The Favorite Game (24 page)

Breavman watched his deputy make her happy while he stared and stared. One night he watched her while she slept. He wanted to know what happened to her. Some faces die of sleep. Mouths go limp. Gone eyes leave a corpse behind. But she was whole and lovely, her hand close to her mouth and clutching a corner of sheet. He heard a cry in the street. He crept to the window but he could see nothing. The cry sounded like the death of something.

I don’t care who’s being killed, he thought. I don’t care what crusades are being planned in historical cafés. I don’t care about lives massacred in slums. He searched the extent of his human concern beyond the room. It was this: cool condolence for the women less beautiful than she, for the men less lucky than he.

Because he was attached to magic the poems continued. He didn’t realize that Shell was won not by the text but by the totality of his attention.

“Can I come in?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I’m getting dressed.”

“Precisely.”

“Don’t come in, please. You’re going to get horribly tired of me. All the books say I’m supposed to guard my mystery.”

“I want to watch you get mysteriously dressed.”

It was not strange that she interpreted this devotion to her presence as love.

S
hell decided to go through with the divorce. Gordon acquiesced. He had intended to put up a battle but when she visited him at his office he was intimidated by her. She was so quiet and friendly, inquiring about his work, happy for his success. She referred to the marriage tenderly, but was firm about its ending, as though it were an after-supper game in the twilight but now the children had to come home to bed. He did not have to guess at the source of her strength. Except for one afternoon when they were filling out some final papers and he made a last-ditch effort to keep her, he was happy he’d had the luck to spend five years with her. And in a few years his literary disposition, unrequited by
Newsweek
, would allow him to dramatize himself to younger women with this little tragedy.

“This is between me and Gordon,” she said to Breavman. Like general lovers, they could only speak in each other’s arms. “So don’t go getting your hat.”

They had lived together for almost a year. She didn’t want him to regard the divorce as a signal to propose. Of course she wanted to marry him. She was not equipped for lovers, for her idea of love was essentially one of loyalty, a loyalty grounded in passion.

Sometimes she believed that no one could give so much tenderness, attention, except as an investment in the future. Sometimes she knew, she could locate the pain in her heart, that he could give so much only if he was going away.

She had already given everything to him, a bestowal we make only once in our lives. She wanted him to love her freely. That is most of the total gift. She had also been bred in the school of heromartyrs, and saw herself, perhaps, as an Héloise. Only the man of
adventure could love — that was his writing — and only the lady who had abandoned her house and name — that was conventional society. Adventurers leave the couch, ladies return to their name; this knowledge is the ordeal which keeps the clasp tight.

It isn’t often we meet someone who has the same vision of what we might be as we have for ourselves. Shell and Breavman, or rather his deputy, saw each other with this remarkable generosity.

She came in crying one afternoon. He took her gloves and purse, put them on the oiled-wood commode, led her to the green sofa.

“Because of what I told Gordon.”

“You had to tell him.”

“Not everything I did. I’m terrible.”

“You’re a terrible vicious witch.”

“I told him how good it is with you; I didn’t have to do that. I just wanted to hurt him.”

They talked all night until Shell could declare, “I hate him.”

Breavman observed to himself that she was further from divorce than she thought. Women take very seriously an attempt to mutilate their bodies. Breavman did not understand that as soon as she uttered the words in his arms she was free from hatred.

He was bothered by the knowledge that Shell was making real decisions, acting, changing her life. He wanted to watch her at rest. It involved him in the world of houses and traffic lights. She was becoming an authentic citizen, using his love for strength.

Suppose he went along with her towards living intimacy, towards comforting incessant married talk. Wasn’t he abandoning something more austere and ideal, even though he laughed at it, something which could apply her beauty to streets, traffic, mountains, ignite the landscape — which he could master if he were alone? Wasn’t that why he stared at her, indulged himself in every motion, expression? Perhaps it was only the conviction that he wasn’t
created for comfort which disturbed him. Disturbed him because it was vanishing.

He was very comfortable. He had begun to accept his deputy’s joy. This lover was the most successful thing he had ever made, and the temptation was to supply him with wallet and identification and drown the master Breavman in a particularly garbage-strewn stretch of the Hudson River.

The Breavman eye, trained for volcano-watching, heavenly hosts, ideal thighs and now perfectly at work on the landscape of Shell’s body, was in danger of sleep. More and more the lover had Shell to himself. These are the times Breavman does not remember too well because he was so happy.

