The Work Is Innocent

by Rafael Yglesias

  “Raul said you’ve dropped out of high school.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And your parents don’t mind?”

  “Oh no.”

  “Are they going to support you?”

  “For a while. I’m hoping to make some money.”

  “You’re gonna get a job?”

  The novel. Should he discuss the novel? “Yeah, I guess so.” From his response, Joan obviously thought he was going nowhere, but he preferred that to being ridiculed for writing.

  She got up. “Let’s go back to the party.”

  Richard was dismayed. He thought she was enjoying this chat, and the unreal assurance of her admiration changed to real assurance of her dislike. The loneliness pressed in on him again. What was just a fit of alienation due to the grass was really the burden of his life, unshakable and remorseless.

  “Are you worried about going in there?” she asked.

  He could confess everything, maybe she’d take pity on him. He looked straight at her and waited for the words.

  “I mean they’re all nice people,” she said.

  “The grass has made me feel weird. So I think I’ll go.”

  “All right,” she said with what might have been regret.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Richard was spending the night with an old friend from Cabot, Bill, who had also invited a thin blond young man named Frank. It had all been arranged so there was no need for discussion. They seemed much like three clean-cut little boys: dressed in their pajamas, surrounded by Bill’s posters and records. Playboy magazines, schoolbooks, and two cots cluttered the room but added to the camp atmosphere. Each had taken a shower. Frank returned from his and found Richard and Bill lying on the cots and looking at the Playboy magazines. They put them aside and Bill picked up a pack of cards while Richard patted a place next to him for Frank. Frank sat down and looked at the five cards Bill had dealt him. Richard had a pair of tens and asked for three more cards. Frank got one and Bill pulled two for himself. Richard laughed and said, “I wish it was for money. Trip tens.”

  Neither Bill nor Frank had better, so they took off their tops. Frank’s chest was hairless, his nipples very pink, but Richard got a glimpse of blond underarm hair which pleased him. Bill enjoyed the look of Frank’s smooth skin and flat belly. Richard dealt the next hand unsteadily, his tingling self-conscious penis eager that Frank should lose. Bill was also pleased when Frank looked sadly at his cards. Bill won and Richard quickly took his top off, fearful of missing Frank disrobing. Richard’s penis strained away from him as Frank stood in the agreed spot for important unveilings.

  Frank’s erection pointed straight to his navel, falling forward and pointing ludicrously at the ceiling when he dropped his bottoms. Waves of longing and heat passed through Richard’s body, and he painfully stopped himself from coming, slowing his pace. Frank held his penis to his belly as he turned to show them his delicious small pink ass.

  Richard won the next hand, distracted by Frank’s moist pubic hair. Bill removed his bottoms, but now the beautiful part was coming. Bill dimmed the lights and Frank stood woozily while Bill held his member with great warmth and tenderness, tenderness—Richard moved his lips over Frank’s, moistening them as he squeezed Frank’s tight superb ass. Bill in great heat was calling for Richard’s penis as he removed Richard’s bottoms held his demanding warm oh warm penis. Frank was putting was putting him on the bed with a hermaphrodyte’s love. Yes fragile womanish man. Bill kissed him kissed him and Frank closed his warm mouth over—

  The three jerks his distended penis gave were regarded coldly by Richard, annoyed that he had ejaculated high on his chest and on his belly in great quantity. He grimaced as he pulled the bed sheet up and tried to wipe the semen off. He flipped the sheet away from him and turned on his stomach to dry thoroughly. The windows were resplendent with the morning sun. He had decided to let his imagination go and Christ! did it ever. Oh, how he had enjoyed it! No, there could be no doubt—he was homosexual. And why not if it’s that good?

  While masturbating, his nudity had seemed lusty and exciting, but now, as he dressed, he was disgusted by the flattened, damp hairs that ran from his navel to his groin. He showered and brushed his teeth, enjoying it more than usual, and spat with vehemence.

