The Favorite Game Page 11

  He had intended by his recklessness to reach her quickly and disarm her, but he succeeded only in making the conversation fashionable.

  “It’s not simple for me. I’m not trying to be funny. Why do you want to sleep with me?”

  “Because we once held hands.”

  “And that’s a reason?”

  “Humans are lucky to be connected in any way at all, even by the table between them.”

  “But you can’t be connected to everyone. It wouldn’t mean anything then.”

  “It would to me.”

  “But is going to bed the only way a man and woman can be connected?”

  Breavman replied in terms of the flirtation, not out of his real experience.

  “What else is there? Conversation? I’m in the business and I have no faith in words whatever. Friendship? A friendship between a man and a woman which is not based on sex is either hypocrisy or masochism. When I see a woman’s face transformed by the orgasm we have reached together, then I know we’ve met. Anything else is fiction. That’s the vocabulary we speak in today. It’s the only language left.”

  “Then it’s a language which nobody understands. It’s just become a babble.”

  “Better than silence. Lisa, let’s get out of here. Any moment now someone’s going to ask why I didn’t bring my guitar, and I’m liable to smash him in the mouth. Let’s talk over coffee, somewhere.”

  She shook her head gently. “No.”

  It was the best no he ever heard because it had in it dignity, appreciation, and firm denial. It claimed him and ended the game. He was content now to talk, watch her, and wonder just as he had when the young men in white scarves had taken her away in their long cars.

  “I’ve never heard that word spoken better.”

  “I thought it was what you wanted to hear.”

  “How did you get so damn wise?”

  “Look out, Larry.”

  “Look what we found.” The hostess beamed. Several guests had followed her over.

  “I’ve never heard you play,” Lisa said. “I’d like to.”

  He took the unfamiliar guitar and tuned it. The record-player was turned off and everyone drew chairs around or sat on the thick carpet.

  It was a good Spanish instrument, very light wood, resonant bass strings. He hadn’t held a guitar for months but as soon as he struck the first chord (A minor) he was happy he’d agreed to play.

  The first chord is always crucial for him. Sometimes it sounds tinny, bland, and the best thing he can do is put the instrument away, because the tone never improves and all his inventions jingle like commercials. This happens when he approaches the instrument without the proper respect or affection. It rebukes him like a complying frigid woman.

  But there are those good times when the tone is deep and lingering, and he cannot believe it is himself who is strumming the strings. He watches the intricate blur of his right hand and the ballet-fingers of his left hand stepping between the frets, and he wonders what connection there is between all that movement and the music in the air, which seems to come from the wood itself.

  It was like that when he played and sang only for Lisa. He sang the Spanish Civil War songs, not as a partisan, but as a Tiresian historian. He sang the minor songs of absence, thinking of Donne’s beautiful opening,

  Sweetest love! I do not go

  For weariness of thee,

  which is the essence of any love song. He hardly sang the words, he spoke them. He rediscovered the poetry which had overwhelmed him years before, the easy line that gave itself carelessly away and then, before it was over, struck home.

  I’d rather be in some dark valley

  Where the sun don’t never shine,

  Than to see my true love love another

  When I know that she should be mine.

  He played for an hour, aiming all the melody at Lisa. While he sang he wanted to untie the red string and let her free. That was the best gift he could give her.

  When it was over and he had put the guitar away carefully, as though it contained the finer part of him, Lisa said, “That made me feel more connected to you than anything you said. Please come to our house soon.”

  “Thank you.”

  Soon he slipped out of the party for a walk on the mountain. He watched the moon and it didn’t move for a long time.

  18

  Four days later the phone rang at one-thirty in the morning. Breavman bolted for it, happy to break his working schedule. He knew everything she was going to say.

  “I didn’t think you’d be asleep,” Lisa said.

  “I’m not. But you should be.”

  “I’d like to see you.”

  “I’d like to see you too, but I’ve got a better idea: put down the telephone and visit each of your children’s rooms and then go to bed.”

  “I did that. Twice.”

  It was a free country. The old taboos were in disrepute. They were grown up and wouldn’t be called in for supper. She was twenty-odd, wealthy, white, with a fast car and an out-of-town husband, classic commercial widow. He was alone with his insomnia and bad manuscripts.

  Breavman, thou false lech, your room hideously empty as your charity smile. I knew she’d be delivered, Krantz.

  She broke the silence. “Do you want me to come down?”

  “Yes.”

  He jammed all his laundry in the closet and hid an egg-caked plate in a stack of clean ones. He sat at his desk and slowly bound up his manuscript, taking an unfamiliar pleasure in the act, as if he now had some special right to condemn the papers.

  She was wearing slacks, her black hair was loose, but freshly combed. She brought a clean Laurentian fragrance into the room.

  “You smell like you just descended a ski slope.”

  He poured her a glass of sherry. In a few minutes he had the whole story. Her husband wasn’t on a trans-Canada trip, opening bowling alleys. He was in Toronto living with some woman, an employee of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

  “My father has the complete detective report. I didn’t want details.”

