The Favorite Game Read online

  “Breavman, you won’t believe what I almost peed on.”

  “A corpse? A blonde wig? A full meeting of the Elders of Zion? An abandoned satchel of limp a-holes!”

  “Shh. C’mere. Carefully.”

  Krantz lit a match and the brass eyes of a bull-frog gleamed from the debris. All three of them jumped at the same time. Krantz carried it in a knotted handkerchief.

  “Must have escaped from a garlic sauce.”

  “Let’s go back and liberate them all. Let the streets swarm with free frogs. Hey, Krantz, I’ve got my dissecting kit!”

  They decided on a solemn ceremony at the foot of the War Memorial.

  Breavman spread loose-leaf sheets on his Zoology text. He grasped the frog by the green hind legs. Krantz intervened, “You know, this is going to ruin the night. It’s been a very fine night but this is going to ruin it.”

  “You’re right, Krantz.”

  They stood there in silence. The night was immense. The headlights streamed along Dorchester Street. They wished they weren’t there, they wished they were at a party with a thousand people. The frog was as tempting to gut as an old alarm clock.

  “Should I proceed, Krantz?”

  “Proceed.”

  “We’re in charge of torture tonight. The regular torturers are relieved.”

  Breavman swung the head smartly against the inscribed stone. The smack of living tissue was louder than all the traffic.

  “At least that stuns it.”

  He laid the frog on the white sheets and secured it to the book with pins through its extremities. He pierced the light-coloured abdomen with the scalpel. He withdrew the scissors from his kit and made a long vertical incision in first the upper and then the lower layer of skin.

  “We could stop now, Krantz. We could get thread and repair the thing.”

  “We could.” Krantz said dreamily.

  Breavman pinned back the stretchy skin. They pressed in over the deep insides, smelling each other’s alcoholic breath.

  “This is the heart.”

  He lifted the organ with the small edge of the scalpel.

  “So that’s the heart.”

  The milky-grey sack heaved up and down and they stared in wonder. The legs of the frog were like a lady’s.

  “I suppose I should get on with it.”

  He removed the organs one by one, the lungs, the kidneys. A pebble and an undigested beetle were discovered in the stomach. He exposed the muscles in the delicate thighs.

  Both of them, the operator and the spectator, hovered in a trance. And finally he removed the heart, which already looked weary and ancient, the colour of old man’s saliva, first heart of the world.

  “If you put it in salt water it’ll keep on beating for a while.”

  Krantz woke up.

  “Will it? Let’s do it. Hurry!”

  Breavman tossed his text-book together with the emptied frog in a wire trash-basket as he ran. He cupped the heart in his hand, afraid of squeezing. The restaurant was only a minute away.

  Don’t die.

  “Hurry! For Christ’s sake!”

  Everything had a second chance if they could save it.

  They took a faraway booth in the bright restaurant. Where was the damn waitress?

  “Look. It’s still going.”

  Breavman placed it in a dish of warm salt water. It heaved its soft weight eleven more times. They counted each time and then said nothing for a while, their faces close to the table, immobile.

  “It doesn’t look like anything now,” Breavman said.

  “What’s a dead frog’s heart supposed to look like?”

  “I suppose that’s the way everything evil happens, like tonight.”

  Krantz grabbed his shoulder, his face suddenly bright.

  “That’s brilliant, what you just said is brilliant!”

  He slapped his friend’s back resoundingly. “You’re a genius, Breavman!”

  Breavman was puzzled at Krantz’s tangent from depression. He silently reconstructed his remark.

  “You’re right! Krantz, you’re right! And so are you – for noticing it!”

  They seized each other’s shoulders and pounded each other’s backs over the Arborite table, bellowing compliments and congratulations.

  “You genius!”

  “You genius!”

  They spilled the salt water, not that it mattered. They turned over the table. They were geniuses! They knew how it happens.

  The manager wanted to know if they’d like to get out.

  3

  The heavy gold frame of his father’s picture was the first thing he noticed. It seemed like another window.

