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

by Hawkes, John

  “Ursula,” I called, “arc you here?”

  There was no answer.

  “I do not mean to hurt your feelings,” Peter was saying, “but tell me, Allert, are you wearing a wig? This evening you look exactly as if you are wearing a wig.”

  He swished the ice in his glass. He stretched his lean leg toward the smoldering fire. He laughed, Ursula laughed, I also laughed, because only moments before Peter uttered his unfortunate remark I had been guilty of wondering precisely the same thing about my well-groomed friend. A trick of the light? An offshoot from our undeniable proclivities toward a night of love? Perhaps, perhaps, since Peter’s hair gleamed thickly in the low light of the fire, while from where I sat on the other side of Ursula I could smell the scent he had applied lavishly, secretly, as part of his bathing ritual upstairs. But Peter’s remark was most unfortunate.

  My hair has always been my own.

  In my dream I am once again a child tall and thickset though very young and alone in the large white chateau in the village of my childhood and youth. The day is mysteriously cast, the afternoon is indeterminate, the enormous sleeping chamber in which I stand is not mine, in a single slanted plane the late sun lights the room with a brightness that will never die. And I am alone, I am unable to hear the slightest sound, neither the ringing of cutlery from the kitchen far below nor the voices of women nor the sounds of our white geese gabbling outside. I am safe, or so I believe, safe and unaccountably standing in the center of a room that is large, warm, scented with dusting powder and a skin lotion distilled from the oil of pine. The room is familiar and unfamiliar both. I know it to be the room from which I am ordinarily excluded except by invitation. And yet alone and trembling in the midst of this serenity, with the door shut and sunlight penetrating my young life in a single plane, I also know that I have not seen before this bed, this dressing table, this chair as soft as a giant peach, this soft carpet which is like a field of snow. And yet I recognize the pair of black masculine hairbrushes on the dressing table.

  I am precisely aware of why I have risked entry into this large and seductive and, yes, even precious room. I know what I want. I have known about it for days, for a month, for seasons of childish need. It is an agony, a thought of joy. And standing in the center of the room, my innocent fleshly body bisected by the plane of light, and glancing at the vast bed and at the icy full-length mirror affixed to what I assume to be a closet door, again I tell myself that it must be so, that I will not be denied, that once and for all I must know with certainty what a woman looks like without her clothes, or without most of her clothes.

  I tremble, I am an impresario, the director of a magical actor on a secret stage because I am all too well aware that I myself am my only access to what I want to know. I smell the feminine smell of some hidden powder puff, I feel the tension in the pale coverlet drawn so tightly across the enormous bed that this decorous piece of furniture now openly appeals to me as forbidden, lewd. Yes, I ask myself, how else am I going to discover what a woman looks like without her clothes? Since the actuality is quite impossible, since I am unknown to any woman except those who live in our house (mother, two maids, an old cook), since I am young and innocent and not given to spying, even though my urge is desperate—yes, how else will I ever see what I need to see, know what I must know, if not through myself and my own ingenuity?

  I am aware of the bed, the sunlight, the silence, the undergarments on the bed, the mirror occupying the entire space of the closet door. My plan has leapt to me from the silence. The mystery will be revealed.

  Quickly and with precision I squeeze out of my short pants, remove my underpants and square black shoes and wintry socks and my tie, shirt, undershirt, and then possessed of myself and my brilliant plan and in agonizing control of my desperate self, slowly I approach the bed and seize the delicate lilac-colored undergarment. With care and languor and excitement I manage to put my bare feet through the holes, clumsily, deftly, and to draw that flimsy garment tightly up my childish thighs, careful not to tear the silk, with each tug smoothing the thin delicious tissue against my skin. Finally that undergarment, fragrant and lilac-colored and clearly intended for an adult woman, has become the second skin perfectly fitted to my young boy’s substantial buttocks and yearning loins.

  How did that intoxicating vulnerable undergarment appear so magically on the inviting bed? And whose body was it actually intended for? My mother’s? One of the maids? I do not know, I do not care, at last I am touching, feeling, actually wearing what I had only seen before fleetingly in the pages of slick and sumptuous magazines. I am filled with the breath of my commencing transformation. The warmth of all the world to come is about to be revealed. The sun’s plane is stationary, my rapid breath is clear.

