The Favorite Game (19 page)

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. They disappear in seconds, you do not follow too closely exactly where they go, and they leave the porcelain brighter than you ever imagined white could be.”

“Like that haiku about strawberries on the white plate.”

“Whiter. And without music.”

“The way you talk you’d think we had fought our way out of the deepest slum.”

“We have, but don’t ask me to explain or it will sound like the cheapest nonsense from an over-privileged bourgeois.”

“I know what you mean and I know that you’re thinking I can’t possibly know.”

She would reach him, he was certain. She would uncover him so he could begin to love her.

“The mansion is as much a part of the slum as your horrible sink. You want to live in a world where the light has just been switched on and everything has just jumped out of the black. That’s all right, Lawrence, and it may even be courageous, but you can’t live there all the time. I want to make the place you come back to and rest in.”

“You do a wonderful job of dignifying a spoiled child.”

It was not that things decay, that the works of men are ephemeral, he believed he saw deeper than that. The things themselves were decay, the works themselves were corruption, the monuments were
made
of worms. Perhaps she was his comrade in the vision, in the knowledge of strangerhood.

“You didn’t want to touch a thing when we came in here. You just wanted to clear a small corner to sleep in.”

“Love in,” Breavman corrected.

“And you hated me for remaking the bed and putting us where we could see the trees and hiding the ugly old table because all of that meant that we couldn’t simply endure the filth, we had to come to terms with it.”

“Yes.”

He found her hand.

“And you really hated me because I was dragging you into it and you would have been free if you’d been alone, with morning a few hours away and the car parked outside.…”

God, he thought as he turned to her and closed her eyes over all he remembered of her, she knows everything.

M
iss McTavish was a tall, mannish Bryn Mawr graduate, ’21, who secretly believed that she was the only one in America who really understood the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

She also believed that the academic world was not worthy of the true Hopkins and was therefore reluctant to discuss her theories. The same superiority kept her out of the universities. She did not wish to participate in the donnish conspiracy against Life and Art.

The same superiority plus a grotesque nose kept her out of marriage. She knew that the man sufficiently intense, wild, and joyous for communion with her would be unavailable for domestic life, having in all probability already consecrated himself to the monastery or mountain climbing.

She saved her passion for the poems she read in class. Even the most cynical students knew that something very important was happening in those moments when she seemed to forget them most. Shell listened like a disciple, knowing that the poems were all the more beautiful because Miss McTavish had such a funny nose.

Miss McTavish liked to think of the Neo-Gothic library as her
private home. On the way to the card index she floated over the bent heads, like a hostess presiding at a feast.

One evening, standing underneath the tall stained-glass windows, she said something very strange to Shell. The glass images could not be seen, only the bumpy lead separators. If mahogany wood could be made translucent and used as a filter, that was the colour of the light in the large quiet room. It was winter and Shell had the impression that snow was falling, she wasn’t sure, not having stepped out since late afternoon.

“I’ve been watching you, Shell. You’re the only aristocrat I have ever met.” Then her voice choked. “I love you because I wanted to be like you, that’s all I ever wanted.”

Shell reached out her hand as if she had just seen someone wounded in front of her. Miss McTavish recovered instantly from her state of exposure and seized Shell’s extended hand and shook it formally, as though they had just been introduced. Both of them bowed slightly several times, and it appeared to an observer that they might be just about to begin a minuet. The image they made occurred to both of them and they laughed in relief.

It was snowing. Without speaking they agreed on a walk. The pine trees beyond the Quadrangle were dark, lofty, and narrow as the windows in the library, shelves of snow on the limbs separating them from the night into rows of upright fish skeletons.

Shell felt that she was in a museum of bones. She had no sense of the outdoors at all, but imagined herself in a sinister extension of the library. And she was already summoning the resources of pity on which she knew she would have to draw.

Miss McTavish whistled a part from a quartet.

The quartet ended in a gasp.

“I’ve never done this before.”

Shell stood still as she was kissed on the mouth, and caught the man’s smell of alcohol on her teacher’s breath. She tried to think through the present, reach the real forest she drove through with her father, but she couldn’t.

