“You’ve got gooseflesh, Tamara.”
She refastened a wisp of floating hair. He studied her fingers in the exercise. He remembered them on various parts of his body.
He thought he would be content if he were condemned to live that moment over and over for the rest of his life. Tamara naked and young, her fingers weaving a lock of hair. The sun tangled in TV aerials and chimneys. The morning breeze whipping the mist from the mountain. A mysterious old man whose mystery he didn’t care to learn. Why should he go looking for better visions?
He couldn’t make things happen.
In the street the old man was lying on his stomach under the bumper of a car, grasping after a cat he had managed to corner between the kerb and the wheel. He kicked his feet in excitement, trying to get the cat by the hind legs, getting scratched and nipped. He finally succeeded. He extracted the cat from the shadows and held it above his head.
The cat wriggled and convulsed like a pennant in a violent wind.
“My God,” said Tamara. “What’s he doing with it?”
They forgot each other and leaned out the window.
The old man staggered under the struggle of the big cat, his face buried in his chest away from the threshing claws. He regained his footing. Wielding the cat as if it were an axe, his feet spread wide, he brought it down hard against the sidewalk. They could hear the head smash from their window. It convulsed like a landed fish.
Tamara turned her head away.
“What’s he doing now?” she wanted to be told.
“He’s putting it in a bag.”
The old man, kneeling beside the twitching cat, had produced a paper bag from out of his huge coat. He attempted to stuff the cat into it.
“I’m sick,” said Tamara. She was hiding her face against his chest. “Can’t you do something?”
It hadn’t occurred to Breavman that he could intrude into the action.
“Hey you!”
The old man looked up suddenly.
“Oui! Toi!”
The old man stopped short. He looked down at his cat. His hands vibrated in indecision. He fled down the street coughing and empty-handed.
Tamara gurgled. “I’m going to be sick.” She broke for the sink and vomited.
Breavman helped her to the bed.
“Anchovies,” she said.
“You’re shivering. I’ll close the window.”
“Just lie beside me.”
Her body was limp as though it had succumbed to some defeat. It frightened him.
“Maybe we shouldn’t have frightened him off,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“He was probably starving.”
“He was going to eat it?”
“Well, we protected our fragile tastes.”
She held him tightly. It was not the kind of embrace he wanted. There was nothing of flesh in it, only hurt.
“We didn’t sleep very much. Try to sleep now.”
“Will you sleep too?”
“Yes. We’re both tired.”
The morning world had been removed from them, the jagged sounds of traffic were beyond the closed window, distant as history. They were two people in a room and there was nothing to watch.
With his hand he soothed her hair and closed her eyelids. He remembered the miniature work of the wind unfastening and floating wisps of hair. A week is a long time.
Her lips trembled.
“Lawrence?”
I know what you’re going to say and I know what I’m going to say and I know what you’re going to say.…
“Don’t be mad.”
“No.”
“I love you,” she said simply.
I’ll wait here.
“You don’t have to say anything,” she said.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Will you kiss me?”
He kissed her mouth lightly.
“Are you angry with me?”
“What do you mean?” he lied.
“For what I said. I know it hurts you in some way.”
“No, Tamara, it makes me feel close to you.”
“I’m happy I told you.”
She adjusted her position and moved closer to him, not for sensation but for warmth and protection. He held her tightly, not as mistress, but bereaved child. The room was hot. Sweat on his palms.
Now she was asleep. He made sure she was asleep. Carefully he disengaged himself from her hold. If only she weren’t so beautiful in sleep. How could he run from that body?
He dressed like a thief.
A round sun burned above the sooty buildings. All the parked cars had driven away. A few old men, brooms in hand, stood blinking among the garbage cans. One of them tried to balance the cat’s carcass on a broom handle because he didn’t want to touch it.
Run, Westmount, run.
He needed to put distance between himself and the hot room where he couldn’t make things happen. Why did she have to speak? Couldn’t she have left it alone? The smell of her flesh was trapped in his clothes.
Her body was with him and he let a vision of it argue against his flight.
I am running through a snowfall which is her thighs, he dramatized in purple. Her thighs are filling up the street. Wide as a snowfall, heavy as huge falling Zeppelins, her damp thighs are settling on the sharp roofs and wooden balconies. Weather-vanes press the shape of roosters and sail-boats into the skin. The faces of famous statues are preserved like intaglios.…
Then he was thinking of a special pair of thighs in a special room. Commitment was oppressive but the thought of flesh-loneliness was worse.
Tamara was awake when he opened the door. He undressed in a hurry and renewed what he had nearly lost.
“Aren’t you glad you came back?”
For three years Tamara was his mistress, until he was twenty.
10
In the third year of college Breavman left his house. He and Krantz took a couple of rooms downtown on Stanley Street.
When Breavman informed his mother that he intended to spend several nights a week downtown she seemed to accept the fact calmly.
“You can use a toaster, can’t you. We have an extra toaster.”
“Thank you, Mother.”
“And cutlery, you’ll need cutlery.”
“Not really, we’re not going to do any serious cooking.…”
“You’ll need plenty of cutlery, Lawrence.”
She went from drawer to drawer in the kitchen selecting items and heaping them on the table before him.
“Mother, I don’t need an egg-beater.”
“How do you know?”
She emptied a drawer of silver
