Raul calmed. “Yes,” he said, “I must have. How are botha ya? Huh? You look good. As for me,” he sighed, “thoroughly exhausted. Completely, eh? Such scenes might rip one’s soul.”
“Well…” Jeff paused. “I didn’t understand, were you kidding?”
“Difficult to say. Listen, I said I had demands to be met, and it is so. I want either you or Bill to go up to the school book lender and get me the complete works of Shakespeare.”
“You’re still not going to school?” Jeff asked.
“No. I didn’t answer you completely before, did I? I don’t know if I was kidding. I wasn’t kidding with that blasphemer Robbie.”
“Why?” Bill asked. “What was…”
“Ignore me, I’m a fool. And, God, an exhausted one. I sweat now like a pig.”
The fat boy seated next to Raul moved away from him.
“Ah, fool, you call that humor. I have a mind to whip you, sir.”
Bill and Jeff laughed.
“Such a release, it’s marvelous.” Raul rose. “I shall determine the nature of garbage.” He sat down again. “Ah, my soul is clean — blue as the sky. The good flight of a bird.”
The fat boy snorted. “Poetry!”
Raul began hitting him violently with a notebook. The fat boy scrambled out of the booth, with Raul yelling after him, “Join the other fools, you baboon!”
Bill smiled slyly at Raul. “You’ll depress them for the whole day.”
“Bill, I swear to God you’re incredible.” He patted him on the shoulder. “It’s really good to have the two of you here, you know?” All three relaxed with laughter.
“No,” Raul said, “it’s true. Why should a group of three meet with one of those fools? What can easily be confided between us cannot be because of their absurd presence. So,” he concluded, with a French executioner’s mad, indifferent charm, “we let their heads roll in the gutters. Only a woman, eh? is more devastating than the guillotine.”
“Your French accent is heavy, man, really heavy.”
Raul laughed again. “Ah, switching accents is fatiguing — which reminds me of a funny story, but I shan’t tell it.”
“Why not?”
“Ah, it’s a reminiscence of an adolescent that has been estranged from his family, so it has that macabre quality of joy that was false, that was believed, that cannot be escaped, that kills one with its humor.”
Raul saw that Bill was quiet, sketching a drawing on the table with his forefinger, that Jeff’s face looked comically confused. Raul laughed louder. “You didn’t understand what I said?”
“Nope.”
“C’est la vie. I can’t handle it. The fact is that what I said was more of an excuse than an explanation.”
“I know what you meant,” Bill said quietly, almost inaudibly.
“Ah…”
The sudden peace at the table was calm, solemn, and moving. The jukebox and the chattering of the others left them lonely and ambiguous figures.
Raul’s voice was hoarse. “Listen, when you get me the Shakespeare, try and get me some Balzac.”
“Balzac?”
“Yes. Cousin Pons, I would hope.”
For a time they were silent. A tall boy, looking healthy and collegiate, came soundlessly down the counter area in his desert boots, sliding into the booth, greeting each separately. “Hi, Raul…Jeff.. Bill.”
“Wally,” Raul said, “how are you?” His hand and cigarette worked with intimacy about him. Streams of smoke trailed from the hollows of his eyes, lips. “I mean it, though, how are you?” Then, with emphasis, “Your being, how is it?”
Wally, at a loss, shrugged his shoulders.
“A brilliant and articulate response. What have you written lately?”
“I wrote a poem last night.”
“Aha!”
Wally blushed.
“Oh, God. May I see it? Quickly, please.”
Wally mumbled sure, scrabbling among his books for the poem.
“You do want me to see it?”
Wally jumped a yes, his body providing so defined a response that it seemed verbal.
Raul chuckled and straightened up. “Okay. I didn’t mean to kid you. Tell me somethin’ about the poem.”
“Well, I was out last night. It was a full moon. And it looked…” Wally strained physically. “It looked…”
“It looked what?”
Wally shrugged. “It looked milky.”
Jeff giggled.
“I mean, I was drawn to it…really. And then I…I began thinking how it was like…” He looked at Raul, his face upturned, flushed and scheming.
“Like what?” Raul said.
“The feeling I have about my mother.”
Raul gave him a quick look of disgust. He shook his head down, toward the table, following the beat of the music. He sighed. “Let me see it.”
Wally, confused, handed it to him.
“I have to get handed at the obscene hour of eight-thirty an Oedipal poem.”
Wally blushed.
“That was a goddamn happy blush, you fool. I assume you want to know, after I’ve read it, what I really, really, think of it.”
“Yes,” Wally said, with an almost sexual hunger.
“Okay.” Raul’s eyes remained fixed on the paper for a brief but uneasy time.
Jeff whispered something to Bill. Raul stared him into an embarrassed apology. Raul smiled. “Thank God, Jeff, you don’t write poetry.” At the laughter of the others, Wally smiled genially and shrugged.
“That’s getting to be quite a habit with you, you know?” Raul said. “Okay. Let me ask you a question: why did you write the first stanza?”
Bill laughed outrageously.
“I realize that sounds ridiculous, but I mean it. It’s unnecessary.”
“Why?”
“It just is. Unless you go in for all that high school nonsense about beginning with a topic sentence and pulling the reader by the penis from there until you reach the carcass of your essay, or poem. I mean, what the fuck? It’s just the babbling of fools — unnecessary condescension. But that’s not the real problem. All the images in the poem are symbolic, right?”
“Yes.”
“And fucking idiotic symbolism. But that’s not the point. You’re contradicting yourself. Look, you start out calling the moon, ahem, milky.”
Bill began gagging.
“No, give the kid a chance. He’ll pull through, don’t worry about it. All rightee, and then you go on, creating the idea of the moon being like — oh, God — like your mother, right? Whew. We got that far — calm down, will ya, Bill? But then, aha! you make the unforgivable, though rectifiable, mistake of calling the moon — oh, Lord, must I repeat this blasphemy? — the night light of the Earth.”
Bill’s laughter degenerated into coughing, while all that could be seen of Raul was the back of his head, placed forward on the table, his hair quivering from the laughter beneath. Jeff’s face was pink, his lips bubbling from suppressed guffaws.
“Now look,” Raul finally said, “it’s ridiculous. And besides being ridiculous, it doesn’t make any sense. I mean, it’s the mother of the earth,” he giggled, “it certainly ain’t a night light too.” He looked at Wally’s flushed, tense face. “Mothers just don’t fill that function in society.” Raul suddenly looked serious, rising with a finalizing gesture. “Okay.” He cleared his throat. “Anybody got a cigarette?”
Jeff handed him one.
“Raul,” Wally said, “you’re right. I said that wrong, but it does make sense. You just ridiculed it and…”
Raul, lighting his cigarette, said quietly, “I really don’t want to discuss it. It’s true I ridiculed it, and it deserved it. However, I showed you the incongruity of your images. If you agree, good. If not, at least put it differently.”
“You have to discuss it.”
“No, I don’t! And I don’t feel like discussing it because it upsets me. I’m a poet, too, and I’m liable to be subjective, get angry, and ruin what could be a promising day. So that ends it.”