The Work Is Innocent (21 page)

“Oh, all right.”

He laughed. “That’s all right? Good.”

“No. I just thought maybe being published and everything had distorted your, you know, sense of what you want.”

Of course it had, he thought, but why is that her business? Triumph and defeat are private matters of the spirit. “No, I’m still a serious artist. I still have my ecstasies, you know?” He smiled and hoped to cheer her out of this romantic melancholy.

She laughed and tugged at his arm excitedly. “That’s good. That’s what I wanted to know.”

“So what’s with you? I hear you’re gonna get a job.”

“Well, I might, I’m not sure.”

They had reached the end of the driveway and they stopped as if waiting for someone to arrive. Richard, looking up and down the empty roadway, got the feeling that no car would come for months. “You mean, you don’t know if you’ll get it?” he asked.

“Oh, I’ll get it,” she said with surprise. “I’ve got it. I mean, they offered it to me. I don’t know—” She broke off and stared ahead with no indication of ever resuming.

“You have a reason for not wanting to work?”

Naomi was delighted. “Sure. Who wants to work? No, I do, but—I don’t know if I should.”

“The baby. Is that it?”

“Yeah,” she said abstractedly, and Richard didn’t encourage any further discussion. He was tired of feeling sympathetic to the needs of women.

“I’m told things are good between you and John,” he said.

“Is that what people do in this family!” Naomi said with stunning irritation. “Check on how my marriage is going?”

“Hey! I’m just—it’s part of your life. You don’t want me to ask about it?”

“No,” she said in a whine near to tears. “Who told you that?”

“What?”

“That we were doing well.”

“John. Who else for Christ’s sake!”

This hit her forcefully and she embraced him, saying, “I’m sorry, I’m crazy.” She broke away. “Let’s go back to the house. I’m in a terrible mood, I need some nice tea.”

They turned to walk back. “I asked him last night,” Richard said in a hurried tone. “And he said things had really been good, so I just wanted, I don’t know, to enjoy that with you.”

“Enjoy that with me?”

“Well, it sounded very nice the way he said it. I thought we could have a pleasant time discussing it.” He tried to smile ingratiatingly at her.

“I don’t know why I did that,” she said. “I just feel the whole family’s talking behind my back about us.”

He wanted to tell her how natural and good it was that people worried about them, but he’d learned how useless it was to try to make the world objective and sensible. “No,” he lied. “No one’s said a word.”

“Good,” she said, shaking off her ill feelings immediately and looking adventurously at him. “So you want to know why things are so good? I taught John to argue.”

Richard laughed.

“I shouldn’t say that. I encouraged him to get angry. To fight. He wasn’t brought up to fight. You know what I mean? I always felt in our family, for whatever else was wrong, we knew how to fight, how to get angry at each other. But his parents only argue when they’re drunk and then it’s just forgotten or dismissed in the morning.”

“Hey, that’s good. That sounds like you’re really dealing with stuff.” Richard listened to this new self of his talk with revulsion—but a revulsion that could diminish.

“Oh yeah,” Naomi said tenderly. “It was good for us to live apart. That’s what nobody, except for you, understood.”

Richard spent the long afternoon, made longer by frantic preparations for a huge meal and the wrapping of presents, having intimate talks. Leo collared him to help gather wood for the fireplace.

But, once in the barn, Leo asked him why Aaron was so upset with him. Richard asked what he meant and Leo complained that Aaron teased him about his lack of a career. “Well, you started that bullshit about being a bum,” Richard said. Leo looked afraid and Richard softened his tone. “Remember when you were busy with the Columbia uprising and you thought it was clever to answer the question of what you were doing by saying, Oh, I’m just a bum?”

“It was a great tactic,” Leo said happily. “Because it would put people back on the defensive. They’d have to start encouraging me and making me feel better about doing political work.”

“Yeah, it was cute. But Mom and Dad took it very seriously and thought you shouldn’t belittle yourself. Now Dad’s figured out that you were being perverse and so now he’s on your ass. It’s his tactic.”

