“That gives you four years at the outside, Breavman.”
His book of Montreal sketches appeared and was well received. He started seeing it on the bookshelves of his friends and relatives and he resented their having it. It was none of their business how Tamara’s breasts looked in the artificial moonlight of Stanley Street.
Canadians are desperate for a Keats. Literary meetings are the manner in which Anglophiles express passion. He read his sketches for small societies, large college groups, enlightened church meetings. He slept with as many pretty chairwomen as he could. He gave up conversation. He merely quoted himself. He could maintain an oppressive silence at a dinner-table to make the lovely daughter of the house believe he was brooding over her soul.
The only person he could joke with was Krantz.
The world was being hoaxed by a disciplined melancholy. All the sketches made a virtue of longing. All that was necessary to be loved widely was to publish one’s anxieties. The whole enterprise of art was a calculated display of suffering.
He walked with pale blonde girls along Westmount Boulevard. He told them he saw the stone houses as ruins. He hinted that they could fulfil themselves through him. He could lean against a fireplace with all the ambiguous tragedy of a blind Samson against the temple pillars.
Among certain commercial Jews he was considered a mild traitor who could not be condemned outright. They were dismayed by the possibility that he might make a financial success out of what he was doing. This their ulcers resented. His name was in the newspapers. He might not be an ideal member of the community but neither was Disraeli or Mendelssohn, whose apostasies the Jewish regard for attainment has always overlooked. Also, writing is an essential part of the Jewish tradition and even the degraded contemporary situation cannot suppress it. A respect for books and artistry will persist for another generation or two. It can’t go on forever without being reconsecrated.
Among certain Gentiles he was suspect for other reasons. His Semitic barbarity hidden under the cloak of Art, he was intruding on their cocktail rituals. They were pledged to Culture (like all good Canadians) but he was threatening the blood purity of their daughters. They made him feel as vital as a Negro. He engaged stockbrokers in long conversations about over-breeding and the loss of creative vitality. He punctuated his speech with Yiddish expressions which he never thought of using anywhere else. In their living-rooms, for no reason at all, he often broke into little Hasidic dances around the tea table.
He incorporated Sherbrooke Street into his general domain. He believed he understood its elegant sadness better than anyone else in the city. Whenever he went into one of the stores he always remembered that he was standing in what was once the drawing-room of a smart town house. He breathed a historical sigh for the mansions become brewery and insurance head offices. He sat on the steps of the museum and watched the chic women float into dress shops or walk their rich dogs in front of the Ritz. He watched people line up for buses, board, and zoom away. He always found that a mystery. He walked into lavatory-like new banks and wondered what everyone was doing there. He stared at pediments of carved grapevines. Gargoyles on the brown stone church. Intricate wooden balconies just east of Park. The rose window of another church spiked to prevent pigeons from roosting. All the old iron, glass, rock.
He had no plans for the future.
Early one morning he and Krantz (they hadn’t gone to bed the night before) sat on a low stone wall at the corner of Mackay and Sherbrooke and admonished the eight-thirty working-day crowds.
“The jig is up,” Breavman shouted. “It’s all over. Go back to your homes. Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars. Go straight to your homes. Return to bed. Can’t you see it’s all done with?”
“Consummatum est,” Krantz said.
Later Breavman said, “You don’t really believe it, do you, Krantz?”
“Not as thoroughly as you.”
No plans for the future.
He could lay his hand on a low-cut gown and nobody minded. He was a kind of mild Dylan Thomas, talent and behaviour modified for Canadian tastes.
He felt as though he had masturbated on television. He was bereft of privacy, restraint, discretion.
“Do you know what I am, Krantz?”
“Yes, and don’t recite the catalogue.”
“A stud for unhappy women. A twilight peeper of Victorian ruins. A middle-class connoisseur of doomed union songs. A race-haunted exhibitionist forever waving my circumcision. A lap-dog who laps.”
Therefore, according to the traditions of his class, he did penance through manual labour.
On one of his walks around the Montreal waterfront he passed a brass foundry, a small firm which manufactured bathroom fixtures. A window was open and he looked inside.
The air was smoke-filled. Loud incessant noise of machinery. Against the wall were hills of mud-coloured sand. At the far end of the foundry stone crucibles glowed in sunken furnaces. The men were covered with grime. They heaved heavy sand moulds. Through the smoke they looked like figures in one of those old engravings of Purgatorio.
Then a red-hot crucible was raised out of the furnace by a pulley system and swung towards the row of moulds. It was lowered to the ground and the slag scooped off the surface.
Now a huge man wearing an asbestos apron and goggles took over. He guided the crucible over to the moulds. With a lever device he tilted the stone pot and poured the molten brass into the lead-holes of the moulds.
Breavman gasped at the brightness of the liquid metal. It was the colour gold should be. It was as beautiful as flesh. It was the colour of gold he thought of when he read the word in prayers or poems. It was yellow, alive and screaming. It poured out in an arch with smoke and white sparks. He watched the man move up and down the rows, dispensing this glory. He looked like a monolithic idol. No, he was a true priest.
