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

“Teaching, you mean?”

“Yes. I admitted I did want to make sure I’d have something to fall back on, like teaching — I didn’t say just in case the stage didn’t work out — or”—Larry twitched his head slightly—“selling housedresses for Irv, and eventual partnership doesn’t work out either. Anyway, I’d like to go out into the world for a while. He said he understood. Anytime I changed my mind to let him know.”

“It’s a wonderful break,” Ira said with enthusiasm.

“Have you seen Iz in the last couple of days?” Larry wondered.

“Just to wave. Why? The E. E. Cummings play is still running.”

“He told me last time the Provincetown may be putting on a Pinsky play next. Jimmy White has been talking about it. He’s strong on experimentation.”

“Pinsky? What did I ever read by Pinsky?” Ira questioned.

“There are quite a few bit parts in it, Iz’s sister says. So I may get a chance to play one.”

“That would be great.”

“Wouldn’t it?”

“Do you get anything for it?” For once, Ira thought monetarily.

“I doubt if it’s very much. A few bucks. But—” Larry left the rest pending a moment — classmates at the alcove study table were closing their notebooks and getting ready to go. “What I get isn’t important right now. It’s the experience I’m after. I’ve had some on the borscht circuit, but it isn’t the same thing. This would be legitimate theater, serious theater.”

“I get the idea. I can’t remember—” Ira wrinkled brow to convey perplexity. “Seems to me I read a Pinsky play — in translation, of course — when I was going through a play-reading phase. What’s the title?”

“I don’t know the title. Iz will probably tell me in a day or two — if they decide to put it on.”

“Then what d’you do?”

“Hoof over pronto and ask White for a tryout.”

“I ketch.” Ira nodded.

“Listen, why don’t you come over to the house? Say, in a few days. It’ll be Thanxy. We’ll both have some time off. We can shmooze . What say?”

“I really don’t know, Larry.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know what I’ll be doing.”

“Look.” Larry’s big hands adjusted his jacket. “I’m sure you know all about what’s happened between Edith and me.”

“Yeah.” Ira looked straight ahead — to the wall above the wainscoting on the other side of the alcove. Wasn’t it strange to be talking about Edith here in CCNY, in the ’28 alcove? Talking about an NYU English professor and a dead romance here in the ’28 alcove? A dead romance, while your mind was on a live embryo in your cousin’s gut, or wherever it was: womb, tomb, uterus. Would such a combination of circumstances ever happen again, anything like that to two guys seated on the rich, smooth, pants-smoothed, mahogany-dark benches of CCNY? Or of Oxford? Or of Cambridge? Or of Heidelberg with its students’ ritual scars — the Sorbonne? Oh, Jesus, what was history? Shadows impinging on shadows impinging, darker and darker and darker. God, what had already happened in one short span. And was happening. Or was it just to him? “Yeah,” Ira answered, reluctant to engage in the subject any further than he had to. “She told me.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. After all, we knew each other before Edith came into the picture, right? In DeWitt Clinton. When we were both freshmen, and I was a predental student. We knew each other. We palled around together. There’s no reason why all that should end just because I don’t see Edith.” Larry’s toes lifted at the same time as his hands on his thighs turned palm upward. “So that’s over, but not our friendship, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah.” Ira could feel a certain hardening within himself — or about himself — a kind of crust forming, a sullen obduracy that beat back appeals to former friendship. Boy, that was queer, and cruel, and ungrateful. But what was he going to do? At a time like this? He couldn’t take Larry into his confidence. First of all, he didn’t need Larry, in fact, didn’t want his intimacy. Larry would be a clog now. Ira stared at shifting patterns of guilt and obligation merging into each other before his eyes. He was in trouble, and the only thing he wanted to talk about was that, and he couldn’t talk about it to Larry. Edith was the only one he could talk with about the nasty fix he had gotten himself into, because only Edith could get him out of it. What was he going to do? Say that he had knocked up his sixteen-year-old cousin? He might as well say that before that, he once fucked his sister. He could have divulged his secrets to Larry long ago. But he hadn’t. Now Ira could give a lecture, no, a term paper, on the adventures of incest — something dirty like that — like his freshman plumber’s helper theme: got him a D, and publication in The Lavender . But bullshit, bullshit. That wasn’t what Larry wanted to talk about. “What’s there to talk about?”

“A lot. For one thing, what you’ll be doing. I’m out of the picture, okay, but I’m still your friend. I’d like to talk about things. I don’t see any reason for a barrier between us, just because of Edith. We’ve got lots in common — the same things as before.”

“Well, we don’t.”

“Why not?” Larry remained calm.

Ira felt himself retreat before the pleading in Larry’s gentle brown eyes. “Trouble is, I’m all frigged up.”

“What about?”

“That’s just it. The things that happened between you and Edith you could talk about — most of the time. I mean, when the affair was going on with Edith, when you were in love and so on. But I can’t.”

“I don’t understand. Who’s stopping you?”

“Nobody. But I’m the center now. That’s what you’re interested in — I’m not flattering myself,” Ira added glumly. “The whole thing has shifted. And on top of that, I’m all screwed up by all kinds of things I can’t talk about. I won’t. I wish I could, but I won’t. It’s a—” He shrugged, shook his head.

“All right. I don’t intend to pry into your personal life,” Larry persisted reasonably. “I just don’t see the objection to talking about what your plans are. What Edith thinks of them.”

“I don’t know what they are myself.” Ira’s rejoinder was curt.

Again Larry tried to contain disagreement within amity. “Listen, I know Edith is crazy about you. She’s crazy about you in a way she never was about me. And I think I know why too. It’s the kind of a person you are. It’s the same thing I found in you when we met by accident, absolutely by accident, in high school, in old man Pickens’s class. What is it? I don’t know how you get it, how you got it — when I visited your home there in Harlem — I mean — I’ll be honest with you — I couldn’t understand how anybody brought up in that place, in that slum,” Larry nodded for emphasis, “ could be so sensitive —listen, all I’m saying is I want for us to keep in touch.”

“Okay. We’ll talk about it later. I think the period is about up.”

“But Ira, come for dinner this Thanxy? We’ll have all the fixings. And special cranberry relish only my sister Sophie has the recipe. You’ll love it.”

“I’m not sure.”

Larry was quick to allow latitude. “All right, you got another Thanxy dinner?”

“No.”

“We’ll see each other tomorrow. We’ve got till Wednesday. You can tell me the day before. If not Thursday, then Friday, Saturday, Sunday.”

It was like a reenactment of an event in the past: that first time Ira had been invited by Larry to have supper at his home, and Ira had declined, deliberately, intuitively, not to appear overeager. Almost four full years ago, at the foot of the stairs of the Eighth Avenue El at 59th Street, amid the battering din and under the autumn shadow. But how different now — no, how different-seeming now. He was still a shlepper , still a pauper, but some kind of self-awareness had come into play, awareness of distinction, arrogance stemming from what he was, the awful, unique things he had done, suffered — who the hell knew. It wasn’t because he was smart or had become smarter than Larry — Gee. “I don’t wanna make you feel bad. I don’t think I can make it,” Ira said.