  Then I execute the final moment of my plan. I conclude my magical performance on the secret stage. Naked except for the lilac-colored underpants and smiling, calculating, swiftly I slide along the wall to the closet door, then seize the knob, and without once peering into the mirror turn the knob and maneuver the door to an angle of approximately forty-five degrees and turn, push the heavy peachlike chair to the edge of the field of vision inside the mirror. Then I steady myself against the chair and, with more care than ever, position myself so that my body from the waist down will lie entrapped but free to assume a quite different life in the silvery glass.

  I open my eyes. I move my head as does a snake to his charmer’s pipe. I prevent my head or torso, or much of my torso, from appearing in the magic glass. And there it is, the belly and hips and thighs and calves of a smallish tight-skinned woman wearing only a pair of lilac-colored panties in the afternoon. She is alive. She is moving. Already the elastic bands in the legs and waist are leaving little red teeth marks in the flesh of the woman in the glass. Her skin is white, it is tight and smooth, the muscles with which she is working her buttocks are entirely visible inside the transparent lilac flowers of her panties, and her thigh nearest the now ecstatic viewer is plumply raised, naturally concealing the most secret of all soft triangulations from the fixed and eager eyes of a viewer who would never have spied on a living woman but who spied with love and relish on himself.

  An arm appears, a limp foot flexes into a tempting arc, the calf of the raised leg dangles in the lovely glass, the left hand travels up the calf and down the raised thigh in a tender stroking motion as if in a long tactile appreciation of a bolt of rare silk. The plane of sunlight bisects the plump waist. The small hand rests on the hip, then snaps the elastic, and then slowly appears over the top of the thigh and down to the concealed thirsting front of the underpants.

  I gasp, I look away, the room goes dark in a single subdued shadow, and young boy once again, and wet with the strain of imagining, quickly I pull aside the crotch of the underpants and resting my limp back against the chair, watch as a long thin phosphorescent string shoots from the tip of my small red panicky penis and in slow motion coils sinuously across the room and floats, wafts, rises to the high ceiling where endlessly it gathers itself up in vast wet stringy loops and masses.

  My little performance is over. I have seen it all. In countless forms I will see it all again. And as I sink into darkness I hear behind me the opening door and the cool comforting voice of a woman saying, “Tomorrow you must get a haircut. For a fine young man like you, my dear, your hair has gotten much too long.”

  One of the maids? Mother? In my new-found serenity I do not need to know.

  When I recounted this dream to Ursula, she told me that if only I had had a sister I would not have had to ingest within myself the explosive Oedipal ingredients of the boy-child’s life. If I had had a sister, she said, I would have been happier and would not have had to become my own mother, as well as her admiring little voyeur, in my earliest dreams. Or perhaps I should have been a girl. But then again perhaps such a spectacular ejaculation, she said, was worth any price.

  At this moment the tone of Ursula’s voice was a typically soothing, and in the dark it w
as no doubt the tone of her own voice in her ears that precipitated the tender but deliberate movement of Ursula’s hand in quest of the rumpled front of my trousers. When she might have hurt me worst she pleased me most.

  But how was Ursula so quick to recognize that the woman I became in my dream was my mother? And how unfortunate that Ursula could not have been always so perceptive and so humane.

  “Allert,” Peter was saying, “do you remember our conversation about a course of treatment I finally persuaded my staff to abolish at Acres Wild some years ago?”

  I smiled my heavy meaningless smile. I tapped my temple, I tried to reconstruct some faded conversation about psychiatric treatment, though why should I care, I thought, what was it to me? I leaned down, tugged at my fallen brightly colored sock, nodded my head. My study was white, attractive, well ordered but oddly filled with the overpowering stench of schnapps, though only one small glass gleamed within easy reach of my swollen and slowly drumming fingers. I struck a match and slowly puffed on my cigar. I was well aware that Peter was watching my eyes closely. I recollected with utter clarity that he had remarked repeatedly that my eyes were much too small to be trusted. In my study we were alone and facing each other in twin chairs.

