Tamara and Breavman rented a room in the east end of the city. They told their families they were visiting out-of-town friends.
“I’m used to being alone,” his mother said.
On the last morning they leaned out of the small high window, squashing shoulders, looking at the street below.
Alarms went off through the boarding house. Bulging ash-cans sentried the dirty sidewalk. Cats cruised between them.
“You won’t believe this, Tamara, but there was a time I could have frozen one of those cats to the sidewalk.”
“That’s very useful, frozen cat.”
“I can’t make things happen so easily these days, alas. Things happen to me. I couldn’t even hypnotize you last night.”
“You’re a failure, Larry, but I’m still crazy about your balls. Yummy.”
“My lips are sore from kissing.”
“So are mine.”
They kissed softly and then she touched his lips with her hand. She was often very tender and it always surprised him because he hadn’t commanded it.
They had hardly been out of bed for the past five days. Even with the window wide open, the air in the room smelt like the bed. The early-morning buildings filled him with nostalgia and he couldn’t understand it until he realized that they were exactly the colour of old tennis shoes.
She rubbed her shoulder against his chin to feel the bristle. He looked at her face. She had closed her eyes to savour the morning breeze against her eyelids.
“Cold?”
“Not if you stay.”
“Hungry?”
“I couldn’t face another anchovy and that’s all we have.”
“We shouldn’t have bought such expensive stuff. It doesn’t quite go with the room, does it?”
“Neither do we,” she said. “Everybody in the house seems to be getting up for work.”
“And here we are: refugees from Westmount. You’ve betrayed your new socialist heritage.”
“You can talk all you want if you let me smell you.”
The cigarettes were crushed. He straightened one out and lit it for her. She blew a mouthful of smoke into the morning.
“Smoking with nothing on is so – so luxurious.”
She shivered over the word. He kissed the nape of her neck and they resumed their idle watch in the window.
“Cold?”
“I’d like to stay for a year,” she said.
“That’s called marriage.”
“Now don’t get all frightened and prickly.”
A very important thing happened.
They caught sight of an old man in an oversize raincoat standing in a doorway across the street, pressed against the door as if he were hiding.
They decided to watch him, just to see what he did.
He leaned forward, looked up and down the street, and satisfied that it was empty, gathered the folds of his raincoat around him like a cape and stepped out on the sidewalk.
Tamara flicked a roll of ashes out the window. It fell like a feather and then disintegrated in the rising wind. Breavman watched the small gesture.
“I can’t stand how beautiful your body is.”
She smiled and leaned her head against his shoulder.
The old man in the swaddling coat kneeled and peered under a parked car. He got up, brushed his knees, and looked around.
The wind moved in her hair, detaching and floating a wisp. She squeezed her arm between them and flicked the butt. He flicked his out too. They fell like tiny doomed parachutists.
Then, as if the butts were a signal, everything began to happen faster.
The sun jelled suddenly between two buildings, intensely darkening the charade of chimneys.
A citizen climbed into his car and drove away.
A cat appeared a few feet from where the old man was standing and crossed in front of him, proud, starved, and muscular. With a flurry of folds the old man leaped after the animal. Effortlessly, the cat changed its direction and softly padded down stone stairs to a cellar entrance. The man coughed and followed, stooped, baffled, and climbed back to the street empty-handed.
They had watched him idly, as people watch water, but now they looked hard.
“You’ve got gooseflesh, Tamara.”
She refastened a wisp of floating hair. He studied her fingers in the exercise. He remembered them on various parts of his body.
He thought he would be content if he were condemned to live that moment over and over for the rest of his life. Tamara naked and young, her fingers weaving a lock of hair. The sun tangled in TV aerials and chimneys. The morning breeze whipping the mist from the mountain. A mysterious old man whose mystery he didn’t care to learn. Why should he go looking for better visions?
He couldn’t make things happen.
In the street the old man was lying on his stomach under the bumper of a car, grasping after a cat he had managed to corner between the kerb and the wheel. He kicked his feet in excitement, trying to get the cat by the hind legs, getting scratched and nipped. He finally succeeded. He extracted the cat from the shadows and held it above his head.
