“I’m filthy after where I’ve been,” he said. “I’m filthy anyway. You shouldn’t do that.”
“I’m simply not going to let you mislead me another time.” As she spoke, she undid a button of his shirt, undid it with determination. “Poor lamb. You should have told me all this a long time ago. Did you think I’d be shocked?” She slipped a cool tiny hand into the opening she had made; her palm glided along the bare skin of his chest. “You seemed quite without interest in sex, as I said before. I took that to mean you hadn’t been awakened — since I hadn’t either until late. I told you how my German-born husband and I threw books at each other because he demanded his rights as husband. It’s only later that men seem to develop an overriding interest in sex. Do you still have sex relations with your sister?”
“No, she won’t let me anymore.” He tried to conceal errant stir of desire from Edith on his knees by leaning sideways to drag out his handkerchief.
“And doesn’t your Aunt Molly—”
“Mamie.”
“—guess why you come to her home?”
“She thinks I come for the dollar she gives me: indigent scholar. I imagine so. Ironic, isn’t it? I get a buck for a — I’m sorry. I—”
“Were you going to use the word ‘fuck’?” He felt the blood rush to his head — with a suddenness that made him feel faint. Those dainty lips to form that word! The very sound of it in her voice rendered him speechless. And yet she looked so calm, unruffled, ladylike. His arm slackened about her waist. She must have guessed why, but how impassive she was, drawing his arms about her again.
“I’ve told you. I’ve outgrown everyone I met. One at a time. I left them completely in the past, and done with. But you’re something I’ll never part with. You’re something that’s — that’s mine. It doesn’t matter what you think of yourself. You’re outside of me and beyond, and at the same time you’re mine. I’m not going to let you go to waste, do you understand?”
“I don’t think so. I’m not sure.”
“It was you I thought of when I had the abortion, not Lewlyn, but you. It was you I wanted near me. And thank heaven something drew you here at just the right moment.” She regarded him with unswerving brown eyes in dusky countenance.
“Yeah, but what am I supposed to feel?”
She laughed — merrily for her. “Whatever you do feel.”
“But it’s not the way Larry felt. I remember.”
“Larry felt something altogether romantic and ephemeral. He’d tell me he loved me, maybe two dozen times each time he saw me. Gratifying for a while, of course, to a woman just turned thirty. But only for a very short while. And then a bore and constricting besides. You let me be myself. That’s what I treasure about you. There’s no false idealism to hem me in.”
“Maybe I don’t know any better.” She laughed again, and they were silent: the woman on his knees, as if it were the most natural thing in the world — and inconceivable at the same time. She was an assistant professor of English literature, and he was — what? — a lout, a shlemiel, laying his sister, until he spoiled it — he hadn’t told Edith half the Jesus Christ Almighty awful details. But could there be anything further than Larry, than Lewlyn, than anybody? And yet here she was. Two things twisted about in his mind simultaneously, without his knowing which to give preference to: the sense of a stage, a new stage entered upon: a leap, a transformation, her lover — impossible — and yet here she sat contentedly on his knees, like the consummation of some kind of mopey plan he had willed — and so he had, he had. It was like that aureate promise to the kid on a street corner in Harlem long ago. And yet, here he was alone with a woman, all alone, private, in her big studio apartment, without dread, without furtiveness, like a friend, despite her sitting on his knees, her petite body close to his, and yielding — what was the word, what was the word? Normal. “Hmph!”
“What is it, precious?”
“You want me to be honest with you?”
“Of course, darling.”
“I feel like a friend.”
She smiled down at him indulgently: “We’ve been friends much too long, more’s the pity. I wish we had been more than friends long ago. And we will be.”
“Yeh?”
“Won’t we?”
“You won’t get mad?” He waited for tacit permission. “With Stella I told you most of the time I felt like a criminal. In that insecticide-perfume balcony, I told you, I could go out of my mind. That was bad enough. But when I was with Minnie — everything started to dazzle, the walls, the green-painted walls, when she said yes. The calendar on the wall, the furniture—” He gesticulated. “They lilted. So what am I going to do?”
“You’re going to stay here tonight.”
“I am? I told you. I’m filthy.”
“Oh, no you’re not. It’s nothing water won’t take off. Would you like a shower?”
“Yeah. But inside?”
The smile on her lips was small and tender, her brown eyes large and grave — and steady, her whole expression sober and reflective. “I’m not going to say, darling, that the kind of thing you’ve suffered won’t have its lasting effect. I’m not an analyst either. And perhaps you ought to see one to help you get over the worst of the effects—”
“Oh, no!”
“I thought not. I’m not inclined that way either, apart from the expense. They may help some. I’m not at all sure they help the artist. For all I know they may neutralize rather than help. And you’re so obviously the artist. But to return to the wounds, the neuroses, you’ll have to live with them, if you can. Do you think you can?”
“I have so far.”
“You know that I’ve suffered some rather bad wounds myself in childhood. I’m sure I’ve told you about the violent quarrels between my father, with his heavy drinking, and my weeping Christian Science mother, protesting, weeping — it could all be heard through the house. You can imagine the effect on a child. I seem to have suffered more than either my brother or sister. At least as far as I could tell. I was so sensitive too, Ira. I saw my mother growing more and more unhappy. I actually could tell when a new wrinkle appeared on her face.” Edith pointed to her own. “I suppose my antipathy to sex, my frigidity until well into my twenties, may have been the result of that. It took Wasserman to break through that — practically rape — to awaken me. I told Lewlyn about it. So of course Marcia knows it. She was amused by it all, Lewlyn reported back, skepticaclass="underline" I could so easily have screamed. Well.” Edith clasped her small hands even closer; she looked off into reminiscence with a kind of fixed disconsolateness. “You had your sister, you had your cousin. I discovered orgasm with one of those hand electric massaging things.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ve never told anyone else.”
“I don’t know. Here I am: East Side. Harlem. New York. And you come from way out in Silver City. What do I mean to say? I don’t know. How can you get so — well, you know: dark. I thought only slums, you know, breed that. Way out west it would be all different.”
“It isn’t. It may be much worse.” Her tiny hand traveled over his chest. “Strange, unhappy lad. Let’s put as much of that behind us as we can.”
“All right. How should I begin? As Eliot says.”
“You already have, dark eyes. Now, you go shower. You prefer that to a bath, don’t you?”
“Oh, yeah. I need to shave too.”
“I have a lady’s safety razor. Will that do?”
“Oh, sure — I’m pretty sure: it’s a Gem, I bet.”
“I think so. It’s on the top shelf in the medicine cabinet.” She stood up from his lap, began smoothing her brown skirt under the sunburst on the black kimono, viewed herself in profile in the mirror over the mantelpiece. “Do you want me to show you?”