When We Argued All Night (6 page)

—Stick to the smart little Reds, said Artie. Harold waved and started walking.

A
rtie continued teaching adult education classes, mostly at night, at the same school, paid by the WPA. Twice he taught a photography course. If you had ten students, you could run a class. More often it was English composition or conversation, and sometimes the same students came term after term. A young woman memorized verb tenses and vocabulary words, turning in pages of homework in pencil, making herself complete every exercise in the textbook. Artie sometimes corrected her errors. Sometimes he didn't. The loose-leaf pages, heavy with pencil marks, made him sad. Miss Kowalski's hands must have been damp with sweat as she clutched the pencil, and the pages were stiff, as if they'd been moist, then dry, more than once. Maybe she cried over them.

Beatrice London remained the supervisor. Artie got used to the sight of her moving quickly through the corridors, always with her curly head thrust slightly forward. She ground her heels into the floor. She was mildly attractive, with a conscientious look, and was careful not to be informal with the teachers she supervised. Artie decided she would like being encouraged to make friends, so he asked questions about lesson plans, and she frowned and answered, then sought him out again to give a fuller answer. She grew friendlier. One night he made a joke with her: he told her she should get ten cents less a week for wearing out the floor with her heels. Miss London ignored that and stayed away from him for a while.

One evening, a year after they'd begun working together, it was raining, and Miss London and Artie happened to meet on their way into the building. Her umbrella had broken and her hair was wet and hung over her face. Artie, wiping his glasses on his handkerchief, bent his knees so he'd seem short and pulled his own hair forward, then walked past her the way she walked, looking down at the floor and coming down hard with each foot. Hey, Bea! he called. She had a stiff way of holding her hands at her sides, and he imitated that as well. It was just a few steps in the corridor, and later Artie swore to Harold that he was the one who looked silly—nobody would even know he was teasing her.

—Teasing? Harold said. You can be rough.

—It was nothing, Artie said. After that, Beatrice London began complaining to Artie when his class made too much noise. He'd write a topic on the blackboard—
The New Deal isn't working
, or
Women should have jobs just like men
, or
Communists should be thrown in jail
. He'd point to someone in the class, who had to start arguing for or against the proposition. Whatever opinion was expressed, Artie opposed it. If a second student disagreed with the first one, he might switch sides—something his students considered magical; they couldn't do it—or he might point to the first student and make the two of them argue. Others would leap to their feet to join in. Teachers complained that shouting came from Artie's classroom, and now and then a student went to Miss London to say Artie had taken some outrageous position in class. One evening, when a fistfight broke out between an Italian man and a Russian Jew, a woman rushed out and phoned the police. A cop appeared in the doorway, and Artie said, What the hell are you doing here? and would have been arrested if the teacher next door, an older guy, had not persuaded the cop to forget it. Beatrice London made Artie sign a long description of this incident.

S
he'd do anything to get me in trouble, Artie said, after telling Harold this story. It was another of their late walks, this time in the fall of 1937. Harold had recently moved to a small apartment in Manhattan. Tonight he'd somehow gotten free tickets to a play, and Artie had come into the city to meet him. Afterward they had coffee. But Artie got angry when Harold first mentioned Beatrice London, and Harold wouldn't let him get away with it. They had been asked to quiet down, then to leave. Ridiculous! Artie said as they made their way out. They walked. When Artie was bored, he stopped to take a photograph, using the light of a street lamp, trying to pick up the shimmer of a puddle.

Now he had returned to the subject. She'd love to get rid of me, he went on. But she's too timid to do anything.

—She might work up her courage, Harold said.

Artie said nothing for quite some time. Then he looked up at the sky, as if for approval, and recited:

A fella who taught for a living

From Labor Day right past Thanksgiving

One day went too far.

He's as dead as the czar!

If only he'd had a misgiving!

—That's not as bad as some, Harold said.

—And the joke is, said Artie, It's all because she thinks I'm good-looking. She's in love with me.

