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
