On one of his walks around the Montreal waterfront he passed a brass foundry, a small firm which manufactured bathroom fixtures. A window was open and he looked inside.
The air was smoke-filled. Loud incessant noise of machinery. Against the wall were hills of mud-coloured sand. At the far end of the foundry stone crucibles glowed in sunken furnaces. The men were covered with grime. They heaved heavy sand moulds. Through the smoke they looked like figures in one of those old engravings of Purgatorio.
Then a red-hot crucible was raised out of the furnace by a pulley system and swung towards the row of moulds. It was lowered to the ground and the slag scooped off the surface.
Now a huge man wearing an asbestos apron and goggles took over. He guided the crucible over to the moulds. With a lever device he tilted the stone pot and poured the molten brass into the lead-holes of the moulds.
Breavman gasped at the brightness of the liquid metal. It was the colour gold should be. It was as beautiful as flesh. It was the colour of gold he thought of when he read the word in prayers or poems. It was yellow, alive and screaming. It poured out in an arch with smoke and white sparks. He watched the man move up and down the rows, dispensing this glory. He looked like a monolithic idol. No, he was a true priest.
That was the job he wanted but that wasn’t what he got. He became a core-wire puller. Unskilled. Pay was seventy-five cents an hour. The hours were seven-thirty to five-thirty, half-hour for lunch.
The size of the core determines the size of the hole running through the faucets. It is made of baked sand packed along a length of wire. It is placed between the two halves of the mould, and the brass flows around it, creating the hole. When the moulds are broken up and the rough-cast faucets extracted they still contain the wire on which the cores were suspended.
His job was to pull these wires out. He sat on a box not far from the long, low roller tables on which the moulds were placed for filling. Beside him was a heap of hot faucets with these core-wires sticking out from the ends. He seized one with his left gloved hand and yanked out the twisted wire with a pair of pliers.
He pulled several thousand wires a week. The only time he stopped was to watch the pouring of the brass. It turned out that the moulder was a Negro. It was impossible to tell with the grime on everybody’s face. Now there’s a heroic proletarian tale if he ever heard one.
Pull your wire, Breavman.
The beauty of the brass never diminished.
He took his place in the fire and smoke and sand. The foundry was not air-conditioned, thank heaven. His hands grew callouses which were ordinary to working girls but they were stroked like medals by others.
He sat on his box and looked around. He had come to the right place. Chopping machines and the roar of furnaces were exactly the right music to purge. Sweat and mud on a man’s pimpled back was a picture to give perspective to flesh. The air was foul: the intake of breath after a nostalgic sigh coated your throat with scum. The view of old men and young men condemned to their sandpiles added an excellent dimension to his vision of lambs, beasts, and little children. The roof windows let in shafts of dirty sunlight which were eventually lost in the general fumes. They laboured in a gloom tinted red by the fires. He had become an integrated figure in the inferno engraving which he had glimpsed a few weeks before.
The firm was not unionized. He thought about contacting the appropriate union and helping to organize the place. But that wasn’t why he had come. He’d come for boredom and penance. He introduced an Irish immigrant to Walt Whitman and talked him into going to a night school. That was the extent of his social work.
The boredom was killing. Manual labour did not free his mind to wander at will. It numbed his mind, but the anaesthesia was not sufficiently potent to deliver it from awareness. It could still recognize its bondage. He would suddenly realize that he had been chanting the same tune over and over for the last hour. Each wire represented a small crisis and each extraction a small triumph. He could not overlook this absurdity.
The more bored he became the more inhuman was the beauty of the brass. It was too bright to look at. You needed goggles. It was too hot to stand close to. You needed an apron. Many times a day he watched the metal being poured, feeling the heat even where he sat. The arch of liquid came to represent an intensity he would never achieve.
He punched the clock every morning for a year.
16
His friend was leaving Montreal to study in England.
“But, Krantz, it’s Montreal you’re leaving, Montreal on the very threshold of greatness, like Athens, like New Orleans.”
“The Frogs are vicious,” he said, “the Jews are vicious, the English are absurd.”
“That’s why we’re great, Krantz. The cross-fertilization.”
“Okay, Breavman, you stay here to chronicle the Renaissance.”
It was an early summer evening on Stanley Street. Breavman had been in the foundry for a month. The strolling girls had their bare arms on.
“Krantz, the arms, the bosoms, the buttocks, O lovely catalogue!”
“They’ve certainly come out.”
“Krantz, do you know why Sherbrooke Street is so bloody beautiful?”
“Because you want to get laid.”
Breavman thought for a second.
“You’re right, Krantz.”
It was great to be back in the dialogue with Krantz; he hadn’t seen him very much in the past few weeks.
But he knew the street was beautiful for other reasons. Because you’ve stores and people living in the same buildings. When you’ve got only stores, especially modern-fronted ones, there is a terrible stink of cold money-grabbing. When you’ve got only houses, or rather when the houses get too far from the stores, they exude some poisonous secret, like a plantation or an abattoir.