The cat wriggled and convulsed like a pennant in a violent wind.
“My God,” said Tamara. “What’s he doing with it?”
They forgot each other and leaned out the window.
The old man staggered under the struggle of the big cat, his face buried in his chest away from the threshing claws. He regained his footing. Wielding the cat as if it were an axe, his feet spread wide, he brought it down hard against the sidewalk. They could hear the head smash from their window. It convulsed like a landed fish.
Tamara turned her head away.
“What’s he doing now?” she wanted to be told.
“He’s putting it in a bag.”
The old man, kneeling beside the twitching cat, had produced a paper bag from out of his huge coat. He attempted to stuff the cat into it.
“I’m sick,” said Tamara. She was hiding her face against his chest. “Can’t you do something?”
It hadn’t occurred to Breavman that he could intrude into the action.
“Hey you!”
The old man looked up suddenly.
“Oui! Toi!”
The old man stopped short. He looked down at his cat. His hands vibrated in indecision. He fled down the street coughing and empty-handed.
Tamara gurgled. “I’m going to be sick.” She broke for the sink and vomited.
Breavman helped her to the bed.
“Anchovies,” she said.
“You’re shivering. I’ll close the window.”
“Just lie beside me.”
Her body was limp as though it had succumbed to some defeat. It frightened him.
“Maybe we shouldn’t have frightened him off,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“He was going to eat it?”
“Well, we protected our fragile tastes.”
She held him tightly. It was not the kind of embrace he wanted. There was nothing of flesh in it, only hurt.
“We didn’t sleep very much. Try to sleep now.”
“Will you sleep too?”
“Yes. We’re both tired.”
The morning world had been removed from them, the jagged sounds of traffic were beyond the closed window, distant as history. They were two people in a room and there was nothing to watch.
With his hand he soothed her hair and closed her eyelids. He remembered the miniature work of the wind unfastening and floating wisps of hair. A week is a long time.
Her lips trembled.
“Lawrence?”
I know what you’re going to say and I know what I’m going to say and I know what you’re going to say….
“Don’t be mad.”
“No.”
“I love you,” she said simply.
I’ll wait here.
“You don’t have to say anything,” she said.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Will you kiss me?”
He kissed her mouth lightly.
“Are you angry with me?”
“What do you mean?” he lied.
“For what I said. I know it hurts you in some way.”
“No, Tamara, it makes me feel close to you.”
“I’m happy I told you.”
She adjusted her position and moved closer to him, not for sensation but for warmth and protection. He held her tightly, not as mistress, but bereaved child. The room was hot. Sweat on his palms.
Now she was asleep. He made sure she was asleep. Carefully he disengaged himself from her hold. If only she weren’t so beautiful in sleep. How could he run from that body?
He dressed like a thief.
A round sun burned above the sooty buildings. All the parked cars had driven away. A few old men, brooms in hand, stood blinking among the garbage cans. One of them tried to balance the cat’s carcass on a broom handle because he didn’t want to touch it.
Run, Westmount, run.
He needed to put distance between himself and the hot room where he couldn’t make things happen. Why did she have to speak? Couldn’t she have left it alone? The smell of her flesh was trapped in his clothes.
Her body was with him and he let a vision of it argue against his flight.
I am running through a snowfall which is her thighs, he dramatized in purple. Her thighs are filling up the street. Wide as a snowfall, heavy as huge falling Zeppelins, her damp thighs are settling on the sharp roofs and wooden balconies. Weather-vanes press the shape of roosters and sail-boats into the skin. The faces of famous statues are preserved like intaglios….
Then he was thinking of a special pair of thighs in a special room. Commitment was oppressive but the thought of flesh-loneliness was worse.
Tamara was awake when he opened the door. He undressed in a hurry and renewed what he had nearly lost.
“Aren’t you glad you came back?”
For three years Tamara was his mistress, until he was twenty.