The Favourite Game & Beautiful Losers

“I’m not. But you should be.”

  “I’d like to see you.”

  “I’d like to see you too, but I’ve got a better idea: put down the telephone and visit each of your children’s rooms and then go to bed.”

  “I did that. Twice.”

  It was a free country. The old taboos were in disrepute. They were grown up and wouldn’t be called in for supper. She was twenty-odd, wealthy, white, with a fast car and an out-of-town husband, classic commercial widow. He was alone with his insomnia and bad manuscripts.

  Breavman, thou false lech, your room hideously empty as your charity smile. I knew she’d be delivered, Krantz.

  She broke the silence. “Do you want me to come down?”

  “Yes.”

  He jammed all his laundry in the closet and hid an egg-caked plate in a stack of clean ones. He sat at his desk and slowly bound up his manuscript, taking an unfamiliar pleasure in the act, as if he now had some special right to condemn the papers.

  She was wearing slacks, her black hair was loose, but freshly combed. She brought a clean Laurentian fragrance into the room.

  “You smell like you just descended a ski slope.”

  He poured her a glass of sherry. In a few minutes he had the whole story. Her husband wasn’t on a trans-Canada trip, opening bowling alleys. He was in Toronto living with some woman, an employee of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

  “My father has the complete detective report. I didn’t want details.”

  “These things happen,” Breavman said, its triteness crushing his last word into a mumble.

  Lisa talked and sipped her drink calmly, far from losing the coolness she had carried in. He felt that, along with all her precious things, she had left her emotions at home. She knew that these things happen, she knew that everything happens, and so what?

  “He’ll come back.”

  Lisa told him with her eyes that her husband didn’t need Breavman’s defence.

  “And you love him, Lisa, and your children, and your home. That’s the most obvious thing about you.”

  She lowered her eyes and studied the wine glass. He thought she must be remembering the rows of crystal in her own house, comparing the disarray of his room with her own household order. But she had come for revenge, and the more distasteful the conditions, the sweeter. Perhaps she was not lonely, perhaps she was offended.

  “I don’t feel like discussing Carl here.”

  “I’m glad you came. You made me feel very good the night of the party, the way you listened. I didn’t think I’d ever see you alone again, and I wanted to.”

  “The strange thing is that I decided you were the only one I could see.”

  Perhaps she could express her revenge with him because he was secret, not part of her life, but not exactly a stranger – like meeting someone from your own town in a foreign place.

  So they could sit together, perhaps he could hold her hand, and talk about the curious way things turn out. They could walk along Sherbrooke arm in arm, the end of the summer was coming. He could offer her his company and friendship as solace. Or they could find the bed immediately; there was no in-between.

  Wasn’t there only one inevitability, and a weary one at that? He walked to her and kissed her mouth. She stood up and they embraced. They both sensed in that moment the mutual need to annihilate thought and speech. She was tired of the offence. He was tired of wondering why he wanted her body, or any body.

  They performed the act of love, as he had many times before, a protest against luck and circumstances. He praised her beauty and the ski slopes that had made her legs so fine.

  But he did not sleep with Lisa the child. He did not return to the park where nurses watched the sailor children. He did not build a mysterious garage above her naked form. He made love to a woman. Not Lisa. He knew this as they lay together and talked, finally, about their childhood and city. That contract, interrupted by the Curse, would never be fulfilled. This was a woman with whom he was beginning an affair, perhaps. The child that grew away from him into breasts and long cars and adult cigarettes was not the peaceful woman beside him. That child would evade him and cause him to wonder at her always.

  The sun had already risen when she dressed to go.

  “Get some rest,” she said. “I’ll call you tomorrow. You’d better not call the house. Never call the house.”

  He went to the window to watch her drive away. She rolled down her car window and waved at him, and suddenly they were waving harder and longer than people ever do. She was crying and pressing her palm up at him, back and forth in urgent semaphore, as if to erase out of the morning air, please, all contracts, vows, agreements, old or new. He leaned out of the window and with his signalling hand agreed to let the night go, to let her go free, because he had all he needed of her fixed in an afternoon.

  19

  Some say that no one ever leaves Montreal, for that city, like Canada itself, is designed to preserve the past, a past that happened somewhere else.

  This past is not preserved in the buildings or monuments, which fall easily to profit, but in the minds of her citizens. The clothes they wear, the jobs they perform are only the disguises of fashion. Each man speaks with his father’s tongue.

  Just as there are no Canadians, there are no Montrealers. Ask a man who he is and he names a race.

  So the streets change swiftly, the skyscrapers climb into silhouettes against the St. Lawrence, but it is somehow unreal and no one believes it, because in Montreal there is no present tense, there is only the past claiming victories.

  Breavman fled the city.

  His mother was phoning him daily. She was alone, did he know what that meant? Her back was sore, her legs were swollen. People asked about her son and she had to tell them he was a factory worker.

  Breavman laid the phone on the bed and let her talk. He had no strength or skill to comfort her. He sat beside the receiver, unable to speak or think, aware only of the monotonous rasp of her voice.

