“I offered to drive,” she said to excuse her energy.
But he couldn’t bear to be conducted through the night, helpless by the side of the speeding driver. If he had to find himself hurtling down a highway, neon motels and hamburgers arresting him absurdly like those uncertain images that were always flashing in his mind, he himself wanted to be in charge of the chaos.
“Besides, there’s something irreverent about moving this stuff around.”
She pushed hard, knuckles white on the brass bars.
It struck Breavman that they were the hands of a nun, bleached, reddened by convent chores; he had always thought them so delicate. Her body was like that. At first she might be mistaken for a Vogue mannequin, tall, small-breasted, angular, and fragile. But then her full thighs and broad shoulders modified the impression and in love he learned that he rode on a great softness. The nostrils of her face over-widened just far enough to destroy the first impression of exquisite harmony and allow for lust.
Her remarkable grace was composed of something very durable, disciplined and athletic, which is often the case with women who do not believe they are beautiful.
Yes, Breavman thought, she would have moved it with or without me. She is the Carry Nation of Evil Chintzy Rooms and I am the greasy drunkard smirking over my stack of Niagara Falls souvenirs. She learned to wield her axe three hundred years ago, clearing a New England field for planting.
Now the bed was beneath the window. He sat down and called for her with two open hands. They held each other softly and with a kind of patience as if they were both waiting for the demons developed in the silence of the long trip to evaporate.
At last she stood up, a little too soon, he thought.
“I’ve got to make the bed.”
“Make the bed? The bed is perfectly well made.”
“I mean at the other end. We won’t be able to see anything.”
“Are you doing this deliberately?”
He was surprised at the hatred in his voice. Nothing had evaporated.
She turned her eyes to him, trying to get through. I must read what she wants to say to me, I love them so much, he thought in a flash, but his anger overwhelmed him. He looked at the baggage to threaten her.
“Lawrence, this is where we are. This is our room for tonight. Just give me five minutes.”
She worked quickly, a kind of side-to-side harvest dance, and the sheets flew as if they were part of her own dress. He knew that only she could change the chore into a ritual.
She puffed the pillows where their heads would lie. She removed one of the blankets and draped it over a hideous armchair, reshaping it with a few tucks and folds. Into the closet she lifted a small drum table complete with doilies, vase, and a broken trick box from which a scissor-beaked bird was meant to dispense cigarettes. She opened the wicker basket he had bought her and withdrew their books, which she placed carelessly on the large table beside the door.
“What are you going to do about the sink? There are cracks in the porcelain. Why don’t you pry up a couple of floorboards and hide it under the carpet?”
“If you’ll help me.”
He would have liked to rip it from the wall and cause it to disappear with a magician’s flourish, a white cigarette gone, a gift for Shell. And he would have liked to wrench it from its grimy roots and swing it like a jawbone, completely demolish the room which she had begun to ruin.
Shell put out his shaving kit and her own secret case of cosmetics which smelled of lemon. She opened the window with a little touch of triumph, and Breavman could hear leaves moving in the spring night.
She had changed the room. They could lay their bodies in it. It was theirs, good enough for love and talk. It was not that she had arranged a stage on which they might sleep hand in hand, but she had made the room answer to what she believed their love asked. Breavman knew it was not his answer. He wished he could honour her home-making and hated his will to hurt her for it.
But didn’t she understand that he didn’t want to disturb an ashtray, move a curtain?
One small light was burning. She stood in the shadows and undressed and then slipped quickly under the covers, pulling them up to her chin.
It’s a better room for her, Breavman thought. Anyone else would have thanked her. She deserved a goose-feather bed with the sheets turned down so bravely-O. Which I cannot give her because I do not want the castle to cover it, with my crest carved above the hearth.
“Come.”
“Should I close the light?”
“Yes.”
“Now it’s the same room for the both of us.”
He got into the bed, careful not to avoid touching her. He knew his mood had to be attacked. Like the chronic migraine sufferer who doubtfully submits himself to the masseur who always cures him, he lay stiffly beside her.
She had known his body like this before. Sometimes he would disappear for two or three days and when he came back his body would be like that, armoured, distant.
Sometimes a poem would catapult him away from her, but she learned how to approach him, equipped with what he had taught her about her body and her beauty.
It was a refusal to be where he was, to accept the walls, the clock, the number on the door which he knew, the familiar limited human being in the familiar limited chair.
“You would have preferred it even dirtier,” she said softly. “Maybe even roaches in the sink.”
“You never see them if you keep the light on.”
“And when the light is off you can’t see them anyway.”
“But it’s the time between,” Breavman said with developing interest. “You come home at night and you switch on the kitchen light and the sink is swarming black.
