“Yes. I’m sure you were here Sunday. Does it matter?”
“No, but it would have saved everybody a lot of trouble: me a lot of dumb worrying. And you making doctor’s appointments and having to cancel ’em.” Ira looked off obliquely, paused for breath. “I guess the worst of it is my having to confess the louse I am.”
She shook her head, so characteristically: not disapproving, but with sober, sympathetic disagreement. “You were only confessing to the need that’s part and parcel of being human, of any species of life, I imagine. Marcia knows that better than all of us. We all satisfy it — in different ways, but we do satisfy it.”
“Yeh? I satisfied it.”
“Is there any reason why you shouldn’t? There isn’t. There are puritanical ones. You’re shy. You’re inhibited. But you needn’t feel that what happened is so very sordid, what you’ve done is so very sordid. If you but knew how really sordid—” Edith groped for words a moment, laughed. “You have no idea. Most children experiment at an early age.”
“Yeh.”
It was no use. He was what he was, and he couldn’t tell her what he was — or only as much as he had, and that was too much, and maybe now that he had, it would be best if he stayed away, let the friendship taper off. Let her words slide over him until he could leave politely. He was expert in attitudes of listening. And he was just tired enough so that he was afraid he might let go altogether, if he allowed himself to become too engaged, if he fueled her interest with rejoinders. She spoke of the practices of respectable businessmen, churchgoers, affluent and married and influential, ways that were truly sordid, with young children and prostitutes — married uncles and young nieces, and all the time maintaining a sanctimonious exterior. Those people were really despicable, because they were hypocrites, and she loathed hypocrites.
But as far as Ira was concerned, his sex relations with his cousin Stella were almost inevitable, because he was extremely sensitive and, unlike Larry, shy and unworldly, and unlike Larry, poverty-stricken and deprived. It was just too bad that he felt so guilty in the matter of sexual intercourse with his cousin. Sexual behavior sprang out of the mores of a culture; so did the attitudes people developed about sex. Because there was no genuine sex education, no sex education in the schools—“Heavens, no! The churches would be horrified, the Watch and Ward societies would be up in arms!”—attitudes about sex with few exceptions were determined by ingrained and often fallacious notions about sex, by sheer ignorance, by social custom and taboo, by religious and puritanical nonsense about sin and punishment—
“Yeah, that’s the way I am,” Ira agreed. “It’s inbred. When I read about Satan and Sin—” he hesitated for fear Edith might draw a parallel—“in Milton, the whole thing hit home despite myself. I don’t believe it, but what if you’re brought up that way? It’s bad.”
“Poor lad, I wish I’d known. But of course you — I’m bound by Victorian decorums too. No use crying over spilt milk. Ira, it’s bred in all of us, that sex is wicked — for some even in marriage,” she consoled. “I know I once thought so. I was deeply affected — influenced by my mother’s Christian Science priggishness. I’ve told you about it. My sister still feels that same way. I’m sure that may have been one of the reasons — I don’t know — of her divorce. It would be the last thing she’d talk about. But sooner or later we learn to escape from that kind of domination — it’s really nothing but superstition. You yourself have already thrown off much of it, haven’t you?”
“Yeah. It’s different throwing it off when you know what you’re doing.”
She smiled comfortingly. “I’m sure it is.” Her eyes strayed to the mirror above the fireplace at Ira’s back. “That very thing you were so concerned about: Stella’s menstruating. When I lived with Sam H in Berkeley, who I suppose had been brought up in much more Orthodox fashion than you were, he told me that Jews considered menstruating women unclean, practically untouchable for a whole week — they had to undergo a ritual bath afterward — he used some word—”
“Mikveh.”
“Ah, that was it. Mikveh, you say?”
“Yes.”
“Mikveh,” she repeated. “What does it mean? Bath?”
“Swimming pool,” Ira said gruffly.
She laughed — always relishing his dumb sallies. “I think if I had agreed to submit to all that folderol I might be Sam H’s wife today.”
“Yes?”
“Sam told me bluntly he couldn’t conceive of marrying anyone who wasn’t Jewish. That’s when I left. But you see, it’s the same thing. It was perfectly all right to live with one.”
Ira sighed quietly. The way she had of deflating dogma and bugaboos, the way she quelled fears and guilts, as if bleaching them out of sight with her objectivity, he recognized had a kind of dual effect on him: she reduced the onus of his wickedness, eliminated much of the sense of heinousness, quenched the shimmer of guilt, stealth, risk that informed, that magnified his furor.
“And you must remember,” Edith was saying, “your cousin Stella is no child.”
“Yeah, not now. But then, then — when she was only fourteen.”
“Even at fourteen. Young people, girls especially, mature at quite different ages — no matter what the law has to say in the matter. It’s only a rule of thumb. I still hadn’t been sexually awakened in my twenties. It took Wasserman to do that.”
“Yes.”
“I’m sure I told you.”
“Yes. In Woodstock. With Larry.”
“Speaking of an utter waste of time!” Her tone of voice and the movement of her head were full of severity. “How could I have been such a ninny?”
The cat perched on top of the stone wall; the cat leaping down to the ground, brushing against her leg under the filigreed white table — the hysterical scream. Prophetic intuition, smarter than the intellect.
“Well.”
There wasn’t much to say: regret: vain synapse between fingernails.
She resumed the didactic. “The thing I wanted you to realize, what you have already surmised from Marcia, was that in other times and places, other cultures, Stella would be considered nubile, marriageable. You needn’t feel as if you had committed a grave offense. You needn’t feel you were vicious. You’re not.”
“No.”
“It’s a lesson. Fortunately not as costly as it might have been. The whole point is, don’t go into these things without a contraceptive of some kind.”
“I did. I thought I did,” Ira defended himself, too spent for vehemence. “I thought the — the thing didn’t work — when she was late, that’s all.” He felt as though they had entered a stage of repetition, of pointlessness. Why had she insisted on his coming to her apartment anyway? He was most ungracious when it came to expressing gratitude. He didn’t know how. It irked, it pained him.
“Would you like some coffee? Or tea?”
He pondered, was about to decline. “All right, coffee,” he conceded. “If it’s not too much trouble. Mind if I go to the bathroom?”
“Oh, no. Go ahead. I’ll make some coffee meanwhile.” He got up from the chair, as she slid off the couch — garter-belt ends winked—
He stopped in the doorway that led to both bathroom and kitchenette. “You were talking about Larry—”
“Yes?” She walked toward him, petite, tender smile glistening from points of olive skin. Her presence, her nearness, gave him pause. He would have wished to ponder with all his strength the contrast: Stella, the Jewish kid with blond hair under cloche, girlish, at best bland, subservient. And Edith, brunette and dainty and knowing and womanly — and a world apart. He could crook his finger at the one, and would shrivel at the other’s tenderness—