The Favorite Game (21 page)

Several voices shrieked for the police. A man who had the air of a doctor kneeled beside the body, which was already soaked in blood, shook his head philosophically to indicate that he was used to this sort of thing, then got up and went away. His attention had quieted the crowd, which was now beginning to bottleneck the passage, but after he had disappeared for some moments the cries for the police were renewed.

Breavman thought he should do something. He took off his jacket, intending to cover the victim, not the face, perhaps the shoulders. But what for? You did this for shock. The slit throat was past shock. It was softly bleeding over the
IRT
steps at the corner of Fourteenth Street and Seventh Avenue. At exactly one o’clock in the afternoon. Poor lousy urban matador. The white-on-white tie nattily knotted. The brown and white shoes very pointed and recently polished.

Breavman folded the jacket over his arm. It would implicate him. The police would want to know why he draped his jacket over a corpse. A bloody jacket was not a good idea for a souvenir. Sirens
from the street. The crowd began to break up and Breavman went with it.

A few blocks away Breavman reflected that two years before he would have done it. A small death, like discovering that you can no longer slip into old underwear or ting the bell with the wooden mallet.

Why wasn’t he thinking about the man?

Two years ago he would have dipped the jacket, made the gesture, connected himself with the accident. Was the ritual dissolving? Was this an advance from morbidity?

A vision of Nazi youth presented itself. Rows and rows of the gold heads filing past the assassinated soldier. They lowered their company flags into the wound and promised. Breavman swallowed bile.

A steady underground question persisted. Who was the man? Sometimes the question was obscured into Where did he buy the shoes? and From what corner did he flash them? Who was the man? Was he the man asleep in the subway at three in the morning dressed in a brand-new suit with cuff marks over the white part of his shoes? Did girls like his blue hair tonic? What shabby room did he step out of, glittering like the plastic madonna on the dresser? Who was the man? Where was he climbing? What was the quarrel, where was the girl, how much was the money? The knife into what water from what foggy bridge? Barry Fitzgerald and the rookie cop want to know everything.

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.

S
hell 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.”

“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.