The Favorite Game (31 page)
Breavman walked back to the mess hall and told Krantz. His face went white. They agreed that the campers must not find out and
that the body be removed secretly. Krantz went up to the marsh and returned in a few minutes.
“You stay up there until the camp’s asleep. Ed will take your bunk.”
“I want to go into town with the body,” Breavman said.
“We’ll see.”
“No, we won’t see. I’m going in with Martin.”
“Breavman, get the hell up there now and don’t give me arguments at a time like this. What’s the matter with you?”
He stood guard for a few hours. Nobody came by. The mosquitoes were very bad. He wondered what they were doing to the body. They’d been all over when he found it. There wasn’t much of a moon. He could hear the seniors singing at their bonfire. At about one in the morning the police and ambulance arrived. They worked under the headlights.
“I’m going in with him.”
Krantz had just spoken to Mrs. Stark on the phone. She had been remarkably calm. She had even mentioned that she wouldn’t press charges of criminal negligence. Krantz was very shaken.
“All right.”
“And I’m not coming back.”
“What do you mean you’re not coming back? Don’t start with me now, Breavman.”
“I’m quitting.”
“Camp runs another three weeks. I don’t have anybody to replace you.”
“I don’t care.”
Krantz grabbed his arm.
“You got a contract, Breavman.”
“Screw the contract. Don’t pay me.”
“You phony little bastard, at a time like this —”
“And you owe me five dollars. I had Wanda first. July eleventh, if you want to see my journal.”
“For Christ’s sake, Breavman, what are you talking about? What are you talking about? Don’t you see where you are? Don’t you see what is happening? A child has been killed and you’re talking about a lay —”
“A lay. That’s your language. Five dollars, Krantz. Then I’m getting out of here. This isn’t where I’m supposed to be —”
It was impossible to say who threw the first punch.
D
ON’T SQUEEZE ANYTHING OUT OF THE BODY IT DOESN’T OWE YOU ANYTHING was the complete entry.
He banged it out on the bus to Montreal, typewriter on knees.
It was the worst stretch of the road, signs and gas stations, and the back of the driver’s neck, and his damn washable plastic shirt was boiling him.
If only death could seize him, come through the scum, dignify.
What was it they sang at the end of the book?
Strength! strength! let us renew ourselves!
He would never learn the names of the trees he passed, he’d never learn anything, he’d always confront a lazy mystery. He wanted to be the tall black mourner who learns everything at the hole.
I’m sorry, Father, I don’t know the Latin for butterflies, I don’t know what stone the lookout is made of.
The driver was having trouble with the doors. Maybe they’d never open. How would it be to suffocate in a plastic shirt?
D
earest Shell,
It will take me a little while to tell you.
It’s two in the morning. You’re sleeping between the green-striped sheets we bought together and I know exactly how your body looks. You are lying on your side, knees bent like a jockey, and you’ve probably pushed the pillow off the bed and your hair looks like calligraphy, and one hand is cupped beside your mouth, and one arm leads over the edge like a bowsprit and your fingers are limp like things that are drifting.
It’s wonderful to be able to speak to you, my darling Shell. I can be peaceful because I know what I want to say.
I’m afraid of loneliness. Just visit a mental hospital or factory, sit in a bus or cafeteria. Everywhere people are living in utter loneliness. I tremble when I think of all the single voices raised, lottery-chance hooks aimed at the sky. And their bodies are growing old, hearts beginning to leak like old accordions, trouble in the kidneys, sphincters going limp like old elastic bands. It’s happening to us, to you under the green stripes. It makes me want to take your hand. And this is the miracle that all the juke-boxes are eating quarters for. That we can protest this indifferent massacre. Taking your hand is a very good protest. I wish you were beside me now.
I went to a funeral today. It was no way to bury a child. His real death contrasted violently with the hush-hush sacredness of the chapel. The beautiful words didn’t belong on the rabbi’s lips. I don’t know if any modern man is fit to bury a person. The family’s grief was real, but the air-conditioned chapel conspired against its expression. I felt lousy and choked because I had nothing to say to the corpse. When they carried away the undersized coffin I thought the boy was cheated.
I can’t claim any lesson. When you read my journal you’ll see how close I am to murder. I can’t even think about it or I stop moving. I mean literally. I can’t move a muscle. All I know is that something prosaic, the comfortable world, has been destroyed irrevocably, and something important guaranteed.
