The Shulman Manoeuvre

Sarah had painted still lifes. Dripping sliced passion fruit, potted snapdragons, almonds and acorns, occasionally a coral or saffron feather teased from the tail of a cockatoo. Leave landscapes and sprawling portraits to the others. Sarah was interested in the things inside the things we see. She had often talked about doing a series: a porcelain bowl of walnuts and feathers set in the folds of a lace tablecloth. The series would consist of one large still life and thirty or so smaller pieces, details of the larger work, explored at different angles and magnitudes while maintaining the qualities of light, shadow, colour and contrast. Shulman believed his wife’s paintings were beautiful, each a sensual meditation, medieval in its obsessiveness, almost erotic. She hadn’t sold any yet, but that would change. He’d spoken to a friend who ran a gallery. He liked Sarah’s work and would consider sponsoring a show. It would be a lot of effort, she’d have to start painting again, but it would be worth it. A show would bring her art to a larger audience, it would bring her the attention she deserved.

The encounter group was Sarah’s idea. The young surgeon agreed to it because there was a certain strategic advantage. Yes, Shulman was curious, and yes, he loved his wife. And when she said it would help her scrape off the veneer of socialization and allow her to see the world in an entirely new light, he nodded as if he understood completely. There was, he noted, a hint of desperation in her voice which he assumed was related to the show. As yet, she hadn’t painted a thing, and in fact technically she hadn’t painted in seventeen months (there were a few false starts and a couple of phantom sketches, much discussed but never revealed). Shulman added up the evidence and came to the conclusion that the real reason for the encounter group was to help her in her work. She had, he assumed, the artist’s equivalent of writer’s block; she needed to find a way to get the creative juices flowing again. In chess, it would be called a Zwischenzug, an intermediate move, achieving little on its own but working toward an eventual improvement of position.

. . .

The encounter began at five-thirty precisely, in a rented suite at the Royal York Hotel. The suite was magnificent: two large living rooms separating three ornate boudoirs, each containing one of the largest beds Shulman and his wife had ever seen. They were connected by a short corridor to a conference room, in which succulent embroidered pillows and knitted rugs had been laid out for the occasion (Sarah made a note in the sketchbook David had given her; already, she’d had an idea), and a spa, which had been cleared of all its exercise equipment, leaving only the marble-tiled floors, mirrored walls, and there, purring in the middle of the room, the ceramic-tiled hot pool. At the sight of the hot pool, Sarah and David looked at each other just as the other couples who’d explored the suite before them had (and the couples yet to come would) with a certain mixture of anticipation and apprehension, a particular shade of titillation, and they wondered without speaking a word if they would actually have the nerve when the time came to take off all their clothes and enter the bubbling water with all those other couples. David panicked slightly: what if he got an erection when he wasn’t supposed to? Or what if he didn’t get one when he was supposed to, if, indeed, erections were at some point required? He deeply regretted ever agreeing to this. He would much rather be at home with his chess, developing his middle game. Sarah squeezed his hand. She was very happy to be here, the squeeze told him. And she was happy he was there with her. She kissed him lightly on the cheek and said that, no matter what happened, she would still love him.

“This is about breaking down walls,” she said; he nodded vigorously, as if in agreement. “This will bring us closer together.”

“They say these sorts of things only make your love stronger.”

“It will, it will make our love stronger. Our love will be stronger, I’m almost certain of that.”

Precisely at five-thirty was perhaps not the right term. The encounter started promptly at five-thirty, although people were still filtering in at quarter past six. And there was no formal opening ceremony; actually, one would hardly have known an encounter had begun. It seemed like any other cocktail party: waiters brought around trays of canapés and tiny sausages skewered with coloured toothpicks, while bartenders were kept busy in the main rooms serving wine and mixed drinks. People perhaps drank a little more than they normally would at this sort of affair, which Shulman figured was a function not only of their heightened state of anxiety, but also because each of them had shelled out $250 and wanted to make sure they got their money’s worth. Shulman had to admit that he was taken aback when he first saw alcohol, but he quickly saw the sense in it. This was a different kind of science from what he was used to, a different kind of medicine. In this context, a martini or whiskey sour was no different from ether. He was also momentarily taken aback when he saw Dr. Barrymore enjoying a large glass of red wine along with everyone else. A definite Fingerfehler, Shulman concluded, regardless of the circumstances. This was his encounter, after all: he was morally, therapeutically and, most important, legally responsible. He should have his wits about him.

