The Favorite Game Read online

  He would never be able to pronounce a Jewish word with any confidence.

  “Krantz,” he whispered, “why weren’t we allowed to cross the tracks?”

  Twelve righteous faces told him to shh.

  Still, and he knew it was arrogance, he often considered himself the Authentic Jew. His background had taught him the alien experience. He was grateful for that. Now he extended that experience to his own people.

  What was it all about anyhow? A solitary man in a desert, begging for the inclination of a face.

  Anne performed a Hasidic dance, annihilating anything womanly in her body with the crammed, ironic movements. But for a few moments they were lost in Europe, their skins untanned, waiting in narrow streets for miracles and the opportunity for revenge they would never take.

  After the Sabbath services a butterfly seemed to follow him down the hill, disappearing as he left the wooded area for the hot campus. He felt the honour of it all through the day.

  9

  “It’s so hard,” said Shell’s voice. “Everybody has a body.”

  “I know,” Breavman said. “And there’s one point in an evening when the thing most urgently needed is just an arm around the shoulder.”

  “I’m so glad we can still talk.”

  Her honesty obliged her to describe her temptations. She wanted to keep nothing from him. They both understood the danger of this technique: there are humans that desire me. Keep me or they will.

  He leaned against the wall in the dark kitchen and listened. How curious that anyone should speak to him so softly! How had he managed to arrange the miracle in which someone spoke softly to him? It was a magic he was sure he never possessed, like reading one’s first poems. But here was his own name whispered.

  An ugly forecast developed in his heart that he would drive the whisperer to a hundred indifferent beds and silence her.

  “Shell, I’m coming to New York tomorrow!”

  “You’re quitting camp?”

  “There’s nothing for me here.”

  “Oh, Lawrence.”

  It was raining when he went outside, her voice still with him. He began to circle one of the playing fields. The tall pines around the field and hills gave him the impression of a bowl which contained him. There was one black hill that seemed so connected with his father that he could hardly bear to look up at it as he came round and round, stumbling like a drunk.

  The rain hazed the electric lights isolated here and there. An indescribable feeling of shame overwhelmed him. His father was involved in the hills, moving like a wind among the millions of wet leaves.

  Then an idea crushed him — he had ancestors! His ancestors reached back and back, like daisies connected in a necklace. He completed circle after circle in the mud.

  He stumbled and collapsed, tasting the ground. He lay very still while his clothes soaked. Something very important was going to happen in this arena. He was sure of that. Not in gold, not in light, but in this mud something necessary and inevitable would take place. He had to stay to watch it unfold. As soon as he wondered why he wasn’t cold he began to shiver.

  He sent Shell a funny telegram explaining why he couldn’t come.

  10

  Breavman received a letter from Mrs. Stark, Martin’s mother. It wasn’t customary for parents to reply to the official reports the counsellors were obliged to send.

  Dear Mr. Breavman,

  I’m sure my son Martin is in excellent hands.

  I’m not anxious and I don’t expect, any further detailed communications concerning his behaviour.

  Very sincerely,

  R. F. STARK

  “What the hell did you write her?” demanded Krantz.

  “Look, Krantz, I happen to like the kid. I took a lot of trouble over the letter. I tried to show that I thought he was a very valuable human being.”

  “Oh, you did?”

  “What was I supposed to say?”

  “Nothing. As little as possible. I told you what she’s like. For two months of every year she doesn’t have to look at him every day and can pretend that he’s a normal boy doing normal things with other normal boys at a normal camp.”

  “Well, he isn’t. He’s much more important than that.”

  “Very good, Breavman, very compassionate. But keep it to yourself, will you? It was Breavman you were pleasing, not the boy’s mother.”

  They were standing on the balcony of the Administration Building. Krantz was about to announce Evening Activity over the PA.

  Didn’t Krantz know what he knew about Martin? No, that wasn’t true. He didn’t know anything about the boy, but he loved him. Martin was a divine idiot. Surely the community should consider itself honoured to have him in their midst. He shouldn’t be tolerated — the institutions should be constructed around him, the traditionally incoherent oracle.

  Out in the open, tempered by the dialogue, it wouldn’t sound so mad.

  Krantz looked at his watch, which he wore on the inside of his wrist. As he turned to go in he caught sight of a figure lying face down in the darkness near a row of bushes at the bottom of the lawn.

  “For God’s sake, Breavman, that’s the sort of thing I mean.”

  Breavman walked quickly across the lawn.

  “What are you doing, Martin?”

  “Twenty thousand and twenty-six.”

  Breavman returned to the balcony.

  “He’s counting grass.”

  Krantz shut his eyes and tapped the banister.

  “What’s your evening activity, Breavman?”

  “Scavenger hunt.”

  “Well, get him over there with the rest of the group.”

  “He isn’t interested in a scavenger hunt.”

  Krantz leaned forward and said with an exasperated smile, “Convince him. That’s what you’re supposed to be here for.”

  “What difference does it make whether he goes looking for yesterday’s newspaper or counts grass?”