—That would make it worse, Harold said.

3

H
arold would finally marry Myra Thorsten in 1943, and during the intervening years he considered himself someone women laughed at or pitied. Still, once he had his own place, he felt he should seduce them, making this decision all but grimly. One afternoon he invited a young woman he had met at the Forty-second Street library to have a sandwich with him. Working for the Federal Writers' Project, he spent many days in the main reading room. The woman's name was Mary, and she was an assistant to a historian. At a delicatessen they ate corned beef sandwiches and sour pickles. Mary told stories about her family; there were uncles younger than their nephews, and each story included two or three characters named
my cousin
. At first he listened, enjoying it. Then his impulse was to convince her that her opinions were wrong. Nobody had such simple motives as she ascribed to her relatives—but he stopped himself: what mattered was taking her to bed. Someone as muddled as Mary would forgive his awkwardness or would not even notice. He invited her to his apartment, a few blocks away.

She hesitated, then agreed. She had a habit of looking up at the ceiling when asked a question and then smiling before speaking. It might have been either annoying or adorable; Harold determined to consider it adorable. As he brought her into his apartment, he remembered that his bed was unmade, the room was cluttered, and he had nothing to offer but coffee. They talked, and he took her home.

The next time—having made the bed and bought a bottle of liquor—Harold stood, crossed the room, and laid his wide hands on Mary's shoulders so heavily she flinched. He expected her to laugh or be offended, but she didn't laugh, and they went to bed. It was clear to him that Mary had lost her virginity earlier, and he wondered if it was as obvious to her that he had not. Maybe one of the uncles or nephews had taken advantage of her. Maybe she was relieved to be approached by someone who bought her a sandwich and touched her gently.

Harold thought of himself not as a good lover but as an emergency lover: someone who could perform if preferable men were unavailable, a kind of understudy. Even if Mary didn't laugh openly, he assumed she laughed when she got home, laughed when telling the story to her girl cousins. It was embarrassing, but he'd learned that to become the kind of man he wanted to be, he had to endure embarrassment. He spent another evening with Mary, this time including a movie in between the sandwich and the sex, and again Mary didn't laugh. But Harold was bored with her, and since his purpose had been achieved, he couldn't come up with the wish to see her again. Surely she wouldn't mind: her interest in him was charitable. He was startled when he received a letter from her a month later, asking if she'd done anything wrong, apologizing. The letter confused him, and he didn't answer it. He decided it was a kind gesture, designed to make him feel as if he'd dropped her instead of being dropped. Of course, in a sense he
had
dropped her, but only in a sense.

Some women said no to Harold, but more than he expected said yes. They did not laugh in his presence. He reflected that there must be even worse lovers around than he, whom women did laugh at openly.

He noted that the women he approached were rarely Jewish. He felt more Jewish, himself, as years passed, and spent gloomy hours wondering exactly what he'd be doing at the present moment if he lived in Germany. The women he dated were surprised when he told them that Jews were no longer permitted to attend German universities or that their passports had been made invalid. One woman's face took on an abstracted, spiritual look, like Joan of Arc's, when he told her about a story he'd seen in the
Times
that week—it was March of 1938, just after Hitler had annexed Austria—reporting that in a few weeks Germans would vote in a plebiscite. Naturally, Jews would not be permitted to vote. Voters would be asked a question Harold had memorized:
Are you German, do you belong to your Germany and its Adolf Hitler or have you nothing to do with us?
He waited for a reaction, but his date seemed too stunned to reply.

Then she reached across the table; they were having coffee in a little place not far from the Metropolitan Museum. Harold felt a momentary triumph when she touched him, then was horrified to feel triumphant and pulled his hand back. Deriving personal benefit from her outrage at Hitler was a trick as contemptible as the tricks of the Nazis themselves. He would have nothing further to do with this woman; she was a decent person and he didn't deserve her.

