The Favorite Game (28 page)

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.

I
t 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 was 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.

H
e 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.

D
ay 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?

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.

N
ow 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.