When I told this dream to Ursula she made no comment but instead leaned across to me enigmatically and put her hand on my thigh. Later in the day she said she found the explicit sexual insecurity of my dream surprising, but would tell me no more.
“Allert,” she said, “all men wish occasionally to be free of their wives. You really must go on this cruise. And go alone.”
She was facing away from me and toward the large expanding glass pane of the window, so that beyond her naked back and beyond the window the snow spread westward in a dazzling white crust for miles.
The third musician was playing his vibraphone with naked knuckles, with knuckles split to the bone and bleeding onto his sentimental percussive instrument. We were heading into a darkening choppy westward sunset. I went out on deck.
It was so cold that a skin of ice had already formed on the surface of Peter’s bright blue car that was still faintly steaming at the side door of his week-end house in the country. The setting sun was licking the hard bright machine like some great invisible beast on its knees.
“Ursula, for you,” he said, giving her the glass. “And for you, Allert. A quick drink and then we’ll try the new sauna.”
“Cheers,” I said in my native Dutch and saw the hard wet light of the sun, which was just beginning to set, in the frozen lacquer of the car beyond the window, in the metallic sheen of Peter’s gray hair, in the window glass itself and in our tumblers, our eyes, our breaths still visible even inside the essentially unused house. Peter lit the enormous fire, we drank, the three small valises — two of matching straw and one of stiffly shining hide — stood together in the entrance hall. The fireplace smelled of the damp soot of the wintry forest, Ursula was sipping from her glass and smiling.
“All right, my dears,” Peter said, “I have a treat for you.”
He refilled the tumblers, he brought the bottle, so that outside the cold and the fierce declining light leapt as one to tumblers and fingers, to bottle and fusing voices, so that the car and the house and the three of us were all cut from the same timeless stuff of light and ice. We laughed, we stumbled together in single file, Peter pointed the way with the bottle held out before him by its frozen neck, though the path was clear enough. The sun turned suddenly orange on the haunch of Ursula’s tight trousers, for some reason the sound of my own footsteps made me think of those of a lurching murderer. Unmarked, faintly visible, the path covered the short distance from the house above us to the cabin in the little cove below in spectacular fashion, skirting the bare birches and crusted snow to our right and hooking downward to the edge of the black and brackish sea on our left.
The cove was narrow in the mouth but deep, a perfect little fat pouch cut roundly into the rocks and snow of that frozen coast, and in the very center of the cove stood the cabin freshly built of stripped white logs and smelling of wood chips and tar and creosote. There were no windows, the large plank door was locked with an obviously new padlock, and yet greenish and highly scented smoke was drifting up from the chimney. The naked birches of the hillside crowded down the white incline to the cabin, which had been built only a few feet from the round rocks, the edge of ice, the brutally black salt water. It seemed to me that all the rocks, large and small, were the color and texture of a man’s skull long exposed to snow, sun, rain.
“Peter,” I called, smelling the green smoke, the fresh wood, and feeling the tension between the white trees and snow and the black water, “what a perfect spot for a sauna!”
The door closed behind us like the door of an ice-house, as if it were six or eight inches thick. Ursula and I commented on the sense of well-being that filled the little solidly built log cabin. The interior smelled of cedar, of ferns, of polished rocks, of water. Over everything drifted the scent of eucalyptus trees.
“Ursula,” Peter said, “why don’t you use the dressing room first? Then Allert and I will take our turn.”
She put down her tumbler and disappeared. She returned with her torso wrapped in a white towel. For only a moment or two Peter and I left her alone tilting the cold glass to her lips and watching fragile cords of flame binding themselves tightly about the log glowing in the enormous fireplace. It took us only a moment or two to strip down and hang our clothes on the wooden pegs as Ursula had done, and to wrap ourselves in the heavy terry cloth towels. One of Peter’s black socks dropped to the floor. Ursula’s clothes were bunched in silken shapelessness on the wooden peg.
“You look like a pair of old Romans,” she said, and the three of us clinked together our tumblers hard, with gusto. Ursula had removed her jewelry and, clearly enough, was pleased to be standing between Peter and me in her white towel. She was holding the upper edge of her towel with a soft hand.
“Yes, Peter,” I said, “it was clever of you to locate all this sensual isolation in the very midst of so much magnificent desolation.”
“But this is only the beginning, my friend. You’ll see.”
And then quietly, seriously, peacefully, we entered the sauna. The rose-colored light, the flagstone floor, the walls of cedar planking, the tranquility of the intense heat, the now heady smell of eucalyptus, suddenly the power of this kind of languid confinement was far more considerable than I had thought.
“Actually,” Peter said, “it is best to spread the towels on the benches and then to sit or lie on them.”
Ursula loosened her towel, removed it, placed it on the hot wooden slats between Peter and me, and slowly leaned back against the cedar wall with her knees to her chin. Her knees were together only for comfort, just as her heels for the same reason were spread apart, and her eyes were open and level while her lips, her heavy lips, were agreeably relaxed. She did not intend to hide her breasts with her knees though she was doing so. Already there was appearing on the cellulous density of Ursula’s body a heat rash indistinguishable from the rough discoloration of the sex rash that was so periodically familiar on her chest and neck. I knew at once that Ursula was thinking and at the same time pleasantly daydreaming in the intense heat.
Peter and I spread our towels, he assuming a perfectly upright Yoga position to Ursula’s right, I reclining into a half-leaning position to her left. Already the rose-colored light had dimmed perceptibly, while time had disappeared completely in the intense heat. Back straight, abdominal muscles visibly tight, ankles crossed, hands on spread knees, in this way Peter had turned himself into a living religious artifact constructed only for the sake of the receptacle that was his lap. And in the receptacle of Peter’s lap lay the hunched conglomerate of his still dormant sexual organs.
My friend did not move except occasionally to lick his lips. Ursula was slack and motionless. I lay massively sprawled with my forearm on the towel, my hip against Ursula, my large smooth shoulder propped against the cedar wall. Our eyes were dry, our skin was dry, with all the clarity of a peaceful dream our immobility was giving way in slow motion to fragments of action: Peter ladling oil of eucalyptus onto hot rocks; Ursula smiling at the bland rear view of Peter’s nudity and thrusting a dry hand between her thighs; I shifting and rolling onto my back with knees raised and feet flat to the towel and hands clasped beneath my head; Peter turning with ladle in hand; Ursula reaching down more firmly, more gently, and pleasing herself with one finger, with several; Peter resuming his Yoga position; Peter ladling out the oil of distant trees; I placing the flat of my right foot against Ursula’s hip; Peter sitting again with his hands on his knees and his spine in a curve; Ursula placing her heels together and then spreading wide her knees and arms toward Peter, toward me.