The Favourite Game & Beautiful Losers

  He pressed his thumb and forefinger in the corners of his eyes, his elbow on the table – a gesture he always regarded as phony. The war-lined desk colonel signing the order that sends the boys, his boys, on the suicide mission, and then we see him steeled for the casualty lists, and all the secretaries have gone home, he is alone with his pin-studded maps, and maybe a montage of the young men in training, close-up of young faces.

  Now he was sure. It was the first thing in a long time he had learned about himself. He wanted no legions to command. He didn’t want to stand on any marble balcony. He didn’t want to ride with Alexander, be a boy-king. He didn’t want to smash his fist across the city, lead the Jews, have visions, love multitudes, bear a mark on his forehead, look in every mirror, lake, hub-cap, for reflection of the mark. Please no. He wanted comfort. He wanted to be comforted.

  He grabbed the bunch of napkins out of the tumbler, wiped the excess ink from his ballpen on a corner of one of them, and scribbled nine poems, certain that she would stay as long as he wrote. He shredded the napkins as he dug the pen in, and he couldn’t read three-quarters of what he’d done; not that it was any good, but that had nothing to do with it. He stuffed the debris into his jacket and stood up. He was armed with amulets.

  “Excuse me,” he said to the man with her, not looking at her at all.

  “Yes?”

  “Excuse me.”

  “Yes?”

  Maybe I’ll say it ten more times.

  “Excuse me.”

  “Can I help you?” A little anger showing. The accent was not American.

  “May I – I would like to talk to the person you are with.” His heart was driving so hard he could believe he was transmitting the beats like a time signal before the news.

  The man granted permission by turning up the palm of his open hand.

  “You’re beautiful, I think.”

  “Thank you.”

  She didn’t speak it, her mouth formed the words as she looked at her loosely clasped hands composed at the edge of the table like a schoolgirl’s.

  Then he walked out of the room, grateful it was a cafeteria and he had already paid his bill. He didn’t know who she was or what she did but he had no doubt whatever that he would see her again and know her.

  10

  Shell took a lover at the end of her fifth year of marriage. It was shortly after she started her new job. She knew what she was doing.

  Talking with Gordon had failed. He was only too eager to talk. She wanted them both to go to psychiatrists.

  “Really, Shell.” He smiled at her paternally, as if she were an adolescent reciting the Rubaiyat with too much belief.

  “I mean it. The insurance covers it.”

  “I don’t think it’s necessary,” he understated, meaning that it was the most outrageous thing he had ever heard of.

  “I do.”

  “I’ve read Simone de Beauvoir,” he said with gentle humour. “I know this world is not kind to women.”

  “I’m talking about us. Please talk with me. Don’t let this night go by.”

  “Just a second, darling.” He knew that at this precise moment she was challenging him to a solemn meeting. He suspected that it was the last time she would ever confront him like this. He also knew that there was nothing within himself that he could summon to meet her. “I really don’t think you can characterize our lives together as a catastrophe.”

  “I don’t want to characterize anything, I want –”

  “We’ve been pretty lucky.” His brand of humility took in the apartment, Shell’s closet of dresses, the plans for the second floor of the house, which were laid out on the desk and to which he was anxious to return.

  “Do you want me to thank you?”

  “That wasn’t becoming.” He allowed her to know he was angry by speaking with a slight British intonation. “Let’s try to understand the process of marriage.”

  “Please!”

  “Don’t get hysterical on me. Oh, come on, Shell, let’s grow up. A marriage changes. It can’t always be passion and promises….”

  It never was. But what was the use of shouting that? He fictionalized an early storm of flesh and wildness from which they had matured. He believed it or he wanted her to believe it. She would never forgive him for that dishonesty.

  “… thing we have now is extremely valuable …”

  Suddenly she didn’t want the doctors, didn’t want to save anything. She watched him speak with that terrible scrutinizing attention that can make a stranger of a bed-mate. He felt that he spoke to her from a far distance. She was a cub reporter in the audience. It was too late for easy married mumbling or intimate silence. He knew she was pretending to be convinced, was grateful to her for the pretence. What else could she do – weep, burn down the walls? She was in a room with him.

  Later she said, “Well, where should we put the partition?” and they leaned over the house plans, playing house.

  Breavman often reviews this scene. Shell told it to him a year later. He sees the two of them bending over the oiled desk, backs towards him, and he sees himself in the corner of the antique room, staring at the incredible hair, waiting for her to feel his gaze, turn, rise, come to him, while Gordon works with his sharp pencil, sketching in the bathroom, the insult of a nursery. She comes to him, they whisper, she looks back, they leave. And in some of the versions he says, “Shell, sit still, build the house, be ugly.” But her beauty makes him selfish. She has to come.

  When she decided to change her job Gordon thought it was a good idea. She was glad to get back into the academic atmosphere. It was a tracking-back, Gordon said. She could re-establish her bearings. Shell simply couldn’t stand another day at Harper’s Bazaar. Watching the cold bodies, clothes.

