Rafael Yglesias - The Work Is Innocent

He walked up and down in his room and stopped finally in front of his windows to look at a New York suffocating in the grayish blue of a winter afternoon. No, this preening, these chants of fame and power were unhappy. The fantasies had reality now: the world would judge this novel, and since the opinions couldn’t be as good as he wished them to be, since now the growing was over, the dreams had begun to nag and not soothe.

The light was dimming, his room aging, as in his imagination he was, and he wished that fucking wasn’t necessary. How sickening I am, he thought. It’s the weakness that’s loathsome. Other agonies are vigorous and significant. This is like being unable to walk.

He got on the IRT and found a familiar world in chaos. The subway cars reeled with sprawling names and numbers. He sat down uneasily on JOE 125, spray-painted in garish red, and stared in wonder at the address book facing him. Who was doing this? And how? The train had stopped in the middle of a tunnel and, outside a window, in royal blue, THE KING 96 mocked him with the question. How did they reach that spot?

He heard someone, in the silence of the stopped train, say with a tone of understanding, “I see your point, but I can’t agree. They’re disgusting, filthy people.”

Richard looked in the direction of the voice and saw nothing but a silent, balding man in his sixties, dressed in a gray overcoat. The train lurched and started up, the many colored names painted on the tunnel walls pretending to be scenery. The old man shifted, a woman deep in the New York Times slid away from him as he moved closer. The old man had revealed SUPERDICK 107 done in baroque lettering. He looked expressively at one of the advertisements, saying, “Oh, of course you’re right. You’re absolutely right.” Richard realized he wasn’t talking to anyone, and he swung his head away from the old man. But there he caught sight of a redheaded young man dressed in a drab green jacket whose sleeves were too short and tight. He was wearing shiny black shoes and white socks. He smiled maliciously at his reflection in one of the subway’s windows and, posing carefully in front of it, he brought his right arm up and flexed his muscle with great deliberation, his freckled angular face tightening with pained joy.

Richard was nervous, but having two madmen in one car was hilarious enough to cheer him up. He cautiously looked straight ahead, but hearing more tones of reasonable argument to his left, he looked past SHAFT’S LAST LAUGH 86 to the old man. He was looking right into Richard’s eyes. “How can you say that? It’s rude!” the old man said.

Like a clock figurine, Richard’s head went right to watch the redhead triumphantly flex his muscles, left to the old man’s discussion, until finally Richard lost his fear of reprisal and he got up and left the car.

For the rest of the ride and for his walk to the movie on the East Side, he adopted a new attitude. Looking down, he walked very fast, brushing past couples strolling arm in arm, knocking an outstretched hand away and not looking at the face it belonged to that asked for spare change. He slammed his shoulder into a lamppost as he veered away from a blind man with a cane and a cup rattling with coins. He was so intent on avoiding the insane that when Ann touched him on the arm to slow him up he yelled, afraid of an assault.

But what had seemed to him a loud shriek of horror had only been a gasp. “It’s me,” Ann said, amused. “Why were you going so fast?”

“Hi,” Joan said.

Richard smiled and nodded at them. There was a line of people waiting to get into the theater and Richard noticed that they were looking. “I was thinking very intensely about something really important,” Richard said, as he moved to the end of the line with Ann and Joan. “You know, like football.” Well done, he thought.

“I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t seen you.”

“We’ll never know,” Richard said. “Isn’t that sad?” He was carrying this facetiousness too far, he realized. Also he hadn’t kissed them and now it was too late.

“Have we got news,” Ann said.

“Oh, God, Ann. I can’t understand why you’re so excited about it.”

“About what?” Richard asked.

“Raul has run away,” Ann said. She bounced on the balls of her feet. “Isn’t that incredible?”

“Oh, come on,” Richard said. “He didn’t.”

“Ann’s exaggerating,” Joan said with a glance of disapproval. “He left his parents, but he’s obviously gone to Alec, so it doesn’t make it as running away.”

Richard restrained his contempt for Raul because he was afraid of offending Joan. “That’s so funny. Because if my parents had insisted I go to school, I’d have done the same thing.”

“Really?” Ann said. “Where would you have gone?”

“To a friend. That’s why it’s so funny.”

Ann looked worried. “You’re not kidding? You really would have run away?”

“Sure I would have run away. I’m glad I didn’t have to, but I wasn’t gonna go to school.”

Joan looked at Ann with a smile of victory. “Thank God I’ve come across a reasonable human being.”

“Why?” Richard asked. “Have people been putting Raul down for going?”

“Well,” Ann said, “it’s a little silly, isn’t it? I mean when you were going to run away, did you plan to tell all your friends, even people who’d be likely to tell, where you were going?”

“Raul told everybody where he was going,” Richard repeated, behaving as if it were a wildly funny thing to do, though he really didn’t feel it was. He was torn between making fun of Raul and defending him. It was apparent that Raul was his rival, and Richard was unable to guess which attitude would win Joan. “Well,” Richard said to Joan, “you must admit that’s a little—well, it’s not wise.” Ann laughed and Richard found himself joining her. Her laughter was coarse, he thought, and his fears were confirmed when Joan looked away in irritation. Joan said, “Forget it. It’s ridiculous to think about it.”

Richard searched desperately for an apology that wouldn’t embarrass, but the line had reached the ticket booth and it was only until they were squeezing their way to seats that Richard realized he’d forgotten to pay for the girls’ tickets.

Richard became more and more unhappy while they waited for the movie to start. He looked at the seedy elegance of the East Side crowd filling the theater. He loathed them. The men who seemed to be homosexual—it annoyed him even more that they probably weren’t—and the women, whose makeup was so liberal that decadence was too mild a word to damn them with. It was no relief to find young people dressed simply in dungarees and sweaters, because Richard saw in their faces a paler and more foolish bankruptcy.

They were silent while waiting, and Richard got a chance to notice how much prettier Joan was than he had remembered her being. She had put on heavy makeup for the party and it had emphasized her plain features. The low forehead, high cheekbones, and small eyes had turned her into a Mongoloid. Without makeup, these imperfections remained, of course, but Richard was growing fond of the toughness they suggested. It was her figure that had sold him the night of the party, and now, with the dress replaced by jeans and a black leotard, he understood why Balzac had bankers lose fortunes over women. They saw Diary of a Mad Housewife, a movie that was both confusing and exaggerated for Richard, but apparently good for the audience and the girls. They left without saying much, Richard particularly disgusted by the press of gaudy sick people with their silly comments. Across the street there was a coffee shop and they went there.