“You’re not pregnant?”
“You want me to be?”
“O-oh! O-oh! O-oh!” He could have whooped, he could have capered for joy, cubits high. Fourteenth Street ahead, gray mass of building, slash of blue sky, solid street and park trees and highway, and everything in it became supple as a tapestry, undulated. “Oh, that’s wonderful! You’re really not?”
She simpered, again her old self, compliant, eager to please. “All right, enjoy yourself.”
“Am I? This is like a dream. A-ah! You’re wonderful.” His hand on her arm checked her from moving away. “Look inside the window a minute.”
“It’s Barron’s.” She peered through the glass. “I told Minnie about it Friday. They’re having a sale of fall dresses. She wants me to come with her tomorrow, Thanksgiving. They’re giving twenty percent off. You know, Ira, your sister is small around the bust? She’s nearly like me.”
“Yeah?” Beatitude of reprieve was what he felt, so exultant, ferocious in its exultance — how could the plate glass in which he saw himself reflected show only a stupid smirk on a face wearing round shell-framed eyeglasses under a gray felt hat? Jesus Christ, Jesus H. Christ, his visage should be transfigured, radiant. Just a dumb dope listening to a kid cousin blabbling. Jesus, he ought to sprout wings with joy. Instead he was already looking sideways down at the short round figure in green beside him: little pork-nose Stella in a black cloche. He had never been out in public with her before. Why the hell didn’t he meet her all the time in front of her school — or whenever he had a chance? Yeah? Where would they go? Smooth, juvenile, fair face, vapid, blond. Ever ready, like a flashlight, but where would they go? Jesus, wasn’t he a goddamn goat? A minute ago, damn near shitting in his pants with dread, now ready to go. And here they were. Alone, alone in a mob.
“What d’ye see?” he asked.
“That navy dress there with the tassels, that would be just right for Minnie — I mean the color. Be just right for winter in the office. And like Mama would say, it’s a gurnisht money: eighteen dollars.”
“Yeah? I don’t know anything about ladies’ clothes. I don’t even look— Boy, do I feel good. Ah-h.” His bespectacled open-mouthed face in the plate glass looked moronic. “Fur-trimmed coats for thirty-nine fifty,” he read the price tag on the mannikin.
“That’s what I mean. You know how much Saks Fifth Avenue gets for them? Twice as much.”
“Really?” He nudged her into the stream of pedestrians. “Boy, I could give you a big fat feel I’m so happy.” He patted the waist of her green coat. “Don’t you feel wonderful too?”
“Not why you feel wonderful. I got a collegiate boyfriend. Somebody in my class should see me. Wouldn’t they look. But they left already. Mr. McLaughlin should see I had a date.” She glanced over her shoulder.
“Mr. McLaughlin wouldn’t bother me,” Ira bantered. “Max, Moe, Harry. Or somebody like that; one of our uncles. What they’d think.”
“You’re like Zaida when he lived with us: worry, worry, worry. Now I know where you get it from.”
“I’m not worrying now.” Ira caressed the green coat sleeve.
“Hey, that’s nice,” she tittered. He kneed her thigh in stride. “Oh, boy.”
At the corner of 14th the two stopped, close to the curb, but to one side of the crossing; the young, placid face beside him — protoplasm came in all shapes and sizes, but none better than the little piece beside him — for what he wanted — as if he mirrored within the distorted, sordid mirror of himself the turmoil all about him, the noise, the traffic become predatory, the crouching storefronts. He was ravening again — like a guy who quit a habit and then caved in, became twice as addicted. He had to fuck her. Where? Jesus, the nuttiest goddamn notions: Ask Edith; she was broad-minded; he was broad-minded — could he have her apartment. Everything had turned out all right: Please: five minutes, he who a half hour ago was ready to crawl with mortification. Oh, God—
“You going to see that professor-lady?” Stella asked.
“Yeah. But I was thinking. Wait a minute. Give me a minute.”
Stella surmised his drift of motive. “I can’t go anyplace, Ira. I have to be home. You know Mama. Ten minutes late, and there’s a big geshrei.”
“We don’t need a half hour.”
“Where? I can’t.”
“I’m trying to think. Someplace. Damn!” An interval passed, desperate interval, while he wracked his brains, while crowds passed, wheels turned and a million million things changed position, and the clock on the Edison tower struck the quarter hour. “What time you supposed to be home?”
“You know. About four o’clock. Same time as Hannah comes home from Julia Richmond.”
“Oh, Jesus!” Ira stared about — at illimitable motion and commotion — and then at the placid pleading, appealing, girlish smiling a trace, blue-eyed, fair countenance — himself and that rusty pederast, but different. “What a goddamn world!”
“We could go into a telephone booth,” Stella ventured.
“A what?” Ira was startled.
“Down in the subway.”
“And then what?”
“Hold a newspaper in front of the glass like.”
“Hold a newspaper?”
“I could go around the world. Underneath.”
“Christ’s sake, when’d you learn that?” She reddened, but kept mum. “I just got an idea. C’mon!”
“Where? Where, I said?”
“No, I’ve got a better idea. Let’s go.” And when she balked, his voice sharpened. “I said, let’s go.”
“But I can’t. I gotta be home. I told you.”
“Tell Mamie it’s a goddman Thanksgiving party. A party, a little party after school everybody stayed for. Why not?”
Overborne, she was fearful, whined, yet submitted to his lead. “Where you gonna take me?”
“You’ll be a few minutes late, that’s all. We can be real quick. I’m not going to take you a mile away. I know you have to be home.”
They stopped only briefly at the impacted, milling intersection of 14th and Broadway. The same young cop Ira had seen before now stood in midstreet, unkinking anarchy with beckoning hand and whistle. He pointed to his feet in strict signal to the left-turn driver. “Ira, where are you going?” Stella pleaded. “Oh, will I get it from Mama.”
“No. It’s right here.”
“Where?”
“The same street. The other side.” Her gaze ranged along the low drab row of buildings. “Read the name,” Ira encouraged.
“You mean that theater?”
“Fox’s. Right.”
“So what d’you wanna go in there for?”
“I worked there.”
“Yeah, but you gotta pay to get in now, don’t you?”
“Damn sight better than a telephone booth. C’mon, you’ll see,” he encouraged. “It’ll be in and out, in and out. Maybe you won’t even be ten minutes late.”
She let the elbow he was holding relax permissively. “Oh, in there?”
“Smart, huh? Let’s cross here.”
“I never was in Fox’s.”
“It’s a good place. Used to be. It’s got a great balcony.”
“Oh.”
“All right? Boy, am I dying. Hey, maybe I’ll let you. I never tried it. You still got your period?” He squeezed her arm, masterfully amorous, steering her toward the run-down theater marquee. “A-ah. You still—?”
“What?”
“Got your period?”
“No. I finished.”
“What?!”
“I finished this morning already.”
“You did!” He all but came to a halt. “How could you?”
“I began Sunday, that’s why, right after you called. Isn’t that funny? Nearly right after I just hung up.”