“Yes.”
“Okay. Night.”
“Night.”
Good night, Tamara. It’s all right to share your mouth. It belongs to everyone, like a park.
He wrote two letters to Shell and then phoned her so he could get to sleep.
23
Ed’s bunk was expected to win the baseball game.
The foul-lines were marked with Israeli flags.
What right did he have to resent their using the symbol? It wasn’t engraved on his shield.
A child brandished a Pepsi, cheering for his side.
Breavman passed out hot dogs. He was glad he’d learned to suspect his Gentile neighbours of uncleanliness, not to believe in flags. Now he could apply that training to his own tribe.
A home run.
Send your children to the academies in Alexandria. Don’t be surprised if they come back Alexandrians.
Three cheers. Mazel tov.
Hello Canada, you big Canada, you dull, beautiful resources. Everybody is Canadian. The Jew’s disguise won’t work.
When it was Ed’s turn to umpire, Breavman walked across the field to the marsh and watched Martin kill mosquitoes. The tractor man knew him well because he often came to see Martin fulfil his mission.
The boy had killed over six thousand mosquitoes.
“I’ll kill some for you, Martin.”
“That won’t help my score.”
“Then I’ll start my own score.”
“I’ll beat you.”
Martin’s feet were wet. Some of the bites were definitely infected. He should send him back to the bunk, but he seemed to be enjoying himself so thoroughly. All his days were 99 per cent.
“I dare you to start your own score.”
As they accompanied their groups back to the campus Ed said, “Not only did you lose the game, Breavman, but you owe me five dollars.”
“What for?”
“Wanda. Last night.”
“Oh, God, the pool. I’d forgotten.”
He checked his journal and gratefully paid the money.
24
All the days were sunny and the bodies bronze. All he watched was the sand and the exposed flesh, marvelling at the softer city white when a strap fell away. He wanted all the strange flesh-shadows.
He hardly ever looked at the sky. A bird swooping low over the beach surprised him. One of the Brandenburgs was blaring over the PA. He was lying on his back, eyes closed, annihilating himself in the heat and glare and music. Suddenly someone was kneeling over him.
“Let me squeeze it,” went Anne’s voice.
He opened his eyes and shivered.
“No, let me,” Wanda laughed.
They were trying to get at a blackhead in his forehead.
“Leave me alone,” he shouted like a maniac.
The violence of his reaction astonished them.
He pretended to smile, waited a decent interval, left the beach. The bunk was too cool. The night air hadn’t been cooked away. He looked around the small wooden cubicle. His laundry bag was bulging. He’d forgotten to send it off. That couldn’t be right. Not right for him. There was a box of Ritz crackers on the window-sill. That wasn’t how he was supposed to eat. He pulled out his journal. That wasn’t how he was supposed to write.
25
Martin Stark was killed in the first week of August 1958. He was accidentally run over by a bulldozer which was clearing a marshy area. The driver of the bulldozer, the Hungarian named Steve, was not aware that he had hit anything except the usual clumps, roots, stones. Martin was probably hiding in the reeds the better to trap his enemy.
When he didn’t show for supper Breavman thought he might be up there. He asked a junior counsellor to sit at his table. He walked leisurely to the marsh, glad for an excuse to leave the noisy mess hall.
He heard a noise from the weeds. He imagined that Martin had seen him coming and wanted to play a hiding game. He took off his shoes and waded in. He was terribly squashed, a tractor tread right across his back. He was lying face down. Where Breavman turned him over his mouth was full of guts.
Breavman walked back to the mess hall and told Krantz. His face went white. They agreed that the campers must not find out and that the body be removed secretly. Krantz went up to the marsh and returned in a few minutes.
“You stay up there until the camp’s asleep. Ed will take your bunk.”
“I want to go into town with the body,” Breavman said.
“We’ll see.”
“No, we won’t see. I’m going in with Martin.”
“Breavman, get the hell up there now and don’t give me arguments at a time like this. What’s the matter with you?”
He stood guard for a few hours. Nobody came by. The mosquitoes were very bad. He wondered what they were doing to the body. They’d been all over when he found it. There wasn’t much of a moon. He could hear the seniors singing at their bonfire. At about one in the morning the police and ambulance arrived. They worked under the headlights.
“I’m going in with him.”
Krantz had just spoken to Mrs. Stark on the phone. She had been remarkably calm. She had even mentioned that she wouldn’t press charges of criminal negligence. Krantz was very shaken.
“All right.”
“And I’m not coming back.”
“What do you mean you’re not coming back? Don’t start with me now, Breavman.”
“I’m quitting.”
“Camp runs another three weeks. I don’t have anybody to replace you.”
“I don’t care.”
Krantz grabbed his arm.
“You got a contract, Breavman.”
“Screw the contract. Don’t pay me.”
“You phony little bastard, at a time like this —”
“And you owe me five dollars. I had Wanda first. July eleventh, if you want to see my journal.”
