes you. We have both made that perfectly clear already.”

I placed my cigar in the glazed white earthen ash tray, looked at my friend and smiled. Behind his back and through the broad windows the late sun was streaking across the snow for miles. At that moment Ursula, my wife, entered the room and sprawled in a white leather chair in such a way as to reveal to my friend and me the tender fat of her upper thighs as well as the promise of her casually concealed mystery. It occurred to me then that my friend and wife were perhaps more intimately agreeable with each other than I had thought. But it did no harm to urge Peter toward the inevitable, even if he had long since discovered it.

“Ursula,” I said, “do you know what we have been talking about?”

She rested her cheek in the palm of her hand, allowed the other to fall against the full white barely visible crotch of her underpants, and looked across the room at me with heat in her eyes. Even from where I sat I could smell the soap and sourness between her heavy legs. The mere thought in my mind was making her moist.

Later she decided that I needed to embark alone on a quest for pleasure.

Around my navel there is concentrated a circular red rash. At first a few isolated splotchy areas of pebbled crimson, it now consists of a broad red welted ring completely encircling the little untouched island of the navel. The fungus, which is what it must be, surely, is textured like the outer livid flesh of a wet strawberry, and is spreading. Soon its faintly exuding and yet sensationless growth will blanket the entire surface of my global belly. Perhaps I contracted the infecting seed while lying almost naked on the lip of the ship’s pool and watching beneath the shield of my crossed arms the slowly tanning figure of the young woman who later confronted me once in her stateroom with a goat’s horned skull masking her sex.

The approaching extinction of what we have known together is unavoidable, not at all like an amputation, and certainly not a matter of morality. Ursula does not like my name, my large size, my self-control, my superficial national characteristics, my cigar smoking, my dreams, my affectionate attachment to a certain city in Holland, my preoccupation with the myths and actual practices of sexuality, my benevolence, my sense of humor which, like the more enticing elements of human anatomy, emerges only on the rarest occasion brightly and bedecked in green. She dislikes me most, she says, for my failure to respond to her emotionally. I, in my turn, resent and admire her constant smoldering, resent and admire her lassitude which is sexual invitation, and resent and admire her boredom which is denial. There are times when I dislike more than anything in the world the lazy fit of the top of her stocking around her upraised thigh as well as the thickness of her breasts, her small waist, the breadth of her stomach, the terrible harmony between her wandering body and her impregnable mind. I do not like her egocentricity, her psychological brutality, her soft voice, her harsh personal judgments, her awareness of sexual challenge, her habit of fondling her own rough nipples, her patience, her cleverness, her occasional smile, her weeks of depression. And yet we have given each other freedom, excitement, tenderness and comfort. We have shared a long marriage.