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

Or just the reverse — when was he going to say something instead of sitting there mulling glumly like a stick? Go over to her and say: Hey, Edith, how about a lay? Hey, Edith how about a frig? Hey, Edith, how about a piece of ass? Would that make a difference? It would break the spell. What spell? Vortex spell. Free things — free her from the web he was weaving. So I’m a prick, all I want is a piece of ass. That’s all I’ve been wanting all along. Nah! Goddamn it, she wouldn’t be horrified; she’d probably laugh at him. what if she said: here. You cuckoo. Can you foresee consequences? Yeah, yeah, yeah, instead of this closeness continually binding them together, that mental web he was helping her spin. Nuts. Drool and swallow, drool and swallow. Only difference between chewing tobacco in the car barn: what’s the use? You chew tobacco and spit the juice.

“I forgot what I was going to say,” he finally said, shrugged hard: “I can’t figure it out.”

“It’s not surprising,” she said. “Only Marcia thinks she can, and probably will. Are you still doing the same work at the repair place?”

“Yeah. Grease monkey. Look at this.” Ira rolled back his sleeve. “I wash and I wash and I wash. And there’s one place I keep missing: right under the elbow. See that black smear? It keeps escaping me. It hides.”

X

Flashing his IRT pass at the change-booth man in the subway station, Ira grabbed a train home after quitting time. Oh, he had to rush, there was so little time between jumping into the tin tub of tepid tap water in the bathroom, scrubbing with pumice soap (and leaving the grime he couldn’t get off ingrained in fingers and deposited under nails), so little time between bolting supper, to Mom’s cries of dismay, and Minnie’s pleadings to slow down — though Pop chortled in rare show of pleasure: his son was earning wages for a change. So little time to trot to 125th Street, in the shadow of the New York Central trestle, iron parasol against the slant sun, and, sweating anew, climb aboard the Third and Amsterdam trolley, and clang, clang, he was on his way to CCNY evening classes. He was twenty-one, and inexhaustible, tough and inexhaustible. If anything was immortal, it was twenty-one, more immortal than De Quincey’s summer: twenty-one. By the shores of the Gitchee Goomee, twenty-one I heard a wise man say. And that last time Zaida and Mamie gone, he had to hold Stella up almost, she went so slack afterward; he grew bigger and bigger coming, scared he’d get stuck like a dog inside her, cock swelling up like a bottle.

So off at 137th Street, and hurrying. There were times he overtook Larry on the way to campus — and once or twice in the company of his sociology instructor, Lewlyn. Oh, that was ironic. One had to have a flair for irony, to enjoy it to the fullest, the overtones within overtones, endlessly propagating: rarer and rarer, evanescent. They made you grin: From bush and bar, from brack and scar, the horns of elfland faintly blowing . The horns of elfland! What did Quinto say, index finger and pinkie spread under his nose in imminent goring of mimic horns? Cornuta . Ha, ha, ha! Eager Larry doing his utmost to entertain his sociology instructor with the latest salesman’s jokes, win a dry chuckle of appreciation, unaware the guy was cuckolding him; nah, he couldn’t be cuckolding Larry; he wasn’t married to Edith: just laying Larry’s lady fair, laying his lady love. Now that was ironic, or wasn’t it? Sitting in the classroom sopping up sociology from the guy sinking a shaft into the same woman you were. Only, Lewlyn really sank a shaft, and Larry just bunny-hugged on the couch. Why the hell was that all he seemed satisfied to do, so innocent he didn’t mind having Ira there? Mystery. . mystery.

