Raul rose, a great calm in his chest. Alec sat up, drawing his legs beneath him. They looked simply at each other. “We must be serious,” Raul said, each word somehow difficult to produce verbally.
Alec nodded, reseating himself in his chair. Raul returned to his.
As they smoked the second joint, the music on the record player slowly began to manifest itself.
In daylight, Alec’s room was obscene: it was made of subdued tones, only night went well with it. And now, in the soft light, with the music so eloquent as to become a presence itself, it seemed to give sway to any of Raul’s movements.
Alec smoked more of the third joint than Raul did. Raul took the joint only when the movement fit into the rhythm. He watched the tones of light in the room: the lava lamp, a mild stream of soft red, uniting with the moonlight from the window. He saw a strange and quiet melancholy in the shadow he cast: the desolation evident in the pale of the moon, the unsubstantial red to which he looked.
Alec tapped him on the shoulder, the joint in an outstretched hand. Raul looked up bewildered, suddenly realizing where he was. He took the joint, saying, “It’s okay,” to explain. Alec nodded: “I understand.” Raul dragged and dragged, not noticing or caring that he was getting anything, rocking silently with the music. He could feel a soft cloud descending; with great precision he felt the depth to which the smoke was going. Then, as an afterthought, the heat followed. And suddenly — the realization was charming — he knew he was going to feel all the heat at once. He quickly pulled the joint out of his mouth, Alec leaping forward to save it. Raul doubled over, coughing. He closed his eyes to pass the ordeal; the discomfort, he knew, promised the rewards.
In a moment the heat passed, and his lungs were lined with gray. It seemed he had something great and inexplicable to say: a powerful love that he couldn’t express, a moving, dry gray that taunted him with its mastery of him. He bowed and swung his head, the familiar movement now alien to him. For the grayness was now his body, the movement of his head a methodical deviation from a set stance. His neck needed loosening, it seemed, and he concentrated on moving his head more quickly. As he did so it took on the flowing movement of the music. A screen lit up before him, the minute details of movement charted carefully within his brain. Raul slowly, ritualistically rose and moved about the room — eyes shut, as if in a trance — omniscient, graceful. His self-consciousness was gone, he had real grace. Without — as he had thought was the only way possible — the lights and heat and intensity of the stage, the movements real and graceful through the practice of interpretation.
He looked at Alec, seated quietly in a chair. “Do you know,” he asked, his voice echoing with power, “that I am possessed by some devil? And I don’t say that as some kind of perverse self-flattery. I am not, in truth, so much a convert of the greats, but a pervert of them. It is something I shall have to change.”
“What is it,” Alec asked slowly, “that perverts you?”
“I don’t know.” Raul moved to the desk, taking a cigarette and lighting it. He looked up at Alec. “I think it’s that I use my insight into men as a weapon, as some sort of a Messiahlike power, rather than create with it. I am vicious and cruel with that that should be used to explain and heal.”
Raul stretched his right leg forward, pausing. “That sounded a bit too much like Salinger’s Seymour to suit my tastes.”
Alec laughed, Raul smiling quietly. “I love Seymour, but…I’m not putting Seymour down, man.” He laughed outrageously, picking up his cigarette.
The laughter seemed to quiver in its wake, recalling the gray, now ticklish, in his lungs. The cigarette was a great dry billow of smoke, tasting of the grass. Leaving his mouth, the smoke twisted and danced like a charmed snake, lying passive, a blue-gray mass, in the air. His voice, husky, sensuous, in both formation and tone, rose like the smoke. “Oh, God. You know, you’re right. I mean, smoking a cigarette stoned is very, very good.”
Alec, drowsily leaning forward, limply pointing a finger at Raul, slurred his words. “I told you.”
Raul broke out laughing. Alec then immediately broke into laughter. Imitating Alec’s drunken voice over and over, their laughter became uncontrollable, hysterical, and cleansing.
The record stopped, and their cackles echoed hollowly, inanely. They stopped, shocked at their ugly, drunken revelry.
Alec stood up and walked about; Raul slid himself into a chair.
“ ‘You made me look ridiculous in there.’ ”
“ ‘You looked just as ridiculous as I did.’ ”
Their voices were sharp, Elizabethan, and contemptuous.
Raul, in a half-moaning, tearful voice said, “ ‘Consistency is all I ask.’ ”
Bitter, cynical, unmoved by his own tragedy, Alec said, “ ‘Give us this day our daily mask.’ ”
And, as a return, the music began again. Alec lowered, in a slow consecrating move, his hands to the floor; Raul stretched his upward, defiant yet pleading.
Raul stood facing the window, a breeze of cool sorrow lightly brushing a hair across his forehead. The intense, empty, static theater lights rapidly passed, as the room in lights, form, and tone became subdued.
He sat on the floor, humble and at peace. Dark forms loomed about his shoulders, twisting about, and then before his eyes; and when the music climaxed, so the forms pressed hard, and when softly, lightly it played, they were brief, insupportable touches of sensuality.
He nodded, as if in recognition of their presence, their power, or their meaning. He rose, somehow the wiser. Alec looked up at him.
“Should anyone ask you,” Raul said, “what it is you do, you answer: acting is my faith.”
“That doesn’t answer the question.”
“And what would?”
“That I act.”
“You may, you may not. What you do is your faith.”
“That doesn’t follow. What I have faith in is acting. That is what I do.”
“No, you don’t catch my meaning. It doesn’t work in this language: what you do is faith itself, not what you have faith in.”
“That’s very spiritual.”
“You’re right. That’s what’s distasteful about it.”
“Then why do you say faith?”
Raul turned about quickly and swung back, his voice severe. “ ‘Everything has to be taken on trust. It’s the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn’t make any difference so long as it is honored. One acts on assumptions. What do you assume?’ ”
Alec smiled again, the satisfaction of the obscure. He moved to Raul and said, “I assume that I am an actor.”
“ ‘We pledged our identities!’ ”
“ ‘Secure in the conventions of our trade,’ ” Alec said, turning despondently away.
“ ‘That someone would be watching.’ ”
Alec’s hand went upward, curved in a bow, falling, gracefully, to his side. “A quote for all occasions.”
“Very good.” Raul smiled pleasantly. “That’s very good.”
They feasted, beginning with Ritz crackers topped with tuna fish and Russian dressing, then going to a luncheonette, eating cheeseburgers and steak sandwiches. They relaxed, smoking, the multiple tastes of the evening lingering on their palates.
Alec, cigarette poised, smiled at Raul’s smile. “Doesn’t it make everything marvelous? Cigarettes, food…”
“Poetry, thought. Yes, it does.” Raul took a sip of his Coke, lightly smacking his lips. “Do you feel with what detail the Coke’s descent is outlined?”
“The Coke’s descent,” Alec repeated, laughing.
Raul looked away. “I always thought,” he said wistfully, “that grass made one inarticulate.”
“If you’re very, very stoned, it does.”
“Yeah, I can see that, but if you gear yourself to it, it has a tendency to increase one’s descriptive powers.”