The Favorite Game Read online

  He visited his mother, was unable to make her understand he’d been away. Same horror as always.

  He walked along Sherbrooke Street. The women of Montreal were beautiful. Launched from tiny ankles, their legs shot up like guided missiles into atmospheres of private height.

  He formed wild theories out of pleats and creases.

  Wrists, white and fast as falling stars, plunged him into arm-holes. Tonight they would have to comb his eyeballs out of all their hair.

  He planted hundreds of hands in bosoms, like hidden money. Therefore he called on Tamara.

  “Come in, old chappie, old.”

  Smell of turpentine. Another batch of agonized self-portraits. “Tamara, you’re the only woman I can talk to. For the past two weeks I’ve gone to sleep with your mouth in my hand.”

  “How’s camp? How’s Krantz?”

  “Flourishing. But he’ll never make a Compassionate P.”

  “You smell delicious. And you’re so brown. Yummy.”

  “Let’s be immoderate.”

  “Good idea in any given situation.”

  “Let’s praise each other’s genitalia. Don’t you hate that word?”

  “For women. It’s good for men. Sounds loopy — things hanging. Makes me think of chandelier.”

  “You’re great, Tamara. God, I like being with you. I can be anything.”

  “So can I.”

  And Shell with her open gift, it struck him, forced him into a kind of nobility.

  “Let’s resort to everything.”

  They left the room at five in the morning to eat a huge meal at the China Gardens. Laughing like maniacs, they fed each other with chopsticks and decided they were in love. The waiters stared. They hadn’t bothered to remove the paint.

  Walking back, they talked about Shell, how beautiful she was. He asked Tamara if she would mind his phoning New York.

  “Of course not. She’s something else.”

  Shell was sleepy but glad to hear from him. She spoke in a little girl’s voice. He told her he loved her.

  He took the early morning bus back to camp. Immortal Tamara, she walked with him to the terminal. After one hour’s sleep he called that real affection.

  15

  Now we must take a closer look at Breavman’s journal:

  Friday night. Sabbath. Ritual music on the PA. Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Hosts. The earth is full of your glory. If I could only end my hate. If I could believe what they wrote and wrapped in silk and crowned with gold. I want to write the word.

  All our bodies are brown. All the children are dressed in white. Make us able to worship.

  Take me home again. Build up my house again. Make me a dweller in thee. Take my pain. I can’t use it any longer. It makes nothing beautiful. It makes the leaves into cinders. It makes the water foul. It makes your body into a stone. Holy life. Let me lead it. I don’t want to hate. Let me flourish. Let the dream of you flourish in me.

  Brother, give me your new car. I want to ride to my love. In return I offer you this wheelchair. Brother, give me all your money. I want to buy everything my love wants. In return I offer you blindness so you may live the rest of your days in absolute control over everyone. Brother, give me your wife. It is she whom I love. In return I have commanded all the whores of the city to give you infinite credit.

  Thou. Help me to work. All the works of my hand belong to you. Do not let me make my offering so paltry. Do not make me insane. Do not let me descend raving your name.

  I have no taste for flesh but my own.

  Lead me away from safety. There is no safety where I am.

  How shall I dedicate my days to thee? Now I have finally said it. How shall I dedicate my days to thee?

  16

  Dearest Shell,

  Your jade earring with the filigree silver. I pictured it on your ear. Then I pictured the side of your head and the wind-paths of hair. Then your face. Finally all your beauty.

  Then I remembered your suspicion of beauty’s praise, so I praised your soul, yours being the only one I believe in.

  I discovered that the beauty of your eyes and flesh was just the soul’s everyday clothes. It turned to music when I asked it what it wore on Sabbath.

  All my love, darling,

  LAWRENCE

  17

  Anne and Breavman were on night duty together. They sat on the steps of one of the bunks waiting for the counsellors to check in.

  Yes, yes, Krantz was in the city on camp business.

  Her braid was like a thick twisting river. Fireflies, some as high as the tops of the pines, some beside the roots.

  Here is my poem for you.

  I don’t know you, Anne.

  I don’t know you, Anne.

  I don’t know you, Anne.

  Eternal theme: small flies and moths flinging themselves against the light bulb.

  “This is the kind of night I’d like to get drunk,” she said.

  “I’d like to get sober.”

  A light rain began to fall. He turned up his face, trying to give himself away.

  “I’m going for a walk.”

  “May I come along? I don’t mind asking because I feel I know you. Krantz has told me so much.”

  It rained for ten seconds. They walked down the road to the village. They stopped where the pine scent was heaviest. He found himself swaying back and forth as though he were in a synagogue. He wanted her, and the more he wanted her the more he became a part of the mist and trees. I’ll never get out of this, he told himself. This is where I’ll stay. I like the smell. I like being that close, that far away. He felt he was manufacturing the mist. It was steaming out of his pores.

  “I’ll go back if you want to stay alone.”

  He didn’t answer for a thousand years.

  “No, we both better go.”

  He didn’t move.

  “What’s that?” Anne asked about a noise.

