At the beginning of the summer we said: let’s be surgical. I don’t want to see or hear from you. I’d like to counterpoint this with tenderness but I’m not going to. I want no attachments. I want to begin again. I think I love you, but I love the idea of a clean slate more. I can say these things to you because we’ve come that close. The temptation of discipline makes me ruthless.
I want to end this letter now. It’s the first one I didn’t make a carbon of. I’m close to flying down and jumping into bed beside you. Please don’t phone or write. Something wants to begin in me.
LAWRENCE
Shell sent three telegrams that he didn’t answer. Five times he allowed his phone to ring all night.
One morning she awakened suddenly and couldn’t catch her breath. Lawrence had done exactly the same thing to her as Gordon – the letters, everything!
28
They drank patiently, waiting for incoherence.
“You know, of course, Tamara, that we’re losing the Cold War?”
“No!”
“Plain as the nose. You know what Chinese youth are doing this very minute?”
“Smelting pig-iron in back yards?”
“Correct. And the Russians are learning trigonometry in kindergarten. What do you think about that, Tamara?”
“Black thoughts.”
“But it doesn’t matter, Tamara.”
“Why?”
He was trying to stand a bottle on its pouring rim.
“I’ll tell you why, Tamara. Because we’re all ripe for a concentration camp.”
That was a little brutal for their stage of intoxication. On the couch he mumbled beside her.
“What are you saying?”
“I’m not saying anything.”
“You were saying something.”
“Do you want to know what I’m saying, Tamara?”
“Yeah.”
“You really want to know?”
“Yes.”
“All right, I’ll tell you.”
Silence.
“Well?”
“I’ll tell you.”
“Okay, you tell me.”
“I’m saying this: …”
There was a pause. He leaped up, ran to the window, smashed his fist through the glass.
“Get the car, Krantz,” he screamed. “Get the car, get the car! …”
29
Let us study one more shadow.
He was heading towards Côte des Neiges. Patricia was sleeping back at his room on Stanley, profound sleep of isolation, her red hair fallen on her shoulders as if arranged by a Botticelli wind.
He could not help thinking that she was too beautiful for him to have, that he wasn’t tall enough or straight, that people didn’t turn to look at him in street-cars, that he didn’t command the glory of the flesh.
She deserved someone, an athlete perhaps, who moved with a grace equal to hers, exercised the same immediate tyranny of beauty in face and limb.
He met her at a cast party. She had played the lead in Hedda Gabler. A cold bitch, she’d done it well, all the ambition and vine leaves. She was as beautiful as Shell, Tamara, one of the great. She was from Winnipeg.
“Do they have Art in Winnipeg?”
Later on that night they walked up Mountain Street. Breavman showed her an iron fence which hid in its calligraphy silhouettes of swallows, rabbits, chipmunks. She opened fast to him. She told him she had an ulcer. Christ, at her age.
“How old are you?”
“Eighteen. I know you’re surprised.”
“I’m surprised you can be that calm and live with whatever it is that’s eating your stomach.”
But something had to pay for the way she moved, her steps like early Spanish music, her face which acted above pain.
He showed her curious parts of the city that night. He tried to see his eighteen-year-old city again. Here was a wall he had loved. There was a crazy filigree doorway he wanted her to see, but when they approached he saw the building had been torn down.
“Où sont les neiges?” he said theatrically.
She looked straight at him and said, “You’ve won me, Lawrence Breavman.”
And he supposed that that was what he had been trying to do.
They lay apart like two slabs. Nothing his hands or mouth could do involved him in her beauty. It was like years ago with Tamara, the silent torture bed.
He knew he couldn’t begin the whole process again. What had happened to his plan? They finally found words to say and tenderness, the kind that follows failure.
They stayed in the room together.
By the end of the next day he had written a still-born poem about two armies marching to battle from different corners of a continent. They never meet in conflict in the central plain. Winter eats through the battalions like a storm of moths at a brocade gown, leaving the metal threads of artillery strewn gunnerless miles behind the frozen men, pointless designs on a vast closet floor. Then months later two corporals of different language meet in a green, unblasted field. Their feet are bound with strips of cloth torn from the uniforms of superiors. The field they meet on is the one that distant powerful marshals ordained for glory. Because the men have come from different directions they face each other, but they have forgotten why they stumbled there.
That next night he watched her move about his room. He had never seen anything so beautiful. She was nested in a brown chair studying a script. He remembered a colour he loved in the crucible of melted brass. Her hair was that colour and her warm body seemed to reflect it just as the caster’s face glows above the poured moulds.
PAUVRE GRANDE BEAUTÉ!
POOR PERFECT BEAUTY!
He gave all his silent praise for her limbs, lips, not to the clamour of personal desire, but to the pure demand of excellence.
They had talked enough for her to be naked. The line of her belly reminded him of the soft forms drawn on the cave well by the artist-hunter. He remembered her intestines.
QUEL MAL MYSTÉRIEUX RONGE SON FLANC D’ATHLÈTE?
WHAT UNKNOWN EVIL HARROWS HER LITHE
