The Work Is Innocent (3 page)

“No. You said it—I thought you were kidding.” Leo had cut his hair short, and his friendly, startled eyes were even more so. “You know Brandeis isn’t so bad.”

“What’s Brandeis?”

“The high school you’re going to go to.”

“I didn’t know I was going to one.”

“Are you kidding, man?” Richard had convinced himself of his power, so this coup was a shock. He wasn’t able to conceal his disappointment, and Leo looked at him sadly. “It’s good there. There are dyno blacks, and you can do some really good organizing.”

Richard retreated into contempt. “If I wanted to get into organizing, I’d prefer to do it outside of school.”

“Yeah, sure, but it’s better to be going to that kind of a school than to some kind of white bullshit like Cabot. Or to something so unreal like the school in Vermont.”

Richard wanted to jeer at Leo for his pitiful adulation of blacks, for the absurd conclusions it led him into—but they had arrived. His mother had made a good lunch, and the talk was lively. His situation wasn’t mentioned, but he enjoyed himself so much that his resolve to run away was weakened.

His mother showed him to his room, proud of how neat she had made it. Richard, though pleased, was uneasy that his things had been gone through.

“It’s lovely,” he told her. “But you didn’t have to. I would have enjoyed doing it.”

“Oh, it was a lot of fun. Richard, I can’t tell you how it broke my mother’s heart, going through your drawers.”

Richard flashed silence with his eyes so expressively that Betty almost jumped. Her smile disappeared and her tone changed. “You know. All the broken ashtrays.”

He quieted and said that he had no other way of disposing of them, since he shouldn’t have been smoking.

“You could have sneaked them into the garbage.”

“Yeah I guess so. Listen, I want to change.”

She turned to leave but asked instead, “How are Naomi and John?”

“Like I said. Fine.”

Betty narrowed her eyes at him. Richard smiled. He felt uncomfortable. “Is there some reason, something you think is wrong between them?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I was just looking at my son.” Richard laughed and she smiled. “How’s my little girl Nana?”

“As cute as ever.”

“Is she walking all over the place?”

“All over the place.”

“Good. Oh, I want to see her!”

“You will pretty soon.”

“Do you need any help unpacking?”

“No, that’s all right.”

“Did Leo tell you about Brandeis?”

“That I’ll be going there? Yes, he did.”

“We have to go on Thursday to sign you up.”

“When does school start?”

“A week from today. So you have a little vacation.”

“Great,” he said, drawling the word sarcastically. He watched her exit, and when the door closed behind her, the flush of embarrassment he had repressed overwhelmed him. He went over to the drawers and looked through them. His collection of
Playboys
and photogenic women had been uncovered and carefully rearranged. It had been his garbage heap: typing paper covering broken ashtrays, covering pornography, covering grass. He had left none of the last in the drawer, his only consolation. He felt he had risen above the meanness of this past suddenly and laughed at its revelation, only to relapse again into a little boy’s shame. Work, he said to himself, work and you’ll forget it.

During the next few days, his parents must have wondered at the serenity of his schedule. He rose early, had breakfast, retired to his room, and began typing. Aaron joked that he must be working on a novel. When Richard admitted it matter-of- factly, Aaron opened his eyes wide and looked serious. “Writing is less profitable than acting, if such a thing is possible. Have you given that up?”

“I didn’t know that I had it to give up,” Richard said.

Aaron looked playfully at his wife. “I think our son’s becoming a wit. Are we going to get a chance to read it?”

“I was going to ask Mom.”

“Quite right,” Aaron said, bowing his head, which showed his longish, graying hair to advantage. “The editor first.”

Richard didn’t think of his mother the way the world did: the magazine for which she was the literary editor was small and printed on rough, ugly paper; its grandiose name,
The Union,
struck him as laughable. Betty had worked there for some years before Richard found out from others that its prestige was great. But he respected her opinion for intimate reasons. He thought of both his parents as extraordinary minds whose literary judgments were particularly formidable.

He knew she was a quick reader, and when he heard her making warning coughs as she approached his room only a half hour after he gave her the manuscript, he expected the worst. He rushed to his desk, lit a cigarette, and in an attempt to seem carefree, tilted his chair back so violently that he had to leap up to avoid splitting his head open. Betty found him like that. “Did I startle you?”

