The Favorite Game Read online

  Gordon was running hot water over a box of strawberries. He knew it would happen like this. Auden had said so. After her first few words he seemed not to hear what she said. He had always known that this was the way it would come.

  He answered, “I see” and “Of course I understand” and “I see” several more times. He kept his hand between the hot and the cold. Preserving the colourful wrapper intact assumed great importance.

  Then suddenly she was leaving him. His life was changing right now.

  “I want to live by myself for a little while.”

  “A little while?”

  “I don’t know how long.”

  “In other words it could be a very long time.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “In other words you have no intention of returning.”

  “I don’t know, Gordon. Can’t you see I don’t know?”

  “You don’t know but you have a pretty good idea.”

  “Gordon, stop. You won’t get anything out of me like that. You never have.”

  At this point it occurred to Shell that when she had begun to speak to him she had not intended to leave but to give him a last chance.

  “Stay here.”

  He turned off the tap, pushed the box with deliberation into a corner of the sink as though it were a chessman, and wiped his hands. It was an ugly voice he used. The words were less than a plea and more than a proposition.

  “Stay. Don’t break up our marriage over this.”

  “Is it so little?”

  “Women have affairs,” he said without philosophy.

  “I was with a man,” she said incredulously.

  “I know.” And the softer: “It’s not the end of the world.”

  But she wanted it to be the end of the world. She wanted a mark on the forehead to prove the union was rotten. That he was fighting for his life was difficult for her to perceive. She interpreted his speech as part of his daily affront. Now he wanted to formalize the disaster.

  “I won’t interfere. I won’t ask you questions.”

  “No.”

  He thought she was bargaining.

  “You’ll get it out of your system. You’ll see, we’ll weather this.”

  “No!”

  He never understood to what she was shouting “No.”

  Even men of limited imagination can sometimes imagine the worst. So he could not have been really surprised to see her packing one day, or to hear themselves discussing who would take what bureau, what candle-mould, or to find himself on the telephone making arrangements with movers to save Shell the trouble. For years now he had known he didn’t deserve her; it was a matter of time. Now it was happening and he had already imagined his gentlemanly role.

  Shell visited her parents in Hartford. They still lived in the big white house, just the two of them. Officially they regretted the separation and hoped she’d soon return to her husband and her senses. But she had a long talk with her father as they walked over the property. The leaves were drained of green but they had not yet turned bright. She was surprised how easily she was able to talk to him.

  “He had no right,” was all he said about Gordon, but it was a handsome old man speaking, who had lived out some kind of man’s life, and it fortified her.

  He let her talk, inviting it with his silence and the paths he chose. When she was through he spoke about the first growth of some trees he had planted.

  She could not help feeling that her mother regarded the breakup as a sinister triumph of heredity, like haemophilia in a royal child that had seemed too healthy.

  Shell was lucky to be able to rent a small apartment on 23rd Street. She didn’t want to get too far from the Village. Except for a tiny kitchen, bathroom, and vestibule, she lived in one room. She stood the tall clock beside the entrance to the main room. She painted the walls lavender and threw lavender translucent draperies over the windows, which seemed to etherize the light, make it thin, and perfume the air with cool colour.

  It was not her home in the same way her body was not her own. She merely lived in them. She watched herself move among the pretty things. She didn’t believe that she was the proper woman to have such a good career job, or to leave a husband or to entertain a lover. It horrified her.

  She would not see Med again, of course, and one afternoon in the cafeteria she told him why. She was not created for a minor adventure. Their interview was interrupted by a young man whose curious declaration moved her unreasonably.

  Breavman thought about her all the time but he experienced no lust for her. This was new. He thought about her presence with no longing. She was alive, her beauty existed, she was pulling on her gloves or pushing back her hair or staring at a movie with her huge eyes. He did not want to tear down the theatre in his fantasy and rescue her from the dark fiction. She was there. She was in the city, or some city, some train, some castle or office. He knew their bodies would move together. That was the least of it.

  He didn’t think of himself as a lover. He knew they would lie mouth to mouth, happier, safer, wilder than ever before. One of the comforts of her merely being was that he need make no plans.

  Once or twice he told himself that he ought to find her, ask people. It wasn’t necessary. He was willing to enter into homage whether he saw her again or not. Like a Wordsworthian hero, he did not wish her his.

  He didn’t even remember her face too perfectly. He hadn’t studied it closely. He had lowered his head and dug his pen into napkin poems. She was what he expected, was always expecting. It was like coming home at night after a tedious extended journey. You stand a minute in the vestibule. No light is switched on. He didn’t have to explore her features. He could walk blindfolded into praise of her, once the first open armourless glance guaranteed her beauty.

  It was the very last time Breavman let go the past and hard promises which he could barely articulate. He did no writing. He suspended himself in the present. He read an architectural survey of New York City and was surprised at his capacity for concentration and interest. He listened to lectures without thinking about the professor’s ambition. He built a kite. He strolled through Riverside Park without coveting the solitary nurses or growing the destinies of children in toy racers. The trees were fine as they were, losing their leaves, both Latin and common names unknown. There wasn’t much terror in the old women in black coats and lisle stockings sitting on the benches of upper Broadway, or the mutilated vendors of pencils and plastic cups. He had never been so calm.

