She looked straight at him and said, “You’ve won me, Lawrence Breavman.”
And he supposed that that was what he had been trying to do.
They lay apart like two slabs. Nothing his hands or mouth could do involved him in her beauty. It was like years ago with Tamara, the silent torture bed.
He knew he couldn’t begin the whole process again. What had happened to his plan? They finally found words to say and tenderness, the kind that follows failure.
They stayed in the room together.
By the end of the next day he had written a still-born poem about two armies marching to battle from different corners of a continent. They never meet in conflict in the central plain. Winter eats through the battalions like a storm of moths at a brocade gown, leaving the metal threads of artillery strewn gunnerless miles behind the frozen men, pointless designs on a vast closet floor. Then months later two corporals of different language meet in a green, unblasted field. Their feet are bound with strips of cloth torn from the uniforms of superiors. The field they meet on is the one that distant powerful marshals ordained for glory. Because the men have come from different directions they face each other, but they have forgotten why they stumbled there.
That next night he watched her move about his room. He had never seen anything so beautiful. She was nested in a brown chair studying a script. He remembered a colour he loved in the crucible of melted brass. Her hair was that colour and her warm body seemed to reflect it just as the caster’s face glows above the poured moulds.
PAUVRE GRANDE BEAUTÉ!
POOR PERFECT BEAUTY!
He gave all his silent praise for her limbs, lips, not to the clamour of personal desire, but to the pure demand of excellence.
They had talked enough for her to be naked. The line of her belly reminded him of the soft forms drawn on the cave well by the artist-hunter. He remembered her intestines.
QUEL MAL MYSTÉRIEUX RONGE SON FLANC D’ATHLÈTE?
WHAT UNKNOWN EVIL HARROWS HER LITHE SIDE?
Lying beside her he thought wildly that a miracle would deliver them into a sexual embrace. He didn’t know why, because they were nice people, the natural language of bodies, because she was leaving tomorrow. She rested her hand on his thigh, no desire in the touch. She went to sleep and he opened his eyes in the black and his room was never emptier or a woman further away. He listened to her breathing. It was like the delicate engine of some cruel machine spreading distance after distance between them. Her sleep was the final withdrawal, more perfect than anything she could say or do. She slept with a deeper grace than that with which she moved.
He knew that hair couldn’t feel; he kissed her hair.
He was heading towards Côte des Neiges. The night had been devised by a purist of Montreal autumns. A light rain made the black iron fences shine. Leaves lay precisely etched on the wet pavement, flat as if they’d fallen from diaries. A wind blurred the leaves of the young acacia on MacGregor Street. He was walking an old route of fences and mansions he knew by heart.
The need for Shell stabbed him in a few seconds. He actually felt himself impaled in the air by a spear of longing. And with the longing came a burden of loneliness he knew he could not support. Why were they in different cities?
He ran to the Mount Royal Hotel. A cleaning lady on her knees thanked him for the mud.
He was dialling, shouting at the operator, reversing the charges.
The phone rang nine times before she answered it.
“Shell!”
“I wasn’t going to answer.”
“Marry me! That’s what I want.”
There was a long silence.
“Lawrence, you can’t treat people like this.”
“Won’t you marry me?”
“I read your journal.”
Oh, her voice was so beautiful, fuzzy with sleep.
“Never mind my journal. I know I hurt you. Please don’t remember it.”
“I want to go back to sleep.”
“Don’t hang up.”
“I won’t hang up,” she said wearily. “I’ll wait till you say goodbye.”
“I love you, Shell.”
There was another long silence and he thought he heard her crying.
“I do. Really.”
“Please go away. I can’t be what you need.”
“Yes, you can. You are.”
“Nobody can be what you need.”
“Shell, this is crazy, talking this way, four hundred miles apart. I’m coming to New York.”
“Have you any money?”
“What kind of a question is that?”
“Do you have any money for a ticket? You quit camp, and I know you didn’t have much when you started.”
He never heard her voice so bitter. It sobered him.
“I’m coming.”
“Because I don’t want to wait for you if you’re not.”
“Shell?”
“Yes.”
“Is there anything left?”
“I don’t know.”
“We’ll talk.”
“All right. I’ll say good night now.”
She said that in her old voice, the voice that accepted him and helped him with his ambitions. It made him sad to hear it. For himself, he had exhausted the emotion that impelled the call. He didn’t need to go to New York.
30
He began his tour through the heart streets of Montreal. The streets were changing. The Victorian gingerbread was going down everywhere, and on every second corner was the half-covered skeleton of a new, flat office building. The city seemed fierce to go modern, as though it had suddenly been converted to some new theory of hygiene and had learned with horror that it was impossible to scrape the dirt out of gargoyle crevices and carved grape vines, and therefore was determined to cauterize the whole landscape.
But they were beautiful. They were the only beauty, the last magic. Breavman knew what he knew, that their bodies never died. Everything else was fiction. It was the beauty they carried. He remembered them all, there was nothing lost. To serve them. His mind sang praise as he climbed a street to the mountain.
For the body of Heather, which slept and slept.
For the body of Bertha, which fell with apples and a flute.
For the body of Lisa,
