The Favourite Game & Beautiful Losers

by Leonard Cohen

  “Lie beside me,” Norma’s voice, maybe Breavman’s.

  Sudden close-up of her body part by part, lingering over the mounds of her thighs, which are presented immense and shadowed, the blue denim tight on the flesh. The fan of creases between her thighs. Camera searches her jacket for the shape of breasts. She exhumes a pack of cigarettes. Activity is studied closely. Her fingers move like tentacles. Manipulation of cigarette skilled and suggestive. Fingers are slow, violent, capable of holding anything.

  He flicks his sight like a dry fly and whips back the shape he’s caught. She makes an O of her mouth and pushes out a smoke ring with her tongue.

  “Let’s go swimming.”

  They stand, they walk, they collide in a loud rush of clothing. Face each other with eyes closed. Camera holds each face, one after the other. They kiss blindly, missing mouths, finding them wet. They fall into a noise of crickets and breathing.

  “No, this is too serious now.”

  Camera records them lying in silence.

  There are distances between each word.

  “Then let’s go swimming.”

  Camera follows them to the shore. They go through the woods with difficulty, the audience has forgotten where they are going, it takes so long the branches will not let them by.

  “Oh, let me see you.”

  “I’m not so pretty underneath. You stand over there.”

  She moves to the other side of an orchard of reeds and now they cross every picture like lines of rain. The moon is a shore-stone someone lucky has found.

  So she emerges wet, her skin tightened by gooseflesh, and the whole bright screen enfolds him, lenses and machinery.

  “No, don’t touch me. It’s not so bad then. Don’t move. I’ve never done this to anyone.”

  Her hair was wet on his stomach. His mind broke into postcards.

  Dear Krantz

  What she did what she did what she did

  Dear Bertha

  You must limp like her or maybe even look like I knew nothing was lost

  Dear Hitler

  Take away the torches I’m not guilty I had to have this

  “Will you walk me down to the village? I promised I’d telephone and it must be late.”

  “You’re not going to phone him now?”

  “I said I would.”

  “But after this?”

  She touched his cheek. “You know that I have to.”

  “I’ll wait at the fire.”

  When she was gone he folded his sleeping bag. He couldn’t find his right moccasin but that didn’t matter. Sticking out of her kit-bag he noticed a packet of Ban the Bomb petition forms. He crouched beside the fire and scribbled signatures.

  I. G. Farben

  Mister Universe

  Joe Hill

  Wolfgang Amadeus Jolson

  Ethel Rosenberg

  Uncle Tom

  Little Boy Blue

  Rabbi Sigmund Freud.

  He shoved the forms down her sleeping bag and headed for the highway, which was streaked with headlights. Nothing could help the air.

  What did she look like that important second?

  She stands in my mind alone, unconnected to the petty narrative. The colour of the skin was startling, like the white of a young branch when the green is thumb-nailed away. Nipples the colour of bare lips. Wet hair a battalion of glistening spears laid on her shoulders.

  She was made of flesh and eyelashes.

  But you said she was lame, perhaps like Bertha would be from the fall?

  I don’t know.

  Why can’t you tell Shell?

  My voice would depress her.

  Shell touched Breavman’s cheek.

  “Tell me the rest of the story.”

  7

  Tamara had long legs, God knows how long they were. Some -times at the meetings she used up three chairs. Her hair was tangled and black. Breavman tried to select one coil and follow where it fell and weaved. It made his eyes feel as though he had walked into a closet of dustless cobwebs.

  Breavman and Krantz wore special costumes for hunting Communist women. Dark suits, vests which buttoned high on their shirts, gloves and umbrellas.

  They attended every meeting of the Communist Club. They sat imperially among the open-collared members who were munching their sandwich lunches out of paper bags.

  During a dull speech on American germ-warfare Krantz whispered: “Breavman, why are paper bags full of white bread so ugly?”

  “I’m glad you asked, Krantz. They are advertisements for the frailty of the body. If a junkie wore his hypodermic needle pinned to his lapel you’d feel exactly the same disgust. A bag bulging with food is a kind of visible bowel. Trust the Bolsheviks to wear their digestive systems on their sleeves!”

  “Sufficient, Breavman. I thought you’d know.”

  “Look at her, Krantz!”

  Tamara appropriated another chair for her mysterious limbs. At the same moment the chairman interrupted the speaker and waved his gavel at Krantz and Breavman.

  “If you two jokers don’t shut up you’re getting right out of here.”

  They stood up to make a formal apology.

  “Siddown, siddown, just keep quiet.”

  Korea had swarmed with Yankee insects. They had bombs filled with contagious mosquitoes.

  “Now I have some questions for you, Krantz. What goes on under those peasant blouses and skirts she always wears? How high do her legs go up? What happens after her wrists plunge into her sleeves? Where do her breasts begin?”

  “That’s why you’re here, Breavman.”

  Tamara had gone to his high-school but he didn’t notice her then because she was fat. They took the same route to school, but he never noticed her. Lust was training his eyes to exclude everything he could not kiss.