  He began to tell her about swallows, cliff-dwelling swallows, barn-dwelling swallows. He knew everything about swallows. He had disguised himself as a swallow and lived among them to learn their ways.

  He was standing close to her but he received no trace of the radar signal to embrace. He walked swiftly away. He came back. He pulled her braid. It was thick, as he imagined. He strode away again and snatched a stick from the bushes by the side of the road.

  He swung it wildly, smashing the foliage. He beat the ground around her feet. She danced, laughing. He raised the dust knee-high. But the bushes had to be attacked again, the trunks of the trees, the low yellow grass, white in the night. Then more dust, the branch nicking her ankles. He wanted to raise the dust over both of them, slice up their bodies with the sharp switch.

  She ran from him. He ran behind her, whipping the calves of her legs. They were both screaming with laughter. She ran to the lights of the camp.

  18

  Dear Anne

  I’d like

  to watch

  your toes

  when you’re

  naked.

  Which he delivered to her several hundred times with his eyes without even thinking.

  19

  “Fifty cents for a hand on her crotch.”

  Krantz was joking with Breavman about selling Anne to him piece by piece. Breavman didn’t like the joke but he laughed.

  “An almost unused nipple for three bits?”

  Oh, Krantz.

  They had quarrelled over Breavman’s treatment of Martin. Breavman had categorically refused to enjoin the boy to participate in group activities. He had put his job on the line.

  “You know we can’t start looking for replacements at this point in the season.”

  “In that case you’ll have to let me handle him my own way.”

  “I’m not telling you to force him into activities, but I swear you encourage him in the other direction.”

  “I enjoy his madness. He enjoys his madness. He’s the only free person I’ve ever met. Nothing that anybody else doe
s is as important as what he does.”

  “You’re talking a lot of nonsense, Breavman.”

  “Probably.”

  Then Breavman had decided he couldn’t deliver a sermon to the camp on Saturday morning when his turn came around. He had nothing to say to anyone.

  Krantz looked at him squarely.

  “You made a mistake, coming up here, didn’t you?”

  “And you made one asking me. We both wanted to prove different things. So now you know you’re your own man, Krantz.”

  “Yes,” he said slowly. “I know.”

  It was a moment, this true meeting, and Breavman didn’t try to stretch it into a guarantee. He had trained himself to delight in the fraction. “What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross.”

  “Of course you know that you’re identifying with Martin and are only excluding yourself when you allow him to separate himself from the group.”

  “Not that jargon, Krantz, please.”

  “I remember everything, Breavman. But I can’t live in it.”

  “Good.”

  Therefore Breavman was obliged to laugh when Anne joined them and Krantz said, “Buttocks are going very cheap.”

  20

  In the evening he stayed motionless on the mess hall balcony. Krantz was about to put a record on the PA.

  “Hey, Anne, you want Mozart, the Forty-ninth?” he shouted. She ran towards him.

  Breavman saw clover in the grass, a discovery, and mist drifting across the tops of the low mountains, like the fade in a photo. Ripples on the water moving in the same direction as the mist, from black into silver into black.

  He didn’t move a muscle, didn’t know whether he was at peace or paralysed.

  Steve, the Hungarian tractor driver, passed below the balcony, picking a white flower from a bush. They were levelling out some land for another playing field, filling in a marsh.

  The flute-bird had a needle in its whistle. A broken door down the hill beside the thick-bottomed pines.

  “London Bridge is falling down

  falling down

  falling down”

  sang a file of children.

  Down the pine-needled path stood Martin, motionless as Breavman, his arm stretched out in a Fascist salute, his sleeve rolled up.

  He was waiting for mosquitoes to land.

  Martin had a new obsession. He elected himself to be the Scourge of Mosquitoes, counting them as he killed them. There was nothing frantic about his technique. He extended his arm and invited them. When one landed, wham! up came the other hand. “I hate you,” he told each one individually, and noted the statistic.

  Martin saw his counsellor standing on the balcony.

  “A hundred and eighty,” he called up as greeting.

  Mozart came loud over the PA, sewing together everything that Breavman observed. It wove, it married the two figures bending over the records, whatever the music touched, child trapped in London Bridge, mountain-top dissolving in mist, empty swing rocking like a pendulum, the row of glistening red canoes, the players clustered underneath the basket, leaping for the ball like a stroboscopic photo of a splashing drop of water — whatever it touched was frozen in an immense tapestry. He was in it, a figure by a railing.

  21

  Since his mission against the mosquitoes had begun, Martin’s enjoyment percentages soared. All the days were up around 98 per cent. The other boys delighted in him and made him the ornament of the bunk, to be shown off to visitors and wondered at. Martin remained an innocent performer. He spent most afternoons down at the marsh where the tractors were preparing new fields to run on. His arm was swollen with bites. Breavman applied calamine.

  On his next day off Breavman took a canoe down the lake. Red-wing blackbirds rose and plunged into the reeds. He ripped open a stalk of a waterlily. It was veined with purple foam.