Sarah nudged him.

“There’s Barrymore,” she said, rather more excitedly that Shulman would have expected. Shulman looked at the group leader again. Barrymore was in his late fifties, completely bald, with a corked beak that made him look, to Shulman’s mind, like a football coach or five-star general, the kind of man who, one would expect, would talk too loudly and laugh too often. The beige turtleneck was an attempt to soften his image, but the eyes gave him away. Little black holes, sucking in everything around them.

“He looks younger than his picture.”

“Really? I thought he looked much, much older.”

Zwischenzug. It was her move now.

. . .

Sarah had many peculiarities when it came to her sexuality, which, strange as they were on the surface, only endeared her to her husband. That she would undress in the dark like a biblical virgin was one (how she would handle the hot pool was anybody’s guess). That she never opened her eyes during their moments of intimacy was another; she kept them shut, not in a fearful way, as if she was afraid to view what was going on, but in a dreamy way, the way of a woman who felt deliciously relaxed, concentrating fully on the pleasure she was receiving. More curious still was her habit of never directly referring to the act of love by anything but the most oblique of euphemisms. Like the patriarchs of old, who’d crafted cunning anagrams rather than utter the name of God, Sarah spoke of sex only in code. Expressions such as “making love” and “doing it” were far too graphic for her. She preferred the more rabbinical “congress” and “laying with” and even “applicated” — words which she managed to imbue with astonishing sensuality. It wasn’t that she was a prude, but that she’d co-opted the veneer of prudishness for her own erotic purposes. Shulman recognized these habits as sadomasochism in its subtlest form, a kind of Indian Defence, the slow development of play, at once toward and in defiance of the endgame.

Shulman met her during his first year of med school. She was working in the day care at the Jewish Cultural Centre, where he frequently came to eat and socialize. Not that he was Jewish, although, because of his last name and his chosen profession . . . well, everyone assumed as much. At first, Schulman paid no attention to the misperception. He was essentially a polite young man and felt no need to put people in an awkward spot by correcting them. For example, when the woman in the registrar’s office asked if he had any special dietary requirements, he shrugged and said, “Just the usual.” And when the practicum advisor took him aside and asked in a hushed voice if Schulman needed to keep his Saturdays open for “religious observations,” the young man replied with equal earnestness, “If it’s not too much trouble.” After a while, Shulman settled into the role, seeing its advantages. Toronto in those days was still a rigidly stratified Anglo-Saxon community: people liked their porters black and their doctors Jewish. Being one of God’s chosen might not be such a bad career move for David Shulman. So he began to feed into the confusion in small ways. He’d say “mazel tov” when everyone else said “cheers,” for example; he started to take his lunch at the kosher deli on Queen Street. Over time he developed a great affinity for Jewish culture and history, reading commentaries on the Torah and studying the meaning of Jewish ritual; he was something of an expert on the Holocaust. He identified with the Jewish sense of isolation and purpose. He wondered what it would be like to be circumcised.

What drew him first to the cultural centre was a group of Jewish students who’d formed something they called the Manhattan North Chess Collective. Followers of Nimzovich, Grünfeld and Breyer — the hypermodernists — the collective set about to revolutionize the Toronto chess scene, to free it from the strictures of centralization. They dreamt of turning the chess world on its big, brainy head, experimenting wildly (starting with brown square bottom right; random configurations of pawns and pieces), mapping solutions for intensely esoteric chess problems (which often included, interestingly enough considering the state of their collective sex lives, highly improbable queen captures) and playing, playing, playing. They even developed an opening gambit that received some attention in serious chess circles. Called the Toronto Defence, it involved the early sacrifice of pawns and bishops in an attempt to draw a positional advantage on the queen’s flank. Unorthodox to be sure, but that was the climate of the collective.