  A friend of hers was doing a couple of afternoons a week of voluntary work at World Student House, hostessing at teas for foreign students, hanging decorations, showing America at its smiling prettiest to the future ministers of black republics. She informed Shell that there was a job open in the Recreation Department. Since a friend of the family was a director and benefactor of the organization her application and interview were formalities. She moved into a pleasant green office decorated with UNESCO reproductions, which looked over Riverside Park, much the same view as Breavman’s, though less elevated.

  She did her work well. The Guest Speakers Programme, the Sunday Dinner Programme, the Tours Programme were better run than they had ever been. She emerged as an expert organizer. People listened to her. Perhaps a creature that lovely wasn’t supposed to speak such sense. Nobody wanted to disappoint her. Success terrified her. Perhaps this was what she was meant to do, not love, not live close. Nevertheless, she liked working with students, meeting people her own age who were planning and beginning their careers. She walked into the spring atmosphere, she found herself making plans.

  It was strange how friendly she felt to Gordon. The construction of the house was fascinating. Every detail interested her. They rented a truck to pick up panelling from an old country hotel which was being demolished. Gordon saw his study in oak. Shell suggested one full wall for the living-room, the other three left in brick. She was puzzled by her own concern.

  Then it occurred to her that she was leaving him. Her interest was exactly the kind displayed to a cousin with whom one has grown up and whom one does not expect to see again for a long time. One clamours to hear everything about the family – for a little while.

  When she slept with Med it was merely the signature to a note of absence she had been writing for almost a year.

  He was a visiting professor from Lebanon, a remarkably handsome young man who was an expert in these matters, who, in intimate circumstances, would admit to his companion that the constant proximity of “desirable little things” was what most attracted him to the academic life. He was over six feet, thin, hair black and carefully wild and swept back, eyes black and always slightly squinted as if he were looking over stretches of sand for high deeds
to perform. He was a T. E. Lawrence Bedouin with an Oxford accent and theatrically exquisite manners. He was always so obviously on the make, so captivated by his charm and indisputable good looks, so dedicated to his vocation, so phony that he was altogether delightful.

  Shell allowed him to court her extravagantly for three weeks. He was not in his best form because he really believed her beautiful and this intruded on the perfection of his technique.

  He gave her a filigree brooch shaped like a scimitar which he claimed belonged to his mother but which she wouldn’t have accepted if she hadn’t been sure he travelled with a bag of them. She accepted a transparent black nightgown like the ones advertised in the back of Playboy, the kind he seriously believed every American girl coveted – she was delighted with his naïveté.

  Deprived of sweet sexual fiat for so long, indeed never having known it, she righteously defended the privilege to make herself sick. And because he was so pretty, so absurd, nothing she did with him could be serious or important. What she knew was going to happen would not really have happened. Except that she needed the dynamite of adultery to blast her life, destroy the rising house.

  Over whose hips was she pulling the flimsy black costume?

  She could see her hair through the material.

  In the mirror of a bathroom in the hotel on upper Broadway. Steel-rimmed, round-cornered mirror. Whose body?

  Med had reserved the room for a week. The critical week. He had never spent so much money on an adventure.

  The bathroom was brilliantly clean. She had been frightened that it would have a naked bulb on a cord, cracked porcelain, hair on old soap. Is this Shell? she inquired blankly of her image, not because she wanted to know, or even open the subject, but because that question was the only form her modesty could assume.

  At first Med couldn’t speak. He had made a mistake, for men of his character the most painful mistake, occurring once or twice in a lifetime and crushing the heart: he might have loved her. The room was dim. He had arranged the lighting, tuned his transistor radio to the classical-music station. She seemed to create her own silence, her own shadow to stand in. She was not part of his setting.

  “Isn’t that the Fifth?” he said finally.

  “I don’t know.”

  She knew which symphony it was. The answer she spoke was in response to the question before the mirror.

  “I believe it is. Da, da da da da. Of course it is.”

  She wished he would begin.

  She felt no desire. This both pleased and pained her. Desire she would hoard for a lover. Med was not her lover. Desire would have made what she was doing important, and it was not important, it must not be important. A weapon, yes, but not a special night in her heart. Not with this clown. Yet, and this was the pain, he was a man and surely she should long for only someone to hold her after all this time. She had dreamed love, bites, surrender, but all she felt now was interest. Interest! Perhaps Gordon was her true mate after all.

  Med relied on a Peeping Tom survey of her body to inflame him.

  It fascinated her to see a man overwhelmed with desire.

  Oh Shell, cries Breavman as he learns of the hotel, as she tells him in the voice she uses when she must tell him everything. Shell, fly away. Heap flowers in the stone fountain. Fight with your sister. Not you with the Expert Fool, in a room like the ones Breavman built. Not you who wore white dresses.

