The Favorite Game

by Leonard Cohen

  Why wasn’t he thinking about the man?

  Breavman supported himself against a trash basket and vomited. A Chinese waiter ran out of the restaurant.

  “Do it up the street. People eat here.”

  Puking clears the soul, he thought as he walked away. He was walking with all his body, which was newly light, easy with athletic promise. You’re filled with poison, it’s brewing in every pouch and hole and pocket of your insides, you’re a swamp, then the sickening miracle, sloof! And you’re empty, free, begin again your second cold clear chance, thank you, thank you.

  The buildings, doorways, sidewalk cracks, city trees shone bright and precise. He was where he was, all of him, beside a drycleaning store, high on the smell of clean brown-wrapped clothes. He was nowhere else. In the window was a secular bust of a man with a chipped plaster shirt and a painted tie. It didn’t remind him of anything when he stared at it. He was wildly happy to be where he was. Clean and empty, he had a place to begin from, this particular place. He could choose to go anywhere but he didn’t have to think about that because here he was and every free deep breath was a beginning. For a second he lived in a real city, one that had a mayor and garbage men and statistical records. For one second.

  Puking clears the soul. Breavman remembered what he felt like. Fry’s Stationery, buying school supplies. Ten years old. The whole new school year coiled like a dragon to be conquered by sharp yellow Eagle pencils. Fresh erasers, rows of them, crying to be sacrificed for purity and stars for Neatness. The stacks of exercise books dazzlingly empty of mistakes, more perfect than Perfect. Unblunted compasses, lethal, containing millions of circles, too sharp and substantial for the cardboard box that contained them. Grown-up ink, black triumphs, eradicable mistakes. Leather bags for the dedicated trek from home to class, arms free for snowball or chestnut attacks. Paper clips surprisingly heavy in their small box, rulers with markings as complicated and important as a Spitfire’s dashboard, sticky red-bordered labels to fasten your name to anything. All tools benign, unused. Nothing yet an accomplice to failure. Fry’s smelled newer than even a winter newspaper brought in after the thump on the porch. And he commanded all these sparkling lieutenants.

  Puking clears the soul but the bad juices come back quick. New York got lost in Breavman’s private city. Gauze grew on everything and as usual he had to imagine the real shape of things. He no longer felt the light Olympic candidate. The painted plaster bust reminded him of some religious statues in a window a few blocks back. They were gaudy, plastic, luminous, sort of jolly. The bust was old, unclean, the white the colour of soiled therapeutic stockings. He tried to spit out the taste in his mouth. The plaster shirt, the sky, the sidewalk, everything was the colour of mucus. Who was the man? Why didn’t he know the folklore of New York? Why didn’t he remember that article about the particular trees which they planted in cities, hardy ones that withstood the polluted air?

  He took the wrong Seventh Avenue subway. When he climbed to the street he noticed everyone was black. It was too complicated to get out of Harlem. He hailed a taxi to get him back across town. At World Student House the Puerto Rican elevator man conducted the creaky machine to the eleventh floor. Breavman wished he could understand the words to the song he was singing. He decided he would say gracias when he left the elevator.

  “Watch your step.”

  “Thanks,” said Breavman in perfect English.

  He knew he’d hate his room before he unlocked the door. It was exactly the same as he’d left it. Who was the man? He didn’t want to look out the window where General and Mrs. Grant were, or Gabriel on the roof of Riverside Church, or the shining Hudson, alien and boring.

  He sat down on the bed, holding the key tightly in his right hand in exactly the position it had been when he twisted it in the keyhole, biting the inside of his cheek with molars. He was not really staring at the chair but the chair was the only image in his mind. He didn’t move a muscle for forty-five minutes. At that point it occurred to him in a wave of terror that if he didn’t make a great effort to rouse himself he would sit there forever. The maid would find him frozen.

  Down at the cafeteria the fast-moving short-order man called him back for change.

  “Giving it away, Professor?”

