The Favourite Game & Beautiful Losers
Miles he would never cover because he could never abandon this bed.
12
Still Breavman and Krantz often used to drive through the whole night. They’d listen to pop tunes on the local stations or classics from the United States. They’d head north to the Laurentians or east to the Townships.
Breavman imagined the car they were in as seen from above. A small black pellet hurtling across the face of the earth. Free as a meteor and maybe as doomed.
They fled past fields of blue snow. The icy crust kept a stroke of moonlight the way rippled water does. The heater was going full blast. They had nowhere to be in the morning, only lectures and that didn’t count. Everything above the snow was black – trees, shacks, whole villages.
Moving at that speed they were not bound to anything. They could sample all the possibilities. They flashed by trees that took a hundred years to grow. They tore through towns where men lived their whole lives. They knew the land was old, the mountains the most ancient on earth. They covered it all at eighty miles an hour.
There was something disdainful in their speed, disdainful of the eons it took the mountains to smooth out, of the generations of muscle which had cleared the fields, of the labour which had gone into the modern road they rolled on. They were aware of the disdain. The barbarians must have ridden Roman highways with the same feeling. We have the power now. Who cares what went before?
And there was something frightened in their speed. Back in the city their families were growing like vines. Mistresses were teaching a sadness no longer lyrical but claustrophobic. The adult community was insisting that they choose an ugly particular from the range of beautiful generalities. They were flying from their majority, from the real bar mitzvah, the real initiation, the real and vicious circumcision which society was hovering to inflict through limits and dull routine.
They spoke gently to the French girls in the diners where they stopped. They were so pathetic, false-toothed and frail. They’d forget them in the next twenty miles. What were they doing behind the Arborite counters? Dreaming of Montreal neon?
The highway was empty. They were the only two in flight and that knowledge made them deeper friends than ever. It elated Breavman. He’d say, “Krantz, all they’ll ever find of us is a streak of oil on the garage floor without even rainbows in it.” Lately Krantz had been very silent, but Breavman was certain he was thinking the same things. Everyone they knew or who loved them was sleeping miles behind the exhaust. If the radio music was rock-and-roll, they understood the longing of it; if it was Handel, they understood the majesty.
At some point in these rides Breavman would proposition himself like this: Breavman, you’re eligible for many diverse experiences in this best of all possible worlds. There are many beautiful poems which you will write and be praised for, many desolate days when you won’t be able to lay pen to paper. There will be many lovely cunts to lie in, different colours of skin to kiss, various orgasms to encounter, and many nights you will walk out your lust, bitter and alone. There will be many heights of emotion, intense sunsets, exalting insights, creative pain, and many murderous plateaux of indifference where you won’t even own your personal despair. There will be many good hands of power you can play with ruthlessness or benevolence, many vast skies to lie under and congratulate yourself on humility, many galley rides of suffocating slavery. This is what waits for you. Now, Breavman, here is the proposition. Let us suppose that you could spend the rest of your life exactly as you are at this very minute, in this car hurtling towards brush country, at this precise stop on the road beside a row of white guide posts, always going past these posts at eighty, this juke-box song of rejection pumping, this particular sky of clouds and stars, your mind including this immediate cross-section of memory – which would you choose? Fifty-more years of this car ride, or fifty more of achievement and failure?
And Breavman never hesitated in his choice.
Let it go on as it is right now. Let the speed never diminish. Let the snow remain. Let me never be removed from this partnership with my friend. Let us never find different things to do. Let us never evaluate one another. Let the moon stay on one side of the road. Let the girls be a gold blur in my mind, like the haze of the moon, or the neon glow above the city. Let the compounded electric guitar keep throbbing under the declaration:
When I lost my baby
I almost lost my mind.
Let the edges of the hills be just about to brighten. Let the trees never fuzz with leaves. Let the black towns sleep in one long night like Lesbia’s lover. Let the monks in the half-built monasteries remain on their knees in the 4 a.m. Latin prayer. Let Pat Boone stand on the highest rung of the Hit Parade and tell all the factory night shifts:
I went to see the gypsy
To have my fortune read.
Let snow always dignify the auto graveyards on the road to Ayer’s Cliff. Let the nailed shacks of apple vendors never show polished apples and hints of cider.
But let me remember what I remember of orchards. Let me keep my tenth of a second’s worth of fantasy and recollection, showing all the layers like a geologist’s sample. Let the Caddie or the VW run like a charm, let it go like a bomb, let it blast. Let the tune make the commercial wait forever.
I can tell you, people,
The news was not so good.
The news is great. The news is sad but it’s in a song so it’s not so bad. Pat is doing all my poems for me. He’s got lines to a million people. It’s all I wanted to say. He’s distilled the sorrow, glorified it in an echo chamber. I don’t need my typewriter. It’s not the piece of luggage I suddenly remembered I forgot. No pencils, ball-pens, pad. I don’t even want to draw in the mist on the windshield. I can make up sagas in my head all the way to Baffin Island but I don’t have to write them down. Pat, you’ve snitched my job, but you’re such a good guy, old-time American success, naïve big winner, that it’s okay. The pr men have convinced me that you are a humble kid. I can’t resent you. My only criticism is: be more desperate, try and sound more agonized or we’ll have to get a Negro to replace you:
She said my baby’s left me
And she’s gone for good.
