The old man, kneeling beside the twitching cat, had produced a paper bag from out of his huge coat. He attempted to stuff the cat into it.
“I’m sick,” said Tamara. She was hiding her face against his chest. “Can’t you do something?”
It hadn’t occurred to Breavman that he could intrude into the action.
“Hey you!”
The old man looked up suddenly.
“Oui! Toi!”
The old man stopped short. He looked down at his cat. His hands vibrated in indecision. He fled down the street coughing and empty-handed.
Tamara gurgled. “I’m going to be sick.” She broke for the sink and vomited.
Breavman helped her to the bed.
“Anchovies,” she said.
“You’re shivering. I’ll close the window.”
“Just lie beside me.”
Her body was limp as though it had succumbed to some defeat. It frightened him.
“Maybe we shouldn’t have frightened him off,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“He was probably starving.”
“He was going to eat it?”
“Well, we protected our fragile tastes.”
She held him tightly. It was not the kind of embrace he wanted. There was nothing of flesh in it, only hurt.
“We didn’t sleep very much. Try to sleep now.”
“Will you sleep too?”
“Yes. We’re both tired.”
The morning world had been removed from them, the jagged sounds of traffic were beyond the closed window, distant as history. They were two people in a room and there was nothing to watch.
With his hand he soothed her hair and closed her eyelids. He remembered the miniature work of the wind unfastening and floating wisps of hair. A week is a long time.
Her lips trembled.
“Lawrence?”
I know what you’re going to say and I know what I’m going to say and I know what you’re going to say….
“Don’t be mad.”
“No.”
“I love you,” she said simply.
I’ll wait here.
“You don’t have to say anything,” she said.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Will you kiss me?”
He kissed her mouth lightly.
“Are you angry with me?”
“What do you mean?” he lied.
“For what I said. I know it hurts you in some way.”
“No, Tamara, it makes me feel close to you.”
“I’m happy I told you.”
She adjusted her position and moved closer to him, not for sensation but for warmth and protection. He held her tightly, not as mistress, but bereaved child. The room was hot. Sweat on his palms.
Now she was asleep. He made sure she was asleep. Carefully he disengaged himself from her hold. If only she weren’t so beautiful in sleep. How could he run from that body?
He dressed like a thief.
A round sun burned above the sooty buildings. All the parked cars had driven away. A few old men, brooms in hand, stood blinking among the garbage cans. One of them tried to balance the cat’s carcass on a broom handle because he didn’t want to touch it.
Run, Westmount, run.
He needed to put distance between himself and the hot room where he couldn’t make things happen. Why did she have to speak? Couldn’t she have left it alone? The smell of her flesh was trapped in his clothes.
Her body was with him and he let a vision of it argue against his flight.
I am running through a snowfall which is her thighs, he dramatized in purple. Her thighs are filling up the street. Wide as a snowfall, heavy as huge falling Zeppelins, her damp thighs are settling on the sharp roofs and wooden balconies. Weather-vanes press the shape of roosters and sail-boats into the skin. The faces of famous statues are preserved like intaglios….
Then he was thinking of a special pair of thighs in a special room. Commitment was oppressive but the thought of flesh-loneliness was worse.
Tamara was awake when he opened the door. He undressed in a hurry and renewed what he had nearly lost.
“Aren’t you glad you came back?”
For three years Tamara was his mistress, until he was twenty.
10
In the third year of college Breavman left his house. He and Krantz took a couple of rooms downtown on Stanley Street.
When Breavman informed his mother that he intended to spend several nights a week downtown she seemed to accept the fact calmly.
“You can use a toaster, can’t you. We have an extra toaster.”
“Thank you, Mother.”
“And cutlery, you’ll need cutlery.”
“Not really, we’re not going to do any serious cooking….”
“You’ll need plenty of cutlery, Lawrence.”
She went from drawer to drawer in the kitchen selecting items and heaping them on the table before him.
“Mother, I don’t need an egg-beater.”
“How do you know?”
She emptied a drawer of silver fish forks on the table. She struggled with the string drawer but she couldn’t get it out. “Mother, this is ridiculous.”
“Take everything.”
He followed her into the living-room. Now she was above him, tottering in a soft chair, trying to keep her balance, while at the same time unhooking some heavy embroidered curtains.
“What are you doing?”
“What do I need in an empty house? Take everything!”
She kicked the fallen curtains towards him and tripped in the folds. Breavman ran to help her. She seemed so heavy.
“Get away, what do I need, take everything!”
“Stop this, Mother, please.”
On the way up the stairs she tore a Persian miniature mounted on velvet from its hook and thrust it at him.
“You have walls down there, don’t you?”
“Please go to bed, Mother.”
She began to empty the linen closet, heaving piles of sheets and blankets at his feet. Standing on tip-toe she tugged at a stack of tablecloths. One unfolded as she pulled and fell about her like a ghost’s costume. She thrashed inside it. He tried to help her but she fought him from under the linen.
He stepped back and watched her struggle, a numbness invading his whole body.
