"Ayea. Listen, later on, Richard's going downtown. Do you want to go along?"
"Sure, if you do."
"No, I mean, I won't go if you don't want to."
Raul smiled, pleased. "I don't know. When would we go?"
"Soon."
"If it's early enough. We'll see, all right?"
"What were you talking about?" Richard asked, coming up to them.
"About going downtown or not," Raul said.
"I hope you come."
"We probably will."
"Good." Richard scowled, annoyed at Raul taking charge.
The lobby was a sheet of glass facing the street. Inside there were a doorman, four elevators, couches, chairs, and large, circular metal containers, filled with sand, that functioned as ashtrays.
Raul, with an uncomfortable butt, went over to one of them, and watched whatever grace of image he had left disappear as he stooped to put it out.
A small staircase led to a platform where the elevators were; going off to the right, there was a cove for mailboxes. Alec had gone up to the platform, Richard to the mailboxes. Raul and Richard approached the platform at the same time, Richard swaggering, jiggling his keys, Raul deviously hunched, leaping the four long, low steps in a stride.
Alec said to him, "You have silly legs. Richard, what did you get in the mail?"
"Nothing. Mother probably picked it up already." Raul, holding the elevator door while a middle-aged woman with a Saks Fifth Avenue shopping bag rushed in, asked, "Were you expecting anything?"
"Some catalogues."
"From college?"
Richard nodded. There was a bad crush in the elevator from the three boys, a short, fat military student, an old Jewish woman, and the woman with the Saks Fifth Avenue bag. She left on the fourth floor, the military boy on the sixth. Raul, relieved, stretched his legs.
The old Jewish woman, as if coming out of a reverie, said to Richard, "Richard darling, how are you?" She stroked his hair.
Richard, blushing, mumbled, "Okay."
She smiled and leaned back to take in the three of them. "Why are you boys not in school?"
Richard guiltily explained that seniors didn't have many classes.
She nodded wisely. Raul and Alec smiled at her, Richard blushing more and more. All of them got off at the fourteenth floor; she moved to go off to the left, the others to the right. Before turning, she said to Richard in a sweet, sorrowful voice, "You shouldn't smoke. It's not good for you."
The hallway was carpeted, the walls covered by wallpaper—an extravagance justified only by the need to hide the prefabricated look those building complexes have. On both sides of the hallway were heavy black doors that led into the apartments, and at one point there was a door with a plate of meshed glass that led to a fire stairway. Richard's apartment was the last one on the left. His door opened with difficulty because of the thickness of the rug inside. It opened into a foyer that, without division, led into a living room that, also without division, led into a dining room. All along the dining room and a section of the living room was a wall of windows. The light coming in was so gray and lifeless that the chairs and tables were transfixed like mute humans.
Off the foyer was a hallway leading to the bedrooms. Immediately to the right of the hallway was the kitchen. One could walk through it to the dining area; it divided the living and dining rooms from the rest of the apartment. Since it was painted white, it was oddly abstracted from them.
Richard's mother called, "Richard? Is that you?" when they came in. They found her in the kitchen cooking in a bathrobe. Recognizing Alec, she said hello to him pleasantly. But at once she turned naggingly to her son. "Richard, Stephie called. She has a dentist's appointment. She wants you to drive her downtown."
Richard halted abruptly.
Alec became jaunty. He walked like a coquette to Richard's mother. Kissing her, he said, mocking. "How are you, Mother Bloom? You are cooking, I see." He smiled.
Mother Bloom, with an indulgent smile, gave Alec a little shove. "Come on, Alec. Who is this?" she said, pointing to Raul.
Richard said, "A friend of Alec's. You saw him in Aria da Capo."
"Oh yes. You were made up differently. You looked like a girl."
Raul did a double-take. A thin smile passed over his face. "Well, that floors me." Richard and Alec laughed.
Mother Bloom, oblivious, said to Richard, "So will you do that." There was no semblance of a question. She blinked her frighteningly clear blue eyes and jerked her head, making the bangs of her short haircut quiver. "Your sister is driving me mad."
"Oh, Mother Bloom!" Alec said, kicking his boots together with disinterest.
