Ursula’s honesty was quite enough to shatter the glaze on Peter’s genitals.
My cheeks were burning from the wind and sun, my lungs were filled with the smell of the sea. It was dusk and I was returning from my newly discovered place of utter privacy, a position on the bow of the ship concealed by the wheels and plates of a great winch painted with thick and glistening black paint. I had watched the sun lowering in the western quadrant, I had detected no clue of approaching land. Was I free or lost, exhilarated or merely flushed with grief? I did not know. I did not know what to make of myself or of all these elements, these details, this fresh but oddly traumatic moment of sunset, except to intuit that I was more youthful and yet closer to death than I had ever been. At least my feelings were mixed, to say the least, when I inserted the brass key in the lock of my cabin door. The porthole, which gave only onto the deck, was sealed.
I saw immediately the small photograph lying undisturbed on the flat leather surface of my locked and as yet unpacked valise. Each object was in itself quite ordinary, the valise, the photograph, though taken together, the one on top of the other, each diminished in some small way the reality of the other, or at least altered it. With my hand on the brass door handle, and my hair and figure still disheveled from the touch of the now vanished wind, standing in this way just inside my cabin and seeing the photograph on the valise which in its turn lay on its stand, it was then that a new dictum passed slowly through my mind to the effect that the smallest alteration in the world of physical objects produces the severest and most frightening transformation of reality. Compared with the sight of the photograph curling slightly at the edges and lying somewhat off-center in the field of golden leather — ordinary, improbable, inexplicable, ringed with invisible chains of unanswerable questions — actual vandalism of my silent cabin, had it in fact occurred, would have been nothing.
I sat on my bed, leaned forward, and took the edge of the aging photograph between my thumb and index finger. I held it as one might hold the wings of a submissive butterfly. Slowly I brought the photograph within range of my unemotional scrutiny. The two small white figures, like fading maggots, were apparently devouring each other sexually with carnivorous joy. I brought the picture closer to my quiet eye and stared at the crack that ran like a bolt of lightning across the glazed emulsion of the much-handled print. After a few more moments of study, I made up my mind that this was a different photograph from the one produced surreptitiously by the wireless officer in the dining saloon, though I could not be sure. It seemed to me that the figures were smaller now and more suggestive of another century.
I decided against destroying the picture. I decided against searching immediately for the wireless operator and facing him down. Though it was true that the unexplained appearance of the old-fashioned photograph in my locked stateroom was somehow worse than receiving a poison-pen letter, nonetheless I decided not to return the picture to its owner. If the wireless operator was attempting to intimidate me through the photograph or tell me something about myself that I did not know, all for the purpose of preventing my friendship with the young woman in the blue halter, he would soon realize that I was more formidable than he had thought.
No sooner had I made my decision and slipped the photograph into my jacket pocket than I leaned forward on impulse and unstrapped my valise, unlocked it, opened it wide. And though the articles inside were unfamiliar and appeared not to be mine, as if Ursula had determined that my transformation as a result of travel would be complete in every way, nonetheless I unpacked my valise at last and found an appropriate shelf or drawer for each of the articles I was so unaccustomed to see or touch. I felt as if I had violated the coffin of some unknown child. I stored the valise in the bottom of the closet, hooked open the cabin door with its brass hook, unscrewed the fat brass wing nuts of my single porthole and thrust it ajar, and then lay down on my unfamiliar bed to wait.
The photograph is still in my possession. It is the last and in some ways an accidental addition to my extensive pornographic collection, though I have kept the fact of its existence hidden from Ursula all this time. I chose not to submit that photograph as evidence at the prolonged and sickening ordeal of the trial.
“Mr. Vanderveenan,” she called as I reached the top of the ladder and rose head and shoulders into the wind and glare of the uppermost deck, “won’t you join me for a game of net ball? I can find no one at all to play with me.”
She was wearing a blue halter, tight blue denim trousers, black dancing slippers, and her hair tied back in a knotted strip of orange velveteen. She was standing in the wind beside the high net and balancing in one hand a black leather ball six or eight inches in diameter. Her waist between the lower edge of the halter and the upper edge of the leather-belted blue pants was bare. I recognized that her costume was the standard one generally intended to cause the viewer to imagine the belt unbuckled and the pants unzippered and hanging loose and partly open from the hips, and yet the naked waist was as smooth and childlike as the expression on her guileless face.
“I would like very much to play your net ball,” I said into the invisible wind. “But tell me, how did you know my name?”
We were close together and partially concealed by the two pale blue smokestacks that were oval in cross section and leaning back at a wind-swept rakish angle in the thrust of our journey. The ball in her hand was a tight ripe sectioned fruit of black leather.
“The purser, of course. Didn’t you know that he’s one of the officers at our table? He knows the names and faces of all the passengers on the cruise.”
“I see. The purser. Apparently I have not been aware of him.”
We were closer together and I was quite familiar with the implications of the belted pants, the lure of the naked midriff. It was a commonplace attire. So far she promised nothing that was not in fact commonplace, except that her nearest shoulder blade was bare and poignant and that the miniature features of her face were grouped together in distinctive harmony. Even if she was an adult instead of a child and was a person who had actually lived beyond her majority, as I assumed she had, still she could never have come even close to half my age, a notion that engaged my attention occasionally from this moment on.
“You don’t know the purser? Really? He’s the one with the handlebar mustache. He’s a favorite of mine.”
“And who is the young officer who has assigned himself the seat next to mine at our table?”
“Oh, that’s the wireless operator. He’s another favorite of mine.”
“You have many favorites.”
She was smiling, I was closer than arm’s length to her naked shoulder, I told myself that she could not possibly wish me to kiss her lips or even to touch her small bare shoulder so soon despite the inviting way she balanced the black ball, and despite her smile, her steady eyes, her upturned face. And yet I could in fact imagine this young person readily unbuckling her tight pants here in the space for games and athletics between smokestacks fore and aft and two white lifeboats on either side. And yet the poles of sex and friendship, I told myself, did not always imply the bright spark leaping between the two, at least not immediately.
“If you don’t know the purser,” she said, glancing down at the black leather ball, “then you don’t know that my name is Ariane.”
I reached for the ball, I felt the heat from the nearest smokestack mingling with the chill of the invisible wind and the bright light of the sun. Far below us a steward was moving along the hidden deck playing the three impersonal notes of his luncheon gong. The young woman’s breathing was reflected in her bare navel as well as in the natural rhythm of the breasts supported only by the triangulation of the blue halter. Between her shoulder blades the halter was tied, I saw, in a crisp knot.