another to shining jelly transparency.
The diver is Krantz. Here he is folded in a jackknife in the air above the water, half silver, half black. The splash rises slowly around the disappearing feet like feathers out of a black crater.
A cheer goes up from the children as he climbs up on the dock. All his movements have an intensity, the smallest gesture a quality of power, close-up size. The children surround him and try to touch his wet shoulders.
“But isn’t Krantz marvellous?”
Now Krantz is running toward his friends, sand sticking to his soles. He is smiling a welcome.
Now Tamara is not touching Breavman, she had been lying close to him, but now nothing of her is touching.
She stands automatically and Krantz’s eyes and her eyes, they invade the screen and change from welcome to surprise to question to desire — here the picture is stopped dead and pockmarked by suns — and now they annihilate all the bodies on the sand, for an enduring fraction they are rushing only to each other.
The swallows fall naturally and the ordinary chaos returns as Krantz laughs.
“It’s about time you people paid me a visit.”
The three of them hugged and talked wildly.
14
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 andthey 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.
15
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 agesof 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
The diver is Krantz. Here he is folded in a jackknife in the air above the water, half silver, half black. The splash rises slowly around the disappearing feet like feathers out of a black crater.
A cheer goes up from the children as he climbs up on the dock. All his movements have an intensity, the smallest gesture a quality of power, close-up size. The children surround him and try to touch his wet shoulders.
“But isn’t Krantz marvellous?”
Now Krantz is running toward his friends, sand sticking to his soles. He is smiling a welcome.
Now Tamara is not touching Breavman, she had been lying close to him, but now nothing of her is touching.
She stands automatically and Krantz’s eyes and her eyes, they invade the screen and change from welcome to surprise to question to desire — here the picture is stopped dead and pockmarked by suns — and now they annihilate all the bodies on the sand, for an enduring fraction they are rushing only to each other.
The swallows fall naturally and the ordinary chaos returns as Krantz laughs.
“It’s about time you people paid me a visit.”
The three of them hugged and talked wildly.
14
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 andthey 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.
15
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 agesof 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
Similar Books
