The Favourite Game & Beautiful Losers

  – I listen in envy, F. said. Don’t you know you’re being loved?

  – I want her to love me in my way.

  – You’ve got to learn –

  – No lessons, I’m not going to settle for lessons this time. This is my bed and my wife, I have some rights.

  – Then ask her.

  – What do you mean “ask her”?

  – Please make me come with your mouth, Edith.

  – You’re disgusting, F. How dare you use that language in connection with Edith? I didn’t tell you this so that you could soil our intimacy.

  – I’m sorry.

  – Of course, I could ask her, that’s obvious. But then she’d be under duress, or worse, it would become a matter of duty. I don’t want to hold a strap over her.

  – Yes you do.

  – I warn you, F., I’m not going to take your cowardly guru shit.

  – You are being loved, you are being invited into a great love, and I envy you.

  – And stay away from Edith. I don’t like the way she sits between us at the movies. That is just courtesy on our part.

  – I’m grateful to you both. I assure you, she could love no other man as she loves you.

  – Do you think that’s true, F.?

  – I know it’s true. Great love is not a partnership, for a partnership can be dissolved by law or parting, and you’re stuck with a great love, as a matter of fact, you are stuck with two great loves, Edith’s and mine. Great love needs a servant, but you don’t know how to use your servants.

  – How should I ask her?

  – With whips, with imperial commands, with a leap into her mouth and a lesson in choking.

  I see F. standing there, the window behind him, his paper-thin ears almost transparent. I remember the expensively appointed slum room, the view of the factory he was trying to buy, his collection of soap arranged like a model town on the green felt of an elaborately carved billiard table. The light came through his ears as if they were made of a bar of Pears Soap. I hear his phony voice, the slight Eskimo accent which he affected after a student summer in the Arctic. You are stuck with two great loves, F. said. What a poor custodian I have been of those two loves, an ignorant custodian who walked his days in a dream museum of self-pity. F. and Edith loved me! But I didn’t hear his declaration that morning or didn’t believe it. You don’t know how to use your servants, F. said, his ears beaming like Jap lanterns. I was loved in 1950! But I didn’t speak to Edith, I couldn’t. Night after night I lay in the dark listening to the sounds of the elevator, my silent commands buried in my brain, like those urgent proud inscriptions on Egyptian monuments dumb under tons of sand. So her mouth sailed crazily over my body like a flock of Bikini birds, their migratory instincts destroyed by radiation.

  – But I warn you, F. continued, a time will come when you’ll want nothing in the world but those aimless kisses.

  Talking about transparent skin, Edith’s throat was like that, the thinnest, softest cover. You thought a heavy shell necklace would draw blood. To kiss her there was to intrude into something private and skeletal, like a turtle’s shoulder. Her shoulders were bony but not meager. She wasn’t thin but no matter how full the flesh her bones were always in command. From the age of thirteen she had the kind of skin which was called ripe, and the men who pursued her then (she was finally raped in a stone quarry) said that she was the kind of girl who would age quickly, which is the way that men on corners comfort themselves about an unattainable child. She grew up in a small town on the north shore of the St. Lawrence, where she infuriated a number of men who thought that they should be able to rub her small breasts and round bum simply because she was an Indian, an A—— at that! At sixteen, when I married her, I myself believed that her skin couldn’t last. It had that fragile juicy quality we associate with growing things just about to decline. At twenty-four, the year of her death, nothing had altered but her buttocks. At sixteen they had been two half spheres suspended in midair, later they came to rest on two deep curved creases, and this was the extent of her body’s decay until she was squashed all at once. Let me think about her. She liked me to rub her skin with olive oil. I complied even though I really didn’t like playing around with food. Sometimes she filled her belly-button hole with oil and using her little finger she drew the spokes of Asoka’s wheel, then she smeared it, skin darkening. Her breasts were small, somewhat muscular, fruit with fiber. Her freakish nipples make me want to tear up my desk when I remember them, which I do at this very instant, miserable paper memory while my cock soars hopelessly into her mangled coffin, and my arms wave my duties away, even you, Catherine Tekakwitha, whom I court with this confession. Her wondrous nipples were dark as mud and very long when stiffened by desire, over an inch high, wrinkled with wisdom and sucking. I stuffed them into my nostrils (one at a time). I stuffed them in my ears. I believed continually that if anatomy permitted and I could have stuffed a nipple into each of my ears at the same time – shock treatment! What is the use of reviving this fantasy, impossible then as now? But I want those leathery electrodes in my head! I want to hear the mystery explained, I want to hear the conversations between those stiff wrinkled sages. There were such messages going between them that even Edith could not hear, signals, warnings, conceits. Revelations! Mathematics! I told F. about this the night of her death.

