The Favorite Game (32 page)

He knew he couldn’t begin the whole process again. What had happened to his plan? They finally found words to say and tenderness, the kind that follows failure.

They stayed in the room together.

By the end of the next day he had written a still-born poem about two armies marching to battle from different corners of a continent. They never meet in conflict in the central plain. Winter eats through the battalions like a storm of moths at a brocade gown, leaving the metal threads of artillery strewn gunnerless miles behind the frozen men, pointless designs on a vast closet floor. Then months later two corporals of different language meet in a green, unblasted field. Their feet are bound with strips of cloth torn from the uniforms of superiors. The field they meet on is the one that distant powerful marshals ordained for glory. Because the men have come from different directions they face each other, but they have forgotten why they stumbled there.

That next night he watched her move about his room. He had never seen anything so beautiful. She was nested in a brown chair studying a script. He remembered a colour he loved in the crucible of melted brass. Her hair was that colour and her warm body seemed to reflect it just as the caster’s face glows above the poured moulds.

He gave all his silent praise for her limbs, lips, not to the clamour of personal desire, but to the pure demand of excellence.

They had talked enough for her to be naked. The line of her belly reminded him of the soft forms drawn on the cave well by the artist-hunter. He remembered her intestines.

Lying beside her he thought wildly that a miracle would deliver them into a sexual embrace. He didn’t know why, because they were nice people, the natural language of bodies, because she was leaving tomorrow. She rested her hand on his thigh, no desire in the touch. She went to sleep and he opened his eyes in the black and his room was never emptier or a woman further away. He listened to her breathing. It was like the delicate engine of some cruel machine spreading distance after distance between them. Her sleep was the final withdrawal, more perfect than anything she could say or do. She slept with a deeper grace than that with which she moved.

He knew that hair couldn’t feel; he kissed her hair.

He was heading towards Côte des Neiges. The night had been devised by a purist of Montreal autumns. A light rain made the black iron fences shine. Leaves lay precisely etched on the wet pavement, flat as if they’d fallen from diaries. A wind blurred the leaves of the young acacia on MacGregor Street. He was walking an old route of fences and mansions he knew by heart.

The need for Shell stabbed him in a few seconds. He actually felt himself impaled in the air by a spear of longing. And with the
longing came a burden of loneliness he knew he could not support. Why were they in different cities?

He ran to the Mount Royal Hotel. A cleaning lady on her knees thanked him for the mud.

He was dialling, shouting at the operator, reversing the charges.

The phone rang nine times before she answered it.

“Shell!”

“I wasn’t going to answer.”

“Marry me! That’s what I want.”

There was a long silence.

“Lawrence, you can’t treat people like this.”

“Won’t you marry me?”

“I read your journal.”

Oh, her voice was so beautiful, fuzzy with sleep.

“Never mind my journal. I know I hurt you. Please don’t remember it.”

“I want to go back to sleep.”

“Don’t hang up.”

“I won’t hang up,” she said wearily. “I’ll wait till you say goodbye.”

“I love you, Shell.”

There was another long silence and he thought he heard her crying.

“I do. Really.”

“Please go away. I can’t be what you need.”

“Yes, you can. You are.”

“Nobody can be what you need.”

“Shell, this is crazy, talking this way, four hundred miles apart. I’m coming to New York.”

“Have you any money?”

“What kind of a question is that?”

“Do you have any money for a ticket? You quit camp, and I know you didn’t have much when you started.”

He never heard her voice so bitter. It sobered him.

“I’m coming.”

“Because I don’t want to wait for you if you’re not.”

“Shell?”

“Yes.”

“Is there anything left?”

“I don’t know.”

“We’ll talk.”

“All right. I’ll say good night now.”

She said that in her old voice, the voice that accepted him and helped him with his ambitions. It made him sad to hear it. For himself, he had exhausted the emotion that impelled the call. He didn’t need to go to New York.

H
e began his tour through the heart streets of Montreal. The streets were changing. The Victorian gingerbread was going down everywhere, and on every second corner was the half-covered skeleton of a new, flat office building. The city seemed fierce to go modern, as though it had suddenly been converted to some new theory of hygiene and had learned with horror that it was impossible to scrape the dirt out of gargoyle crevices and carved grape vines, and therefore was determined to cauterize the whole landscape.

