The Favorite Game Read online

  The lover, being planned so well, had a life of his own and often left Breavman behind. He came to Shell with his gift, let us say, of an ostrich feather bought at a Second Avenue store or tea roses from the shops at the corner of Eighth Street. He sat at Shell’s table and they exchanged gossip and plans.

  Wherever you move

  I hear the sounds of closing wings

  of falling wings

  I am speechless

  because you have fallen beside me

  because your eyelashes

  are the spines of tiny fragile animals.

  “They cashed a cheque for me at the supermarket.”

  “The privileges of beauty. The last high caste left in classless America.”

  “No, they did the same for a little brown old lady.”

  “So the neighbourhood virtues persist.”

  “How did your work go?”

  “I blackened my page.”

  I dread the time

  when your mouth

  begins to call me hunter.

  The chatter went on and on. Stories of Hartford, the stone fountain, the summers at Lake George, huge houses remembered. Stories of Montreal, night drives with Krantz, death of a father. And as they lived together their own stories grew, myths of first meeting, first loving, quiet of coming trips.

  “Can I read you something?”

  “Yours?”

  “You know I can’t stand anybody else’s work.”

  She wanted him to sit beside her in a special favourite way.

  “Is it about me?”

  “Well, wait till I read the damn thing.”

  She listened seriously. She asked him to read it again. She had never been so happy. He began in his low voice which always abdicated before the meaning of the words, never forced an effect. She loved this honesty in him, this intensity that made everything important.

  “Oh it’s fine, Lawrence, it’s really fine.”

  “Good. That’s what I wanted.”

  “But it’s not for me — it’s not for anyone.”

  “No, Shell, it’s for you.”

  She had a treat for him, frozen strawberries.

  When you call me close

  to tell me

  your body is not beautiful

  I want to summon

  the eyes and hidden mouths

  of stone of light of water

  to testify against you.

  Breavman watched his deputy make her happy while he stared and stared. One night he watched her while she slept. He wanted to know what happened to her. Some faces die of sleep. Mouths go limp. Gone eyes leave a corpse behind. But she was whole and lovely, her hand close to her mouth and clutching a corner of sheet. He heard a cry in the street. He crept to the window but he could see nothing. The cry sounded like the death of something.

  I want them

  to surrender before you

  the trembling rhyme of your face

  from their deep caskets.

  I don’t care who’s being killed, he thought. I don’t care what crusades are being planned in historical cafés. I don’t care about lives massacred in slums. He searched the extent of his human concern beyond the room. It was this: cool condolence for the women less beautiful than she, for the men less lucky than he.

  Because he was attached to magic the poems continued. He didn’t realize that Shell was won not by the text but by the totality of his attention.

  “Can I come in?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m getting dressed.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Don’t come in, please. You’re going to get horribly tired of me. All the books say I’m supposed to guard my mystery.”

  “I want to watch you get mysteriously dressed.”

  It was not strange that she interpreted this devotion to her presence as love.

  When you call me close

  to tell me

  your body is not beautiful

  I want my body and my hands

  to be pools

  for your looking and laughing.

  12

  Shell decided to go through with the divorce. Gordon acquiesced. He had intended to put up a battle but when she visited him at his office he was intimidated by her. She was so quiet and friendly, inquiring about his work, happy for his success. She referred to the marriage tenderly, but was firm about its ending, as though it were an after-supper game in the twilight but now the children had to come home to bed. He did not have to guess at the source of her strength. Except for one afternoon when they were filling out some final papers and he made a last-ditch effort to keep her, he was happy he’d had the luck to spend five years with her. And in a few years his literary disposition, unrequited by Newsweek, would allow him to dramatize himself to younger women with this little tragedy.

  “This is between me and Gordon,” she said to Breavman. Like general lovers, they could only speak in each other’s arms. “So don’t go getting your hat.”

  They had lived together for almost a year. She didn’t want him to regard the divorce as a signal to propose. Of course she wanted to marry him. She was not equipped for lovers, for her idea of love was essentially one of loyalty, a loyalty grounded in passion.

  Sometimes she believed that no one could give so much tenderness, attention, except as an investment in the future. Sometimes she knew, she could locate the pain in her heart, that he could give so much only if he was going away.

  She had already given everything to him, a bestowal we make only once in our lives. She wanted him to love her freely. That is most of the total gift. She had also been bred in the school of heromartyrs, and saw herself, perhaps, as an Héloise. Only the man of adventure could love — that was his writing — and only the lady who had abandoned her house and name — that was conventional society. Adventurers leave the couch, ladies return to their name; this knowledge is the ordeal which keeps the clasp tight.

  It isn’t often we meet someone who has the same vision of what we might be as we have for ourselves. Shell and Breavman, or rather his deputy, saw each other with this remarkable generosity.

  She came in crying one afternoon. He took her gloves and purse, put them on the oiled-wood commode, led her to the green sofa.

  “Because of what I told Gordon.”

  “You had to tell him.”

  “Not everything I did. I’m terrible.”

  “You’re a terrible vicious witch.”

  “I told him how good it is with you; I didn’t have to do that. I just wanted to hurt him.”

  They talked all night until Shell could declare, “I hate him.”

  Breavman observed to himself that she was further from divorce than she thought. Women take very seriously an attempt to mutilate their bodies. Breavman did not understand that as soon as she uttered the words in his arms she was free from hatred.

  He was bothered by the knowledge that Shell was making real decisions, acting, changing her life. He wanted to watch her at rest. It involved him in the world of houses and traffic lights. She was becoming an authentic citizen, using his love for strength.

