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

“Yeah?” Cool now, limp and detached, he listened with a certain degree of judiciousness. Curious, though his reaction was understandably ambiguous. He was aware that he felt benign, even helpful: “Well, you don’t mind he’s Spanish. Is he a nice guy?”

“Oh, he’s lovely. He’s so good-looking, I’m telling you; he’s the floorwalker, in charge of all the different kinds of plants and flowerpots, all those things that have to do with houseplants growing in windows, and hanging from the ceiling. Vines. He knows all their names. He learned all that in Panama.” She paused in amused reminiscence. “And he wears a white carnation in his lapel, just like you see in the movies.”

“Yeah? How’d you meet him?”

“Oh, you know Altman’s. In the elevator before the store opens. You see people. You hear them talk. I heard about the gorgeous flowers and plants on the third floor. So I went up there during my lunch hour. He thought I was a customer, and we started in talking. He asked me to meet him after the store closed. He took me to Schrafft’s.”

“To Schrafft’s. Hey, that’s high-class. How old is he?”

“Twenty-six, maybe twenty-eight.”

“And you don’t mind that he’s not Jewish? You said last year you’d never again go steady with a goy . Or something like that.”

“I don’t care. I was a fool then. I’m not going to be a dope this time. So Zaida can say Kaddish for me. But,” she stressed, “until then, I’m just talking. He gives me that feeling, you know?”

“Yeah?” Ira studied her: pretty, despite the thickened eyeglasses she now had to wear, lips parted, her eyelids arched, her fresh, dappled cheeks rosy with surge of tender sentiment, she signaled the kind of state he recognized, but would never know.

“Well, good,” he said. “Good luck.” He started suddenly to his feet.

A few days later, on a Sunday morning, he heard Mom leave. He lay in his narrow bed, unmoving, staring at the opposite gray-daubed bricks seen through the window of their air shaft. It was only a few weeks after the summer solstice, he reflected, and yet the sunlight would no longer descend even this far down at high noon — not that it was noon. Who was it? Eratosthenes, who had conducted his experiment to determine the earth’s diameter by climbing down into a deep well. It couldn’t have been any deeper than the bottom of an air shaft was from the roof. Even to the first flight.

Minnie had been out late last night, a sure sign she was out on another date. She had turned on the ceiling lights after entering the kitchen, shut the door to the bedrooms immediately after, but he had awakened. He said nothing to her when she went by on her way to her folding cot in Mom and Pop’s bedroom. There could be no doubt in his mind with whom she had been out: Arturo — but she called him Artie, the good-looking Latin floorwalker in charge of the potted plants and the hanging vines. He felt strange; he felt almost sexless as he lay there in abject silence, trying to determine how he felt, since it was really over for good. Oh, hell, let it be over, and stay over. He’d sneak a quick one into Stella as he had at most other times. Needed only to raise half a hard-on, and he was done, hardly had a hard-on and it was over, and she was retreating from his knees — before anyone even guessed. Hell of a way to fuck, half a minute, half-backed, high speed.

Toss-up. She was sleeping, sleeping it off. Well, then, get up, get up and dress, if he really wanted to make this the breaking point. Show her. Oh, hell, he didn’t know. Would the Latin romance go on? Would there be an engagement, the way other romances progressed? Would she accept? Maybe. Would he attend to old Zaida, tearing his hair, davening over her Kaddish candle? But she would never begin with him again anyway.

So pay no attention to her. Get out of bed. Right. Jesus, start now. Right. Get your clothes on. Okay.

He got up, walked quietly barefooted into the kitchen. He was behaving so differently now, aware of it, for once not opportunistic, not halfhearted, or what to call it? Shilly-shallying. He felt almost like a somnambulist, sleepwalking in broad daylight, standing in the kitchen, Sunday morning, looking at the washpole out of the corner window on the backyard, and alone with Minnie — would that be the way Siamese twins felt if they tried to tear themselves apart?

He was about to shut the kitchen door to the bedroom, but he heard a bed creak, the creak of one bed, a few barefooted footsteps, and the creak of another bed. She was changing from her cot to Pop and Mom’s bed. He eased the tongue of the lock into its aperture as quietly as he could.

“Mama?”

“No,” he said gruffly. “It’s me.”

“So she went away a long time?”

“No. A few minutes ago.”

“So what are you doing?”

Invisible point of the spinning dreidel on Hanukkah: shim when it came to rest, take all or lose all. Which? He had forgotten. Gimel , take all or what? Not since the East Side. “I was gonna get dressed.”

“Let me talk to you a second.”

“What for?”

“Sit down. I want to tell you about my date. It was wonderful. Oh, it was wonderful.”

“Yeah?” Ira sat on the edge of the bed. Oh, Jesus, would it never end. “Tell me quick. All right?”

“You got time. We’re not doing anything. He took us to a hotel room, you know. Just for a couple of hours. Oh, we had such a wonderful time. So easy—” Her hands came together rapturously above the white-fringed bosom of her nightgown. “I’ve been out on dates. But like this, never. You got a big bed, you got a wonderful room all to yourselves. Oh, you got ti-i-me.”

“Wonderful. So why tell me?”

“He’s got such a soft, golden skin. And what a wonderful lover. You feel like you could—” The hands at her bosom arose upward, spread apart. “You don’t know how much you can stand. I’ll tell you something else you should know. He’s married!” Her head lifted from the pillow. “He’s married, he’s even got two kids.”

“Well, I’ll be goddamned.”

“He told me.”

“You know that, and you still let him fuck you?”

“Shut up, you dirty louse. Dirty. Dirty. That’s all that you are.”

“All right. Good.”

“You stink.”

“Yeah?”

“You oughta see somebody who can make love. Oh.”

He turned on her, spewed vindictiveness. “You mean you with your spic feller. Why not?” He was about to dredge up more, but the viciousness of his own gloating stunned him, nay, intoxicated him — there was no telling the two apart, only that he was ravished by his own memories — and transfigured by the rapture of his horror at the abyss he had come to, untrammeled, the barriers he had broken down to the verge of depravity — that he had fondly imagined only minutes ago that he could somehow begin to restore. He barely heard her as through a corridor of selves in a mirror, the dark reiterated reflection of becoming nil.

“Shut up, louse. He makes you look like a mensheleh , you know that? What he’s got you’ll never have in all your life. He’s got charm. And a build. He’s beautiful.”

She stung, the way Mom did Pop, when she taunted him. “So what’re you blaming me for, you goddamn twat!” he reviled. “And with a Spanish goy yet! And married.” He could hear himself, abandoned in his malevolence, saw apparition of summery gutter dust at the curb, the grated sewer at the corner. What of it? He could murder her.

“Better than a brother, better than a brother,” she kept jeering in rejoinder. “Better than you. And don’t scare me you’re gonna tell Mom this time. I’m nearly of age. I’m a senior at Richmond. I told her myself I was going out with a Panamanian.”