The Favorite Game Read online

  Miss McTavish whistled a part from a quartet.

  The quartet ended in a gasp.

  “I’ve never done this before.”

  Shell stood still as she was kissed on the mouth, and caught the man’s smell of alcohol on her teacher’s breath. She tried to think through the present, reach the real forest she drove through with her father, but she couldn’t.

  “Ha ha,” cried Miss McTavish, flinging herself backwards in the snow. “I’m brave. I’m very brave.”

  Shell believed her. She was a human tossed in the snow, humiliating herself. She must be brave, as nuns with whips are brave, and drunk sailors in a storm. People who walk into desolation, beggars, saints, call to those they leave behind, and these cries are nobler than the victory shouts of generals. She knew this from books and her house.

  Not too far away there was a second-class road. The headlights of a single car sawed through the woods, disappeared, and left the woman and the girl with a renewed sense of the outside, regulating world, which Shell already knew was engineered against the remarkable.

  Miss McTavish had succeeded in immersing herself almost entirely in a drift of snow. Shell helped her out of it. They faced each other as they had in the library. Shell knew that her teacher would have preferred to be standing back there now, the declaration and kiss undone.

  “You’re old enough for me to say nothing.”

  Breavman was surprised to learn that Shell still corresponded with her.

  “Once or twice a year,” said Shell.

  “Why?”

  “I spent the rest of my time at school trying to convince her that she hadn’t destroyed herself in my eyes and was still my ordinary and well-beloved English teacher.”

  “I know that kind of tyranny.”

  “Will you let me send your book to her?”

  “If your idea of charity is to bore a Hopkins expert.”

  “This isn’t for her.”

  “You’ll wind up your debt —”

  “Yes.”

  “— by becoming what she wanted you to be.”

  “In a way. I have a king.”

  “Ummm.”

  He was not convinced.

  4

  When Shell was nineteen she married Gordon Ritchie Sims. As the announcement in The New York Times specified, he was in the graduating class at Amherst and she was in her freshman year at Smith.

  The best man was Gordon’s room-mate, a devout Episcopalian whose banking family was of Jewish origin. He was half in love with Shell himself and dreamed of just such a wife to guarantee and cement his assimilation.

  Gordon wanted to be a writer and most of his courting was literary. He enjoyed the fat letters he sent her from Amherst. Every night, after he had done a respectable amount of work on his thesis, he filled his personalized writing sheets with promises, love, and expectation, the passion tempered by an imitation of the style of Henry James.

  Mail became a part of Shell’s heart. She carefully chose the places to read these lengthy communications, which were far more exciting than the chapters of a novel because she was the major character in them.

  Gordon summoned a world of honour and order and cultivation, and the return to a simpler, more exalting way of life which Americans had once experienced, and which he, by virtue of his name and love, intended to resurrect with her.

  Shell loved his seriousness.

  At the football weekends she practised being quiet beside him, indulging herself in the pleasures of responsible devotion.

  He was tall and white-skinned. Horn-rimmed spectacles turned to pensive a face which without them would have been merely dreamy.

  At dances their quiet behaviour and head-bending interest in just about everything gave the impression that they were chaperons rather than participants in the celebration. One almost expected them to say, “We like to spend some time with young people, it’s so easy to lose contact.”

  With him Shell passed from the startling colt-like beauty of her adolescence directly into that kind of gracious senility typified by Queen Mothers and the widows of American presidents.

  They announced their betrothal in the summer, after a session of mutual masturbation on the screened porch of the Sims house at Lake George.

  They married and after his graduation he immediately began his military service. It occurred to her as she drove him to the railway station that he had never really seen her completely naked, there were places he hadn’t touched her. She attempted to conceive of this as a compliment.

  She did not see very much of him in the next two years, weekends here and there, and generally he was exhausted. But his letters were regular and tireless, not to say disturbing. They seemed to threaten the serenity of a temporary widowhood she had been quite willing to assume.

  She loved her clothes, which were dark and simple. She enjoyed the frequent extended visits at the houses of his family and hers. And she felt her place in the world: her lover was a soldier.

  She would almost have preferred not to cut the envelopes. Intact, thick, lying on her dresser, they were part of the mirror in which she was brushing her long hair, part of the austere battered colonial furniture they had begun to collect.

  Opened, they were not what he promised. They had become intricate invitations to physical love, filled with props, cold cream, lipstick, mirrors, feathers, games where the button is found in private places.

