The Favorite Game

by Leonard Cohen

  “Stay. Please.”

  She ran to me and we hugged. The texture of her clothes felt funny against my skin. She wet my neck and cheek with tears.

  “We haven’t the time to hurt each other,” she whispered.

  “Don’t cry.”

  “We can’t tire of one another.”

  During her grief I got hold of myself again. I’ve noted many times during my life that only when faced with extremes of emotion in others can I confirm my own stability. Her grief restored me, made me manly and compassionate.

  I led her to the bed.

  “You are beautiful,” I said. “You always will be.”

  Soon she fell asleep in my arms. Her body was heavier than it had been. She seemed laden and swollen with sorrow. I dreamed of a huge cloak thrown on my shoulders from a weeping man in a flying cart.

  In the morning she had left, as usual, before I awakened.

  Tamara read it carefully.

  “But I don’t talk that way,” she said softly.

  “Neither do I,” said Breavman.

  The act of writing had been completed when he handed her the manuscript. He no longer felt ownership.

  “But you do, Larry. You talk like both characters.”

  “All right, I talk like both characters.”

  “Please don’t get angry. I’m trying to understand why you wrote it.”

  They were lying in the eternal room on Stanley Street. The fluorescent lights across the street provided moonlight.

  “I don’t care why I wrote it. I just wrote it, that’s all.”

  “And gave it to me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? You knew it would hurt me.”

  “You’re supposed to be interested in my work.”

  “Oh, Larry, you know that I am.”

  “Well, that’s why I gave it to you.”

  “We don’t seem to be able to talk.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Nothing.”

  The silence began. The bed became like a prison surrounded by electric wires. He couldn’t get off it or even move. He was gnawed by the notion that this was where he belonged, right on this bed, bandaged with silence. It was what he deserved, all he was fit for.

  He told himself that he should just open his mouth and speak. Simple. Just say words. Break up the silence with any remark. Talk about the story. If only he could assault the silence. Then they could make warm and friendly love and talk like strangers right up to morning.

  “Was it to tell me that you want to end it between us?”

  She’s made a brave attempt. Now I must try to answer her. I’ll tell her I wanted to challenge her love with a display of venom. She’ll say, Oh that’s what I wanted to hear, and she’ll hug me to prove that the venom failed.

  All I have to do is force open my teeth, operate the hinges of my jaw, vibrate vocal chords. One word will do it. One word will wedge into the silence and split it open.

  “Just try to say something, Larry. I know it’s hard.”

  Any noise, Breavman, any noise, any noise, any noise.

  Using his brain like a derrick, he lifted his twenty-ton hand and lowered it on her breast. He sent his fingers through buttonholes. Her skin made the tips of his fingers warm. He loved her for being warm.

  “Oh, come here,” she said.

  They undressed as if they were being chased. He tried to make up for his silence with his tongue and teeth. She had to put his face gently away from her nipple. He praised her loins with a conversation of moans.

  “Please say something this time.”

  He knew if he touched her face he would feel tears. He lay still. He didn’t think he ever wanted to move again. He was ready to stay that way for days, catatonic.

  She moved to touch him and her motion released him like a spring. This time she didn’t stop him. She resigned herself to his numbness. He said everything he could with his body.

  They lay quietly.

  “Do you feel O.K.?” he said, and suddenly he was talking his head off.

  He rehearsed all his plans for obscure glory and they laughed. He told her poems and they decided he was going to be great. She pitied him for his courage as he described the demons on his shoulders.

  “Get away, you dirty old things.” She kissed his neck.

  “Some on my stomach, too.”

  After a while Tamara fell asleep. That was what he had been talking against. Her sleeping seemed like a desertion. It always happened when he felt most awake. He was ready to make immortal declarations.

  Her hand rested on his arm like snow on a leaf, ready to slip off when he moved.

  He lay beside her, an insomniac with visions of vastness. He thought of desert stretches so huge no Chosen People could cross them. He counted grains of sand like sheep and he knew his job would last forever. He thought of aeroplane views of wheatlands so high he couldn’t see which way the wind was bending the stalks. Arctic territories and sled-track distances.

  Miles he would never cover because he could never abandon this bed.

  12

  Still Breavman and Krantz often used to drive through the whole night. They’d listen to pop tunes on the local stations or classics from the United States. They’d head north to the Laurentians or east to the Townships.