  “I looked in the mirror today, I didn’t recognize myself, wrinkles from aggravation, from nights thinking about my son, do I deserve this, fifteen years with a sick man, a son who doesn’t care whether his mother lies like a stone, like a dog, a mother, an only mother should lie like a stone, a prostitute wouldn’t stand from her son what I stand, do I have so much, do I eat chocolate all day, have I got diamonds for all that I gave away, fifteen years, did I ever ask anything for myself, two broken legs from Russia, swollen ankles that the doctor was surprised, but my son is too busy to hear the truth, night after night I lie in front of the TV, does anybody care what I do, I was such a happy person, I was a beauty, now I’m ugly, people on the street don’t recognize me, I gave my life for what, I was so good to everyone, a mother, once in a lifetime you have a mother, do we live forever, a mother is a fragile thing, your best friend, in the whole world does anyone else care what happens to you, you can fall down on the street and people pass you by, and I lie like a stone, all over the world people are running to see their mothers, but to my son it doesn’t matter, he can get another mother, one life we have, everything is a dream, it’s luck …”

  And when she was through he said, “I hope you’re feeling better, Mother,” and good-bye.

  She was seeing a psychiatrist now. He didn’t seem to be helping her. Was she taking the pills he prescribed? Her voice sounded more hysterical.

  He fled his mother and his family.

  He had thought that his tall uncles in their dark clothes were princes of an élite brotherhood. He had thought the synagogue was their house of purification. He had thought their businesses were realms of feudal benevolence. But he had grown to understand that none of them even pretended to these things. They were proud of their financial and communal success. They liked to be first, to be respected, to sit close to the altar, to be called up to lift the scrolls. They weren’t pledged to any other idea. They did not believe their blood was consecrated. Where had he got the notion that they did?
br />   When he saw the rabbi and cantor move in their white robes, the light on the brocaded letters of their prayer shawls, when he stood among his uncles and bowed with them and joined his voice to theirs in the responses; when he followed in the prayer book the catalogue of magnificence —

  No, his uncles were not grave enough. They were strict, not grave. They did not seem to realize how fragile the ceremony was. They participated in it blindly, as if it would last forever. They did not seem to realize how important they were, not self-important, but important to the incantation, the altar, the ritual. They were ignorant of the craft of devotion. They were merely devoted. They never thought how close the ceremony was to chaos. Their nobility was insecure because it rested on inheritance and not moment-to-moment creation in the face of annihilation.

  In the most solemn or joyous part of the ritual Breavman knew the whole procedure could revert in a second to desolation. The cantor, the rabbi, the chosen laymen stood before the open Ark, cradling the Torah scrolls, which looked like stiff-necked royal children, and returned them one by one to their golden stall. The beautiful melody soared, which proclaimed that the Law was a tree of life and a path of peace. Couldn’t they see how it had to be nourished? And all these men who bowed, who performed the customary motions, they were unaware that other men had written the sacred tune, other men had developed the seemingly eternal gestures out of clumsy confusion. They took for granted what was dying in their hands.

  But why should he care? He wasn’t Isaiah, and the people claimed nothing. He didn’t even like the people or the god of their cult. He had no rights in the matter.

  He didn’t want to blame anyone. Why should he feel that they had bred him to a disappointment? He was bitter because he couldn’t inherit the glory they unwittingly advertised. He couldn’t be part of their brotherhood but he wanted to be among them. A nostalgia for solidarity. Why was his father’s pain involved?

  He turned away from the city. He had abused the streets with praise. He had expected too much from certain cast-iron fences, special absurd turrets, staircases to the mountain, early-morning views of bridges on the St. Lawrence. He was tired of the mystery he had tried to impute to public squares and gardens. He was tired of the atmosphere in which he tried to involve Peel Street and boarding-house mansions. The city refused to rest quietly under the gauze of melancholy he had draped over the buildings. It reasserted its indifference.

  He stood very still.

  New York City. He lived in the tower of World Student House. His window overlooked the Hudson River. He was relieved that it wasn’t his city and he didn’t have to record its ugly magnificence. He walked on whatever streets he wanted and he didn’t have to put their names in stories. New York had already been sung. And by great voices. This freed him to stare and taste at will. Everybody spoke a kind of English, no resentment, he could talk to people everywhere. He wandered in the early-morning markets. He asked the names of the fish, stiff and silver in boxes of ice. He attended more of his seminars.

  He saw the most beautiful person and pursued her. Shell.

  1

  Her middle name was Marshell, after her mother’s people, but they called her Shell.

  Her ancestors crossed the ocean early enough to insure her mother membership in the DAR. The family produced two undistinguished senators and a number of very good traders. For the past seventy-five years all the males (excepting the utterly stupid) have attended Williams. Shell was the second youngest in a family of four. Her older brother was one of the unfortunates who did not make Williams. To compound his shame he ran off with a Baptist and made his father bitterly happy when he quarrelled with his wife over their children’s education.

  Shell grew up in a large white house on the outskirts of Hartford, where her maternal great-grandfather had founded a successful bank. There were a stone fountain in the garden, many acres of land, and a stream which her father stocked with trout. After the younger son made a reasonable marriage and moved to Pittsburgh, Shell and her sister were bought two horses. A stable was built, a miniature reproduction of the house itself. Her father was fond of building miniatures of his house. Scattered through the trees there were a chicken coop, a rabbit hutch, a doll’s house, and a bird roost, all copies of the original one, which (they reminded their weekend guests) was for humans.