Fittingly, it was her art that first brought Sarah to his attention. He’d noticed a half-finished mural on the day care centre wall, cartoon animals, large renderings of the Hebrew alphabet. From his seat in the card room, during a blitz marathon with the Hassidic core of the collective, Shulman watched the young woman working on her murals. Because of their relative positions, her back was almost always toward him; in the course of the two weeks it took Sarah to finish, he probably saw her face only half a dozen times. But her back, her back was enough. She wore white overalls (judging by the paint marks, the same white overalls) every day, loose enough to give her body a kind of amorphous sexlessness, an ambiguity which only heightened her mysterious attractiveness; Shulman began to appreciate the lure of the burka in Islamic cultures. She wore a short t-shirt under the overalls, and when she reached up, the overalls pulling against her buttocks to reveal, for only moments at a time, its strong contours, the shirt would slide up her back and her arms. Before he ever even knew her name, Shulman was in love with the row of muscles and eye of olive skin that surrounded the thin section of spine in the middle of Sarah’s back. He’d always thought he’d marry an artist. He used to dream about it the way other adolescent boys would dream about playing in the NHL or going off to war. He already knew he’d be a doctor — his parents had prepped him since birth — and in his mind he could picture them, him and his wife, sitting in the study on Sundays, him, perhaps with a pipe, reading the latest issue of Deutsche Schachzeitung or perhaps The Lancet, she, in the corner by the window where the light was best, working on her latest piece. Sarah became the woman by the window. Within a month he’d asked her out (the beginning of the end of the collective); within the year he had proposed; and within another year, they were married in an orthodox service which only mildly surprised Shulman’s family and childhood friends.

. . .

On their wedding night they made love for the first time. David Shulman lost his virginity. Sarah Shulman did not.

. . .

By eight o’clock almost everyone at the encounter was drunk, including Shulman and his wife. The first of the clothes had come off, jackets mostly, but some sweaters, ties, scarves and cravats (it was an age when men still wore cravats with impunity), and here and there a shirt or blouse. Shulman removed his coat and carefully folded it. By now he’d cornered himself in a side room with Kitty, an actress from Syracuse. She’d unbuttoned her top completely, and he, holding the folded coat across his chest, pretended to be interested as she told him, for the third time, how she’d recently almost been mugged in the shadow of the World Trade towers. Nearby, Sarah was talking at close quarters to a man with longish hair and fashionably ridiculous sideburns. As Kitty re-related the part where she screamed and screamed — now adding slurred and drunken screams for effect — Shulman noticed the man playfully tugging at one of the buttons on his wife’s blouse. She pushed his hand away but let his fingers linger on her arm for a moment. Shulman’s natural impulse was to interpose. But he’d promised her her space. He concentrated on Kitty’s breasts instead.

A measured roar came from across the hall, and Shulman turned his head to see two women dancing bare-breasted in the middle of the room (although Shulman suspected they might have been more than innocent revellers; he’d noticed them arrive together and saw them stand off to the side together a few times. They seemed a little too detached, by Shulman’s reckoning: professional dancers, probably, or prostitutes, hired to get the ball rolling). Everyone — men and women — strained to get a view of the dancers, and it wasn’t long before other women were pulling off their tops.

“Dare I?” Kitty asked, her fingers on the front clasp of her bra.

“I wish you would.” Shulman had hoped to sound less horny and more nonchalant.

Kitty kept her fingers in place, waiting for him to egg her on, but by now Shulman’s concentration had returned to Sarah. She held her fingers on her top button for a very long time, five or six seconds, before finally pulling it open. She moved deliberately, almost mechanically, to the next button and repeated the process. Down and down she went, slowly, and so enraptured Shulman that he could almost hear her fingers scrape across the fabric, the buttons sigh as they slipped out of their holes. She was doing it for him. She was doing it to him. The tease. She knew it would upset him. She knew he would love it.

The first exercise was designed, in Barrymore’s words, to “clear away the false images we project of ourselves.” Participants were called to the front of the room one at a time to, in the case of women, ritualistically wash their faces with a small cloth to clear away any makeup, and in the case of men, shave off beards and moustaches (sideburns running to the bottom of the earlobe were accepted and, judging by Barrymore’s mutton chops, encouraged); a couple of men were relieved of their toupees. Resentment was running high.