“No. I just nearly killed myself on that chair.” Richard became very absorbed in moving the chair about and pressing down on it as if the floor might give way.

“You were leaning back?”

“Yes, yes. I know. You’ve always warned me. But, uh, my work.” Richard despaired of the chair being any more of a distraction, so he resigned himself to sitting in it. He looked at his mother standing solemnly in front of him, holding the manuscript. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other and said, “Well, Richard—”

“Oh, God,” he mumbled.

She tilted her head up questioningly. She looked old.

“Nothing,” he said. “Go on.” He lunged for his cigarette in the ashtray and burst out with, “What did you think?”

“It’s great,” she said so simply that he was tempted to take it as an insult. “It’s lovely. I’m very impressed.”

“Is that it?”

She relaxed and laughed. “Isn’t that enough?”

He followed her movements to the bed where she sat down. “No, I didn’t mean that. I mean wasn’t anything wrong with it?”

“Not really. It needs some polishing.”

“Well, it’s a first draft.”

“Of course. That’s the kind of work it needs. Silly things. You’ve misspelled some words in such a funny way.”

“Okay. I don’t want to hear that.”

“It’s fine. This is only half the novel. So I don’t know what you’re going to do with it.” She tapped her foot thoughtfully and looked around the room dully. “It’s very strong and surprising. Reminds one of the real way it felt to be young. That’s very unusual.”

Her tone was full of the shock of recognition, and it acted like a strong purgative on the awkward and insecure feelings he had for his work.

“So,” she said, turning her eyes on him and narrowing them. “You mean to publish this?”

“You make it sound like it’s up to me. I hope to.”

“If the rest is as good, then I think you have a real chance. But,” she said, laughing while she repeated a family joke, “don’t get your hopes up.”

He smiled but held her eyes and put force in his tone. “Good enough to get me out of school?”

Betty looked at the large poster of Che on the wall opposite the bed. A cigar was comfortably tucked into the corner of his mouth and his eyes glittered with mischief. She was not surprised by his question. There was a silence. Richard felt a mad compulsion to wink at Che.

“You want to finish this, get it published, and then what?”

Richard frowned, leaped for his cigarette, dragged on it, and hastily pressed it out. “Write more.”

“Come on, Richard. You’re fifteen. It’s just crazy to settle down at that age to a life of writing.”

“I’m sick of going over this. I’m willing to do other things, but not go to high school. I’m willing to get a job, anything but that.”

“Okay. Okay. What about college?”

“College means high school first. So forget it.”

“I mean that if we sent this manuscript to some people at Columbia to see if they can get you in.”

“Are you kidding? That would be great.”

“We can try,” she said, getting up and approaching the desk slowly. “I can’t imagine what else they might want.”

“Then do you think it’s really good?”

She smiled and lowered his manuscript to the desk. “You’re as bad as your father. You don’t even want to go to school until you’re sixteen?”

“Mom, truancy is a joke in New York. Leo can tell you that.”

“Some recommendation.”

“Well, you can forget about trying to get me to go to high school. I just won’t do it.”

“Richie, you don’t have to threaten me. I want your father to read this and then we’ll talk about it.”

The wait for his father to finish reading was ghastly. Not because the school issue depended on his opinion; Aaron had disapproved of most of his actions lately and Richard had been used to getting his greatest encouragement from him. The lack of it had upset him more than he knew.

Richard and Betty waited in the kitchen and Richard continued to describe John’s work nervously while he heard his father approaching. He stopped in mid-sentence and looked at Aaron when he entered and sat down. When he had written papers for school, or been in its theater productions, his father would congratulate him noisily, with hugs and unbounded predictions for his future. It was pleasing but never allowed Richard to think that he had achieved a permanent, adult success. He had tried to force that recognition and failed, losing also paternal delight.

“Well,” Aaron said as if the word had meaning. He looked at Richard, his eyes glittering with feeling. Richard was embarrassed by its intimacy. “You rotten kid.” He looked at Betty and she smiled.

