“No, I could have gone home.”
“Then what do you mean? Not that I don’t appreciate your staying.”
“I saw something beautiful, and you had to pay a lot for it. So you hated me.”
“Oh, fiddlesticks!”
“Didn’t you stare at me during the night?”
“I may have. I may have wondered what the strange man was doing in my bed.”
“Oh, was that it? You didn’t hate me because I caused it? I didn’t help you afterward.” He gesticulated.
“Caused what?”
“All you suffered last night.”
“Heavens, child! Caused it? You stood by me magnificently. No, because of what I cause. You are the strangest lad!” The face above the checked bathrobe became businesslike. “I’ve got to run.” And as an afterthought, plucking a dress of bronze lozenges from the closet, before she entered the bathroom: “The cause is my playing a role, that’s the cause. Trying to extract a very little beauty on false pretenses — from a hopeless situation. That can be very costly emotionally. But I really believe I learned this time.” The bathroom door closed.
Beauty. Beauty. Beauty. They were always talking about it. Ira munched toast and marmalade. He knew what a beautiful statue was, or thought he did, music, a poem, a picture, yeah, even like a few times in the country, in Woodstock, when the dirt road curved out of sight a certain way, or streams of light came through the mountains like the swirls of amber seashells. Yeah, and the ship too on the dark water amid all the lights. And that scene of the two lovers parting, gee whiz: as if parting forever. That could be beautiful. He understood that. But as soon as he tried to concentrate on why it was beautiful, the thought sailed away, flew off in all directions, like a dandelion when you puffed on it. He became drowsy. Jesus, he was drowsy. Beauty. Beauty. Beauty. Hell, what was tragedy all about? Romeo and Juliet, which he didn’t like: it gushed with amorous sentiment. And all he had ever known was hardly beauty, but that sordid exaltation of years past of slipping the little brass nipple of the lock — up! And fast as you could into Minnie’s dingy bedroom. Was that beautiful? Or Stella sliding down with parted thighs on his hard-on. Or back-scuttling her, hoisting her up while the radio band blared dance music live from the ballroom of the Commodore Hotel.
As the keyboard played its melody, every sense became an antenna. See? You’re cracked. The only guy who came that close was Joyce. But even he didn’t come anywhere near that close: to beauty of fear, beauty of furtiveness, of sordidness. The guy was afraid to venture, afraid of the shock, of real terror. There was something phony about the way that Bloom agonized at two o’clock in the afternoon, or whenever it was that Blazes Boylan gave Molly the business. His agonizing was bullshit. If it was that tough, he would have interfered — long before. But hell, if he was a Jew, and he was, he would have talked about it to her, gone to a medico. Found some other way if they still loved each other. Naah. The guy who was so interested in finding out how far into the marble the statue’s nates went was Jimmy Joyce, the timid harp. Not the semi-demi-hemi half-assed Yiddle of his invention — cut it out. He was getting somewhere.
Edith came out of the bathroom, fully attired, groomed, her bronze dress blanching her olive skin by contrast, her delicate lips rouged, and forced into a smile, her face still piqued and strained. She seemed unwilling to speak, beyond essentials. “Would you help me pull the bed up?. . Don’t bother with the dishes.” She took a last sip of cold coffee, looked up at the mirror, and ran a tiny fingertip over her large eyelids, made a hopeless moue. No, she didn’t want Ira to escort her to the university. Unseemly — the thought crossed his mind — to be seen at such an early hour leaving the house together. No need to. It was a fair morning, although cool; she let him help her into her dark, satiny jacket. And yes, here was Lewlyn’s set of keys. Ira could have them: the door had to be locked from the outside.
“You’re welcome to stay as long as you please,” she said. “And if the phone rings, just ignore it.” Her utterly sober face in black cloche hat, she tugged the lapel of his jacket and kissed him. “Please call me in the next few days.”
“All right.”
She opened the apartment door to leave. How gamely she braced her shoulders back, tightened her lips, lifted her chin, took a fresh grip of her briefcase handle. Boy, that took courage. Without effort he noted her behavior those last seconds: the petite woman resolutely determined to meet the world. She shut the door behind her, and he was suddenly aware of a shamefaced admiration for her. Could he have behaved with such resolve after what she had been through? He was relieved he wasn’t called on to prove himself, wasn’t put to the test. He would certainly have failed. Even now, all his inclinations called for a nap, right there on the gunnycloth-covered bed. But better get home, he told himself, before Mom started to worry. Get home and have another breakfast — and a real nap. His eyes were like some kind of synchronized device, one eyelid closing as he forced the other open. Wash the few plates and coffee cups on the card table. That would be a decent gesture. He picked up the few breakfast things, took them to the small sink in the kitchenette, rinsed them, soaped and again rinsed them, placed them on the drainer.
Well, there could be no mistaking now: enough time had elapsed to break any connection between her leaving the house and his, if that was what she wanted. She must have crossed Washington Square Park by now. He could just see her advancing with quick step and with fixed, unhappy expression on her face, hurrying toward the off-white administration building, and now and then having to smile mechanically at a student or colleague. God, what they didn’t know.
VII
And suddenly another memory came floating back, memory to the man at the keyboard before the amber monitor: not of the woman in the black cloche hat, whom he had genuinely loved for a time, whose image, wraithlike, was receding, like Eurydice’s, back to an underworld he had once inhabited, but of his wife in Maine, in Montville, M in the Army-Navy surplus-store coveralls Ira had bought her while he worked as a toolmaker for Keystone Camera Co., near Boston. This more enduring image came flooding back, his tall, cheerful, brave wife in her khaki coveralls, leaving the warmth of the house for the frigid outdoors, carrying milk pail in gloved hand (who had to teach herself to milk, for the sake of their two boys, because no stores were nigh in that rural countryside her husband had brought her to). And returning to the warmth of the kitchen again, chilled, nose white and cheeks rose — chilled in her khaki coveralls, with not too much milk in pail, for the cow was nearing the end of her cycle, and needed breeding again, needed a calf, which as it turned out she never could have — for some reason — as the Yankee neighbor knew, who moved away after he sold the animaclass="underline" a true Yankee trader. He had been married to her for fifty years, fifty years plus four months. He had to say it again, fifty years. Was it not a wondrous thing, the pioneer courage of M’s New England tradition, her fortitude, her fidelity?
The five years that had intervened since her death seemed so agonizingly slow, as if time were suspended, not allowed to proceed in a normal sort of way. He could, with the flick of a key, recall her voice, her intonation, the subtlety of her logic. He recalled the time he had become, despite her calming protestations, so very upset, the very evening after they moved into the apartment that housed them during their stint in Mexico, when the superabundance of cucarachas, roaches, big enough to throw a saddle over, as the old quip goes, roaches big, brown, and ubiquitous, filled the new household. They epitomized all that was vile, hideous, in childhood spent on the East Side, but even more so, early boyhood and youth spent in Harlem, spent living on 119th Street. So much that had become nasty and hateful to him about those early years of his life seemed closely associated with scurrying roaches, roaches, by the way, not half the size of these, ever lurking in some crevice despite Mom’s constant forays against them. He hated them worse than he did bedbugs — or even lice. After nearly ninety years, there still remained in memory the image of a doomed roach spreading his glistening outer shell to bring into play his billion-year-atrophied, gauzy wings in vain attempt to escape the sole of his pursuer’s shoe. Ha, the bastard, how could he keep from exulting when he heard the small squish that marked the end of his loathsome career: you bastard, you can’t have it both ways: wings and a sheltered life. . But those roaches lived in Harlem; and they were mere shavers compared to these whoppers in the land of alegría.