  The lake was glass-calm. He could make out sounds of camp from time to time, the PA announcing General Swim”; recorded music filtered through the forest and crept over the water.

  He went down the creek as far as he could before sandbars stopped him. The only indication of current was the leaning underwater weeds. Clams black and thickly coated with mud — an unclean food. A snap of water and the green stretched-out body of a frog zoomed under the canoe. The low sun was blinding. As he paddled back to his camp-site it turned the paddle gold.

  He built a fire, spread out his sleeping bag in the moss, and prepared to watch the sky.

  The sun is always part of the sky, but the moon is a splendid and remote stranger. The moon. Your eye keeps coming back to it as it would do to a beautiful woman in a restaurant. He thought about Shell. The same moment he believed he had the confidence to live alone he believed he could live with Shell.

  The mist was riding slowly on the reflection of birch trees; now it was piled like a snowdrift.

  Four hours later he awakened with a start and grabbed his axe.

  “It’s Martin Stark,” said Martin.

  The fire was still giving some light, but not enough. He shone his flash in the boy’s face. One cheek had been badly scratched by branches but the boy grinned widely.

  “What’s your favourite store?”

  “What are you doing out here in the middle of the night?

  “What’s your favourite store?”

  Breavman wrapped the sleeping bag around the boy and ruffled his hair.

  “Dionne’s.”

  “What’s your favourite parking lot?”

  “Dionne’s Parking Lot.”

  When the ritual was finished Breavman packed up, lifted him into the canoe, and shoved off for camp. He didn’t want to think about what would have happened if Martin hadn’t been able to find him. That cheek needed iodine. And it seemed that some of the bites were infected.

  It was beautiful paddling back, reeds scraping the bottom of the canoe and turning it into a big fragile drum. Martin was an Indian chief squatting beside him, bundled in the sleeping bag. The sky displayed continents of fire.

  “When I’m back home,” Martin said loudly, “rats eat me.”

  “I’m sorry, Martin.”

  “Hundreds and hundreds of them.”

  When Breavman saw the lights of the camp he had a wild urge to pass them, to keep paddling up the lake with the boy, make a site somewhere up the shore among the naked birch trees.

  “Keep it down, Martin. They’ll kill us if they hear us.”

  “That would be all right.”

  22

  Green? Beige? Riding in the bus he tried to remember the colour of his mother’s room. In this way he avoided thinking about her lying there. Some careful shade determined at a medical conference.

  In this room she spends her time. It has a good view of the southern slopes of Mount Royal. In the spring you get the smell of lilacs. You want to throw the window open to get more of the perfume, but you can’t. The window slides up only so far. They don’t want any suicides littering the lawn.

  “We haven’t seen you for a while, Mr. Breavman,” said the head nurse.

  “Haven’t we?”

  His mother was staring at the ceiling. He looked up there himself. Maybe something was going on that nobody knew about.

  The walls were clever grey.

  “Are you feeling better, Mother?” He gave the cue.

  “Am I feeling better? better for what? that I should go outside and see what he’s doing with his life? thank you, for that I don’t have to go outside, for that I can lie here, in this room, beside the crazy people, your mother in an insane asylum.…”

  “You know it isn’t that, Mother. Just somewhere you can rest —”

  “Rest! How can I rest with what I know? traitor for a son, don’t you think I know where I am? with their needles and their polite manner, a mother like this and he’s away swimming —”

  “But, Mother, nobody’s trying to hurt —”

  What was he doing, trying to argue with her? She flung out one arm and groped for somethin
g on the night table, but everything had been taken away.

  “Don’t interrupt your mother, haven’t I suffered enough? a sick man for fifteen years, don’t I know? don’t I know, don’t I know …?”

  “Mother, please, don’t scream —”

  “Oh! he’s ashamed of his mother, his mother will wake up the neighbours, his mother will frighten away his goyish girlfriends, traitor! what all of you have done to me! a mother has to be quiet, I was beautiful, I came from Russia a beauty, people looked at me —”

  “Let me speak to you —”

  “People spoke to me, does my child speak to me? the world knows I lie here like a stone, a beauty, they called me a Russian beauty, but what I gave to my child, to treat a mother, I can’t stand to think of it, you should have it from your own child, like today is Tuesday over the whole world you should have it from your child what I had, rat in my house, I can’t believe my life, that this should happen to me, I was so good to my parents, my mother had cancer, the doctor held her stomach in his hand, does anyone try to help me? does my son lift a finger? Cancer! cancer! I had to see everything, I had to give my life away to sick people, this isn’t my life, to see these things, your father would kill you, my face is old, I don’t know who I am in the mirror, wrinkles where I was beautiful.…”

  He sat back, didn’t try to break in again. If she let him speak she wouldn’t hear. He really didn’t know what he would have been able to say had he known she was listening.

  He attempted to let his mind wander, but he hung on every wild detail, waiting for the hour to be up.

  He knocked on Tamara’s door at about ten o’clock. There were a few whispers exchanged inside. She called out, “Who is it?”

  “Breavman from the north. But you’re busy.”