“It’s good, isn’t it?” she asked.

“What’s extraordinary is the narrative line. It’s so sophisticated. You’d think this was his eighth novel. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” he asked playfully.

“Yeah, I know.” Richard was insistent.

Aaron laughed and grabbed his shoulder, shaking him with his pleasure. “I’m kidding. It’s great. I think you might have some trouble with the scene you’re working on.”

“Oh no. I have that planned. I know what I’m doing.”

Aaron laughed again and got up. “Come on. Let me give you a hug.” Richard did so reluctantly but almost burst into tears in his embrace. “Well, if you’ve written this you certainly don’t need any encouragement.”

His parents had a long private conference and then announced to him that he would not have to finish high school. They wanted him to finish the book and send it to both publishers and universities.

For a month he worked and was close to being done. It was peaceful, at first, to do nothing else. But soon the studied elegance of the apartment, of his life, added to the monkishness of his celibacy.

He was sixteen, and no amount of talent or imagination could make a woman’s vagina real for him. He didn’t know what it looked like. He laughed at the idea but the truth was inescapable—
he
had not seen or felt one.
And that neat business with the penis, though he had a dim sense of it, still seemed a most unlikely and ridiculous thing to do. Homosexuality was as real as the metal of his typewriter: just as grubby and unyielding. Oh sure, he had never fucked that way, but it was imaginable. And it was that truth that made him unable to shrug off this renewed fear of being homosexual as being typically adolescent.

How could he pretend to the manliness of being published without fucking (one way or the other)? Without being cool and breezy with women: the pleasant nudging of his father’s charm or the uncomplicated exuberance with which his brother posed his body for women.

He decided this isolation and passivity, however grand in intention, were perverse. So he called an old friend from Cabot. He traveled through time more than space, but there it was: to lose one’s virginity, one had to be an adolescent.

“May I speak to Raul, please?”

After a long silence an unrecognizable voice answered.

“Raul? This is Richard.”

“Richard? Uh. Who?”

“Richard Goodman. From Cabot.”

“Oh! How come you’re calling?”

“I’ve been in Vermont for about a year and I just wanted to be in touch again.”

“In touch again. I see you still have that stiffness.”

“Well, I feel uncomfortable. I’ve cut myself off from all my friends. But no one can live that way, so you can’t blame me for trying.”

“Yeah. Well, I left, you know, so I haven’t been seeing the old crowd either.”

“No loss, I guess. So they finally threw you out?”

“Not exactly, but more or less. Fuck it. Let’s not talk about Cabot. I’m in Performing Arts now. Are you going to school in Vermont?”

“I’m not going to school at all.”

“Huh? Are you living with your parents?”

“Oh, I’m not crashing and on the run and dealing dope in the Village. I’m the affluent dropout.”

“Shit, I thought I was the only one from Cabot who’d have that privilege.”

“Naw. I was just quieter about it than you were.”

“Hey! We’re on the phone for a minute and you’re insulting me?”

Richard’s boyish face absorbed this with difficulty. “I’m sorry. I really didn’t mean that.”

“Don’t get maudlin. Listen. It’s a guess, but are you all alone in this wonderful city and you’d like to enter the wonderful world of society?”

“It sounds pitiful but that’s it.” There was a silence. “I wish I could make it less puppyish.”

“Aw, Richard, you are a puppy. You’re cute. You should play that up with chicks. They like that. Okay, it’s crazy, but there’s a party tomorrow night. Can you smoke dope?”

“Yes,” Richard said without humor.

“Terrific. So I’ll give you—no, we’ll go together and I’ll do the honors.” So at this price of humiliation Richard began his hunt.

He left the orderliness of his room, he left the life of the mind and went out onto the busy, decadent streets of New York. He held his arms against his plump body and swung his torso from side to side in a rocking motion. He was terrified that one of the many mad people who were talking to themselves and waving their arms distractedly would address him; that he would be suspected of a thousand crimes and seized by one of those obese monstrosities with their wooden-handled heavy guns. He walked carelessly to defy these terrors but would betray himself by jumping at loud noises and by his many stops to check street numbers. Even they could conspire against him.