  But on those weekends when he managed to get back to their small apartment, he was too tired to do anything but sleep and talk and go to small restaurants.

  The letters were not mentioned.

  5

  Shell believed her breasts were stuffed with cancer.

  The doctor told her to put her blouse back on.

  “You’re a healthy woman. And lovely.” He allowed that he was old enough to say that.

  “I feel so foolish. I don’t know where the bumps have gone.”

  Meanwhile, back at the Montreal poem factory, Breavman is interning, training to become her Compleat Physician.

  6

  After Gordon got out of the service they decided to move to New York and took a fairly expensive apartment on Perry Street in the Village. He had a job with Newsweek, in the books section, and he also sold some pieces to the Saturday Review. Shell was Girl Friday to one of the editors of Harper’s Bazaar. She took some pleasure in refusing the many invitations to model.

  According to their friends they had a cunning apartment. There was a tall handless clock with wooden works and roses painted on the face. There was a massive corner cabinet with many square glass windows in which they kept liqueurs and long-stemmed glasses. They had worked hard to remove the paint and stain it.

  A child in severe clothes on a black background, painted by a journeyman portraitist, hung over a refectory table and insured the dignity of their frequent small dinner parties.

  They were all good children eating up their frozen cream of shrimp soup, and they were about to assume control of the banks, the periodicals, the State Department, the Free World.

  At one of these occasions, Roger, Gordon’s old room-mate, managed to have a few private words with Shell. He had been liberated by six cognacs.

  “If this ever stops working,” — the gesture of his hand took in the accumulated triumph of antique shops — “come to me, Shell.”

  “Why?”

  “I love you.”

  “I know you love me, Roger.” She smiled. “And Gordon and I love you. I mean why should it ever stop working?”

  Shell was holding an empty silver tray and he could see her face in it through the crumbs.

  “I don’t love you gently, friendly, I don’t love you auld lang syne, I don’t love you sweetheart of Sigma Chi.” He had made it humorous enough; now he said seriously, “I want you.”

  “I know.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “No,” she said, grateful for the tray she was holding. “Not the best friend.”

  “You can�
�t be happy.”

  “Oh?”

  There was something wrong with his suit, the pants hung badly, he would kill his tailor, the kitchen was too small, he wasn’t elegant.

  “He never touches you.”

  “How can you say this to me?”

  “He told me.”

  “What?”

  “It was the same all through school. He can’t.”

  “Why? Tell me why!”

  Now information was the most important thing. Apparently Roger thought she would kiss him for it, having been trained in trade. He found himself with his nose against the bottom of the silver platter.

  “He can’t, that’s all. He can’t. He never could. All you people are a laugh,” he added, speaking from his authentic background.

  7

  How can anybody take the skyscrapers seriously? Breavman wonders. And what if they lasted ten thousand years, and what if the world spoke American? Where was the comfort for today? And each day the father’s gift grows heavier — history, bricks, monuments, the names of streets — tomorrow was already crushed!

  Where was the comfort? Where was the war to make him here and hero? Where was his legion? He had met people with numbers branded on their wrists, some of them wrecked, some shrewd and very quiet. Where was his ordeal?

  Eat junk, join the enemies of the police, volunteer for crime? Correct America with violence? Suffer in the Village? But the concentration camps were vast, unthinkable. They seemed to descend on man from a great height. And America was so small, man-made.

  In his room in the World Student House, Breavman leans elbows on the window-sill and watches the sun ignite the Hudson. It is no longer the garbage river, catch-all for safes, excrement, industrial poison, the route of strings of ponderous barges.

  Can something do that to his body?

  There must be something written on the fiery water. An affidavit from God. A detailed destiny chart. The address of his perfect wife. A message choosing him for glory or martyrdom.

  His room is in the tower, beside the elevator shaft, and he listens to the heavy mechanism of cables and weights. The mechanism of his pumping hand is just as ponderous. The glare off the Hudson is monotonous. There is a pigeon on Grant’s Tomb. It’s cold with the window open.

  8

  Gordon and Shell talked. Gordon welcomed the talk because again it was a literary treatment of the problem. And because they had labelled their absent bodies a problem, defined the boundaries of their trouble, they were able to bandage their union for a little longer.