Richard, anguished, said to Raul and Alec, "Go in my room."
Alec scraped and bowed. "Yessir, massa, yessir!" He clucked his tongue, beckoning to Raul. Raul's eyes were glassy from no emotion. He spun about, falling to his knees and madly scrambling down the hallway. Alec ran yelling behind him, gurgling in his throat to imitate a whip.
Raul, crucified on the carpet, became annoyed at the scratching of his face. He dropped abruptly out of character, raising himself to his knees. Alec, spinning around the corner, screamed gleefully at the sight of the oncoming disaster. He smacked into Raul at his waist, jackknifing over him. Raul and he toppled, flying and crashing. A beautifully chaotic tackle.
Raul got up, shaking himself. Alec lay sprawled, groaning, his arms outstretched, crossing the doorsill of Richard's room. Raul went over to him; he stooped, studying Alec's arms. Alec groaned, "0 my poor, sweet body. 'My reputation, Iago, my reputation.' "
Raul looked at him, considering. He touched one of Alec's arms. "Touchdown."
Alec shot up. Mother Bloom's and Richard's voices swelled. They cocked their ears. "Come," Alec said abruptly, "I'll show you Richard's room."
"I could not be more charmed. The noise here is deafening."
Richard's room, small and exact, had one bed, one desk, one stereo hi/fi, one FM/AM radio, one closet, two chairs, two windows, one bulletin board, and a poster of Karl Marx.
"Oh," Alec said. "I wonder where he got his earphones."
"Ah, Marx. Interesting he should be here, in River-dale."
"You should be pleased."
"At the poster, not its location." Alec looked pained. "I don't mean to be hitting Richard so much," Raul said. "I'm sorry."
Alec nodded and turned the radio on, riddling with the dial.
Raul sat down in a swivel chair underneath a lamp. The lamp had a long post, painted black, that, at the top, divided into three small lamps. Raul turned the chair toward the wall and studied Marx's austere face: the narrow, penetrating eyes; the long, gray-black beard. The dirty black jacket could be seen; the unsatisfied, abstract mind. Or, Raul thought, he could have been called an old fogey—one of Yeats's scholars.
"My hatred," Raul said over the sound of WNEW, "for Lenin's prostitution of Marx even extends to his poster. Have you ever seen one? He's clean. His forehead—everything—clean. He doesn't have the furrows, the lines, in Marx's forehead. There's a picture of Lenin and Stalin, just before his death. He looked relaxed, at ease. He looked as if he were convalescing, but he seemed content. Beside the unfortunate fact that he died too young, and he should have been worrying about who would take over, his job simply wasn't done. Russia had regressed. It hadn't gone forward. He looked at ease, and there were years of work ahead."
"Are you a Trotskyite?" Alec asked. "Good God, no. God knows what I am." He paused. "There's a picture of Trotsky with his wife in Mexico, and he looks relaxed and at ease. They're all like Chekov characters. It's sickening. How could they possibly be able to smile? All right, so you could say they're doing it just for the picture. Nonsense! That even makes it Machiavellian. Or shows that their concern was not too great to overcome for a picture. I must admit, however, what I'm saying isn't a sound political argument." Raul laughed. "I can see my S.D.S. brother's indulgent smile."
Alec smiled, returning his attentio
n to the radio. From the kitchen, Richard's voice rose in one antagonized phrase. Over that was his mother's—calm, persuading, reasonable. Seductively sure of victory, she taunted, forgave, accused, threatened, relaxed into reason.
"Politics is mad. Could Marx have dreamed his work would need so much revision? Alec, listen." Alec turned to him.
"It's a common idea of my father's… that's absurd, it's not only my father's idea. One of the basic ideas of art is political art. Not political, but social art. For example, Balzac was reactionary. But no one murders the middle class the way he does, no one. So art, everyone begins to say, must be social to be great. But, in order to maintain that, they become pretty vague. Joyce is social, though he threw away politics. He's writing about the middle class in Ireland. Everything will get thrown into that bag: Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, every fucking one of them. Kafka is political: his novels are about middle-class psychosis. It didn't matter how reactionary Dostoevsky was, his novels all show class struggles. But all this is obvious. As long as a novel is about life in some time, some definite period, it must be about some class, because there've always been class struggles, and since it's about some class, it's social, and because it's social, it's political, and now you can relax and say it's great art. Okay. But we've still got a little problem. What do you say about Beckett? There's no definite time, or society, so essentially there isn't a class. Okay, so what do you say about this? Dad has a simple solution—Beckett isn't great."