  He spent many evenings in the Music Room of World Student House. Thick blue carpet, wood panelling, dark heavy furniture, and a sign commanding quiet. The record collection was only adequate but it was all discovery for him. He had never really listened to music before. It had been a backdrop for poems and talk.

  Now he listened to other men. How they spoke! It made his own voice small and put his body back into the multitudes of the world. No images formed while he listened, nothing he could steal for his page. It was their landscape where he sat guest.

  He was following the flute in a Schubert quartet. It climbed and returned and ascended again, launched and received by low powerful strings. Shell opened the door, stepped into the room, turned to the door to give her attention to closing it softly. She quickly crossed the silent carpet and sat in a chair beside the french windows, through which she could see the darkening park, walls, and street.

  He noticed the way she tried to relax her body, to make herself like a child hearing a favourite story. But her hands tightened on the carved wooden arms and for a hundredth of a second she was suffering in an electric chair. Then she sank back again and tried to annihilate herself in the melody.

  Some women possess their beauty as they do a custom sportscar or a thoroughbred horse. They drive it hard to every appointment and grant interviews from the saddle. The lucky ones have small accidents and learn to walk in the street, because nobody wants to listen to an arrogant old lady. Some women wear moss over their beauty and occasional
ly something rips it away — a lover, a pregnancy, maybe a death — and an incredible smile shows through, deep happy eyes, perfect skin, but this is temporary and soon the moss reforms. Some women study and counterfeit beauty. Industries have been established to serve these women, and men are conditioned to favour them. Some women inherit beauty as a family feature, and learn to value it slowly, as the scion of a great family becomes proud of an unusual chin because so many distinguished men bore it. And some women, Breavman thought, women like Shell, create it as they go along, changing not so much their faces as the air around them. They break down old rules of light and cannot be interpreted or compared. They make every room original.

  He believed she was in some kind of pain, or rather, defeat. The loveliness she composed seemed to rebel and escape her, as sometimes a poem under the pen becomes wild and uncontrollable. This did not modify his wonder at her. What she created was still remarkable. Into that he wouldn’t dare intrude. But perhaps he could have some part in comforting her.

  She recognized him and met his stare, having learned that this was the best method to greet the public seducer, and immediately perceived that there was in his eyes nothing that tried to make her an indifferent means, an object. She was simply being adored. For some curious reason she remembered a certain dress she had worn when she was at school and wished vaguely to be wearing it or know where it was. His head was inclined, he was smiling. He’s ready to watch me all night, she thought. Not speak, not ask anything. She wondered who he was. His face was young but there were unusually deep lines from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth. It was as if all his experience were recorded there. The mouth would have been too full and sensual without the chastening lines, like those idiotic fat kissing lips of Hindu gods.

  Well, what was she doing thinking about his lips? And what was she doing in this chair sitting so stilly for him? She should be back at her apartment, thinking, considering her future, learning a language, sorting things out, or whatever people who live alone are supposed to do when they come back at night.

  She realized that years ago this was exactly how she would have liked to be observed, with music, before a window, with light made soft by old wood.

  Soon she wouldn’t be able to see the separate stones in the wall, or the iron fence against the bushes. The sidewalks were mother-of-pearl, and although she could not see it, she knew the sun was dragging darkness as it cut behind the rose-edged New Jersey hills. Would he never turn away?

  She closed her eyes and could still feel his stare. It had the power of defenceless praise. It did not call her beautiful, but called her to delight in her beauty, which is more understandable and human, and it pleased her to contemplate the pleasure she created. Who was the man who did this to her? She opened her eyes and smiled her curiosity at him. He stood up and walked to her.

  “Will you come with me?”

  “All right.”

  “It’s almost dark.”

  They left the room softly. Breavman closed the door carefully. They exchanged their names in whispers and laughed when they remembered that they could talk out loud.

  They walked back and forth on the cement expanse that stretches in front of Grant’s Tomb. There is a certain formality about that area; at night it could be the private garden of an illustrious friend. They went in step over the large squares.

  “The Grants are excellent hosts,” said Shell.

  “They retire very early of an evening,” said Breavman.

  “Wouldn’t you say their house is a wee bit pretentious?” said Shell.

  “That’s generous. The entrance hall looks like a bloody mausoleum!” said Breavman. “And I hear he drinks.”

  “So does she.”

  They joined hands and ran down the hill. Crisp leaves splintered under their feet and they looked for drifts of them to trample down. Then they watched the traffic speed on the driveway below, the lights of countless cars. On the Hudson there were other lights, the necklace of the George Washington bridge, the slow-moving barges and the Alcoa sign across the water. The air was clear, the stars big. They stood close and inherited everything.

  “I must go now.”