Richard had disappointed Leo as an analyst. “No, man. It has to do with your book.” Richard told himself to go on alert and repel any pain. Leo whispered, “He’s afraid that I feel bad. That’s why he keeps encouraging me to do that jail stuff into a book.”

Richard wanted to remind Leo that he had mentioned it first to Aaron. But instead he listened patiently and said, “I guess so,” to each elaborate scenario Leo created to explain Aaron’s attitude. Richard found it difficult, but it pleased Leo to have him agree.

When they returned to the living room Richard was upset even more by Louise. She had never forgotten the fights Richard used to have with Aaron and, for the last few days, had spent a lot of time whispering asides to Richard when Aaron would slap him on the back and tell him to stand up straight, or suggest he brush his teeth. Richard hated her for it: he was enraged by her assumption that he was oppressed by the duties of a son. She imitated Aaron as they came in carrying the wood, calling Richard “dear boy” with the tone of an English patrician. “Dear boy, would you feed the dog. Oh, I’m so grateful. Your old man is so grateful having such a dutiful son.” He stared at her coldly but she continued, seemingly unruffled. She obviously remembered when Richard used to imitate Aaron and thought it relieved him to make fun of his father.

He escaped by joining his mother in her room where she was writing out cards for the presents. He told her about Louise’s behavior, frustrated at his inability to stop her without a fight.

“That’s the way people are, Richard,” she said. “They never get it out of their heads if you tell them something about yourself.”

“My God, I wrote a whole novel full of feelings that I no longer have and everybody assumes I’ve still got them. There are people who seriously ask me if I ever see my parents. It’s bad enough they assume everything in it is true of me, but at least they could realize I’m bound to change in five years.”

“Well,” she smiled. “They won’t.”

“Sorry, huh? I just gotta take it.”

“It has its advantages, doesn’t it? Don’t let that bother you. So Louise has made up some crazy story in her brain about you and your father. She’s a good friend of yours. She means you no harm.”

“She thinks Leo is under constant attack in this family. You know that, don’t you?”

“Well, she loves him.”

“It drives me crazy. She protects us all. That hopeless neurotic protecting us! There, you see. She makes me talk like her. How do I know she’s neurotic?”

“Who isn’t?” Betty laughed, delighted with the thought. “Don’t let it bother you. It doesn’t affect your father, you realize that?”

“No. That’s why it bothers me. I’m unhappy that Dad and I had so much trouble about school.”

“You were right about school. He doesn’t bear you any ill will for that. He’s very proud of you.”

Richard was pleased to hear her say so, but embarrassed by the intensity of the satisfaction. “Anyway, it bothers me. I’ve been able to straighten things out with Dad and she won’t, the
world
won’t, realize it.”

“That’s what you get for being such a wise guy and publishing a novel.”

Betty got him to laugh and relax about it so that when he rejoined the group downstairs he could tell himself that he’d let Louise retain her fantasy world in which Richard was harassed by his father, overprotected by his mother, all of them burdened with guilt and repressed anger. He wasn’t upset by the faces she made at Aaron’s admiration of John’s work while they had their huge meal. He knew she was thinking of what she had once told him: that his parents had hit Leo over the head with John’s hard work while they thought of Leo as a bum. He would have fought her so hard in the past. But he would have been forgiven for vehemence as an adolescent. He had the innate power of an adult now and must practice nuclear restraint.

He watched as they sat about the table, feeling the strength and independence that Joan’s presence gave him, and listened to the secret thoughts that he knew ran like the currents of a stream beneath the quiet surface of their conversation—like a brook babbling now, but it used to have the deafening roar of the ocean’s surf.

He felt absolutely different. He watched all night while they played charades, the house busy with their laughter and inventiveness. He studied them one by one while they performed. Their faults and virtues popped up in his mind’s eye like sums on a cash register.