S
ummer was still very young.

Did you know forget-me-nots were that tiny?

They climbed the hill behind the cabin, listened to the birds, checked the guide to identify their calls.

He didn’t want to give her the little flowers because they both listened to names so carefully.

They talked about the conduct of parting. This to lovers is as remote and interesting as a discussion of H-bomb defence at a convention of mayors.

“… and if it isn’t working for one of us, we’ve got to tell the other.”

“… and let’s hope we have the courage to be surgical.”

Shell was delighted by a certain cluster of birch.

“They look like
naked
trees! They make the woods look black.”

At night they listened to the sound of the lake beating the sand and shore stones. A dark luminous sky made of burned silver foil. The cries of birds, wetter and more desperate now, as though food and lives were involved.

Shell said that every sound of the lake was different. Breavman preferred not to investigate; he enjoyed the blur of happiness. She could listen more carefully than he. Details made her richer, chained him.

“If you tape their whistles, Shell, and slow them down, you can hear the most extraordinary things. What the naked ear hears as one note is often in reality two or three notes sung simultaneously. A bird can sing three notes at the same time!”

“I wish I could speak that way. I wish I could say twelve things at once. I wish I could say all there was to say in one word. I hate all the things that can happen between the beginning of a sentence and the end.”

He worked while she slept. When he heard her easy breathing he knew the day was sealed and he could begin to record it.

A queer distortion of honesty holds me back from you …

Shell made herself wake up in the middle of the night. Moths battered against the window beside which he worked. She crept behind him and kissed his neck.

He wheeled around in surprise, pencil in hand, and scraped skin from her cheek. He upset the chair as he stood.

They faced one another in the cold flat light of the Coleman lantern. The night was deafening. The whirring and thudding of the moths, the hiss of the lantern, the water working on boulders, small animals hunting, nothing was at rest.

“I thought I …” He stopped.

“You thought you were alone!” she cried in pain.

“I thought I …” “You thought you were alone
.” he recorded when she was asleep again.

O
ne night, watching her, he decided he would leave the next morning.

Otherwise he’d stay beside her always, staring at her.

It was the middle of June. He was running an elevator in a small office building, scab labour. He picked up extra money cleaning some of the offices on Friday evenings. It was a rickety elevator, carried a maximum of five passengers, and went out of commission if brought too far below the basement floor level.

At night there was Shell, poems and the journal while she slept.

Most of the time he was happy. This surprised and disturbed him, as generals get uneasy during a protracted peace. He enjoyed the elevator, which was sometimes a chariot, sometimes a torture device of Kafka, sometimes a time machine, and, the worst times, an elevator. He told people who asked that his name was Charon and welcomed them aboard.

Then there were the evening meals with Shell. Straw mats on an oiled-wood folding table. Candlelight and the smell of beeswax. The elaborate food lovers will prepare for one another, cooked in wine, held together by toothpicks. Or hilarious gentle morning feasts out of cans and frozen boxes.

There were weekend breakfasts of eggs and blueberry muffins when Shell was the genius of an ancient farmhouse kitchen histories away from New York — which they could abandon at any time for the green sofa, which was dateless. There were movie afternoons, mythological analyses of C Westerns, historic spaghetti dinners at Tony’s at which the phoniness of Bergman was discovered.

The poems continued, celebrating the two of them. Poems of parting, a man writing to a woman he will not let out of his sight. He had enough for a fat book but he didn’t need a book. That would come later when he needed to convince himself that he had lived such a life of work and love.

Breavman became his deputy. He returned to his watchtower an hour every few days to fill in his journal. He wrote quickly and blindly, disbelieving what he was doing, like a thrice-failed suicide looking for razor blades.

He exorcized the glory demons. The pages were jammed into an antique drawer that Shell respected. It was a Pandora’s box of visas and airline-ticket folders that would spirit him away if she opened it. Then he would climb back into the warm bed, their bodies sweetened by the threat.

God, she was beautiful. Why shouldn’t he stay with her? Why shouldn’t he be a citizen with a woman and a job? Why shouldn’t he join the world? The beauty he had planned as a repose between solitudes now led him to demand old questions of loneliness.

What did he betray if he remained with her? He didn’t dare recite the half-baked claims. And now he could taste the guilt that would nourish him if he left her. But he didn’t want to leave for good. He needed to be by himself, so he could miss her, to get perspective.

He shoved an air-mail letter into the stuffed drawer.