4

U
nlike Harold's girlfriends, Evelyn Shapiro truly didn't count, according to Artie, who had been taking walks and eating ice cream with her for years. He'd never bought her more than a soda. Evelyn, whom he'd met in the neighborhood, had graduated from Hunter College at the worst of the Depression and could get a job only in her uncle's shoe store. You'd be surprised how many people have ugly feet, she said to Artie. Bumps, corns, squashed toes.

—Don't they wear socks?

—Not for fancy shoes.

The store sold good shoes and Evelyn got substantial discounts. Artie liked the way her legs looked in high heels with little straps, but he also liked taking long walks. When Evelyn said her feet hurt, he teased her, offering to buy her shoes just like his own. Except for her shoes, she was practical, with wavy hair and a round face. Her big breasts made Artie sick with longing, but that was late at night on the sofa he slept on in his parents' crowded apartment, where his married brothers got the bedrooms. When he was with her, Evelyn's breasts were under blouses and jackets. He'd often rest an arm on her shoulders and even stroke her neck, but that was all.

One summer night Artie and Evelyn walked all the way to the reservoir in Highland Park, past the tennis courts where Artie spent Saturdays and Sundays if possible. Then they walked around the reservoir and back home, stopping for ice cream cones. Artie began complaining. Beatrice London had threatened to give him fewer classes to teach in the fall. He couldn't get away from her. The ice cream was spoiled by anger, and before he finished his cone, he dropped it.

—I don't like it when you shout, Evelyn said, elaborately stepping around his cone on the sidewalk, continuing to lick hers. She always bought maple walnut.

—Who's shouting? said Artie. I'm not shouting.

—You've been shouting for twenty minutes, said Evelyn. I'm not your supervisor.

—And it's a good thing, too, Artie said.

She stood still and then turned toward him, suddenly looking younger. Now that her cone was gone, she stopped to lick her fingers, one at a time, between sentences, but it made what she said, for some reason, more serious. I'm tired of you and your yelling. I'm tired of you and your banging on tables.

—What tables? He was frightened. Was she tired of him, himself?

—Anywhere there's a table, you bang on it. You banged on the table in my house last week. My father thought you were yelling at me. He almost threw you out.

—For Christ's sake, I wasn't yelling at you! Artie said. He's got nothing to do but listen to us?

—I'm his daughter, Evelyn said. She was quiet and Artie whistled. They walked.

—So you're tired of me, is that it? he said then. You want me to stop showing up? Is that what you have in mind?

—I'm not tired of you, Evelyn said. I'm tired of spending my time deciding whether the head of the WPA is the stupidest man in the world, or somebody in Washington, or the editor who wouldn't buy your pictures.

—He should have taken them! said Artie. I've never heard anything so stupid in my life.

Evelyn stopped walking. She said slowly, Yes, I guess that editor is the stupidest. He's been the stupidest man in the world three times in the last two weeks. That has to mean something.

Artie stood under a street lamp and looked at her. He looked down at the sidewalk and began to whistle. Come on, he said then. He stopped to pick up something he caught sight of in the dark. It glinted. It was a key, an old key, and he slipped it into his pocket, in case he wanted to take a picture of a key. When she started walking again, he put an arm on her shoulders, not squeezing but resting it there for a moment. She shook him off. She meant it. Other times when Evelyn had yelled like this and laughed at him, he had stopped calling or coming by for a while, and maybe he'd do that again. He didn't need her.

5

M
yra Thorsten grew tired of Henry James after making it all the way through
The Wings of the Dove
, annoyed when the lovers—who had deceived a rich, dying woman so she'd leave them her money—didn't marry at the end. They did wrong, Myra said, but it won't help to waste the rest of their lives feeling bad.

—Do you think they go to bed? Harold asked. James had included a scene that didn't quite say it.

—Of course. It was the summer of 1938, and they were sitting on a park bench outside the Central Park Zoo, having a rare outdoor meeting.

He tried to argue that the betrothed couple couldn't marry, explaining that for Henry James, moral questions took on life, that characters might spend their lives in response to what had happened earlier, living with an absence.