Alec laughed.
"But it doesn't work. So you speak to someone else. Someone who believes great art must be political and believes that Beckett is great. So they'll say, 'Beckett isn't located anywhere, just the way Kafka isn't,' but he's still writing about middle-class neurosis."
There was a bang.
"What's that?"
They both listened carefully. They could hear someone dialing.
"Richard's calling somebody," Alec said. "Probably Stephie."
"Oh. So what was I saying? Oh yeah, but anyone who knew a fuck about Beckett would say that he is writing about all man for all time. Those groups of idiots that are trying to extend communism to all art hate philosophy. They're right to, but when they give their line on it, they'll be cut short. Beckett isn't presenting a philosophy, he's presenting a situation. The condition of man, not a unifying, universal concept. So they'll leap on that. All right, the condition of man. That's class struggle, and that's social… etc. This just becomes a farce. Why didn't they leave it alone? What the hell are they trying to do by making it a universal concept? Making communism a philosophy is absurd. The existence of a perfect communism would allow fantastic developments, sure, but not because of its nature as a system. It allows them because it negates the evils, the restrictions of capitalism. Anyway, we get fucked right into socialist realism. Why, for God's sake, the first realists, the best realists, were bourgeois. That egotism drives me mad."
"I don't think you should…"
Richard appeared at the doorway, cutting Alec short. He looked thoroughly beaten.
"You look miserable," Raul said. "What happened?"
"A million things."
Raul and Alec laughed. Alec said, "A little more specifically, what happened?"
"Well, besides taking Stephie to the dentist, I have to drive her to the hairdresser. She was complaining about everything."
"To the hairdresser," Raul said. "What is that to do with it?"
"I don't know. I feel terrible. I have to wash up," Richard said in a monotone. He walked out without energy, his head bowed.
"He looked clean to me," Raul said.
"He's probably going to vomit."
Raul swiveled his chair to face Alec. "How old is Stephie?"
"Richard's age. Eighteen."
"Richard's age! How could that be?"
"What do you mean, how could that be? They were born the same year."
"Are they twins?"
"Twins? What? Oh. Oh, you thought… oh no. Stephie isn't Richard's sister."
"Then why did his mother say, 'Your sister's driving me mad'?"
"It was just general lamenting. Stephie is Richard's girl friend."
"I see." Raul scratched his hair. "What were you going to say before Richard came in?"
Alec stopped to think. "Oh yeah. I was going to say you should stay out of politics. That it doesn't go well with art."
"It's true you can't go in for political organization and produce art; but I wouldn't want to be producing art in America without it being political."
"Why?"
"We're living in a country that carries on the most extensive imperialism in history. That must have some kind of an effect on its people. One must have a political viewpoint to deal with Americans as characters. Very soon, everyone is going to be forced into a commitment, and if you're going to be. writing about them, it's important, even in the smallest way, to have politics in it."
"Not in the theater."
"In the theater, I don't know. There have been political plays, but what I was thinking about in writing was that the cultural forces should be revealed. You'd have to write about people who were up to their necks in politics to have it carry the necessary emotional weight."
"That's right. All I was trying to say is that, well, getting involved with the power struggles in S.D.S. can be destructive for an artist."
"Oh, absolutely. Boy, do I agree with that. Hey, Alec."
"Ayea."
"What the hell happened to Richard?"
"Good point." Alec got up and went out of the room, calling for Richard. Presently he returned. "He's speaking to Stephie again."
"That must add up in phone bills."
"I'll tell ya something really funny. Stephie lives across the hall."
"What? Then why the hell is he calling her?"
Alec shrugged. "I don't know. She's probably not home."
"Romance in Riverdale. What time do you think it is?"
"Eleven."
