So what is truth? said jesting Pilate. And would not stop for answer, said Francis Bacon. Yeah. Ira paused to scratch an eyebrow. Sometimes as he typed, countenances merged, or persons merged. There were times when he thought it was M he was lying so scrupulously separated from by the width of the bed. Not Edith. Because after a while the separation, that separation, ceased to exist — with Edith. And became the same kind of intimacy he had known with M, and still did, even five years after her death. With Edith, there was understandably not the same kind of treasured intimacy as with M, but real intimacy — over a long period of time, an entire decade. Yeah. Where was all this leading to? Why had he begun by saying, What is truth? said jesting Pilate. Not because he had been talking about a pilot, and the echo lingered. No. And why the merging of persons, the intrusion of one period on another, of youth retracting on age? Was his own mind beginning to become cloudy, become blurred with senescence? No, he didn’t think so. He had been listening to a microtape the other day, the kind of tape, or tape recorder, he used to eavesdrop, and this particular tape had been enclosed in a plastic case on which he had written the word: listen.
Listen. He wrote that, or some other warning sometimes, to keep himself from absentmindedly erasing the tape on behalf of some immediate matter that had come up. And he was fortunate he did listen. The tape was worth preserving, preserving in the original. He had had, as Edith remarked about men, rotten luck when it came to duplicating these small tapes (which were relatively expensive) onto the cheaper larger cassettes. What was the cause of the ill luck he didn’t know, wasn’t expert enough to tell. When he listened to the same tape with earphones — he had a very fine though painfully binding headset, almost vise-tight earphones — he heard all that was audible with great clarity. When he tried transferring the tape via patchcord to another, the results were extremely disappointing: all gravelly, speech drowned in gravelly growling, almost as bad as those ancient days on 119th Street, when the coal that each denizen of the tenement bought to be stored in his own cellar bin roared down in a steel chute from truck to sidewalk manhole through a conduit to the cellar below; and waiting for it to pour out of the conduit stood the Irish navvy with streaked visage and bushel basket. (Homeric, the way men toiled in those days, days not so very long ago.) So Ira had heeded the injunction and listened to the microtape. Ah, what is truth? said jesting Pilate. Or do you simply let the statement, Bacon’s epigram, overlap with “All’s fair in love and war”? The common, coarse expression was — stable talk, the well-bred would call it — blowing one’s nuts. Lewlyn had to blow his nuts (glands, he would term them); Ira had to blow his nuts. What male adult didn’t have to? And all’s fair in love and war.
Ira then did as he had instructed himself, he listened, eavesdropped on the old tape. The year, the year was about 1979, or perhaps the year before. And the place was where he and M and Lewlyn, having aged over fifty years, were having their lunch; it was — judging from the voices of youngsters that seemed to come from the immediate surroundings — and judging from the context — a small picnic area off the road to Jemez Springs. The road was opposite an abandoned copper mine, which geophysicist son Jess had previously prospected, bringing back a few specimens.
Why did one feel that peculiar bitterness? Was it truly bitterness? Difficult to decide what the feeling was, this feeling of listening, not to a voice of the distant past, but to one evoking the distant past. And not only that, but rectifying impressions one had of that past, correcting, giving form to one’s fuzziness, giving it substance, as he said, definition.
Perhaps the demonstration of his woeful mental inadequacy (at least, his lack of social sophistication, “gentle breeding”) contributed as much to his sense of bitterness as anything else: that he should have been thrown into a milieu that he only scarcely understood, had so little foundation for understanding, so little familiarity with, and so slow an intelligence to comprehend. The reality, this small sample of it, made even more glaring the contrast between what occurred and what he grasped, between the complexity of the actuality and the mote he grasped. Of necessity his interpretation was — and still remained — simplistic. And realization pari passu with that. . trailing the awareness of the extent to which his abnormal adolescence, his more than usually stricken adolescence, his distorted, cramped, deformed assessments, his judgment of events and circumstances that even with his limited faculties and slum rearing he might otherwise have perceived — and recalled — to a greater degree than he did. One had to make the best of it, peg the trophies of fancy to a few authentic memories.
Begin anywhere, skip anything. There would still be enough left over, enough obtained to provide some indication of the nature of the protagonists, the workings of their minds, the interaction of their personalities. In fact, it occurred to Ira, given his traditions, his warped growth, upbringing, outlook — and theirs — no other way was open to him than to resort to the impersonal, the fictional as transmuted by time, the “electronic” evidence, not only to adjust his portrayal, his interpretation of other characters, but his own as well, inescapably, out of reach of the scribe’s gentle mitigations.
Yow! Didn’t those earphones hurt! They must have been manufactured at the very acme of the tight, heavily padded set — before the lighter, more comfortable ones were introduced. They muffled outside noises better than those made to be worn on a rifle range. “We were abstinent until the time of our marriage,” Lewlyn’s words continued sounding outside the earphones. “We were very, very careful.” That was a tough one, Ira reflected: put yourself in the man’s place. What would you have done? Aye. Not with Stella — that was somehow too easy. No moral problem. Just an old habit. It had been the same with Minnie, if such a situation were possible. Neither of them meant, would have meant for either one, more than the most transient emotional surrender; no, not even that, so well understood it was, even when Minnie had been tenderest toward him — it wasn’t possible. Understood, understood. And the same thing was true with Stella. Ah, but what if it had been Dorothy? Dorothy in L.A. years later, the year he had pledged his troth, declared his love for M, his intention to marry her? Supposing Dorothy had come out to L.A. to stay with her father, Bill Loem, when Ira had fled out there with him in order to break his dependence on Edith? A dozen years later in the narrative he had to tell. Fortunately Dorothy was in New York, freckled, unlettered, working-class Dorothy. So not even that would have been fair test; he didn’t know what would have been. But he was lucky anyway; he was lucky anyway: six months without a woman. So don’t judge, Ira thought. And yet, how unconsciously the man would apply one set of rules to Cecilia, the woman he came to love, and at the earliest, to marry, and another to Edith, whom he was to leave. “We were very, very careful,” he said: careful. And the word he had used to describe the degree of their self-imposed reserve, “abstinent,” wasn’t quite apropos in this context. Oh, this was picayune on your part, niggling, Ira censured himself. But then, he was inescapably the literary guy: “abstinent” was not the most appropriate word he could have used — oh, it would do, it would do — better than “celibate.” But the word Lewlyn should have chosen was “continent.” They were continent.
Ira awoke once during the little that was left of the night, awoke to see Edith’s drawn face in the crumbling dark turned toward him — and she must have seen that he was awake and conscious of her gaze — for the face stamped on the brayed gloom seemed indurate with censure — or scorn — or contempt. He felt himself shrink away placatingly: apologizing for sharing the same bed with her, without proffering the ultimate comfort she craved and needed. How puerile could he be not to be aroused by her proximity, not to turn toward her with a hard-on? That was how he construed her gaze. . even though he attempted in the short interval between her daunting look and the time he rolled over sheepishly and fell asleep to interpret her severity with a palliating excuse: it was the manifestation of the fierce grudge she held against all men because of her resentment of Lewlyn. Still, instinct prompted, albeit fuzzily, that he was kidding himself. She wanted to be laid, needed to be laid as a kind of solace against the overwhelming rejection she had suffered. It had been that which had impelled him to his tentative-bold act of staying with her the night. Instinct in him told him that, but how to muster a hard-on for an adult woman, for a real lady, when libido, except for a single encounter with a black streetwalker, had functioned only with minors, only in a milieu of stealth and guilt? It was easy to persuade himself his instincts were wrong.