Why was she a Communist?
Because she played the guitar. Because the copper bosses shot Joe Hill. Because notenemos ni aviones ni cañones, and all her friends had died at Jarama. Because General MacArthur was a criminal and ruled Japan as a personal kingdom. Because the Wobblies sang into tear gas. Because Sacco loved Vanzetti. Because Hiroshima hurt her eyes and she was collecting names on a Ban the Bomb petition and was often told to go back to Russia.
Did she limp?
When she was very tired you noticed it. She usually wore a long Mexican skirt.
And the Mexican ring?
Yes, she was engaged to a chartered accountant. She assured me that he was progressive. But how could someone who was waiting for a revolution be a chartered accountant? I wanted to know. And how could she, with her ideas of freedom, commit herself to conventional marriage?
“We have to be effective in society. Communists aren’t bohemians. That’s a luxury of Westmount.”
Did you love her?
I loved to kiss her breasts, the few times she let me.
How many times, how many times?
Twice. And I was allowed to touch. Arms, stomach, pubic hair, I almost made the jewel of my list but her jeans were too tight. She was four years older than me.
She was engaged?
But I was young. She kept telling me I was a baby. So nothing we did was really important. She phoned him long distance every night. I stood beside her as she spoke. They talked about apartments and wedding plans. It was the prosaic adult world, the museum of failure, and I had nothing to do with it.
What about her face when she talked to him?
I believe I could read guilt on it.
Liar.
We both felt terribly guilty, I guess. So we worked hard to collect more signatures. But we loved to lie together beside the fire. Our tiny circle of light seemed so far from everything. I told her stories. She made up a blues called “My Golden Bourgeois Baby Sold His House For Me.” No, that’s a lie.
What did you do during the day?
We hitch-hiked all over the Laurentians. We’d go down to a beach crowded with sun-bathers and we’d start singing. We were brown, we had good harmonies, people liked to listen to us even if they didn’t open their eyes. Then I’d talk.
“I’m not talking about Russia or America. I’m not even talking about politics. I’m talking about your bodies, the ones stretched out on this beach, the ones you’ve just smeared with sun-tan oil. Some of you are over-weight and some of you are too thin, and some of you are very proud. You all know your bodies. You’ve looked at them in mirrors, you’ve waited to hear them complimented, or touched with love. Do you want what you kiss to turn to cancer? Do you want to take handfuls of hair from your child’s scalp? You see, I’m not talking about Russia or America. I’m talking about bodies, which are all we have, and no government can restore one finger, one tooth, one inch of normal skin that is lost because of the poison in the air.…”
Did they listen?
They listened and most of them signed. I knew I could be Prime Minister because of the way their eyes listened. It didn’t matter what was said as long as the old words were used and the old chanting rhythm, I could have led them into a drowning ritual.…
Stop this fantasy right now. What were the bodies like on the beach?
Ugly and white and ruined by offices.
What did you do at night?
She helped me to her bare breasts and the clothed outline of her body.
Be more specific, will you?
The mountain released the moon, like a bubble it could no longer contain, with reluctance and pain. I was in a film and the machine was whirring into slower and slower motion.
A bat swooped over the fire and thudded into the pines. Norma closed her eyes and pressed the guitar closer. She sent a minor chord through his spine and into the forest.
America was lost, the scabs ruled everything, the skyscrapers of chrome would never budge, but Canada was here, infant dream, the stars high and sharp and cold, and the enemies were brittle and easy and English.
The firelight grazed over her, calling out a cheek, a hand, then waving it back to the darkness.
The camera takes them from faraway, moves through the forest, catches the glint of a raccoon’s eyes, examines the water, reeds, closed water-flowers, involves itself with mist and rocks.
“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?
&nbs
p; 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. Sometimes 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.
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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.
The Favorite Game Page 7