But what Krantz said was true. No, not laid. Beauty at close quarters.
A half-block up, a girl turned down to Sherbrooke. She was strolling alone.
“Remember, Krantz, three years ago we would have followed her with all kinds of fleshly dreams.”
“And fled if she ever looked back.”
The girl ahead of them walked under a lamplight, the light sliding down the folds of her hair. Breavman began to whistle “Lili Marlene.”
“Krantz, we’re walking into a European movie. You and me are old officers walking along to something important. Sherbrooke is a ruin. Why does it feel like a war just ended?”
“Because you want to get laid.”
“C’mon, Krantz, give me a chance.”
“Breavman, if I gave you a chance, you’d weep through every summer night.”
“Do you know what I’m going to do, Krantz? I’m going to walk up to that girl and be very gentle and polite and ask her to join us for a small walk over the world.”
“You do that, Breavman.”
He quickened his pace and moved beside her. This would be it. All the compassion of strangers. She turned her face and looked at him.
“Excuse me,” he said and stopped. “Mistake.”
She walked away and he waited for Krantz to catch up.
“She was a beast, Krantz. We couldn’t have toasted her. She wasn’t all that is beautiful in women.”
“It’s not our night.”
“There’s lots of night left.”
“I’ve got to get up early for the boat.”
But they did not go right back to Stanley. They walked slowly up the streets towards home: University, Metcalfe, Peel, MacTavish. Named for the distinguished from the British Isles. They passed by the stone houses and the black iron fences. Many of the houses had been taken over by the university or turned into boarding-houses, but here and there a colonel or a lady still lived, manicured the lawns and bushes, still climbed the stone steps as if all the neighbours were peers. They wandered through the campus of the university. Night, like time, gave all the buildings a deep dignity. There was the library with its crushing cargo of words, dark and stone.
> “Krantz, let’s get out of here. The buildings are starting to claim me.”
“I know what you mean, Breavman.”
As they walked back to Stanley, Breavman was no longer in a movie. All he wanted to do was turn to Krantz and wish him luck, all the luck in the world. There was nothing else to say to a person.
The taxis were beginning to pile up in front of the tourist houses. Half a block down you could get whisky in coffee cups at a blind pig disguised as a bridge club. They watched the taximen making U-turns in the one-way street: friends of the police. They knew all the landladies and store owners and waitresses. They were citizens of downtown. And Krantz was taking off like a big bird.
“You know, Breavman, you’re not Montreal’s suffering servant.”
“Of course I am. Can’t you see me, crucified on a maple tree at the top of Mount Royal? The miracles are just beginning to happen. I have just enough breath to tell them, ‘I told you so, you cruel bastards.’”
“Breavman, you’re a schmuck.”
And soon their dialogue would be broken. They stood on the balcony in silence, watching the night-doings get into gear.
“Krantz, do I have anything to do with you leaving?”
“A little.”
“I’m sorry.”
“We’ve got to stop interpreting the world for one another.”
“Yes … yes.”
The buildings were so familiar and the street so well known. Even Gautama wept when he lost a friend. Nothing would be the same tomorrow. He could hardly bear to understand that. Krantz wouldn’t be there. That would be like a bulldozer turned loose in the heart of the city. They weren’t the kind of people that wrote letters to each other.
Krantz took a long glance around him. “Yup,” he said, like an old farmer in a rocking chair.
“Yup,” Breavman agreed over nothing.
“Just about time,” said Krantz.
“Good night, Krantz.”
“Good night, old Breavman.”
He smiled and clasped his friend’s hand.
“Good night, old Krantz,” and they joined four hands and then went into their separate rooms.
17
Montreal was madly buying records of Leadbelly and the Weavers and rushing down to Gesu Hall in mink coats to hear Pete Seeger sing socialist songs. Breavman was at the party by virtue of his reputation as a folk singer and minor celebrity. The hostess had subtly suggested on the phone that he bring his guitar, but he didn’t. He hadn’t touched it for months.
“Larry! It’s so good to see you; it’s been years!”
“You look beautiful, Lisa.”
With his first glance of appreciation he claimed her, because of the street they had lived on, because he knew the whiteness of her, because her skipping body was bound to his by red string. She lowered her eyes.
“Thank you, Larry. And you’ve managed to become famous.”
“Hardly famous, but it’s a good word.”
“We saw you interviewed on TV last week.”
“In this country writers are interviewed on TV for one reason only: to give the rest of the nation a good laugh.”
“Everybody says you’re very clever.”
“Everybody is a vicious gossip.”
He brought her a drink and they talked. She told him about her children, two boys, and they exchanged information about their families. Her husband was on a business trip. He and her father were opening automatic bowling alleys right across the country. Knowing she was alone launched Breavman’s fantasies. Of course she was alone, of course he had met her that specific night, she would be delivered to him.
“Lisa, now that you have children, do you ever think about your own childhood?”
“I always used to promise myself that when I grew up I’d remember exactly how it was, and treat my children from that viewpoint.”
