“Take everything.”
He followed her into the living-room. Now she was above him, tottering in a soft chair, trying to keep her balance, while at the same time unhooking some heavy embroidered curtains.
“What are you doing?”
“What do I need in an empty house? Take everything!”
She kicked the fallen curtains towards him and tripped in the folds. Breavman ran to help her. She seemed so heavy.
“Get away, what do I need, take everything!”
“Stop this, Mother, please.”
On the way up the stairs she tore a Persian miniature mounted on velvet from its hook and thrust it at him.
“You have walls down there, don’t you?”
“Please go to bed, Mother.”
She began to empty the linen closet, heaving piles of sheets and blankets at his feet. Standing on tip-toe she tugged at a stack of tablecloths. One unfolded as she pulled and fell about her like a ghost’s costume. She thrashed inside it. He tried to help her but she fought him from under the linen.
He stepped back and watched her struggle, a numbness invading his whole body.
When she had freed herself she carefully spread the tablecloth on the floor and crawled from corner to corner folding it. Her hair was disarrayed and she couldn’t catch her breath.
He followed each of her movements with intense dual concentration. He folded it ten times in his mind before she kneeled in triumph beside the immaculate white rectangle.
11
The house had been built at the beginning of the century. There were still some coloured panes in the window. The city had installed modern fluorescent street-lamps on Stanley, which cast a ghostly yellow light. Shining through the blue and green Victorian glass the result was intense artificial moonlight and the flesh of any woman looked fresh and out-of-doors.
His guitar was always handy. The cedar wood was cool against his stomach. The inside of the guitar smelled like the cigar boxes his father used to have. The tone was excellent in the middle of the night. In those late hours the purity of the music surprised and almost convinced him that he was creating a sacramental relationship with the girl, the outside city, and himself.
Breavman and Tamara were cruel to each other. They used infidelity as a weapon for pain and an incentive for passion. And they kept returning to the bed on Stanley Street and the strange light which seemed to repair the innocence of their bodies. There they would lie for hours, unable to touch or speak. Sometimes he would be able to comfort her and sometimes she him. They used their bodies but that became more and more difficult. They were living off each other, had tubes to each other’s guts. The reasons were too deep and original for him to discover.
He remembers terrible silences and crying he couldn’t come close to. There was nothing he could do, least of all get dressed and leave. He hated himself for hurting her and he hated her for smothering him.
He should have kept running that bright morning.
She made him helpless. They made each other helpless.
Breavman let Tamara see some notes of a long story he was writing. The characters in it were named Tamara and Lawrence and it took place in a room.
“How ardent you are!” Tamara said theatrically. “Tonight you are my ardent lover. Tonight we are sentry and animals, birds and lizards, slime and marble. Tonight we are glorious and degraded, knighted and crushed, beautiful and disgusting. Sweat is perfume. Gasps are bells. I wouldn’t trade this for the ravages of the loveliest swan. This is why I must have come to you in the first place. This is why I must have left the others, the hundreds who tried to stay my ankle with crippled hands as I sped to you.”
“Horseshit,” I said.
She eased herself out of my arms’ clasp and stood on the bed. I thought of the thighs of stone colossi but I didn’t say anything.
She stretched out her arms shoulder high.
“Christ of the Andes,” she proclaimed.
I kneeled below her and nuzzled her delta.
“Heal me, heal me.” I mimicked a prayer.
“Heal me yourself.” She laughed and collapsed over me, her face finally resting on my belly.
When we were quiet I said, “Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity.”
She swung her legs on to the floor, danced over to the table and lit the candle in my tin Mexican candelabra. Holding the light over her head like a religious banner she danced back to the bedside and took my hand.
“Come with me, my beast, my swan,” she canted. “The mirror, eunuchs, the mirror!”
We stood before the mirror.
“Who shall say we are not beautiful?” she challenged.
“Yeah.”
For a minute or two we inspected our bodies. She put the candelabra down. We embraced.
“Life has not passed us by,” she said with imitation nostalgia.
“Ah. Alas. Sorrow. Moon. Love.”
I tried to be funny. I hoped that our sentimental hoaxing would not lead her to reflect in earnest. That was a process I couldn’t take.
I sat on a chair in front of the window and she sat on my lap.
“We are lovers,” she began, as if she were stating geometry axioms before attempting the proposition. “If one of those people down there were to look up, someone with very good eyes, he would see a naked woman held by a naked man. That person would be immediately aroused, wouldn’t he? The way we become aroused when we read a provoking sexual description in a novel.”
I winced at the word sexual. There is no word more inappropriate to lovers.
“And that is the way,” she went on, “most lovers try to look at one another, even after they have been intimate for a long time.”
Intimate. That was another of those words.
“It’s a great mistake,” she said. “The thrill of the forbidden, the thrill of the naughty is quickly expended and lovers are soon bored with one another. Their sexual identities become
