The Work Is Innocent

by Rafael Yglesias

  “All your examples are writers.”

  Richard was puzzled by this, but he saw that Mark considered it a clever point. “So?”

  “Well—” Mark held the edge of the table with the tips of his fingers, as if balancing himself. “It really may be true of novelists, but I was thinking more of the way, say, that Che relates to life.”

  “Che!” Richard gestured to the ceiling scornfully. “That’s ridiculous. There’s no more egotistical an act—”

  “Oh, that’s fucked up. You can’t call dying to free oppressed people an act of egotism.”

  “I’m not saying that!” Richard yelled. Mark looked at him with mild shock at his vehemence. “How else would one sustain oneself through guerrilla warfare not once, but many times, except by believing that you embody the will of mankind? It’s a lovely egotism. Selfless and great.”

  “That’s just an intellectual concept. When you’re a revolutionary you understand that that’s like the kind of thinking in liberal history books. Being a revolutionary isn’t romantic. That’s why Don Juan is so heavy. Through action you lose all sense of guilt and self-consciousness. Writing is very alienating, and I’m sure that’s why egotism is an important part of it. But the opposite is true of political action.” Mark’s moon face was kindly though patronizing. Richard wanted to jeer at him for his pretense of being revolutionary—he couldn’t hit a tree from ten paces. But Richard felt that was an unfair point. Yet he was hurt by Mark’s implication that he was alienated and that Mark had somehow transcended this common fate of middle- class kids.

  “Listen. Writers may be alienated, but good writing is not. I mean, despite the fact that it is a Freudian cliché, one writes to break through alienation, not to reinforce it. You have far too little respect for writing.”

  Mark made a sound of surprise. “That’s not true.”

  “Oh, you think they’re important, but you hate them for it.” Richard was returning Mark’s open, matter-of-fact manner. As he had guessed, it was effective. Mark was nonplused. “The other day you discussed them politically and my impression was that you thought they were all counterrevolutionary, and now you think they’re alienated and don’t have the mystical calm of revolutionaries. What writer do you think avoids these things?”

  Neither of them concealed their hostility at this moment. Richard’s adoption of Mark’s condescending malice was provoking. Mark said, “Well, like I do think the only correct way of living is to be a revolutionary. Anything else supports the bourgeois world.”

  “Okay, so let’s say the bourgeois world doesn’t exist any more. Would you be satisfied with me just being a novelist?” Richard was amused by this turn of their discussion. His family had taught him that such utopian hypotheses were considered foolishness by political activists.

  Mark was solemn about this grave matter. “You would have to do socially useful labor.”

  Richard was unable to dismiss Mark as a crude and silly young man because Richard was so much younger. “That’s just Stalinism!” he yelled, convinced that Mark couldn’t ignore the truth of that label and its implied moral judgment.

  “Richard, you shouldn’t react defensively to what I’m saying. Part of me really understands what you’re into about writing. You know? Really. I felt the same way in college. I wanted to be another Camus—”

  “How do you know what I’m into about writing? How do you know anything—”

  “Well, I know you’ve written a novel and your family’s very literary.” Mark paused and Richard couldn’t deny it. “If everybody felt the way your family does about society we wouldn’t have to have a revolution. For me I’ve gone through a lot of changes about the values that like I had in college. In terms of the Vietnam War and what’s happening to black people I couldn’t really feel good about myself as an intellectual or an artist.”

  Richard listened uncritically. He was cowed. Mark was a revolutionary and along with Leo was prepared to make sacrifices to change the world. I’m just a schmucky selfish kid who masturbates. He really didn’t feel good about himself.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  In late August, well after Mark had left, Richard was sitting up with Leo and Louise after their parents had gone to sleep. He tried to explain his guilt about being politically inactive. “What I’m trying to say is that the only thing that seems real, I mean I have respect for demonstrations, I just mean deep down”—he smiled—“deep down I feel unless you’re willing to die, to become a guerrilla like Che, that you’re just bullshitting.” He waved his hands at them frantically to stop any response. “I don’t mean I think people are bullshitting. I mean I would think I would be bullshitting.” He said quickly to Leo: “Did you see how I misused would-should?” He hoped that would alleviate his confession of naïve political feelings, but it simply made him feel precious.