  – You could have had everything you wanted.

  – Why do you torment me, F.?

  – You lost yourself in particulars. All parts of the body are erotogenic, or at least have the possibility of so becoming. If she had stuck her index fingers in your ears you would have got the same results.

  – Are you sure?

  – Yes.

  – Have you tried it?

  – Yes.

  – I have to ask you this. With Edith?

  – Yes.

  – F. !

  – Listen, my friend, the elevators, the buzzers, the fan: the world is waking up in the heads of a few million.

  – Stop. Did you do that with her? Did you go that far? Did you do that together? You’re going to sit right there and tell me every detail. I hate you, F.

  – Well, she stuck her index fingers –

  – Was she wearing nail polish?

  – No.

  – She was, damn you, she was! Stop trying to protect me.

  – All right, she was. She stuck her red nails in my ears –

  – You enjoy this, don’t you?

  – She stuck her fingers in my ears and I stuck my fingers in her ears and we kissed.

  – You did it to each other? With your bare fingers? You touched ears and fingers?

  – You begin to learn.

  – Shut up. What did her ears feel like?

  – Tight.

  – Tight!

  – Edith had very tight ears, nearly virgin, I’d say.

  – Get out, F.! Get off our bed! Take your hands off me!

  – Listen, or I’ll break your neck, chicken voyeur. We were fully dressed except for our fingers. Yes! We sucked each other’s fingers, and then we stuck them in each other’s ears –

  – The ring, did she take the ring off?

  – I don’t think so. I was worried about my eardrums because of her long red nails, she was digging so hard. We shut our eyes and we kissed like friends, without opening our mouths. Suddenly the sounds of the lobby were gone and I was listening to Edith.

  – To her body! Where did this happen? When did you do this to me?

  – So those are your questions. It happened in a telephone booth in the lobby of a movie theater downtown.

  – What theater?

  – The System Theatre.

  – You’re lying! There is no telephone booth in the System. There’s only one or two telephones on the wall separated by glass partitions, I think. You did it out in the open! I know that dirty basement lobby! There’s always some fairy hanging around there, drawing cocks and telephone numbers on the green wall. Out in the open! Was anyone watc
hing? How could you do this to me?

  – You were in the men’s room. We were waiting for you beside the telephones, eating chocolate-covered ice-cream bars. I don’t know what was keeping you so long. We finished our ice cream. Edith spotted a flake of chocolate sticking to my little finger. In a very charming fashion she leaned over and flicked it into her mouth with her tongue, like an anteater. She had overlooked a flake of chocolate on her own wrist. I swooped in and got that, clumsily, I confess. Then it turned into a game. Games are nature’s most beautiful creation. All animals play games, and the truly Messianic vision of the brotherhood of creatures must be based on the idea of the game, indeed –

  – So Edith began it! And who touched whose ear first? I have to know everything now. You saw her tongue stretched out, you probably stared. Who started it with the ears?

  – I don’t remember. Maybe we were under the influence of the telephones. If you remember, one of the fluorescent lights was flickering, and the corner where we were standing jumped in and out of shadows as though great wings were passing over us or the huge blades of an immense electric fan. The telephones kept their steady black, the only stable shape in the shifting gloom. They hung there like carved masks, black, gleaming, smooth as the toes of kissed stone R.C. saints. We were sucking each other’s fingers, slightly frightened now, like children pulling at lollipops during the car chase. And then one of the telephones rang! It rang just once. I am always startled when a pay phone rings. It is so imperial and forlorn, like the best poem of a minor poet, like King Michael saying goodbye to Communist Romania, like a message in a floating bottle which begins: If anyone finds this, know that –

  – Damn you, F.! You’re torturing me. Please.

