The Favourite Game & Beautiful Losers

  It ran a chill through his spine to be involved in the mysterious mechanism of city and black hills.

  Father, I’m ignorant.

  He would master the rules and techniques of the city, why the one-way streets were chosen, how the stock-market worked, what notaries did.

  It wasn’t a hellish Bunny Hop if you knew the true names of things. He would study leaves and bark, and visit stone quarries as his father had done.

  Good-bye, world of Kleenex.

  He gathered his shoes, walked into the bushes, climbed the fence which separated his house from the park.

  Black lines, like an ink drawing of a storm, plunged out of the sky to help him over, he could have sworn. The house he entered was important as a museum.

  24

  Krantz had a reputation for being wild, having been spotted from time to time smoking two cigarettes at once on obscure Westmount streets.

  He was small and wiry, his face triangular, with almost Oriental eyes. A portrait in the dining-room of his house, painted, as his mother is fond of informing people, by the artist who “did the Governor General’s,” shows an elfish boy with pointed ears, black, curly hair, butterfly lips as in a Rossetti, and an expression of good-natured superiority, an aloofness (even at that age) which is so calm that it disturbs no one.

  They sat one night on someone’s lawn, two Talmudists, delighting in their dialectic, which was a disguise for love. It was furious talk, the talk of a boy discovering how good it was not to be alone.

  “Krantz, I know you hate this kind of question, but if you’d care to make an off-hand statement, it would be appreciated. To your knowledge, that is, the extent of your information, is there anyone on this planet who approaches the dullness of the Canadian Prime Minister?”

  “Rabbi Swort?”

  “Krantz, do you honestly submit that Rabbi Swort, who, as the world knows, is not exactly the Messiah or even a minor messenger of the Redemption, do you seriously suggest that Rabbi Swort challenges the utter and complete boringness of our national leader?”

  “I do, Breavman, I do.”

  “I suppose you have your reasons, Krantz.”

  “I do, Breavman, you know I do.”

  There were once giants on the earth.

  They swore not to be fooled by long cars, screen love, the Red Menace, or The New Yorker magazine.

  Giants in unmarked graves.

  All right, it’s fine that people don’t starve, that epidemics are controlled, that the classics are available as comics, but what about the corny old verities, truth and fun?

  The fashion model was not their idea of grace, the Bomb not their idea of power, Sabbath Service not their idea of God.

  “Krantz, is it true that we are Jewish?”

  “So it has been rumoured, Breavman.”

  “Do you feel Jewish, Krantz?”

  “Thoroughly.”

  “Do your teeth feel Jewish?”

  “Especially my teeth, to say nothing of my left ball.”

  “We really shouldn’t joke, what we were just saying reminds me of pictures from the camps.”

  “True.”

  Weren’t they supposed to be a holy people consecrated to purity, service, spiritual honesty? Weren’t they a nation set apart?

  Why had the idea of a jealously guarded sanctity degenerated into a sly contempt for the goy, empty of self-criticism?

  Parents were traitors.

  They had sold their sense of destiny for an Israeli victory in the desert. Charity had become a social competition in which nobody gave away anything he really needed, like a penny-toss, the prizes being the recognition of wealth and a high place in the Donor’s Book.

  Smug traitors who believed spiritual fulfilment had been achieved because Einstein and Heifetz are Jews.

  If only they could find the right girls. Then they could fight their way out of the swamp. Not Kleenex girls.

  Breavman wonders how many miles through Montreal streets he and Krantz have driven and walked, on the look-out for the two girls who had been chosen cosmically to be their companion-mistresses. Hot summer evenings casing the mobs in Lafontaine Park, looking searchingly into young female eyes, they knew that at any moment two beauties would detach themselves from the crowd and take their arms. Krantz at the wheel of his father’s Buick, steering between hedges of snow piled on either side of the narrow back streets in the east end, at a crawling speed because there was a blizzard going on, they knew that two shivering figures would emerge from a doorway, tap timidly on the frosted windows of the car, and it would be they.