  Suppose he went along with her towards living intimacy, towards comforting incessant married talk. Wasn’t he abandoning something more austere and ideal, even though he laughed at it, something which could apply her beauty to streets, traffic, mountains, ignite the landscape — which he could master if he were alone? Wasn’t that why he stared at her, indulged himself in every motion, expression? Perhaps it was only the conviction that he wasn’t created for comfort which disturbed him. Disturbed him because it was vanishing.

  He was very comfortable. He had begun to accept his deputy’s joy. This lover was the most successful thing he had ever made, and the temptation was to supply him with wallet and identification and drown the master Breavman in a particularly garbage-strewn stretch of the Hudson River.

  The Breavman eye, trained for volcano-watching, heavenly hosts, ideal thighs and now perfectly
at work on the landscape of Shell’s body, was in danger of sleep. More and more the lover had Shell to himself. These are the times Breavman does not remember too well because he was so happy.

  13

  Summer was still very young.

  Did you know forget-me-nots were that tiny?

  They climbed the hill behind the cabin, listened to the birds, checked the guide to identify their calls.

  He didn’t want to give her the little flowers because they both listened to names so carefully.

  They talked about the conduct of parting. This to lovers is as remote and interesting as a discussion of H-bomb defence at a convention of mayors.

  “… and if it isn’t working for one of us, we’ve got to tell the other.”

  “… and let’s hope we have the courage to be surgical.”

  Shell was delighted by a certain cluster of birch.

  “They look like naked trees! They make the woods look black.”

  At night they listened to the sound of the lake beating the sand and shore stones. A dark luminous sky made of burned silver foil. The cries of birds, wetter and more desperate now, as though food and lives were involved.

  Shell said that every sound of the lake was different. Breavman preferred not to investigate; he enjoyed the blur of happiness. She could listen more carefully than he. Details made her richer, chained him.

  “If you tape their whistles, Shell, and slow them down, you can hear the most extraordinary things. What the naked ear hears as one note is often in reality two or three notes sung simultaneously. A bird can sing three notes at the same time!”

  “I wish I could speak that way. I wish I could say twelve things at once. I wish I could say all there was to say in one word. I hate all the things that can happen between the beginning of a sentence and the end.”

  He worked while she slept. When he heard her easy breathing he knew the day was sealed and he could begin to record it.

  A queer distortion of honesty holds me back from you …

  Shell made herself wake up in the middle of the night. Moths battered against the window beside which he worked. She crept behind him and kissed his neck.

  He wheeled around in surprise, pencil in hand, and scraped skin from her cheek. He upset the chair as he stood.

  They faced one another in the cold flat light of the Coleman lantern. The night was deafening. The whirring and thudding of the moths, the hiss of the lantern, the water working on boulders, small animals hunting, nothing was at rest.

  “I thought I …” He stopped.

  “You thought you were alone!” she cried in pain.

  “I thought I …” “You thought you were alone.” he recorded when she was asleep again.

  14

  One night, watching her, he decided he would leave the next morning.

  Otherwise he’d stay beside her always, staring at her.

  It was the middle of June. He was running an elevator in a small office building, scab labour. He picked up extra money cleaning some of the offices on Friday evenings. It was a rickety elevator, carried a maximum of five passengers, and went out of commission if brought too far below the basement floor level.

  At night there was Shell, poems and the journal while she slept.

  Most of the time he was happy. This surprised and disturbed him, as generals get uneasy during a protracted peace. He enjoyed the elevator, which was sometimes a chariot, sometimes a torture device of Kafka, sometimes a time machine, and, the worst times, an elevator. He told people who asked that his name was Charon and welcomed them aboard.

  Then there were the evening meals with Shell. Straw mats on an oiled-wood folding table. Candlelight and the smell of beeswax. The elaborate food lovers will prepare for one another, cooked in wine, held together by toothpicks. Or hilarious gentle morning feasts out of cans and frozen boxes.

  There were weekend breakfasts of eggs and blueberry muffins when Shell was the genius of an ancient farmhouse kitchen histories away from New York — which they could abandon at any time for the green sofa, which was dateless. There were movie afternoons, mythological analyses of C Westerns, historic spaghetti dinners at Tony’s at which the phoniness of Bergman was discovered.

  The poems continued, celebrating the two of them. Poems of parting, a man writing to a woman he will not let out of his sight. He had enough for a fat book but he didn’t need a book. That would come later when he needed to convince himself that he had lived such a life of work and love.

  Breavman became his deputy. He returned to his watchtower an hour every few days to fill in his journal. He wrote quickly and blindly, disbelieving what he was doing, like a thrice-failed suicide looking for razor blades.

  He exorcized the glory demons. The pages were jammed into an antique drawer that Shell respected. It was a Pandora’s box of visas and airline-ticket folders that would spirit him away if she opened it. Then he would climb back into the warm bed, their bodies sweetened by the threat.

  God, she was beautiful. Why shouldn’t he stay with her? Why shouldn’t he be a citizen with a woman and a job? Why shouldn’t he join the world? The beauty he had planned as a repose between solitudes now led him to demand old questions of loneliness.

  What did he betray if he remained with her? He didn’t dare recite the half-baked claims. And now he could taste the guilt that would nourish him if he left her. But he didn’t want to leave for good. He needed to be by himself, so he could miss her, to get perspective.

  He shoved an air-mail letter into the stuffed drawer.

  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.

  “Really, Shell, it’s just the summer.”

  “I haven’t said anything.”

  “I wish you’d be more miserable.”

  She smiled.

  Book IV

  1

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

  a rat

  a frog

  a girl sleeping

  a man on the mountain

  the moon

  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.