That was the job he wanted but that wasn’t what he got. He became a core-wire puller. Unskilled. Pay was seventy-five cents an hour. The hours were seven-thirty to five-thirty, half-hour for lunch.
The size of the core determines the size of the hole running through the faucets. It is made of baked sand packed along a length of wire. It is placed between the two halves of the mould, and the brass flows around it, creating the hole. When the moulds are broken up and the rough-cast faucets extracted they still contain the wire on which the cores were suspended.
His job was to pull these wires out. He sat on a box not far from the long, low roller tables on which the moulds were placed for filling. Beside him was a heap of hot faucets with these core-wires sticking out from the ends. He seized one with his left gloved hand and yanked out the twisted wire with a pair of pliers.
He pulled several thousand wires a week. The only time he stopped was to watch the pouring of the brass. It turned out that the moulder was a Negro. It was impossible to tell with the grime on everybody’s face. Now there’s a heroic proletarian tale if he ever heard one.
Pull your wire, Breavman.
The beauty of the brass never diminished.
He took his place in the fire and smoke and sand. The foundry was not air-conditioned, thank heaven. His hands grew callouses which were ordinary to working girls but they were stroked like medals by others.
He sat on his box and looked around. He had come to the right place. Chopping machines and the roar of furnaces were exactly the right music to purge. Sweat and mud on a man’s pimpled back was a picture to give perspective to flesh. The air was foul: the intake of breath after a nostalgic sigh coated your throat with scum. The view of old men and young men condemned to their sandpiles added an excellent dimension to his vision of lambs, beasts, and little children. The roof windows let in shafts of dirty sunlight which were eventually lost in the general fumes. They laboured in a gloom tinted red by the fires. He had become an integrated figure in the inferno engraving which he had glimpsed a few weeks before.
The firm was not unionized. He thought about contacting the appr
opriate union and helping to organize the place. But that wasn’t why he had come. He’d come for boredom and penance. He introduced an Irish immigrant to Walt Whitman and talked him into going to a night school. That was the extent of his social work.
The boredom was killing. Manual labour did not free his mind to wander at will. It numbed his mind, but the anaesthesia was not sufficiently potent to deliver it from awareness. It could still recognize its bondage. He would suddenly realize that he had been chanting the same tune over and over for the last hour. Each wire represented a small crisis and each extraction a small triumph. He could not overlook this absurdity.
The more bored he became the more inhuman was the beauty of the brass. It was too bright to look at. You needed goggles. It was too hot to stand close to. You needed an apron. Many times a day he watched the metal being poured, feeling the heat even where he sat. The arch of liquid came to represent an intensity he would never achieve.
He punched the clock every morning for a year.
16
H is friend was leaving Montreal to study in England.
“But, Krantz, it’s Montreal you’re leaving, Montreal on the very threshold of greatness, like Athens, like New Orleans.”
“The Frogs are vicious,” he said, “the Jews are vicious, the English are absurd.”
“That’s why we’re great, Krantz. The cross-fertilization.”
“Okay, Breavman, you stay here to chronicle the Renaissance.”
It was an early summer evening on Stanley Street. Breavman had been in the foundry for a month. The strolling girls had their bare arms on.
“Krantz, the arms, the bosoms, the buttocks, O lovely catalogue!”
“They’ve certainly come out.”
“Krantz, do you know why Sherbrooke Street is so bloody beautiful?”
“Because you want to get laid.”
Breavman thought for a second.
“You’re right, Krantz.”
It was great to be back in the dialogue with Krantz; he hadn’t seen him very much in the past few weeks.
But he knew the street was beautiful for other reasons. Because you’ve stores and people living in the same buildings. When you’ve got only stores, especially modern-fronted ones, there is a terrible stink of cold money-grabbing. When you’ve got only houses, or rather when the houses get too far from the stores, they exude some poisonous secret, like a plantation or an abattoir.
But what Krantz said was true. No, not laid. Beauty at close quarters.
A half-block up, a girl turned down to Sherbrooke. She was strolling alone.
“Remember, Krantz, three years ago we would have followed her with all kinds of fleshly dreams.”
“And fled if she ever looked back.”
The girl ahead of them walked under a lamplight, the light sliding down the folds of her hair. Breavman began to whistle “Lili Marlene.”
“Krantz, we’re walking into a European movie. You and me are old officers walking along to something important. Sherbrooke is a ruin. Why does it feel like a war just ended?”
“Because you want to get laid.”
“C’mon, Krantz, give me a chance.”
“Breavman, if I gave you a chance, you’d weep through every summer night.”
“Do you know what I’m going to do, Krantz? I’m going to walk up to that girl and be very gentle and polite and ask her to join us for a small walk over the world.”
“You do that, Breavman.”
He quickened his pace and moved beside her. This would be it. All the compassion of strangers. She turned her face and looked at him.
“Excuse me,” he said and stopped. “Mistake.”
She walked away and he waited for Krantz to catch up.
“She was a beast, Krantz. We couldn’t have toasted her. She wasn’t all that is beautiful in women.”
“It’s not our night.”
“There’s lots of night left.”
