It was the middle of June. He was running an elevator in a small office building, scab labour. He picked up extra money cleaning some of the offices on Friday evenings. It was a rickety elevator, carried a maximum of five passengers, and went out of commission if brought too far below the basement floor level.
At night there was Shell, poems and the journal while she slept.
Most of the time he was happy. This surprised and disturbed him, as generals get uneasy during a protracted peace. He enjoyed the elevator, which was sometimes a chariot, sometimes a torture device of Kafka, sometimes a time machine, and, the worst times, an elevator. He told people who asked that his name was Charon and welcomed them aboard.
Then there were the evening meals with Shell. Straw mats on an oiled-wood folding table. Candlelight and the smell of beeswax. The elaborate food lovers will prepare for one another, cooked in wine, held together by toothpicks. Or hilarious gentle morning feasts out of cans and frozen boxes.
There were weekend breakfasts of eggs and blueberry muffins when Shell was the genius of an ancient farmhouse kitchen histories away from New York — which they could abandon at any time for the green sofa, which was dateless. There were movie afternoons, mythological analyses of C Westerns, historic spaghetti dinners at Tony’s at which the phoniness of Bergman was discovered.
The poems continued, celebrating the two of them. Poems of parting, a man writing to a woman he will not let out of his sight. He had enough for a fat book but he didn’t need a book. That would come later when he needed to convince himself that he had lived such a life of work and love.
Breavman became his deputy. He returned to his watchtower an hour every few days to fill in his journal. He wrote quickly and blindly, disbelieving what he was doing, like a thrice-failed suicide looking for razor blades.
He exorcized the glory demons. The pages were jammed into an antique drawer that Shell respected. It was a Pandora’s box of visas and airline-ticket folders that would spirit him away if she opened it. Then he would climb back into the warm bed, their bodies sweetened by the threat.
God, she was beautiful. Why shouldn’t he stay with her? Why shouldn’t he be a citizen with a woman and a job? Why shouldn’t he join the world? The beauty he had planned as a repose between solitudes now led him to demand old questions of loneliness.
What did he betray if he remained with her? He didn’t dare recite the half-baked claims. And now he could taste the guilt that would nourish him if he left her. But he didn’t want to leave for good. He needed to be by himself, so he could miss her, to get perspective.
He shoved an air-mail letter into the stuffed drawer.
He watched her sleeping, sheet clutched in her hand like an amulet, hair sprung over the pillow in Hokusai waves. Certainly he would be willing to murder for that suspended body. It was the only allegiance. Then why turn from it?
His mind leaped beyond parting to regret. He was writing to her from a great distance, from some desperate flesh-covered desk in the future.
My darling Shell, there is someone lost in me whom I drowned stupidly in risky games a while ago — I would like to bring him to you, he’d jump into your daydreams without asking and take care of your flesh like a drunk scholar, with laughing and precious secret footnotes. But as I say, he is drowned, or crumpled in cowardly sleep, heavily medicated, dreamless, his ears jammed with seaweed or cotton — I don’t even know the location of the body, except that sometimes he stirs like a starving foetus in my heart when I remember you dressing or at work in the kitchen. That’s all I can write. I would have liked to bring him to you — not this page, not this regret.
He looked up from his lined book. He imagined Shell’s silhouette and his own. Valentine sweethearts of his parents’ time. A card on his collector’s shelf. Could he embalm her for easy reference?
She changed her position, drawing the white sheet tight along the side of her body, so that her waist and thigh seemed to emerge out of rough marble. He had no comparisons. It wasn’t just that the forms were perfect, or that he knew them so well. It was not a sleeping beauty, everybody’s princess. It was Shell. It was a certain particular woman who had an address and the features of her family. She was not a kaleidoscope to be adjusted for different visions. All her expressions represented feelings. When she laughed it was because. When she took his hand in the middle of the night it was because. She was the reason. Shell, the Shell he knew, was the owner of the body. It answered her, was her. It didn’t serve him from a pedestal. He had collided with a particular person. Beautiful or not, or ruined with vitriol tomorrow, it didn’t matter. Shell was the one he loved.
When the room was half filled with sunlight Shell opened her eyes.
“Hello,” said Breavman.
“Hello. You haven’t been to sleep at all?”
“No.”
“Come now.”
She sat up and straightened the bedclothes and pulled a corner down to invite him in. He sat on the edge of the bed. She wanted to know what was the matter.
“Shell, I think I should go to Montreal for a little …”
“You’re leaving?”
He felt her stiffen.
“I’ll be back. Krantz is coming back — he wrote and offered me this job at a camp.…”
“I knew you were leaving. For the past few weeks I could just tell.”
“This is just for the summer.…”
“How long?”
“The summer.”
“How many months?”
Before he could answer she brought her fingertips to her mouth with a little hurt sound.
“What is it?” asked Breavman.
“I sound like Gordon did.”
He took her in