“And do you?”
“It’s very hard. You’d be surprised how much you forget and how little time there is to remember. Usually you act right on the spot and hope your decision is the best one.”
“Do you remember Bertha?” was the first of the questions he meant to ask.
“Yes, but didn’t she –”
“Do you remember me?”
“Of course.”
“What was I like?”
“I suppose you’d be annoyed if I said you were like any other ten-year-old boy. I don’t know, Larry. You were a nice boy.”
“Do you remember the Soldier and the Whore?”
“What?”
“Do you remember my green pants?”
“You’re getting silly….”
“I wish you remembered everything.”
“Why? If we remembered everything we’d never be able to do anything.”
“If you remembered what I remember you’d be in bed with me right now,” he said blindly.
Lisa was kind, wise, or interested enough not to make a joke of what he said.
“No, I wouldn’t. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t. I’m too selfish or scared or prudish, or whatever it is, to risk what I’ve got. I want to keep everything I have.”
“So do I. I don’t want to forget anyone I was ever connected with.”
“You don’t have to. Especially me. I’m glad I met you tonight. You have to come over and meet Carl and the children. Carl reads a lot, I’m sure you’d enjoy talking to him.”
“The last thing I intend to do is talk books with anybody, even Carl. I want to sleep with you. It’s very simple.”
He had intended by his recklessness to reach her quickly and disarm her, but he succeeded only in making the conversation fashionable.
“It’s not simple for me. I’m not trying to be funny. Why do you want to sleep with me?”
“Because we once held hands.”
“And that’s a reason?”
“Humans are lucky to be connected in any way at all, even by the table between them.”
“But you can’t be connected to everyone. It wouldn’t mean anything then.”
“It would to me.”
“But is going to bed the only way a man and woman can be connected?”
Breavman replied in terms of the flirtation, not out of his real experience.
“What else is there? Conversation? I’m in the business and I have no faith in words whatever. Friendship? A friendship between a man and a woman which is not based on sex is either hypocrisy or masochism. When I see a woman’s face transformed by the orgasm we have reached together, then I know we’ve met. Any thing else is fiction. That’s the vocabulary we speak in today. It’s the only language left.”
“Then it’s a language which nobody understands. It’s just become a babble.”
“Better than silence. Lisa, let’s get out of here. Any moment now someone’s going to ask why I didn’t bring my guitar, and I’m liable to smash him in the mouth. Let’s talk over coffee, somewhere.”
She shook her head gently. “No.”
It was the best no he ever heard because it had in it dignity, appreciation, and firm denial. It claimed him and ended the game. He was content now to talk, watch her, and wonder just as he had when the young men in white scarves had taken her away in their long cars.
“I’ve never heard that word spoken better.”
“I thought it was what you wanted to hear.”
“How did you get so damn wise?”
“Look out, Larry.”
“Look what we found.” The hostess beamed. Several guests had followed her over.
“I’ve never heard you play,” Lisa said. “I’d like to.”
He took the unfamiliar guitar and tuned it. The record-player was turned off and everyone drew chairs around or sat on the thick carpet.
It was a good Spanish instrument, very light wood, resonant bass strings. He hadn’t held a guitar for months but as soon as he struck the first chord (A minor) he was happy he’d agreed to play.
The first chord is always crucial for him. Someti
mes it sounds tinny, bland, and the best thing he can do is put the instrument away, because the tone never improves and all his inventions jingle like commercials. This happens when he approaches the instrument without the proper respect or affection. It rebukes him like a complying frigid woman.
But there are those good times when the tone is deep and lingering, and he cannot believe it is himself who is strumming the strings. He watches the intricate blur of his right hand and the ballet-fingers of his left hand stepping between the frets, and he wonders what connection there is between all that movement and the music in the air, which seems to come from the wood itself.
It was like that when he played and sang only for Lisa. He sang the Spanish Civil War songs, not as a partisan, but as a Tiresian historian. He sang the minor songs of absence, thinking of Donne’s beautiful opening,
Sweetest love! I do not go
For weariness of thee,
which is the essence of any love song. He hardly sang the words, he spoke them. He rediscovered the poetry which had overwhelmed him years before, the easy line that gave itself carelessly away and then, before it was over, struck home.
I’d rather be in some dark valley
Where the sun don’t never shine,
Than to see my true love love another
When I know that she should be mine.
He played for an hour, aiming all the melody at Lisa. While he sang he wanted to untie the red string and let her free. That was the best gift he could give her.
When it was over and he had put the guitar away carefully, as though it contained the finer part of him, Lisa said, “That made me feel more connected to you than anything you said. Please come to our house soon.”
“Thank you.”
Soon he slipped out of the party for a walk on the mountain. He watched the moon and it didn’t move for a long time.
18
Four days later the phone rang at one-thirty in the morning. Breavman bolted for it, happy to break his working schedule. He knew everything she was going to say.
“I didn’t think you’d be asleep,” Lisa said.