  “You’re wasting your life in bed, you’re turning night into day,” his mother shouted outside the door.

  “Will you leave me alone? I just got up.”

  He stared for a long while at his bookshelf, watching the sun move from the leather Chaucer to the leather Wordsworth. Good sun, in harmony with history. Comforting thought for early morning. Except that it is the middle of the afternoon.

  “How can you waste your life in bed? How can you do this to me?”

  “I’m on a different cycle. I go to bed late. Please go away.”

  “The beautiful sun. You’re ruining your health.”

  “I still sleep my seven hours, it’s just that I sleep them at a different time than you sleep yours.”

  “The beautiful sun,” she wailed, “the park, you could be walking.”

  What am I doing arguing with her?

  “But mother, I walked in the park last night. It was still the park then, in the night.”

  “You turn night into day, you’re using up your time, your beautiful health.”

  “Leave me alone!”

  She’s in bad shape, she just wants to talk, she’ll use any maternal duty as an occasion for lengthy debate.

  He rested his elbows on the window sill and let the landscape develop in his thought. Park. Lilacs. Nurses in white talking together beside the green branches or pushing dark carriages. Children launching their white sailboats from the concrete shore of the blue pool, praying for wind, safe journeys or spectacular wrecks.

  “What do you want for your brunch? Eggs, scrambled, salmon, there’s a lovely piece of steak, I’ll tell her to make you a salad, what do you want in it, Russian dressing, how do you want your eggs, there’s coffee-cake, fresh, the refrigerator is full, in this house there is always something to eat, nobody goes hungry, thank God, there are oranges imported from California, do you want juice?”

  He opened the door and spoke carefully.

  “I’m aware how fortunate we are. I’ll take some juice when I feel like it. Don’t disturb the maid or anybody.”

  But she was already at the banister, shouting, “Mary, Mary, prepare Mr. Lawrence some orange juice, squeeze three oranges. How do you want your eggs, Lawrence?”

  She slipped the last question to him like a trick.

  “Will you stop shoving food down my throat? You can make a person sick with your damn food!”

  He slammed his door.

  “He slams a door at a mother,” she reported bitterly from the hall.

  What a mess! His clothes were everywhere. His desk was a confusion of manuscripts, books, underwear, fragments of Eskimo sculpture. He tried to shove a half-finished sestina into the drawer but it was jammed with accumulated scraps, boarded envelopes, abandoned diaries.

  What this room needs is a good, clean fire. He couldn’t find his kimono so he covered himself with The New York Times and ran across the hall into the bathroom.

  “Very pretty. He wears a newspaper.”

  He managed to creep downstairs, but his mother ambushed him in the kitchen.

  “Is that all you’re having, orange juice, with the house filled with food, half the world fighting for leftovers?”

  “Don’t start, Mother.”

  She threw open the door of the refrigerator.

  “Look,” she challen
ged. “Look at all this, eggs that you didn’t want, look at the size of them, cheese, Gruyère, Oka, Danish, Camembert, some cheese and crackers, and who’s going to drink all the wine, that’s a shame, Lawrence, look at them, feel the weight of this grapefruit, we’re so lucky, and meat, three kinds, I’ll make it myself, feel the weight.…”

  Try and see the poem, Breavman, the beautiful catalogue.

  “- here, feel the weight.…”

  He heaved the raw slab of steak at her feet, splitting the wax-paper on the linoleum.

  “Haven’t you got anything better to do with your life than stuff food down my face? I’m not starving.”

  “This is the way a son talks to his mother,” she informed the world.

  “Will you leave me alone now?”

  “This is a son talking, your father should see you, he should be here to see you throwing down meat, meat on the floor, what tyrant does that, only someone rotten, to do this to a mother.…”

  He followed her out of the kitchen.

  “I just asked to be left alone, to wake up by myself.”

