“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.
“Allert,” he said, without opening his eyes, “what are you reading? Why so studious?”
Hearing the sound of Peter’s voice and Ursula’s pen, telling myself that Peter had spoken and to me as well, I looked over the top of my large leather-bound volume in the direction of the love seat where Peter and Ursula were sitting as if for a large revealing photographic portrait in black and white. I smiled in order to acknowledge Peter’s question within the silence of my concentration. In this way I was on the verge of answering when Ursula, still composing her letter with the swiftly moving black pen, spoke up ahead of me and in my stead. The snow had been falling since before dawn, but now the darkening sky was cloudless and filled with the color of burnished gold. Beyond the window the earth and pines and birches, already crusted with the frozen accumulation of other storms, were now several inches thicker with a pure illusory powder of bright snow.
“Allert is looking at his pornography,” Ursula said. “At such times he is always distracted.”
Peter’s head was tilted backward and resting on the curved white leather surface of the love seat. His smiling face appeared to be scanning the ceiling. He appeared unconscious of the fact that he had thrust his dark fingers into the waistband of Ursula’s tight slacks. He was sitting low in the seat with his legs stretched out before him and slightly spread, quite unaware apparently of the sensation of Ursula’s warm thigh against his own. Ursula was sitting with her legs crossed knee-to-ankle like a man. Today the gold point of her pen was precise and furious. Her tight slacks were the brushed warm sandy color of the doe freshly shot in some wooded glen.
“Pornography,” Peter said, musing as if to himself but addressing me, “does it not become boring, unutterably boring, my friend? Please be honest. I want to know.”
“What a shocking thing to say to Allert,” Ursula replied immediately, once more speaking for me though still concentrating on her letter. “After all, Allert covets sexual representations of any kind. For Allert almost anything representing the female or female form is pornographic.”
“So,” murmured Peter after a brief thoughtful pause, “so your collection of pornography is extensive.”
“The work of a lifetime,” Ursula answered simply. “An entire lifetime.”
“And you do not find your collection boring.”
“For you and me,” Ursula said quickly, though in a mild and somewhat unthinking voice, “Allert’s pornography would be intolerable. You and I do not filter life through fantasy. But it is otherwise with Allert. You cannot tear him away from a picture of a bare arm, let alone an entire and explicit scene of eroticism.”
I rested the heavy volume flat on my knees. I valued the calmness evident in Ursula’s soft face, which was broad and shadowed with golden light and turned slightly downward toward the handwritten sheets of paper gathered on the large and stylish magazine spread on her lap, and evident also in Peter’s dark face which, smiling through the guise of sleep, was quietly and comfortably awake. The thickening golden light harmonized the soft white face and the face that was wrinkled, dark. Ursula had changed her position and folded her legs beneath her, as might a young girl, and she was wearing a soft tight shirt knitted from yarn my favorite color, the palest of all shades of purple. Even from where I sat I could smell her skin, her garments, her hair, her black ink. Peter was pressing his flat hand deep inside the waistband of Ursula’s tight pants and had never looked more at ease, more at home.