Free Clair De Lune by Jetta Carleton Page A

chances.”
    The waiter said, “If yawl expectin’ to catch a bus, it don’t go there.”
    â€œNah, we’re drivin’,” Toby said. “Left the car around the corner. You ready?” he said to Allen. “Guess we’ll be on our way then. Thanks for your trouble.”
    â€œYeah, thanks,” she said.
    They sauntered out, taking their time till they were well beyond the light. There they broke into a run. George caught up with them in the next block, and they ran out of breath in front of the Scottish Rite Temple.
    â€œDid you get it?”
    Toby shook a fork out of his sleeve. “If they’d a-had trout, we’d a-been up a creek.”
    They sat on the steps between two sphinxes that supported the clustered lamps. In the dim yellow glow they finished off the pie with the relish of lucky thieves. George scraped the plate clean with his finger.
    Leaning back on their elbows, they listened to the bleating of frogs somewhere in a grassy ditch.
    â€œâ€˜Last night we sat beside a pool of pink,’” said Allen, letting the rest go unspoken. Stevens’s bright chromes and booming frog were familiar enough; they could finish the lines for themselves. “What are you reading?” she said, pulling a book out of Toby’s pocket. “Oh, that again.”
    Toby had borrowed her copy of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and never given it back.
    George said, “How many times have your read it, for crine in the bucket?”
    â€œFour, more or less, since we read it for the class.”
    They laughed.
    â€œWell, I like it,” he said. “There’s always something I didn’t get before, something you can sink your teeth into. Listen to this.” He flipped through the pages and began to read from the fifth chapter.
    â€”Look at that basket—he said.
    â€”I see it—said Lynch.
    â€”In order to see that basket—said Stephen—your mind first of all separates the basket from the rest of the visible universe which is not the basket.
    He read on through the passage on perception, apprehension, and esthetic image; the three forms—lyrical, epical, dramatic—into which art divides itself; and Stephen’s questions on the theory of the esthetic: Was a finely made chair tragic or comic? If a man carves an image of a cow, is the image a work of art, and if not, why not?
    â€œIs a sonata pathetic?” said George.
    â€œâ€˜That’s a lovely one,’” Toby said, reading. “‘That has the true scholastic stink.’”
    â€œNever mind him,” said Allen. “Go on, Toby.”
    â€”The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.—
    â€”Trying to refine them also out of existence—said Lynch.
    A fine rain began to fall from the high veiled sky and they turned into the duke’s lawn, to reach the national library before the shower came.
    He closed the book, and they sat for a moment, thoughtfully hugging their knees, lost in the Joycean weather—mist, fog, rain, and evening.
    â€œI don’t get it,” George said.
    Toby beat him over the head with the book and they laughed, relieved of a tension congenial but not to be held too long.
    â€œNow,” said Toby, taking up the paper plate that had held the pie, “regard this plate. In order to see this plate, the mind separates the plate from the rest of the universe. Which is not the plate. Observe it luminously. Is this finely made object tragic or comic?”
    â€œTragic,” George said promptly. “It’s empty.”
    â€œBull’s-eye!” said Toby, and sent the plate spinning into the street.
    â€œPick it up,” said Allen. “Only white trash leaves white trash in the street.”
    Toby dutifully trotted across and retrieved the plate.
    When