  “Rotten, a rat wouldn’t treat a mother, rotten as if you were a stranger, would anybody throw meat and my ankles are swollen, beat you, your father would beat you, a rotten son.…”

  He followed her up the stairs.

  “You can make someone sick with your screaming.”

  She slammed her closet door. He stood beside it and listened to her opening and shutting the big drawers.

  “Get away! A son talks to a mother, a son can kill a mother, I knew everything, what I have to hear, a traitor not a son, to talk to me, nobody who remembers me to talk …”

  He heard her slide open the dress compartment. First she tore the sleeves from some old housecoats. She tripped over a tangle of hangers. Then she began on an expensive black one she had bought in New York.

  “What good are they, what good are they, when a son is killing a mother.…”

  He heard every sound, his cheek pressed against the wood.

  4

  At night the park was his domain.

  He covered all the playing fields and hills like a paranoiac squire hunting for poachers. The flower-beds, the terraces of grass had an aspect of formality they did not have by daylight. The trees were taller and older. The high-fenced tennis court looked like a cage for huge wingless creatures which had somehow got away. The ponds were calm and deadly black. Lamps floated in them like multiple moons.

  Walking past the Chalet he remembered the masculine smell of hockey equipment and underwear, the thud of skates on wooden planks.

  The empty baseball diamond was blurred with spectacular sliding ghosts. He could hear the absence of cheers. With no bikes leaning against them the chestnut tree and wire backstop seemed strangely isolated.

  How many leaves have to scrape together to record the rustle of the wind? He tried to distinguish the sound of acacia from the sound of maple.

  Just beyond the green rose the large stone houses of Westmount Avenue. In them the baseball players were growing their bodies with sleep, resting their voices. He imagined that he could see them dimly through the walls of the upper storeys, or rather the sheets they were wrapped in, floating row upon row over the street, like a colony of cocoons in a moonlit tree. The young men of his age, Christian and blond, dreaming of Jewish sex and bank careers.

  The park nourished all the sleepers in the surrounding houses. It was the green heart. It gave the children dangerous bushes and heroic landscapes so they could imagine bravery. It gave the nurses and maids winding walks so they could imagine beauty. It gave the young merchant-princes leaf-hid necking benches, views of factories so they could imagine power. It gave the retired brokers vignettes of Scottish lanes where loving couples walked, so they could lean on their canes and imagine poetry. It was the best part of everyone’s life. Nobody comes into a park for mean purposes except perhaps a sex maniac and who is to say that he isn’t thinking of eternal roses as he unzips before the skipping-rope Beatrice?

  He visited the Japanese pond to ensure the safety of the goldfish. He climbed through the prickly bushes and over the wall to inspect the miniature waterfall. Lisa was not there. He somersaulted down the hill to see if it was still steep enough. Wouldn’t it be funny if Lisa of all people should be waiting at the bottom? He sifted a handful in the sand-box to guard against polio. He did a test run on the slide, surprised that it squeezed him. He looked gravely from the lookout to guarantee the view.

  “My city, my river, my bridges, shit on you, no I didn’t mean it.”

  The bases had to be run, the upper ponds examined for sail-boat wrecks or abandoned babies or raped white nurses. Touch the tree trunks to encourage them.

  He had his duty to the community, to the nation.

  At any moment a girl is going to step out of one of the flowerbeds. She will look as though she has just been swimming and she’ll know all about my dedication.

  He lay under the lilacs. The flowers were almost gone, they looked like molecular diagrams. Sky was immense. Cover me with black fire. Uncles, why do you look so confident when you pray? Is it because you know the words? When the curtains of the Holy Ark are drawn apart and gold-crowned Torah scrolls revealed, and all the men of the altar wear white clothes, why don’t your eyes let go of the ritual, why don’t you succumb to raving epilepsy? Why are your confessions so easy?

  He hated the men floating in sleep in the big stone houses. Because their lives were ordered and their rooms tidy. Because they got up every morning and did their public work. Because they weren’t going to dynamite their factories and have naked parties in the fire.