  Breavman imagined the car they were in as seen from above. A small black pellet hurtling across the face of the earth. Free as a meteor and maybe as doomed.

  They fled past fields of blue snow. The icy crust kept a stroke of moonlight the way rippled water does. The heater was going full blast. They had nowhere to be in the morning, only lectures and that didn’t count. Everything above the snow was black — trees, shacks, whole villages.

  Moving at that speed they were not bound to anything. They could sample all the possibilities. They flashed by trees that took a hundred years to grow. They tore through towns where men lived their whole lives. They knew the land was old, the mountains the most ancient on earth. They covered it all at eighty miles an hour.

  There was something disdainful in their speed, disdainful of the eons it took the mountains to smooth out, of the generations of muscle which had cleared the fields, of the labour which had gone into the modern road they rolled on. They were aware of the disdain. The barbarians must have ridden Roman highways with the same feeling. We have the power now. Who cares what went before?

  And there was something frightened in their speed. Back in the city their families were growing like vines. Mistresses were teaching a sadness no longer lyrical but claustrophobic. The adult community was insisting that they choose an ugly particular from the range of beautiful generalities. They were flying from their majority, from the real bar mitzvah, the real initiation, the real and vicious circumcision which society was hovering to inflict through limits and dull routine.

  They spoke gently to the French girls in the diners where they stopped. They were so pathetic, false-toothed and frail. They’d forget them in the next twenty miles. What were they doing behind the Arborite counters? Dreaming of Montreal neon?

  The highway was empty. They were the only two in flight and that knowledge made them deeper friends than ever. It elated Breavman. He’d say, “Krantz, all they’ll ever find of us is a streak of oil on the garage floor without even rainbows in it.” Lately Krantz had been very silent, but Breavman was certain he was thinking the same things. Everyone they knew or who loved them was sleeping miles behind the exhaust. If the radio music was rock-and-roll, they understood the longing of it; if it was Handel, they understood the majesty.

  At some point in these rides Breavman would proposition himself like this: Breavman, you’re eligible for many diverse experiences in this best of all possible worlds. There are many beautiful poems which you will write and be praised for, many desolate days when you won’t be able to lay pen to paper. There will be many lovely cunts to lie in, different colours of skin to kiss, various orgasms to encounter, and many nights you will walk out you
r lust, bitter and alone. There will be many heights of emotion, intense sunsets, exalting insights, creative pain, and many murderous plateaux of indifference where you won’t even own your personal despair. There will be many good hands of power you can play with ruthlessness or benevolence, many vast skies to lie under and congratulate yourself on humility, many galley rides of suffocating slavery. This is what waits for you. Now, Breavman, here is the proposition. Let us suppose that you could spend the rest of your life exactly as you are at this very minute, in this car hurtling towards brush country, at this precise stop on the road beside a row of white guide posts, always going past these posts at eighty, this juke-box song of rejection pumping, this particular sky of clouds and stars, your mind including this immediate cross-section of memory — which would you choose? Fifty-more years of this car ride, or fifty more of achievement and failure?

  And Breavman never hesitated in his choice.

  Let it go on as it is right now. Let the speed never diminish. Let the snow remain. Let me never be removed from this partnership with my friend. Let us never find different things to do. Let us never evaluate one another. Let the moon stay on one side of the road. Let the girls be a gold blur in my mind, like the haze of the moon, or the neon glow above the city. Let the compounded electric guitar keep throbbing under the declaration:

  When I lost my baby

  I almost lost my mind.

  Let the edges of the hills be just about to brighten. Let the trees never fuzz with leaves. Let the black towns sleep in one long night like Lesbia’s lover. Let the monks in the half-built monasteries remain on their knees in the 4 A.M. Latin prayer. Let Pat Boone stand on the highest rung of the Hit Parade and tell all the factory night shifts:

  I went to see the gypsy

  To have my fortune read.

  Let snow always dignify the auto graveyards on the road to Ayer’s Cliff. Let the nailed shacks of apple vendors never show polished apples and hints of cider.

  But let me remember what I remember of orchards. Let me keep my tenth of a second’s worth of fantasy and recollection, showing all the layers like a geologist’s sample. Let the Caddie or the VW run like a charm, let it go like a bomb, let it blast. Let the tune make the commercial wait forever.

  I can tell you, people,

  The news was not so good.

