The Favorite Game Page 5

  “Their new blouses were useless, Krantz.”

  Seen from above, the movement on the floor had taken on a frantic quality. Soon the trumpeter would aim his horn into the smoke and give the last of Hoagy Carmichael and it would be all over. Every throb of the band had to be hoarded now against the end of the evening and the silence. Soak it through pressed cheeks and closed eyes in the dreamy tunes. In the boogie-woogie gather the nourishment like manna and knead it between the bodies drawing away and towards each other.

  “Let’s get one more dance in, Breavman?”

  “Same girls?”

  “Might as well.”

  Breavman leaned over the rail one more second and wished he were delivering a hysterical speech to the thick mob below.

  … and you must listen, friends, strangers, I am binding the generations one to another, o, little people of numberless streets, bark, bark, hoot, blood, your long stairways are curling around my heart like a vine …

  They went downstairs and found the girls with the same group. It was a mistake, they knew instantly. Yvette stepped forward as if to tell Breavman something but one of the boys pulled her back.

  “You like the girls, eh?” he said, the swaggerer of the party. His smile was triumphant rather than friendly.

  “Sure we like them. Anything wrong with that?”

  “Where you live, you?”

  Breavman and Krantz knew what they wanted to hear. Westmount is a collection of large stone houses and lush trees arranged on the top of the mountain especially to humiliate the underprivileged.

  “Westmount,” they said with one voice.

  “You have not the girls at Westmount, you?”

  They had no chance to answer him. In the very last second before they fell backwards over the kneeling accomplices stationed behind them they detected a signalling of eyes. The ring-leader and a buddy stepped forward and shoved them. Breavman lost his balance and as he fell the stoolie behind him raised himself up to turn the fall into a flip. Breavman landed hard in a belly-flop, a couple of girls that he had crashed into squealing above him. He looked up to see Krantz on his feet, his left fist in someone’s face and his right cocked back ready to fly. He was about to get up when a fat boy decided he shouldn’t and dived at him.

  “Reste là, maudit juif!”

  Breavman struggled under the blankets of flesh, not trying to defeat the fat boy but merely to get out from under him so he could do battle from a more honourable upright position. He managed to squeeze away. Where was Krantz?

  There must have been twenty people fighting. Here and there he could see girls on their tiptoes as though in fear of mice, while boys wrestled on the floor between them.

  He wheeled around, expecting an attack. The fat boy was smothering someone else. He threw his fist at a stranger. He was a drop in the wave of history, anonymous, exhilarated, free.

  “O, little friends, hoot, blooey, dark fighters, shazam, bloop!” he shouted in his happiness.

  Racing down the stairs were three bouncers of the management’s and what they feared most began to happen. The fighting spread to the dance floor. The band was blowing a loud dreamy tune but a disorganized noise could already be heard in opposition to the music.

  Breavman waved his fist at everyone, hitting very few. The bouncers were in his immediate area, breaking up individual fights. At the far side of the hall the couples still danced closely and peacefully, but on Breavman’s side their rhythm was disintegrating into flailing arms, blind punches, lunges, and female squeals.

  The bouncers pursued the disruption like compulsive housekeepers after an enormous spreading stain, jerking fighters apart by their collars and sweeping them aside as they followed the struggle deeper into the dance floor.

  A man rushed onto the bandstand and shouted something to the bandleader, who looked around and shrugged his shoulders. The bright lights went on and the curious coloured walls disappeared. The music stopped.

  Everyone woke up. A noise like a wail of national mourning rose up and at the same time fighting swept over the hall like released entropic molecules. To see the mass of dancers change to mass of fighters was like watching a huge highly organized animal succumb to muscular convulsions.

  Krantz grabbed Breavman.

  “Mr. Breavman?”

  “Krantzstone, I presume.”

  They headed for the front exit, which was already jammed with refugees. No one cared about his coat.

  “Don’t say it, Breavman.”

  “O.K. I won’t say it, Krantz.”

  They got out just as the police arrived, about twenty of them in cars and the Black Maria. They entered with miraculous ease.

  The boys waited in the front seat of the Lincoln. Krantz’s jacket was missing a lapel. The Palais D’Or began to empty of its victims.

  “Pity the guys in there, Breavman – and don’t say it,” he added quickly when he saw Breavman put on his mystical face.

  “I won’t say it, Krantz, I won’t even whisper that I planned the whole thing from the balcony and executed it by the simple means of mass-hypnosis.”

  “You had to say it, eh?”

  “We were mocked, Krantz. We seized the pillars and brought down the temple of the Philistines.”

  Krantz shifted into second with exaggerated weariness.

  “Go on, Breavman. You have to say it.”

  26

  He would love to have heard Hitler or Mussolini bellow from his marble balcony, to have seen partisans hang him upside down; to see the hockey crowds lynch the sports commissioner; to see the black or yellow hordes get even with the small outposts of their colonial enemies; to see the weeping country folk acclaim the strong-jawed road-builders; to see football fans rip down goalposts; to have seen the panicking movie-viewers stampede Montreal children in the famous fire; to see five hundred thousand snap into any salute at all; to see a countless array of Arabian behinds pointing west; to see the chalices on any altar tremble with the congregational Amen.