  There were lights on the St. Lawrence the size of stars, and an impatient stillness in the air. Trees as fragile as the legs of listening deer. At any minute the sun would come crashing out of the roofs like a clenched fist, driving out determined workers and one-way cars to jam the streets. He hoped he wouldn’t have to see the herds of traffic on Westmount Avenue. Turning night into day.

  “Hello there.”

  A stout man of thirty in an Air Force uniform stood above him. He had been the centre of attention in the park a few days before. Several nurses complained that he had been too enthusiastic in the fondling of their male children. A policeman had escorted him to the street and invited him to move along.

  “I thought you weren’t allowed in here.”

  “Nobody’s around. I just felt like talking.”

  His uniform was sharply pressed. Really, he was too clean for that time of the morning or night or whatever it was. Breavman isolated the smell of shaving lotion from the lilac-laden air. He stood up.

  “Talk. You have my permission. I’m going home.”

  “I just thought …”

  Breavman looked back over his shoulder and shouted, “Talk! Why aren’t you talking? It’s all yours – the park’s empty!”

  There were gardeners in faded clothes on his street. They called to one another as they swept, all Italian names. Breavman studied their brooms made out of wire-bound branches. It must be nice to use something that real.

  5

  “Will you stop shouting, Breavman, or stand further back, I can’t hear a damn thing you’re saying.”

  “Bertha, I said! I just saw Bertha! She’s in town!”

  “Bertha who?”

  “Oh, you wicked and careless fool. Bertha of our childhood, of The Tree, who mangled herself under our noses.”

  “How does she look?”

  “Her face is perfect, really Krantz, she was beautiful.”

  “Where did you see her?”

  “In a bus window.”

  “Good-bye, Breavman.”

  “Don’t hang up, Krantz. I swear it was really her. I won’t say she was smiling. It was an open, blonde face with no family lines, so you could make anything you want of it.”

  “You go follow the bus, Breavman.”

  “Oh, no, she saw me. I’ll just wait here till it comes round again. She moved he
r lips.”

  “Good-bye, Breavman.”

  “Krantz, this is a most pleasant telephone booth I’m living in today. Sherbrooke Street is a parade of everyone I ever knew. I’m going to loiter immoderately. They’ll all be delivered to me today, Bertha, Lisa. Nobody, not one name, not one limb will be taken away in the dustload.”

  “Where did you dig up those old names?”

  “I’m the keeper. I’m the sentimental dirty old man in front of a classroom of children.”

  “Good-bye, Breavman, for real.”

  It was a beautiful telephone box. It smelled of new spring paint and fresh nails. You could feel the sun through the wire-embedded glass. He was the guard, he was the sentry.

  Bertha, who had fallen out of a tree for his sake! Bertha, who played “Greensleeves” sweeter than he ever could! Bertha, who fell with apples and twisted her limbs!

  He dropped in another nickel and waited for the music.

  “Krantz, she just came round again.…”

  6

  Wait, wait, wait, wait. Everything took so long.

  The mountain released the moon like a bubble it could no longer contain, with reluctance and pain.

  That summer Breavman had a queer sense of time slowing down.

  He was in a film and the machine was whirring into slower and slower motion.

  Eight years later he told Shell about it, but not everything, because he didn’t want Shell to think that he saw her in the same way he saw the girl he was telling about, as if she were a moon-lit body in a slow Swedish movie, and from far away.

  What was her name? he demanded of himself.

  I forget. It was a sweet, Jewish last name which meant mother-of-pearl or rose-forest.

  How dare you forget?

  Norma.

  What did she look like?

  It doesn’t matter what she looked like every day. It only matters what she looked like for that important second. That I remember and will tell you.

  What did she look like every day?

  As a matter of fact, her face was squashed, her nose spread too wide. One of her grandmothers must have been carried away by the Tartars. She always seemed to be astride something, a railing or a diving-board, waving her brown arms, eyes lost in her laugh, galloping to a feast or a massacre. Her flesh was loose.