Henry Roth - Mercy of a Rude Stream - The Complete Novels

“Maybe.”

“And married, well — there’s the fact, that’s all: my parents, family, they’d have to face it, they’d have to take it, that’s all. That was my point with her.” Larry turned aside in negation. “She said I was very dear, very tender, and sweet. All right, maybe I am. But that doesn’t help, doesn’t solve anything. I could marry her now. Nobody has to know. My folks, yes, well, they’d be aghast. That’s the sickening part of it. I’m eighteen, say, almost nineteen, and she’s thirty. It’s okay the other way around. I’m thirty. She’s nineteen. Ask Father Time to draw us closer together. There’s a poem about that in our Outlines of English Lit. I can’t remember — Cartwright, I think, Cartwright. More or less on the same theme: difference in age.” He began hunting for his pipe.

“Hey, eat something, will you? Christ, you’ll have me turning into a Jewish mama: Ess, ess, mein kindt . SOS.”

“No. I’ve had all I want right now. You can finish everything.”

“Yeah? Thanks. There’s still some goulash left.”

“My mother’ll be glad to see it gone.”

“Yeah, you know why? She’ll think you ate it. Anyway, I’m glad to help out. I’m glad I’m not in love either.” Ira made another trip to the stove. “Sure?”

“Absolutely. She doesn’t earn enough on an instructor’s salary. She doesn’t earn enough to do all the things she feels she has to do — mostly for others. She canvasses the Times , the New York Trib, The Nation, The New Republic , for book reviews. It breaks my heart to see her driving herself so — for others. And I’m beginning to understand what a disadvantage the women in the department are under, in the English department — and in the other departments too. She’s already entitled to an assistant professorship. A doctorate and two books out on Navajo Indian religious chants. And praised by poets and anthropologists. Some man, just because he wears pants, will get there ahead of her. It makes her so mad. It makes me sore too.”

“Yeah?” Ira had to suppress his disgruntlement with having to attend to the same thing, the same subject. Boy, to be able to say, the way Jews said: all right already. Well, fress instead. His gluttony would go unnoticed.

Annoyed, Ira locked fingers below the keyboard. That was not in the text; he was diverging from the text, diverging from the yellow typescript, from the first draft. He was bored with it. He was bored with it, rather than his character; he was bored with it in advance of his character — in fact, he was projecting his boredom onto his character. Why? Because there was so goddamn much information still to be presented, still to be introduced. Oh, Jesus, what tricks of the trade, new devices, to employ? He had used about every stratagem he could think of. He was fresh out, as the storekeepers said in Maine: we’re fresh out of bacon.

It was John Vernon, Ira remembered, the homosexually inclined instructor, who had set the ball rolling — with his advances toward Larry. His advances toward Larry had aroused, so it would have seemed, Edith’s competitiveness. Speaking of wearing pants as a reason for getting ahead of women! She had not wanted Larry to fall into the toils of a homosexual — at least before he had experienced normal love. Okay. You’ve said it, Ira told himself irritably. Delete all the rest, goddamn it.

Yes, as novelist practitioner, he had recourse to any number of different stratagems. True. Somebody entered the apartment, say, Irma again, and put an end to the intimacy of disclosure. Or Ira had deliberately thrown the narration off track, asked one of his typical obtuse questions. Or better yet — look, man — what was the legal lingo? — appeal to the prurient urge, postpone matters by writing that he had got an idea that maybe he might be lucky tonight. Tear off two pieces of ass in one day. And said: “You know, I owe my Aunt Mamie a visit. I haven’t been there in an age.” Or should he have said that his grandfather intended to move there soon? Or that Zaida was living there already? Christ, no. He had to keep something straight, and something in reserve too. He intended to use that ploy later. It was a thought, though. He always got horny a few hours after his connubial-type intercourse with Minnie in the morning. Usually, he pulled off that same night, and that held him for the rest of the week — or if he was lucky, the rest of the midweek, when a nocturnal call at Mamie’s paid off. But actually, there was only one thing that was of value, quite apart from the information, one narrative detail that was interesting in itself, that had a touch of encounter about it, that mix of the absurd, the youthful, the silly yet erotic. Ira scrolled up the amber text on the monitor.

“There’s somebody else lives there, isn’t that right?” Ira felt impelled to assure Larry that he had an audience. “Somebody else shares her apartment with her, I thought you told me.”

“Iola Reid. You know, they’re both instructors in the English department. They have separate bedrooms and a common living room.”

“Oh, that’s how it is.”

That wasn’t bad, Ira encouraged himself. He felt better, now that he had released his pent-up impatience.

Larry began clearing the dishes from the kitchen table.

“Want some help with the dishes?”

“They’re only a few. I’ll stack them. I’ll leave the pan for Mary. I don’t mean, well, you know, that he’s the cause of it all, but that’s how it all began. I was telling her about John Vernon. He’s a nice guy, but he’s a homo.”

“Huh?”

“He’s been trying to make me.”

“Yeah?”

“Oh, yes. I never bothered telling you all the details. But Edith knew.”

“Jesus. In the college too. I know you told me about homos. But I have to get used to the idea.”

“Oh, yes. It’s nothing unusual anymore. He writes free verse. He read some of his work at the first meeting of the Arts Club I attended.” Larry grimaced, tilted his head. “He had it privately printed.”

“A book?”

“Yes. You pay for the printing and binding yourself. I don’t see that it’s worthwhile. Especially his stuff. Either I’m crazy, or it’s — it’s just prose broken up into different lengths. Edith thinks so, too. He has an idea it’ll come into its own someday.”

“You mean be—” Ira gesticulated. “Be recognized? Win applause?”

“He’s convinced it will.”

“Yeah?”

“He invited me up to his apartment. Turns the lights down. We smoke. His hand’s on my thigh.”

“When was that?”

“Oh, about a week ago. I thought to myself: you make for my fly, I’m going to tip that burning cigarette end down on the back of your hand.”

“Did he?”

“No. He must have guessed.”

“Jesus.” Ira tried to grin. “What the—” He paused in semiperplexity. “The — er — the thing gives me half a dozen different notions: what a girl must feel like if a guy she doesn’t like makes passes at her. What the hell makes guys that way? I can’t imagine it, ye know. Getting worked up about another man?”

“Well, that was what worried Edith.” He scraped the uneaten goulash on his plate into the metal garbage can, replaced the lid. “I told her about it.”

“About him? Vernon?”

“She said that she was very much afraid. That he would succeed in seducing me before I had a chance to experience a normal love relationship with a woman.”

Ira chortled in derision. “You already did. Aboard ship. Right?”

“Well, nevertheless, we all have that tendency,” Larry assured him.

“What d’ye mean? In us?”

“In us, yes; we’re partly feminine, partly masculine. One dominates over the other, usually. But it’s true in all of us, no matter how masculine the fellow is. Sometimes he’ll fool you. He acts like a bruiser, looks like one, and likes guys. Cowboys often were homos, Edith said.”