“Allert,” she called, precisely as my extended hands and head and puffy shoulders struck the blue water and I, with lungs distended and eyes open, began to descend. I took the small and feminine sound of her voice with me on my way to the bottom. As I dove down, a huge man in blue trunks upended in a small deep body of water that was pitching and sliding in counter-violence to the afternoon’s heavy seas, the faint clear welcome voice remained afloat in my ear, like a second swimmer undulating downward with violent strokes. My name was submerged in the sound of her voice, her voice in my name, while I myself was deeply submerged in the pool of captive sea water that was thoroughly still now and of a darker blue than before. My eyes were open and I was working my arms and pectoral muscles in the slow rhythm of some luminous under-water butterfly. The nearest wall of the pool was driven into the water like a blue knife at a steep angle. A ladder-like series of empty holes for the hands and feet climbed sharply to the surface on which the shadows of spray and foam and the girl’s outstretched leg were falling. I knew I was quite alone in the pool.
The invigorating pain of held breath, the black and white tiles like those of a lavatory floor, a drain hole covered with wire mesh, body more sensitive than ever to the weight of the water and the exertion of flotation, suddenly I had in fact achieved the bottom, as I was not always able to do on such occasions, and I put the flat of one hand on the tiles, concentrated on remaining down there as if anchored by a chunk of rusted iron, waited until I had surely propitiated the god of all those in fear of drowning at sea, and then pushed off, rolling onto my back, and prolonged the ritualized agony of the return to the surface by forcing my stiffened body to rise of its own accord, unaided by the use of either stroking hands or kicking feet.
“Allert,” she called only moments after I re-emerged head and shoulders into the random forces of that bright day, “it’s dangerous to swim when the sea is so rough!”
With a laugh and one upraised slippery arm I acknowledged her concern for my welfare and also conveyed my appreciation of her presence at the edge of the pool where she sat in splendid girlish near-nudity with one childish leg thrust over the water and dripping. I waved again, I snorted, I shook off the water, my shoulders heaved, I struck out to cover the short choppy distance to the glare of the fiery ladder. Gasping repeatedly and voraciously for breath, and feeling the dead flow of all my returning weight, and managing to catch hold of the hot aluminum that was curled like the horns of some great artificial goat, slowly I dragged myself back to the deck of the pitching ship and to the heat of the white towel which, while I was on the bottom of the pool, she had spread out behind her.
“Allert,” she said as I collapsed face down on the towel, “I am not going into the pool today. It’s too rough. I am not as strong as you are.”
I grunted and rested my cheek on my soft pinkish hands, one of which was pillowing the other, and felt the upper portion of the small seated buttocks fitting tightly into my hollow side while the water trickled slowly from my ears and mouth. I did not need to open my eyes to know she was there, since I could see her with my eyes quite shut: scant and pale blue halter and bikini bottom indistinguishable from underwear, small nubile body hairless and unmarked except for a scar in the shape of a fishhook below her navel, small face whose weight and shape I could contain nicely in one hand, soft intensely black hair concealed now beneath her bathing cap, little white rubber bathing cap with the flaps upraised like those of a pilot’s old-fashioned leather helmet after an arduous flight. Even with the warm water trickling from one of my ears and the pain subsiding from my lungs and the ship pitching and rolling in a ring of bright spray, still in the darkness I could see her perfectly because, as I had long since decided, she was the only other person on the ship I was willing to know.
“Allert,” she said more softly, though we were alone on the stern of the rising and falling ship and alone in the wind and sun, “how does it happen that you are such a smooth lover?”
“You seem to be speaking about oil,” I replied, humming and mouthing the words with pleasure, “and not at all speaking about a man. Shame on you!”
But of course she responded at once to the kindly tone of my chiding by leaning down and placing her lips against the loose fat along my left shoulder and suddenly creating with her mouth, as small as it was, a sensation of extreme and pointed suction. Then she rested her cheek where her mouth had been and sighed, stretched out beside me and began gently stroking me in the rolls of fat along my ribs. Her cheek on my shoulder was like a wafer in a field of snow.
“Allert,” she whispered, as we lay there under a curving sheet of bright spray, “let’s go down to my cabin right now and strip off our clothes. Shall we?”
Her name, as I learned inevitably and fairly soon in the voyage, was Ariane. I thought that the name Ariane was quite typical of those elegant names bestowed so often on female children in poor families. At once I recognized the name for the type it was, and recognized its purpose, its poor taste, its pathos. At once I found the name extremely appealing because of its simplicity and sentimentality).
Ariane was the name of the young woman I knew so emotionally and so briefly on the cruise. I do not find the name appealing now.
“Allert,” Peter said, “I have a request. I would like to give you and Ursula an in-depth psychological test. Ursula agrees. And, after all, there is no reason why our friendship should not further my line of work. You must admit that the two of you would be excellent subjects. What do you say?”
He was smoking his pipe. I was smoking my cigar. Peter’s darkened study smelled as if everything in it was constructed not of wood and leather, which was actually the case, but of compressed blocks of rich and acrid tobacco. Green tobacco, I thought, searching for my friend’s profile in the unlighted room, remarkable green tobacco evocative of the time when I myself was a helpless boy.
“You know what I think of psychiatrists,” I said with the cigar not inches from my waiting lips. “But for you, my friend, anything. In the right company I have nothing to hide.”
Unfortunately Peter was not able to administer the test before his death.
My life has always been uncensored, overexposed. Each event, each situation, each image stands before me like a piece of film blackened from overexposure to intense light. The figures within my photographic frames are slick but charred. In the middle of the dark wood I am a golden horse lying dead on its side across the path and rotting.
“Why do I have the impression that we two are the only people on board this ship?”
“Perhaps because you are not in general friendly, Allert.”
“But I am remarkably friendly as you well know.” “Besides, you are certainly aware of the officers and crew. You are aware of them all the time.”
“Perhaps after all these years I am jealous.”
“Poor Allert, there is no need to be.”
Peter, who was lean and naked, bent his knees and clasped his ankles and arched his spine and drew himself into his favorite Yoga position. His lap formed a broad and angular receptacle bearing his genitals which, I noted, lay there like some kind of excreted pile of waste fired in a blazing kiln and then varnished.
“The one thing you ought to know, Peter,” Ursula was saying, “is that Allert and I go very well together in bed. We always have.”