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.
13
Summer 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.
14
One 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