  If they had the right seats on the loop-the-loop the girls’ hair would blow against their faces. If they went up north for a ski weekend and stayed at the right hotel they would hear the beautiful sound of girls undressing in the room next door. And if they walked twelve miles along St. Catherine Street, there was no telling whom they’d meet.

  “I can get the Lincoln tonight, Breavman.”

  “Great. It’ll be packed downtown.”

  “Great. We’ll drive around.”

  So they would drive, like American tourists on the make, almost lost in the front seat of one of the huge Krantzstone automobiles, until everyone had gone home and the streets were empty. Still they continued their prowl because the girls they wanted might prefer deserted streets. Then when it was clear that they weren’t coming that particular night they’d head out to the lake shore, and circle the black water of Lac St. Louis.

  “What do you think it’s like to drown, Krantz?”

  “You’re supposed to black out after you take in a fairly small amount of water.”

  “How much, Krantz?”

  “You’re supposed to be able to drown in a bathtub.”

  “In a glass of water, Krantz.”

  “In a damp rag, Breavman.”

  “In a moist Kleenex. Hey, Krantz, that would be a great way to kill a guy, with water. You get the guy and use an eyedropper on him, a squirt at a time. They find him drowned in his study. Big mystery.”

  “Wouldn’t work, Breavman. How would you hold him still? There’d be bruise marks or rope marks on him.”

  “But if it could work. They find the guy slumped over his desk and nobody knows how he died. Coroner’s inquest: death by drowning. And he hasn’t been to the sea-shore in ten years.”

  “Germans used a lot of water in their tortures. They’d shove a hose up a guy’s arse-hole to make him talk.”

  “Great, Krantz. Japs had something like that. They’d make a guy eat a lot of uncooked rice then he’d have to drink a gallon of water. The rice would swell and —”

  “Yeah, I heard that one.”

  “But, Krantz, want to hear the worst one? And it was the Americans who did it. Listen, they catch a Jap on the battlefield and make him swallow five or six rifle cartridges. Then they’d make him run and jump. The cartridges’d rip his stomach apart. He’d die of internal haemorrhage. American soldiers.”

  “How about tossing babies in the air for bayonet practice?”

  “Who did that?”

  “Both sides.”

  “That’s nothing, Krantz, they did that in the Bible. ‘Happy will they be who dash their little ones against the rock.’”

  Ten thousand conversations. Breavman remembers about eight thousand of them. Peculiarities, horrors, wonders. They are still having them. As they grow older, the horrors become mental, the peculiarities sexual, the wonders religious.

  And while they talked the car shot over the broken country roads and the All Night Record Man spun the disks of longing, and one by one the couples drove away from the Edgewater, the Maple Leaf, the El Paso. The dangerous currents of Lac St. Louis curled over the weekend’s toll of drowned amateur sailors from the yacht clubs, the Montreal pioneer commuters breathed the cool fresh air they had bought into, and the prospect of waiting parents loomed and made the minutes of talk sweeter. Paradoxes, bafflements, problems dissolved in the fascinating dialectic.

  Whoosh,
there was nothing that couldn’t be done.

  25

  Suspended from the centre of the ceiling a revolving mirrored sphere cast a rage of pockmarks from wall to wall of the huge Palais D’Or on lower Stanley Street.

  Each wall looked like an enormous decayed Swiss cheese on the march.

  On the raised platform a band of shiny-haired musicians sat behind heavy red and white music stands and blew the standard arrangements.

  There’s but one place for me

  Near you.

  It’s like heaven to be

  Near you

  echoed coldly over the sparse dancers. Breavman and Krantz had got there too early. There was not much hope for magic.

  “Wrong dance hall, Breavman.”

  By ten o’clock the floor was jammed with sharply dressed couples, and, seen from the upstairs balcony, their swaying and jolting seemed to be nourished directly by the pulsing music, and they muffled it like shock absorbers. The bass and piano and steady brush-drum passed almost silently into their bodies where it was preserved as motion.

