Within a half hour Alec called, obviously upset. He went over to Raul’s house, Raul sneaking him in, his parents asleep.
They huddled over the kitchen table. “Why did you answer the phone?”
“It had been ringing for a long time. Now who the hell would call at two in the morning but you? I figured I had the signals wrong.”
Alec’s harassed anger subsided. “Oh, why did you do it, Raul?” The question was rhetorical.
“Did she lower the boom?”
“Many booms, my friend.”
Raul smiled, but Alec had spoken humorlessly. “What?”
“You can’t come over any more.”
“What!”
“Not only that, but I get no allowance. I have to work for my spending money.” Raul began to exclaim. “And I have to go every weekend to the country, or stay with my grandfather in the city.”
“You’re kidding.”
Alec shook his head.
“I mean, who the hell does she think you are! You’re going to college in a couple of months. What’s she doing? Grounding you, like a typical American punishment. What is she doing? Reverting to Andy Hardy or something.”
Anita called, waking Raul’s mother. Raul quickly got his mother off, putting Alec on. It was three o’clock. She scolded him again, ordering him to go home immediately.
“Did she say anything about me?” Raul asked.
“Yeah. She said you’re a terrible liar.”
“No, really.”
“When she said I couldn’t see you, I said, ‘You just can’t do that. Raul’s too important.’ Then what she said was just utter bullshit.”
“Well,” Raul said, “what did she say?”
“She said if that was so, then there was something unnatural about our relationship.”
“God, that old line. I thought adults grew out of that sort of thing.”
“Yeah, that’s nonsense, real nonsense. I told her that. I made it very clear I wasn’t going to take that bullshit.”
“Then did she, you know, apologize?”
Alec looked at Raul condescendingly. “My dear child, my mother never apologizes. She made it less insulting. She said you were a very brilliant young man and that I’m very impressionable, so you’re a very powerful influence.”
“And a bad one.”
“Right. The more brilliant you are, the more dangerous.”
“But what it all comes down to is that I can’t see you.”
“Right again.”
A mother’s cliché arrogance had yanked from beneath Raul a whole section of his life that had become as necessary and as vital as food. What doubled Raul’s frustration was Alec’s unquestioning submission to his mother’s will. He was a pampered Jewish son; his mother’s dominance approached soap-opera proportions.
With this submission, Alec fell even farther from grace. His image was now swollen and degenerate with imperfection. He was fitting easily into a cubbyhole; another human that Raul could dissect. The criticisms of Alec’s acting that Raul had heard and ignored returned to his mind. The insecurity of his ego sexually shattered the image of the seducer. His mother’s sharp dominance closed the case definitively. Raul usually delighted in such discoveries, but with Alec he fought the investigation of each weakness. There wasn’t that Messianic sense of power that someone else was predictable. He had lost his Alec: the delusion that had made a comrade.
Realizing this, he still buried it. Perhaps I am being bitter, he thought. This sudden criticism may come from my ego.
A terrible languor followed Raul’s separation from Alec, and if he didn’t subside totally into a heap, it was because Alec assured him that his mother would be over her anger in a week or two. She dropped her demand that Alec work for his spending money almost immediately, and Alec expected her capitulation on banning Raul shortly.
Raul lay passive for two weeks. Final exams were coming up, but he seemed barely to notice them. During the third week, meeting Alec in the theater, Raul was told that Anita planned to invite him for dinner.
“She’ll give in soon,” Alec said.
“It’s late, Alec. School will be over in a little while, and then I’ll be off to the country. You should have fought her earlier.”
“I explained to you why I don’t.…”
“Yeah, I’m sorry. Forget it, I’m just terribly angry at her.”
“I can understand that.”
But did he understand? Did the relationship hold the significance for him that it held for Raul? Alec seemed like a child smashing an old toy.
He was invited for Friday night, and in the middle of dinner, Thursday, the phone rang. Raul rose from the table — his parents had company — and answered the phone.
“Raul.” It was Alec. He was whispering, low, intense and frightened. “My mother found my grass. All hell’s broke loose.”
A hot New York night, bright and alive. Alec told his mother that he had to go out for a walk; Raul and he met, taking the 104 bus to Columbus Circle.
Neither Alec nor Raul could avoid enjoying the air of catastrophe; they heightened it, smiling sheepishly with exclamations of “Oh, my God, we’re ruined!” They walked frantically through the city streets, lamenting conspicuously. Ah, the glory of this parade of despair. If alone they were afraid of this disaster, together their drama reduced it to an interesting scenario. For an hour their unity returned.
They talked of running away, neither for a moment seriously intending to. But the romance of it keyed them up, their vitality, hopes, and ideals suddenly free.
Yet this was fatal. Which one would break the acting, the scene, the love? Neither could do it separately, and a rare loss of sanity caused them not to end together.
Alec finally said he would have to call his father. He was close to him, and he wouldn’t leave without first discussing it with him. Why didn’t Raul then say, “Let’s forget it?” He knew it was over, why did he allow it to drag on?
Again, he watched a mad suicide without stopping it. Though superficially no major rift seemed to be going on, Raul was breaking the rules of their game. He allowed this dwindling descent from the scene to reality. It was humiliation for both; a corruption of the rare contact they had. And he knew it.
Alec spoke to his father for more than a half hour. This was a process well rehearsed: his father was the opium to subdue any rebellion against his mother’s dominance, while allowing Alec his self-respect. His father would promise to calm her, and thereby would calm Alec. He’d lower his voice and they’d be conspiratorial — without laying any plans, without any results.
This isn’t a novelty among adolescent relations with parents. Perhaps this was preferable; far less humiliating than having to dope oneself. Then one must openly admit cowardice, Raul thought. However responsible the advice one takes against rebellion, the reason is still fear. No matter how sound and true the objections, its appeal lies in the ready rationalization. The lengths Raul would go to at times to excuse himself from action were laughable.
Alec finished his call. “He said I should wait a week or two and see if she calms down. He promised he would call her right after speaking to me.”
“Well,” Raul said, smiling, “that’s certainly reasonable.”
Alec’s house was unconditionally denied to Raul. With only a week or two left in the school year, it was unnecessary for Alec to go to classes. Raul, therefore, didn’t see him.
On the following Monday, Miller announced that Michael Sussbaum would play Iago in next year’s production of Othello.
The pressure was overpowering. No friendly voice greeted Raul. His parents, his teachers, his advisers, and his brother all urged him to study for final exams. Returning to the company of his classmates, he found them doubly intolerable. Everywhere waste and frustration.