Rafael Yglesias - The Work Is Innocent

She lay back and enjoyed his kisses and tonguing as if he were a dutiful pet. What he imagined her feelings to be while she touched his genitals were really his: he resented her pleasure, her passive acceptance of his self-abnegation. He worked carefully, methodically, at bringing her to a climax. And finally entered her for his own, by now jaded, ecstasy. But she was much happier after they had intercourse this way, even though it was clear to her that he didn’t enjoy it. Richard concluded that fucking was one-sided in this peculiar sense and understood why so many people seemed to be flailing about intellectually on the subject. He felt it was to his credit that he had faced the truth so quickly.

Early fall was Richard’s happiest time. He and Joan had their honeymoon, financed by his novel’s advance: their life was lazy and occupied by fucking.

But, in late October, his career reached a climax that lasted for a month. His novel appeared in the stores and was reviewed in papers around the country, including those he had read daily in what he came to think of as that other miserable obscure existence.

At last—all anyone talked about was his life and his novel. His parents called every other day to hear the latest review or tell him of someone else’s praise. At first it seemed as if there would be no limit to his success, but finally boundaries appeared—after a month his book began to be missed from the shelves and there were no more reviews in the morning mail or friends to tell him how good his novel was.

It was an exhilarating high, like nothing else he had experienced, and its collapse was terrible. He took it, physically, as badly as if it were a hangover. He woke up in the late afternoons with a grogginess it took hours to fight off. He felt stupefied until late at night when nervousness and regret over the wasted day kept him awake talking compulsively to Joan about his ideas for the “future of literature.” He would promise himself that he’d get up early and write, but Joan’s efforts to rouse him were shrugged off angrily until she refused to try any more.

Everyone else was pleased by his novel’s results and thought his life well taken care of. He could go to college if he wished or just get an advance on his second book and write.

Richard couldn’t accept that a year’s work and a year’s wait—a whole life of anticipation—were over in four weeks.

The change in people’s attitudes toward him was at first a delight, a delicate revenge. When he saw Mark at his brother’s apartment during the week his book was published he nearly burst out laughing at the humble manner that Mark adopted while telling him how “Joycean and painful your novel is. You deal really correctly with middle-class alienation.”

Richard had to look long at Mark’s face, and even then he couldn’t believe it. “Do you mean that or are you just kidding me?”

Lisa interrupted Mark’s answer. “Kidding! He’s been talking to me about it for two days.” She began saying something about how funny his book was but he heard only his own thought, like a voice-over in a movie: “So it takes a capitalist publishing house to stamp my ideas with approval so that you’ll respect them.”

Later, a man asked Richard what he did in a bored tone, and when Richard said he was a novelist the man seemed even more indifferent. Richard pictured how he appeared to this stranger: his hair long and unwashed, his shirt wrinkled, his jeans almost thoughtfully splashed with paint stains, and above all, the boyish face. “Have you published anything?” the man asked.

Richard had thought he wanted a final proof of contempt, because he could shatter it so effortlessly, but this acting out of what he knew intellectually, that he was nothing unpublished and everything once in print, was depressing. “Yes, my first novel was just published.” Richard had flashed his credentials but the man, after a start, wanted a closer look.

“Who published it?”

This was still asked with a trace of condescension, and Richard needed a moment before realizing that the man expected a university press or something equally small and comforting. Richard snapped his publisher’s name like a whip and at last brought the stranger to attention.

This scene was repeated so often that he forgot why it depressed him and would feel only a dulled embarrassment—as if he were merely too sensitive and should bear the blame for the small shocks that information of his career caused. People asked him, shortly after being introduced, how much money he was earning. On one occasion, when he responded by saying it wasn’t enough, he received a lecture that he would end up vulgarizing his novels in order to make enough money.

So the family gathering in Vermont was a relaxing prospect. He would not have to explain himself. Richard and Joan went up with his brother and Louise, and he was surprised by Leo’s comment as the car pulled away from their apartment house. “Well, here we go, like lambs to the slaughter.”

“No, no,” said Louise, looking at Richard. “It’s going to be nice, won’t it?”

“I’ve really been looking forward to it,” he said so solemnly that Leo laughed, thinking Richard had meant it sardonically. After a moment of confusion, Richard said, “I mean it. I expect it to be great.”

Leo seemed embarrassed and Louise said, “Yes, I hope so. I think we’ll have fun. We’ll try to, right?”

Her tone was suspiciously pointed, and Richard glanced at Joan to see if she was having the same reaction. But she just looked tired from rising early. It was a miserable gray morning, the sky unfinished and disgruntled. He felt a chill and leaned back against Joan, falling into a fitful sleep while they swung gracefully through the moody slopes and turns of the Saw Mill River Parkway. Richard thought intermittently about Louise’s puzzling comment, and when he finally sat up to waken fully, he asked, “You two aren’t looking forward to this, huh?”

This was greeted with a pause that endured too long to be meaningless. Leo glanced at Louise before answering. “You know, man, with all of us together—John and Naomi—it could become one of those psychodramas.”

“You know how Aaron gets when he has all the kids together,” Louise said, and then addressed Joan: “Aaron is one of the most intelligent and sophisticated men I know, but when he gathers his dear children—”

“He becomes a basket case,” Leo said.

“No,” Louise said quickly, “he becomes”—she moved her hand in the air several times, searching for the word—“neurotically self-important. You know, that parent thing where he tries to make everything reflect on his being Big Daddy.”

Richard watched Joan’s neutral reaction to this information and remembered the romantic picture he had given her of his relationship with Aaron. He had turned Aaron’s casually arrogant judgments on literature into a massive intellectual domination that would fit nicely with Louise’s comments. It would be useless to try to wipe all that out with a one-liner like, “We’re the neurotics, because we can’t admit we are his children.”

After all, he realized later when they had almost reached their destination, I’m sensitive about it because I feel guilty that I unfairly criticized Dad. I wouldn’t argue with them for his sake.

But it took the warmth out of the hugging when they arrived. It seemed sinister to Richard, watching Leo and Louise embrace his father, particularly since they did so with more enthusiasm than he could muster.

The routine of arrival—the hellos, the tours of the grounds to see improvements, a series of bathroom visits, and the eating—had this difference: Joan. Richard was excited for the first time while the house and grounds were toured. He wanted her to love them, to think of the property as he did, the home where they would eventually live, the first sanctuary for the long line of peasants who made up his ancestry. But he was not disappointed when she obviously thought of the place as his parents’, behaving politely and wearily. He still had the pleasure of someone’s hand to hold while they sat around the kitchen table snacking.