  Krantz leaped down the stairs, helped Martin up, and offered him a piggy-back across the field, to where Breavman’s group was assembled. Martin climbed on gleefully and as he rode stuck his index fingers in his ears for no apparent reason, squinting as if he were expecting some drum-splitting explosion.

  Every night, just before he went to sleep, it was Martin’s custom to declare how much fun he had had that day. He checked it against some mysterious ideal.

  “Well, Martin, how did it go today?” asked Breavman, sitting on his bed.

  The mechanical voice never hesitated.

  “Seventy-four per cent.”

  “Is that good?

  “Permissible.”

  11

  He marvelled at how still he could lie.

  He was stiller than the water which took the green of the mountains.

  Wanda was fidgeting, pretending to write a letter in what was left of the light of the day. So her long yellow hair wasn’t quite in the great tradition. Her gold-haired limbs could be worshipped individually, but they did not amalgamate into beauty. Nevertheless, how many thighs could he kiss at the same time?

  If I had a really immense mouth.

  The flies were very bad. They put on Six-Twelve. Wanda extended her arm to him but instead of applying the lotion himself gave the bottle to her. His fantasy: applying the lotion with greater and greater frenzy all over her flesh.

  A light rain swept across the face of the water, veiling it with a silver net. From time to time they heard the cheer of the camp, which had assembled in the mess hall for a Lassie movie.

  The rain passed and the still surface recomposed itself.

  “I’ve never really lived by a lake,” said Wanda, who was given to walking barefoot.

  “Now don’t get into poetry, Wanda.”

  He absently caressed her face and hair, which was softer than he had imagined.

  An inner eye flying away from the boathouse like a slow high star gave him the view of a tiny plywood box in which two minuscule figures (mat
ing insects?) made inevitable ballet movements to each other.

  Wanda was trying to get her head into a position in which she could kiss his caressing fingers.

  Finally he kissed her lips, mouth, stomach, all the parts.

  Then something very disturbing occurred.

  Her face blurred into the face of little Lisa, it was dark in the boathouse, and that face blurred into one he didn’t recognize, that one dissolved into the face of Bertha, maybe it was the blonde hair. He stared hard to make the changing stop, to return to the girl beside him.

  He chased the different faces with his mouth, stopping no one. Wanda mistook his exercise for passion.

  They walked back up the path. The sky was mauve. A moon emerged from a gentle accumulation of clouds. The path was softened by millions of pine needles. Martin would find out how many, perhaps.

  Wanda sneezed. The damp wood planks.

  “It was so peaceful down there, so peaceful.”

  Breavman was tempted to punish her for the trite rhythm of her sentence by telling her about the pool for her body.

  “Do you know what the ambition of our generation is, Wanda? We all want to be Chinese mystics living in thatched huts, but getting laid frequently.”

  “Can’t you say anything that isn’t cruel?” she squeaked as she ran from him.

  He sat up all night to punish himself for hurting her. The morning birds began. In the window grew a cool grey light, the trees beyond still black. There was a light mist on the mountain but he didn’t feel like following it.

  A few days later he discovered that he had caught Wanda’s cold. And he couldn’t understand the way his campers were shoving food down their faces. They bubbled in the milk, diluting it with spit, fought over extras, sculptured out of squeezed bread.

  Breavman glanced at Martin. The boy hadn’t eaten anything. Krantz had warned him that he must supervise the boy’s diet closely. Sometimes he went on mysterious hunger strikes, the reasons for which could never be discovered. On this occasion Breavman could have hugged him.

  His head was completely stuffed. The flies were vicious. He went to bed with the campers but couldn’t sleep.

  He lay there thinking stupidly of Krantz and Anne, lovingly of Shell.

  The horizontal position was a trap. He would learn to sleep standing up, like horses.

  Poor Krantz and Anne off in the woods. How long can they lie naked before the black flies get them? His hands will have to leave her flesh and hair to scratch his own.

  “Can I come in?”

  It was Wanda. Of course she could come in. He was fettered on the bed, wasn’t he?

  “I just want to tell you why I haven’t let you see me.”

  She turned off the lights to give them an even chance against the flies. They mingled fingers as she talked. Just before he drew to himself and kissed her lightly, he noticed a firefly in the corner. It was flashing infrequently. Breavman was sure it was almost dead.

  “Why are you kissing me?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not what I came here for. Just the opposite.”

  He was taking a great interest in the firefly. It wasn’t dead yet.

  “Why the hell don’t you know?”

  She was fumbling with something under her blouse. “You’ve broken my bra strap.”

  “This is a great conversation.”

  “I’d better go.”

  “You’d better go. He’d better go. We’d better go. They’d better go.”

  “You can’t seem to talk to anyone.”

  Was that supposed to make him miserable? It didn’t. He had given himself to the firefly’s crisis. The intervals became longer and longer between the small cold flashes. It was Tinker Bell. Everybody had to believe in magic. Nobody believed in magic. He didn’t believe in magic. Magic didn’t believe in magic. Please don’t die.

  It didn’t. It flashed long after Wanda left. It flashed when Krantz came to borrow Ed’s Time magazine. It flashed as he tried to sleep. It flashed as he scribbled his journal in the dark.