  “No, I need it, Sam.”

  “Name is Eddy, Professor.”

  “Eddy? Glad to meet you, Sam.”

  I’m cracking up, thought Breavman. He was wet-eyed happy because of the trivial exchange. He sat at a small table, his hands clasped over the cup of tea, enjoying the warmth. Then he saw Shell for the first time.

  Fantastic luck, she was sitting alone, but no, here was a man coming to her table, balancing a cup in each of his hands. Shell stood up to take one from him. She has small breasts, I love her clothes, I hope she has nowhere to go, prayed Breavman. I hope she sits there all night. He looked around the cafeteria. Everyone was staring at her.

  He pressed his thumb and forefinger in the corners of his eyes, his elbow on the table — a gesture he always regarded as phony. The war-lined desk colonel signing the order that sends the boys, his boys, on the suicide mission, and then we see him steeled for the casualty lists, and all the secretaries have gone home, he is alone with his pin-studded maps, and maybe a montage of the young men in training, close-up of young faces.

  Now he was sure. It was the first thing in a long time he had learned about himself. He wanted no legions to command. He didn’t want to stand on any marble balcony. He didn’t want to ride with Alexander, be a boy-king. He didn’t want to smash his fist across the city, lead the Jews, have visions, love multitudes, bear a mark on his forehead, look in every mirror, lake, hub-cap, for reflection of the mark. Please no. He wanted comfort. He wanted to be comforted.

  He grabbed the bunch of napkins out of the tumbler, wiped the excess ink from his ballpen on a corner of one of them, and scribbled nine poems, certain that she would stay as long as he wrote. He shredded the napkins as he dug the pen in, and he couldn’t read three-quarters of what he’d done; not that it was any good, but that had nothing to do with it. He stuffed the debris into his jacket and stood up. He was armed with amulets.

  “Excuse me,” he said to the man with her, not looking at her at all.

  “Yes?”

  “Excuse me.”

  “Yes?”

  Maybe I’ll say it ten more times.

  “Excuse me.”

  “Can I help you?” A little anger showing. The accent was not American.

  “May I — I would like to talk to the person you are with.” His heart was driving so hard he could believe he was transmitting the beats like a time signal before the news.

  The man granted permission by turning up the palm of his open hand.

  “You’re beautiful, I think.”

  “Thank you.”

  She didn’t speak it, her mouth formed the words as she looked at her loosely clasped hands composed at the edge of the table like a schoolgirl’s.

  Then he walked out of the room, grateful it was a cafeteria and he had already paid his bill. He didn’t know who she was or what she did but he had no doubt whatever that he would see her again and know her.

  10

  Shell took a lover at the end of her fifth year of marriage. It was shortly after she started her new job. She knew what she was doing.

  Talking with Gordon had failed. He was only too eager to talk. She wanted them both to go to psychiatrists.

  “Really, Shell.” He smiled at her paternally, as if she were an adolescent reciting the Rubaiyat with too much belief.

  “I mean it. The insurance covers it.”

  “I don’t think it’s necessary,” he understated, meaning that it was the most outrageous thing he had ever heard of.

  “I do.”

  “I’ve read Simone de Beauvoir,” he said with gentle humour. “I know this world is not kind to women.”

  “I’m talking about us. Please talk with me. Don’t let this night go by.”r />
  “Just a second, darling.” He knew that at this precise moment she was challenging him to a solemn meeting. He suspected that it was the last time she would ever confront him like this. He also knew that there was nothing within himself that he could summon to meet her. “I really don’t think you can characterize our lives together as a catastrophe.”

  “I don’t want to characterize anything, I want —”

  “We’ve been pretty lucky.” His brand of humility took in the apartment, Shell’s closet of dresses, the plans for the second floor of the house, which were laid out on the desk and to which he was anxious to return.

  “Do you want me to thank you?”

  “That wasn’t becoming.” He allowed her to know he was angry by speaking with a slight British intonation. “Let’s try to understand the process of marriage.”