  – You asked me for the whole picture. I forgot to mention that the lights were buzzing, unevenly, like the snores of a sinus victim. I was sucking her narrow finger, careful of the sharp nail, thinking of the wolves who bleed to death from licking the blood-baited knife. When the light was healthy our skin was yellow, the merest pimple exaggerated, and when it failed we fell into a purple pallor, our skin like old wet mushrooms. And when it rang we were so startled that we actually bit each other! Children in a scary cave. Yes, there was someone watching us, not that we cared. He was watching us in the mirror of the fortune-telling scale which he was climbing off and on, dropping in nickel after nickel, dialing various questions, or the same one for all I know. And where the hell were you? The basement of the System is a horrible place if you do not stick with the people you came with. It smells like a desperate clearing in a siege of rats –

  – You lie. Edith’s skin was perfect. And it smells of piss, nothing else, just piss. And never mind what I was doing.

  – I know what you were doing, but never mind. When the telephone rang this fellow wheeled around and stepped off the scale, quite gracefully, I must say, and in that moment the whole eerie place seemed like his personal office. We were standing between him and his telephone, and I feared (it sounds ridiculous) that he would do some violence, pull a knife or expose himself, for his whole weary life among the water pipes and urinals seemed to hang on this telephone message –

  – I remember him! He was wearing one of those Western string neckties.

  – Right. I remember thinking in that instant of terror that he had conjured up the ring himself with his incessant dialing, that he had been performing a ritual, like rain-making. He was looking right through us as he stepped forward. He stopped, waiting, I suppose, for the second ring, which never came. He snapped his fingers, turned, climbed back on the scale, and returned to his combinations. We felt delivered, Edith and I! The telephone, hitherto so foreboding and powerful, was our friend! It was the agent of some benign electronic deity, and we wanted to praise it. I suppose that certain primitive bird and snake dances began the same way, a need to imitate the fearful and the beautiful, yes, an imitative procedure to acquire some of the qualities of the adored awesome beast.

  – What are you trying to tell me, F.?

  – We invented the Telephone Dance. Spontaneously. I don’t know who made the first move. Suddenly our index fingers were in each other’s ears. We became telephones!

  – I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  – Why are you crying?

  – I think you have ruined my life, F. For years I’ve been telling secrets to an enemy.

  – You’re wrong, my friend. I have loved you, we’ve both loved you, and you’re very close to understanding this.

  – No, F., no. Maybe it’s true, but it’s been too hard, too much crazy education, and God knows for what. Every second day I’ve had to learn something, some lesson, some lousy parable, and what am I this morning, a Doctor of Shit.

  – That’s it. That’s love!

  – Please go away.

  – Don’t you want to hear what happened when I was a telephone?

  – I do, but I don’t want to beg. I have to beg you for every scrap of information about the world.

  – But that’s the only way you value it. When it falls on you from out of the trees you think it’s rotten fruit.

  – Tell me about Edith when you were telephones.

  – No.

  – Arrwk! Sob! Ahahah! Sob!

  – Contain yourself. Discipline!

  – You’re killing me, you’re killing me, you’re killing me!

  – Now you’re ready. We dug our index fingers in each other’s ears. I won’t deny the sexual implications. You are ready to face them now. All parts of the body are erotogenic. Assholes can be trained with whips and kisses, that’s elementary. Pricks and cunts have become monstrous! Down with genital imperialism! All flesh can come! Don’t you see what we have lost? Why have we abdicated so much pleasure to that which lives in our underwear? Orgasms in the shoulder! Knees going off like firecrackers! Hair in motion! And not only caresses leading us into the nourishing anonymity of the climax, not only sucking and wet tubes, but wind and conversation and a beautiful pair of gloves, fingers blushing! Lost! Lost!

  – You’re insane. I’ve told my secrets to an insane person.

  – There we were, locked in the Telephone Dance. Edith’s ears began to wrap around my fingers, at least so it seemed. She was very highly developed, perhaps the most highly developed woman I ever knew. Her ears folded around my throbbing fingers –

  – I don’t want the details! I see the two of you a lot clearer than you could ever describe. That’s a picture I’ll never be able to get out of my mind.

  – Jealousy is the education you have chosen.

