because your eyelashes
are the spines of tiny fragile animals.
“They cashed a cheque for me at the supermarket.”
“The privileges of beauty. The last high caste left in classless America.”
“No, they did the same for a little brown old lady.”
“So the neighbourhood virtues persist.”
“How did your work go?”
“I blackened my page.”
I dread the time
when your mouth
begins to call me hunter.
The chatter went on and on. Stories of Hartford, the stone fountain, the summers at Lake George, huge houses remembered. Stories of Montreal, night drives with Krantz, death of a father. And as they lived together their own stories grew, myths of first meeting, first loving, quiet of coming trips.
“Can I read you something?”
“Yours?”
“You know I can’t stand anybody else’s work.”
She wanted him to sit beside her in a special favourite way.
“Is it about me?”
“Well, wait till I read the damn thing.”
She listened seriously. She asked him to read it again. She had never been so happy. He began in his low voice which always abdicated before the meaning of the words, never forced an effect. She loved this honesty in him, this intensity that made everything important.
“Oh it’s fine, Lawrence, it’s really fine.”
“Good. That’s what I wanted.”
“But it’s not for me – it’s not for anyone.”
“No, Shell, it’s for you.”
She had a treat for him, frozen strawberries.
When you call me close
to tell me
your body is not beautiful
I want to summon
the eyes and hidden mouths
of stone of light of water
to testify against you.
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 want them
to surrender before you
the trembling rhyme of your face
from their deep caskets.
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.
When you call me close
to tell me
your body is not beautiful
I want my body and my hands
to be pools
for your looking and laughing.
12
Shell 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 hero-martyrs, 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
