The Work Is Innocent

by Rafael Yglesias

  He put his suitcase down—a ridiculous object, he felt—and sat in a director’s chair next to a coffee table. He pretended to be tired.

  “You’ve had some day,” Joan said.

  She became shy with him, he noticed. She lost the amazing assurance she displayed with others. He knew what that meant but convinced himself she was just trying not to make fun of him. He was unable to answer her. He nodded and smiled. She went over to the record player, built into a bookcase, and shut off the music.

  I should just pull my pants down and get it over with. The idea was so funny that he relaxed and finally took off his overcoat. She had settled on the bed unselfconsciously and he didn’t allow himself any thought. She looked a little alarmed at his approach but he continued and flopped awkwardly next to her. He put an arm around her waist and was erect immediately on feeling her soft belly.

  He worked hard at the kiss. It had to be thorough and passionate, he kept telling himself, and moved his head rather than permit a stagnant contact that would disgust her.

  That delicious weakness hit his stomach and he was happy just to lie there kissing, but he had to move on and when he found the bump of the zipper, he pulled it down and remembered a James Bond movie in which the hero ostentatiously unzips a girl by remote control.

  She hugged him closer when his hand touched her bare back and he interpreted this as a request for him to stop undressing her. He became a little frightened of her enthusiasm: she murmured loudly and pulled him on top of her. He was pissed off that their clothes were still on—the natural rhythm would have to be halted.

  He made these transitions—convinced she was finding him inadequate to being disturbed by her pleasure—without the slightest regard for their inconsistency. He didn’t like being on top of her clothed. There was nothing to do. He broke the contact and started taking his clothes off. He congratulated himself on this straightforward act.

  She turned the lights out, and they both hustled out of their clothes and into bed as if the apartment was unheated. They lay on their backs and Richard was paralyzed. He was furious at this reaction, and following it came shocks of hopelessness that he felt unable to break.

  Joan suddenly moved over with determination. To see the line of her breasts and waist was thrilling, and he was grateful for the reassurance of her warmth. She kissed him and ran her hand lightly over his stomach and settled more into the kiss before stroking his penis with her fingertips. It jumped with pleasure, and he felt how tense he had been by the relaxation that her touch created. She ran a hand up his thigh and cupped his testicles for a moment before grabbing his penis. She squeezed and moved up and down its length. Her hand was cool and his penis inflamed: the contact framed it; everything concentrated in the organ so that his body yawned to the spot with desperate pleasure.

  He wrestled her over, afraid of coming. He felt her disappointment and couldn’t understand it. He had read at least five short stories in which the woman was disgusted by a man climaxing either too soon or outside the vagina.

  What do I do? The question provoked terror. Make love. He just let himself go, running his hands up and down her body, kissing, and licking every part but one with his mouth. He pushed the covers off and straddled her body to get a good look at her. He was delighted. He lay on top of her and kissed deeply, intrigued by the feel of his penis amidst her pubic hairs.

  He felt confident and her legs were spread: he lowered his body enough to be ready and pushed forward. The lips opened and he felt moisture but then a wall stopped him. His penis jammed against it and he backed up. He pushed hard, very hard, and hurt his penis.

  What was happening?

  He lay on top of her, feeling his sweat and the soft cushions her breasts made for his chest. He felt sexless, as if he had just done some push-ups.

  Joan’s hand reached down and he lifted a leg when she nudged it. She reached his penis and when she squeezed it he realized it wasn’t erect.

  “I don’t understand that,” he said in a whisper.

  She tried to move, so he got off her. “What?” she asked. Her tone made him trust her. He said, “I guess this is impotence, huh?”

  She laughed with such pleasure that he was amused. “I guess so. What happens?”

  “Well, I mean everything’s going along fine and suddenly”—he was laughing—“we hit a few air pockets just as I’m making my descent.” It was good to laugh about it. They were quiet until she said, “You know that this usually happens because of the Oedipus complex.”

  He giggled nervously. “No, I didn’t know that.” He thought about it. “I don’t understand why.”

