Alec had no ready response. It was his habit to reduce all comments made by his schoolmates to obvious statements of character. So intuitive was the quality, which Raul had also, that answers came to mind immediately. Tone, look, degree of sincerity; the kind of response was evaluated quickly and delivered. That statement of Raul’s, without the tone Raul gave it in, without the last sentence, without all that had gone before, could be easily written down to a method of self-flattery. But Raul’s character seemed too ambiguous to reduce to a formula. Alec, nevertheless, kept his suspicions.
Raul was furious at himself. He had made a sham of an important idea. It had to be woven carefully to express the varied emotional hues. His urge was to blurt it out, but that caused havoc — it came out as egotism, or adolescent pretension, or…he had seen people dismiss it many times.
And it was imperative that he make this casual acquaintance a friend. “Look,” Raul said, “let me try and explain it. You and I seem very different, don’t we?”
“In what way?”
“Well, superficially. I’ve gathered quite a bit of secondhand information about you. All the time we were working on Arid da Capo, I sensed certain things about you. For example, you’re a very big-time seducer.”
Alec laughed, Raul smiled. “It is so, isn’t it? That’s an embarrassing question, of course. If you say yes, you’ll seem like you’re doing what hundreds of teenagers do. The bragging of sexual prowess is very fatiguing for me.” Raul’s tone seemed to suggest a point of tension had been relieved. “At any rate, you are. One didn’t have to sense a thing, the extensive variety of girls on your arm those weeks of rehearsal were enough. And you once confided in me, do you remember?”
“What I said backstage the night of the first performance?”
“It was not typical bragging, and it had a kind of flair…Shit! It had a kind of… Christ, I’m in a rut. It was very dramatic. I’ll explain that later, that’s the conclusion. Well, one of the…wait a second, let’s not get into that.”
Alec laughed — Raul was arguing with himself. With an embarrassed smile, Raul acknowledged the fact.
“The point is, I am the opposite. In fact, I’m the cliché, neurotic adolescent about sex. I’m unwilling — it would be time-consuming, not to mention the humiliation — to go into details. But…you don’t fuck with all those girls because you love them.”
“God, no. But I did once love a girl.”
“I’m sure. But, uh, one, you said. That leaves ninety- nine per cent unloved. I don’t mean to make you out to be cruel. I’m sure every one you fuck knows damn well what you’re doing.”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“In fact, you’re probably a lot more honest. Others keep one girl around for ready fucking and, from that base, do some free-lancing.”
Alec roared. “Well put, my boy, well put.”
Raul asked him for a light. “So…thank you. And you play roles while you do it. The boots, either dungarees or chinos, the French style of smoking — in fact, your major seductive role is all done in the French style.”
Alec was amazed at the ease with which his portrait was done. Bits and pieces of what Raul was saying, he had been accused of with malice. But this was done as a whole, with complete understanding. It gave him a great sense of calm to have what he had always sensed, so neatly expressed.
“All right, so we’ve reached what’s the basis of all that fucking — art. Acting, really, but that’s an art. Now, not everybody can do that, right? Some people use it as a way of getting ahead. For example, most of Balzac’s novels are, in some way, based on that. But it’s different with you. You’d go out of your mind if you didn’t play that game for, say, a period of a month. A great deal of your artistic energy in life — no, even more than that, the maintenance of your self-imagery — would dissipate. You’d be thrown into a depression.”
Raul swallowed. “Okay. Now I said I was the opposite, but yet I’m completely the same. Of all those you fuck, which outnumber me by a hundred per cent, you don’t have a serious human relationship with any of them. If one of the girls you’ve dropped comes up to you on the street and makes an enormous scene, you’d have exactly two feelings: embarrassment and exhibitionism. You’d think it was a marvelous scene. You’d imagine all those looking on as snickering and envious. I said two emotions and they contradict, but Dostoevsky has already dispelled that puzzle. You might have a twinge of guilt, but you’d conjure up the image of the scene and burst out laughing, saying between your teeth, ‘What a fool!’ And you’d walk off; all your ability in acting reinforced.
“You are, however, incapable of having a real relationship, incapable of focusing your love on any one being now. And guess what, kiddo? Precisely the same thing is true for me. So where’s the difference? Only in our reactions to the same problem. One thing is stressed more in both cases. We both had complexes about our bodies. You’re a little short, though now, it would be impossible to think that — you project an image so strong that one ignores it. Not even ignores it, one doesn’t realize it. You’ve also got an incredible case of acne. But for fuck’s sake, it ain’t taken in that sense. They are so hardened, really they almost look wind-beaten, that they only add to the image of French seducer.”
Alec smiled with the relief of reaching calm waters after going over the hump of an enormous wave.
“At one time, and even a little now, you were massively self-conscious. All right, now let’s dissect me: I’m gangling, often awkward. But with great ease I’m at once insane, deformed; speaking significantly through the inference of madness. I play the image. I make myself more ridiculous physically than I was in the first place. So that I’ve even heightened my self-consciousness.”
“Okay, so what have we got? You got out of your sense of physical inadequacy by playing the opposite of your fear — and you did it. I made myself even more so. It’s the same root: the psychology of an actor, of an artist. And to be able to play it so well that people, people, not fellow actors, are consumed by our vortex of imagery, brother, we gotta be geniuses.”
“And even then I don’t mean ‘genius’ in its common sense. I mean that that quality is the stuff genius is made of — in that sense even American businessmen in the intrigues of opportunism reach some level of genius. But, in us, it is heightened, intense. Now what I meant about Richard was that that was not in him. That he played no such games; that he controlled no one, no groups, or the atmosphere of moods. And in that sense he is not like us: he is not a genius.”
Raul’s throat was parched. He dragged on his cigarette as if it were a soothing source.
Alec had been deluged by this flood. Everything that Raul said was so personal to him that his movements within the labyrinth of Raul’s thought made him feel aged.
Alec had walked into Mike & Gino’s with his first impression of Raul altered only by the admiration his mother had for Raul’s performance in Aria da Capo. It had been annoying to hear him praised. He had seemed just like a quiet ninth grader who looked incredibly tall and skinny. But for his mother’s praise, he remembered him that way — even wanted to, because of his mother’s compliments. And now, in a matter of moments, Raul had shifted levels so quickly, so often.