  Louise leaned forward and put a hand on Richard’s knee. She spoke in a rush. “Don’t worry about that. It’s because you think life isn’t going to change. I never thought, years ago, that I would be political. You don’t have to feel that you’re making those choices for life.”

  “Don’t say that to him,” Leo objected. He must have sensed Richard’s recoil from even this careful and well-meaning patronization. “He wants to get into politics. This is a problem everybody has—”

  “I didn’t mean he shouldn’t get into politics.”

  “Don’t fight about it, for Christ’s sake,” Richard said, glad and ashamed that they took his worry seriously.

  “Look, man,” Leo said. “When you come to New York you’ll see what things are like. And you’ll probably get involved. I mean Louise is right in that you shouldn’t worry about it. Thinking about that up here is a no-win situation. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

  This pleasantly resolved the question and they went out to look at the bright, vivid sky, full of stars. As they were coming back in, Louise asked Richard what John was like when he stayed with him.

  “Oh, I really love him. I mean he’s incredible, you know. You’ve seen the upstairs. He does incredible work.” She looked at him strangely, busy with thoughts that she shouldn’t express. He knew she disliked John, though not the reason for it. He continued, hoping to change her opinion. “He’s been very important for me throughout all that shit about school.”

  Leo bit his nails ferociously, his eyes not meeting Richard’s. “Really? Oh, you know, Aaron and Betty said a really funny thing. Apparently when they came up here they had a lot of liquor that—”

  Richard laughed. “Oh yeah, yeah. He and I drank it all. But we left a tiny, tiny amount in each bottle.”

  Leo laughed, but Louise shook her head from side to side, disapprovingly. She said, “Oh, how terrible,” but with sympathy as if Richard had had this behavior inflicted on him.

  “It was embarrassing, but it wasn’t terrible. I enjoyed drinking with him.” They were quiet and he went on nervously. “It’s hard to get to know him. He’s very—he’s an actor. You know he’s developed a really incredible method of dealing with people. He puts on that modesty, pretends he’s not intellectual—”

  “Why does he do that?” Leo’s question was sharp.

  “It’s because he’s an actor. He makes conversation a game, a study. He figures out appropriate lines in response to routine situations that normally one just stumbles through. I love that. I love pushing life, bending it out of shape.”

  “You know, Richard, that’s just a WASP thing,” Louise said in a rush as if it was impossible to contain herself. She looked meek afterward.

  “It’s not a WASP thing,” Richard said quietly.

  “I just hope he doesn’t try and leave Naomi without a penny,” Leo said.

  “What are you talking about!” Richard yelled while Louise said something to reprove Leo. “They’re not breaking up. And even if they did, she owns the property on the mountain. It’s a joint deed.” This got no reply so Richard’s anger subsided. “It’s not a WASP thing, Louise,” he repeated
to her. “I mean his behavior. I have it. It comes from being self-conscious.”

  “You’re not like that, Richard,” she said sweetly. “You don’t have that neurotic reaction to people.”

  “It’s not neurotic! It just comes from being afraid—”

  “That’s what neurotic means—fear.”

  He found himself gaping at her after this release of her contempt. She felt his ignorance so strongly that, after correcting it, she tried to soften the blow by looking meekly at him. Richard perceived that and felt it as the meaner part of her insults. “I know that!” he yelled. He stopped the surge of rage and parceled it out to each word. “It’s a very normal kind of neurosis, so normal that you have it. When you sit there at a dinner party as I’ve seen you do and run that little line of chatter, trying to organize people into nice feelings about black people and Latin Americans, you’re doing the same dishonest shit!” He put all of the pain of being tactful and self-effacing into this speech of freedom. The joy of it was gone in an instant. Louise had jumped up as in a comic repetition of Leo’s earlier flight and left the room.