  “You mean why it would make you impotent?” They were both embarrassed by the conversation. “Well, the theory goes, you want to sleep with your mother and you’re too guilty about that to sleep—”

  “—with anybody else.” He laughed nervously. “Yeah, that makes sense.”

  “It does?” She was excited.

  “About me?” He was appalled. “No. I think maybe I’ve got a cold.” They laughed like drunks and Richard was dismayed that the relief was satisfying. “I don’t think I’ve told you yet that I’m a virgin. I mean in case you didn’t know.” He started to laugh hysterically but was stopped by her turning and embracing him.

  She didn’t know and it seemed to have an effect similar to having told her he was an orphan. His penis was raw, his legs pulled taut, but holding her was comforting and the pleasure of her kisses eventually overwhelmed the aches. She pulled him on top of her and he obliged skeptically. She held his penis in front of her cunt and stroked the underside as she guided it in. He felt the moisture and pushed, and for a moment the wall stopped him, but then he was in.

  He smiled and would have shouted triumphantly except that he worried instantly that she was not enjoying his occupation. He knew, of course, what to do—and the motion in and out became a dance he tried desperately to choreograph.

  He didn’t breathe, as if concentration could help him better feel the act. No one had described it: the sensation of that hard long arced thing surrounded and caressed. Her lips would cling to the head of his penis as he pulled out and tickle and soothe as he pushed in. He clamped down on his teeth, involuntarily suppressing the scream of ecstasy he wanted to release. He stopped moving and rested deep inside her, fighting the tickling liquid that gathered in his penis. How long had he been in? A minute perhaps. Premature ejaculation. That sin only schmucks commit. He grabbed the pillow and made his body rigid, lying perfectly still. But he climaxed nevertheless, in four ejaculations that hurt.

  Though the next few days should have kept him busy with the lunches and conferences of being published, his mind stayed on the drama with Joan. He would run back to her apartment after the day’s activities and continue fucking. He slept with her several times, and as it became obvious that she was not enjoying it, he asked her why. They were in bed late at night and he was relaxed and confident of life: a published novelist who fucks.

  She turned on the light and scurried out of bed. “I’m going to need a cigarette for this,” she said. They laughed and she got over her constraint about their discussion by pacing up and down with mock self-importance. “Well, see, between therapy and women’s liberation I’ve learned about, you know, what’s been fucked up about the sex I’ve had.” She looked at him seriously, measuring her effect. He felt numbed and told himself to squash any fearful reaction.

  “Yeah?” He tried to look encouraging.

  “Our sex has been good, but the reason I don’t have an orgasm is because you’re not relating to—you know—my clitoris.” She stopped walking and looked at him. Her eyes were curious and tense as if waiting for an explosion.

  “Okay,” he said very loudly. “You’d better get ready for a shock. I don’t know what a clitoris is.” He put his hands out and made a big gesture of sheepishness.

  “Really?” She seemed delighted.

  “All right now, no jokes. It’s not funny. It’s absurd. I
t’s disgusting.”

  “Oh, don’t be silly.” She ran over to the bookcase. “Wait, I can show you.”

  “I’m sure you can,” he said, and laughed wildly. She returned happily and bounced onto the bed. She opened a magazine to an article titled, “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” and told him to read it. Its headline was its point, that there was no such thing, that in fact the clitoris is the source of all sexual pleasure. “I didn’t even know there was such a myth,” he said, and giggled.

  “Are you kidding? It’s a very heavy trip that’s laid—”

  “I’m sure, I’m sure. I mean, you know, I don’t know anything.” He looked at the enormous diagram of the vagina and tried to figure out the location of the clitoris.

  “So, um, you know what it is now?”

  He had to make the experience even more absurd since he could not understand the diagram. So she took his hand and showed him: he had felt that small bump before and that cheered him up a little.

