Rafael Yglesias - The Work Is Innocent

Richard listened uncritically. He was cowed. Mark was a revolutionary and along with Leo was prepared to make sacrifices to change the world. I’m just a schmucky selfish kid who masturbates. He really didn’t feel good about himself.

In late August, well after Mark had left, Richard was sitting up with Leo and Louise after their parents had gone to sleep. He tried to explain his guilt about being politically inactive. “What I’m trying to say is that the only thing that seems real, I mean I have respect for demonstrations, I just mean deep down”—he smiled—“deep down I feel unless you’re willing to die, to become a guerrilla like Che, that you’re just bullshitting.” He waved his hands at them frantically to stop any response. “I don’t mean I think people are bullshitting. I mean I would think I would be bullshitting.” He said quickly to Leo: “Did you see how I misused would-should?” He hoped that would alleviate his confession of naïve political feelings, but it simply made him feel precious.

Louise leaned forward and put a hand on Richard’s knee. She spoke in a rush. “Don’t worry about that. It’s because you think life isn’t going to change. I never thought, years ago, that I would be political. You don’t have to feel that you’re making those choices for life.”

“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.