  And this is where he would like to be:

  in the marble balcony

  the press-box

  the projection-room

  the reviewing stand

  the minaret

  the Holy of Holies

  And in each case he wants to be surrounded by the best armed, squint-eyed, ruthless, loyal, tallest, leather-jacketed, technical brain-washed heavy police guard that money can buy.

  27

  Is there anything more beautiful than a girl with a lute?

  It wasn’t a lute. Heather, the Breavmans’ maid, attempted the ukulele. She came from Alberta, spoke with a twang, was always singing laments and trying to yodel.

  The chords were too hard. Breavman held her hand and agreed that the strings were tearing her fingers to pieces. She knew all the cowboy stars and traded their autographs.

  She was a husky, good-looking girl of twenty with high-coloured cheeks like a porcelain doll. Breavman chose her for his first victim of sleep.

  A veritable Canadian peasant.

  He tried to make the offer attractive.

  “You’ll feel wonderful when you wake up.”

  Sure, she winked and settled herself on the couch in the crammed basement store-room. If only it would work.

  He moved his yellow pencil like a slow pendulum before her eyes.

  “Your eyelids will feel heavy as lead on your cheeks.…”

  He swung the pencil for ten minutes. Her large eyelids thickened and slowed down. She followed the pencil with difficulty.

  “And your breathing heavy and regular.…”

  Soon she let out a sigh, took in a deep breath, and breathed like a drunkard, laboured and exhausted.

  Now the eyelashes barely flickered. He couldn’t believe that he had ordered the changes in her. Maybe she was joking.

  “You’re falling backwards, you’re a tiny body falling backwards, getting smaller and smaller, and you can hear nothing but my voice.…”

  Her breath was soft and
he knew it would smell like wind.

  He felt as though he had got his hands under her sweater, under her skin and ribs, and was manipulating her lungs, and they felt like balloons of silk.

  “You are asleep,” he commanded in a whisper.

  He touched her face in disbelief.

  Was he really a master? She must be joking.

  “Are you asleep?”

  The yes came out the length of an exhalation, husky, unformed.

  “You can feel nothing. Absolutely nothing. Do you understand?”

  The same yes.

  He drove a needle through the lobe of her ear. He was dizzy with his new power. All her energy at his disposal.

  He wanted to run through the streets with a bell and summon the whole cynical city. There was a new magician in the world.

  He had no interest in ears pierced by needles.

  Breavman had studied the books. A subject cannot be compelled to anything which he would consider indecent while awake. But there were ways. For instance, a modest woman can be induced to remove her clothes before an audience of men if the operator can suggest a situation in which such an act can be performed quite naturally, such as taking a bath in the privacy of her own home, or a naked rest under the sun in some humid deserted place.

  “It’s hot, you’ve never been so hot. Your sweater weighs a ton. You’re sweating like a pig.…”

  As she undressed Breavman kept thinking of the illustrations in the pulp-paper Hypnotism for You manuals he knew by heart. Line drawings of fierce men leaning over smiling, sleeping women. Zigzags of electricity emanate from under the heavy eyebrows or from the tips of their piano-poised fingers.

  Oh, she was, she really was, she was so lovely.

  He had never seen a woman so naked. He ran his hand all over her body. He was astonished, happy, and frightened before all the spiritual authorities of the universe. He couldn’t get it out of his mind that he was performing a Black Mass. Her breasts were strangely flat because she was lying on her back. The mound of her delta was a surprise and he cupped it in wonder. He covered her body with two trembling hands like mine-detectors. Then he sat back to stare, like Cortez over his new ocean. This was what he had waited for so long to see. He wasn’t disappointed and never has been. The tungsten light was the same as the moon.

  He unbuttoned his fly and told her she was holding a stick. His heart pounded.

  He was intoxicated with relief, achievement, guilt, experience. There was semen on his clothes. He told Heather that the alarm clock had just rung. It was morning, she had to get up. He handed her her clothes and slowly she got dressed. He told her that she would remember nothing. Hurriedly he took her out of the sleep. He wanted to be alone and contemplate his triumph.

  Three hours later he heard laughter from the basement and thought that Heather must be entertaining friends down there. Then he listened more carefully to the laughter and realized that it wasn’t social.

  He raced down the stairs. Thank God his mother was out. Heather was standing in the centre of the floor, legs apart, convulsed with frightened, hysterical laughter. Her eyes were rolled up in her head and shone white. Her head was thrown back and she looked as if she was about to fall over. He shook her. No response. Her laughter became a terrible fit of coughing.

  I’ve driven her insane.

  He wondered what the criminal penalty was. He was being punished for his illegal orgasm and his dark powers. Should he call a doctor, make his sin public right away? Would anyone know how to cure her?

  He was close to panic as he led her to the couch and sat her down. Perhaps he should hide her in a closet. Lock her in a trunk and forget about everything. Those big steamers with his father’s initials stencilled in white paint.

  He slapped her face twice, once with each side of his hand, like a Gestapo investigator. She caught her breath, her cheeks reddened and faded like a blush, and she spluttered again into cough-laughing. There was saliva on her chin.

