in so short a time. Whatever misgivings Shmerl may have had about abandoning his autonomy were dispelled by his attachment to his capable friend; while for his part, Max, basking in the inventor’s fond regard, felt at ease enough to bring up a touchy subject.
“I lied to you, Karp,” he confessed, eyes inclined toward his small hands folded almost prayerfully before him on the table. “I lied that was a chance occurrence the attack in the alley.” He admitted that, while he’d never felt so safe as when in his partner’s company, he was in effect still a marked man, targeted for an untimely end by the agents of a party who believed Max had cheated him.
Appalled by the information, Shmerl snapped at his friend for the first time in their mutual history, “Why you didn’t tell me before!” All these weeks Max had spent in harm’s way could have been avoided. Shmerl knew where the culprits hung out; he would go there and challenge them to their face, he would blow them all farplotzn with a chemical cocktail, he would… But Max calmed him down with the assurance that he’d taken the liberty of sending a small portion of their capital to Pisgat, the offended party, as an installment on his lost money, promising the balance in due course; so it was possible that by now the ice mensch had called off his dogs. In the meantime, however, just to stay on the safe side, Max Feinshmeker would remain “by the Ice Castle a silent partner.”
The inventor tilted his head in an effort to see better the logic of his friend’s proposal.
But Max had not been entirely candid. He’d neglected to say that this intended arrangement had as much to do with distancing himself from Shmerl as it did with protecting his own neck and their business. For he’d come to feel that he and his associate had grown too close; they depended too much on one another. It was an attitude prompted in part by Jocheved, with whom Max no longer felt so much at odds. Both he and the girl were painfully aware of the danger of overmuch intimacy with a member of the opposite sex, even one as ultimately harmless as Shmerl Karp. But was he harmless? Because the inventor had become altogether too necessary to the yungerman, who was ever more conscious lately of being female. Lately he felt he was equal parts Max Feinshmeker and Jocheved, with Jocheved beginning to tip the balance as he deferred more and more to her native commercial flair. Moreover, Max was growing weary of always pretending. Sometimes he wanted simply to set the girl free, if only for a little while, but for that a greater privacy was needed; for that, he admitted, “I rented also an apartment uptown.”
Assuming at first that the apartment was for both of them, Shmerl protested albeit mildly, “What if I don’t want to leave the East Side?”
“You don’t got to,” replied Max.
“But…”
“It’s for me the apartment.”
A rush of conflicting emotions fought for dominance in Shmerl’s brain: Max was tired of his company; perhaps he had met a girl; funny they never talked about girls. Shmerl could feel himself beginning to seethe with jealousy, never mind how irrational the response; he was on the verge of starting a quarrel. I’m mad on you, he had it in mind to say, but the words stuck in his craw, arrested as he was by Max’s obsidian eyes, his cream-pale cheek that seemed never to require a shave, his swanlike throat minus (interestingly) an adam’s apple. Then the inventor reasoned with himself that his friend’s independence was his right, and in the end he merely mouthed a silent Oh. When he could find his voice, Shmerl said it was natural Max should want a place of his own, though as for himself he preferred to remain in the ghetto where he belonged.
Max settled with a pomatumed waiter, who bowed in a kind of haughty self-effacement, and rose to leave the cellar while Shmerl, still seated, said he’d meet him outside in a minute. “They got here a indoor water closet.” Sodden from overmuch wine and spent emotion, Shmerl was just getting up from the table when he heard from the street a cry that pierced his ear like an awl. He looked about for his stock prod only to remember that, a technician now, he no longer carried the thing; then he bolted up the stairs