  “Yes,” I said, exhaling, using my hands to cross one knee upon the other, “yes, I believe I do remember something of the sort. For you it was quite a victory, was it not?”

  “Yes, my friend, it was a victory. Even your brightest young clinician can be fixated on the old barbaric ways. And yet recently I’ve been thinking that perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps that treatment should not have been abolished.”

  “But it was dangerous. If I remember, you said it was dangerous.”

  His blue eyes were watching mine. One of his knees was crossed upon the other, as was mine, and his long dark fingers were prayerfully joined at the tips. His leathery face was a mask of expressionless concentration and dead nerves, his angular elegance was a mockery of my own shapeless size. It was obvious that Peter would never know the sensation of fine blue veins treading the whiteness of a fat arm. I waited, puffing the cigar, thinking of a bay horse harnessed to a gleaming carriage behind a white chateau and recognizing the familiar seriousness, even condescension, of Peter’s talk. Once again he was trapping me, I knew, in one of his dramatic pauses.

  “Yes, Allert,” he said at last, “you’re right. The treatment was dangerous.”

  He paused. I could resist no longer the little glass of schnapps. I found myself imagining some hostile patient who, in a mad stroke of understanding, snatches from the pocket of Peter’s long white coat a cheap paperbound work of fiction concerning a pair of young nurses who set about using their sexuality as a cure for maniacs. Another dangerous treatment, I told myself.

  “The problem with that archaic cure,” he said at last, as if lecturing some of his students in the warm light of my study, “was that by subjecting the patient to deeper and deeper states of coma we brought him increasingly close to death’s door. The patient descended within himself and, while we, the worried staff, hovered at his side, always waiting to administer the antidote or undertake the rescue mission, so to speak, the patient was traveling inside himself and in a kind of sexual agony was sinking into the depths of psychic darkness, drowning in the sea of the self, submerging into the long slow chaos of the dreamer on the edge of extinction. The closer such a patient came to death the greater his cure. The whiter and wetter he became in his grave of rubber sheets, my friend, and the deeper his breathing, the slower his pulse, the more he felt himself consumed as in liquid lead, the greater the agony with which he approached oblivion, then the greater and more profound and more joyous his recovery, his rebirth. The cure, when it occurred, was remarkable. The only trouble was the possibility of the patient’s death. On the other hand, coma and myth are inseparable. True myth can only be experienced in the coma. Perhaps such an experience is worth the necessary risk of death.”

  He stopped, paused, frowned. His dark elongated face assumed an expression of grief and profundity. But I knew that he was not yet done, that there was something further he wished to say, which caused my own breath to grow more shallow. So I myself said nothing, but, well-intended and helpless as always, merely glanced at him with my usual openness as if to beckon him on to his conclusion, his familiar bitterness. I found myself wishing for gray light and falling snow.

  “Allert,” he said then, as the sweat came out on the back of my neck, “has it ever occurred to you that your life is a coma? That you live your entire life in a coma? Sometimes I cannot help but think that you never entirely emerge from your flickering cave. You must know things the rest of us can never know, except by inference. But I do not envy you the darkness and suffering of your coma, my friend. I hope you do not die in it.”

  Silence. More silence. He was through at last. And I raised my hand, I took three puffs on the cigar, I raised my head, the glass of schnapps was empty, the room was warm. Peter was standing, preparing to stroll out of my study in search of Ursula. If pity could kill, as Ursula was fond of saying, I would have died in his glance.

  “I am fond of you,” I said. “Ursula and I are both fond of you. But there are certain days when I do not enjoy your company.”

  As he passed me he allowed his hand to rest for a moment on my slumping shoulders.

  “What do you think of my theory,” Peter was saying, “that past a certain age it becomes quite impossible to make new friends? The avenue of the unexpected friend is simply obliterated. No enjoyment of sudden recognition, no new faces, no prolonged sharing of secret confidences never heard before, no thrill of a new voice in the open air. None of this for those of us who are beyond a certain age. We simply live as best we can with the old friends we have already made, until there is one offense too many or some silly eruption of sexual conflict, or one of us dies and thus even the old friends disappear. It is a desolate situation, my friend. Quite desolate.”