  But now she was slender and tall. Her ripe lower lip curved over its own little shadow. She moved heavily, though, as if her limbs were still bound with the mass of flesh she remembered with bitterness.

  “Do you know one of the main reasons why I want her?”

  “I know the main reason.”

  “You’re wrong, Krantz. It’s because she lives one street away from me. She belongs to me for the same reason the park does.”

  “You’re a very sick boy.”

  A minute later Krantz said: “These people are half right about you, Breavman. You’re an emotional imperialist.”

  “You thought about that for a long time, didn’t you?”

  “A while.”

  “It’s good.”

  They shook hands solemnly. They exchanged umbrellas. They tightened each other’s ties. Breavman kissed Krantz on each cheek in the manner of a French general awarding medals.

  The chairman hammered his gavel to preserve the meeting.

  “Out! We’re not interested in a vaudeville show. Go perform on the mountain!”

  The mountain meant Westmount. They decided to accept his advice. They practised a soft-shoe routine at the Lookout, delighting in their own absurdity. Breavman never could master the steps, but he liked swinging the umbrella.

  “Do you know why I love Communist women?”

  “I do, Breavman.”

  “You’re wrong again. It’s because they don’t believe in the world.”

  They sat on the stone wall, their backs to the river and city.

  “Very soon, Krantz, very soon I’m going to be in a room with her. We’re going to be in a room. There’s going to be a room around us.”

  “So long, Breavman, I’ve got to study.”

  Krantz’s house wasn’t far. He meant it, he really went. It was the first time Krantz had –

  “Hey!” Breavman called. “You broke the dialogue.”

  He was out of hearing.

  8

  “Don’t you see it, Tamara, don’t you see that both sides, both sides of every fight, they’re both always using germ-warfare?”

  He was walking with her in the park behind his house, telling the
secret of conflict and the habits of nocturnal goldfish and why poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

  Then he was in a room undressing her. He couldn’t believe his hands. The kind of surprise when the silver paper comes off the triangle of Gruyère in one piece.

  Then she said no and bundled her clothes against her breasts.

  He felt like an archaeologist watching the sand blow back. She was putting on her bra. He helped her with the clasp just to show that he wasn’t a maniac.

  Then he asked why four times.

  Then he stood at the window.

  Tell her you love her, Breavman. That’s what she wants to hear. He came back and rubbed her back.

  Now he was working in the small of her back.

  Say I love you. Say it. One-two-three, now.

  He was getting an occasional finger under the elastic.

  She crossed her ankles and seemed to squeeze her thighs together in some kind of private pleasure. This gesture shivered his spine.

  Then he dived at her thighs, which were floating and damp. The flesh splashed up. He used his teeth. He didn’t know whether the wetness was blood or spit or lubricating perfume.

  Then there were the strange strained voices which had turned into whispers, rushed and breathless, as though time were against them, bringing police and parents to the keyhole.

  “I better put something on.”

  “I’m afraid I’m tight.”

  “It’s beautiful that you’re tight.”

  Who was she, who owned her body?

  “You see, I’m tight.”

  “Oh yes.”

  Congratulations, like slow-falling confetti, covered his mind with sleep, but someone said: “Tell me a poem.”

  “Let me look at you first.”

  “Let me look at you too.”

  Then he walked her home. It was his personal time of the morning. The sun was threatening in the east. The newsboys were limping with their grey bags. The sidewalks looked new.

  Then he took her hands in his hands and spoke with serious appreciation:

  “Thank you, Tamara.”

  Then she slapped his face with the hand that was holding the key.

  “It sounds so horrible. As if I let you take something. As if you got something out of me.”

  She cried for the seconds it took until a line of blood appeared on his cheek.

  Then they hugged to repair everything.

  When she was inside she put her mouth to the window of the door and they kissed through the glass. He wanted her to go first and she wanted him to go first. He hoped his back looked good.

  C’mon, everybody! He exulted as he marched home, newest member of the adult community. Why weren’t all the sleepers hanging out of their windows cheering? Didn’t they admire his ritual of love and deceit? He visited his park, stood on the nursery hill and looked over the city to the grey river. He was finally involved with the sleepers, the men who went to work, the buildings, the commerce.

  Then he threw stones at Krantz’s window because he didn’t want to go to bed.

  “Steal a car, Krantz. Chinese soup time.”

  Breavman told everything in three minutes and then they drove in silence. He leaned his head against the window glass expecting it to be cool, but it wasn’t.

  “I know why you’re depressed. Because you told me.”

  “Yes. I dishonoured it twice.”

  It was worse than that. He wished he loved her, it must be so nice to love her, and to tell her, not once or five times, but over and over, because he knew he was going to be with her in rooms for a long time.

  Then what about rooms, wasn’t every room the same, hadn’t he known what it would be like, weren’t all the rooms they passed exactly the same, wherever a woman was stretched out, even a forest was a glass room, wasn’t it like with Lisa, under the bed and when they played the Soldier and the Whore, wasn’t it the same, even to the listening for enemy sounds?

