Let us study one more shadow.
He was heading towards Côte des Neiges. Patricia was sleeping back at his room on Stanley, profound sleep of isolation, her red hair fallen on her shoulders as if arranged by a Botticelli wind.
He could not help thinking that she was too beautiful for him to have, that he wasn’t tall enough or straight, that people didn’t turn to look at him in street-cars, that he didn’t command the glory of the flesh.
She deserved someone, an athlete perhaps, who moved with a grace equal to hers, exercised the same immediate tyranny of beauty in face and limb.
He met her at a cast party. She had played the lead in Hedda Gabler. A cold bitch, she’d done it well, all the ambition and vine leaves. She was as beautiful as Shell, Tamara, one of the great. She was from Winnipeg.
“Do they have Art in Winnipeg?”
Later on that night they walked up Mountain Street. Breavman showed her an iron fence which hid in its calligraphy silhouettes of swallows, rabbits, chipmunks. She opened fast to him. She told him she had an ulcer. Christ, at her age.
“How old are you?”
“Eighteen. I know you’re surprised.”
“I’m surprised you can be that calm and live with whatever it is that’s eating your stomach.”
But something had to pay for the way she moved, her steps like early Spanish music, her face which acted above pain.
He showed her curious parts of the city that night. He tried to see his eighteen-year-old city again. Here was a wall he had loved. There was a crazy filigree doorway he wanted her to see, but when they approached he saw the building had been torn down.
“Où sont les neiges?” he said theatrically.
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.
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.