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

And as he did, he heard, he thought he heard, no, he heard the slightest commotion on the other side of the door, and he hesitated—

Just in time to hear Edith’s voice, unmistakably Edith’s, hurried: “Just a minute, Ira!”

Had she been asleep, had he wakened her? Oh, God! Ira withdrew the key.

A second later, two seconds later, the door swung open, and into the electric-lighted hall stepped Edith, pulling the door after her. “Ira,” she said. “I thought it was you.”

“Yeah, it’s me.” He retreated in utter confusion. “Excuse me! Gee, Edith. I rang the buzzer — I–I’m sorry!”

“I wasn’t in a position to receive callers.” The Professora’s eyes were bright, bright and roguish; and her voice high-pitched, on the verge of shrillness. “It’s quite all right, Ira.” She was wearing a new dark green bathrobe with black trefoils on it. Not merely wearing it, but by the way she held the garment at her throat, bunching the cloth together with tiny fist, by the intimate way her form swelled the cloth with contour, there could be no escaping the perception: the body her bathrobe enveloped was nude. “Ira, can you wait a few minutes? You can wait in my neighbor Amelia’s room. She’s gone for the weekend, and I have her keys. Please wait,” she appealed.

“Oh, no. What a dope I am. Gee.”

“I’m glad you came over. I’ll get her keys. Just one minute.”

“No, I was only walking. I’ll come again. It’s all right.”

“You’re sure? Will you call me?”

“Yeah, I just happened to eat too much macaroni — I mean pasta — and I—” Keys still in hand, Ira began making his way toward the stairs. “I was walking it off.”

“I’m so sorry,” Edith said. “Are you all right?”

“Oh, sure. It’s all eased up, shrunk.”

As he spoke, he took the first step down. Solicitously watching him descend, Edith opened the door behind her, and from deep inside the room, a dry, sandy chuckle emanated.

“You’ll call?” Edith’s voice followed Ira down the steps.

“Yeah. In a couple o’ days. All right?”

“I’m so sorry.”

“It’s nothing. G’bye.”

“Goodbye, Ira.”

He heard the apartment door close above him. . walked carefully, deliberately down the stair treads, as if his doing so helped to obliterate his blunder, as if quiet would eliminate his mistake — as if it never happened. . What a sap. Hand slid on banister to newel post. He jingled the two keys on the ring; he could almost have flung them out into the gutter when he opened the house door, so great was his chagrin. He pocketed them instead, and stepped out onto the sidewalk.

What a dope! What an imbecile! He turned back toward Seventh Avenue. Yeah, but all those tears, all that sound and fury, storm and stress, that wracking taxi ride last spring with Edith so distraught, those floods of woe — they didn’t mean a thing; there she was in bed with Lewlyn again. The same guy she had renounced, denounced, heaped with scorn! Hey, wait a minute — and now his knees began to ache with renewed pang — couldn’t he get it through his thick head that ladies wanted to be laid? Yeah, ladies wanted to be laid, just like gentlemen wanted to lay them?

It was the same feeling of disappointment he had had six weeks before, just as his senior year of CCNY had begun, when, keeping pace with the scattering of fellow students traveling downhill, he had caught sight of Larry about a half block ahead: Larry accompanied by someone else: yes, sociology professor Lewlyn, still fleeing his unfaithful wife, Marcia Meede. . how operatic it all did sound. . had returned from England. Ira made no effort to catch up with the two, but kept his distance, until he saw them enter Wentworth Hall. Something to meditate on, watching the pair, the younger and the elder, instructor and student, Larry gesturing with large, white hands, Lewlyn listening benignly. Something to ponder on, with Edith the unseen despairing apex of the triangle. So much meaning inhered in it, so much meaning in this transient configuration, but what was it? Irony, irony was easy to discern — he was a mehvin of irony. But the immense, positive shape of meaning escaped him, the meaning that all this irony declared about human life. It was way beyond the mere sexual involvement of student and instructor with the same woman. What was human life striving after? If he could only discover that larger significance, that larger affirmation. Maybe there wasn’t any, though it seemed there was. He had thought he was then nothing but a big fool and a wretched sinner too.