When she had freed herself she carefully spread the tablecloth on the floor and crawled from corner to corner folding it. Her hair was disarrayed and she couldn’t catch her breath.
He followed each of her movements with intense dual concentration. He folded it ten times in his mind before she kneeled in triumph beside the immaculate white rectangle.
11
The house had been built at the beginning of the century. There were still some coloured panes in the window. The city had installed modern fluorescent street-lamps on Stanley, which cast a ghostly yellow light. Shining through the blue and green Victorian glass the result was intense artificial moonlight and the flesh of any woman looked fresh and out-of-doors.
His guitar was always handy. The cedar wood was cool against his stomach. The inside of the guitar smelled like the cigar boxes his father used to have. The tone was excellent in the middle of the night. In those late hours the purity of the music surprised and almost convinced him that he was creating a sacramental relationship with the girl, the outside city, and himself.
Breavman and Tamara were cruel to each other. They used infidelity as a weapon for pain and an incentive for passion. And they kept returning to the bed on Stanley Street and the strange light which seemed to repair the innocence of their bodies. There they would lie for hours, unable to touch or speak. Sometimes he would be able to comfort her and sometimes she him. They used their bodies but that became more and more difficult. They were living off each other, had tubes to each other’s guts. The reasons were too deep and original for him to discover.
He remembers terrible silences and crying he couldn’t come c
lose to. There was nothing he could do, least of all get dressed and leave. He hated himself for hurting her and he hated her for smothering him.
He should have kept running that bright morning.
She made him helpless. They made each other helpless.
Breavman let Tamara see some notes of a long story he was writing. The characters in it were named Tamara and Lawrence and it took place in a room.
“How ardent you are!” Tamara said theatrically. “Tonight you are my ardent lover. Tonight we are sentry and animals, birds and lizards, slime and marble. Tonight we are glorious and degraded, knighted and crushed, beautiful and disgusting. Sweat is perfume. Gasps are bells. I wouldn’t trade this for the ravages of the loveliest swan. This is why I must have come to you in the first place. This is why I must have left the others, the hundreds who tried to stay my ankle with crippled hands as I sped to you.”
“Horseshit,” I said.
She eased herself out of my arms’ clasp and stood on the bed. I thought of the thighs of stone colossi but I didn’t say anything.
She stretched out her arms shoulder high.
“Christ of the Andes,” she proclaimed.
I kneeled below her and nuzzled her delta.
“Heal me, heal me.” I mimicked a prayer.
“Heal me yourself.” She laughed and collapsed over me, her face finally resting on my belly.
When we were quiet I said, “Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity.”
She swung her legs on to the floor, danced over to the table and lit the candle in my tin Mexican candelabra. Holding the light over her head like a religious banner she danced back to the bedside and took my hand.
“Come with me, my beast, my swan,” she canted. “The mirror, eunuchs, the mirror!”
We stood before the mirror.
“Who shall say we are not beautiful?” she challenged.
“Yeah.”
For a minute or two we inspected our bodies. She put the candelabra down. We embraced.
“Life has not passed us by,” she said with imitation nostalgia.
“Ah. Alas. Sorrow. Moon. Love.”
I tried to be funny. I hoped that our sentimental hoaxing would not lead her to reflect in earnest. That was a process I couldn’t take.
I sat on a chair in front of the window and she sat on my lap.
“We are lovers,” she began, as if she were stating geometry axioms before attempting the proposition. “If one of those people down there were to look up, someone with very good eyes, he would see a naked woman held by a naked man. That person would be immediately aroused, wouldn’t he? The way we become aroused when we read a provoking sexual description in a novel.”
I winced at the word sexual. There is no word more inappropriate to lovers.
“And that is the way,” she went on, “most lovers try to look at one another, even after they have been intimate for a long time.”
Intimate. That was another of those words.
“It’s a great mistake,” she said. “The thrill of the forbidden, the thrill of the naughty is quickly expended and lovers are soon bored with one another. Their sexual identities become more and more vague until they are lost altogether.”
“What’s the alternative?” She was beginning to get me.
“It’s to make that which is permitted, thrilling. The lover must totally familiarize himself with his beloved. He must know her every movement: the motion of her buttocks when she walks, the direction of every tiny earthquake when she heaves her chest, the way her thighs spread like lava when she sits down. He must know the sudden coil her stomach makes just before the brink of climax, each orchard of hair, blonde and black, the path of pores on the nose, the chart of vessels in her eyes. He must know her so completely that she becomes, in effect, his own creation. He has moulded the shape of her limbs, distilled her smell. This is the only successful kind of sexual love: the love of the creator for his creation. In other words, the love of the creator for himself. This love can never change.”
Her voice became more and more charged as she spoke. She delivered the last words in a kind of frenzy. I had ceased to caress her. Her clinical terms nearly sickened me.
“What is the matter?” she said. “Why have you stopped holding me?”
“Why must you always do this? I’ve just made love to you. Isn’t that enough? Do you have to begin an operation, an autopsy? Sexual, intimate, distil – Jesus Christ! I don’t want to memorize everything. I want to be surprised every once in a while. Where are you going?”
