Shell loved his seriousness.
At the football weekends she practised being quiet beside him, indulging herself in the pleasures of responsible devotion.
He was tall and white-skinned. Horn-rimmed spectacles turned to pensive a face which without them would have been merely dreamy.
At dances their quiet behaviour and head-bending interest in just about everything gave the impression that they were chaperons rather than participants in the celebration. One almost expected them to say, “We like to spend some time with young people, it’s so easy to lose contact.”
With him Shell passed from the startling colt-like beauty of her adolescence directly into that kind of gracious senility typified by Queen Mothers and the widows of American presidents.
They announced their betrothal in the summer, after a session of mutual masturbation on the screened porch of the Sims house at Lake George.
They married and after his graduation he immediately began his military service. It occurred to her as she drove him to the railway station that he had never really seen her completely naked, there were places he hadn’t touched her. She attempted to conceive of this as a compliment.
She did not see very much of him in the next two years, weekends here and there, and generally he was exhausted. But his letters were regular and tireless, not to say disturbing. They seemed to threaten the serenity of a temporary widowhood she had been quite willing to assume.
She loved her clothes, which were dark and simple. She enjoyed the frequent extended visits at the houses of his family and hers. And she felt her place in the world: her lover was a soldier.
She would almost have preferred not to cut the envelopes. Intact, thick, lying on her dresser, they were part of the mirror in which she was brushing her long hair, part of the austere battered colonial furniture they had begun to collect.
Opened, they were not what he promised. They had become intricate invitations to physical love, filled with props, cold cream, lipstick, mirrors, feathers, games where the button is found in private places.
But on those weekends when he managed to get back to their small apartment, he was too tired to do anything but sleep and talk and go to small restaurants.
The letters were not mentioned.
5
Shell believed her breasts were stuffed with cancer.
The doctor told her to put her blouse back on.
“You’re a healthy woman. And lovely.” He allowed that he was old enough to say that.
“I feel so foolish. I don’t know where the bumps have gone.”
Meanwhile, back at the Montreal poem factory, Breavman is interning, training to become her Compleat Physician.
6
After Gordon got out of the service they decided to move to New York and took a fairly expensive apartment on Perry Street in the Village. He had a job with Newsweek, in the books section, and he also sold some pieces to the Saturday Review. Shell was Girl Friday to one of the editors of Harper’s Bazaar. She took some pleasure in refusing the many invitations to model.
According to their friends they had a cunning apartment. There was a tall handless clock with wooden works and roses painted on the face. There was a massive corner cabinet with many square glass windows in which they kept liqueurs and long-stemmed glasses. They had worked hard to remove the paint and stain it.
A child in severe clothes on a black background, painted by a journeyman portraitist, hung over a refectory table and insured the dignity of their frequent small dinner parties.
They were all good children eating up their frozen cream of shrimp soup, and they were about to assume control of the banks, the periodicals, the State Department, the Free World.
At one of these occasions, Roger, Gordon’s old room-mate, managed to have a few private words with Shell. He had been liberated by six cognacs.
“If this ever stops working,” – the gesture of his hand took in the accumulated triumph of antique shops – “come to me, Shell.”
“Why?”
“I love you.”
“I know you love me, Roger.” She smiled. “And Gordon and I love you. I mean why should it ever stop working?”
Shell was holding an empty silver tray and he could see her face in it through the crumbs.
“I don’t love you gently, friendly, I don’t love you auld lang syne, I don’t love you sweetheart of Sigma Chi.” He had made it humorous enough; now he said seriously, “I want you.”
“I know.”
“Of course you do.”
“No,” she said, grateful for the tray she was holding. “Not the best friend.”
“You can’t be happy.”
“Oh?”
There was something wrong with his suit, the pants hung badly, he would kill his tailor, the kitchen was too small, he wasn’t elegant.
“He never touches you.”
“How can you say this to me?”
“He told me.”
“What?”
“It was the same all through school. He can’t.”
“Why? Tell me why!”
Now information was the most important thing. Apparently Roger thought she would kiss him for it, having been trained in trade. He found himself with his nose against the bottom of the silver platter.
“He can’t, that’s all. He can’t. He never could. All you people are a laugh,” he added, speaking from his authentic background.
7
How can anybody take the skyscrapers seriously? Breavman wonders. And what if they lasted ten thousand years, and what if the world spoke American? Where was the comfort for today? And each day the father’s gift grows heavier – history, bricks, monuments, the names of streets – tomorrow was already crushed!
Where was the comfort? Where was the war to make him here and hero? Where was his legion? He had met people with numbers branded on their wrists, some of them wrecked, some shrewd and very quiet. Where was his ordeal?
Eat junk, join the enemies of the police, volunteer for crime? Correct America with violence? Suffer in the
