“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 silence 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.
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