  Leo got to his feet and said, “How can you talk that way to a friend?” And he followed her out.

  These experiences with his slightly older contemporaries frightened him. He was reminded of John’s thesis: be humble, don’t challenge people. They might dismiss John, but he escaped having to apologize for actions that were merely truthful.

  The agent said his novel was unpublishable, but the writers at the university said they could probably get him in. He took this as a defeat, even though the writers said they thought it was publishable. His parents kept him going: “What a thing,” Aaron said. “He’s sixteen, a high school dropout, and he’s depressed that a university wants him.” His novel was repacked and sent off to an editor, and this got him an invitation to lunch but no sale.

  Louise, whose women’s group included an editor, asked for a copy to take with her to New York to show her editor friend. She had read his book, and their argument didn’t lessen her admiration of it. She wrote him and said that his novel might be too subtle for editors to understand; that they might find it unbelievable, considering his age, that he knew what he had written. He thought this ridiculous, but he followed her advice and wrote a short note to accompany the manuscript:

  “This novel is about the humiliation of being an adolescent. Adolescents see themselves through the eyes of others, as actors do, but without any control over the image projected for them. The main character is conscious of this, and the novel, in one sense, is a chronicle of his submitting to, and, at other times, breaking out of, the image imposed on him. His inconsistency, hysteria, and arrogance all arise from this trap: his consciousness of his place, his superiority to it, and his inability to break free of it.

  “The prolonged absence of his parents and of his school exist because the usual image of fourteen-year-olds had to be shocked away by portraying him as independent of the institutions that rule his life—in a word, as he really is.”

  During the fall months, when he was alone again with his parents, he wrote regularly to Leo and Louise and tried hard to make up for his attack on her. They recognized his friendly intentions and pitied his situation. When his parents decided to go on a trip, Louise wrote him and said that a friend of hers had offered to put him up for a few weeks.

  It was January when they left for New York, and Richard had not heard if he had been accepted by the university or by the publisher Louise had sent his novel to. He decided the note he had written for his novel was a mistake, and when he reread it he was suffused with embarrassment. They’re laughing at me, he thought. The drive to New York was paranoid: he felt encased and ancient, as if he was being carried to his death.

  They arrived late and Richard spent the night with his parents at the apartment of family friends. He slept uneasily on the couch in the living room and was awakened out of a tormented dream. His father’s face merged with the high school teacher berating him. “It’s Louise!” Aaron yelled. “They’ve taken it! Get on the phone.” Aaron hustled him out of bed and handed him the receiver.

  He listened to Louise excitedly telling him the details and tried hard to make it an enthralling and romantic moment. He was happier but only in the gentle way that a cool breeze gives relief. What really pleased him was the four thousand dollars they were to give him. It made him independent, it freed him from school.

  His parents’ friends, who had felt sorry the night before for this sweet young man obviously in trouble, were stunned. He was transformed in a moment.

  Louise told him to come to her apartment. He rode on the train and began to realize the implications: he was going to be in the bookstores. He could pace down those aisles amid the idiots and geniuses and see his novel. All of the predictions that were made about his dropping out were shattered by that phone call. He didn’t know how to celebrate so private, so impolite a triumph.

  His happiness gathered strength with each step he took toward Leo and Louise’s apartment, and he was ready to shout with joy when he rang their doorbell.

  “Congratulations!” Joan said, and gave him an embarrassed kiss on the cheek. He stared at her and was doubly stunned to see Ann waving to him from the living room. Louise rushed forward and hugged him. “You must be so surprised to see Joan and Ann,” she said. “Congratulations, Richard. Come in, come in.”