  As Gordon put it, they had a good solid house, why demolish it because one of the rooms could not be entered? They were intelligent people who loved each other; certainly a key could be found. And while they worked sanely for a solution they must not neglect the appointments of the other rooms.

  So the well-ordered existence continued, really it flourished. Shell changed her dressmaker, Gordon moved his politics farther to the right. They bought a piece of land in Connecticut which had on it a sheep fold which they intended to preserve. Architects were consulted.

  Shell was genuinely fond of him. She had to resort to that expression when she examined her feelings. That sickened her because she did not wish to dedicate her life to a fondness. This was not the kind of quiet she wanted. The elegance of a dancing couple was remarkable only because the grace evolved from a sweet struggle of flesh. Otherwise it was puppetry, hideous. She began to understand peace as an aftermath.

  Now it seemed she was as tired as he was. The dinner parties were ordeals to be faced. The house was a huge project. They had to be in the country every other weekend and the traffic out of the city was impossible. And it was better to buy now because next year the prices would be even higher. The big things they stored but the apartment was crammed with cookie moulds, candle moulds, shoemaker benches, wooden buckets, and a spinning wheel which was too fragile for them to let out of their sight.

  Shell grew to believe, in the terms of Gordon’s metaphor, that they were living in a ruin already and that the locked door was the sole entrance to sanity and rest. But Gordon had taken pains to package the problem neatly not so much in order to examine it as to drop it into the sea. He was not one of those hairy passion chaps, it was not his nature, he almost believed, except, like all of us, he dreamed. In dreams the truth is learned that all good works are done in the absence of a caress.

  A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love. Shell studied herself in the mirror, which had an eighteenth-century frame.

  She was ugly. Her body had betrayed her. Her breasts were fried eggs. It didn’t matter what she knew about Gordon, the extent of his responsibility in the failure. It was the burden of flesh and bone and hair which she could not command perfectly. She was the woman, the bad flower, how could he be blamed?

  Look at the size of her thighs, they spread frighteningly when she sat. Gordon was tall, thin, white, her legs must weigh more than his legs. The appendix scar was an appalling gash ruining her belly. Damn the butcher doctor. And Gordon must be forgiven for not coming close to a dried wound.

  Desire made her close her eyes, not for Gordon, not for a prince, but for the human man who would return her to her envelope of skin and sit beside her in the afternoon light.

  Her friends had their problems too. Someone dedicated her seventh martini to the extinct American male. Shell did not raise her glass; besides, she didn’t like hen parties. The toast-mistress regretted the death of American peasants, gamekeepers, and mourned the dependable cab-drivers, stable-boys, milkmen lost to analysts and psychological Westerns. Shell was not heartened by the general masculine failure.

  What were the dressmakers doing? Why were all these massaged limbs bound in expensive cloth? A massage is not a caress. The intricate styles of hair, sleeves slit to show the arm, the children’s eyes redeemed in pencil, what for? Whom to delight? Dead under the velvet. The rooms cleverly appointed, the ancient designs on the wallpaper, furniture of taste, rescued Victorian opulence, what was it meant to enclose? The beginning was wrong. The coupling did not occur. It should grow from entwined bodies.

  The bath filled up. She nursed her body in, squatting on her knees, then, spreading her hands over the surface of the water as one does over a heater in a cold room, she slid back, even wetting her hair, wholly given over to the warmth and the dainty clean smell of lemon soap.

  9

  The crowd mounted the stone steps quickly. Perhaps when they reached street level their lives would have changed, roads gold, different homes and families waiting.

  Two men moved faster than the crowd and the crowd let them through. Their lives were not outside the tunnel.

  Breavman climbed at another speed, studying graffiti, wondering what secretary he could separate for the afternoon from her office routine. He had nowhere to go. He had abandoned the lectures he usually attended at that hour ever since the famous professor had agreed to let him do the term thesis on Breavman’s own book.

  “Stop!”

  At least it sounded like stop. Breavman stopped but the command was not for him.

  “Brother!”

  He wished he understood their language. Why did he think he knew what the words were? The two men were fighting on the steps, wedging Breavman against the wall. He extracted his feet with difficulty, like someone stepping out of quicksand.

  It took two seconds. They hugged each other tightly. There was a hollow grunt, Breavman could not be sure from which man. Then one stood up and ran. The other’s head hung over the edge of the step less muscularly than a head should. The throat was widely and deeply cut.

  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 so
me 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.