  He told the story again, six years later, to Shell, but he didn’t dishonour it that time. Once, when he went away from Shell for a little while, he wrote her this:

  “I think that if Elijah’s chariot, or Apollo’s, or any mythical boat of the sky, should pull up at my doorstep, I would know exactly where to sit, and as we flew I’d recall with delicious familiarity all the clouds and mysteries we passed.”

  9

  Tamara and Breavman rented a room in the east end of the city. They told their families they were visiting out-of-town friends.

  “I’m used to being alone,” his mother said.

  On the last morning they leaned out of the small high window, squashing shoulders, looking at the street below.

  Alarms went off through the boarding house. Bulging ash-cans sentried the dirty sidewalk. Cats cruised between them.

  “You won’t believe this, Tamara, but there was a time I could have frozen one of those cats to the sidewalk.”

  “That’s very useful, frozen cat.”

  “I can’t make things happen so easily these days, alas. Things happen to me. I couldn’t even hypnotize you last night.”

  “You’re a failure, Larry, but I’m still crazy about your balls. Yummy.”

  “My lips are sore from kissing.”

  “So are mine.”

  They kissed softly and then she touched his lips with her hand. She was often very tender and it always surprised him because he hadn’t commanded it.

  They had hardly been out of bed for the past five days. Even with the window wide open, the air in the room smelt like the bed. The early-morning buildings filled him with nostalgia and he couldn’t understand it until he realized that they were exactly the colour of old tennis shoes.

  She rubbed her shoulder against his chin to feel the bristle. He looked at her face. She had closed her eyes to savour the morning breeze against her eyelids.

  “Cold?”

  “Not if you stay.”

  “Hungry?”

  “I couldn’t face another anchovy and that’s all we have.”

  “We shouldn’t have bought such expensive stuff. It doesn’t quite go with the room, does it?”

  “Neither do we,” she said. “Everybody in the house seems to be getting up for work.”

  “And here we are: refugees from Westmount. You’ve betrayed your new socialist heritage.”

  “You can talk all you want if you let me smell you.”

  The cigarettes were crushed. He straightened one out and lit it for her. She blew a mouthful of smoke into the morning.

  “Smoking with nothing on is so – so luxurious.”

  She shivered over the word. He kissed the nape of her neck and they resumed their idle watch in the window.

  “Cold?”

  “I’d like to stay for a year,” she said.

  “That’s called marriage.”

  “Now don’t get all frightened and prickly.”

  A very important thing happened.

  They caught sight of an old man in an oversize raincoat standing in a doorway across the street, pressed against the door as if he were hiding.

  They decided to watch him, just to see what he did.

  He leaned forward, looked up and down the street, and satisfied that it was empty, gathered the folds of his raincoat around him like a cape and stepped out on the sidewalk.

  Tamara flicked a roll of ashes out the window. It fell like a feather and then disintegrated in the rising wind. Breavman watched the small gesture.

  “I can’t stand how beautiful your body is.”

  She smiled and leaned her head against his shoulder.

  The old man in the swaddling coat kneeled and peered under a parked car. He got up, brushed his knees, and looked around.

  The wind moved in her hair, detaching and floating a wisp. She squeezed her arm between them and flicked the butt. He flicked his out too. They fell like tiny doomed parachutists.

  Then, as if the butts were a signal, everything began to happen faster.
/>   The sun jelled suddenly between two buildings, intensely darkening the charade of chimneys.

  A citizen climbed into his car and drove away.

  A cat appeared a few feet from where the old man was standing and crossed in front of him, proud, starved, and muscular. With a flurry of folds the old man leaped after the animal. Effortlessly, the cat changed its direction and softly padded down stone stairs to a cellar entrance. The man coughed and followed, stooped, baffled, and climbed back to the street empty-handed.

  They had watched him idly, as people watch water, but now they looked hard.

  “You’ve got gooseflesh, Tamara.”

  She refastened a wisp of floating hair. He studied her fingers in the exercise. He remembered them on various parts of his body.

  He thought he would be content if he were condemned to live that moment over and over for the rest of his life. Tamara naked and young, her fingers weaving a lock of hair. The sun tangled in TV aerials and chimneys. The morning breeze whipping the mist from the mountain. A mysterious old man whose mystery he didn’t care to learn. Why should he go looking for better visions?

  He couldn’t make things happen.

  In the street the old man was lying on his stomach under the bumper of a car, grasping after a cat he had managed to corner between the kerb and the wheel. He kicked his feet in excitement, trying to get the cat by the hind legs, getting scratched and nipped. He finally succeeded. He extracted the cat from the shadows and held it above his head.

  The cat wriggled and convulsed like a pennant in a violent wind.

  “My God,” said Tamara. “What’s he doing with it?”

  They forgot each other and leaned out the window.

  The old man staggered under the struggle of the big cat, his face buried in his chest away from the threshing claws. He regained his footing. Wielding the cat as if it were an axe, his feet spread wide, he brought it down hard against the sidewalk. They could hear the head smash from their window. It convulsed like a landed fish.

  Tamara turned her head away.

  “What’s he doing now?” she wanted to be told.

  “He’s putting it in a bag.”