  The apartment was quiet, his mother off at work, his father locked away in his study. The kitchen was brilliant from the sun, and, engulfed by this cheerful light, he felt strong and healthy. He made eggs, bacon, toast, and fresh coffee—an unusually large breakfast. He read the Times from cover to cover and found it remarkably interesting. When finished, he energetically cleaned up and went to his room. He made the bed, glad to have removed any traces of his sexuality from sight.

  Finally it became impossible to avoid thinking about his fantasy. He tried to stop himself from revoking his earlier judgment that he was homosexual. He wanted the issue decided and forgotten. But a voice argued convincingly that nothing had been proved: he would have to attempt sleeping with a woman before it would be. So he called Information and got Joan’s number. It was eleven and she would be in school, so he worked on his novel.

  He had been within a few pages of finishing for several days. Everything he had planned to write was already in it, but he despaired of finding the words to end it. He was tempted to escape the problem by killing the main character. He sat at his desk and allowed the weary sadness of the music playing on his radio to mix with the mood of the most recent paragraphs. He had one of the few moments of inspiration while working and he was finished.

  The manuscript was fat and definite. He raised the papers and dropped them on his desk, listening with pleasure to the soft slap they made. He could sit back and face the problem of living now; he could enjoy life with this as his passport.

  If he could use the determination it took to complete his novel and improve his life with it, then—improve his life? How cold that was! Always confined, thoughtful, and self-conscious. Rule one: be natural. Have a drink maybe and tell his father.

  Aaron looked startled when his study door opened with a bang. He looked quizzically at Richard standing triumphantly in the doorway. “It’s finished,” Richard said. “I did it.”

  “Really? All done?”

  His father wasn’t excited and the question embarrassed Richard. He felt he had lied. “Well, you know. The first draft. But it’ll just be a retyping, really.”

  His father maintained his serious, almost stern, look and said, “Be sure to go over it very carefully.” Aaron crossed out sentences in the air with an imaginary pen. “Thoroughly weed it out. That’s very important. It’s slow, annoying work, but you mustn’t be impatient.”

  “Don’t worry. I won’t be unprofessional.” Richard smiled ingratiatingly. He hoped to make his father be more cheerful. Aaron got up and walked over to his son with an abstracted air, putting his arm around him. “So you’re all done, eh kiddo?” His father hugged Richard to his side and pulled him off balance. “It’s terrific that you’ve finished it so fast. You know it’s a terrible habit of mine to get most of it done and then prevaricate forever over the ending.”

  Richard laughed. “That’s funny. I was thinking what a fake I am. I just wrote the ending unconsciously.”

  His father looked down at him, his face, it seemed to Richard, suddenly distant. It wore his father’s formal mask and Richard was frightened by it: had Aaron taken his comment as a confession of amateurism? “You know what I mean,” Richard continued in a rush. “I started out having an apocalyptic vision for an ending. It was almost as if I wrote the whole thing for the ending. But after a while I forgot what hideous idea I had, and in fact finished with the right thing.” This speech erased his father’s conventional look, but now Richard felt he was running off at the mouth about his book. He knew he had to avoid that. After all he was just a pretentious kid in the eyes of the world. His father was a respected playwright. He didn’t really know if his parents believed in his book. Let him finish it, he imagin
ed them saying, when it’s turned down he’ll go to school quietly.

  “So how does it feel to be a writer?”

  “I don’t know. Am I a writer?”

  Aaron exaggerated his surprise. “Sure. You know your mother and I were very casual about it but what you showed us was extraordinary.” His voice had an unnatural seriousness. “I was just thinking about one of your scenes. I’m very eager to read it.”

  Richard thought, he’s being careful to make me realize that he respects my work. “I’ll give it to you now.”

  “Okay. But why don’t we go out to lunch first?”

  They both relaxed once out in the street and in the restaurant where they used to have their intimate talks. “You know, Dad,” Richard said after ordering, “I always felt I was becoming an adult when you would bring me here.”

