The Favorite Game (25 page)

He watched her sleeping, sheet clutched in her hand like an amulet, hair sprung over the pillow in Hokusai waves. Certainly he would be willing to murder for that suspended body. It was the only allegiance. Then why turn from it?

His mind leaped beyond parting to regret. He was writing to her from a great distance, from some desperate flesh-covered desk in the future.

My darling Shell, there is someone lost in me whom I drowned stupidly in risky games a while ago — I would like to bring him to you, he’d jump into your daydreams without asking and take care of your flesh like a drunk scholar, with laughing and precious secret footnotes. But as I say, he is drowned, or crumpled in cowardly sleep, heavily medicated, dreamless, his ears jammed with seaweed or cotton — I don’t even know the location of the body, except that sometimes he stirs like a starving foetus in my heart when I remember you dressing or at work in the kitchen. That’s all I can write. I would have liked to bring him to you — not this page, not this regret.

He looked up from his lined book. He imagined Shell’s silhouette and his own. Valentine sweethearts of his parents’ time. A card on his collector’s shelf. Could he embalm her for easy reference?

She changed her position, drawing the white sheet tight along the side of her body, so that her waist and thigh seemed to emerge out of rough marble. He had no comparisons. It wasn’t just that the forms were perfect, or that he knew them so well. It was not a sleeping beauty, everybody’s princess. It was Shell. It was a certain particular woman who had an address and the features of her family. She was not a kaleidoscope to be adjusted for different visions. All her expressions represented feelings. When she laughed it was because. When she took his hand in the middle of the night it was because. She was the reason. Shell, the Shell he knew, was the owner of the body. It answered her, was her. It didn’t serve him from
a pedestal. He had collided with a particular person. Beautiful or not, or ruined with vitriol tomorrow, it didn’t matter. Shell was the one he loved.

When the room was half filled with sunlight Shell opened her eyes.

“Hello,” said Breavman.

“Hello. You haven’t been to sleep at all?”

“No.”

“Come now.”

She sat up and straightened the bedclothes and pulled a corner down to invite him in. He sat on the edge of the bed. She wanted to know what was the matter.

“Shell, I think I should go to Montreal for a little …”

“You’re leaving?”

He felt her stiffen.

“I’ll be back. Krantz is coming back — he wrote and offered me this job at a camp.…”

“I knew you were leaving. For the past few weeks I could just tell.”

“This is just for the summer.…”

“How long?”

“The summer.”

“How many months?”

Before he could answer she brought her fingertips to her mouth with a little hurt sound.

“What is it?” asked Breavman.

“I sound like Gordon did.”

He took her in his arms to tell her this wasn’t the same thing at all. She recalled him to their promise to be surgical.

“That’s nonsense, you know it is. C’mon, let’s create a great breakfast.”

He stayed that day and the next, but the third day he left.

C
oncerning the bodies Breavman lost. No detective will find them. He lost them in the condition of their highest beauty. They are:

You and I have our bodies, mutilated as they might be by time and memory. Breavman lost them in fire where they persist whole and perfect. This kind of permanence is no comfort to anyone. After many burnings they became faint constellations which controlled him as they turned in his own sky.

It might be said they were eaten by the Mosaic bush each of us grows in our heart but few of us cares to ignite.

H
e stood on the lawn of the Allan Memorial, looking down at Montreal.

Loonies have the best view in town.

Here and there were clusters of people gathered on the expensive grass around wood furniture. It could have been a country club. The nurses gave it away. White and perfect, there was one on the circumference of every group, not quite joining the conversation, but in quiet control, like a moon.

“Good evening, Mr. Breavman,” said the floor nurse. “Your mother will be glad to see you.”

Was that reproach in her smile?

He opened the door. The room was cool and dark. As soon as his mother saw him it began. He sat down. He didn’t bother saying hello this time.

“… I want you to have the house, Lawrence, it’s for you so you’ll have a place for your head, you’ve got to protect yourself, they’ll take everything away, they have no heart, for me it’s the end of the story, what I did for everyone, and now I have to be with the crazy people, lying like a dog, the whole
world
outside, the whole world, I wouldn’t let a
dog
lie this way, I should be in a hospital, is this a
hos
pital? do they know about my feet, that I can’t walk? but my son is too busy, oh he’s a great man, too busy for his mother, a poet for the world, for the world …!”

