“No? When we came back from the ship, last spring, I asked you, why did you have to do it? You explained. Love was that way. You wouldn’t be denied the beauty of its ending. Something like that. You said you were — you weren’t wise.” Ira gesticulated. “So why did you begin again?”
“I can’t resist another’s need.” She smiled placatingly.
“But everybody needs.”
“I do too. I need to be reassured in my insecurity with men. I mentioned Louise Bogan to you, I remember. I have a feeling of inadequacy with the typical masculine male, the kind of thing she doesn’t have. I have to shore up the feeling that haunts me of not being entirely — not being properly a woman.”
The perplexity on Ira’s countenance must have been graphic; her delicate lips formed into tender sympathy. “I don’t suppose I make too much sense.”
“Not yet, but that’s probably me.”
She laughed outright.
“No, I don’t mean that,” Ira hastened to amend. “I mean, I’ll think about it. That’s how I figure things out. I go over what somebody said. Over and over. And then there’s a kind of message comes out of it.”
“I know. You’re remarkable. I’m going to tell you something,” she said after a brief pause. “Something I’ve never told anyone else. It’s something in the nature of a confession. It’s the other side of what I just said about not being able to resist another’s need. It needs to be said, so you won’t think I’m all magnanimity, I’m all altruism. In other words, I have my wicked side.”
“You? You have a wicked side, Edith?”
“Why did I begin again? It’s my secret way of evening scores. With Marcia, with Cecilia. I guess Marcia would see it in her typically anthropological way. We’re all apes, you know. It’s a female’s way of evening scores, and not a very nice one. I’m going to have to pay for it too.”
“I just hope it comes out all right.”
“Yes. But I’m much tougher than I seem.”
“I hope so, Edith. I hope I can help, but I don’t know how.”
“You have already. A great deal. As long as you don’t become impatient with me.”
“No. Gee.”
“You’ll call me? Often. Do you have enough money?”
“Enough? A whole nickel?”
“I don’t want you to go without. Ira, you’re very dear to me.” She slid forward, and pretty above the knees too, stood up.
Ira did too.
“I guess I’ll go.”
“I won’t let you go unless you let me help you — for all the help you’ve given me.”
He was all too familiar with the maneuver. “I haven’t! I haven’t given you any help,” he protested — pro forma. “You’re gonna need the money yourself.”
“Not to that extent. I need you more. Please. I know how little allowance you get.” She extracted a five-dollar greenback from her purse, tendered it.
“You keep tempting me, Edith, and I can’t resist.”
“Don’t. You’ll hurt my feelings.”
She could look so winning at some moments, moments like these, the gleam on her olive skin, her brown eyes appealing, she’d get him started, when it was the furthest thing from his mind: maternal, that was it: she wanted to take care of him. Maybe because she was pregnant. He took the five dollars from her, guiltily, yet with a sense of sheepish inevitability. Rumors of the future could petrify you where you stood between the dark piano and the dark tapa on the door. “Thanks, Edith.”
“How are courses going, Ira?”
“Huh? ‘Orful,’ as Mom would say. The only thing I get anything out of is Milton.”
“Do you?”
“Yeah. What vowels: Ophiucus huge. Makes you drool.”
“I may get to work on an anthology of modern poetry — after this is all over.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“It’s Professor Watt’s idea, his and the publishers. They believe I ought to have a textbook for my course. You can see why.” She inclined her head pertly. “I’ll get very little out of it, either in money or glory. Do you think you’d care to help? I have a feeling I could use your help once it really begins to take shape.”
“Me? How? I can spull good, that’s all.” He chortled.
“Indexing, acknowledgments, and other chores. How’s your cold, by the way? You seem to have recovered.”
“I did. I got over it a long time ago.” He moved, self-conscious and awkward again, reached for the doorknob, fell silent a second peering at the dark tapa. “I wish your troubles didn’t amount to more than my cold.”
“I’d be glad if they didn’t. Unfortunately it’s not one of those things that goes away by itself.” She extended her hand.
And for the first time in his life, he felt like kissing somebody’s hand. She was so kind, so fond, so brave in the midst of trial, you had to bow before her. It didn’t seem artificial, lifting her tiny hand to his lips. It seemed as if the act were already presaged, performed in space. She raised her other hand toward her bosom. .
He glanced at the top of his yellow typescript, his notes, prepared years before. Nearly two decades ago he had attempted a first draft, on his Olivetti manual, with much prompting from dear friends, when his hands could still stand the impact of the keys. Now he knew he would never finish. Fortunately, the holy sages of his people relieved him of the obligation: “You are not required to finish,” ran the Talmudic dictum (as if it could be otherwise). A posthumous novel that might never see publication, floppy disks that might never be printed into paper copies.
His thoughts returned to Edith. And when I crumble who will remember the lady of the west country. Who could remember now, so many years after, decades after, why he had paid a visit to Mamie’s so late in the evening? Had he also been to Edith’s? Had he just left Edith’s, and on impulse on the way home gotten off at the 110th Street station on the Lenox Avenue line? Or had he just gone mad with craving for a piece of ass, vulgar as he thought of it, burning within? Need, desire, lust that had driven him out of the house and along the tract from 119th and Park Avenue to 112th west of Fifth. Skip to my loo, my darling. Memory held a kind of detritus, an intimation, that he was coming from somewhere, perhaps Edith’s, keeping him informed of the latest developments of her pregnancy, or the steps being taken to abort it, the appointment made for her by Lewlyn with the abortionist, the place, the fee. Was it twenty-five dollars? Or was that some figure that merely stuck in his mind for some reason? Still, twenty-five bucks was no mean sum in those days, a week’s pay (after all, Ira had earned about twenty-seven dollars for a fifty-six-hour work week in the subway repair barn). It would be ironic if his vestigial memory was correct: if he had actually come from a visit to Edith’s to Mamie’s — and hence called on Mamie so much later than usual. Ha, where the hell had he come from?
He had sought the answers to some of these questions with Marcia over twenty years ago at a luncheon in New York. “Once in the evening at Edith’s. .” Ira lunged heavily into the subject, hesitated for lack of preamble, and tacked into generalities. “I want to point this out first, the shock the uninitiated receives simply because he was unacquainted with the nuances, or hadn’t yet learned the—” he gesticulated erratically—” the amenities of the culture into which he was being inducted.”