  Only the tilt-backed trumpeter, arching away from the mike and pointing his horn at the revolving mirrored sphere, could put a lingering sharp cry in the smoky air, coiling like a rope of rescue above the bobbing figures. It disappeared as the chorus renewed itself.

  “Right dance hall, Krantz.”

  They scorned many public demonstrations in those prowling days but they didn’t scorn the Palais D’Or. It was too big. There was nothing superficial about a thousand people deeply engaged in the courting ritual, the swinging fragments of reflected light sweeping across their immobile eye-closed faces, amber, green, violet. They couldn’t help being impressed, fascinated by the channelled violence and the voluntary organization.

  Why are they dancing to the music, Breavman wondered from the balcony, submitting to its dictation?

  At the beginning of a tune they arranged themselves on the floor, obeyed the tempo, fast or slow. and when the tune was done they disintegrated into disorder again, like a battalion scattered by a land mine.

  “What makes them listen, Krantz? Why don’t they rip the platform to pieces?”

  “Let’s go down and get some women.”

  “Soon.”

  “What are you staring at?”

  “I’m planning a catastrophe.”

  They watched the dancers silently and they heard their parents talking.

  The dancers were Catholics, French-Canadian, anti-Semitic, anti-Anglais, belligerent. They told the priest everything, they were scared by the Church, they knelt in wax-smelling musty shrines hung with abandoned dirty crutches and braces. Everyone of them worked for a Jewish manufacturer whom he hated and waited for revenge. They had bad teeth because they lived on Pepsi-Cola and Mae West chocolate cakes. The girls were either maids or factory help. Their dresses were too bright and you could see bra straps through the flimsy material. Frizzy hair and cheap perfume. They screwed like jack rabbits and at confession the priest forgave them. They were the mob. Give them a chance and they’d burn down the synagogue. Pepsies. Frogs. Fransoyzen.

  Breavman and Krantz knew their parents were bigots so they attempted to reverse all their opinions. They did not quite succeed. They wanted to participate in the vitality but they felt there was something vaguely unclean in their fun, the pawing of girls, the guffaws, the goosing.

  The girls might be beautiful but they all had false teeth.

  “Krantz, I believe we’re the only two Jews in the place.”

  “No, I saw some BTOS on the make a couple of minutes ago.”

  “Well, we’re the only Westmount Jews around.”

  “Bernie’s here.”

  “O.K. Krantz. I’m the only Jew from Wellgreen Avenue. Do something with that.”

  “O.K. Breavman, you’re the only Jew from Wellgreen Avenue at the Palais D’Or.”

  “Distinctions are important.”

  “Let’s get some women.”

  At one of the doors in the main hall there was a knot of young people. They argued jovially in French, pushing one another, slapping back-sides, squirting Coke bottles.

  The hunters approached the group and instantly modified its hilarity. The French boys stepped back slightly and Krantz and Breavman invited the girls they’d chosen. They spoke in French, fooling no one. The girls exchanged glances with each other and members of the party. One of the French boys magnanimously put his arm around the shoulder of the girl Breavman had asked and swept her to him, clapping Breavman on the back at the same time.

  They danced stiffly. Her mouth was full of fillings. He knew he’d be able to smell her all night.

  “Do you come here often, Yvette?”

  “You know, once in a while, for fun.”

  “Me too. Moi aussi.”

  He told her he was in high school, that he didn’t work.

  “You are Italian?”

  “No.”

  “English?”

  “I’m Jewish.”

  He didn’t tell her he was the only one from Wellgreen Avenue.

  “My brothers work for Jew people.”

  “Oh?”

  “They are good to work for.”

  The dance was unsatisfying. She was not attractive, but her racial mystery challenged investigation. He returned her to her friends. Krantz had finished his dance, too.

  “What was she like, Krantz?”

  “Don’t know. She couldn’t speak English.”