  “To this dump? What about when we went to Europe? That’s when I felt I was showing you the world like a Henry James character.”

  “Well, of course, there too, but that was more exalted. There was something about not having a sandwich at home but making it into an excursion. We go into the bookstores after—”

  “Admit it. That’s what you liked. You’d con me into buying you all those books.”

  Richard laughed with him. “That’s true. That’s more true than you can imagine. But I was always conscious of who bought me those books.”

  “And that’s what’s led you into this disgraceful career.”

  Richard waited for the waitress to leave after serving their food before speaking. “It doesn’t do any good to discourage me now after a lifetime of hyping Dickens, Tolstoy, et cetera. It’s just a pose.”

  Aaron smiled and then was quickly reserved. He looked at Richard, his eyes signaling that this was serious. “You know I have made it a family joke. My complaints about writing. But it really is a terrible life. If your work wasn’t so good I should discourage you.” He let this sink in and then said, “That’s why I hope a university will have the sense to ask you in. Because at least, if you get a teaching job eventually, then you have the money, the time to work. You’re too young to have the pressure of proving yourself at this age. You’re going to live a long time, I hope, and you may wish to do something other than write.”

  “I can always do something else, can’t I?”

  “You understand I’m not underestimating your talents or even your ability to use them. It’s just that universities give one great freedom—”

  “To freeload.”

  “Yes,” Aaron said, laughing. “But also to investigate other things. I should still like to see you act professionally.”

  “If a university takes me I’ll accept. I mean. Obviously. I have no desire to starve.”

  “You know you have to allow your father to worry about you. It’s one of the pleasures of having a son.”

  Richard almost wept at these words. Back in his room, he reacted against this sudden sentimentality for his father. You’d think Dad was on his deathbed, he thought—as if Aaron’s health precluded Richard’s feeling love for him. His father’s manner and conversation might have been considered routine, but it was a great change from the heavy silent disapproval of the last two years while Richard was cutting school. Richard had also lost his sullen hostility. But this soap opera bullshit, he thought, must be false. Why a miraculous resolution of their mutual dislike? Just letting him quit school solved everything. Was that possible? He felt love for his father a month after hating him. He didn’t doubt that he had hated him: it seemed more likely that his love was insincere.

  He stared out his window at Broadway, and New York, as it always does through windows and in movies, looked like a pleasant, well-ordered home for active, interesting people. The garbage on the streets skipped along with apparent harmlessness, and the mad old man with his bag of rags had nothing to do with Richard’s life as long as he was six flights up. He loved the city from his windows but was so afraid of it on the street that he had no time to hate it. He knew this and other fears that didn’t complement the writing of his book. He had to deal with them: learn to talk easily with people he didn’t know; to walk New York’s streets; to laugh with women and sleep with them as heartily as men ought to do such things. Fuck all that rationalizing his generation indulged in: he was going to stand over New York and challenge it like Rastignac defying Paris.

  He picked up the scrap of paper with Joan’s number on it, got up from the desk, and strode over to the phone. He cheered himself up with the little parody he performed: dialing the numbers so aggressively that he hurt his fingers, casually asking of the adult who answered the phone if he could speak to Joan, and it was only until he had informed her of his name and she had made a polite, pleasant sound of recognition that he realized this scene couldn’t end right here with a fadeout and open up again with them in bed.

  There was enough of a pause to alert Joan, and she tried to help by saying that she hoped he hadn’t had too terrible a time at the party.

  Be honest, he thought. “I’m fucked up about parties. I get very self-conscious.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Anyway, I’m afraid I left a bad impression.”

  “No, no, I thought we had made a bad impression. Listen, Ann and I were going to go to the movies tonight, would you like to come along?”

  Richard didn’t bother to conceal his enthusiasm. “Uh, yeah, I’d love to.”

  “Okay. Let me arrange things with—do you care what movie we go to?”