  The news is great. The news is sad but it’s in a song so it’s not so bad. Pat is doing all my poems for me. He’s got lines to a million people. It’s all I wanted to say. He’s distilled the sorrow, glorified it in an echo chamber. I don’t need my typewriter. It’s not the piece of luggage I suddenly remembered I forgot. No pencils, ball-pens, pad. I don’t even want to draw in the mist on the windshield. I can make up sagas in my head all the way to Baffin Island but I don’t have to write them down. Pat, you’ve snitched my job, but you’re such a good guy, old-time American success, naïve big winner, that it’s okay. The PR men have convinced me that you are a humble kid. I can’t resent you. My only criticism is: be more desperate, try and sound more agonized or we’ll have to get a Negro to replace you:

  She said my baby’s left me

  And she’s gone for good.

  Don’t let the guitars slow down like locomotive wheels. Don’t let the man at CKVL tell me what I’ve just been listening to. Sweet sounds, reject me not. Let the words go on like the landscape we’re never driving out of.

  gone for good

  O.K., let the last syllable endure. This is the tenth of a second I’ve traded all the presidencies for. The telephone poles are playing intricate games of Cat’s Cradle with the rushing wires. The snow is piled like the Red Sea on either side of our fenders. We’re not expected and we’re not missed. We put all our money in the gas tank, we’re fat as camels in the Sahara. The hurtling car, the trees, the moon and its light on the fields of snow, the resigned grinding chords of the tune — everything is poised in perfection for the quick freeze, the eternal case in the astral museum.

  good

  So long, mister, mistress, rabbi, doctor. ’Bye. Don’t forget your salesman’s bag of adventure samples. My friend and I, we’ll stay right here — on our side of the speed limit. Won’t we, Krantz, won’t we, Krantz, won’t we, Krantz?

  “Want to stop for a hamburger?” says Krantz as though he were musing on an abstract theory.

  “Now or one of these days?”

  13

  Breavman and Tamara were white. Everybody else on the beach had a long summer tan. Krantz was positively bronze.

  “I feel extra naked,” said Tamara, “as if I had taken off a layer of skin with my clothes. I wish they’d take off theirs.”

  They relaxed on the hot sand while Krantz supervised the General Swim. He sat on a white-painted wooden tower, megaphone in one hand, whistle in the other.

  The water was silver with thrashing bodies. His whistle pierced the cries and laughter and suddenly the waterfront was silent. At his command the campers paired off, lifting their joined hands out of the water at their turns.

  Then, in succession, the counsellors posted along the docks snapped, “Check!” A hundred and fifty children kept still. The safety check over, Krantz blew his whistle again and the general din was resumed.

  Krantz in the role of disciplinarian surprised Breavman. He knew Krantz had worked many summers at a children’s camp, but he always thought of him (now that he examined it) as one of the children, or let’s say, the best child, devising grand nocturnal tricks, first figure of a follow-the-leader game through the woods.

  But here he was, master of the beach, bronze and squint-eyed, absolute. Children and water obeyed him. Stopping and starting the noise and laughter and splashing with the whistle blast, Krantz seemed to be cutting into the natural progression of time like a movie frozen into a single image and then released to run again. Breavman had never suspected him of that command.

  Breavman and Tamara were city-white, and it separated them from the brown bodies as if they were second-rate harmless lepers.

  Breavman was surprised to discover on Tamara’s thigh a squall of tiny gold hairs. Her black hair was loose and the intense sun picked out metallic highlights.

  It wasn’t just that they were white — they were white together, and their whiteness seemed to advertise some daily unclean indoor ritual which they shared.

  “When the Negroes take over,” Breavman said, “this is the way we’re going to feel all the time.”

  “But isn’t Krantz marvellous?”

  They both stared at him, as if for the first time.

  Perhaps it was this curious fracturing of time of Krantz’s whistle that removed Breavman into the slow-motion movie which was always running somewhere in his mind.

  He is watching himself from a long way off. The whistle has silenced the water-play. Even the swallows seem motionless, poised, pinned at the top of ladders of air.

  This part of the film is overexposed. It hurts his eyes to remember but he loves to stare.

  Overexposed and double-exposed. The Laurentian summer sun is behind every image, turning one to silhouette, 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 annih
ilate 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

  Tamara 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.

  15

  Breavman 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.”