  They hung around for a little while longer, drinking Orange Crush, leaning on the balcony rail to comment on the swaying mob below. The air was dense with smoke now. The band played either frantic jitterbug or slow fox trot, nothing between. After each dance the crowd hovered impatiently for the next one to begin.

  It was late now. The wallflowers and the stag-line expected no miracles any more. They were lined along three walls watching the packed charged dancers with indifferent fixed stares. Some of the girls were collecting their coats and going home.

  “Their new blouses were useless, Krantz.”

  Seen from above, the movement on the floor had taken on a frantic quality. Soon the trumpeter would aim his horn into the smoke and give the last of Hoagy Carmichael and it would be all over. Every throb of the band had to be hoarded now against the end of the evening and the silence. Soak it through pressed cheeks and closed eyes in the dreamy tunes. In the boogie-woogie gather the nourishment like manna and knead it between the bodies drawing away and towards each other.

  “Let’s get one more dance in, Breavman?”

  “Same girls?”

  “Might as well.”

  Breavman leaned over the rail one more second and wished he were delivering a hysterical speech to the thick mob below.

  … and you must listen, friends, strangers, I am binding the generations one to another, o, little people of numberless streets, bark, bark, hoot, blood, your long stairways are curling around my heart like a vine …

  They went downstairs and found the girls with the same group. It was a mistake, they knew instantly. Yvette stepped forward as if to tell Breavman something but one of the boys pulled her back.

  “You like the girls, eh?” he said, the swaggerer of the party. His smile was triumphant rather than friendly.

  “Sure we like them. Anything wrong with that?”

  “Where you live, you?”

  Breavman and Krantz knew what they wanted to hear. Westmount is a collection of large stone houses and lush trees arranged on the top of the mountain especially to humiliate the underprivileged.

  “Westmount,” they said with one voice.

  “You have not the girls at Westmount, you?”

  They had no chance to answer him. In the very last second before they fell backwards over the kneeling accomplices stationed behind them they detected a signalling of eyes. The ring-leader and a buddy stepped forward and shoved them. Breavman lost his balance and as he fell the stoolie behind him raised himself up to turn the fall into a flip. Bre
avman landed hard in a belly-flop, a couple of girls that he had crashed into squealing above him. He looked up to see Krantz on his feet, his left fist in someone’s face and his right cocked back ready to fly. He was about to get up when a fat boy decided he shouldn’t and dived at him.

  “Reste là, maudit juif!”

  Breavman struggled under the blankets of flesh, not trying to defeat the fat boy but merely to get out from under him so he could do battle from a more honourable upright position. He managed to squeeze away. Where was Krantz?

  There must have been twenty people fighting. Here and there he could see girls on their tiptoes as though in fear of mice, while boys wrestled on the floor between them.

  He wheeled around, expecting an attack. The fat boy was smothering someone else. He threw his fist at a stranger. He was a drop in the wave of history, anonymous, exhilarated, free.

  “O, little friends, hoot, blooey, dark fighters, shazam, bloop!” he shouted in his happiness.

  Racing down the stairs were three bouncers of the management’s and what they feared most began to happen. The fighting spread to the dance floor. The band was blowing a loud dreamy tune but a disorganized noise could already be heard in opposition to the music.

  Breavman waved his fist at everyone, hitting very few. The bouncers were in his immediate area, breaking up individual fights. At the far side of the hall the couples still danced closely and peacefully, but on Breavman’s side their rhythm was disintegrating into flailing arms, blind punches, lunges, and female squeals.

  The bouncers pursued the disruption like compulsive housekeepers after an enormous spreading stain, jerking fighters apart by their collars and sweeping them aside as they followed the struggle deeper into the dance floor.

  A man rushed onto the bandstand and shouted something to the bandleader, who looked around and shrugged his shoulders. The bright lights went on and the curious coloured walls disappeared. The music stopped.

  Everyone woke up. A noise like a wail of national mourning rose up and at the same time fighting swept over the hall like released entropic molecules. To see the mass of dancers change to mass of fighters was like watching a huge highly organized animal succumb to muscular convulsions.