  The affairs of the house were conducted with much ritual and decorum. Both the mother and father, deep readers of American history and collectors of colonial furniture, took some pride in never having been tempted to visit Europe.

  Every spring Shell was in charge of floating cut flowers in the stone fountain. She took the business of being a girl very seriously. She thought her sister was too rough, wondered why her mother raised her voice, was hurt when she contradicted her husband. Not only did she believe in fairy tales, she experimented with peas under her mattress.

  She hated her hair, which was black, thick, and long. After a washing it could not be managed and she was called “Zulu.” But she would not cut it, thinking perhaps of ladders let down from tower windows. She didn’t like her body. It was not a princess’s body, she was sure. It wasn’t growing in the right places. She envied her younger sister’s breasts, her straight auburn hair. She attacked hers with a brush and did not begin to count until she had done at least two hundred strokes. She was appalled when one of her sister’s boyfriends tried to kiss her.

  “Why?” she demanded.

  The boy didn’t know why. He had expected to be accepted or refused, not examined.

  “Because you’re pretty….”

  He said it like a question. Shell turned and ran. The grass seemed suddenly white, the trees white. She dropped the flowers meant for the fountain because they were white and dirty as bones. She was a spider on a field of ash.

  “Primavera,” said Breavman when he heard the story. “Not Botticelli – Giacometti.”

  “You won’t let me keep anything ugly, will you?”

  “No.”

  Besides, Breavman could not resist adding to his memory the picture of a delicate American girl running through the woods, scattering wild flowers.

  Shell loved the early morning. She asked for the room with the big east window which had been the nursery. She was allowed to choose her own wallpaper. The sun crept over the calico bedspread. It was her miracle.

  Apparently life was not all Robert Frost and Little Women.

  One Sunday morning she was in her mother’s bed. They were listening to a children’s programme. Gobs of snow, the size of seeded dandelions, were drifting diagonally across the many-paned windows. Shell’s hair, gathered by a black ribbon, lay tame and smooth over her chest. Her mother was fingering it.

  On the air a child was singing a simplified aria.

  “Daddy’s so silly. He says you’re all growing up so fast that the house will be too big.”

  “He’ll never leave his fish and chickens.”

  Her mother’s fingers had been leisurely twining and intertwining but now only the thumb and forefinger were at work, a few strands of hair between them. The movement was that with which the bargain hunter tests the fabric of a lapel, but more rhythmical and prolonged.

  She was smiling faintly and looking straight into Shell’s face but Shell could not make contact with her eyes. The movement made the hair impersonal. It didn’t belong to Shell. The blanket was moving. With the other hand her mother was doing something beneath it. The same rhythm.

  There is a kind of silence with which we respond to the vices, addictions, self-indulgence of people close to us. It has nothing to do with disapproval. Shell lay very still, watched the snow. She was between the snow and her mother, unconnected to either.

  The announcer invited all the boys and girls out there to join the Caravan next week, when they would take a trip to the far-off land of Greece.

  “Well, aren’t we the lazy things? Up you get, Miss Dainty….”

  Shell took a long time getting dressed. The house felt very anc
ient, haunted by the ghosts of old sanitary napkins, exhausted garters, used razor blades. She had encountered adult weakness with none of the ruthlessness of a child.

  When her father, coming in red and jolly from walking in the woods, kissed her mother, Shell watched very closely. She was sorry for her father’s failure, which she understood was as much a part of him as his passion for miniature houses, his gentle interest in animals.

  It was not too many years before her mother began to exercise the inalienable rights of menopause. She took to wearing a fur coat and sun-glasses in the house at all times. She hinted, then claimed that she had sacrificed a career as a concert pianist. When asked on whose behalf, she refused to reply and turned the thermostat lower.

  Her husband kept her eccentricities on the level of a joke, even though her attacks on her young daughters were occasionally vicious. He allowed her to become the baby of the house, kissing her as usual before and after every meal.

  Shell loved him for the way he treated her mother, believed herself lucky to grow up in this atmosphere of married affection. His patience, his kisses were tiny instalments on a debt she knew he could never cover.

  A damaging consequence of this neurotic interlude was a rivalry between Shell and her sister. Their mother developed and encouraged it with that faultless instinct which people who live under one roof have for one another’s pain.

  “I can’t remember which of you hurt most,” she reflected. “Good thing you weren’t twins.”

  Shell’s father drove her to school every morning. It was his idea that the girls go to different schools. This was a wonderful part of the day for both of them.

  She watched the forest go by. She knew how happy he was that she had inherited his love of trees. This was more important than her own delight, and it ushered her into a woman’s life.

  He drove very carefully. He must have been unwilling to turn his head to look at her, he had such a precious cargo. He mustn’t have quite believed he had anything to do with her, she was so lovely, and he must have wondered why she believed the things he told her. When she was sixteen he gave her a car of her own, a second-hand Austin.