  Boohoohoohoohoohoo say all the little children.

  12

  It was three in the morning and Breavman was glad they were all sleeping. It was tidier that way, the campers and counsellors arranged on their cots, row after row. When they were awake there were too many possibilities, egos to encounter, faces to interpret, worlds to enter. The variety was confusing. It was hard enough to meet one other person. A community is an alibi for the failure of individual love.

  A clear night, cold enough to turn the breath to steam. The landscape seemed intimately connected to the sky, as if it were held in the grip of the high, icy stars. Trees, hills, wood buildings, even a low streak of mist, were riveted to the rock of the planet. It seemed that nothing would ever move, nothing could break the general sleep.

  Breavman walked, almost marched, between the black-filled cabins. He was exhilarated to be the only free agent in this frozen world. Wanda was asleep, her hair colourless. Martin was asleep, his jaws relaxed, at home in his terror. Anne was asleep, a dancer out of training. Krantz was asleep. Certainly he knew how Krantz slept, how his lips budged forward each time he exhaled his jagged snore.

  He dissolved the walls in his mind as he walked between them, and he took an inventory of each form’s isolation. This night’s sleep was strangely graceless. He noted the greedy expression a sleeper wears, that of a solitary eater at a banquet. In sleep every man is an only child. They turned, they shifted, drew up a limb, uncocked an elbow, turned again, shifted again, a series of prize crabs, each on his private white beach.

  All their ambition, energy, speed, individuality was swaddled in excelsior, like rows of Christmas ornaments out of season. Each form, so intent on power, was locked in a nursery struggle far away. And it seemed that the night, so sharp and still, the physical world, would wait motionless until they all came back.

  You’ve lost, Breavman addressed them out loud. It’s a hypnotists’ tournament, this little life of ours, and I’m the winner.

  He decided to share the prize with Krantz.

  The screen in the window above Krantz’s bed had a bulge in it. When Breavman tapped it from the outside it created a miniature thunder.

  His face did not appear. Breavman tapped again. Krantz’s disembodied voice began in a monotone.

  “You are stepping on the flowers, Breavman. If you look down, you will discover that you are in a flower-bed. Why are you standing on the flowers, Breavman?”

  “Krantz, listen to this: The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.”

  “That’s very good, Breavman. Good night.”

  “The last superiority of the refuge is a sleeping sense of the insomniac world.”

  “Oh, excellent.”

  “The refuge world of the superiority is a last sense of the sleeping insomniac.”

  “Umm. Yes.”

  There was a creaking of springs and Krantz blinked out of the window.

  “Hello, Breavman.”

  “You can go back to sleep now, Krantz. I just wanted to wake you up.”

  “Well, you might as well rouse the camp. Rouse the camp, Breavman! It’s the night.”

  “For what?”

  “A Children’s Crusade. We’ll march on Montreal.”

  “So there’s a reason for all this discipline. Forgive me, Krantz, I should have known.”

  They planned the assault on Montreal and the ensuing martyrdom with sinister enthusiasm. After four minutes of talk Breavman broke into the fantasy.

  “Is this for my benefit, Krantz? Some sort of charitable therapy?”

  “God damn you, Breavman!”

  The bed creaked again and in a few seconds Krantz was outside, wearing a bathrobe and a towel around his neck.

  “Let’s walk, Breavman.”

  “You were humouring me, Krantz.”

  “I don’t know how you can be so perceptive in one instant and so miserably blind in another. I admit it. I w
as asleep and I felt like telling you to fuck off. Besides, Anne was in bed with me.”

  “I’m sorry, I — ”

  “No, I want to talk to you, now. I’ve been trying to get to talk to you for weeks.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve made yourself completely unavailable, Breavman. To me, to everyone.…”

  They stood beside the canoe racks, talking, listening to the water. The sand was damp and it was really too cold to be there but neither wished to cripple the communication that had begun, and which both knew was fragile.

  The mist along the shore began to weave itself thick out of snaky wisps, and the edge of the sky brightened into a royal blue.

  They told each other about their girls, a little solemnly, carefully omitting any sexual information.

  13

  He watched Martin clean his nose, his great Caesarian nose that should have sponsored historic campaigns but only counted grass and pine needles.

  Every morning Martin got up half an hour early to fulfil the ritual.

  Toothpicks, cotton-wool, vaseline, mirrors.

  Breavman asked him why.

  “I like to have a clean nose.”

  Martin asked Breavman to mail a letter to his brother. Mrs. Stark had given instructions that they be intercepted and destroyed. Breavman read them and they brought him closer to the boy’s anguish.

  Dear Bully fat Bully you dirty

  I got your last thirty-four letters and saw in a second the millions of lies. I hope you starve and your boner breaks in half with lots of screams and lets the beetles out after what you told her about me. Why don’t you fill your mouth with towels and razor-blades. Mummy is not a stupid skull she sneaked a look in the flashlight and read the poison shit you wrote me under the blankets.

  love your brother,

  MARTIN STARK

  14

  Day off. Despite the hot drive in the bus he was exhilarated to be back in Montreal. But who were the bastards responsible for tearing down the best parts of the city?