  “These things happen,” Breavman said, its triteness crushing his last word into a mumble.

  Lisa talked and sipped her drink calmly, far from losing the coolness she had carried in. He felt that, along with all her precious things, she had left her emotions at home. She knew that these things happen, she knew that everything happens, and so what?

  “He’ll come back.”

  Lisa told him with her eyes that her husband didn’t need Breavman’s defence.

  “And you love him, Lisa, and your children, and your home. That’s the most obvious thing about you.”

  She lowered her eyes and studied the wine glass. He thought she must be remembering the rows of crystal in her own house, comparing the disarray of his room with her own household order. But she had come for revenge, and the more distasteful the conditions, the sweeter. Perhaps she was not lonely, perhaps she was offended.

  “I don’t feel like discussing Carl here.”

  “I’m glad you came. You made me feel very good the night of the party, the way you listened. I didn’t think I’d ever see you alone again, and I wanted to.”

  “The strange thing is that I decided you were the only one I could see.”

  Perhaps she could express her revenge with him because he was secret, not part of her life, but not exactly a stranger — like meeting someone from your own town in a foreign place.

  So they could sit together, perhaps he could hold her hand, and talk about the curious way things turn out. They could walk along Sherbrooke arm in arm, the end of the summer was coming. He could offer her his company and friendship as solace. Or they could find the bed immediately; there was no in-between.

  Wasn’t there only one inevitability, and a weary one at that? He walked to her and kissed her mouth. She stood up and they embraced. They both sensed in that moment the mutual need to annihilate thought and speech. She was tired of the offence. He was tire
d of wondering why he wanted her body, or any body.

  They performed the act of love, as he had many times before, a protest against luck and circumstances. He praised her beauty and the ski slopes that had made her legs so fine.

  But he did not sleep with Lisa the child. He did not return to the park where nurses watched the sailor children. He did not build a mysterious garage above her naked form. He made love to a woman. Not Lisa. He knew this as they lay together and talked, finally, about their childhood and city. That contract, interrupted by the Curse, would never be fulfilled. This was a woman with whom he was beginning an affair, perhaps. The child that grew away from him into breasts and long cars and adult cigarettes was not the peaceful woman beside him. That child would evade him and cause him to wonder at her always.

  The sun had already risen when she dressed to go.

  “Get some rest,” she said. “I’ll call you tomorrow. You’d better not call the house. Never call the house.”

  He went to the window to watch her drive away. She rolled down her car window and waved at him, and suddenly they were waving harder and longer than people ever do. She was crying and pressing her palm up at him, back and forth in urgent semaphore, as if to erase out of the morning air, please, all contracts, vows, agreements, old or new. He leaned out of the window and with his signalling hand agreed to let the night go, to let her go free, because he had all he needed of her fixed in an afternoon.

  19

  Some say that no one ever leaves Montreal, for that city, like Canada itself, is designed to preserve the past, a past that happened somewhere else.

  This past is not preserved in the buildings or monuments, which fall easily to profit, but in the minds of her citizens. The clothes they wear, the jobs they perform are only the disguises of fashion. Each man speaks with his father’s tongue.

  Just as there are no Canadians, there are no Montrealers. Ask a man who he is and he names a race.

  So the streets change swiftly, the skyscrapers climb into silhouettes against the St. Lawrence, but it is somehow unreal and no one believes it, because in Montreal there is no present tense, there is only the past claiming victories.

  Breavman fled the city.

  His mother was phoning him daily. She was alone, did he know what that meant? Her back was sore, her legs were swollen. People asked about her son and she had to tell them he was a factory worker.

  Breavman laid the phone on the bed and let her talk. He had no strength or skill to comfort her. He sat beside the receiver, unable to speak or think, aware only of the monotonous rasp of her voice.

  “I looked in the mirror today, I didn’t recognize myself, wrinkles from aggravation, from nights thinking about my son, do I deserve this, fifteen years with a sick man, a son who doesn’t care whether his mother lies like a stone, like a dog, a mother, an only mother should lie like a stone, a prostitute wouldn’t stand from her son what I stand, do I have so much, do I eat chocolate all day, have I got diamonds for all that I gave away, fifteen years, did I ever ask anything for myself, two broken legs from Russia, swollen ankles that the doctor was surprised, but my son is too busy to hear the truth, night after night I lie in front of the TV, does anybody care what I do, I was such a happy person, I was a beauty, now I’m ugly, people on the street don’t recognize me, I gave my life for what, I was so good to everyone, a mother, once in a lifetime you have a mother, do we live forever, a mother is a fragile thing, your best friend, in the whole world does anyone else care what happens to you, you can fall down on the street and people pass you by, and I lie like a stone, all over the world people are running to see their mothers, but to my son it doesn’t matter, he can get another mother, one life we have, everything is a dream, it’s luck …”

  And when she was through he said, “I hope you’re feeling better, Mother,” and good-bye.

  She was seeing a psychiatrist now. He didn’t seem to be helping her. Was she taking the pills he prescribed? Her voice sounded more hysterical.

  He fled his mother and his family.

