“My girlfriend,” the young soda jerk revived the conversation, “is on Hutchins’s staff of undergraduate assistants. She gets straight A’s. The whole staff is crazy about him.”
The druggist brought to light the familiar small, round container, placed it on the counter, and picked up the dollar with practiced hand. “You want a bag?”
“No wonder, I would be too.”
“Oh, you would?” her escort bantered.
“He’s so young and handsome. He looks like an undergraduate.”
“Huh? A bag? No.” Anything could trip the mind, tense with haste, strung to the highest pitch of hazard. He was sure he had betrayed himself — by their pause, by the druggist’s brief, incurious survey — and tried to compensate by overdeliberate possession of his purchase, neat little round of aluminum, with its Grecian helmeted head stamped on the lid. Stop twitching. Be a Trojan like the crested hero — will you hurry up, already, mister? Let me get outta here. Christ. What I am and what they are, and I go to college too.
He had to abide the transaction though, crowd out, nay, bury their seemliness and decency, their undergraduate, worthy conformity, with makeshift, with frantic mental rubble: my mother gave me a nickel to buy a pickle. I didn’t buy a pickle. I bought some chooing gum. Listen, listen, the cat is pissen. Where, where? Under the chair. He had to abide it: ah, hell, abort it instead. Don’t go back. Leave his damned “An Assessment of U.S. Immigration Quotas” on the Yiddish newspaper. It wasn’t any good anyway. The more he listened to what regular collegians talked about, the more certain he was. Go home. You sap, you’re always getting yourself into these fixes. Oh, Jesus, jams. That’s you, patent it: Stigman’s jams—
“Something else?”
“No.”
“He looks just like Nicholas Murray Butler,” the soda jerk quipped. To laughter.
“You’d have to have a bad case of astigmatism.”
“Twenty-five cents.” With scant smile, mossy dollar bill on the alabaster ledge of the elaborately filigreed brass cash register, the key went down and the flag popped up: 25¢. Keeping the dollar in view, the druggist made change. “That’s fifty,” he laid a quarter on the glass. “And fifty is a dollar.”
Scoop up the change. What shackles could stop him now? Hell, they didn’t know who he was, nor did the druggist. Ira pocketed the silver. So the customer was in a hurry, so — but walk, he’d have to walk out of the store, a dignified six strides — no, less. If he ran out, some dumb cop’d think he was a holdup guy, a holdupnik, as Mamie would say. Jesus, was she still asleep? Anh, you’re wasting your goddamn time, he censured himself. And now he began to run. Faster. Stop thinking. Run. Holdup man. Get shot in the ass with two new condoms in your pocket. New. What else could the druggist sell him? They couldn’t be secondhand. Secondhand condoms — condrums, they called them on 119th Street, the Irish: scum bags. No, no, don’t stop. So gasp. Shot in the ass with two new condoms, just bought, five dollars and seventy-five cents in his pocket, on 112th Street, Mamie’s block. So what would she think happened to the dollar she gave him? It grew. And Mom? And Pop? And the mishpokha, too. Jesus, dead giveaway. Yeah, dead — and giveaway. One kid, one only kid that my father bought for two zuzim, khad gadyo, khad gadyo.
Panting, he dashed into the flyer. Stop. Stop. Stop. Hold it. That’s what you get from smoking. No wind. No, that’s all right. At least grab your term paper: you forgot it, see? Say, if Jonas is there — no, he couldn’t be home yet. But say he is. Hello, Jonas, you know what? There it is, there it is. Right on Der Tag where I left it: right on the washtub. Boy, was I dumb. .
His breathlessness of a moment before strangely converted into long, momentous heaving of chest as he climbed the flight of stairs to Mamie’s floor, halted before the apartment’s dull red lead-painted, metal-sheathed door. Here goes. He reviewed his alibis — like loading a weapon. Wait! If Jonas had come, the door would be locked. For once he was smart. Why wasn’t he smart this way always? The door would be locked, and Jonas would be asking Stella why wasn’t it locked when he came home? But maybe she had already ducked into bed beside Hannah. She didn’t know from nothin’. Blame Ira when he left. But if the door wasn’t locked — let’s go.