Don’t let the guitars slow down like locomotive wheels. Don’t let the man at CKVL tell me what I’ve just been listening to. Sweet sounds, reject me not. Let the words go on like the landscape we’re never driving out of.
gone for good
O.K., let the last syllable endure. This is the tenth of a second I’ve traded all the presidencies for. The telephone poles are playing intricate games of Cat’s Cradle with the rushing wires. The snow is piled like the Red Sea on either side of our fenders. We’re not expected and we’re not missed. We put all our money in the gas tank, we’re fat as camels in the Sahara. The hurtling car, the trees, the moon and its light on the fields of snow, the resigned grinding chords of the tune – everything is poised in perfection for the quick freeze, the eternal case in the astral museum.
good
So long, mister, mistress, rabbi, doctor. ’Bye. Don’t forget your salesman’s bag of adventure samples. My friend and I, we’ll stay right here – on our side of the speed limit. Won’t we, Krantz, won’t we, Krantz, won’t we, Krantz?
“Want to stop for a hamburger?” says Krantz as though he were musing on an abstract theory.
“Now or one of these days?”
13
Breavman and Tamara were white. Everybody else on the beach had a long summer tan. Krantz was positively bronze.
“I feel extra naked,” said Tamara, “as if I had taken off a layer of skin with my clothes. I wish they’d take off theirs.”
They relaxed on the hot sand while Krantz supervised the General Swim. He sat on a white-painted wooden tower, megaphone in one hand, whistle in the other.
The water was silver with thrashing bodies. His whistle pierced the cries and laughter and suddenly the waterfront was silent. At his command the campers paired off, lifting their joined hands out
of the water at their turns.
Then, in succession, the counsellors posted along the docks snapped, “Check!” A hundred and fifty children kept still. The safety check over, Krantz blew his whistle again and the general din was resumed.
Krantz in the role of disciplinarian surprised Breavman. He knew Krantz had worked many summers at a children’s camp, but he always thought of him (now that he examined it) as one of the children, or let’s say, the best child, devising grand nocturnal tricks, first figure of a follow-the-leader game through the woods.
But here he was, master of the beach, bronze and squint-eyed, absolute. Children and water obeyed him. Stopping and starting the noise and laughter and splashing with the whistle blast, Krantz seemed to be cutting into the natural progression of time like a movie frozen into a single image and then released to run again. Breavman had never suspected him of that command.
Breavman and Tamara were city-white, and it separated them from the brown bodies as if they were second-rate harmless lepers.
Breavman was surprised to discover on Tamara’s thigh a squall of tiny gold hairs. Her black hair was loose and the intense sun picked out metallic highlights.
It wasn’t just that they were white – they were white together, and their whiteness seemed to advertise some daily unclean indoor ritual which they shared.
“When the Negroes take over,” Breavman said, “this is the way we’re going to feel all the time.”
“But isn’t Krantz marvellous?”
They both stared at him, as if for the first time.
Perhaps it was this curious fracturing of time of Krantz’s whistle that removed Breavman into the slow-motion movie which was always running somewhere in his mind.
He is watching himself from a long way off. The whistle has silenced the water-play. Even the swallows seem motionless, poised, pinned at the top of ladders of air.
This part of the film is overexposed. It hurts his eyes to remember but he loves to stare.
Overexposed and double-exposed. The Laurentian summer sun is behind every image, turning one to silhouette, another to shining jelly transparency.
The diver is Krantz. Here he is folded in a jackknife in the air above the water, half silver, half black. The splash rises slowly around the disappearing feet like feathers out of a black crater.
A cheer goes up from the children as he climbs up on the dock. All his movements have an intensity, the smallest gesture a quality of power, close-up size. The children surround him and try to touch his wet shoulders.
“But isn’t Krantz marvellous?”
Now Krantz is running toward his friends, sand sticking to his soles. He is smiling a welcome.
Now Tamara is not touching Breavman, she had been lying close to him, but now nothing of her is touching.
She stands automatically and Krantz’s eyes and her eyes, they invade the screen and change from welcome to surprise to question to desire – here the picture is stopped dead and pockmarked by suns – and now they annihilate all the bodies on the sand, for an enduring fraction they are rushing only to each other.
The swallows fall naturally and the ordinary chaos returns as Krantz laughs.
“It’s about time you people paid me a visit.”
The three of them hugged and talked wildly.
14
Tamara and Breavman graduated from college. There was no longer any framework around their battered union, so down it came. They were lucky the parting was not bitter. They were both fed up with pain. Each had slept with about a dozen people and they had used every name as a weapon. It was a torture-list of friends and enemies.
They parted over a table in a coffee-shop. You could get wine in teacups if you knew the proprietress and asked in French.