But they were beautiful. They were the only beauty, the last magic. Breavman knew what he knew, that their bodies never died.
Everything else was fiction. It was the beauty they carried. He remembered them all, there was nothing lost. To serve them. His mind sang praise as he climbed a street to the mountain.

For the body of Heather, which slept and slept.

For the body of Bertha, which fell with apples and a flute.

For the body of Lisa, early and late, which smelled of speed and forests.

For the body of Tamara, whose thighs made him a fetishist of thighs.

For the body of Norma, goose-fleshed, wet.

For the body of Patricia, which he had still to tame.

For the body of Shell, which was altogether sweet in his memory, which he loved as he walked, the little breasts he wrote about, and her hair which was so black it shone blue.

For all the bodies in and out of bathing suits, clothes, water, going between rooms, lying on grass, taking the print of grass, dancing discipline, leaping over horses, growing in mirrors, felt like treasure, slobbered over, cheated for, all of them, the great ballet line, the cream in them, the sun on them, the oil anointed.

A thousand shadows, a single fire, everything that happened, twisted by telling, served the vision, and when he saw it, he was in the very centre of things.

Blindly he climbed the wooden steps that led up the side of the mountain. He was stopped by the high walls of the hospital. Its Italian towers looked sinister. His mother was sleeping in one of them.

He turned and looked at the city below him.

The heart of the city wasn’t down there among the new buildings and widened streets. It was right over there at the Allan, which, with drugs and electricity, was keeping the businessmen sane and their wives from suicide and their children free from hatred. The hospital was the true heart, pumping stability and creations and
orgasms and sleep into all the withering commercial limbs. His mother was sleeping in one of the towers. With windows that didn’t quite open.

The restaurant bathed the corner of Stanley and St. Catherine in a light that made your skin yellow and the veins show through. It was a big place, mirrored, crowded as usual. There wasn’t a woman he could see. Breavman noted that a lot of the men used hair tonic; the sides of their heads seemed shiny and wet. Most of them were thin. And there seemed to be a uniform, almost. Tight chinos with belts in the back, V-neck sweaters without shirts.

He sat at a table. He was very thirsty. He felt in his pocket. Shell was right. He didn’t have much money.

No, he wouldn’t go to New York. He knew that. But he must always be connected to her. That must never be severed. Everything was simple as long as he was connected to her, as long as they remembered.

One day what he did to her, to the child, would enter his understanding with such a smash of guilt that he would sit motionless for days, until others carried him and medical machines brought him back to speech.

But that was not today.

The juke-box wailed. He believed he understood the longing of the cheap tunes better than anyone there. The Wurlitzer was a great beast, blinking in pain. It was everybody’s neon wound. A suffering ventriloquist. It was the kind of pet people wanted. An eternal bear for baiting, with electric blood. Breavman had a quarter to spare. It was fat, it loved its chains, it gobbled and was ready to fester all night.

Breavman thought he’d just sit back and sip his Orange Crush. A memory hit him urgently and he asked a waitress for her pencil. On a napkin he scribbled:

Jesus! I just remembered what Lisa’s favourite game was. After a heavy snow we would go into a back yard with a few of our friends. The expanse of snow would be white and unbroken. Bertha was the spinner. You held her hands while she turned on her heels, you circled her until your feet left the ground. Then she let go and you flew over the snow. You remained still in whatever position you landed. When everyone had been flung in this fashion into the fresh snow, the beautiful part of the game began. You stood up carefully, taking great pains not to disturb the impression you had made. Now the comparisons. Of course you would have done your best to land in some crazy position, arms and legs sticking out. Then we walked away, leaving a lovely white field of blossom-like shapes with footprint stems.

The epigraph poem and others quoted in
The Favourite Game
are from
The Spice Box of Earth
by Leonard Cohen, and are reprinted by kind permission of the publishers, McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

The lyrics on
this page
are from “The Girl That I Marry” by Irving Berlin. Copyright © 1946 (Renewed) by Irving Berlin. All rights for the world, excluding the U.S., China, Japan, Okinawa controlled by Warner Chappell Music Ltd. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL. 33014.

The lyrics on
this page
are from “Near You” by Kermit Goell and Francis Craig. Copyright © 1947 (Renewed) by Supreme Music Corporation. All rights administered by WB Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL. 33014.

The lyrics on
this page
–
this page
are from “I Almost Lost My Mind” by Ivory Joe Hunter © 1956 (Renewed) by Unichappell Music, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL. 33014.