  As Med lay beside her, silently cataloguing what he had gathered, Shell succumbed to a wave of hatred which made her grit her teeth. She did not know where to attach it. First she tried Med. He was too simple. Besides for the first time since she had known him he seemed genuinely sad, not theatrically melancholy. She guessed he was walking through a museum of dead female forms. She absently massaged the nape of his neck. She tried to hate herself but all she could hate was her silly body. She hated Gordon! She was here because of him. No, that was not true. But still she hated him and the truth of this threw open her eyes, wide in the dark.

  She inspected herself as she dressed. Her body seemed an interesting alien twin, a growth which she didn’t own, like a wart on one’s finger.

  Breavman bites his lip as he listens.

  “I shouldn’t tell you this.” Shell says.

  “Yes.”

  “It wasn’t me. It wasn’t the me you’re holding now.”

  “Yes it was. It is.”

  “Does that hurt you?”

  “Yes,” he says, kissing her eyes. “We have to bring everything to each other. Even the times we are corpses.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “I know you do.”

  If I can always decipher that, Breavman believes, then nothing can happen to us.

  Armed with the betrayal, Shell approached her husband.

  One needs weapons to hunt those close. Foreign steel must be introduced. The world in the married house is too spongy, familiar. The pain, present in plenty, is absorbed. Other worlds must be ushered in to cut the numb.

  Gordon was running hot water over a box of strawberries. He knew it would happen like this. Auden had said so. After her first few words he seemed not to hear what she said. He had always known that this was the way it would come.

  He answered, “I see” and “Of course I understand” and “I see” several more times. He kept his hand between the hot and the cold. Preserving the colourful wrapper intact assumed great importance.

  Then suddenly she was leaving him. His life was changing right now.

  “I want to live by myself for a little while.”

  “A little while?”

  “I don’t know how long.”

  “In other words it could be a very long time.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “In other words you have no intention of returning.”

  “I don’t know, Gordon. Can’t you see I don’t know?”

  “You don’t know but you have a pretty good idea.”

  “Gordon, stop. You won’t get anything out of me like that. You never have.”

  At this point it occurred to Shell that when she had begun to speak to him she had not intended to leave but to give him a last chance.

  “Stay here.”

  He turned off the tap, pushed the box with deliberation into a corner of the sink as though it were a chessman, and wiped his hands. It was an ugly voice he used. The words were less than a plea and more than a proposition.

  “Stay. Don’t break up our marriage over this.”

  “Is it so little?”

  “Women have affairs,” he said without philosophy.

  “I was with a man,” she said incredulously.

  “I know.” And the softer: “It’s not the end of the world.”

  But she wanted it to be the end of the world. She wanted a mark on the forehead to prove the union was rotten. That he was fighting for his life was difficult for her to perceive. She interpreted his speech as part of his daily affront. Now he wanted to formalize the disaster.

  “I won’t interfere. I won’t ask you questions.”

  “No.”

  He thought she was bargaining.

  “You’ll get it out of your system. You’ll see, we’ll weather this.”

  “No!”

  He never understood to what she was shouting “No.”

  Even men of limited imagination can sometimes imagine the worst. So he could not have been really surprised to see her packing one day, or to hear themselves discussing who would take what bureau, what candle-mould, or to find himself on the telephone making arrangements with movers to save Shell the trouble. For years now he had known he didn’t deserve her; it was a matter of time. Now it was happening and he had already imagined his gentlemanly role.

  Shell visited her parents in Hartford. They still lived in the big white house, just the two of them. Officially they regretted the separation and hoped she’d soon return to her husband and her senses. But she had a long talk with her father as they walked over the property. The leaves were
drained of green but they had not yet turned bright. She was surprised how easily she was able to talk to him.

  “He had no right,” was all he said about Gordon, but it was a handsome old man speaking, who had lived out some kind of man’s life, and it fortified her.

  He let her talk, inviting it with his silence and the paths he chose. When she was through he spoke about the first growth of some trees he had planted.

  She could not help feeling that her mother regarded the breakup as a sinister triumph of heredity, like haemophilia in a royal child that had seemed too healthy.

  Shell was lucky to be able to rent a small apartment on 23rd Street. She didn’t want to get too far from the Village. Except for a tiny kitchen, bathroom, and vestibule, she lived in one room. She stood the tall clock beside the entrance to the main room. She painted the walls lavender and threw lavender translucent draperies over the windows, which seemed to etherize the light, make it thin, and perfume the air with cool colour.

  It was not her home in the same way her body was not her own. She merely lived in them. She watched herself move among the pretty things. She didn’t believe that she was the proper woman to have such a good career job, or to leave a husband or to entertain a lover. It horrified her.

  She would not see Med again, of course, and one afternoon in the cafeteria she told him why. She was not created for a minor adventure. Their interview was interrupted by a young man whose curious declaration moved her unreasonably.

  Breavman thought about her all the time but he experienced no lust for her. This was new. He thought about her presence with no longing. She was alive, her beauty existed, she was pulling on her gloves or pushing back her hair or staring at a movie with her huge eyes. He did not want to tear down the theatre in his fantasy and rescue her from the dark fiction. She was there. She was in the city, or some city, some train, some castle or office. He knew their bodies would move together. That was the least of it.