  – Fuck you. What did you hear?

  – Hear is not the right word. I became a telephone. Edith was the electrical conversation that went through me.

  – Well, what was it, what was it?

  – Machinery.

  – Machinery?

  – Ordinary eternal machinery.

  – And?

  – Ordinary eternal machinery.

  – Is that all you’re going to say?

  – Ordinary eternal machinery like the grinding of the stars.

  – That’s better.

  – That was a distortion of the truth, which, I see, suits you very well. I distorted the truth to make it easy for you. The truth is: ordinary eternal machinery.

  – Was it nice?

  – It was the most beautiful thing I have ever felt.

  – Did she like it?

  – No.

  – Really?

  – Yes, she liked it. How anxious you are to be deceived!

  – F., I could kill you for what you’ve done. Courts would forgive me.

  – You’ve done enough killing for one night.

  – Get off our bed! Our bed! This was our bed!

  I don’t want to think too much about what F. said. Why must I? Who was he after all but a madman who lost control of his bowels, a fucker of one’s wife, a collector of soap, a politician? Ordinary eternal machinery. Do I have to understand that? This morning is another morning, flowe
rs have opened up again, men turn on their sides to see whom they have married, everything is ready to begin anew. Why must I be lashed to the past by the words of a dead man? Why must I reproduce these conversations so painstakingly, letting not one lost comma alter the beat of our voices? I want to talk to men in taverns and buses and remember nothing. And you, Catherine Tekakwitha, burning in your stall of time, does it please you that I strip myself so cruelly? I fear you smell of the Plague. The long house where you crouch day after day smells of the Plague. Why is my research so hard? Why can’t I memorize baseball statistics like the Prime Minister? Why do baseball statistics smell like the Plague? What has happened to the morning? My desk smells! 1660 smells! The Indians are dying! The trails smell! They are pouring roads over the trails, it doesn’t help. Save the Indians! Serve them the hearts of Jesuits! I caught the Plague in my butterfly net. I merely wanted to fuck a saint, as F. advised. I don’t know why it seemed like such a good idea. I barely understand it but it seemed like the only thing left to me. Here I am courting with research, the only juggling I can do, waiting for the statues to move – and what happens? I’ve poisoned the air, I’ve lost my erection. Is it because I’ve stumbled on the truth about Canada? I don’t want to stumble on the truth about Canada. Have the Jews paid for the destruction of Jericho? Will the French learn how to hunt? Are wigwam souvenirs enough? City Fathers, kill me, for I have talked too much about the Plague. I thought the Indians died of bullet wounds and broken treaties. More roads! The forest stinks! Catherine Tekakwitha, is there something sinister in your escape from the Plague? Do I have to love a mutant? Look at me, Catherine Tekakwitha, a man with a stack of contagious papers, limp in the groin. Look at you, Catherine Tekakwitha, your face half eaten, unable to go outside in the sun because of the damage to your eyes. Shouldn’t I be chasing someone earlier than you? Discipline, as F. said. This must not be easy. And if I knew where my research led, where would the danger be? I confess that I don’t know the point of anything. Take one step to the side and it’s all absurd. What is this fucking of a dead saint? It’s impossible. We all know that. I’ll publish a paper on Catherine Tekakwitha, that’s all. I’ll get married again. The National Museum needs me. I’ve been through a lot, I’ll make a marvelous lecturer. I’ll pass off F.’s sayings as my own, become a wit, a mystic wit. He owes me that much. I’ll give away his soap collection to female students, a bar at a time, lemon cunts, pine cunts, I’ll be a master of mixed juices. I’ll run for Parliament, just like F. I’ll get the Eskimo accent. I’ll have the wives of other men. Edith! Her lovely body comes stalking back, the balanced walk, the selfish eyes (or are they?). Oh, she does not stink of the Plague. Please don’t make me think about your parts. Her belly button was a tiny swirl, almost hidden. If all the breeze it took to ruffle a tea rose suddenly became flesh, it would be like her belly button. On different occasions she covered it with oil, semen, thirty-five dollars’ worth of perfume, a burr, rice, urine, the parings of a man’s fingernails, another man’s tears, spit, a thimbleful of rain water. I’ve got to recall the occasions.