He thought his own pantomime was apt, his silence about their faults, and his own, the saving device that life gives. He sat with Joan while she laughed at their antics, at the masks they put on, and decided to believe in those mock faces along with her.

This was life’s sadness—standing mute before the people one loves. He had lost his awe of them but he was freed of its bewilderment. Naomi was not Tolstoy, a forbidding hypocritical philosopher who had to be either overthrown or obeyed without question. Beckett’s beautiful understanding of silence, her paranoid hatred of New York, her naïveté about the corruption and decadence of American life didn’t have to be believed or fought. It was absurd that he had been unable to see her plainly without feeling guilt over his discoveries. It was possible to love her only by accepting those things without contempt, without terror at losing a prophet.

He had lived in a wax museum of heroes. Leo playing Fidel to his Raul, Naomi’s Don Juan to his Castaneda, John’s cool masculine instincts to his Jewish schleppiness. He had blamed them for their melting under the steady, dull heat of reality. He couldn’t face what was weak and ridiculous in people.

But he had had to face it in himself.

A BIOGRAPHY OF RAFAEL YGLESIAS

Rafael Yglesias (b. 1954) is a master American storyteller whose career began with the publication of his first novel at seventeen. Through four decades of writing, Yglesias has produced numerous highly acclaimed novels and screenplays, and his fiction is distinguished by its clear-eyed realism and keen insight into human behavior. His books range in style and scope from novels of ideas, psychological thrillers, and biting satires, to self-portraits and portraits of New York society.

Yglesias was born and raised in Washington Heights, a working-class neighborhood in northern Manhattan. Both his parents were writers. His father, Jose, was the son of Cuban and Spanish parents and wrote articles for the
New Yorker
, the
New York Times
, and the
Daily Worker
, as well as novels. His mother, Helen, was the daughter of Yiddish-speaking Russian and Polish immigrants and worked as literary editor of the
Nation
. Rafael was educated mainly at public schools, but the Yglesiases did send him to the prestigious Horace Mann School for three years. Inspired by his parents’ burgeoning literary careers, Rafael left school in the tenth grade in order to finish his first book. The largely autobiographical
Hide Fox, and All After
(1972) is the story of a bright young student who drops out of private school against his parents’ wishes to pursue his artistic ambitions.

Many of Yglesias’s subsequent novels would also draw heavily from his own life experiences. Yglesias wrote
The Work Is Innocent
(1976), a novel that candidly examines the pressures of youthful literary success, in his early twenties.
Hot Properties
(1986) follows the up-and-down fortunes of young literary upstarts drawn to New York’s entertainment and media worlds. In 1977, Yglesias married artist Margaret Joskow and the couple had two sons: Matthew, now a renowned political pundit and blogger, and Nicholas, a science-fiction writer. Yglesias’s experiences as a parent in Manhattan would help shape
Only Children
(1988), a novel about wealthy and ambitious new parents in the city. Margaret would later battle cancer, which she died from in 2004. Yglesias chronicled their relationship in the loving, honest, and unsparing
A Happy Marriage
(2009).

After marrying Joskow, Ylgesias took nearly a decade away from writing novels to dedicate himself to family life. During this break from book-writing, Yglesias began producing screenplays. He would eventually have great success adapting his novel
Fearless
(1992), a story of trauma and recovery, into a critically acclaimed motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Rosie Perez. Other notable screenplays and adaptations include
From Hell
,
Les Misérables
, and
Death and the Maiden
. He has collaborated with such directors as Roman Polanski and the Hughes brothers.

A lifelong New Yorker, Yglesias’s eye for city life—ambition, privilege, class struggle, and the clash of cultures—informs much of his work. Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts are often primary characters in Yglesias’s narratives, and titles such as
The Murderer Next Door
(1991) and
Dr. Neruda’s Cure for Evil
(1998) draw heavily on the intellectual traditions of psychology.

Yglesias lives in New York’s Upper East Side.