  “Be quiet, Heather!”

  To his absolute surprise she stifled her cough.

  It was then he realized that she was still hypnotized. He commanded her to lie down and close her eyes. He re-established contact with her. She was deep asleep. He had tried to bring her out too quickly and it hadn’t taken. Slowly he worked her back to full wakefulness. She would be refreshed and gay. She would remember nothing.

  This time she came round correctly. He chatted with her a while just to make sure. She stood up with a puzzled look and patted her hips.

  “Hey! My pants!”

  Wedged between the couch and wall were her pink elastic-bottomed panties. He had forgotten to hand them to her when she was dressing.

  Skilfully and modestly she slipped into them.

  He waited for the unnatural punishment, the humiliation of the master, the collapse of his proud house.

  “What have you been doing?” she said slyly, chucking him under the chin. “What went on while I was asleep? Eh? Eh?”

  “What do you remember?”

  She put her hands on her hips and smiled broadly at him.

  “I’d never of thought it could be done. Never of thought.”

  “Nothing happened, Heather, I swear.”

  “And what would your mother say? Be looking for a job, I would.”

  She surveyed the couch and looked up at him with genuine admiration.

  “Jewish people,” she sighed. “Education.”

  Soon after his imaginary assault she ran off with a deserting soldier. He came alone for her clothes and Breavman watched with envy as he carried off her cardboard suitcase and unused ukulele. A week later Military Police visited Mrs. Breavman but she didn’t know anything.

  Where are you, Heather, why didn’t you stay to introduce me into the warm important rites? I might have gone straight. Poemless, a baron of industry, I might have been spared the soft-cover books on rejection-level stabilization by wealthy New York analysts. Didn’t you feel good when I brought you out?

  Sometimes Breavman likes to think that she is somewhere in the world, not fully awake, sleeping under his power. And a man in a tattered uniform asks:

  “Where are you, Heather?”

  Book II

  1

  Breavman loves the pictures of Henri Rousseau, the way he stops time.

  Always is the word that must be used. The lion will always be sniffing the robes of the sleeping gypsy, there will be no attack, no guts on the sand: the total encounter is expressed. The moon, even though it is doomed to travel, will never go down on this scene. The abandoned lute does not cry for fingers. It is swollen with all the music it needs.

  In the middle of the forest the leopard topples the human victim, who falls more slowly than the Tower of Pisa. He’ll never reach the ground while you watch him, or even if you turn away. He is comfortable in his imbalance. The intricate leaves and limbs nourish the figures, not malignly or benignly, but naturally, as blossoms or fruits. But because the function is natural does not diminish its mystery. How have the animal flesh and the vegetable flesh become connected?

  In another place the roots sponsor a wedding-couple or a family portrait. You are the photographer but you can never emerge from under the black hood or squeeze the rubber bulb or lose the image on the frosted glass. There is violence and immobility: the humans are involved, at home in each. It is not their forest, their clothes are city clothes, but the forest would be barren without them.

  Wherever the violence or stillness happens, it is the centre of the picture, no matter how tiny or hidden. Cover it with your thumb and all the foliage dies.

  2

  In his first year of college, at a drinking place called the Shrine, Breavman rose up with this toast:

  “Jewish girls are not any more passionate than Gentile girls of any given economic area. Jewish girls have very bad legs. Of course, this is a generalization. In fact, the new American Jewess is being bred with long, beautiful legs.

  “Negro girls are as screwed
up as anyone else. They are no better than white girls, except, of course, the Anglo-Saxon girls from Upper Westmount, but even drugged sheep are better than they are. Their tongues are not rougher, nor is there any special quality in the lubricated areas. The second-to-best blow job in the world is a Negro girl I happen to know. She has a forty-seven-thousand-dollar mouth.

  “The best blow job in the world (technically) is a French-Canadian whore by the name of Yvette. Her telephone number is Chateau 2033. She has a ninety-thousand-dollar mouth.”

  He raised high his cloudy glass.

  “I am happy to give her the publicity here.”

  He sat down among the cheers of his comrades, suddenly tired of his voice. He had been expected for dinner but he hadn’t phoned his mother. Obediently the new shot of Pernod turned white.

  Krantz leaned over and whispered, “That was quite a speech for a sixteen-year-old virgin cherry to deliver upon us.”

  “Why didn’t you pull me down?”

  “They loved it.”

  “Why didn’t you stop me?”

  “Go stop you, Breavman.”

  “Let’s get out of here, Krantz.”

  “Can you walk, Breavman?

  “No.”

  “Me neither. Let’s go.”

  They supported each other through their favourite streets and alleys. They kept dropping their books and clip boards. They screamed hysterically at taxis that cruised too close. They tore up an economics text-book and burnt it as a sacrifice on the steps of a Sherbrooke Street bank. They prostrated themselves on the pavement. Krantz stood up first.

  “Why aren’t you praying, Krantz?”

  “Car coming.”

  “Scream at it.”

  “Police car.”

  They ran down a narrow alley. A delicious smell stopped them, bestowed by the kitchen-ventilating fan of an expensive restaurant. They relieved themselves among the garbage cans.