“But Allert,” she said then, and her eyes were large, her teeth white, “the island we just passed belongs to me. Didn’t you know?”
“Do you wish to explain yourself?”
“I do. Yes, I do. But another time.”
Together we leaned on the rail and side by side stared at what we were leaving in our wake, which was nothing. But had I understood her meaning at that moment I would have bruised her in the agony of my desperate embrace.
The water comes down the surface of the glass, melting all vision. The water is an invisibly moving veneer of light on the black shale. The water is rearranging the pebbles that are so firm and white that they appear edible. The cold water spouts from the cleft in the rock, fills the tumbler, produces liquid weight in the earthen jar, emerges in cold bubbles from the bed of clay, sucks and gurgles through the moss, flows and drips and collects in the trees, the stream, the tall glass in my hand. And I drink it as I would breathe, letting it fill my oral cavity as it might a pool in the rocks, or I suck its freezing clarity against my teeth so that teeth and forehead ache with the cold. Or I hold it in the heavy pouch of my mouth and gulp it down, feel the clear cold water delivering itself to me drop by drop or in a steady transparent curve from silver spigot, brass tap, clay orifice with milky lips, and from the depths of frozen black trees. I wait, I drink, I consume the cold water beyond my usual capacity, making of myself a spongy reservoir, and teeth and gums and tongue and palate ache from the painful joy of this natural anesthetic. I feel that a spike has been driven into the back of my throat, my mouth is filled with the taste of white rocks and green ferns, I watch two large drops conforming to the laws of physics down the inside vertical space of the glass. And then I strike the match, grip the antithetical cigar between my front teeth, complete the cigar-lighting ritual — puffing, working the flame in slow wheels of light — and then at last the whitened tissues of my rinsed and empty mouth arc bathed in smoke, are bathed and flooded with the thick gray smoke that tastes stronger than ever, more than ever like rich manure dug in bright golden gobs from a deep bed. That foul but cherished smoke is to the vanished water as Caliban was to Ariel, both of whom existed but in the mind.
Sometimes I hear myself saying Ja-Ja-Ja quickly, silently, so as to put a little spunk — to use Ursula’s word — into my ponderousness. Ja-Ja-Ja I say to myself, and not even in Dutch.
“Allert,” she said, “I do not mind your girl friends. I do not mind their visits in our household. I do not mind when one of them spends a few hours or the night sharing with you the pleasures of the guest room bed. That’s all very well. In a way it’s enjoyable even for me. But I tell you, Allert, I refuse to have your friend Simone sitting on my handbag. How on earth could you fail to see? How could you fail to feel my mortification, my anger, and fail to pull her off by one of her innocent arms? I tell you, when I saw that woman sitting so ignorantly on all the intimacies of my own handbag, like a stupid chicken giving anal birth to my own uterine baggage, I tell you I began to question your judgment, your taste, even your motivations. I simply cannot have any woman putting her buttocks on my handbag. That she used her buttocks that way unconsciously is only the more insulting. So I trust we agree, Allert — no more Simone.”
While hearing out this monologue I found that I was generally in agreement with Ursula, since I had indeed noted the episode in question but had reacted to its symbolic message with inward pleasure and amusement, rather than with Ursula’s rage, for which I felt a certain additional shame while listening. But on the other hand, why did she have no sense of humor? And why did she leave her soft smooth leather handbag lying in the broad hollow of one of the sofa cushions precisely where poor Simone might be drawn unwittingly and might settle down upon it like some gentle victim on a land mine?
It was a trivial episode. And yet I was careful thereafter to make no jokes about Ursula’s handbag, while poor Simone never again lay naked and bathed in candlelight on our guest room bed.
Ursula was to me one woman and every woman. I was more than forty years old when we married, quite experienced enough to realize early in our relationship that Ursula was practical, physical, mythical, and that all the multiplicities of her natural power were not merely products of my own projections or even of the culture into which she was born — like a muted wind, a fist through glass — but to start with were engendered most explicitly in her name alone. Uterine, ugly, odorous, earthen, vulval, convolvulaceous, saline, mutable, seductive — the words, the qualities kept issuing without cessation from the round and beautiful sound of her name like bees from a hive or little fish from a tube. She has always been one woman and every woman to me because her attitudes have never been predictable, while minute by minute throughout the long years of our marriage her physical qualities have undergone constant metamorphosis from fat to lean, soft to hard, smooth to rough, lean to fat — languid urgent Ursula, who is leaving me.
“Allert,” she said, while masking her face with the smooth nightly glaze of thick white cream, “tell me the truth. Did you push her through the porthole as they accused you of doing?”
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.