The Water-Method Man

'He's brushing his teeth, I guess,' Biggie said. 'For God's sake, at least shut the door!'

Just when everyone seemed to be straightened out and settled in their proper rooms, Ralph Packer appeared naked in the hall. Through the open bedroom door behind him, Matje could be heard enquiring what he thought he was doing. 'I am not going to pee out the window,' he shouted. 'There are bathrooms all over this bloody castle, and I intend to find one!'

Biggie sweetly led the nude Ralph to the right place.

'I'm sorry, Biggie,' Matje said, hurrying after Ralph with his pants.

'Es ist mir Wurst,' Biggie said, and touched Matje's tummy fondly. If Trumper had been there, he would have understood Biggie's Austrian dialect. 'It doesn't matter' was what it meant, but the literal translation was, 'It is sausage to me.'

Trumper wasn't where he could have heard her. He was having delicious love made to him by Tulpen; he was too drunk to appreciate such loving, really, but it did have a startling after effect: he found himself wide-awake and sitting up very sober. Tulpen was deeply asleep beside him, but when he kissed her feet to thank her, she smiled.

He couldn't sleep, though. He kissed Tulpen all over, but she couldn't be aroused.

Wide, wide awake, Trumper got up and dressed himself warmly; he wished it were morning. Tiptoeing to Colm's room, he kissed the boy and tucked him in. He went to look at the babies, and then listened to the other adults sleeping, but it wasn't enough. He tiptoed into Biggie and Couth's room and watched them sleeping in a warm tangle. Couth woke up. 'It's next door, down the hall,' he said, thinking that Bogus was looking for the bathroom.

Wandering around, Trumper found Ralph and Matje's room and looked in on them too. Ralph lay splayed out on his stomach, his hands and feet dangling off the bed. Across his broad, hairy back, tiny Matje lay sleeping like a flower on a compost heap.

Downstairs, Bogus opened the French doors to the pool room and let in the air. It was very cold, and the fog was moving out of the bay. Trumper knew that there was a barren rock island in the center of the bay, and that this was what he saw, revealed and concealed by the shifting fog. But if he stared hard, the island actually seemed to roll, to rise and fall, and if he stared very hard, he could see a broad, flat tail arch up and smack the sea so hard that the dogs whined in their sleep. 'Hello, Moby Dick,' Trumper whispered. Gob growled and Loom staggered to his feet and then collapsed.

In the kitchen, Bogus found some paper and sat down and began writing. His first sentence was one he'd written before: 'Her gynecologist recommended him to me.' Others followed and formed a paragraph. 'Ironic: the best urologist in New York is French. Dr Jean Claude Vigneron: ONLY BY APPOINTMENT. So I made one.'

What have I begun? he wondered. He didn't know. He put the paper with these crude beginnings in his pocket to save for a time when he had more to say.

He wished he understood what made him feel so restless. Then it occurred to him that he was actually at peace with himself for the first time in his life. He realized how much he'd been anticipating peace some day, but the feeling was not what he'd expected. He used to think that peace was a state he would achieve, but the peace he was feeling was like a force he'd submitted to. God, why should peace depress me? he thought. But he wasn't depressed, exactly. Nothing was exact.

He was chalking up his pool cue, thinking how he wanted the balls to break, when he became aware that he wasn't the only one who was up and awake in the sleeping house. 'That you, Big?' he said quietly, without turning around. (Later, he would lose another night's sleep wondering how he knew it was her.)

Biggie was careful; she only skirted the borders of her subject - the phase Colm was going through, how he was at the age when boys turn more naturally to a father than to a mother. 'I know it's going to be painful for you,' she told Bogus, 'but Colm's turning more and more to Couth. When you're here, I can tell the child is confused.'

'I'm going to Europe soon,' Trumper said bitterly. 'Then I won't be around to confuse him for a good long time.'

'I'm sorry,' Biggie said. 'I really like seeing you. I just don't like how it makes me feel, sometimes, when you're around.'

Trumper felt a strange meanness come over him; he wanted to tell Biggie that she simply resented being confronted with how happy he was with Tulpen. But that was insane; he wanted to tell her no such thing. He didn't even believe it. 'I get confused too,' he told her, and she nodded, agreeing with such sudden vigor that he felt embarrassed. Then she left him alone again, fleeing upstairs so quickly that he thought she must be trying not to cry in front of him. Or not to laugh!

He was thinking that he actually agreed with how Biggie felt - that he liked to see her, but didn't like the way he felt around her - when he thought he heard her coming back downstairs.

But this time it was Tulpen, and Trumper saw at a glance that she'd been awake for a while herself and that she'd probably just passed Biggie in the upstairs hall.

'Oh, shit,' he said. 'It's so complicated sometimes.' He went quickly over to her and hugged her; she seemed in need of some reassurance.

'I want to leave tomorrow,' Tulpen said.

'But it's Throgsgafen.'

'After the meal, then,' she said. 'I don't want to spend another night.'

'OK, OK,' he told her, 'I know, I know.' His voice went on comforting her without much meaning to his words. He knew that back in New York there'd be a week of trying to understand this, but it didn't pay to think too hard about what came after the holiday, about the often lonely business of living with someone. Surviving a relationship with any other human being sometimes seemed impossible to him. But so what? he thought.

'I love you,' he whispered to Tulpen.

'I know,' she said.

He took her back upstairs to bed, and just before she fell asleep, she asked him groggily, 'Why can't you just fall asleep next to me after we make love? Why does it wake you up? It puts me to sleep, but it wakes you up. That's not fair, because I wake up later and the bed's empty and I find you staring at the fish or watching the baby sleep or playing pool with your old wife ...'

He lay awake until dawn, trying to figure all that out. Tulpen was sleeping soundly and didn't wake up when Colm appeared at their bedside in layers of sweaters over his pajamas, wading boots and a wool hat. 'I know, I know,' Trumper whispered. 'If I come down to the dock, you can go down too.'

It was cold, but they were wearing lots of clothes; the slush had turned to ice and they slid on their bottoms down the steep flagstone path. The sun was hazy, but the air was clear inland and across the bay. Out to sea, a dense fog was slowly rolling in; it would take a while to reach them, though, and they had the clearest part of the coming day to themselves.