Rafael Yglesias - The Work Is Innocent

It was an effort to eat a dinner that was really an early lunch. He was out of synch—his parents ended the day happily while he warmed up to the fantasies and monologues of the night. And every day began with a defeat. No mail, his mother would say. Nothing for you, kiddo, was his father’s phrase. He was embarrassed by it and felt it had to end badly. Only movies finished with lucky letters that solved all.

Therefore he was excited to hear that his brother and Louise—the woman Leo had been living with for three years—were coming up. And he wasn’t displeased when his parents told him that he would have to share his room with a friend that was coming with them.

They arrived at lunch time on a brilliant sunny day. It was a shock to discover that the friend, Mark, treated him like a kid. He had become used to the assumption his family at least pretended to believe: that he was a novelist. It didn’t enrage Richard. He was even ironically pleased by it and sat back listening to the conversation, feeling his own absence. He counted at least three witticisms he would not have failed to make but that went by unsaid. When lunch was over he began to notice that his brother had an unusual air of self-importance. He trailed after them as the two young men toured the grounds, and Richard’s tolerance was strained by the fact that the only question asked of him was what the local school had been like when he went there. He labored at his answer and told an anecdote they enjoyed. But that was all. Literary and political subjects were discussed as if they were talking about sexual intercourse and he was eight years old.

In the evening it was the same. But when Richard woke up in the morning and found that Mark was up, he washed quickly so as not to miss the large morning breakfast. His parents weren’t there. He might have known that by sound alone: Magical Mystery Tour was being played on the hi-fi. Leo and Mark sat with their legs crossed, their knees resting against the edge of the butcher-block table. They were smoking, and the sun caught the smoke and danced with it over their heads.

“Hi, man,” his brother said with such good humor that Richard felt happy. Mark nodded at him and then he heard Louise say his name ominously. “Richard, if you want eggs here’s the pan. But Betty says that it shouldn’t be washed and left to dry because it—”

“Rusts,” Richard said with faint contempt.

Leo laughed.

“Oh, you know,” Louise said quickly. “How silly of me—you are the strange young man who lives here.” She picked up the coffeepot and shook it. “There’s coffee. But I think little Leo has eaten all de bacon.”

Richard knew he’d made her nervous and he felt bad. He and Louise had always gotten along very well. He put a hand on her arm to add to the reassurance of his words. “Thank you. Your preparations are thorough and, I feel, vital to the health of our community.” She and Leo laughed. They had always based their relationship with him on this kind of banter. Mark looked a little bewildered by the exchange, and Richard thought to himself, Oh, he’s going to be surprised every time I show intelligence. Louise announced that she was going out to read on the lawn and she left. Richard fried two eggs while Leo and Mark rustled the front and back sections of the New York Times.

He broke both yolks when flipping them over and he told them about it proudly. Leo enjoyed his mood but Mark was stubbornly unresponsive. “So where are Mom and Dad that this rock-and-roll orgy is going on?”

Leo looked at him with ferocious appreciation. “You’re so Proustian today, man. It’s intense.”

“Proustian?” That seemed wrong.

“Uh, they’re in town shopping. Listen. Are the three records you have in there all you’ve got?”

“There’s this and Their Satanic Majesty’s Request.”

Leo made a face. “That’s not a good one of theirs.”

“I am humbled.” Leo laughed again and Richard was tempted to give up any seriousness. “This is a very bleak aspect of my life. My record collection is like a middle-aged person’s idea of being hip.” Even Mark got that one.

His brother and Mark went back to the newspapers and Richard felt deserted. He knew it was irrational, but he needed companionship desperately. I’ve got to separate my loneliness from a desire to be friendly to them. He would relax and let them make the advances.

But there were none. They left him eating his breakfast, the kitchen in a sun-filled chaos of drained orange juice glasses and dirty plates. He put away the milk and the melted butter and read about Koosman’s arm problems but lost the thread of it thinking he was like a spinster: eating breakfast alone was an emotional problem.

He looked out the window at them as they talked on the lawn. His brother was tall and strong. Leo had a man’s body and Richard lacked that. But his brother’s long face and his eyes with their open expression always had something childish about them. Richard realized the look was gone. Leo leaned against a tree, talking, and his face was concentrated and joyless. Louise seemed harassed, even worried, as she looked at him.

I’m making it up, he thought. Drama, drama, drama. Fuck it. He got up and the chair legs scraped. The sound was loud and hollow unlike noise in the city, where every sound is met and engulfed by another. Mark, he noticed, looked a little bit like him. A moon face with small eyes and a low forehead. No, Mark’s uglier, he thought. He was coarser. Broad, hairy forearms, his hair mousy and knotted.

Richard decided to go out. Opening the front door made a noise and they all turned to face it. They had abruptly stopped their conversation and they watched his progress up to them. Louise said, “Hello,” with too much formality.

“Am I interrupting?”

“No, man.” Leo was almost scornful of that possibility. “Anyway,” he went on, “we should do that today, Mark.”

Mark sat on the lawn in a half-lotus. He nodded with great deliberation, his eyes fixed on some spot in the distance.

“All right,” Louise said in a rush, “so that’s decided. But I have a lot of work to do, so I won’t go along. Is that all right, Leo?”

“Sure, sure.” He looked at Richard. “Uh, we were thinking of going to a pond near here to swim. You wanna come?”

“Swim? Well—”

“Why don’t you come, man? It’ll be good.”

“Okay, I’ll tag along, but I may not swim.”

Leo seemed to disapprove but he said all right and he and Mark went in to change. Richard looked at Louise, who still seemed disproportionately tense. She was pretending to be absorbed.

He was in the back of Mark’s Volkswagen half-back sedan, the sun roof and car windows open, trying to inhale cigarette smoke that was caught, right out of his mouth, by the wind, when his brother asked him, “Do you know where would be a good place to buy guns?”

“Guns?”

His brother nodded with what was supposed to be complacency, but his mouth was nervously tense like a child’s before weeping.

“Well, you mean for a rifle or—”

“Yeah, a rifle. But I mean, you know, the best store for that?”

“Well, I don’t know very much about it.” His brother didn’t hear him and he repeated it. “But I would say that Sears, whose gun department is very big, is the best.”

“Sears?” Leo seemed almost offended. Mark smiled. “I don’t think so, man. I was thinking more of a local store.”

“You should ask around. But the only store that I’ve seen guns in is Ralph’s Hardware, and Sears. And Sears has an enormous section.”

“Let’s check them out,” Mark said. Leo dragged carefully on his cigarette and squinted out the window of the car. Richard saw him as if in a movie. Leo nodded yes grimly with hard-won integrity, his eyes seeing a tragic future. Something was up, Richard knew, but he also knew that he shouldn’t ask. So he was not surprised when they drove past the pond they normally swam in and drove on to town. They stopped at the hardware store, and Leo told them to stay put while he browsed. Richard and Mark said nothing until Leo returned and said that it wasn’t very good. “We’ll go to Sears,” he said, and a moment later laughed incongruously.