It was enough, their passing, their grazing so close to the shameful, nameless knot that bound the victimizer and his victim together, Mr. Joe a hairsbreadth from discovery of his guilt, and Ira so bound to him, he couldn’t even run to the passing lovers, the young man and woman, to say: “He, Joe — the Mister — him, he wants me—” Ira felt he himself shared in the shame and the guilt to have accompanied Mr. Joe out here.
It was enough to end the impasse. And both knew it. “Let’s go back,” said Mr. Joe.
Ira followed him with alacrity, uphill along the path. But then Joe stopped. Just before they came out into the open, and could already hear the automobiles on the street, the trolley cars, voices calling out, reassuring, Joe stopped. He led Ira behind a clump of trees, and reassured by the proximity of other beings to him, his own to them, close enough to be heard, could almost run to, Ira followed. Unbuttoning his own fly, Joe began a tranced pumping of the swollen thing he had in his hand — until — his breath became animal audible — he suddenly grabbed Ira’s buttock, and began squirting a pale, glairy substance against the bark of the tree.
Mr. Joe buttoned his fly. The two walked the short distance to the street, to the trolley tracks, boarded a car when it came.
Mr. Joe paid the fare, and they rode back, street after street, their numbers so happily, happily diminishing. Ira didn’t care if all this time Mr. Joe kept his hand on his young friend’s thigh. To overjoyed eyes, the trolley reached and rounded familiar West 125th Street, and then traveled east: Seventh Avenue, the Hotel Theresa— Oh, he could walk happily home from here, but he stayed: Lenox and Fifth and Madison, and the welcome, welcome gray-painted trestle of the railway overpass with the station bustle and ticket office below: Park Avenue! He was home! “I have to get off here,” Ira stood up. “My mama’s waiting.”
“Sure. See you later.” Smiling amiably, Joe reached up and pulled the bell cord.
Ira alighted from the trolley; turned immediately downtown around the beer-parlor corner, downtown to face home. Hurrying along Park Avenue, past the plumbing-supply corner on 124th Street, he glimpsed the edge of Mt. Morris Park a block to the west. Seen now, as he would see it, at the end of each street he passed, the park — and the hill above and the bell tower — seemed fixed within a harrowing nimbus — as everything was: houses, people, store windows, pillars of the overpass, everything was steeped in something sinister, sinister, diluted by deliverance, but ineradicable, an inescapable smut.
Don’t say anything to Mom. Pop’ll murder you.
XI
He too, Ira thought, ironically, he too could date his writing A.C. and B.C.: After Computer and Before Computer. Because what he wrote now (today, this 4th of February, ’85) was in essence — largely — of what he had typewritten, beginning almost exactly six years ago, in February of 1979. So he faced himself, and would face himself from time to time with asides of another period, a period when he was typing — when he was still able to type, his hands still able to stand the impact of the keys of his Olivetti manual typewriter.
Such was the case today: The yellow second-copy page waiting for him to transcribe it to disk began: This is Tuesday, April 3, 1979. The morning is clear, temperature a bit chillier than seasonable. I passed the night in considerable pain. M, my selfless spouse, will again have to drive me to the Presbyterian Hospital this afternoon for the blood and urine tests that determine how well the body has been tolerating the “gold” injections, remedy of last resort, or almost, of arresting the depredations of this pernicious disorder, hight in medical language rheumatoid arthritis, abbreviated hereafter as RA (Joyce would be happy at the correspondence, being batty on the subject that RA in Hebrew meant anything bad, the whole spectrum of bad). Outside my study window at the moment, the first transitory bronze buds blur the cottonwood boughs.
Menachem Begin is in Cairo. He is reported to be enjoying the cool, though correct, reception accorded him by the Egyptians (and refrained from mentioning that part of the labor that went into constructing the Pyramids he viewed was that of Hebrew slaves). To me the man is without appeal, both in presence and address, something like our own Cal Coolidge of long ago mapped into a fiercely partisan Israeli context. But all that’s irrelevant, dubiously whimsical, I tell myself. El Arish is to be returned to Egypt on May 27, 1979. Most of the Arab world is focusing its hatred on Sadat; and yet, even his Arab enemies are divided — as always, praise be to Allah.
Is it genuine, durable, I ask myself: Will the peace between the two countries hold? Or should one regard the whole business as a piece (peace) of consummate trickery on the part of Anwar Sadat, a genius at machination and trickery, who apparently succeeded in lulling the Israeli government, the Israeli high command, into complacency — and then with Syria for ally, attacked on Yom Kippur. As usual, the minor detail tends to attain undue prominence in memory because human and dramatic: the debate between the two allies whether the attack should be launched at dawn or dusk, when the sun would be behind the one, and in the other’s eyes. Truly, the man is a genius of trickery, and with the help of portly German-Jewish Henry Kissinger—“Vee biliefe. . und dun’t preempt”—regained oil fields captured by Israel and so vital to her economy without firing another shot; and now, with the blessings of Prexy Jolly Jimmy, is about to recover the entire Sinai.
And yet, what other alternative than to do so? Not whether Begin is personally, or politically, attractive to me is the important thing; but whether his agreements and concessions have placed Israel in mortal danger — or brought a real peace a step closer. .
It was more than he could hope to disentangle at the moment. He frowned at the ensuing pages, yellow, slippery, tissue-thin second-copy he had saved money in purchasing — like Pop with his ineffable, inveterate buying by price alone, inferior merchandise. “Doesn’t the merchant know the cost of his goods?” Mom would try to reason with Pop. It did no good: He would still buy the printed piece of floor covering rather than genuine linoleum of some quality; and in a short time his purchase was scuffed to dead brown underlay, the painted floral design flaked off. Mom’s practical common-sense importunings did no good.
Had the pages slithered about? The narrative on the ensuing page began in the middle — and he knew, he knew that events of that year — or was it the year before? — were of great significance to him personally, to him as narrator. It would be best — he looked at his watch: 3:20 P.M. — it would be best to take time out, save the working copy on the screen, and try to impose some order on what followed. He could hear his tongue click in annoyance at the unpleasant prospect of making a little sense of the disarray before him. But there was no help for it. Somehow he would have to assemble it, account for it, dispose of it — clear it out of his way. Like Plato’s infinite mind (was the thought worth recording, as he poised mentally to terminate, to “save”; no, it was silly: the notion of infinite mind existing on an infinite floppy disk).