They sat stupidly for a while. The sun was out now, streaming peacefully through the windows. Raul, all in black, baked; he stretched and yawned, beginning to feel his lack of sleep. Alec stared ahead of him, bored, methodically smoking. Very suddenly, Richard came in, saying, "Let's go," and rushed out.
Slowly Raul and Alec lifted themselves up, Raul saying between yawns, madly, for Richard wasn't there, "Nice chatting with you in your house, Richard."
Richard, Alec, and Raul, coming out the back way to the parking lot, could see Mother Bloom, her long, Russian-style coat blossoming in the wind, standing impatiently by the white Buick Electra.
"Hurry up, Richard, or I'll be late."
Richard didn't reply. He got in, turned the ignition on.
Alec called, "Should we get in the back?"
"Yeah."
Raul and Alec climbed in. Mother Bloom took a Nicoban from the glove compartment and said, "It might rain."
Richard, with a burst of air, got in, saying, "It won't rain."
Alec lit a Tareyton between his bloodless lips. "It can't rain."
Raul, blinking like an old mole out in the sun, said, . "It would be naughty."
They lurched down winding hill roads, Richard driving with vengeance. Mother Bloom stared ahead; Alec watched the road out the window, squinting from the force of the wind against his face; Raul felt pain in every fiber.
"Go slower, Richard," his mother said. "Your father wants this car in decent shape when he returns."
"Nothing will happen to the car."
"Don't be silly, Richard. The repairs are up to what already?" She turned to face Alec and Raul. She smiled. Alec still looked out the window. Raul studied Mother Bloom's sunken cheeks—the high, exposed cheekbones.
"That had nothing to do with my driving, Mother."
"Still," she said in a singing voice, "an accident won't do us any good."
Alec turned his face toward Mother Bloom's, now staring ahead. To Raul, for a moment, it
looked contorted. "What were you cooking, Mother Bloom?"
The veins of Mother Bloom's neck stood out like drawstrings pulled tight. "Alec, I think calling me Mother Bloom is a little worn."
Raul smiled wanly. "I rather like it."
Mother Bloom opened the glove compartment and put on sunglasses. Alec tapped Raul twice on the knee and smiled at him. Raul nodded.
Mother Bloom cleared her bird's throat. "Richard, how much did those repairs cost?"
Long pause. Richard mumbled something. Mother Bloom laughed, high and contemptuous. "Wichie, how much? Huh, Wichie? How much?" She turned smiling to Alec, who couldn't avoid laughing, and looked at Raul, who was puzzled. "Steyphie, Wichie's giwl fwiend, tawks like dis."
Raul could feel an imp rise in him at the glee on Mother Bloom's face. "She really talks like that?"
The red of Mother Bloom's lipstick, which brought the lines on her lips into relief, went up in a smile.
"Ma, it isn't…"
The green that covered Mother Bloom's hollow eyes, eyebrows, and contoured her cheekbones swung about. "You don't have to defend your maid, Richard. I was just having fun. You see they enjoyed it."
"Great, Alec. Thank you."
The glove compartment fell open loudly. Another Nicoban slid gracefully onto Mother Bloom's tongue.
"Come on, Richard, it was funny. I was just…" Alec stopped, annoyed. He tossed his cigarette out the window.
Mother Bloom sucked loudly. "Now, Richard, don't alienate your friends. One suffers for one's beloved." She turned loudly in her seat to smile at Raul and Alec. "Hmmm? Tell me, Richard, how much did the repairs come to?"
"Ma, I told you that inside already." Mother Bloom blinked her blue eyes. "How long have you been driving the car? Let's see. Daddy left last Wednesday, rather the week before last Wednesday. That makes it a week and two days. How much were the repairs?"
"Ma, you're crazy, you're out of your mind." Mother Bloom's small chin arched in laughter. "Now, Richard, how much did those repairs cost?"
"Just shut up, Mom, just shut up." Raul and Alec glanced at each other. Mother Bloom had won. "That's enough, Richard, that's enough. Your friends have seen enough of your bad manners. You were given a responsibility when Daddy said you could use his car while he was gone, and you've shown that you can't handle it. So slow down, Richard. Right now, before this becomes ugly." He slowed down. "I've just about had enough of your bad manners, young man."
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