The door wasn’t locked, the tongue still back, held by its catch. The hallway was dark — until where lit at the other end by the kitchen light. Who the hell knew: anybody there and who? He was in deep, deep danger now. Boy. Holding the bolt, he quietly raised the tongue. . into its catch. You’re in deep danger now, boy. No, he could still bluff it out with the forgotten term paper. Come in as if looking for it, grab it — he tiptoed past Zaida’s bedroom. And ah — still the momentum of the ruse, he snatched up the term paper, stowed it. . safely. . in breast pocket, all the while his eyes fixed on Stella seated at the table in green bathrobe, before her an open movie magazine. Her lips were parted, expectant, waiting. He pointed at the bedroom door, behind which Mamie lay; it was exactly, barely ajar as he remembered leaving it. Stella nodded, docile, expectant. Sound of Mamie’s breathing filled the kitchen — Ira leaned toward it a moment, listening with sharpened ears, heard the reassuring snore, stertorous, he thought, regular, impervious, rough with weariness. He beckoned, eyes and head. Boy. Stella arose softly, approached, shallow blue-green eyes in trance, and blond and still humid, entered his embrace, to his swift, imperious pawings, and ruthless signals of his will. He retracted the little tin, displayed it a fraction of a second: it would have to explain all, his going, his absence, his errand — and it did, for when he opened it, she tittered.
“Turn around.” He armed his piece. “Bend over,” he pressed compliant shoulders. “Wow.” He couldn’t restrain exultation altogether, at least vent that whisper of gratified vision: of orbital womanly spinnaker unfurled. Unfurled from the release of the green toweling of bathrobe wings, cupped, sleek, ballooning vans of fulfillment. The brain scintillated. Hoist. She weighed a wisp, she lost gravity to furor.
“O-o-oh, Ira!”
“Sh!”
“O-o-oh, Ira, o-o-oh, Ira!”
“Shut up!” Ram-pant. Ra-a-m. Ram, ram, rampant Lions of Judah, gold Lions of Judah on sapphire ground guarding the Torah. Ram-ram-ram, tikyoo, tikyoo. Sound the shofar. Tikeeyoo, matryoo.
“Ooooh, Ira, ooooh, Ira, ooooh!”
To that last lustful gasp. Breathless both, they separated. Green curtain fell on plump, adolescent rump, too soon, even as he took up cudgel for composure, buttoning up with all celerity. “All right?” he asked her as she turned around.
And received her assent in lambent, pale blue-green eyes.
“Boy, that was good,” he breathed in the wake of rapture. “You better get in bed. I’m going to sneak out.” For the first time he felt a truly tender impulse toward her, toward Stella. He kissed her — on not so sweetly exhaling lips. “G’bye.”
She smiled, girlishly, uncertainly appreciative. “Bye-bye.”
A last swift glance at the bedroom door reassured him: all unchanged. Mamie’s regular burr of breath rasping out of the dark. Safe. Safe all around. Get rid of his “safety” sticking to him, peel it off as soon as outdoors. Stella had already started toward the front room, and he in the opposite direction to the apartment door at the end of the hall. On the very point of raising the balls of his feet to tiptoe, when he heard it — he heard it: bedspring noise, bed creak, groan, and electric-switch button click all at once. And crack of light under Zaida’s door. Jesus Christ! Ira wavered. He’d never beat it out before the old man opened the door. Tell Zaida he’d dozed off? No! No! Ira retreated. Tiptoes, tip toe, Jesus, like a ballet dancer, back to kitchen-light. Pretend to read Yiddish still? Zaida’s door opened, and a terrifying slab of incandescence toppled sinisterly from the room across the narrow passage of hall. God Almighty! He bumped into Stella.