At the same time, everyone had to face the crowd and tell the audience one thing about themselves they hoped the encounter would help them change. It couldn’t be anything superficial; Barrymore, with his studied badgering, made sure of that. One man, a real estate agent from Ajax, tried to turn the tables, asking Barrymore what he would like to change. The therapist, who’d been down the road a hundred times before, launched into a prolonged and rather graphic story about the sexual dysfunction he was currently experiencing, and how he hoped this challenging and loving group experience would help him overcoming the hidden hangups that were causing the dysfunction. The realtor from Ajax had to dig deeply indeed to top that.

Shulman was one of the last people to go before the crowd and figured he’d have a relatively easy time of it. “I really just came because of my wife,” he explained. “We hoped it would help her painting.”

“She’s a good painter, isn’t she, David?” Barrymore seemed genuinely interested.

“I think so.”

“But you, you don’t see any value in this experience for yourself?”

Shulman shrugged. “I’m willing to give it a try.”

Barrymore looked at him for several moments, a cold grin spreading across his face. “Anyone can try, David,” he said in perfect modulation. “But tonight we’re not rewarding effort. Tonight, David” — and as he spoke Shulman’s name he turned to the little mob — “tonight, we’re rewarding achievement.”

The crowd responded, madly clapping and whooping. Sarah seemed to slip a little further into the background. Most likely the crowd had pushed her there.

. . .

The pawn is much maligned in the popular imagination. Philidor, in his seminal Analyse du jeu des échecs, called it “the soul of chess.” An overstatement perhaps, but he was urging us to recognize that pawns are more than expendable decorations. They are an integral part of any successful winning strategy. Their sacrifice should be contemplated as deeply as the loss of any queen or rook. It was the small game where Shulman excelled, the setting up of pawns to maximize the effectiveness of his strongest pieces. His father used to say that the greatest victories were the smallest, and every battle contained within it a thousand more, rules that applied as much to surgery — and marriage — as chess. Curiously, it was this advice that came into his head as he pushed his underwear to his feet and stepped out of it. He was not the last person to undress. An elderly couple who appeared somewhat Amish were still fully clothed (granted, they might have joined the group by mistake), while a terribly obese woman had stopped at her corset and was now broken down in the corner, having apparently regressed to childhood.

Shulman needn’t have worried about the erection. Under the scrutiny of several dozen men and women, already waist-deep in the hot pool and anxious to move to the next phase of the therapeutic game, Shulman’s member had recoiled and actually seemed to be retreating within itself. In retrospect, he saw the strategic advantages to not being the last one naked.

The game was simple. The men would stand in a line facing the women, all wearing blindfolds. When the music started, you let your hands explore the body of the person in front of you. You should touch everywhere — face, lips, breasts, genitals, feet — without disrupting the blindfolds. When the music stopped, you stopped and took two steps to the left. The music would start again. “It’s a kind of sensual musical chairs,” Barrymore explained, holding his own blindfold in front of his naked chest. The man was thirty years older than Shulman but in better physical condition than he could ever hope to attain. “But a word of caution. The point is not to arouse your partner or become aroused yourself. The point is to become more in tune with your tactile self — to literally get in touch with your feelings.” His gestures were emphatic, like a TV pitchman’s.

Shulman put on his blindfold and waited for the music to start. He sensed the house lights dim, as the sound of loud, slow rock music rose from nearby speakers. The music was sexy — soft horns and lingering guitar solos. Shulman reached out.

He intended only to touch his partner’s hand and work his way rather purposefully up the arms and to the face. But his fingers almost immediately lit on the woman’s breast, and in the moment between when he thought he should reposition his hand and the actual repositioning of that hand, the anonymous partner moved closer to him, encouraging him, and placed her fingers directly on his nipples. Perhaps it was the alcohol, but Shulman found himself instantly aroused, and more so by the second, as his partner’s obvious arousal (her nipples puffed, her genitals pressed against his, one hand quickly slid to his buttocks, massaging, tickling . . .) grew stronger. She had begun to slide her hand down his chest when the music stopped.