She stood before me. The candlelight sketched her mouth hardened with anger.
“Surprised! You’re a fool. Like a dozen other men I’ve had. Who wanted to make love in the dark, in silence, eyes bound, ears stuffed. Men who tired of me and I of them. And you fly off because I want something different for us. You don’t know the difference between creation and masturbation. And there is a difference. You didn’t understand a thing I said.”
“Double-talk,” I shouted, “double-talk, touble-dock.”
I spluttered and covered my face. How had I come to be in this room?
“We don’t know what we’re saying,” she said, the anger gone.
“Why couldn’t you just lie in my arms?”
“Oh, you’re hopeless!” she snapped. “Where are my things?”
I watched her dress, my mind a blank, numb. She dressed, covering her flesh one area after the other, and the numbness grew and got my throat like a wind of ether. It seemed to dissolve my skin and blur me with the air of the room.
She walked to the door. I waited for the noise of the latch. She paused, her hand on the knob.
“Stay. Please.”
She ran to me and we hugged. The texture of her clothes felt funny against my skin. She wet my neck and cheek with tears.
“We haven’t the time to hurt each other,” she whispered.
“Don’t cry.”
“We can’t tire of one another.”
During her grief I got hold of myself again. I’ve noted many times during my life that only when faced with extremes of emotion in others can I confirm my own stability. Her grief restored me, made me manly and compassionate.
I led her to the bed.
“You are beautiful,” I said. “You always will be.”
Soon she fell asleep in my arms. Her body was heavier than it had been. She seemed laden and swollen with sorrow. I dreamed of a huge cloak thrown on my shoulders from a weeping man in a flying cart.
In the morning she had left, as usual, before I awakened. Tamara read it carefully.
“But I don’t talk that way,” she said softly.
“Neither do I,” said Breavman.
The act of writing had been completed when he handed her the manuscript. He no longer felt ownership.
“But you do, Larry. You talk like both characters.”
“All right, I talk like both characters.”
“Please don’t get angry. I’m trying to understand why you wrote it.”
They were lying in the eternal room on Stanley Street. The fluorescent lights across the street provided moonlight.
“I don’t care why I wrote it. I just wrote it, that’s all.”
“And gave it to me.”
“Yes.”
“Why? You knew it would hurt me.”
“You’re supposed to be interested in my work.”
“Oh, Larry, you know that I am.”
“Well, that’s why I gave it to you.”
“We don’t seem to be able to talk.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Nothing.”
The silence began. The bed became like a prison surrounded by electric wires. He couldn’t get off it or even move. He was gnawed by the notion that this was where he belonged, right on this bed, bandaged with silence. It was what he deserved, all he was fit for.
He told himself that he should just open his mouth and speak. Simple. Just say words. Break up the silenc
e with any remark. Talk about the story. If only he could assault the silence. Then they could make warm and friendly love and talk like strangers right up to morning.
“Was it to tell me that you want to end it between us?”
She’s made a brave attempt. Now I must try to answer her. I’ll tell her I wanted to challenge her love with a display of venom. She’ll say, Oh that’s what I wanted to hear, and she’ll hug me to prove that the venom failed.
All I have to do is force open my teeth, operate the hinges of my jaw, vibrate vocal chords. One word will do it. One word will wedge into the silence and split it open.
“Just try to say something, Larry. I know it’s hard.”
Any noise, Breavman, any noise, any noise, any noise.
Using his brain like a derrick, he lifted his twenty-ton hand and lowered it on her breast. He sent his fingers through buttonholes. Her skin made the tips of his fingers warm. He loved her for being warm.
“Oh, come here,” she said.
They undressed as if they were being chased. He tried to make up for his silence with his tongue and teeth. She had to put his face gently away from her nipple. He praised her loins with a conversation of moans.
“Please say something this time.”
He knew if he touched her face he would feel tears. He lay still. He didn’t think he ever wanted to move again. He was ready to stay that way for days, catatonic.
She moved to touch him and her motion released him like a spring. This time she didn’t stop him. She resigned herself to his numbness. He said everything he could with his body.
They lay quietly.
“Do you feel O.K.?” he said, and suddenly he was talking his head off.
He rehearsed all his plans for obscure glory and they laughed. He told her poems and they decided he was going to be great. She pitied him for his courage as he described the demons on his shoulders.
“Get away, you dirty old things.” She kissed his neck.
“Some on my stomach, too.”
After a while Tamara fell asleep. That was what he had been talking against. Her sleeping seemed like a desertion. It always happened when he felt most awake. He was ready to make immortal declarations.
Her hand rested on his arm like snow on a leaf, ready to slip off when he moved.
He lay beside her, an insomniac with visions of vastness. He thought of desert stretches so huge no Chosen People could cross them. He counted grains of sand like sheep and he knew his job would last forever. He thought of aeroplane views of wheatlands so high he couldn’t see which way the wind was bending the stalks. Arctic territories and sled-track distances.