“For Christ’s sake, Breavman, what are you talking about? What are you talking about? Don’t you see where you are? Don’t you see what is happening? A child has been killed and you’re talking about a lay —”
“A lay. That’s your language. Five dollars, Krantz. Then I’m getting out of here. This isn’t where I’m supposed to be —”
It was impossible to say who threw the first punch.
26
DON’T SQUEEZE ANYTHING OUT OF THE BODY IT DOESN’T OWE YOU ANYTHING was the complete entry.
He banged it out on the bus to Montreal, typewriter on knees.
It was the worst stretch of the road, signs and gas stations, and the back of the driver’s neck, and his damn washable plastic shirt was boiling him.
If only death could seize him, come through the scum, dignify.
What was it they sang at the end of the book?
Strength! strength! let us renew ourselves!
He would never learn the names of the trees he passed, he’d never learn anything, he’d always confront a lazy mystery. He wanted to be the tall black mourner who learns everything at the hole.
I’m sorry, Father, I don’t know the Latin for butterflies, I don’t know what stone the lookout is made of.
The driver was having trouble with the doors. Maybe they’d never open. How would it be to suffocate in a plastic shirt?
27
Dearest Shell,
It will take me a little while to tell you.
It’s two in the morning. You’re sleeping between the green-striped sheets we bought together and I know exactly how your body looks. You are lying on your side, knees bent like a jockey, and you’ve probably pushed the pillow off the bed and your hair looks like calligraphy, and one hand is cupped beside your mouth, and one arm leads over the edge like a bowsprit and your fingers are limp like things that are drifting.
It’s wonderful to be able to speak to you, my darling Shell. I can be peaceful because I know what I want to say.
I’m afraid of loneliness. Just visit a mental hospital or factory, sit in a bus or cafeteria. Everywhere
people are living in utter loneliness. I tremble when I think of all the single voices raised, lottery-chance hooks aimed at the sky. And their bodies are growing old, hearts beginning to leak like old accordions, trouble in the kidneys, sphincters going limp like old elastic bands. It’s happening to us, to you under the green stripes. It makes me want to take your hand. And this is the miracle that all the juke-boxes are eating quarters for. That we can protest this indifferent massacre. Taking your hand is a very good protest. I wish you were beside me now.
I went to a funeral today. It was no way to bury a child. His real death contrasted violently with the hush-hush sacredness of the chapel. The beautiful words didn’t belong on the rabbi’s lips. I don’t know if any modern man is fit to bury a person. The family’s grief was real, but the air-conditioned chapel conspired against its expression. I felt lousy and choked because I had nothing to say to the corpse. When they carried away the undersized coffin I thought the boy was cheated.
I can’t claim any lesson. When you read my journal you’ll see how close I am to murder. I can’t even think about it or I stop moving. I mean literally. I can’t move a muscle. All I know is that something prosaic, the comfortable world, has been destroyed irrevocably, and something important guaranteed.
A religious stink hovers above this city and we all breathe it. Work goes on at the Oratoire St. Joseph, the copper dome is raised. The Temple Emmanuel initiates a building fund. A religious stink composed of musty shrine and tabernacle smells, decayed wreaths and rotting bar-mitzvah tables. Boredom, money, vanity, guilt, packs the pews. The candles, memorials, eternal lights shine unconvincingly, like neon signs, sincere as advertising. The holy vessels belch miasmal smoke. Good lovers turn away.
I’m not a good lover or I’d be with you now. I’d be beside you, not using this longing for a proof of feeling. That’s why I’m writing you and sending you this summer’s journal. I want you to know something about me. Here it is day by day. Dearest Shell, if you let me I’d always keep you four hundred miles away and write you pretty poems and letters. That’s true. I’m afraid to live any place but in expectation. I’m no life-risk.
At the beginning of the summer we said: let’s be surgical. I don’t want to see or hear from you. I’d like to counterpoint this with tenderness but I’m not going to. I want no attachments. I want to begin again. I think I love you, but I love the idea of a clean slate more. I can say these things to you because we’ve come that close. The temptation of discipline makes me ruthless.
I want to end this letter now. It’s the first one I didn’t make a carbon of. I’m close to flying down and jumping into bed beside you. Please don’t phone or write. Something wants to begin in me.
LAWRENCE
Shell sent three telegrams that he didn’t answer. Five times he allowed his phone to ring all night.
One morning she awakened suddenly and couldn’t catch her breath. Lawrence had done exactly the same thing to her as Gordon — the letters, everything!
28
They drank patiently, waiting for incoherence.
“You know, of course, Tamara, that we’re losing the Cold War?”
“No!”
“Plain as the nose. You know what Chinese youth are doing this very minute?”
“Smelting pig-iron in backyards?”
“Correct. And the Russians are learning trigonometry in kindergarten. What do you think about that, Tamara?
“Black thoughts.”
“But it doesn’t matter, Tamara.”
“Why?”
He was trying to stand a bottle on its pouring rim.
“I’ll tell you why, Tamara. Because we’re all ripe for a concentration camp.”
That was a little brutal for their stage of intoxication. On the couch he mumbled beside her.
“What are you saying?”
“I’m not saying anything.”
“You were saying something.”