  He had thought that his tall uncles in their dark clothes were princes of an élite brotherhood. He had thought the synagogue was their house of purification. He had thought their businesses were realms of feudal benevolence. But he had grown to understand that none of them even pretended to these things. They were proud of their financial and communal success. They liked to be first, to be respected, to sit close to the altar, to be called up to lift the scrolls. They weren’t pledged to any other idea. They did not believe their blood was consecrated. Where had he got the notion that they did?

  When he saw the rabbi and cantor move in their white robes, the light on the brocaded letters of their prayer shawls, when he stood among his uncles and bowed with them and joined his voice to theirs in the responses; when he followed in the prayer book the catalogue of magnificence —

  No, his uncles were not grave enough. They were strict, not grave. They did not seem to realize how fragile the ceremony was. They participated in it blindly, as if it would last forever. They did not seem to realize how important they were, not self-important, but important to the incantation, the altar, the ritual. They were ignorant of the craft of devotion. They were merely devoted. They never thought how close the ceremony was to chaos. Their nobility was insecure because it rested on inheritance and not moment-to-moment creation in the face of annihilation.

  In the most solemn or joyous part of the ritual Breavman knew the whole procedure could revert in a second to desolation. The cantor, the rabbi, the chosen laymen stood before the open Ark, cradling the Torah scrolls, which looked like stiff-necked royal children, and returned them one by one to their golden stall. The beautiful melody soared, which proclaimed that the Law was a tree of life and a path of peace. Couldn’t they see how it had to be nourished? And all these men who bowed, who performed the customary motions, they were unaware that other men had written the sacred tune, other men had developed the seemingly eternal gestures out of clumsy confusion. They took for granted what was dying in their hands.

  But why should he care? He wasn’t Isaiah, and the people claimed nothing. He didn’t even like the people or the god of their cult. He had no rights in the matter.

  He didn’t want to blame anyone. Why should he feel that they had bred him to a disappointment? He was bitter because he couldn’t inherit the glory they unwittingly advertised. He couldn’t be part of their brotherhood but he wanted to be among them. A nostalgia for solidarity. Why was his father’s pain involved?

  He turned away from the city. He had abused the streets with praise. He had expected too much from certain cast-iron fences, special absurd turrets, staircases to the mountain, early-morning views of bridges on the St. Lawrence. He was tired of the mystery he had tried to impute to public squares and gardens. He was tired of the atmosphere in which he tried to involve Peel Street and boarding-house mansions. The city refused to rest quietly under the gauze of melancholy he had draped over the buildings. It reasserted its indifference.

  He stood very still.

  New York City. He lived in the tower of World Student House. His window overlooked the Hudson River. He was relieved that it wasn’t his city and he didn’t have to record its ugly magnificence. He walked on whatever streets he wanted and he didn’t have to put their names in stories. New York had already been sung. And by great voices. This freed him to stare and taste at will. Everybody spoke a kind of English, no resentment, he could talk to people everywhere. He wandered in the early-morning markets. He asked the names of the fish, stiff and silver in boxes of ice. He attended more of his seminars.

  He saw the most beautiful person and pursued her. Shell.

  Book III

  1

  Her middle name was Marshell, after her mother’s people, but they called her Shell.

  Her ancestors crossed the ocean early enough to insure her mother membership in the DAR. The family produced two undistinguished senators and a number of very good traders. For the p
ast seventy-five years all the males (excepting the utterly stupid) have attended Williams. Shell was the second youngest in a family of four. Her older brother was one of the unfortunates who did not make Williams. To compound his shame he ran off with a Baptist and made his father bitterly happy when he quarrelled with his wife over their children’s education.

  Shell grew up in a large white house on the outskirts of Hartford, where her maternal great-grandfather had founded a successful bank. There were a stone fountain in the garden, many acres of land, and a stream which her father stocked with trout. After the younger son made a reasonable marriage and moved to Pittsburgh, Shell and her sister were bought two horses. A stable was built, a miniature reproduction of the house itself. Her father was fond of building miniatures of his house. Scattered through the trees there were a chicken coop, a rabbit hutch, a doll’s house, and a bird roost, all copies of the original one, which (they reminded their weekend guests) was for humans.

  The affairs of the house were conducted with much ritual and decorum. Both the mother and father, deep readers of American history and collectors of colonial furniture, took some pride in never having been tempted to visit Europe.

  Every spring Shell was in charge of floating cut flowers in the stone fountain. She took the business of being a girl very seriously. She thought her sister was too rough, wondered why her mother raised her voice, was hurt when she contradicted her husband. Not only did she believe in fairy tales, she experimented with peas under her mattress.

  She hated her hair, which was black, thick, and long. After a washing it could not be managed and she was called “Zulu.” But she would not cut it, thinking perhaps of ladders let down from tower windows. She didn’t like her body. It was not a princess’s body, she was sure. It wasn’t growing in the right places. She envied her younger sister’s breasts, her straight auburn hair. She attacked hers with a brush and did not begin to count until she had done at least two hundred strokes. She was appalled when one of her sister’s boyfriends tried to kiss her.