There were lights on the St. Lawrence the size of stars, and an impatient stillness in the air. Trees as fragile as the legs of listening deer. At any minute the sun would come crashing out of the roofs like a clenched fist, driving out determined workers and one-way cars to jam the streets. He hoped he wouldn’t have to see the herds of traffic on Westmount Avenue. Turning night into day.
“Hello there.”
A stout man of thirty in an Air Force uniform stood above him. He had been the centre of attention in the park a few days before. Several nurses complained that he had been too enthusiastic in the fondling of their male children. A policeman had escorted him to the street and invited him to move along.
“I thought you weren’t allowed in here.”
“Nobody’s around. I just felt like talking.”
His uniform was sharply pressed. Really, he was too clean for that time of the morning or night or whatever it was. Breavman isolated the smell of shaving lotion from the lilac-laden air. He stood up.
“Talk. You have my permission. I’m going home.”
“I just thought …”
Breavman looked back over his shoulder and shouted, “Talk! Why aren’t you talking? It’s all yours – the park’s empty!”
There were gardeners in faded clothes on his street. They called to one another as they swept, all Italian names. Breavman studied their brooms made out of wire-bound branches. It must be nice to use something that real.
5
“Will you stop shouting, Breavman, or stand further back, I can’t hear a damn thing you’re saying.”
“Bertha, I said! I just saw Bertha! She’s in town!”
“Bertha who?”
“Oh, you wicked and careless fool. Bertha of our childhood, of The Tree, who mangled herself under our noses.”
“How does she look?”
“Her face is perfect, really Krantz, she was beautiful.”
“Where did you see her?”
“In a bus window.”
“Good-bye, Breavman.”
“Don’t hang up, Krantz. I swear it was really her. I won’t say she was smiling. It was an open, blonde face with no family lines, so you could make anything you want of it.”
“You go follow the bus, Breavman.”
“Oh, no, she saw me. I’ll just wait here till it comes round again. She moved her lips.”
“Good-bye, Breavman.”
“Krantz, this is a most pleasant telephone booth I’m living in today. Sherbrooke Street is a parade of everyone I ever knew. I’m going to loiter immoderately. They’ll all be delivered to me today, Bertha, Lisa. Nobody, not one name, not one limb will be taken away in the dustload.”
“Where did you dig up those old names?”
“I’m the keeper. I’m the sentimental dirty old man in front of a classroom of children.”
“Good-bye, Breavman, for real.”
It was a beautiful telephone box. It smelled of new spring paint and fresh nails. You could feel the sun through the wire-embedded glass. He was the guard, he was the sentry.
Bertha, who had fallen out of a tree for his sake! Bertha, who played “Greensleeves” sweeter than he ever could! Bertha, who fell with apples and twisted her limbs!
He dropped in another nickel and waited for the music.
“Krantz, she just came round again.…”
6
Wait, wait, wait, wait. Everything took so long.
The mountain released the moon like a bubble it could no longer contain, with reluctance and pain.
That summer Breavman had a queer sense of time slowing down.
He was in a film and the machine was whirring into slower and slower motion.
Eight years later he told Shell about it, but not everything, because he didn’t want Shell to think that he saw her in the same way he saw the girl he was telling about, as if she were a moon-lit body in a slow Swedish movie, and from far away.
What was her name? he demanded of himself.
I forget. It was a sweet, Jewish last name which meant mother-of-pearl or rose-forest.
How dare you forget?
Norma.
What did she look like?
It doesn’t matter what she looked like every day. It only matters what she looked like for that important second. That I remember and will tell you.
What did she look like every day?
As a matter of fact, her face was squashed, her nose spread too wide. One of her grandmothers must have been carried away by the Tartars. She always seemed to be astride something, a railing or a diving-board, waving her brown arms, eyes lost in her laugh, galloping to a feast or a massacre. Her flesh was loose.
Why was she a Communist?
Because she played the guitar. Because the copper bosses shot Joe Hill. Because notenemos ni aviones ni cañones, and all her friends had died at Jarama. Because General MacArthur was a criminal and ruled Japan as a personal kingdom. Because the Wobblies sang into tear gas. Because Sacco loved Vanzetti. Because Hiroshima hurt her eyes and she was collecting names on a Ban the Bomb petition and was often told to go back to Russia.
Did she limp?
When she was very tired you noticed it. She usually wore a long Mexican skirt.
And the Mexican ring?
Yes, she was engaged to a chartered accountant. She assured me that he was progressive. But how could someone who was waiting for a revolution be a chartered accountant? I wanted to know. And how could she, with her ideas of freedom, commit herself to conventional marriage?
“We have to be effective in society. Communists aren’t bohemians. That’s a luxury of Westmount.”
Did you love her?
I loved to kiss her breasts, the few times she let me.
How many times, how many times?
Twice. And I was allowed to touch. Arms, stomach, pubic hair, I almost made the jewel of my list but her jeans were too tight. She was four years older than me.
She was engaged?
But I was young. She kept telling me I was a baby. So nothing we did was really important. She phoned him long distance every night. I stood beside her as she spoke. They talked about apartments and wedding plans. It was the prosaic adult world, the museum of failure, and I had nothing to do
