The firm moved its location to new, more commodious quarters. The entire office decor underwent a change: the stout old friendly oak filing cabinets and the grainy yellow oak desks were replaced by sleek, coffee-colored metal. Along with that change came a change of office boys. Another youth took Ira’s place, a youth of about Ira’s age, but slender, large-eyed, knowing, a little amused, a little condescending. He reminded Ira of the fellow student from whom he had stolen the silver-filigreed fountain pen. Mr. Phillips explained that the newcomer was to take Ira’s place beginning the next week. Ira was a good boy, Mr. Phillips affirmed, but not suitable for work in a law firm. He was sorry, but he would have to let him go.
To tell the truth, Ira wasn’t too unhappy. He found the work boring, devoid of color and encounter, of the tangible tartan of the city’s aspects he loved to contemplate. Except that he would have to go home and tell Mom that the source of his nine dollars per week had dried up, he felt more relieved than regretful at being fired. He knew he was just too much of a mope to cope with the job, with the abstractions he already perceived composed most of it.
So ended his brief untenable and tenuous association with the law, lawyers, and the legal process. He resolved never again to work in an office of any kind. It was enough to be a boob without having to cringe in humiliation of having others discover the fact.
If only there weren’t so many interruptions, Ira mused, so many distractions in the life of the narrator. He could go on from episode to episode in a tale told autonomously from end to end. (His old complaint; was it pretext or legitimate?) Distractions were too many for him, or too beguiling, or he — his will — was too weak to resist. Once it had been strong enough, once it had, when he wrote his one and only novel.
He had managed to exclude distractions and involvements for as long as four years, until the opus was done. Ah, youth — and he had had a plethora of distractions and involvements. Sexual often, though not always: a love affair that went to hell; and that pas de deux, de trois, de quatre. And illness too had interrupted, but again, not for long. He had then clung tenaciously to his narrative, which was something he could no longer always do. And, dear reader, as Jane Eyre would say, and a whole swarm of other literary narrators of fiction, in the good old days when ye scrivener snuggled up to the reader, dear reader, if you don’t like it you can lump it, whatever “lumping it” meant. Dear reader. There might not ever be any readers, dear or otherwise, though he made every effort to preserve means of communication with them, future means of communication: those floppy disks wherein he addressed Ecclesias. Dear reader.
But then, those were not the days, and these were, when he spent, or rather wrecked, an entire day, with a gut gone haywire — or perhaps he should say, spent altogether too many of them that way, recuperating from various surgeries or miasmas of mood and malaise, all or most of them, very likely, payments or penalties, retributions from excesses of the way, way back. But then too, and that perhaps was the worst of it, in that long past when he wrote his youthful “classic of Lower East Side childhood,” he hadn’t tried to pry off and peddle segments of the novel, as he did now, still hoping to make an impression on modernity (and garner a few bucks while he was at it), and in consequence, hadn’t received the rebuffs he did now, and likely deserved, from various and sundry well-thought-of periodicals.
His stuff was now old hat, and for all he knew, stereotyped as well. But the rejections brought him face to face with the fact that he was an old man of seventy-nine, and his literary wares those of a seventy-nine-year-old man, waning and wanting, and perhaps pathetic. Be better, more dignified, if he shut up, maintained an air of remote reserve, because that way his deficiencies would remain unexposed. Good idea.
Well. . As he wrote his literary agent: he would refrain from submitting further fragments of his writing. It was all or nothing now, and if it was to be all, then it would have to be posthumous. Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume, labuntur anni. .
Roving again in the vicinity of 14th Street, on the east side of Union Square Park, passing by the ornate facades and arched windows of the lofts and office buildings of the time, he glanced at a BOY WANTED sign posted on a doorway: Inquire at the Acme Toy Company Upstairs. Again he found what he so lackadaisically sought, and was all but afraid to find: a job interview. The blowsy, stertorously breathing, cigar-puffing Jewish proprietor behind his mussed desk in his small, cluttered office was Mr. Stein, he informed the young applicant. Mr. Stein appeared to be in his late fifties. Beside him stood his son, Mortimer, a tall, dark young man in his twenties, who scrutinized Ira through the slits of intolerant brown eyes.
Together, they quizzed Ira, at the same time as they briefed him about what they expected of him. Did he intend to go back to school? Experience had already taught Ira the answer to that one. Oh, no, he assured Mr. Stein, he had quit school for good. They needed somebody all year round. They needed somebody who was quick to learn, somebody with a good head, because they had a big inventory with hundreds of different items in different bins, and somebody who was wide awake and honest and careful. Ira gave them Park & Tilford as a reference, stressing that he had learned the location of hundreds of items down in the cellar. Of course, the P&T store uptown had closed, and he was out of a job. His half-truth bore some weight. And further, they wanted somebody who was not afraid of a little hard work (pronounced “ard-vark” by the owner). Oh, no, not he.
Although the son remained darkly skeptical, the father hired Ira:
“Vee’ll geeve you a chence,” he decided. The wages would be eight dollars and fifty cents a week, payable Saturday afternoon.
That first day he worked there, that first day he was hired, was already Saturday. Then he had been led into a contradiction again: payday on Saturday; and if so, why hadn’t he been paid? Had he worked too short a time, or wasn’t Saturday payday? Answer he could find none. Only that the few cents with which Mom had supplied him to go job-hunting, now that he had found one, he expended on buying lunch, and skimpy enough it was. When time came to hie him home, he had no carfare — and as usual was reluctant to ask. Why? Too deeply submerged in the past to fathom now. One nickel. Did he fear refusal? Did it mean to the kid that he was betraying some kind of weakness in having made no provision for a subway ride home? Did it deflate his seemingly sturdy self-reliance, hint at schoolboy dependence? God knows.
The kid hoofed it all the way from 15th Street to 119th Street. Over a hundred blocks in a straight line: five miles, as they reckoned it in New York, and this at the end of most of a day’s work. The hike didn’t hurt him, of course, borne along on those young, resilient legs, legs wearying only toward the end, the last few blocks of pavement over which he forged ahead with the single-minded resolve of a homing pigeon. He could see himself in the kaleidoscope of passage, in the shade of buildings in the late sun of late spring, see his straining face among the other innumerable faces and figures limned for an instant on the storefronts he strode past, as if progressing along a system of ill-reflecting mirrors. And turning the corner, at last, around the Phoenix Cheese Company’s wholesale depot at Lexington Avenue into familiar 119th Street, his own sleazy street, his shelter, his home.