Overexposed and double-exposed. The Laurentian summer sun is behind every image, turning one to silhouette, another to shining jelly transparency.
The diver is Krantz. Here he is folded in a jackknife in the air above the water, half silver, half black. The splash rises slowly around the disappearing feet like feathers out of a black crater.
A cheer goes up from the children as he climbs up on the dock. All his movements have an intensity, the smallest gesture a quality of power, close-up size. The children surround him and try to touch his wet shoulders.
“But isn’t Krantz marvellous?”
Now Krantz is running toward his friends, sand sticking to his soles. He is smiling a welcome.
Now Tamara is not touching Breavman, she had been lying close to him, but now nothing of her is touching.
She stands automatically and Krantz’s eyes and her eyes, they invade the screen and change from welcome to surprise to question to desire — here the picture is stopped dead and pockmarked by suns — and now they annihilate all the bodies on the sand, for an enduring fraction they are rushing only to each other.
The swallows fall naturally and the ordinary chaos returns as Krantz laughs.
“It’s about time you people paid me a visit.”
The three of them hugged and talked wildly.
14
Tamara and Breavman graduated from college. There was no longer any framework around their battered union, so down it came. They were lucky the parting was not bitter. They were both fed up with pain. Each had slept with about a dozen people and they had used every name as a weapon. It was a torture-list of friends and enemies.
They parted over a table in a coffee-shop. You could get wine in teacups if you knew the proprietress and asked in French.
All along he had known that he never knew her and never would. Adoration of thighs is not enough. He never cared who Tamara was, only what she represented. He confessed this to her and they talked for three hours.
“I’m sorry, Tamara. I want to touch people like a magician, to change them or hurt them, leave my brand, make them beautiful. I want to be the hypnotist who takes no chances of falling asleep himself. I want to kiss with one eye open. Or I did. I don’t want to any more.”
She loved the way he talked.
They returned to the room on Stanley, unofficially, from time to time. A twenty-year-old can be very tender to an ancient mistress.
“I know I never saw you. I blur everyone in my personal vision. I never get their own music.…”
After a while her psychiatrist thought it would be better if she didn’t see him again.
15
Breavman won a scholarship to do graduate work in English at Columbia but he decided not to take it.
“Oh no, Krantz, nothing smells more like a slaughterhouse than a graduate seminar. People sitting around tables in small classrooms, their hands bloody with commas. They get older and the ages of the poets remain the same, twenty-three, twenty-five, nineteen.”
“That gives you four years at the outside, Breavman.”
His book of Montreal sketches appeared and was well received. He started seeing it on the bookshelves of his friends and relatives and he resented their having it. It was none of their business how Tamara’s breasts looked in the artificial moonlight of Stanley Street.
Canadians are desperate for a Keats. Literary meetings are the manner in which Anglophiles express passion. He read his sketches for small societies, large college groups, enlightened church meetings. He slept with as many pretty chairwomen as he could. He gave up conversation. He merely quoted himself. He could maintain an oppressive silence at a dinner-table to make the lovely daughter of the house believe he was brooding over her soul.
The only person he could joke with was Krantz.
The world was being hoaxed by a disciplined melancholy. All the sketches made a virtue of longing. All that was necessary to be loved widely was to publish one’s anxieties. The whole enterprise of art was a calculated display of suffering.
He walked with pale blonde girls along Westmount Boulevard. He told them he saw the stone houses as ruins. He hinted that they could fulfil themselves through him. He could lean against a fireplace with all the ambiguous tragedy of a blind Samson against the temple pillars.
Among certain commercial Jews he was considered a mild traitor who could not be condemned outright. They were dismayed by the possibility that he might make a financial success out of what he was doing. This their ulcers resented. His name was in the newspapers. He might not be an ideal member of the community but neither was Disraeli or Mendelssohn, whose apostasies the Jewish regard for attainment has always overlooked. Also, writing is an essential part of the Jewish tradition and even the degraded contemporary situation cannot suppress it. A respect for books and artistry will persist for another generation or two. It can’t go on forever without being reconsecrated.
Among certain Gentiles he was suspect for other reasons. His Semitic barbarity hidden under the cloak of Art, he was intruding on their cocktail rituals. They were pledged to Culture (like all good Canadians) but he was threatening the blood purity of their daughters. They made him feel as vital as a Negro. He engaged stockbrokers in long conversations about over-breeding and the loss of creative vitality. He punctuated his speech with Yiddish expressions which he never thought of using anywhere else. In their living-rooms, for no reason at all, he often broke into little Hasidic dances around the tea table.
He incorporated Sherbrooke Street into his general domain. He believed he understood its elegant sadness better than anyone else in the city. Whenever he went into one of the stores he always remembered that he was standing in what was once the drawing-room of a smart town house. He
