The Favorite Game (15 page)

“It’s about time you people paid me a visit.”

The three of them hugged and talked wildly.

T
amara 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.

B
reavman 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 breathed a historical sigh for the mansions become brewery and insurance head offices. He sat on the steps of the museum and watched the chic women float into dress shops or walk their rich dogs in front of the Ritz. He watched people line up for buses, board, and zoom away. He always found that a mystery. He walked into lavatory-like new banks and wondered what everyone was doing there. He stared at pediments of carved grapevines. Gargoyles on the brown stone church. Intricate wooden balconies just east of Park. The rose window of another church spiked to prevent pigeons from roosting. All the old iron, glass, rock.

He had no plans for the future.

Early one morning he and Krantz (they hadn’t gone to bed the night before) sat on a low stone wall at the corner of Mackay and Sherbrooke and admonished the eight-thirty working-day crowds.

“The jig is up,” Breavman shouted. “It’s all over. Go back to your homes. Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars. Go straight to your homes. Return to bed. Can’t you see it’s all done with?”

“Consummatum est,”
Krantz said.

Later Breavman said, “You don’t really believe it, do you, Krantz?”

“Not as thoroughly as you.”

No plans for the future.

He could lay his hand on a low-cut gown and nobody minded. He was a kind of mild Dylan Thomas, talent and behaviour modified for Canadian tastes.

He felt as though he had masturbated on television. He was bereft of privacy, restraint, discretion.

“Do you know what I am, Krantz?”

“Yes, and don’t recite the catalogue.”

“A stud for unhappy women. A twilight peeper of Victorian ruins. A middle-class connoisseur of doomed union songs. A race-haunted exhibitionist forever waving my circumcision. A lap-dog who laps.”

Therefore, according to the traditions of his class, he did penance through manual labour.

On one of his walks around the Montreal waterfront he passed a brass foundry, a small firm which manufactured bathroom fixtures. A window was open and he looked inside.

The air was smoke-filled. Loud incessant noise of machinery. Against the wall were hills of mud-coloured sand. At the far end of the foundry stone crucibles glowed in sunken furnaces. The men were covered with grime. They heaved heavy sand moulds. Through the smoke they looked like figures in one of those old engravings of Purgatorio.

Then a red-hot crucible was raised out of the furnace by a pulley system and swung towards the row of moulds. It was lowered to the ground and the slag scooped off the surface.

Now a huge man wearing an asbestos apron and goggles took over. He guided the crucible over to the moulds. With a lever device he tilted the stone pot and poured the molten brass into the lead-holes of the moulds.

Breavman gasped at the brightness of the liquid metal. It was the colour gold should be. It was as beautiful as flesh. It was the colour of gold he thought of when he read the word in prayers or poems. It was yellow, alive and screaming. It poured out in an arch with smoke and white sparks. He watched the man move up and down the rows, dispensing this glory. He looked like a monolithic idol. No, he was a true priest.

That was the job he wanted but that wasn’t what he got. He became a core-wire puller. Unskilled. Pay was seventy-five cents an hour. The hours were seven-thirty to five-thirty, half-hour for lunch.

The size of the core determines the size of the hole running through the faucets. It is made of baked sand packed along a length of wire. It is placed between the two halves of the mould, and the brass flows around it, creating the hole. When the moulds are broken up and the rough-cast faucets extracted they still contain the wire on which the cores were suspended.

His job was to pull these wires out. He sat on a box not far from the long, low roller tables on which the moulds were placed for filling. Beside him was a heap of hot faucets with these core-wires sticking out from the ends. He seized one with his left gloved hand and yanked out the twisted wire with a pair of pliers.

He pulled several thousand wires a week. The only time he stopped was to watch the pouring of the brass. It turned out that the moulder was a Negro. It was impossible to tell with the grime on
everybody’s face. Now there’s a heroic proletarian tale if he ever heard one.

Pull your wire, Breavman.

The beauty of the brass never diminished.

He took his place in the fire and smoke and sand. The foundry was not air-conditioned, thank heaven. His hands grew callouses which were ordinary to working girls but they were stroked like medals by others.

He sat on his box and looked around. He had come to the right place. Chopping machines and the roar of furnaces were exactly the right music to purge. Sweat and mud on a man’s pimpled back was a picture to give perspective to flesh. The air was foul: the intake of breath after a nostalgic sigh coated your throat with scum. The view of old men and young men condemned to their sandpiles added an excellent dimension to his vision of lambs, beasts, and little children. The roof windows let in shafts of dirty sunlight which were eventually lost in the general fumes. They laboured in a gloom tinted red by the fires. He had become an integrated figure in the inferno engraving which he had glimpsed a few weeks before.

The firm was not unionized. He thought about contacting the appropriate union and helping to organize the place. But that wasn’t why he had come. He’d come for boredom and penance. He introduced an Irish immigrant to Walt Whitman and talked him into going to a night school. That was the extent of his social work.

The boredom was killing. Manual labour did not free his mind to wander at will. It numbed his mind, but the anaesthesia was not sufficiently potent to deliver it from awareness. It could still recognize its bondage. He would suddenly realize that he had been chanting the same tune over and over for the last hour. Each wire
represented a small crisis and each extraction a small triumph. He could not overlook this absurdity.

The more bored he became the more inhuman was the beauty of the brass. It was too bright to look at. You needed goggles. It was too hot to stand close to. You needed an apron. Many times a day he watched the metal being poured, feeling the heat even where he sat. The arch of liquid came to represent an intensity he would never achieve.

He punched the clock every morning for a year.

H
is friend was leaving Montreal to study in England.