Lying beside her he thought wildly that a miracle would deliver them into a sexual embrace. He didn’t know why, because they were nice people, the natural language of bodies, because she was leaving tomorrow. She rested her hand on his thigh, no desire in the touch. She went to sleep and he opened his eyes in the black and his room was never emptier or a woman further away. He listened to her breathing. It was like the delicate engine of some cruel machine spreading distance after distance between them. Her sleep was the final withdrawal, more perfect than anything she could say or do. She slept with a deeper grace than that with which she moved.
He knew that hair couldn’t feel; he kissed her hair.
He was heading towards Côte des Neiges. The night had been devised by a purist of Montreal autumns. A light rain made the black iron fences shine. Leaves lay precisely etched on the wet pavement, flat as if they’d fallen from diaries. A wind blurred the leaves of the young acacia on MacGregor Street. He was walking an old route of fences and mansions he knew by heart.
The need for Shell stabbed him in a few seconds. He actually felt himself impaled in the air by a spear of longing. And with the longing came a burden of loneliness he knew he could not support. Why were they in different cities?
He ran to the Mount Royal Hotel. A cleaning lady on her knees thanked him for the mud.
He was dialling, shouting at the operator, reversing the charges.
The phone rang nine times before she answered it.
“Shell!”
“I wasn’t going to answer.”
“Marry me! That’s what I want.”
There was a long silence.
“Lawrence, you can’t treat people like this.”
“Won’t you marry me?”
“I read your journal.”
Oh, her voice was so beautiful, fuzzy with sleep.
“Never mind my journal. I know I hurt you. Please don’t remember it.”
“I want to go back to sleep.”
“Don’t hang up.”
“I won’t hang up,” she said wearily. “I’ll wait till you say goodbye.”
“I love you, Shell.”
There was another long silence and he thought he heard her crying.
“I do. Really.”
“Please go away. I can’t be what you need.”
“Yes, you can. You are.”
“Nobody can be what you need.”
“Shell, this is crazy, talking this way, four hundred miles apart. I’m coming to New York.”
“Have you any money?”
“What kind of a question is that?”
“Do you have any money for a ticket? You quit camp, and I know you didn’t have much when you started.”
He never heard her voice so bitter. It sobered him.
“I’m coming.”
“Because I don’t want to wait for you if you’re not.”
“Shell?”
“Yes.”
“Is there anything left?”
“I don’t know.”
“We’ll talk.”
“All right. I’ll say good night now.”
She said that in her old voice, the voice that accepted him and helped him with his ambitions. It made him sad to hear it. For himself, he had exhausted the emotion that impelled the call. He didn’t need to go to New York.
30
He began his tour through the heart streets of Montreal. The streets were changing. The Victorian gingerbread was going down everywhere, and on every second corner was the half-covered skeleton of a new, flat office building. The city seemed fierce to go modern, as though it had suddenly been converted to some new theory of hygiene and had learned with horror that it was impossible to scrape the dirt out of gargoyle crevices and carved grape vines, and therefore was determined to cauterize the whole landscape.
But they were beautiful. They were the only beauty, the last magic. Breavman knew what he knew, that their bodies never died. Everything else was fiction. It was the beauty they carried. He remembered them all, there was nothing lost. To serve them. His mind sang praise as he climbed a street to the mountain.
For the body of Heather, which slept and slept.
For the body of Bertha, which fell with apples and a flute.
For the body of Lisa, early and late, which smelled of speed and forests.
For the body of Tamara, whose thighs made him a fetishist of thighs.
For the body of Norma, goose-fleshed, wet.
For the body of Patricia, which he had still to tame.
For the body of Shell, which was altogether sweet in his memory, which he loved as he walked, the little breasts he wrote about, and her hair which was so black it shone blue.
For all the bodies in and out of bathing suits, clothes, water, going between rooms, lying on grass, taking the print of grass, dancing discipline, leaping over horses, growing in mirrors, felt like treasure, slobbered over, cheated for, all of them, the great ballet line, the cream in them, the sun on them, the oil anointed.
A thousand shadows, a single fire, everything that happened, twisted by telling, served the vision, and when he saw it, he was in the very centre of things.
Blindly he climbed the wooden steps that led up the side of the mountain. He was stopped by the high walls of the hospital. Its Italian towers looked sinister. His mother was sleeping in one of them.
He turned and looked at the city below him.
The heart of the city wasn’t down there among the new buildings and widened streets. It was right over there at the Allan, which, with drugs and electricity, was keeping the businessmen sane and their wives from suicide and their children free from hatred. The hospital was the true heart, pumping stability and creations and orgasms and sleep into all the withering commercial limbs. His mother was sleeping in one of the towers. With windows that didn’t quite open.
The restaurant bathed the corner of Stanley and St. Catherine in a light that made your skin yellow and the veins show through. It was a big place, mirrored, crowded as usual. There wasn’t a woman he could see. Breavman noted that a lot of the men used hair tonic; the sides of their heads seemed shiny and wet. Most of them were thin. And there seemed to be a uniform, almost. Tight chinos
