“Holy crow! I suffered all those days, thinking you— And I made arrangements. Jesus, I haven’t even told her. And boy.” He screwed up his face, clawed at his brow. “I spilled the beans. All about — me. Jesus, I didn’t have to. If I’d only known— Why couldn’t you have stayed home that goddamn afternoon? Roxy, shmoxy.” The words poured out of him rife with contempt.
“You’re not the only one.” She turned on him resentfully. “It’s what I keep telling you, Ira. Only you count. Just like Zaida.”
“Just like — now, listen—” He nipped off his truculence. Jesus Christ, he’d lose her if he didn’t. “All right,” he appeased. “All I’m saying is you could have given me a break. You could have let me know. Somehow. Oof, Jesus. Have I got luck.”
“What d’you think I did? I tried to tell you.” Stella lifted her face in bland challenge.
“What d’you mean? What did you do?”
“And I got myself in trouble, too.”
“When?”
“You know how much I love your neighborhood, with all the Irish and the Italians. They’re worse than the Portorickies. Even your hallway. That long, dark — o-o-h. Don’t tell me I wasn’t afraid.”
“Is that what you mean? What were you doing in my neighborhood? My house? You mean 108 East 119th Street?”
“Yes, I mean 108 East 119th,” she repeated. “Your house. Where else?” And she suddenly added: “Let’s go back.”
“Oh, no, no!” Ira truckled. “There’s the theater. Where was I? Me?”
“You weren’t home.”
“I wasn’t?”
“No.”
“I wasn’t!”
“You talk about me? Why shouldn’t I go to the Roxy afterward? I’m gonna wait? You’ll find out later.”
“Oh, that was Sunday morning! Oh, Jesus Christ Almighty! I would go get advice I didn’t need. Oh, Jesus!” he wailed. “Talk about Romeo and Juliet.”
“Who?”
“Oh, you know, Romeo and Juliet. Christ.” His voice slowed under freight of utter disgust. “Oh—” And then suddenly spurred on: “So how’d you get in trouble? Some mick follow you in the hall, or what?”
“No. And don’t think there wasn’t somebody on the stoop.”
“Then what? So what happened?” Again, her mum, obdurate mien met his question. How could she be so blue-eyed, blank, and recalcitrant: sappy enigmatic. “Okay. Forget it, none of my business,” he slurred. “Let’s go.”
“But not to watch anything? No flick?”
“No, no. I told you. Listen, the subway gets jammed.” He gesticulated. “It’s a holiday tomorrow. Things like that can happen.”
“So you tell Mama.” There was a new note of defiance in her tone.
“C’mon, kid, you forgot something in school.” He patted her butt. “Hey, Mr. McLaughlin — he wanted to show you something,” Ira teased provocatively. “Is he good-looking? Married? I bet you’re teacher’s pet.” She refused the lure.
“Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.”
“Right. Lucky guy. Okay. Here we go. In another ten minutes we’ll be walkin’ the other way.”
“You make me feel I’m doing you a favor, Ira, because I worried you so much.”
“Oh, no,” he patronized. “It’s Thanxy, it’s Thanxy. Let’s celebrate. Turkey-lurkey. Goosey-loosey.” He winked. “And here’s Foxy-loxy. Foxy-loxy with cream cheese on a bagel.”
Rewarded with a token simper, he got out his wallet, approached the ticket booth. There. He had gotten around her again. But she baffled him just the same, baffled him, once she made up her mind she wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t let on; fooled him because so unexpected: suddenly her flaccid mask became impenetrable. What kind of trouble did she mean? Well, just as he had his tricks of artful dodging, she had too: like that round-the-world stuff. What d’you know about that? Mr. McLaughlin’s big mick uncircumcised cock with her heavily rouged lips around it. She was getting way ahead of him, the little cunt. A head was right. Jesus, the way street words had ruined him. What if she takes it into her head to make money, now? Lucky she had no inkling of what he could do in Fox’s, no, what he could think of doing in Fox’s. Boy, wild — He laid a dollar in front of the half-moon opening at the bottom of the glass cage shielding the woman cashier: “Two in the mezzanine.”
“Admission’s the same as the orchestra till six o’clock.” Spoken crisply from behind the glass cubicle. Glimpse of regular, chiseled features no longer young, heavily made up, in eyeglasses, too.
“Oh, I didn’t notice. Okay. Two.” Flat brass mechanism crackled under the woman’s fingers. The tickets sprouted magically from the metal, were tendered through the opening, along with the change. His briefcase under the crook of his arm, Ira scooped up tickets and coins. He still had comfortable surplus from Edith’s fiver. Could anything plait together the mat of irony that got him here because of Mamie’s dollar that he was going to replicate with a Trojan bought out of Edith’s fiver: out of Mamie’s kitchen to Fox’s smoking balcony. He had an odd image of primitive, of African statuary — the plum-and-striped-uniformed swarthy ticket taker returned the stubs — the grotesque faces they maybe thought were beautiful. Try to map, to match, the different cultures, Edith called them, and smart-ass Marcia — with Stella hesitantly in his lee, Ira made for the balcony. Their thoughts must have converged within the dingy plaster of the spiral walled staircase.
“Isn’t she waiting for you, Ira, that lady we were going to?”
“Yeah. I shoulda called her. She made an appointment — for you.”
“So?”
Ira climbed a couple of steps, turned. “She’ll know.” Stella’s shallow blue eyes glistened up at him. These females really had their own rivalries. Or whatever you call it: their own fortes, circean premiums, something like that, niches for bitches — Jesus, the dirty valences of terms.
“What do you get out of all of this?” he asked, two steps before the balcony top.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“Yeah.”
“You’d be surprised.” In the last dull streetlight of the small window of the staircase, her lips barely swelled out, her short throat barely inflated. Boy, that was a new one, all right. From the gray light of the staircase they stepped into the stale perfume of piano musical gloom of the first balcony. Disoriented a few seconds, they groped through tenebrae, through movie-house night pegged to the red exit lights, under the cigarette smoke meandering in the beam high above them that fell on the screen. The usher’s flashlight moved toward them.
“Right here, Stella.” Ira anticipated the usher’s approach, led her to the very last row, behind barrier and curtain, at the top of the balcony.
“Here?”
“Yeah. Last row.” She understood: he meant the first two seats on the aisle — the last aisle, with the heavy protective curtain behind them. Just in front of the curtain, she stood poised a moment uncertainly. And Ira after her: “You want help with your coat?”
“No. Should I take it off?”
“A minute. It’d be easier.” Ira set down his briefcase, doffed his Chesterfield. They both sat down, coats over their knees. Her pudgy face emerging out of the beam-lightened gloom looked contented, reassured, spreading her short legs to invite the course of his ardor. With his hand on her thigh, working up, they watched the screen: a few minutes of hot petting, fingering her parted muff under her green coat, till her legs stretched rigid. With graven, expectant face, her eyes followed the hand he guided to the hard-on sprung like a pale spar from his open fly. President Coolidge — grave-faced, austere countenance, the embodiment of Puritan rectitude — shook hands with Gene Tunney on the newsreel. Below the scanty audience, men scattered here and there on the balcony, here and there puffing on a cigar or cigarette.