Here she began to shout. Nobody looked in.

“… but for his mother he’s too
busy
, for his shiksa he’s got plenty of time, for her he doesn’t count minutes, after what they did to our people, I had to hide in the cellar on Easter, they chased us, what I went through, and to see a son, to see my son, a traitor to his people, I have to forget about everything, I have no son.…”

She continued for an hour, staring at the ceiling as she ranted. When it was nine o’clock he said, “I’m not supposed to stay any longer, Mother.”

She stopped suddenly and blinked.

“Lawrence?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Are you taking care of yourself?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Are you eating enough?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“What did you eat today?”

He mumbled a few words. He tried to make up a menu she’d approve. He could hardly speak, not that she could hear.

“… never took a cent, it was everything for my son, fifteen years with a sick man, did I ask for diamonds like other women.…”

He left her talking.

There was a therapeutic dance going on outside. Nurses held by frightened patients. Recorded pop music, romantic fantasies even more ludicrous in this setting.

Behind the circle of soft light in which they moved rose the dark slope of Mount Royal. Below them flashed the whole commercial city.

He watched the dancers and, as we do when confronted with the helpless, he heaped on them all the chaotic love he couldn’t put anywhere else. They lived in terror.

He wished that one of the immaculate white women would walk him down the hill.

H
e saw Tamara almost every night of the two weeks he was in the city.

She had abandoned her psychiatrist and espoused Art, which was less demanding and cheaper.

“Let’s not learn a single new thing about one another, Tamara.”

“Is that laziness or friendship?”

“It’s love!”

He staged a theatrical swoon.

She lived in a curious little room on Fort Street, a street of dolls’ houses. There was a marble fireplace with carved torches and hearts, above it a narrow mirror surrounded by slender wood pillars and entablatures, a kind of brown Acropolis.

“That mirror’s doing nobody any good up there.”

They pried it out and arranged it beside the couch.

The room had been partitioned flimsily by an economical landlady. Tamara’s third, because of the high ceiling, seemed to be standing on one end. She liked it because it felt so temporary.

Tamara was a painter now, who did only self-portraits. There were canvases everywhere. The sole background for all the portraits
was this room she lived in. There was paint under her fingernails.

“Why do you only do yourself?”

“Can you think of anyone more beautiful, charming, intelligent, sensitive, et cetera?”

“You’re getting fat, Tamara.”

“So I can paint my childhood.”

Her hair was the same black, and she hadn’t cut it.

They founded the Compassionate Philistines one night, and limited the membership to two. It was devoted to the adoration of the vulgar. They celebrated the fins of the new Cadillac, defended Hollywood and the Hit Parade, wall-to-wall carpets, Polynesian restaurants, affirmed their allegiance to the Affluent Society.

Wallpaper roses were peeling from the grapevine moulding. The single piece of furniture was a small Salvation Army couch, over-stuffed and severely wounded. She supported herself as an artist’s model and ate only bananas, the theory of the week.

The night before he left she had a surprise for him and all loyal Compassionate Philistines. She removed her bandanna. She had dyed her hair blonde in accordance with the aims of the organization.

Good-bye, old Tamara, Breavman recorded for his biographers, may you flourish, you have a three-hundred-thousand-dollar mouth.

W
hen would the old dialogue with Krantz resume?

The lake was beautiful in the evening. Frogs went off like coiled springs.

When would they sit beside the water like small figures in a misty scroll painting, and talk about their long exile? He wanted to tell him everything.

Krantz lectured the counsellors on Indoor Games for Rainy Days. Krantz prepared a days-off schedule. Krantz set up a new buddy system for the waterfront and drilled the counsellors for two hours. Krantz carried a clip-board and a whistle around his neck.

No crude bugle wakened them in the morning, but a recording on the PA of the first few bars of Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto. Krantz’s idea. On the fifth morning of the pre-camp training programme which Krantz had instituted for the counsellors, Breavman knew that this particular piece of music had been ruined for him for life.