  The metaphor that the article had used to describe the function of the clitoris was that it was a penis. And when they made love after this he treated it as she treated his penis. They never coupled without first going through various systems of massage and caressing of these centers. Despite, as Joan mentioned casually one morning, the dangers of “genital-oriented sex.”

  He labored at giving her pleasure and was frightened by her abandoned, hungry orgasms. She would ask him if he was enjoying the fucking, because of the rigid, silent climaxes he would have. He thought he was. For the first two months of living with Joan he would walk the streets enthusiastically: he felt the clean emptiness of sex in his body. There’s nothing like losing your virginity, he told his brother, and it was true.

  But he had no problem with his feeling for Joan. He wanted to live with her and they agreed to by the end of their first week together. To his amazement, this caused some difficulty. Louise didn’t approve, nor did Ann; they thought he was too young. Louise worried that Joan wasn’t serious and a quick affair would disturb Richard, while Ann felt it was Richard who would quickly desert Joan. He was enraged by their opinions. Joan was used to this kind of self-important advice and went off to have lunches with them, unperturbed by Louise’s probing questions or Ann’s analysis that Joan was refusing to grow up. She told Richard about them and was surprised by the fit he threw.

  “That’s just like Louise. She’s a dumb jerk!” She laughed and he stared at her. “I’m serious. Do you know that because she knows I’ve had big fucking arguments with my father, she apologizes to me for any contact she has with him.”

  “Babes, you’re being incoherent,” Joan said.

  “Look. When we were there for dinner yesterday, remember? She had a letter from my father, a perfectly normal letter. You said look how neat his handwriting is and she said, ‘That! It’s so uptight.’ And she looked at me as if I would approve. And then when that friend of theirs asked if I would be going to Vermont during the summer in order to write, she said that I had a hard time writing when living with my parents.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “She said it. And I don’t know how she got that idea.”

  “You shouldn’t let that bother you, sweetheart. That’s the way she is about everybody she likes. She’s very protective.”

  “Oh, come on! That’s egotism. I don’t understand why when people are finished having dinner they don’t pay her fifty bucks for the therapy session that’s thrown in.”

  Joan didn’t like his sarcasm about Louise and he instinctively shut it off. They were having a love affair, he realized, and he followed its mood. They had breakfasts at three in the afternoon and dinner in the middle of the night. He liked the isolation they fell into and he didn’t lose his secret pride in being able to fuck for months.

  When they finally did go out, they went to Leo and Louise’s apartment. They always seemed to have guests, most of them political people. His experience with Mark had taught him to be careful with them; he did so because he wanted their respect.

  So he listened and gathered rather quickly their rules of behavior. The men never generalized about women and no one generalized about Third World people. Though Joan would occasionally joke about the absurdity that calling all females women could create—I saw two nine-year-old women skipping rope—it was a major sin to call an eighteen-year-old a girl. Relationships with men were dubious: he was terribly embarrassed one evening when an intense young woman said that she would never get into that fucked up isolated trip with a man, where you don’t go out or see anyone else for months. She was a member of Joan’s group and she looked at Richard when saying it. He worried about it and immediately said no whenever Joan asked him if he minded that she had to go out. He went so far as to ask her if she was seeing enough people, but he stopped that when she looked at him as if he were mad.

  He watched his brother when the women talked liberation and followed his lead. So when the story was told that two women just out of college had decided to be gay and live together, he behaved as if this was great: nodding and smiling along with the others, though he couldn’t figure out why Leo and Louise seemed constrained in their approval. But when he found out that one of the women, a month into the lesbian relationship, had begun vomiting whenever she went out and had developed such severe psychosomatic symptoms that she had started going to a psychiatrist, he couldn’t contain a slight outburst, “That’s terrible.”

  “Well, her father has really fucked her up,” he was told, and he accepted it as fact, repressing the obvious conclusion. He forced himself to believe their interpretation.

  He told himself these were necessary failures. There were so many successes. Joan, Louise, and Ann had a freedom of expression that other women lacked; they faced the world and didn’t put on the coy ignorance that being chauvinized apparently produced. He had great respect for them, and since they credited the women’s movement for their openness, he was careful about his attitudes toward it.

