“So why cut it?”
“Oh, nuts. No reason. Just want to stew by myself for a while.”
“Listen, if you go to class, we get out the same time. We can shmooze on the way,” Larry urged. His handsome face became sober. “Maybe a few minutes’ really serious talk would help.”
“It’d help you.”
“Why not you?”
“I’m frigged. That’s what my appointment’s about.” Larry arrested his sigh of frustration, regarded Ira with his gentle brown eyes, almost pleading for enlightenment, that failed of forthcoming — an answer literally stillborn, the trope darted through Ira’s mind.
“Well, you have your reasons,” Larry conceded the minor defeat after a pause. “Okay, we take the train together?”
“Okay.”
“May take your mind off things. That sometimes helps.”
“Yeah. Vie a toiten bankehs.”
Intrigued as always when a new Yiddish expression came within his ken: “A toiten bankehs?” Larry queried.
“Yeah. It means cupping a corpse, cupping a cadaver. You know how much good that would do.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Abyssinia.” Ira invoked their old parting logo.
“Abyssinia.”
Ever the peregrine lout, lackluster, purposeless, wayward, roaming from car to car, left the doors open between them — to skate and slam with every lurch of the train. Cold, drear tunnel draft swooped in, swirled the dust and pounced on newspaper scraps, Hershey penny chocolates and Tootsie Roll candy wrappers on the floor, flapped the pages of tabloids in the hands of seated, swaying readers. The short, husky Italian in flannel shirt and raveling gray sweater under a nondescript mackinaw fixed his brown hat tighter on his head against the gale; and with tabloid gripped in one fist, stood up, grabbed the brass door latch, exposing the longshoreman’s cargo hook in his belt, and banged the door shut, permanently. “Punk!” He scowled through the glass of the door after the departed vagrant, and then sat down again.
Across the aisle two teenage girls studied Larry, trailed rapt gaze away to chatter to each other behind the covers of raised loose-leaf black notebooks, stole glances at Larry again, who remained oblivious. It was early afternoon, Wednesday afternoon.
The train slanted up the grade from 137th Street, where Larry and Ira had gotten on, as usual, as was their custom — an almost four-year custom by now — slanted up the grade from the tunnel to the cold elevation of the 125th Street station. With its outdoor view, anomalous for a subway. But somewhere, in his geology class last summer — Iven would know — the land had dipped here because of a terrestrial fault, or been gouged out by a glacier — there was even an obsolescent, beat-up escalator under the station to lift passengers aloft. Years ago, how bemused he had stood, East Side kid from 9th Street reconnoitering along 125th.
Out of the windows of the train, the solid, fused apartment houses each lowered their roofs a jog as the train climbed, and at street intersections, offered brief panels of the slaty Hudson and the wintry bluffs of the Palisades across the river. The subway car doors opened. A few passengers boarded, among them a Salvation Army couple in uniform. In rushed cold air with them. The doors slid closed. And now the train slanted downward again past concrete parapet to reenter the stuffy, snug tunnel.
“All right, we get off at 96th?” Larry asked. “I have to change there anyway.”
Ira was loath to mesh with the imminent encounter he had sensed was coming from the minute Larry proposed riding downtown with him. But there was no evading it: it had to be faced sooner or later. “You’re gonna pass your own station? 110th?” As if reminding Larry would bring a change of mind.
“I know. We’ll both have to change. When you change for the Lenox Avenue to Harlem, I’ll grab the Broadway local.”
I’m in a double bind now, Ecclesias. I’ve got to use essentially the same episode, now on the same file, in two places, to serve two purposes.
— I know it.
What do you advise? Do you have any advice to offer?
— No. Nothing plausible. Indeed, it’s impossible to do what you intend to do. At least I don’t ever recall the narrative use of substantially the same episode in two different time frames.
I can’t either. So do what?
— Do what you may do.
What? Do what you may, and wisdom is early to despair — if I quote Gerard Manley Hopkins with any fidelity.
You may, as far as I can tell, but you can’t quote your way out of difficulties. You could, of course, rewrite to suit, or shall I say, rewrite clear of your temporal contradictions. Two meetings, two encounters, more or less devoted to the same subject on the same subway train, on the same station? Creo cano. I don’t think so.
Then what alternative do I have? I’ve already interrupted, greatly interfered with, the course of the narrative. So be it. I’m too advanced in years—
— Oh, I’ve heard all that before. That plea grows tiresome.
I’m sorry. Nonetheless, ’tis so.
— Fact is that Larry is eager to take this occasion to make his pitch to retain some remnant of his former intimacy with Ira. And Ira is far too worried about his responsibility in Stella’s pregnancy to care about discussing such matters with Larry, at this point, too preoccupied with this, as well as the obligation preying on his mind, excessively, as usual, of escorting Stella into Edith’s presence. The coming confrontation, or whatever to call it in this case, the full revelation of his disgrace, almost sickens him. . Well, why make any more bones about it. We know what faces him. Do the best you can.
The best I can will be a fiasco. . Nonetheless. I thank you. .
Ira refrained from answering, and Larry appeared nonchalant all at once. Larry appeared to have discovered another fleck of color in the large turquoise gem of the Navajo ring bestowed on him so seemingly long ago. He turned it pensively, appreciatively, on his long pale finger, unconstrained, oblivious of the girls across the way, candid in the boldness of their admiration as Ira was surreptitious in his admiration of their boldness: shiksas. Cute. Pert. Staring blue-eyed, the intensity of their interest forcing their knuckles to press whitely on girlish, weak clenched hands. Little wonder they stared. Despite his thick black mustache, his added weight, Larry still looked like Ganymede, a little older, Ganymede a few years after being snatched up to Olympus to wait on the gods, chief butler now, chief steward: Greek nose, winged eyebrows, milky skin — and dressed like a prince: his ample gray camel’s-hair topcoat, tweed trousers showing below, his woven, woolen burnt-umber necktie, his finely tooled brogans. Nothing needed adornment with Larry. Nothing needed superfluous gloss; everything was rich, everything spoke of good taste and fine rearing. Clothes, features, deportment, person. Only his full lips, his big hands, deviated from some ideal, his big hands, his longer-than-average arms, fused Michelangelo’s David to classic Greek.
Raising his voice against the din in the tunnel, Larry leaned toward Ira: “All your midterm tests finished?”
“Narbhill had the flu. So we had public speaking the last minute. Pain in the ass. You have him too, don’t you?”
“That’s why I’m here today. Had to come in for only a couple of classes.”
“How did you make out?”
“In public speaking? I didn’t tell you. Oh, Narbhill beamed approval when I finished. I gave him Alfred Noyes’s old chestnut ‘Highwayman.’”
“Wow. All o’ that?” Ira feigned amazement.
“I still had it more than half memorized from last year. Did I put on the dog? ‘Impeccable diction,’ he said.”