How the stores had all proliferated along the avenue, now that there was a subway station on 116th Street. It was just Pop’s bad luck that he had invested in a delicatessen on 116th near Lexington too soon, before the subway was built. He might have prospered afterward.
Ira descended the subway stairs, wedged his jitney into the slot, and bulled through the turnstile to the platform. What he should be thinking about was Edith’s saying meaningless — meaningless what? Meaningless pastime — oh, no, she didn’t say that; she said utterly meaningless. That was it. It could only mean one thing: it was just pastime, just as she had said. Lewlyn was betrothed, fancy word, to the other woman in England. That was what it meant. So the way was open. Wow. He entered the uncrowded downtown train. So he wasn’t wrong. Destiny was destiny. Jesus, how would he do it then? She said he was a treasure. So what should he do? Lie to her? Say he had never done it, but wanted to do it with her. He liked her, dearest person he knew. She was so fond of him too, valued his friendship, she said. So he — he needed, like Lewlyn, like Lewlyn’s Greek idea of intimacy consummating. Ah, hell, he couldn’t. He was sure she would, but he couldn’t. Jesus Christ. Edith pulling up her knees, drawers off, pussy out, bare-ass. He couldn’t. He couldn’t think of her that way. Delicate, refined, Ph.D., professor of English literature, a professor. That was the trouble. .
II
Open-mouthed, aware momentarily that he had lapsed into total unawareness, he listened to Edith.
She had suspected she might be in for trouble, Edith said, when she was four days overdue. She had always been so regular. But now she was certain, after the examination by Dr. Teragan. There could be no doubt about it: she was definitely pregnant. “It’s so strange,” she said. “I feel so blithe, and yet I’m terribly concerned. Abortions are no joke, Ira, and it looks as if I may have to go through one.”
“Why?” he asked numbly.
She had tried everything else, she explained. Everything that might bring on menstruation, chamomile, angelica, even castor oil. Of course, what she was really trying to do was to bring on miscarriage, but nothing had worked. She was lavish with particulars; feminine and arcane, they agitated rather than edified: there might be all sorts of complications from an abortion. Even with the best of them, when one had money enough to have them done by a doctor, they were illegal, and abortionists risked their licenses to perform them. Also because of the pressure on the physician, and the conditions of secrecy under which he performed the operation, sterility might be neglected; hemorrhaging and infections might result, and often did. With lagging and uneasy attention, Ira interrupted only once: that was when she said, “I can imagine how risky these back-alley ones must be.”
“What are back-alley ones?” he asked.
“When they’re done by midwives or other nonprofessionals.” She laughed ruefully. “What women have to go through.” And because the doctor did risk his license, the fee he charged for an abortion was high. And that brought on another round of problems, problems centering on money, or the lack of it, and why: “I can ill afford the expense of an abortion right now,” she said. “It comes at such a dreadful time. I ought to send my sister something for the child’s birthday. Something, now that she’s divorced. Her husband is deliberately delaying alimony. He has plenty of money. He was law partner of Woodrow Wilson’s secretary. But that’s his way of getting back at Leona. And of course, she’s a fool when it comes to managing her affairs. Father is in a terrible fix. He can’t help her. He needs help himself. He’s hardly able to carry on his own law practice. And Mother’s life insurance payments are due.” Still, oddly enough, despite all the difficulties and obligations she enumerated, she was animated in feature and in movement, and she laughed — quite gaily for Edith. “If I could, if it weren’t that kind of a male-dominated world, I’d be tempted to go through with it. I really think I would, for the sake of the sensation of well-being. I don’t imagine it lasts.”
“Go through with what?” God, his mouth was wet enough, he had to run the back of his hand over his lips.
“Have the child.”
“You would?”
“Oh, yes. Can you imagine the shock I’d give the head of the English department? Can’t you just see Professor Watt’s face when I became unmistakably pregnant — walked into our faculty office, big with child!” She was jesting, something she almost never did, deliberately breaking out of her patina of solemnity with witticism of her own making. “In some societies one could. I’m sure I could have my own child if I so wished in modern-day Russia, without benefit of a marriage license. But alas, it’s our own sanctimonious America, and I’ll have to have an abortion, and an illegal one too, as if even a legal one were fun. And I’ll have to find the money to pay for it. And that’s going to be a great, great nuisance, to say the least. And I’ll have to find an abortionist. I don’t know any. And I’ll have to turn to Lewlyn. It is his child.”
Ira felt as if all his past worries, worries and anxieties — and memories of anguish — effectively dammed the flow of even simpleminded inference. “So if it is?”
“I think I know exactly the day. I thought it was one of my safe ones.” Her little hands, locked negligently in her lap, tightened. “Oh, I understand. I don’t have the money. Can you imagine what would happen if I didn’t have an abortion — in the impossible event I didn’t? Lewlyn would regard that as willful, deliberate entrapment, do you understand, Ira? As if I were compelling him to marry me. I wouldn’t stoop to that, it goes without saying.” Her brown eyes held steady in determination, and she added: “I no longer want him to marry me.”
“No? I didn’t think of it that way.” How could he tell her in what way he thought of these things? What these things were to him that she dwelled on so freely, things that to him were snarled into such knots and tangles of wrongdoing he could never hope to loosen them. So she was pregnant. Pregnancy pointed toward abortion, abortion to abortionist, abortionist to his fee, to money. That was how it went. He frowned with downcast eyes at the stylized corn symbol on the gray Navajo blanket at his feet. That was how it went, how it ought to go, diagrammatic, honest. His mind felt so caught in its own coils — no, struggling with its own coils, trying to free itself, to see, see what? Objectively, no, more than that: see himself oppositely, from the woman’s point of view — Edith’s view — his mirror image in his own head. “Does Lewlyn know?” he groped.
“Not yet.”
“No?”
“I wasn’t certain myself until I wrote you.”
“No.” Again, Ira felt compelled to resort to the back of his hand against his moist lips. “I don’t know how it goes. I just feel scared.”
“You’re very sweet,” she said. Voice and feature combined in endearment. “I knew I could turn to you. No, it’s not all that dangerous,” she reassured. “There’s always a chance of infection, of course. And bleeding. The nastiest thing is the illegality of the whole business. And that’s not very comforting. But most people walk out of the doctor’s office after a few hours’ rest not too much the worse for the experience. I suppose because I’ve never had an abortion I’m less fearful about it than perhaps I should be. What worries me most at the moment is the financial aspect of it. As I say, Lewlyn will have to take financial responsibility for that, or part of it. I don’t expect there will be any trouble on that score. Marcia and her friends can undoubtedly put him in touch with a competent abortionist.” Seated on the gunnysack-cloth-covered couch, with her back to the wall as always, she tugged absently at the ash-gray hem of her skirt, toward trim, silk-smooth calves. And as absent as her act, her mien: “Irony is, I no longer care.”