“I’ve got to get up early for the boat.”
But they did not go right back to Stanley. They walked slowly up the streets towards home: University, Metcalfe, Peel, MacTavish. Named for the distinguished from the British Isles. They passed by the stone houses and the black iron fences. Many of the houses had been taken over by the university or turned into boarding-houses, but here and there a colonel or a lady still lived, manicured the lawns and bushes, still climbed the stone steps as if all the neighbours were peers. They wandered through the campus of the university. Night, like time, gave all the buildings a deep dignity. There was the library with its crushing cargo of words, dark and stone.
“Krantz, let’s get out of here. The buildings are starting to claim me.”
“I know what you mean, Breavman.”
As they walked back to Stanley, Breavman was no longer in a movie. All he wanted to do was turn to Krantz and wish him luck, all the luck in the world. There was nothing else to say to a person.
The taxis were beginning to pile up in front of the tourist houses. Half a block down you could get whisky in coffee cups at a blind pig disguised as a bridge club. They watched the taximen making U-turns in the one-way street: friends of the police. They knew all the landladies and store owners and waitresses. They were citizens of downtown. And Krantz was taking off like a big bird.
“You know, Breavman, you’re not Montreal’s suffering servant.”
“Of course I am. Can’t you see me, crucified on a maple tree at the top of Mount Royal? The miracles are just beginning to happen. I have just enough breath to tell them, ‘I told you so, you cruel bastards.’ ”
“Breavman, you’re a schmuck.”
And soon their dialogue would be broken. They stood on the balcony in silence, watching the night-doings get into gear.
“Krantz, do I have anything to do with you leaving?”
“A little.”
“I’m sorry.”
“We’ve got to stop interpreting the world for one another.”
“Yes … yes.”
The buildings were so familiar and the street so well known. Even Gautama wept when he lost a friend. Nothing would be the same tomorrow. He could hardly bear to understand that. Krantz wouldn’t be there. That would be like a bulldozer turned loose in the heart of the city. They weren’t the kind of people that wrote letters to each other.
Krantz took a long glance around him. “Yup,” he said, like an old farmer in a rocking chair.
“Yup,” Breavman agreed over nothing.
“Just about time,” said Krantz.
“Good night, Krantz.”
“Good night, old Breavman.”
He smiled and clasped his friend’s hand.
“Good night, old Krantz,” and they joined four hands and then went into their separate rooms.
17
Montreal was madly buying records of Leadbelly and the Weavers and rushing down to Gesu Hall in mink coats to hear Pete Seeger sing socialist songs. Breavman was at the party by virtue of his reputation as a folk singer and minor celebrity. The hostess had subtly suggested on the phone that he bring his guitar, but he didn’t. He hadn’t touched it for months.
“Larry! It’s so good to see you; it’s been years!”
“You look beautiful, Lisa.”
With his first glance of appreciation he claimed her, because of the street they had lived on, because he knew the whiteness of her, because her skipping body was bound to his by red string. She lowered her eyes.
“Thank you, Larry. And you’ve managed to become famous.”
“Hardly famous, but it’s a good word.”
“We saw you interviewed on TV last week.”
“In this country writers are interviewed on TV for one reason only: to give the rest of the nation a good laugh.”
“Everybody says you’re very clever.”
“Everybody is a vicious gossip.”
He brought her a drink and they talked. She told him about her children, two boys, and they exchanged information about their f
amilies. Her husband was on a business trip. He and her father were opening automatic bowling alleys right across the country. Knowing she was alone launched Breavman’s fantasies. Of course she was alone, of course he had met her that specific night, she would be delivered to him.
“Lisa, now that you have children, do you ever think about your own childhood?”
“I always used to promise myself that when I grew up I’d remember exactly how it was, and treat my children from that viewpoint.”
“And do you?”
“It’s very hard. You’d be surprised how much you forget and how little time there is to remember. Usually you act right on the spot and hope your decision is the best one.”
“Do you remember Bertha?” was the first of the questions he meant to ask.
“Yes, but didn’t she —”
“Do you remember me?”
“Of course.”
“What was I like?”
“I suppose you’d be annoyed if I said you were like any other ten-year-old boy. I don’t know, Larry. You were a nice boy.”
“Do you remember the Soldier and the Whore?”
“What?”
“Do you remember my green pants?
“You’re getting silly.…”
“I wish you remembered everything.”
“Why? If we remembered everything we’d never be able to do anything.”
“If you remembered what I remember you’d be in bed with me right now,” he said blindly.
Lisa was kind, wise, or interested enough not to make a joke of what he said.
“No, I wouldn’t. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t. I’m too selfish or scared or prudish, or whatever it is, to risk what I’ve got. I want to keep everything I have.”
“So do I. I don’t want to forget anyone I was ever connected with.”
“You don’t have to. Especially me. I’m glad I met you tonight. You have to come over and meet Carl and the children. Carl reads a lot, I’m sure you’d enjoy talking to him.”
“The last thing I intend to do is talk books with anybody, even Carl. I want to sleep with you. It’s very simple.”
The Favorite Game Page 10