“You must think I’m a hopeless idiot to go along with this charade.”
“No. I don’t.”
“You’d have a perfect right to. I have no one to blame but myself.”
Wordless. They sat back on the cushioned seats, as the streetlamps passed. Silent, solitary, eerie, all of it: the driver steering his cab, his face in profile as impassive in the intermittent light as if cut out of sheet metal, the dark kind, hot rolled steel it was called, the frying-pan kind — oh, boy, was he nutty. Swirling thought seeking respite. . The driver steered his curved way along Hudson Street; the cab throbbed south — only a couple of blocks from that same river where he had once thought of killing himself, where the Cunarder now was moored. Or was it? Had it already cast off? The ship moving south toward the harbor’s mouth, Sandy Hook, while they moved south between desolate, unlit tenements. . they were being driven on an excavated street of a buried city. . by an expressionless driver who never turned his head, an Egyptian charioteer, through a necropolis with streetlights on the corners. . Edith continued to weep softly.
“Listen, Edith,” Ira tried to assuage. “You’re an English professor. I mean, you know literature. You’ve come to this situation a hundred times reading about it.” He fumbled, opened his hands to the dark. “You know what I mean?”
“You mean I ought to have been better prepared, and I’m not.”
“Something like that.”
“You’re perfectly right. I ought to have been better prepared. Better prepared by every minute I was with him. But you see I’m not. I wasn’t. Will I be any better prepared when he returns in a few weeks? He’s coming back, as you said. Oh, yes, he has to. With the same needs as before.” She shook her head hopelessly while she let it sink in. “Another’s need becomes my need. Isn’t it ridiculous?”
“Two more blocks,” Ira leaned forward to speak to the driver. “The one after this one, Morton Street.”
“I know it.”
Jesus, did he have that five bucks? Ira felt in his right-hand pocket. Yeah. Hell, he didn’t need it anyway. He had a few bucks of his own, really of hers anyway. Did the driver think he was the culprit? Who the hell knew? “Here it is. Sixty-four is the middle of the block.”
The driver nodded, rounded the corner.
“Right there.”
The cab drew up to the curb. And no sooner did it come to a stop than, unassisted, Edith sprang from car to the sidewalk, and eyes streaming anew, crossed the sidewalk to the house door and disappeared inside.
“What is it, eighty-five cents?” Ira peered at the meter.
“Right.”
“Here’s a dollar. Sorry. . you know.”
“Okay, pal. T’anks.” Curtly spoken as the greenback was pocketed. Up went the meter flag. Ira made for the door. The cab, its engine churning loudly in the empty street, the reeking exhaust visible under the nearby streetlight, squeaked a tire against the curb, rolling away toward the dark bend before Seventh Avenue.
VI
She was stretched out on the gunnysack-covered couch weeping when he entered the floor-lamp-illuminated apartment. She sat up when he came in. And uncertain how to comfort her further, to bring her to quiescence, except by his presence, he dropped into the wicker armchair opposite. His damp handkerchief lay crumpled on top of the chest of drawers — the upper drawer was open, and two or three of her dainty handkerchiefs lay on the couch beside her. “I’ve made a proper fool of myself,” she said. “In all ways. Will you ever forgive me?”
His mind thick with the late hour, he could find little soothing to say: “Oh, sure. Gee. But don’t you give him any credit?”
For once she laughed — shortly: “For helping make me one?”
“No, no, I didn’t mean that!” Jesus, he’d better wake up. “I mean, you’re so sure he’ll never change his mind?”
“Oh, no. That would be more of the same wishful thinking I’ve been guilty of all along, that I’ve been silly enough to indulge in all along. You can be certain that if there is any hope in that direction — and I know there isn’t — Marcia will be here to see that he doesn’t change his mind. As I say, even if he wanted to. And I’m sure he doesn’t. You’re an angel to stand by anyone so stupidly redundant.”
Checked, he’d better shut up. What did he have to offer to people older, smarter, more sophisticated? What did he know about their lives? Only something about Edith’s life: a little something: her affair with Larry, her affair with Lewlyn. He had seen this evening the beautiful, the dramatic parting on board ship. Lucky he hadn’t put his foot in it so far, had gotten by with least betrayal of gaucheness. If she were Stella he’d know what to do. So, say, Stella — what a cinch. Alone, boy. All he had to offer now was a sigh. A forked-tongue sigh: sympathy for her plight — sympathy that melted into contemptible self-satisfaction, because she had lost. A triple-tongued sigh, maybe: that he felt he could take advantage of her plight, as he could have of Minnie, as he easily could of Stella, but now didn’t dare. . Different world, class, everything else different. A grown-up woman. Same old story. How the hell did Larry have the nerve? Now wait a minute. Don’t give up altogether: forlorn, drooping havoc-aftermath, you call it? Small, defeated by perjury: Minnie with a Ph.D., if you made changes — in her, in himself.
She was talking, alternately berating Marcia for the ruin she had wrought in Edith’s chances of marrying Lewlyn, and Lewlyn for his weakness in listening to the wife who had cast him off, railing even at Cecilia, her artfully winsome letters — of a spinster ten years Lewlyn’s senior, desperate to snare him. And to none of it could Ira make any reply. What could he say? Any more than the mirror her eyes sought from time to time could answer. He could sit soberly and listen with pained attention — or half listen — and often understand only half of what we heard.
“I’ve had such rotten luck with men,” she kept repeating. “Yes, I’ve had any number who deared me and darlinged me, but they were either impossible, like Shmuel, or Larry, young and impossible, or Silver City grown-ups, deadly bores, reminiscing till you could scream. Or Boris — I can’t stand him physically, even though I have had to. I think I ought to go jump in a lake.”
“Oh, now, Edith. Gee.”
“That insufferable Tinklepaugh I married so he could finish his doctoral at Berkeley. Oh, dear. My fat cousin Ralph in New Jersey, auto parts salesman, courting me. Wasserman, committing just plain rape. Only that Mexican boy years ago — of course, there was no possibility there, but he was so gentle and tender. And now the only man with whom a marriage would have worked.”
What a strange way of putting it: a marriage would have worked. What had he said to Larry once about his sisters’ marriages? He had translated into English the Yiddish expression gitten shiddekh. And been reproved for it. What subtle distinctions: a marriage would have worked. “But there are others,” he ventured.
“I just don’t have that kind of feminine attraction. The sexual appeal of someone like Louise Bogan that men find so arresting.”
“Oh, I don’t think so.” That was the best he could say to her — at this hour of the night. Jesus, at this hour of the night he’d be apt to say anything: if she were someone else, someone Jewish, he’d flare up, rudely, agree with her sarcastically, put an end to her lachrymose self-decrying. But it wouldn’t be true. Even grief-darkened as her features were, and limp with fatigue her body, she was still so girlishly attractive. But hell, it would be even more ludicrous if he waxed enthusiastic about her sex appeaclass="underline" praised her Elizabethan features, her protrusive brown eyes, the bun of hair at the back of her head, her ankles, her tiny feet, her hourglass waist. Christ, look at the clock, clock over the arched mantelpiece. She’s suffering, sure, suffering, but it’s getting past one-thirty. The very number made his eyelids tacky.