Then they hugged to repair everything.
When she was inside she put her mouth to the window of the door and they kissed through the glass. He wanted her to go first and she wanted him to go first. He hoped his back looked good.
C’mon, everybody! He exulted as he marched home, newest member of the adult community. Why weren’t all the sleepers hanging out of their windows cheering? Didn’t they admire his ritual of love and deceit? He visited his park, stood on the nursery hill and looked over the city to the grey river. He was finally involved with the sleepers, the men who went to work, the buildings, the commerce.
Then he threw stones at Krantz’s window because he didn’t want to go to bed.
“Steal a car, Krantz. Chinese soup time.”
Breavman told everything in three minutes and then they drove in silence. He leaned his head against the window glass expecting it to be cool, but it wasn’t.
“I know why you’re depressed. Because you told me.”
“Yes. I dishonoured it twice.”
It was worse than that. He wished he loved her, it must be so nice to love her, and to tell her, not once or five times, but over and over, because he knew he was going to be with her in rooms for a long time.
Then what about rooms, wasn’t every room the same, hadn’t he known what it would be like, weren’t all the rooms they passed exactly the same, wherever a woman was stretched out, even a forest was a glass room, wasn’t it like with Lisa, under the bed and when they played the Soldier and the Whore, wasn’t it the same, even to the listening for enemy sounds?
He told the story again, six years later, to Shell, but he didn’t dishonour it that time. Once, when he went away from Shell for a little while, he wrote her this:
“I think that if Elijah’s chariot, or Apollo’s, or any mythical boat of the sky, should pull up at my doorstep, I would know exactly where to sit, and as we flew I’d recall with delicious familiarity all the clouds and mysteries we passed.”
9
Tamara and Breavman rented a room in the east end of the city. They told their families they were visiting out-of-town friends.
“I’m used to being alone,” his mother said.
On the last morning they leaned out of the small high window, squashing shoulders, looking at the street below.
Alarms went off through the boarding house. Bulging ash-cans sentried the dirty sidewalk. Cats cruised between them.
“You won’t believe this, Tamara, but there was a time I could have frozen one of those cats to the sidewalk.”
“That’s very useful, frozen cat.”
“I can’t make things happen so easily these days, alas. Things happen to me. I couldn’t even hypnotize you last night.”
“You’re a failure, Larry, but I’m still crazy about your balls. Yummy.”
“My lips are sore from kissing.”
“So are mine.”
They kissed softly and then she touched his lips with her hand. She was often very tender and it always surprised him because he hadn’t commanded it.
They had hardly been out of bed for the past five days. Even with the window wide open, the air in the room smelt like the bed. The early-morning buildings filled him with nostalgia and he couldn’t understand it until he realized that they were exactly the colour of old tennis shoes.
She rubbed her shoulder against his chin to feel the bristle. He looked at her face. She had closed her eyes to savour the morning breeze against her eyelids.
“Cold?”
“Not if you stay.”
“Hungry?”
“I couldn’t face another anchovy and that’s all we have.”
“We shouldn’t have bought such expensive stuff. It doesn’t quite go with the room, does it?”
“Neither do we,” she said. “Everybody in the house seems to be getting up for work.”
“And here we are: refugees from Westmount. You’ve betrayed your new socialist heritage.”
“You can talk all you want if you let me smell you.”
The cigarettes were crushed. He straightened one out and lit it for her. She blew a mouthful of smoke into the morning.
“Smoking with nothing on is so — so luxurious.”
She shivered over the word. He kissed the nape of her neck and they resumed their idle watch in the window.
“Cold?”
“I’d like to stay for a year,” she said.
“That’s called marriage.”
“Now don’t get all frightened and prickly.”
A very important thing happened.
They caught sight of an old man in an oversize raincoat standing in a doorway across the street, pressed against the door as if he were hiding.
They decided to watch him, just to see what he did.
He leaned forward, looked up and down the street, and satisfied that it was empty, gathered the folds of his raincoat around him like a cape and stepped out on the sidewalk.
Tamara flicked a roll of ashes out the window. It fell like a feather and then disintegrated in the rising wind. Breavman watched the small gesture.
“I can’t stand how beautiful your body is.”
She smiled and leaned her head against his shoulder.
The old man in the swaddling coat kneeled and peered under a parked car. He got up, brushed his knees, and looked around.
The wind moved in her hair, detaching and floating a wisp. She squeezed her arm between them and flicked the butt. He flicked his out too. They fell like tiny doomed parachutists.
Then, as if the butts were a signal, everything began to happen faster.
The sun jelled suddenly between two buildings, intensely darkening the charade of chimneys.
A citizen climbed into his car and drove away.
A cat appeared a few feet from where the old man was standing and crossed in front of him, proud, starved, and muscular. With a flurry of folds the old man leaped after the animal. Effortlessly, the cat changed its direction and softly padded down stone stairs to a cellar entrance. The man coughed and followed, stooped, baffled, and climbed back to the street empty-handed.
They had watched him idly, as people watch