“Do you want to know what I’m saying, Tamara?”
“Yeah.”
“You really want to know?”
“Yes.”
“All right, I’ll tell you.”
Silence.
“Well?”
“I’ll tell you.”
“Okay, you tell me.”
“I’m saying this: …”
There was a pause. He leaped up, ran to the window, smashed his fist through the glass.
“Get the car, Krantz,” he screamed. “Get the car, get the car!…”
29
Let us study one more shadow.
He was heading towards Côte des Neiges. Patricia was sleeping back at his room on Stanley, profound sleep of isolation, her red hair fallen on her shoulders as if arranged by a Botticelli wind.
He could not help thinking that she was too beautiful for him to have, that he wasn’t tall enough or straight, that people didn’t turn to look at him in street-cars, that he didn’t command the glory of the flesh.
She deserved someone, an athlete perhaps, who moved with a grace equal to hers, exercised the same immediate tyranny of beauty in face and limb.
He met her at a cast party. She had played the lead in Hedda Gabler. A cold bitch, she’d done it well, all the ambition and vine leaves. She was as beautiful as Shell, Tamara, one of the great. She was from Winnipeg.
“Do they have Art in Winnipeg?”
Later on that night they walked up Mountain Street. Breavman showed her an iron fence which hid in its calligraphy silhouettes of swallows, rabbits, chipmunks. She opened fast to him. She told him she had an ulcer. Christ, at her age.
“How old are you?”
“Eighteen. I know you’re surprised.”
“I’m surprised you can be that calm and live with whatever it is that’s eating your stomach.”
But something had to pay for the way she moved, her steps like early Spanish music, her face which acted above pain.
He showed her curious parts of the city that night. He tried to see his eighteen-year-old city again. Here was a wall he had loved. There was a crazy filigree doorway he wanted her to see, but when they approached he saw the building had been torn down.
“Où sont les neiges?” he said theatrically.
She looked straight at him and said, “You’ve won me, Lawrence Breavman.”
And he supposed that that was what he had been trying to do.
They lay apart like two slabs. Nothing his hands or mouth could do involved him in her beauty. It was like years ago with Tamara, the silent torture bed.
He knew he couldn’t begin the whole process again. What had happened to his plan? They finally found words to say and tenderness, the kind that follows failure.
They stayed in the room together.
By the end of the next day he had written a still-born poem about two armies marching to battle from different corners of a continent. They never meet in conflict in the central plain. Winter eats through the battalions like a storm of moths at a brocade gown, leaving the metal threads of artillery strewn gunnerless miles behind the frozen men, pointless designs on a vast closet floor. Then months later two corporals of different language meet in a green, unblasted field. Their feet are bound with strips of cloth torn from the uniforms of superiors. The field they meet on is the one that distant powerful marshals ordained for glory. Because the men have come from different directions they face each other, but they have forgotten why they stumbled there.
That next night he watched her move about his room. He had never seen anything so beautiful. She was nested in a brown chair studying a script. He remembered a colour he loved in the crucible of melted brass. Her hair was that colour and her warm body seemed to reflect it just as the caster’s face glows above the poured moulds.
PAUVRE GRANDE BEAUTÉ!
POOR PERFECT BEAUTY!
He gave all his silent praise for her limbs, lips, not to the clamour of personal desire, but to the pure demand of excellence.
They had talked enough for her to be naked
. The line of her belly reminded him of the soft forms drawn on the cave well by the artist-hunter. He remembered her intestines.
QUEL MAL MYSTÉRIEUX RONGE SON FLANC D’ATHLÈTE?
WHAT UNKNOWN EVIL HARROWS HER LITHE SIDE?
Lying beside her he thought wildly that a miracle would deliver them into a sexual embrace. He didn’t know why, because they were nice people, the natural language of bodies, because she was leaving tomorrow. She rested her hand on his thigh, no desire in the touch. She went to sleep and he opened his eyes in the black and his room was never emptier or a woman further away. He listened to her breathing. It was like the delicate engine of some cruel machine spreading distance after distance between them. Her sleep was the final withdrawal, more perfect than anything she could say or do. She slept with a deeper grace than that with which she moved.
He knew that hair couldn’t feel; he kissed her hair.
He was heading towards Côte des Neiges. The night had been devised by a purist of Montreal autumns. A light rain made the black iron fences shine. Leaves lay precisely etched on the wet pavement, flat as if they’d fallen from diaries. A wind blurred the leaves of the young acacia on MacGregor Street. He was walking an old route of fences and mansions he knew by heart.
The need for Shell stabbed him in a few seconds. He actually felt himself impaled in the air by a spear of longing. And with the longing came a burden of loneliness he knew he could not support. Why were they in different cities?
He ran to the Mount Royal Hotel. A cleaning lady on her knees thanked him for the mud.
He was dialling, shouting at the operator, reversing the charges.
The phone rang nine times before she answered it.
“Shell!”
“I wasn’t going to answer.”
“Marry me! That’s what I want.”
There was a long silence.
“Lawrence, you can’t treat people like this.”
The Favorite Game Page 20