  “But, Peter,” I said, laughing and in slow motion thrusting my hand through the clear pane of glass toward the falling snow of my childhood, “at least our mistresses tend to retain their allure, their interest. Is it not so?”

  But I myself have never had a mistress, of course. Only my eager young girls and friendly women. Only a wife.

  “What do you think of my theory,” Peter was saying, “that a man remains a virgin until he commits murder? The destruction of unwanted purity depends not on sexual experience but only on the commission of what is generally called the most heinous of crimes. What do you think?”

  My rash is now an unremovable undergarment that covers and contains my belly and buttocks and genitalia in a wet palpable flush of color like a tincture of blood in warm water. Thus it has spread. But this flush, this color, is thicker than skin. It is a growth that has totally enveloped the mid-portion of my body and, in the process, has lost its pebbled texture that once brought to my mind the flesh of the pink-lipped strawberry. Now it is smooth, velvety, thick and, throughout most of the day, glistening and moist with its own secretion. I have never known such a rash and could not have imagined any skin condition capable of so much change and such determined growth. It is as if I am girdled day and night with the velvet, as it is called, that covers the antlers of those northern horned creatures (elk and so forth) in the period immediately preceding the season of sexual aggression and mating. But the sight is not entirely unattractive. And my rash does not itch. Of course the question is whether or not it will continue to expand its dominion until it covers my entire body, or whether it will be contented merely to have consumed the bulging erogenous center of my physical life.

  Our white chateau was bedecked with wooden shutters painted with triangular or sail-like shapes of bright purple and blue. There were geese, the remnants of a moat, a few cypress trees and a stable that smelled of ammonia and straw and roses in full bloom. Most of the cottages in the village carried our family colors on shutters and doors out of lingering sentimental deference to
the time in history when the owner of the chateau was owner of the village as well. Our tulips, waxy and fat enough to fill a hand, were the pride of our old pipe-smoking coachman, who wore leather puttees summer and winter and was the driver of a small blue horse-drawn sled in which I often and happily suffered the winter cold in my childhood. It was in that sled, wrapped in a fur robe, and staring at the old man’s gnomish back and at the flat snow bright with the sun, snuffling and trying to move my frozen feet, fearing the swift pace at which the pony was pulling us, that I experienced the first ejaculation of my childhood. Today I find myself hearing some of the whistled tunes with which the old coachman kept the pony alert.

  When I am able to exercise my memory of the distant past, which is not often, I am able to do so with the precision of a stamp collector.

  I clung to the rail. I was in the grip of the wind. The ship plunged like an abandoned freighter. The day was without light, the noise of the sea was deafening. And suddenly I felt his arm holding me tightly about the shoulder and felt his cold wet mouth close to my ear.

  “Landfall tomorrow, Vanderveenan,” he was shouting, “landfall and island whores, Vanderveenan. Plenty of them. Just what you need....”

  He tore himself loose from me and staggered off against the wind. And there at the rail, spread-legged and drenched in spray, I stood hearing again and again the echo of his hard young voice as the afternoon died away and the troughs between the waves grew deeper and the sea became vaster and blacker and louder than anything I had ever known.

  I waited. I licked off the spray. I waited. In the darkness and in passing I acknowledged to myself that the ship’s orchestra was warming up, faintly, beyond reach of the sea.

  I listened.

  Deep in one of the leather chairs, feet resting on a leather hassock, half a dozen bound volumes on the rug-covered floor at my side and a single volume from the same set propped in my lap, thus I sat in complete absorption and yet also exposing myself to the fair light that always accompanies the waning day. I studied my elegant volume. Ursula and Peter sat side by side on the small white leather love seat half surrounded by some of Ursula’s green plants. The plants were thriving and intensely green, Ursula was writing a letter, Peter’s arm was around Ursula’s waist. His eyes were closed, his hand lay with evident tenderness on Ursula’s hip. The last sunlight in the room was turning the color of the stem of Peter’s pipe.