  He walked in and took off his coat, the sense of himself as a young author mixing with his shame of his sexual failure. “Hello, Ann,” he said, unable to decide whether to kiss her. He pretended almost to bump into the coffee table and that avoided the problem.

  “I’m going to Cuba,” Ann said.

  “And I’m quitting therapy,” Joan said. They both looked delighted.

  “What the hell is going on?” Richard couldn’t contain his pleasure at running into Joan. “How do you know—”

  “Isn’t it a funny thing but Ann and Joan are in a women’s group with me and when I had them over a little while ago Joan saw one of your letters and surprise, surprise.” Louise settled on the couch next to him and signaled with her eyes that she was worried by the following details: “Joan has a lovely little apartment”—Joan laughed—“oh, it’s tiny but very nice,” Louise went on. “Anyway she’s very kindly offered to put you up. I didn’t mention in my letter who it was because I didn’t want to scandalize your parents.”

  Louise communicated anxiety so well that it was obvious to Richard that Joan must have told her about that evening. He tried to laugh but ended up only baring his teeth—reminding him that they hadn’t been brushed. “I don’t think Mom and Dad would care—”

  “Well, it’s not that they would be such dinosaurs,” Louise said quickly. “But you are their baby boy.”

  “Aw,” Ann said. “How cute.”

  “I won’t get in the way of your work,” Joan said. “I even have a little desk that you can use.” Joan handled herself well, Richard noticed.

  “That doesn’t matter,” he said. “I don’t have any work. Anyway, thanks. That’ll be great.” She seemed really pleased. “What was all that about Cuba and—”

  “I’m going on the Venceremos Brigade.”

  “And I’m quitting therapy.” The two women went off into hysterical laughter. “We just thought,” Joan said, “we’d be funny insisting on you congratulating us. But it’s true. I’m quitting therapy after six years.”

  Louise, still nervous, said, “Ann and Joan can’t stay but you’ll have dinner with us, won’t you? And later Leo will drive you over.”

  “Yeah, I have to go,” Joan said, getting up.

  “Where to?” Richard asked.

  “To my shrink.” She laughed at his expression. “To tell him.”

  Leo shut off the car and said to Richard, “Joan’s really a nice girl.” His tone made it a question.

  Richard agreed, but tensely, so that Leo didn’t follow it up. While they took the elevator to the fourth floor, Richard’s
stomach yelled at him for his agreement to spend his nights at Joan’s. She lived in a building much like her father’s: thin white walls, the corridors covered by thick undistinguished carpets, and heavy metal doors for the apartment entrances. Richard wanted to ask Leo to stay for a while rather than leave immediately as he planned. But instead he said, “Boy, it must be a heavy rent.”

  “Yeah, it’s a small place but she must be paying two-fifty a month.” Leo rang the bell of number six. “But her father’s paying for it,” he whispered with too little respect to please Richard.

  Joan swung the door open, music escaping from within. “All right!” she said, and made a big movement out of giving Leo a hand slap.

  “How ya doin’, sister,” Leo said. He hugged her after the hand slapping. It was a thorough hug that provoked not jealousy but envy from Richard. “Hey, that’s Dylan, isn’t it?” Leo asked.

  “Yeah.” She snapped her fingers. “Check it out. It’s New Morning.”

  Leo looked doubtful. “Yeah. I’m not sure I like it.”

  Joan disagreed cheerfully. “Oh, that’s fucked up. It’s beautiful.”

  “I’ll have to listen to it more carefully.” Leo hurried on to explain that he had to leave. He hugged Richard before going and said, his voice loaded with meaning, “Have a good time, huh?”

  The apartment had a kitchenette, one big room, and a bathroom. The implication was immediate, even silly, considering that the largest and most beautiful piece of furniture was a mattress on the floor, covered by a white-knit spread.

  Joan was in a full-length green robe that had no visible opening and was less revealing than her street clothes, but much more intimate.