  And then Mayday, the massive demonstration on Washington, was called. The talk about it was depressed: people spoke of the repressive Nixon regime and the heavy busts they expected to come down. Richard was too scared to go. He imagined the brutality others described happening to him and no amount of self-goading could overcome his terror. He expected Joan to be disgusted with him but she was just as frightened and had no intention of going. But having company didn’t lessen his shame at being left in New York with the reactionaries and the apolitical young while the good and strong people were gassed and jailed.

  So Richard insisted that they go to New Haven in the spring to support Black Panthers Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins while the jury was deliberating on their case.

  They were driven there by Leo and Louise, and his tension about it was dissipated by the strong feeling that they were just sightseeing. When they pulled up in the large square that faces the courthouse and Richard saw people milling around a wooden platform with a large banner saying, FREE BOBBY AND ERICKA, it seemed just like the picnic that Mao says politics isn’t.

  They went out and sat on the grass, people coming over to talk with Leo, everyone watching the police watching them. Richard was excited by the experience and he chatted away happily. “Look,” he said, and pointed to the line of police across the street, their helmets a deep blue that reflected the sun. “I’m disappointed that there’s no swelling music to accompany them.”

  But no one else was having fun. A friend of theirs, Salvatore, came over and said, “It’s so depressing. There’s nobody new here.”

  Louise objected and introduced Richard. Salvatore’s kinky hair was a tall bush that the sun lit up. “Hi,” he said, and stepped back to give a quiet gesture with his fist. “Salvatore. Panther Defense Committee. New Haven Branch.” Everybody laughed. Richard couldn’t get over it. It was the first time he heard the machismo that the Panthers inspired being mocked.

  Richard expected someone to deliver a speech because of the continual ac
tivity on the platform, but nothing happened until he heard a cry that the jury was leaving, and suddenly swarms of people crowded the sidewalks that faced the courthouse.

  He didn’t understand why the sudden shock of activity had started. The police ran up and down the block, stopping traffic at both ends of the street and lining up opposite the demonstrators. A big yellow school bus had pulled up in front of the pretentious steps to the building. A moment before there was a soft breeze, the quiet broken only by occasional bursts of laughter from the relaxed picnickers. Now, in a steady exhilarating roar, a jammed mass of people waving banners were chanting, “Free Bobby! Free Ericka!”

  Behind the barricades the police had put up to block traffic, Richard could see the respectable citizens of New Haven looking slightly bored. He couldn’t understand that. The chanting was strong and real, the whole mass raising fists in unison and roaring for Bobby’s and Ericka’s release.

  “What’s going on?” he yelled at Louise in between shouts.

  “We’re doing this for the jury when it goes out,” she said.

  A group of people to their right began another chant. They named members of the jury, exhorted the blacks to support their brothers and sisters, and gave specific advice to the whites according to their professions. This caused a fuss. Leo and a few others were approached by a Panther leader, and after a brief conference they went over to that group and told them to stop. A few did but others kept it up. Then a voice boomed out over all the noise: “Listen! People! The lawyers have told us not to use the jury chant. It scares them. And it may have a bad effect.” Richard turned and saw a young black woman saying this over the loudspeaker system hooked up to the platform. The chant stopped and Richard heard Salvatore say to Louise, “Those fucking YAWF people.”

  They had added rhythmic claps to the chants, and noise exploded into the air. Richard, his hands red and his throat sore, thought the New Haven citizens weren’t bored any more.

  Over this one loud voice that the chant had become, Richard heard people yelling that Bobby and Ericka were leaving. He saw a whole wing of color and noise swing by, the blue shifting with them, and run down a street to the side of the courthouse. “Stay for the jury,” someone yelled. “No,” yelled a woman. “There’s time. They won’t bring the jury out until they’re gone.” Richard’s group was pushed forward toward the police, and he found himself running with others and for a moment he thought they would run right into the barricades.