“Ha ha,” cried Miss McTavish, flinging herself backwards in the snow. “I’m brave. I’m very brave.”

Shell believed her. She was a human tossed in the snow, humiliating herself. She must be brave, as nuns with whips are brave, and drunk sailors in a storm. People who walk into desolation, beggars, saints, call to those they leave behind, and these cries are nobler than the victory shouts of generals. She knew this from books and her house.

Not too far away there was a second-class road. The headlights of a single car sawed through the woods, disappeared, and left the woman and the girl with a renewed sense of the outside, regulating world, which Shell already knew was engineered against the remarkable.

Miss McTavish had succeeded in immersing herself almost entirely in a drift of snow. Shell helped her out of it. They faced each other as they had in the library. Shell knew that her teacher would have preferred to be standing back there now, the declaration and kiss undone.

“You’re old enough for me to say nothing.”

Breavman was surprised to learn that Shell still corresponded with her.

“Once or twice a year,” said Shell.

“Why?”

“I spent the rest of my time at school trying to convince her that she hadn’t destroyed herself in my eyes and was still my ordinary and well-beloved English teacher.”

“I know that kind of tyranny.”

“Will you let me send your book to her?”

“If your idea of charity is to bore a Hopkins expert.”

“This isn’t for her.”

“You’ll wind up your debt —”

“Yes.”

“— by becoming what she wanted you to be.”

“In a way. I have a king.”

“Ummm.”

He was not convinced.

W
hen Shell was nineteen she married Gordon Ritchie Sims. As the announcement in
The New York Times
specified, he was in the graduating class at Amherst and she was in her freshman year at Smith.

The best man was Gordon’s room-mate, a devout Episcopalian whose banking family was of Jewish origin. He was half in love with Shell himself and dreamed of just such a wife to guarantee and cement his assimilation.

Gordon wanted to be a writer and most of his courting was literary. He enjoyed the fat letters he sent her from Amherst. Every night, after he had done a respectable amount of work on his thesis, he filled his personalized writing sheets with promises, love, and expectation, the passion tempered by an imitation of the style of Henry James.

Mail became a part of Shell’s heart. She carefully chose the places to read these lengthy communications, which were far more exciting than the chapters of a novel because she was the major character in them.

Gordon summoned a world of honour and order and cultivation, and the return to a simpler, more exalting way of life which Americans had once experienced, and which he, by virtue of his name and love, intended to resurrect with her.

Shell loved his seriousness.

At the football weekends she practised being quiet beside him, indulging herself in the pleasures of responsible devotion.

He was tall and white-skinned. Horn-rimmed spectacles turned to pensive a face which without them would have been merely dreamy.

At dances their quiet behaviour and head-bending interest in just about everything gave the impression that they were chaperons rather than participants in the celebration. One almost expected them to say, “We like to spend some time with young people, it’s so easy to lose contact.”

With him Shell passed from the startling colt-like beauty of her adolescence directly into that kind of gracious senility typified by Queen Mothers and the widows of American presidents.

They announced their betrothal in the summer, after a session of mutual masturbation on the screened porch of the Sims house at Lake George.

They married and after his graduation he immediately began his military service. It occurred to her as she drove him to the railway station that he had never really seen her completely naked, there were places he hadn’t touched her. She attempted to conceive of this as a compliment.

She did not see very much of him in the next two years, weekends here and there, and generally he was exhausted. But his letters were regular and tireless, not to say disturbing. They seemed to threaten the serenity of a temporary widowhood she had been quite willing to assume.

She loved her clothes, which were dark and simple. She enjoyed the frequent extended visits at the houses of his family and hers. And she felt her place in the world: her lover was a soldier.

She would almost have preferred not to cut the envelopes. Intact, thick, lying on her dresser, they were part of the mirror in which she was brushing her long hair, part of the austere battered colonial furniture they had begun to collect.

Opened, they were not what he promised. They had become intricate invitations to physical love, filled with props, cold cream, lipstick, mirrors, feathers, games where the button is found in private places.

But on those weekends when he managed to get back to their small apartment, he was too tired to do anything but sleep and talk and go to small restaurants.

The letters were not mentioned.