Shulman took two steps to the left. As the music started, he wasted no time, moving his hands directly to his new partner’s breasts, cupping them, tracing the outline of her nipples. She was taller than the last woman and slighter, with strong stomach muscles and taut breasts. She’d wasted no time either: both her hands went immediately to his genitals, running her fingers with glacial deliberation from the hard tip to the soft folds where his legs came together. She pulled him toward her, and he responded, grinding his hips into hers . . . just as the music stopped.

He moved on again, and again picked up where he left off. But his newest partner seemed rigid in his hands. She moved his hands off her breasts and placed them on her hips, pushing her own coarse fingers up his arms to his neck, where they lingered, encircling, almost on the verge of gentle strangulation. By the time he moved on to the next woman, his arousal was almost extinguished. But the new partner quickly changed that. Her hands went right between his legs and agitated his softened piece. Their lips met a moment later, and she sucked his tongue into her mouth. There was a familiarity to all this, and by now he was certain he’d found Sarah. He pressed his hips against hers and she directed him inside. There it was, the old compatibility. They came together within seconds, careful not to make a noise. And as they rested in each other’s arms, he pushed his mask up with her cheek to see her face and find reassurance in it. All around them, other blind couples were in various advanced stages of intimacy, some having sex, some wildly groping, some resting in the afterglow. Only Barrymore and his partner were beyond arousal, or perhaps had reached a kind of hyper-arousal. His hands seemed to barely touch the woman, washing over her in the thin layer between the aura and the epidermis, while she stood, her head tilted, her arms out-stretched like some art-film homage to the crucifix, her face radiant with something between anguish and delight. Shulman had never seen that look before, but if he had to hazard a guess, he would have described it as rapture.

He looked at his partner again. Kitty was still languishing. Not far off, he saw her husband vigorously mounting a women on the hot pool steps. And Sarah, standing two steps to his right, her arms outstretched, joy twisting off her face, as Barrymore — a naked, muscled sun — radiated around her.

. . .

There are men (and it’s mostly men; chess is a masculine displacement) who see the game twenty, thirty, forty moves ahead. The Dutch Master Max Euwe is said to have been able to accurately predict the winner of a game ninety-nine out of a hundred times, based solely on the first two moves. That’s because despite the outward appearance, chess isn’t a random encounter between free-floating intellects. Chess is an unfolding of inevitabilities, always an approximation of life, never life itself. Mathematically, there are only a finite number of ways the game can be played out (it’s an imponderably high number, but still finite), and as any mathematician will tell you, anything that is finite can be quantified and qualified. A chess player, therefore — and this may be the key to the attraction the game holds for some — is a kind of chess piece himself, an überpiece, whose function is to move, in some degree mechanically, the other pieces and pawns. And like any other piece, the Player (let’s call him) is severely limited in his range of movement (the finite versus the infinite). But it’s precisely these limitations — the ultimate predictability, or better, inevitability — of chess that appeals to the Player. The game is almost wholly objective and, despite appeals to the contrary, provides no quarter for such traditionally feminine values as creativity and intuition. There are, of course, Creative Players and Intuitive Players, but these are men who have committed a larger number of inevitabilities to memory and can work one off another. Chess tournaments, for example, regularly offer a brilliancy prize to the player who displays the most innovative moves in the course of his game, but this in fact rewards counter-intuitive behaviour, that is, play which rapidly shifts the game from one unfolding of the inevitable to another in a surprising but, ultimately, entirely predictable way. Shulman sometimes contemplated what the game of chess would have been like if it had been invented by women. It occurred to him that the finished product would no longer be an approximation of life but a game within which all the boundaries of life are contained.

And were brilliancy prizes to be handed out at this organized orgy, Barrymore would be taking all of them home. He had been studying Shulman for several moments. In the post-coital wash of the game, the room had gone silent, the men and women, many of them already unwrapped from their towels, bundled in identical silk housecoats (the word, Shulman thought, was “unisex”), all looking at Shulman’s own little encounter group. He could smell Barrymore’s minty breath and heavy cologne. “I said” — the therapist was emphatic — “you can go home.”

