Intimate Conflicts : The thoughts a man can get up to while waiting for his wife! : LYING IN BED, <i> By J.D. Landis (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill: $19.95; 296 pp.)</i>

To read this novel is to enter into a night of webby mysteries. Simple as the premise is--a man lies in bed awaiting the return of his wife--it quickly opens into a dangerous adventure of mind and of heart, of intellect and passion, of language and eros.

The narrator, John Chambers--born rich, bred to heady disenchantment--is a failed rhetorician, or rather, a man failed by words, by way of having been a boy failed by family and an adolescent failed by sex. After having lost his virginity, he’d sworn off the pleasures of the flesh. He’d vowed to be a true ascetic priest, one of the “great, fruitful, inventive spirits” Nietzsche wrote about in “On the Genealogy of Morals.” With no need to earn money, no will to act, his became a life of contemplation, of pondering the twin enigmas of language and of consciousness; he eventually discarded speech itself, moving through his circumscribed world in wordlessness, losing himself in the solace of music--until the day he discovered a diary lying in the street.

John Chambers cracked its code (reading just a little; just enough to be smitten) and tracked down its owner: Clara--Clara Bell, no less, impossibly named and saucily lovely. His silence was broken. He had found his mirror, his lissome sex-and-soul mate. Turns out that no one but John had ever been able to decipher her handwriting. And that’s not all that had been impenetrable. Though seemingly promiscuous, she’d engaged solely in mutual onanism; she was, unbeknown to John, a virgin on their wedding day.

That Clara runs a quilt shop is altogether fitting, as everything in their marriage, and in this novel, is layered, interwoven. She is visual; he oral and aural. He trembles before the power of words, reduces them to morphemes; she adores a story. Their lives are stitched together by verbal and physical passion: “Clara and I have always talked to one another,” John says. “When I have been able to take my eyes from her eyes, as I was speaking, or from the wet haze of her lips, as she was speaking, I have seen other couples, silent, watching us as we spoke. I could almost see their ears bending toward us like wintry plants toward the sun. Our intimacy, in the privacy of our conversation . . . could fill a room. And I know that those people looking at us talk and trying to hear our words were imagining our sex life.” At another point he says: “In a good marriage, it is impossible to separate sex from conversation.”

Their union is one of lust and erudition intermingled, of wordplay as foreplay, of intimacy bordering on terror. “No sex is safe,” John claims. “And sex in marriage . . . is the most dangerous sex of all. Sex in marriage is always threatening, in and of itself, to renounce its own powers in mockery of your commitment and to leave you in perpetual grief and mourning. The ravages of AIDS to the body cannot compare to the devastation to the mind wrought by the slow evaporation of passion. AIDS kills you; marriage, mercilessly, lets you live.”

In this marriage, however, passion is in no danger of evaporating; it is more likely to consume the bride and groom, to vaporize both parties. On the night the novel takes place, Clara has left their loft to go out on an undisclosed errand. John at first savors this rare solitude. But alone with his music and his yearning and his fears, his ghosts and dogged shadows, his mind rises to a frenzy. He decides to do the thing he’d promised not to do, the thing she probably wants him to do. He decides to read her diaries. All of them. Book after quilt-covered book.

But he is thwarted by the bell--by the arrival of a young man delivering Chinese food. This cheeky interlocutor quickly stokes the chaos of John’s thoughts and feelings. Just when the novel seems to be in danger of resting on too much mental gamesmanship, John commits an act so dark, so primal that reality loses its mooring. It is also the one act guaranteed to rouse his father--just a phone call, a universe, away--from estrangement into horror, and that, further, could destroy John’s life.

At this point, all forms of understanding, all assumptions are called into question. The diaries, to which John returns, his mental state precarious, titillate and threaten. What is written therein is witty, erotic, nervily thrilling, a patchwork of memory, deceit and desire. How much is true? Has he known his wife at all? The more graphic the entries, the deeper the enigma. She has, it would seem, invented herself--or has he invented her? Where has she gone to? And does she intend to return?

“Lying in Bed” is a novel of the most intimate conflicts. Ultimately, it comes down to the contest between annihilation--the dominion of the darkness embedded in the mind and heart of each of us, the ruin of the body--and regeneration. The shock of this novel isn’t its plot, its tricky sleights of hand or its frankly rendered sex. The shock is in its unabashed intelligence, and, in the end, its grace. One sees John Chambers as a sort of latter-day Leopold Bloom, wandering the treacherous enclosures of his room, his ruminations, of his night--possessed and dispossessed, moving and moved--delivered to a fragile seed of reverence, to Clara, to a not-unironic yes.