The feeling persisted still, not a week after Yom Kippur, his unobservant atonements all for naught, as he rounded the small gas station at Seventh Avenue again. Maybe he was wrong. What the hell did he know about love? Maybe Lewlyn was now all finished with that British spinster he hoped would free him from Marcia’s net. Or maybe Lewlyn had come back to Edith again. No wonder she looked that way: droll, wanton, impish. “’ Tis done, ’tis done, I’ve won, I’ve won, quoth she and whistles thrice . Yeah, but why had she wanted Ira to come over again, almost imploring him? No, he was wrong again. Nothing had changed. He could bet on that.

He had to get to a subway seat and sit down before his legs caved in. Get on at Christopher, transfer at 42nd. In the scarce remaining light from the west, Ira broke into a trot, and as he passed the news kiosk on Seventh he picked up speed, from trot to run. He tore down the stairs, in twilight’s gloom, plunked a token in the slot, for once, and breathless, he boarded the uptown train; he’d dropped his jitney into the hopper.

Ira sat with thumbs hooked in belt. Had he painted himself into a corner? Probably. But he had to keep going to keep from falling down. He tried to think back, scanned an older yellow typescript to his right: I felt baffled; I felt bitter; with this first line, the next chapter had begun. No use denying it to myself any longer, slurring the matter over as I did about so much else in life, habitually permitting connotations to blur, and thus obviate a decisive response . It was true, Ira meditated, he had a knack for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. He had already begun to hope, more and more articulately, that Edith would lose Lewlyn, irrevocably. And with Larry clearly diminishing to a mere indulgence, one depending on a propitious moment to terminate, he, Ira himself, heir apparent, somehow, sometime soon would become Edith’s lover.

Ira bolted up and suddenly addressed himself consciously to the little chips of the time when he was alive, alive, twenty-one, and entering that senior year at CCNY. Chips, he called them, noting he had used a singular instead of a plural verb. Well, chips of the time — considered as a unit. In a more illustrative way of speaking, they weren’t really chips, these notations he had beside him on the collapsible steel typing table; they were a few of the anchor points in the world he lived in, and to which the web of his existence was connected, loosely connected mostly, remotely connected. They and millions of other events like them made up the ever-changing content of his days. In this particular case, these events — the start of class, the Yankees World Series win, those agonizing fifteen seconds of the Tunney-Dempsey fight, the “slow count,” were all part, all chips, of the year 1927, nearing the end of October.

For a while, after what he had seen — and heard — that Sunday afternoon in October, his hopes seemed to him fatuous, fatuous and untenable. How could she so reverse herself, when she had hardened her mind against Lewlyn as a duplicitous and perfidious person — and weak — as one who had made it appear that he was undecided in his choice of wife, whose indecision she was gullible enough to take at face value? Was he still undecided, or was he still playing her for a fool? Which? These were difficult, nay, impossible judgments for the young and anything but acute Ira to make. According to Edith’s version in later years, Lewlyn had come back from England in the same uncertain frame of mind as he had gone, and she had resumed the relationship with him upon his return, because Lewlyn still ostensibly hadn’t made up his mind. He was still in a state of uncertainty, but Edith tended to fabricate. Ira came to learn that, to learn it by his own relationship with her, and its aftermath. It was the same thing he had discerned, intuitively, about Edith from the beginning: her trait of making herself the heroine of a tragedy in which she was enmeshed and made to suffer because others took advantage of her innate goodness. And just as she had admitted in the midst of her sobs and tears, the night Ira escorted her home from the ship, that she had been deceiving herself with regard to Lewlyn’s choice of permanent mate, so she did when he came back from England — came back, according to him, to Lewlyn, with vows of marriage already exchanged between himself and Cecilia. That he entered into a sexual transaction with Edith, that was another matter. An entire year of continence, or celibacy, was too much to expect of any man, as Ira found out when he nearly went mad in Los Angeles during his six months of separation from M in ’38—too much to ask of any man, and yet not too much to ask of a woman, as M bore witness, as Cecilia bore witness, and how many myriads of women over the centuries bore witness? Anyway, this last sequel of the sterile affair Edith evidently entered into in a spirit of play — consciously — or in that Greek spirit that Lewlyn esteemed so greatly: wherein friendship between the sexes reached its greatest intimacy via intercourse.