A religious stink hovers above this city and we all breathe it. Work goes on at the Oratoire St. Joseph, the copper dome is raised. The Temple Emmanuel initiates a building fund. A religious stink composed of musty shrine and tabernacle smells, decayed wreaths and rotting bar-mitzvah tables. Boredom, money, vanity, guilt, packs the pews. The candles, memorials, eternal lights shine unconvincingly, like neon signs, sincere as advertising. The holy vessels belch miasmal smoke. Good lovers turn away.
I’m not a good lover or I’d be with you now. I’d be beside you, not using this longing for a proof of feeling. That’s why I’m writing you and sending you this summer’s journal. I want you to know something about me. Here it is day by day. Dearest Shell, if you let me I’d always keep you four hundred miles away and write you pretty poems and letters.
That’s true. I’m afraid to live any place but in expectation. I’m no life-risk.
At the beginning of the summer we said: let’s be surgical. I don’t want to see or hear from you. I’d like to counterpoint this with tenderness but I’m not going to. I want no attachments. I want to begin again. I think I love you, but I love the idea of a clean slate more. I can say these things to you because we’ve come that close. The temptation of discipline makes me ruthless.
I want to end this letter now. It’s the first one I didn’t make a carbon of. I’m close to flying down and jumping into bed beside you. Please don’t phone or write. Something wants to begin in me.
LAWRENCE
Shell sent three telegrams that he didn’t answer. Five times he allowed his phone to ring all night.
One morning she awakened suddenly and couldn’t catch her breath. Lawrence had done exactly the same thing to her as Gordon — the letters, everything!
T
hey drank patiently, waiting for incoherence.
“You know, of course, Tamara, that we’re losing the Cold War?”
“No!”
“Plain as the nose. You know what Chinese youth are doing this very minute?”
“Smelting pig-iron in backyards?”
“Correct. And the Russians are learning trigonometry in kindergarten. What do you think about that, Tamara?
“Black thoughts.”
“But it doesn’t matter, Tamara.”
“Why?”
He was trying to stand a bottle on its pouring rim.
“I’ll tell you why, Tamara. Because we’re all ripe for a concentration camp.”
That was a little brutal for their stage of intoxication. On the couch he mumbled beside her.
“What are you saying?”
“I’m not saying anything.”
“You were saying something.”
“Do you want to know what I’m saying, Tamara?”
“Yeah.”
“You really want to know?”
“Yes.”
“All right, I’ll tell you.”
Silence.
“Well?”
“I’ll tell you.”
“Okay, you tell me.”
“I’m saying this: …”
There was a pause. He leaped up, ran to the window, smashed his fist through the glass.
“Get the car, Krantz
,” he screamed.
“Get the car, get the car!…”
L
et us study one more shadow.
He was heading towards Côte des Neiges. Patricia was sleeping back at his room on Stanley, profound sleep of isolation, her red hair fallen on her shoulders as if arranged by a Botticelli wind.
He could not help thinking that she was too beautiful for him to have, that he wasn’t tall enough or straight, that people didn’t turn to look at him in street-cars, that he didn’t command the glory of the flesh.
She deserved someone, an athlete perhaps, who moved with a grace equal to hers, exercised the same immediate tyranny of beauty in face and limb.
He met her at a cast party. She had played the lead in
Hedda Gabler
. A cold bitch, she’d done it well, all the ambition and vine leaves. She was as beautiful as Shell, Tamara, one of the great. She was from Winnipeg.
“Do they have Art in Winnipeg?”
Later on that night they walked up Mountain Street. Breavman showed her an iron fence which hid in its calligraphy silhouettes of swallows, rabbits, chipmunks. She opened fast to him. She told him she had an ulcer. Christ, at her age.
“How old are you?”
“Eighteen. I know you’re surprised.”
“I’m surprised you can be that calm and live with whatever it is that’s eating your stomach.”
But something had to pay for the way she moved, her steps like early Spanish music, her face which acted above pain.
He showed her curious parts of the city that night. He tried to see his eighteen-year-old city again. Here was a wall he had loved.
There was a crazy filigree doorway he wanted her to see, but when they approached he saw the building had been torn down.
“Où sont les neiges?”
he said theatrically.
She looked straight at him and said, “You’ve won me, Lawrence Breavman.”
And he supposed that that was what he had been trying to do.
They lay apart like two slabs. Nothing his hands or mouth could do involved him in her beauty. It was like years ago with Tamara, the silent torture bed.