  “Stay up the night with me! We’ll go to the fish market. There are great noble monsters packed in ice. There are turtles, live ones, for famous restaurants. We’ll rescue one and write messages on his shell and put him in the sea, Shell, sea-shell. Or we’ll go to the vegetable market. They’ve got red-net bags full of onions that look like huge pearls. Or we’ll go down to Forty-second Street and see ten movies and buy a mimeographed bulletin of jobs we can get in Pakistan —”

  “I work tomorrow.”

  “Which has nothing to do with it.”

  “But I’d better go now.”

  “I know this is unheard of in America, but I’ll walk you home.”

  “I live on Twenty-third Street.”

  “Exactly what I’d hoped. It’s over a hundred blocks.”

  Shell took his arm, he brought his elbow close against her hand, and they were both part of a single motion, a sort of gentle Siamese beast that could cover ten thousand blocks. She took her arm away after a little while and he felt empty.

  “Is there something wrong?”

  “I’m tired, I guess. There’s a cab.”

  “Talk to me a second before we get into a car.”

  She thought it was too difficult to explain. He would consider her a perfect fool of a possessive female if she told him. She didn’t want to walk that close to anyone casually. And was the man supposed to declare himself after knowing her for half an evening? And she didn’t even know her own desires; he was a stranger. Of one thing only she was certain. She could not expend herself in the casual. “I’m married,” was all she said.

  He studied her face. It was a temptation not to connect her loveliness with prosaic human problems. All her expressions were so beautiful, what did it matter what provoked them? Weren’t her lips perfect when they trembled? Then he remembered the pain he had sensed in her when she was sitting before the window. He shook his head and answered her.

  “No, no, I don’t think you are.”

  He hailed a taxi and before he could touch the handle of the door the cabbie leaned over and pushed it open. Times Square was a sudden invasion of light. Blue veins showed through the skin of their faces and hands and the bald head of the driver. They welcomed the comparative darkness of Seventh Avenue. They weren’t close enough yet to enjoy ugliness.

  He told the cab to wait and took her to the elevator.

  “I won’t ask you up,” Shell said without coyness.

  “I know. We have time.”

  “Thank you for saying that. I loved our walk.”

  He dismissed the taxi and walked the hundred blocks himself. Trying not to step on cracks was the extent of any ordeal he entertained. He had retired into comfort, which is doing what you know you can do.

  Shell got ready for bed quickly. When she was lying in the dark she suddenly realized that she hadn’t brushed her hair.

  11

  Breavman always envied the old artists who had great and accepted ideas to serve. Then the colour of gold could be laid on and glory written down. The death of a god in scarlet and glowing leaf is very different from the collapse of a drunkard in a blue café, no matter what underground literature might profess.

  He never described himself as a poet or his work as poetry. The fact that the lines do not come to the edge of the page is no guarantee. Poetry is a verdict, not an occupation. He hated to argue about the techniques of verse. The poem is a dirty, bloody, burning thing that has to be grabbed first with bare hands. Once the fire celebrated Light, the dirt Humility, the blood Sacrifice. Now the poets are professional fire-eaters, freelancing at any carnival. The fire goes down easily and honours no one in particular.

  Once, for a while, he seemed to serve something other than himself. Those were the only poems he ever wrote. They were for Shell. He wanted to give her back her body.
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  Beneath my hands

  your small breasts

  are the upturned bellies

  of breathing fallen sparrows.

  Or was it really for her that he worked? It made it easier for him if she liked her body. The bed was more peaceful. They didn’t begin as poems at all, but propaganda. The verdict was poetry. If she continued to believe her flesh an indifferent enemy then she would not let him look at her as he wanted.

  He would fold the sheet away from her to watch her while she slept. There was nothing in the room but her uncovered flesh. He didn’t have to compare it with anything. To kneel beside her and run his fingers on her lips, follow every shape, was to annihilate sunsets he couldn’t touch. Ambition, demands of excellence were happily lost as he rested in her. This was most excellent. But she had to feel herself whole. A goddess mustn’t fidget. So he must work to make her joyous and still. She learned the conventional instrument of climax, which for a woman is the beginning of pride and stillness.

  When she finally shyly traded her body with his she wasn’t altogether certain that she wouldn’t disgust him. Gordon had said he loved her but he had refrained from touching her. Five years. He had allowed limited contact. Not her body but the fingers of one hand might trace his furtive dash to pleasure. Her flesh died from that. Every night it went greyer.

  Breavman brushed aside the silk like a cobweb fallen across her shoulders. She made a little noise of pleasure and resignation, as if now he knew the worst. He rested his head on her breast, this old attitude speaking best for him.

  She learned quickly, but no woman is so beautiful she will not want her beauty told again in rhyme. He was a professional, he knew how to build a lover to court her.

  He thought poems made things happen. He had no contempt for the robot lover who made every night a celebration and any meal they took a feast. He was a skilful product, riveted with care, whom Breavman wouldn’t have minded being himself. He approved of the lover’s tenderness, was even envious of some of the things the lover said, as though he were a wit Breavman had invited for dinner.