“But —” Shulman tried not to look at the others, tried to catch on to where this exercise was leading.

The therapist continued. “You obviously don’t want to be here, and we can’t afford to have someone here who isn’t committed to the needs of the group.”

“But . . . but I’ve already paid.”

Before Shulman had finished speaking, Barrymore had produced a chequebook from his kimono pocket. “I’ll cut you a refund right now,” he said, already writing. “And I’ll tell you what, I’ll add a hundred bucks for your trouble.” The therapist handed the cheque to Shulman, then turned to the crowd again. “Now, is there anyone else here who isn’t personally committed to this encounter?”

Shulman awkwardly shifted from one foot to the other. He held the cheque in one hand. Surely, he thought, Barrymore was joking. He’d merely suggested that perhaps the group could take a short break for coffee and maybe a visit to the bathrooms. Barrymore, who by now had taken to calling Shulman (with a curious biblical poignancy) the Uncommitted One, had barely been able to veil his contempt.

“I’m sorry, David,” the therapist said, his voice rising slightly as he squared his shoulders. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave now.”

“You’re joking.”

“Please, we need to move on.”

“But —”

“Don’t make me call security.”

David hesitated, then took a step back.

“We’ll get our clothes,” he said quietly. Instinctively, he looked at Sarah. She began to walk toward him.

“Hang on, Sarah.” Dr. Barrymore raised his hand. “You don’t have to go. Clearly, you’re the one who’s committed to what we’re trying to do tonight. You’re certainly welcome to stay. In fact, I very much think you should.”

. . .

“You stay, no, really.”

Sarah was in his arms by now. “I can’t stay without you.”

“We came for your sake, honey. It’s better this way, it really is.”

“Really? Should I stay?”

“Really. Maybe that’s what you need. A little time away from me. A chance to grow on your own.”

“This will only make your love stronger.”

“It will make our love stronger than ever.”

. . .

Schulman waited until two o’clock in the morning for Sarah to come home. Finally, he fell asleep on the couch listening to classical music on the radio. Bartok. Music to not sleep by.

. . .

When he returned from work Monday evening, Sarah was in the bedroom packing her things. He did not enter the house immediately but stood in the driveway and waited. He knew she was in there, but he convinced himself that he needed to give her a little space. By the time he entered the front hall, she had stacked three suitcases by the doorway.

Each waited for the other to speak.

Shulman finally went to her. He wanted to hold her. He went to her with his arms open, and she accepted him in her arms. They embraced, and she held him very hard before letting go.

“I’m —”

“Don’t.”

“Dr. Barrymore says I need to grow, on my own. I need to be my own person.”

“Don’t go. Please.”

“Maybe, in time —”

“Don’t say it.”

“He’s a wonderful man. Brilliant.”

“Is he?”

Sarah tried to pick up all three bags. The small one, the valise with the embroidered cover, kept falling. Shulman picked it up to hand to her; it was almost empty.

“This is just a phase, right? You’re coming back, right?”

Sarah did not respond. She walked toward the door. “Don’t worry about the car. I’ve called a cab.”

Shulman grabbed her arm.

“This is just a phase, right?” He was squeezing her tighter now, and she was shaking his arm to get out of his grip.

“That’s hurting, David, please . . .”

“You are coming back, right?”

“I need some time. I need to sort some things out.”

She leaned forward and kissed him on the lips. They stood at the doorway for a moment, watching each other. David thought about grabbing her hair, throwing her to the floor. Then maybe she’d stay.

“I love you,” he said.

“I know.” She was already halfway out the door.

Shulman did not go to the front window to watch her leave. Instead, he went to the living room and sat in his chair. The fire was out now, and the flue exhaled a cool draft. That’s when he spotted them in the corner, by the bay window, overlooking the willow and the sleeping hibiscus: her paints, her easel, half a dozen empty canvases. She forgot them all. Of course, it was her way of telling him that she would be back. It was her way of reassuring him. She left her painting supplies, her sketchbooks, the old shirt she wore (his old shirt), dappled with a hundred colours. This was Zwischenzug. She would be back. He was sure of it.