Free The Favorite Game by Leonard Cohen Page B

seconds it took until a line of blood appeared on his cheek.
    Then they hugged to repair everything.
    When she was inside she put her mouth to the window of the door and they kissed through the glass. He wanted her to go first and she wanted him to go first. He hoped his back looked good.
    C’mon, everybody! He exulted as he marched home, newest member of the adult community. Why weren’t all the sleepers hanging out of their windows cheering? Didn’t they admire his ritual of love and deceit? He visited his park, stood on the nursery hill and looked over the city to the grey river. He was finally involved with the sleepers, the men who went to work, the buildings, the commerce.
    Then he threw stones at Krantz’s window because he didn’t want to go to bed.
    “Steal a car, Krantz. Chinese soup time.”
    Breavman told everything in three minutes and then they drove in silence. He leaned his head against the window glass expecting it to be cool, but it wasn’t.
    “I know why you’re depressed. Because you told me.”
    “Yes. I dishonoured it twice.”
    It was worse than that. He wished he loved her, it must be so nice to love her, and to tell her, not once or five times, but over and over, because he knew he was going to be with her in rooms for a long time.
    Then what about rooms, wasn’t every room the same, hadn’t he known what it would be like, weren’t all the rooms they passed exactly the same, wherever a woman was stretched out, even a forest was a glass room, wasn’t it like with Lisa, under the bed and when they played the Soldier and the Whore, wasn’t it the same, even to the listening for enemy sounds?
    He told the story again, six years later, to Shell, but he didn’t dishonour it that time. Once, when he went away from Shell for a little while, he wrote her this:
    “I think that if Elijah’s chariot, or Apollo’s, or any mythical boat of the sky, should pull up at my doorstep, I would know exactly where to sit, and as we flew I’d recall with delicious familiarity all the clouds and mysteries we passed.”

9

    T amara 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