He had to get to a subway seat and sit down before his legs caved in. Get on at Christopher, transfer at 42nd. In the scarce remaining light from the west, Ira broke into a trot, and as he passed the news kiosk on Seventh he picked up speed, from trot to run. He tore down the stairs, in twilight’s gloom, plunked a token in the slot, for once, and breathless, he boarded the uptown train; he’d dropped his jitney into the hopper.
Ira sat with thumbs hooked in belt. Had he painted himself into a corner? Probably. But he had to keep going to keep from falling down. He tried to think back, scanned an older yellow typescript to his right: I felt baffled; I felt bitter; with this first line, the next chapter had begun. No use denying it to myself any longer, slurring the matter over as I did about so much else in life, habitually permitting connotations to blur, and thus obviate a decisive response. It was true, Ira meditated, he had a knack for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. He had already begun to hope, more and more articulately, that Edith would lose Lewlyn, irrevocably. And with Larry clearly diminishing to a mere indulgence, one depending on a propitious moment to terminate, he, Ira himself, heir apparent, somehow, sometime soon would become Edith’s lover.
Ira bolted up and suddenly addressed himself consciously to the little chips of the time when he was alive, alive, twenty-one, and entering that senior year at CCNY. Chips, he called them, noting he had used a singular instead of a plural verb. Well, chips of the time — considered as a unit. In a more illustrative way of speaking, they weren’t really chips, these notations he had beside him on the collapsible steel typing table; they were a few of the anchor points in the world he lived in, and to which the web of his existence was connected, loosely connected mostly, remotely connected. They and millions of other events like them made up the ever-changing content of his days. In this particular case, these events — the start of class, the Yankees World Series win, those agonizing fifteen seconds of the Tunney-Dempsey fight, the “slow count,” were all part, all chips, of the year 1927, nearing the end of October.
For a while, after what he had seen — and heard — that Sunday afternoon in October, his hopes seemed to him fatuous, fatuous and untenable. How could she so reverse herself, when she had hardened her mind against Lewlyn as a duplicitous and perfidious person — and weak — as one who had made it appear that he was undecided in his choice of wife, whose indecision she was gullible enough to take at face value? Was he still undecided, or was he still playing her for a fool? Which? These were difficult, nay, impossible judgments for the young and anything but acute Ira to make. According to Edith’s version in later years, Lewlyn had come back from England in the same uncertain frame of mind as he had gone, and she had resumed the relationship with him upon his return, because Lewlyn still ostensibly hadn’t made up his mind. He was still in a state of uncertainty, but Edith tended to fabricate. Ira came to learn that, to learn it by his own relationship with her, and its aftermath. It was the same thing he had discerned, intuitively, about Edith from the beginning: her trait of making herself the heroine of a tragedy in which she was enmeshed and made to suffer because others took advantage of her innate goodness. And just as she had admitted in the midst of her sobs and tears, the night Ira escorted her home from the ship, that she had been deceiving herself with regard to Lewlyn’s choice of permanent mate, so she did when he came back from England — came back, according to him, to Lewlyn, with vows of marriage already exchanged between himself and Cecilia. That he entered into a sexual transaction with Edith, that was another matter. An entire year of continence, or celibacy, was too much to expect of any man, as Ira found out when he nearly went mad in Los Angeles during his six months of separation from M in ’38—too much to ask of any man, and yet not too much to ask of a woman, as M bore witness, as Cecilia bore witness, and how many myriads of women over the centuries bore witness? Anyway, this last sequel of the sterile affair Edith evidently entered into in a spirit of play — consciously — or in that Greek spirit that Lewlyn esteemed so greatly: wherein friendship between the sexes reached its greatest intimacy via intercourse.
October was in its third week when in the afternoon’s mail delivery Ira recognized the single letter showing through the scroll in the dented brass letterbox as Edith’s: inside her unmistakable envelope was her typed note, single-spaced as was her wont, helter-skelter, and dashed-off. PLEASE! PLEASE! Her letter appeared almost hysterical. Would he telephone her as soon as he could? She was very much concerned at not hearing from him. She had telephoned the drugstore, Biolov’s, but they told her nobody answered the door. Please, would he call her as soon as he received this. Ira had refused to come along to visit Edith, Larry had told her. She thought she knew why, but not hearing from him so long, she was deeply upset. She had something terribly important she wanted to tell him — and only him.
Ira had sulked awhile. Was that “something important” just an inducement? Was he wrong about Lewlyn? And what if he was wrong? And Lewlyn and Edith had just made shift to while away the time until Lewlyn could marry elsewhere. They played the two-backed beast in the meantime, as Shakespeare called it, expediently and amicably franfreluquied — how did Quarles spell it? So there was still Lewlyn. And there was Larry still. So he would kind of squeeze in between them, if he ever did. Make up a troika. Nah. And he wouldn’t know how to break down the barrier anyway. If he couldn’t when he lay next to her in the same bed, when would he have the gumption? All he had about a career as a writer was just a bunch of hallucinations, his usual muzzy fantasies. Leaving his briefcase on the kitchen table of Mom’s empty kitchen, he tripped lightly down the dingy stairs. Fishing the nickel out of his pocket, he crossed the street, entered Biolov’s, twirled his hand in greeting at Joey Shapiro behind the counter. Joe was the younger son of Mrs. Shapiro on the same floor, and now a longtime Biolov’s unlicensed pharmacy assistant. Ira opened the telephone booth’s folding wooden doors and called Edith’s number.
“Ira, is that you? Heavens, I’m dreadfully sorry about what happened. I didn’t offend you, I hope. I wouldn’t offend you for the world.”
“Oh, no. It’s just a—” He shrugged at the transmitter. “It wasn’t your fault. If I barge in like that.”
“You’re always welcome. You know that. I was hoping you’d be with Larry when he came over. I don’t know how I could have made amends. Or somehow — indicated — I was with Lewlyn.”
“I know. I heard him.”
“You did? One of those utterly meaningless things still continuing. You must have gone away thinking I’m a perfect fool.”
“No. I just figured.”
“I’d made up my mind I wasn’t going to break my heart a second time. And just when I do, wouldn’t you know this silly thing renews — only it’s far from silly.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh. Can you come over? I miss not being able to talk to you terribly, Ira.”
“What d’you mean? When?”
“This afternoon, for a few minutes.”
“Today?”
“Yes. Can you? I’ve gotten so dependent on you.”
“Well, if you want me to.”
“Very much.”
“All right. I’m in the street already. I’ll take the subway.”
“You’re a treasure.”
Utterly meaningless. Ira mulled over her words as he directed his purposeful stride toward Lexington Avenue. At the corner of Lexington, he turned right to 116th Street. Less of a walk. What did utterly meaningless signify? It meant that she didn’t expect anything to come of this, what d’you call it? Liaison. That was what it meant. What the hell, he laid Stella every chance he got; he wasn’t going to marry her. It was what he was telling himself a couple of weeks ago — that Surfeit Sunday, he could call it, the way goyim, gentiles, called a certain Tuesday — before Lent? After Lent? No, before Lent, Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, Schmaltzy Tuesday. And what else? Maundy Thursday. What the hell was Maundy?