Ah, loyalties had long ago shifted, hadn’t they? Now it was all waiting, waiting, long waiting and wondering. No other way to describe it. Waiting for what? Wondering about what? Whether the way for him would someday be cleared: by Larry, by Lewlyn. Ira didn’t have to gloat over it, he ought not; Larry was his friend, but it was a fact. Larry was just hanging on by sufferance, as they called it: she didn’t want to hurt him, Edith said, dreaded his harming himself. If she was unnecessarily drastic, it might affect his heart. The other, ah, there was the rub, the toss-up. Negative, Marcia decreed: Edith’s outlook on life was negative. She and Lewlyn would destroy each other, if he joined his life with hers in marriage at this time. Why would they destroy each other? Can you think that one through? Ira asked himself. On a magnet, poles that are like repel, but hell, they weren’t magnets. He wasn’t afraid of Edith destroying him, and he was more negative than Edith was, a damn sight more, Ira told himself. What was Edith’s negativism compared to his negativism, Ira heard himself echo a quotation he couldn’t place. Biblical maybe. His world had been twisted right around, dislocated by woe, and not by self-pity either, twisted around all the way to murder, murder Minnie, his own sister. What contemplation of an act could make one more negative than that? Lot’s wife had turned to look back at burning Sodom and Gomorrah, and been turned into a pillar of salt (if you believed it). But what it meant was that horror petrified her.

And so resolve to murder had petrified him, unhappy forever, though an assignment in plane geometry saved him a split hair away from killing. “Woe, woe, unhappy,” Jocasta’s words crossed his mind, “this is all I have to say to thee, and no word more forever.” That’s what negativism meant: unhappy. Lewlyn couldn’t stand the depth of Edith’s unhappiness. The guy was normal, the guy was sound, optimistic in disposition; that was it: he was affirmative in outlook. He believed in Man’s future. That was why a permanent union with Edith, marriage with Edith, would destroy him. She was too sad for him, she was too tragic in outlook, that was all there was to it, Marcia or no Marcia. Bet a buck Lewlyn only listened to counsel he wanted to hear, and Marcia’s was the counsel he wanted to hear. Even though Ira nodded his head in agreement when Edith accused Marcia of prejudicing Lewlyn against her, that was just good tactics to agree. Instinct told him Lewlyn was more and more inclined to do what Marcia advised him to do. So. . go along with her interpretation. What use saying no? Besides, he couldn’t be sure. She was older, smarter, a hundred times more sophisticated in the ways of the polite world than he was or would ever be. Who the hell was he to gainsay? Gainsay and lose-say. No, let it unfold.

Privy to it all, wasn’t it strange? Grease monkey working over a pit under a subway train, so engrossed with what was going on in Greenwich Village, so bemused about Edith and Lewlyn and that brilliant, brilliant anthropologist pitted against poor Edith, so in the grip of speculations about the future, he felt himself at times like a link, an odd human turnbuckle, fastening the most delicate of people to the grossest, the poet and professor to subway repair barn crews, where nobody would have dreamed as he started to loosen the bolts on a brake housing, when working alone by old red mule, while Quinto faded off to take a leak, nobody would have dreamed, when, wham! Jesus! Someone was in the motorman’s cab checking the brakes. The sleeve snapped back within an inch of his cheek. But he was battle-hardened, he was twenty-one. What the hell was a brake sleeve, as long as it didn’t hit you? Nothing. Except on his part: “Hey, for Jesus’ sake, you up there?” To the answering cry of: “Hey, for Jesus’ sake, you down there? Why didn’t you tell me?”

So downhill toward campus of a late, sunlit afternoon, with Lewlyn between them, Ira and Larry, talking of this and that, Ira’s subway job, Larry’s salesman’s job, Lewlyn saying that his father expected each of his sons to grow enough wheat during the summer to pay for his tuition at Penn State. Ah, how different, how healthy, wholesome in the best sense. . Downhill past Lewisohn Stadium to the campus quadrangle in tranquil shadow. There they separated, Larry to Lewlyn’s sociology course, Ira to Government or Geology, or once a week another way, Larry and Ira to Public Speaking 7. Larry had applauded vigorously, his big hands smacking together noisily, when Ira finished delivering his defense of Sacco and Vanzetti. It was a rehash of the same defense he had delivered in Public Speaking 6, but tolerant, old (and more politically sympathetic). Dr. Dranon didn’t know that. Anything to get by in the summer.