Rafael Yglesias: The Work Is Innocent

He called them the Dark Years. And pictured them thus: he would vomit out his intimate feelings to each person he met (imagining it was his soul he revealed), was quickly humiliated by having done so, and then spat where his vomit lay. All this, and the poor victim was never allowed a response.

But his judgment was too harsh. His compulsion to confess was not like vomiting, it was like masturbation. The humiliation was real, though it came from the mistake of believing his confession was disgusting; only the anger is accurately described. But this image encouraged him to continue the destructive cycle, since it was romantic. A wonderfully violent character creating altars of vomit and saliva, rather than the truth: a perverse boy producing pools of watery-white liquid.

The previous spring, when Richard Goodman was thrown out of a New York prep school, he begged his parents to allow him to live in Vermont with his sister, brother-in-law, and niece, and go to school there. He was afraid of being knifed in a New York public high school. Since his parents had decided to move to Vermont permanently, they figured Richard might as well start early in the high school where he would have to finish his last three years.

He had managed to reach the Christmas holidays without cutting, but in January his addiction to Balzac had resulted in five days of staying home. His parents had warned that failure would mean an immediate summons to New York, so Richard knew what awaited him when his brother-in-law, John, answered the phone and told Richard to come and speak with his father.

The entire affair seemed so ritualized and predictable that it assumed theatrical proportions causing Richard to imagine that his slow movements to the phone were observed by an audience impressed with the contempt he showed for his fate.

The kitchen had only one pale yellow light, and it added to the dreariness of the scene. His father was terse, telling him to get on the next flight to New York. Richard asked if he might stay for the weekend and was given permission. That ended the call, not unlike one to a travel agency. Yet after hanging up, an explosion of sweat betrayed his calm and Richard lost himself in that sickly light, harassed and nauseated by the countryside’s loud buzzing silence.

After waiting for either Naomi, his sister, or John to call out asking what had happened, but getting no such question, Richard sought them out. They were on the living-room couch, John’s arm around Naomi. She looked at Richard with concern, love, and confidence, but John’s eyes asked: “Can you survive this?”

“Well, the man has called,” Richard said. “I must go.”

“Really?” John asked.

“I go Monday. Dad said you should pay for my ticket and he’ll send you a check for it.”

“They’re going to have you go to school there?” Naomi asked.

“Didn’t say a word about it.”

“I’m surprised they did it,” John said.

“Oh, come on. They had to.” Richard smiled at both of them to communicate his awareness of every move his parents might make. He looked through the doorway to his bedroom and saw the typewriter with page ninety-eight of his novel in it. He realized that his calm came from it. “That’s gonna get me out of this,” he said.

Naomi looked pleased. “What page are you on?”

“I think I’m almost halfway done.”

“Did you tell them about it?” John asked.

“No. I told you I wasn’t going to tell them about it until it’s done. I mean it’s gonna seem crazy enough to them when I present it finished.”

“I don’t think it’s gonna seem crazy,” Naomi said. “It’s really good.”

“No, no. I don’t mean that. I mean letting me drop out of school because of my writing it will seem crazy.” Richard watched them. They had read his novel almost page by page since he had begun it three months before and they had told him it was terrific. But he never tired of checking. “You know I think Mom and Dad are gonna like it,” he said, playing the coquette.

John nodded. “Oh yeah. I think it’ll really give them pause.”

Richard was delighted. “That’s what I wanna give them. Pause.” He laughed. “You know, if I can pull them inside my life. That should be heavy for them. For the world.”

John made a noise. “Uh. Little Richard’s gettin’ carried away with himself.”

“Well, I have to feel that way, right? I mean I couldn’t write if I thought about it like it’s a cute hobby.”

“No, that’s cool,” John said earnestly. “But the world’s gonna give you a little fight on that. They’re not just gonna concede it to you.”

Naomi disengaged herself from John. “But that’s not important, is it?” she asked. “I mean you’re doing what you want to do. Most people can’t, you know?” She looked at Richard plaintively. “It doesn’t matter what the world says.”

“Oh yes, it does!” He smiled briefly to impress her with the importance of being realistic. “Unless the world relates to it I won’t be published or make money.” This didn’t seem to convince Naomi. “I mean how do you go on writing when you’re broke?”

“Oh, that’s such bullshit. I’m sorry but that’s nonsense. Plenty of writers have had a job while writing. Most of them have. Haven’t they?”

Richard laughed. “First you say so, then you ask. Tolstoy didn’t, Dickens didn’t, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Eliot—”

“Richard, you can’t bring up those people all the time. I mean today. There are very few writers who earn a living—”

“Yeah, they have a job. They teach a fuckin’ English course for thirty-thousand a year.”

“I don’t mean those people. That’s not who you want to be.”

“I’d like to,” John said.

“No, I don’t want to be them,” Richard said. “But that’s unusual.”

“Richard! Why are you being so silly?” Naomi was flushed. “You can’t expect Mom and Dad to support you while you write.”

“Who said I expected them to?”

“Then you’ll have to get a job. And it won’t be in a college.” She was suddenly sorry for her vehemence. “Right? I mean. You know what I mean.”

“Okay, so I have to get a lousy job. What’s the point?”

“There’s no point!”

Richard looked at John, exasperated. “Then what are you saying to me,” he yelled.

“Whoa,” John said. “Everybody be cool.”

“Oh, God!” Naomi jumped up from the couch. “What’s the matter with everybody?” She was naturally thin and nervous, and anger seemed too strong a feeling for her body to support. “I just mean that you shouldn’t believe that bullshit that you have to be pampered in order to write. You can write holding a lousy job.”