The Work Is Innocent (14 page)

“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.

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.