  “No, it doesn’t matter.”

  “All right. I’ll figure it out with Ann and let you know.”

  I’d better give her my number, he thought, but remained frozen with the phone to his ear.

  “Oh!” Joan said. “You’d better give me your number.”

  Why is she so eager to see me again? he asked himself, once off the phone. Because of Dad? The problems multiplied with appalling speed. He had to tell his parents without awkwardness, he had to fight back the panicky feeling that Joan thought him childish for being unable to take the lead in asking her for a date, he had to figure out how to dress, how to act, how he would manage to arrange another meeting, whether he would go and come back from the movie in a cab or by subway—money! He’d forgotten that. Could he get enough from his parents? Maybe he should pay for the girls. Every moment would be a problem. Meeting them on the street—he should give them a kiss, his brother would—saying good-by…. Should he favor Joan with his attention or would it be smarter to play up to Ann? Maybe a little socialism was the answer, but was it possible? He laughed. He should call his brother and tell him he’d just refuted Marxism by proving there was no equality in sexual admiration.

  His mind was running at an astonishing pace. Thinking that, if he called his brother and said that, it wouldn’t be a chatty, funny talk. His brother would say, “Huh?” in a strained voice. Then, “That’s cute,” when Richard explained, and end with, “Listen I’m busy right now. We should get together soon.”

  What was it about Richard that his boyishness only made people more constrained? His mind was busy remembering anything that could humiliate him. Forget that, he said, nobody cares, it doesn’t matter. But when he began imagining the reviews his books would get—“It is an incredible achievement. America has a new genius and should take care of him”—he was reminded that as absurd as it might be to imagine he’d ever get such praise, for all the world’s giggling at youthful egotism, humanity respected fame and allowed anything for its realization. His self-consciousness would then be charming humility. How comfortable to be an eccentric author! Richard fixed his face as Rastignac would fix his—a knowing, sharp smile—and deep in this romance of ambition he hoped to forget his awkwardness.

  He walked up and down in his room and stopped finally in front of his windows to look at a New York suffocating in the grayish blue of a winter afternoon. No, this preening, these chants of fame and power were unhappy. The fantasies had reality now: the world would judge this n
ovel, and since the opinions couldn’t be as good as he wished them to be, since now the growing was over, the dreams had begun to nag and not soothe.

  The light was dimming, his room aging, as in his imagination he was, and he wished that fucking wasn’t necessary. How sickening I am, he thought. It’s the weakness that’s loathsome. Other agonies are vigorous and significant. This is like being unable to walk.

  He got on the IRT and found a familiar world in chaos. The subway cars reeled with sprawling names and numbers. He sat down uneasily on JOE 125, spray-painted in garish red, and stared in wonder at the address book facing him. Who was doing this? And how? The train had stopped in the middle of a tunnel and, outside a window, in royal blue, THE KING 96 mocked him with the question. How did they reach that spot?

  He heard someone, in the silence of the stopped train, say with a tone of understanding, “I see your point, but I can’t agree. They’re disgusting, filthy people.”

  Richard looked in the direction of the voice and saw nothing but a silent, balding man in his sixties, dressed in a gray overcoat. The train lurched and started up, the many colored names painted on the tunnel walls pretending to be scenery. The old man shifted, a woman deep in the New York Times slid away from him as he moved closer. The old man had revealed SUPERDICK 107 done in baroque lettering. He looked expressively at one of the advertisements, saying, “Oh, of course you’re right. You’re absolutely right.” Richard realized he wasn’t talking to anyone, and he swung his head away from the old man. But there he caught sight of a redheaded young man dressed in a drab green jacket whose sleeves were too short and tight. He was wearing shiny black shoes and white socks. He smiled maliciously at his reflection in one of the subway’s windows and, posing carefully in front of it, he brought his right arm up and flexed his muscle with great deliberation, his freckled angular face tightening with pained joy.