The Favorite Game (29 page)

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?

D
earest 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

A
nne 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.

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.

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

“F
ifty 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 does 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.”

I
n 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.

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.