“Yes, of course. Just what I expected happened. He was through with me. I didn’t deserve his love.” She found solace in a deep breath. “Thank heavens he won’t be too hurt. He won’t hurt himself. At least, I’m sure of that: the one thing I was so afraid of. What a relief that is!”
Her pallor had increased, ashy; her solemn brown eyes bulged; her shoulders drooped. He wasn’t following her.
“Maybe you shouldn’t talk anymore,” Ira pleaded. “Listen, I’ll stay around till you go to bed. Whatever you want.”
“No, I’d rather forget the pain. Please. If you don’t mind.”
“Yeah, but maybe it’s no good for you.”
“Oh, no. It is. Wait till you hear why: he slammed the door when he left. Larry actually slammed the door. I knew then he had protected his ego. He was safe.”
“Oh.”
Ira turned his chilly feet toward the fire for a second or two. Tongues of flame rising from the blocks of coal inaudibly mulled the thought in warmth and color: so that was how she knew: the guy slammed the door. The guy was sore, so he slammed the door. He slammed the door, so he was safe. The gray rain pattered hard against the window when Ira faced Edith again.
“So he’s through with you?”
“Oh, yes, he’s through.” She spoke with such animated disdain it approached derision. “His undefiled love for me is at an end — poof! But what I’ve been through — what I’m going through this minute — is nothing.”
“You hurt?”
“I hurt like fury.”
“I’m so sorry, Edith.”
She laughed — and wept. Ira sat quietly, wondering what to do next. Pity, he heard a block of coal shift in the basket grate behind him: pity. The fire somehow felt good at his back. Pity was consumed into comfort, oxidized into warmth. Why, let the stricken deer go weep; the hart ungalled play. Yeah, he had willed it all. But what could he do?. . Just sit there, socks drying, woman weeping, Bulluc sterteth, bucke verteth, murie sing cuccu. In a little while, the rain would let up a little maybe, but it wouldn’t matter if it didn’t. He couldn’t console her, he couldn’t help her. What it must feel like with your insides scraped — about where would the uterus be in him? Belly-button height, or lower? Imagine it rubbed against a grater, Mom’s riebahsel. Well, he’d get his socks, and see what she said: whether she wanted him there any longer, or wanted to be alone with her suffering.
He got up from the creaking chair and went to the radiator. Her gaze followed him; drearily, she wiped the copious tears on her cheeks with dainty handkerchief. “I bet you hate the sight of everybody who wears pants,” Ira ventured.
“Not quite everybody.” She held the damp ball of handkerchief in her lap. “Are you going out in this?”
“I think I better.”
“I don’t blame you.”
“No, it isn’t that,” he protested the implication of his deserting her. “If you want me to stay — or do something.”
“You’ve borne with me quite long enough.”
“Nah.”
“I’m a little ashamed of myself, as usual. I ought to be able to stand this, without having to weep on your shoulder.”
“It’s all right. Boy, these socks are nice and toasty already.”
“At least one good thing has come out of the whole sorry mess: a harmless end to a long-drawn-out, silly affair. I don’t think you’re likely to see Larry here again very soon.”
“No,” Ira agreed. “I guess not.” Curious, how the past coalesced into a kind of opaque introspection that marked the end. “Could I get you a drink, Edith? Would you like something? I think my socks are pretty dry by now. I could go out to a restaurant.”
“No. Thanks. I’d like some tea. Would you?”
“Yes, sure. How do you make it? I saw you use a teapot. You just put the tea in it? I mean, at home, Mom makes a kind of essence. It’s separate, and you add hot water.” Was his garrulity welcome to her, he wondered: she sat so passively enduring pain. “We have tea when we have meat for supper. If you have coffee, you can’t have milk in it.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, I only learned here you can drink coffee black. So what do I do?”
“There’s a teaball in the drawer of the kitchenette. I think I ought to stay quiet.”
“Oh, yeah, I’ll find it. I’m the champeen finder of teaballs. Which drawer?”
“Usually, it’s in the one on the left — unless Dorotheena changed it when she cleaned.”
“Then it would have to be on the right. Hmm!” Why did he feel compelled to clown? “My inferences—” he wagged his hand—“nobody can match them. Except when I have to find something. I’ll need hot water, right?”
“Yes.” Was that a wan smile she tried to retain through a troubled shifting of her body? “About half-fill the copper kettle. And no more tea than half in the teaball. I use much less. I like it weak. I’m afraid you’ll have to rummage in the shelf above the sink for the package of tea. Can you find it? I keep it up there with the coffee and the Grape-Nuts.”
“Oh, yeh, yeh.” He held the copper kettle under the gushing brass faucet in the closet kitchenette. And after he had lit the flame on the two-burner gas stove and set the kettle on it, he hunted for the other articles. He found them also. Finding them was no great trick, since utensils were few, and the place was so small. “You going to want some toast? I see there’s slices of package bread here.”
“No, thanks, dear, I’d better not. I’ll consider myself lucky if the tea stays down.”
“Is that so? It hurts that much?” He couldn’t help noticing the gray cast over her olive skin. “I’ll sit down where I can keep my eye on the kettle.”
“Make some toast for yourself, if you like. There’s marmalade.”
“No, I’ll spoil my supper. I’ve got to have an appetite like a wolf, or I don’t eat. And then Mom moans and groans— Wait a minute: you want me to stay? I mean it: I can stay as long as you like.”
“No, thanks. It’s sweet of you, Ira, but I’ll be all right. I’ve just got to get through the next twenty-four hours. I have some kind of painkiller the doctor gave me if I needed it.”
“Well, don’t you need it?”
“I hate to take it. It has morphine in it, I’m sure.”
“Oh, yeh?” Ira glanced at the kettle.
“It’s terribly constipating.”
“Well, maybe you’ll get dreams, like De Quincey. I read that Coleridge was interrupted in the middle of ‘Kublai Khan’—” He chortled at his absurd non sequitur. “I mean somebody interrupted him.” She regarded him with patient indulgence. “Another minute. Maybe I put too much water in the kettle. But I got the teaball in the teapot already. Then I pour about half full of boiling water in the teapot. Is that the idea?”
“Yes.”
“Another minute. My mother never lets me do anything around the kitchen.”
“I’m sure this puts an end to any notion I may have had of having children,” Edith said apathetically, as if at a distance, or talking to herself. “It may not be the worst thing: they take up one’s whole life, unless one is rich and can afford a maid to take care of them. And how often they turn out like some relative one has no use for. Or worse, perhaps, in this case: like the father. But they are adorable as babies.”
Slowly, the extent, the numbness of her dolor communicated itself to him, vacated his masquerade of concentrating on the kettle. He glimpsed for an instant something outside his ken, the frustration of a womanly urge, a woman’s reality, a woman’s woe. And there was nothing to offer in the face of that, only the silence of pity, and nothing commensurable with it either, only the troubled forcing of fingernails against the flesh of fingers — even as he listened. So that was an abortion, a bereavement of her body.