  “Please!”

  “Don’t get hysterical on me. Oh, come on, Shell, let’s grow up. A marriage changes. It can’t always be passion and promises.…”

  It never was. But what was the use of shouting that? He fictionalized an early storm of flesh and wildness from which they had matured. He believed it or he wanted her to believe it. She would never forgive him for that dishonesty.

  “… thing we have now is extremely valuable …”

  Suddenly she didn’t want the doctors, didn’t want to save anything. She watched him speak with that terrible scrutinizing attention that can make a stranger of a bed-mate. He felt that he spoke to her from a far distance. She was a cub reporter in the audience. It was too late for easy married mumbling or intimate silence. He knew she was pretending to be convinced, was grateful to her for the pretence. What else could she do — weep, burn down the walls? She was in a room with him.

  Later she said, “Well, where should we put the partition?” and they leaned over the house plans, playing house.

  Breavman often reviews this scene. Shell told it to him a year later. He sees the two of them bending over the oiled desk, backs towards him, and he sees himself in the corner of the antique room, staring at the incredible hair, waiting for her to feel his gaze, turn, rise, come to him, while Gordon works with his sharp pencil, sketching in the bathroom, the insult of a nursery. She comes to him, they whisper, she looks back, they leave. And in some of the versions he says, “Shell, sit still, build the house, be ugly.” But her beauty makes him selfish. She has to come.

  When she decided to change her job Gordon thought it was a good idea. She was glad to get back into the academic atmosphere. It was a tracking-back, Gordon said. She could re-establish her bearings. Shell simply couldn’t stand another day at Harper’s Bazaar. Watching the cold bodies, clothes.

  A friend of hers was doing a couple of afternoons a week of voluntary work at World Student House, hostessing at teas for foreign students, hanging decorations, showing America at its smiling prettiest to the future ministers of black republics. She informed Shell that there was a job open in the Recreation Department. Since a friend of the family was a director and benefactor of the organization her application and interview were formalities. She moved into a pleasant green office decorated with UNESCO reproductions, which looked over Riverside Park, much the same view as Breavman’s, though less elevated.

  She did her work well. The Guest Speakers Programme, the Sunday Dinner Programme, the Tours Programme were better run than they had ever been. She emerged as an expert organizer. People listened to her. Perhaps a creature that lovely wasn’t supposed to speak such sense. Nobody wanted to disappoint her. Success terrified her. Perhaps this was what she was meant to do, not love, not live close. Nevertheless, she liked working with students, meeting people her own age who were planning and beginning their careers. She walked into the spring atmosphere, she found herself making plans.

  It was strange how friendly she felt to Gordon. The construction of the house was fascinating. Every detail interested her. They rented a truck to pick up panelling from an old country hotel which was being demolished. Gordon saw his study in oak. Shell suggested one full wall for the living-room, the other three left in brick. She was puzzled by her own concern.

  Then it occurred to her that she was leaving him. Her interest was exactly the kind displayed to a cousin with whom one has grown up and whom one does not expect to see again for a long time. One clamours to hear everything about the family — for a little while.

  When she slept with Med it was merely the signature to a note of absence she had been writing for almost a year.

  He was a visiting professor from Lebanon, a remarkably handsome young man who was an expert in these matters, who, in intimate circumstances, would admit to his companion that the constant proximity of “desirable little things” was what most attracted him to the academic life. He was over six feet, thin, hair black and carefully wild and swept back, eyes black and always slightly squinted as if he were looking over stretches of sand for high deeds to perform. He was a T. E. Lawrence Bedouin with an Oxford accent and theatrically exquisite manners. He was always so obviously on the make, so captivated by his charm and indisputable good looks, so dedicated to his vocation, so phony that he was altogether delightful.

  Shell allowed him to court her extravagantly for three weeks. He was not in his best form because he really believed her beautiful and this intruded on the perfection of his technique.