All along he had known that he never knew her and never would. Adoration of thighs is not enough. He never cared who Tamara was, only what she represented. He confessed this to her and they talked for three hours.
“I’m sorry, Tamara. I want to touch people like a magician, to change them or hurt them, leave my brand, make them beautiful. I want to be the hypnotist who takes no chances of falling asleep himself. I want to kiss with one eye open. Or I did. I don’t want to any more.”
She loved the way he talked.
They returned to the room on Stanley, unofficially, from time to time. A twenty-year-old can be very tender to an ancient mistress.
“I know I never saw you. I blur everyone in my personal vision. I never get their own music….”
After a while her psychiatrist thought it would be better if she didn’t see him again.
15
Breavman won a scholarship to do graduate work in English at Columbia but he decided not to take it.
“Oh no, Krantz, nothing smells more like a slaughterhouse than a graduate seminar. People sitting around tables in small classrooms, their hands bloody with commas. They get older and the ages of the poets remain the same, twenty-three, twenty-five, nineteen.”
“That gives you four years at the outside, Breavman.”
His book of Montreal sketches appeared and was well received. He started seeing it on the bookshelves of his friends and relatives and he resented their having it. It was none of their business how Tamara’s breasts looked in the artificial moonlight of Stanley Street.
Canadians are desperate for a Keats. Literary meetings are the manner in which Anglophiles express passion. He read his sketches for small societies, large college groups, enlightened church meetings. He slept with as many pretty chairwomen as he could. He gave up conversation. He merely quoted himself. He could maintain an oppressive silence at a dinner-table to make the lovely daughter of the house believe he was brooding over her soul.
The only person he could joke with was Krantz.
The world was being hoaxed by a disciplined melancholy. All the sketches made a virtue of longing. All that was necessary to be loved widely was to publish one’s anxieties. The whole enterprise of art was a calculated display of suffering.
He walked with pale blonde girls along Westmount Boulevard. He told them he saw the stone houses as ruins. He hinted that they could fulfil themselves through him. He could lean against a fireplace with all the ambiguous tragedy of a blind Samson against the temple pillars.
Among certain commercial Jews he was considered a mild traitor who could not be condemned outright. They were dismayed by the possibility that he might make a financial success out of what he was doing. This their ulcers resented. His name was in the newspapers. He might not be an ideal member of the community but neither was Disraeli or Mendelssohn, whose apostasies the Jewish regard for attainment has always overlooked. Also, writing is an essential part of the Jewish tradition and even the degraded contemporary situation cannot suppress it. A respect for books and artistry will persist for another generation or two. It can’t go on forever without being reconsecrated.
Among certain Gentiles he was suspect for other reasons. His Semitic barbarity hidden under the cloak of Art, he was intruding on their cocktail rituals. They were pledged to Culture (like all good Canadians) but he was threatening the blood purity of their daughters. They made him feel as vital as a Negro. He engaged stockbrokers in long conversations about over-breeding and the loss of creative vitality. He punctuated his speech with Yiddish expressions which he never thought of using anywhere else. In their living-rooms, for no reason at all, he often broke into little Hasidic dances around the tea table.
He incorporated Sherbrooke Street into his general domain. He believed he understood its elegant sadness better than anyone else in the city. Whenever he went into one of the stores he always remembered that he was standing in what was once the drawing-room of a smart town house. He breathed a historical sigh for the mansions become brewery and insurance head offices. He sat on the steps of the museum and watched the chic women float into dress shops or walk their rich dogs in front of the Ritz. He watched people line up for buses, board, and zoom away. He always found that a myster
y. He walked into lavatory-like new banks and wondered what everyone was doing there. He stared at pediments of carved grapevines. Gargoyles on the brown stone church. Intricate wooden balconies just east of Park. The rose window of another church spiked to prevent pigeons from roosting. All the old iron, glass, rock.
He had no plans for the future.
Early one morning he and Krantz (they hadn’t gone to bed the night before) sat on a low stone wall at the corner of Mackay and Sherbrooke and admonished the eight-thirty working-day crowds.
“The jig is up,” Breavman shouted. “It’s all over. Go back to your homes. Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars. Go straight to your homes. Return to bed. Can’t you see it’s all done with?”
“Consummatum est,” Krantz said.
Later Breavman said, “You don’t really believe it, do you, Krantz?”
“Not as thoroughly as you.”
No plans for the future.
He could lay his hand on a low-cut gown and nobody minded. He was a kind of mild Dylan Thomas, talent and behaviour modified for Canadian tastes.
He felt as though he had masturbated on television. He was bereft of privacy, restraint, discretion.
“Do you know what I am, Krantz?”
“Yes, and don’t recite the catalogue.”
“A stud for unhappy women. A twilight peeper of Victorian ruins. A middle-class connoisseur of doomed union songs. A race-haunted exhibitionist forever waving my circumcision. A lap-dog who laps.”
Therefore, according to the traditions of his class, he did penance through manual labour.