“I’m not surprised. I heard about that too.”
“Okay. And now you have something—” Ira began, gave up before the clash of an incoming uptown express train, immediately augmented to overpowering din by a downtown express pounding in on the parallel track — deafening. “Helluva place is right.” Even shouting, he barely made himself heard.
“Let’s wait a minute,” Larry said, raising his voice. A cheerful couple with a youngster in tow sat down between them and the orange-eater; a lively kid, but fixed into quiescence by the sight of the old man peeling the orange. The trains came to a halt; the thunder of metal subsided. “I’ve always thought it would happen, you and Edith.” Larry resumed. “I knew she was humoring me, long before she told me that Lewlyn was engaged to the woman in England. I knew she would turn to you.”
“All right. So it’s all sorta predictable on both sides.”
“Now it is. I didn’t foresee that I would be a rung in your ladder. Did you?”
“Sure. I had designs on Edith from the beginning.” Ira’s candor shocked him.
“Oh, come on.”
“Fact.”
Larry sat with one large hand in the other, watching the two express trains rumble apart. They seemed to stretch an elastic transparency between them. Then he turned to Ira: “I don’t believe it.”
“You said ‘rung,’ didn’t you. We could go on indefinitely. I’m not going to. Because it’ll get to be damn painful. I know you’ve got some kind of trouble with your heart—”
“Oh, to hell with that! Just a transient thing: a small clot. I lost consciousness for all of five seconds.”
“Edith was damned concerned.”
“She’s always ready to magnify any disorder: a cough becomes TB.”
“Okay. Okay. Is that what you wanted to complain to me about, your being a rung in my ladder? Let’s have it.”
“No, I wasn’t going to complain at all.”
“Then what?”
“We were friends, weren’t we? You were my friend, weren’t you? Clichés about bosom companions aside, that’s what we were. And that’s what remains precious to me, more than I can tell you.”
“Yes?” Ira could feel himself congealing defensively.
“Look, what I’m trying to tell you is this—”
The family trio sitting beside them got to their feet, the young mother holding firmly to the child’s lifted hand, as the Broadway local pulled in. The old man carefully separated orange segments. Larry kept on speaking: “When I went to bed at night, I would think of things I would tell you tomorrow — storing them up, from my reading, Irving’s latest salesman’s gags. Do you remember the winter you stayed overnight in my room, so we could see the eclipse the next morning on the roof — when we were still in DeWitt Clinton — everything had twice the meaning when we did things together.”
“Yes? I felt that way too. All right.” Just what would he have to brace himself against? The outlines were becoming more defined.
“That night in that dusty old tent in your uncle’s summer hotel when your uncle brought that telegram from Edith, you were with me — we were together. When we shook the crowd after the soirée in her St. Mark’s Place apartment. And there was the cottage in Woodstock.”
“Yeah. And we visited her apartment in the Village together.” Ira wondered whether the crease of irony in his cheek would betray him. It didn’t.
“That’s what I mean.”
“So? Okay.”
“I’m making a kind of appeal. You were on my side from the beginning. Because you’ve become Edith’s confidant — I guess that is what you’d call it, right — doesn’t destroy for me what you were. I just don’t want you to cut me out of your life. I want to feel that I continue to share in it.”
“Oh.”
Larry made a peculiar motion, with rigid white fingers directed toward his heart. “You can’t let it all die.”
“And how do you intend to keep it alive?”
“By keeping our friendship alive: sharing your impressions about what you’re doing — if you’re writing — mostly what you’re thinking, feeling. And — anything else.”
“I don’t know, Larry. I’m not that generous, I guess.”
“No?”
“It’s the way I’m built. I don’t feel that kind of allegiance.” The more liquid the brown eyes looking into his, the more appealing the features, the more ruthless Ira had to be in Stygian caves forlorn, in subway caves forlorn. “I’m sorry, Larry, the best thing we can do is cut loose from each other. I’m going my own way.” Boy, that was brusque. Boy, that was cruel.
Larry’s breath snagged in his throat. He snuffed up tears. He would have run for cover, sought hiding place — Ira felt — if he could. The last ties were breaking. And there were others due to break, Ira reflected gloomily: he had to announce changes at home, renounce home — and Mom, say to her: or ever the silver cord be loosed, Mom, or the beaker be shattered in the chemistry lab, the threads be stripped off the screw, the battery shot, the what else is ruined? The straw Kelly bashed in at the end of summer.
“I’m thinking of leaving my long home on 119th Street, leaving Mom. Part of the time anyway,” Ira said aloud. Give the guy a decent interval, a chance to recover. Ira let a minute go by. The old gaffer at the other end still had a couple of orange segments left. Jumpin’ Jesus, the guy must be toothless to take so long. He probably was, masticating nose to chin. He probably had nothing else to do: orange peel in a bag, and licking the cleft between stuck, stiff fingers, while subway trains came and went, came and went, local and express: Bronx Park and Van Cortlandt, and Lenox Avenue, plunging into the tunnel at the end of the platform, an incandescent-stippled murk in which track and train disappeared at random. And the guy was young once; once the guy was young.
A pale, middle-aged man sat down, his hair the smoky hue of once-blond hair faded. And pouting with thought, he opened his newspaper: Polish. Hobo Canobo was the name the top of the paper seemed to spell out, almost like Hobo Canoe, Hoboken. But of course it wasn’t: in Cyrillic, half the time the alphabet was written backward. Polish was in Cyrillic, wasn’t it? Larry reached down, retrieved his briefcase. His full lips were scrolled in, features set into a determined equanimity.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Sure.” They stood up, paid their ritual respects at the edge of platform, leaning over to see what was coming. The guy was all right, wasn’t he? Leaning over that way? After the way he’d pointed to his heart.
“I think the next one’s mine,” said Larry.
“Oh, did I miss the local?”
“If I’m not mistaken,” Larry answered.
Suppress everything, Ira counseled himself: suppress everything. Anything you say is out of place. But Jesus, what a — academic, yeah, academic temptation to pitch it all away: destiny, destiny. Bullshit. Recover the old hobnob: come back to Aaron, Mavourneen, Mavourneen. Say to him: Listen, pal, doesn’t she give it up to anybody? Boy, that was vulgar: gutter smut. What the hell. Come back to each other the way they did after they parted with Edith at Woodstock. Not to jeopardize her job at the university. Not to be seen in the same train with a couple of freshman. Took different routes home, and skulked in the shadowy midship of the ferry boat when it grew dark. . to hide the ten-day growth of beard on their chin-chops. Was that ever hilarious: Larry rid of the strain of courting an older woman, Ira rid of the strain of good conduct, the two youths howled with mirth. Do it in reverse: your turn now. Never. Never. Never.