  He gave her a filigree brooch shaped like a scimitar which he claimed belonged to his mother but which she wouldn’t have accepted if she hadn’t been sure he travelled with a bag of them. She accepted a transparent black nightgown like the ones advertised in the back of Playboy, the kind he seriously believed every American girl coveted — she was delighted with his naïveté.

  Deprived of sweet sexual fiat for so long, indeed never having known it, she righteously defended the privilege to make herself sick. And because he was so pretty, so absurd, nothing she did with him could be serious or important. What she knew was going to happen would not really have happened. Except that she needed the dynamite of adultery to blast her life, destroy the rising house.

  Over whose hips was she pulling the flimsy black costume?

  She could see her hair through the material.

  In the mirror of a bathroom in the hotel on upper Broadway. Steel-rimmed, round-cornered mirror. Whose body?

  Med had reserved the room for a week. The critical week. He had never spent so much money on an adventure.

  The bathroom was brilliantly clean. She had been frightened that it would have a naked bulb on a cord, cracked porcelain, hair on old soap. Is this Shell? she inquired blankly of her image, not because she wanted to know, or even open the subject, but because that question was the only form her modesty could assume.

  At first Med couldn’t speak. He had made a mistake, for men of his character the most painful mistake, occurring once or twice in a lifetime and crushing the heart: he might have loved her. The room was dim. He had arranged the lighting, tuned his transistor radio to the classical-music station. She seemed to create her own silence, her own shadow to stand in. She was not part of his setting.

  “Isn’t that the Fifth?” he said finally.

  “I don’t know.”

  She knew which symphony it was. The answer she spoke was in response to the question before the mirror.

  “I believe it is. Da, da da da da. Of course it is.”

  She wished he would begin.

  She felt no desire. This both pleased and pained her. Desire she would hoard for a lover. Med was not her lover. Desire would have made what she was doing important, and it was not important, it must not be important. A weapon, yes, but not a special night in her heart. Not with this clown. Yet, and this was the pain, he was a man and surely she should long for only someone to hold her after all this time. She had dreamed love, bites, surrender, but all she felt now was interest. Interest! Perhaps Gordon was her true mate after all.

  Med relied on a Peeping Tom survey of her body to inflame him.

  It fascinated
her to see a man overwhelmed with desire.

  Oh Shell, cries Breavman as he learns of the hotel, as she tells him in the voice she uses when she must tell him everything. Shell, fly away. Heap flowers in the stone fountain. Fight with your sister. Not you with the Expert Fool, in a room like the ones Breavman built. Not you who wore white dresses.

  As Med lay beside her, silently cataloguing what he had gathered, Shell succumbed to a wave of hatred which made her grit her teeth. She did not know where to attach it. First she tried Med. He was too simple. Besides for the first time since she had known him he seemed genuinely sad, not theatrically melancholy. She guessed he was walking through a museum of dead female forms. She absently massaged the nape of his neck. She tried to hate herself but all she could hate was her silly body. She hated Gordon! She was here because of him. No, that was not true. But still she hated him and the truth of this threw open her eyes, wide in the dark.

  She inspected herself as she dressed. Her body seemed an interesting alien twin, a growth which she didn’t own, like a wart on one’s finger.

  Breavman bites his lip as he listens.

  “I shouldn’t tell you this.” Shell says.

  “Yes.”

  “It wasn’t me. It wasn’t the me you’re holding now.”

  “Yes it was. It is.”

  “Does that hurt you?”

  “Yes,” he says, kissing her eyes. “We have to bring everything to each other. Even the times we are corpses.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “I know you do.”

  If I can always decipher that, Breavman believes, then nothing can happen to us.

  Armed with the betrayal, Shell approached her husband.

  One needs weapons to hunt those close. Foreign steel must be introduced. The world in the married house is too spongy, familiar. The pain, present in plenty, is absorbed. Other worlds must be ushered in to cut the numb.