“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.
26
DON’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?
27
Dearest 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!
28
They 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 back yards?”
“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! …”
29
Let 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.
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.
PAUVRE GRANDE BEAUTÉ!
POOR PERFECT BEAUTY!
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.
QUEL MAL MYSTÉRIEUX RONGE SON FLANC D’ATHLÈTE?
WHAT UNKNOWN EVIL HARROWS HER LITHE SIDE?
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.
30
He 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. Every -thing 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.