The Work Is Innocent (17 page)

After the first rush of feeling superior to political people, Richard began to feel nauseous and bored. He was aware only dimly that these intense shifts of feeling about politics were due to the complications of making judgments based on his emotional ties to his family. When he noticed that his belief of the inadequacy of young movement people was accompanied by contempt and that when he
had
believed in his brother he then felt guilt and self-righteousness, he thought suddenly, I’m mimicking my father and brother. And was so appalled that he instantly decided this was examining himself too closely and could only lead to total passivity. He had to take his own judgments on faith. If they were due to others originally, that couldn’t change them now.

His father’s article appeared without Richard thinking anything more about it. He thought of it as a purely family matter and, when he and Joan were invited to dinner at Mark’s apartment, Richard was unprepared for the question that a young woman asked him immediately after they were introduced. “Why doesn’t Leo confront your father about his article?” she said aggressively, but with a charming, self-satisfied smile.

Joan had told him that Lisa, his questioner, was a lot of fun, though slightly crazy. Madness being a loosely applied term by his friends, Richard thought this meant she was frivolous, and her appearance fit that image. Lisa was small with curly ringlets that along with her oval face made her seem like a clown. “Your sentence doesn’t make clear whose article you’re talking about. Leo’s or my father’s.”

“Come on,” Lisa said, even more harshly but still smiling. “Leo’s behaving like a whimp.”

“Lisa!” Mark said reprovingly.

“It’s true!” She protested. “He tells me a lot of liberal shit about how there is no point in dealing with it because it’s already done. That’s whimpy.”

She said all this in a high voice with such delight and animation that Richard was confused by her insistence and the alarm in Mark’s face. She was apparently serious. But since her appearance was easygoing, Richard felt confident. “Leo’s smart not to,” he said. “Dad would destroy him. Because Leo knows little or nothing about it and because Dad’s right and Leo’s wrong.” Richard laughed at Lisa’s expression of astonishment. “You didn’t expect that, eh? He’s being whimpy because his position is just peeved self-righteousness. Leo knows he’s wrong.” Richard looked at Mark and quickly felt the need to impress him. “Yes, I have the gall to agree with my father.”

“That’s not new,” Mark said.

“I can’t believe—” Lisa began but Mark interrupted: “Set the table while I check out the food.”

Salvatore, who shared the large apartment with Mark and Lisa, entered the living room. Richard listened casually to Joan’s conversation with Sal about the new Stones album. Lisa had put him in a contentious mood, and he wanted to tell Joan and Sal that they were fools to discuss the Stones seriously. But that was a private snobbery he knew he should never reveal to his contemporaries. He prepared himself for further harassment from Lisa while they were eating, but the talk was casual.

He was so preoccupied with imagined arguments about Aaron’s article that he didn’t hear Lisa’s next reference to it. She was handing him what proved to be a watery cup of coffee and he smiled automatically at her friendly expression. “I’m sorry, what did you say?” Richard asked.

“I said, So you think Leo’s just pretending to disapprove of Aaron’s article?”

“Oh no, I never said that. I think that Leo wouldn’t dare criticize Dad about it because Dad’d tear him apart.”

“So you agree with your father?” Lisa asked with a prosecutor’s anticipatory glee at the discovery of a weakness.

Richard couldn’t answer at first, afraid of the terms it might create for a discussion. “Yeah, I do. I can’t believe I’m sitting here terrified to admit it.” He looked at them during the silence that followed. Suspicious of their private thoughts, he said angrily to Mark: “And I resent your crack that it’s not unusual for me. I’ve fought with him over everything in the past few years. In fact,
inside,
it feels like he’s agreeing with me, not the reverse.”

“Why are you so defensive about it?” Lisa asked with that familiar tone of a person beginning to interrogate.

Richard felt clever and he smiled to show it. “Because you keep expressing your incredulity about my opinion as if you were about to drop an atomic bomb.”

Salvatore laughed while both Mark and Joan showed in their smiles an acknowledgment of the justice of Richard’s remark. When attacked, nothing was more important to Richard than the approval of the bystanders.

“How do you know Padilla wasn’t an agent?”

“Come on. He was accused of helping a CIA agent to develop propaganda for anti-Cuban articles published in the United States.”

“He admitted!” Lisa said triumphantly. “He admitted he helped an agent.”

“All right,” Richard said, repeating his clever smile and making a dramatic gesture with his arm. “He admitted. Now do you really believe the CIA would bother to research such an article? Have you noticed that reactionary columnists are suddenly showing scruples about writing lies?”

“Well, if it’s so unimportant why does your father have to write an article denouncing Fidel in—”

“He didn’t denounce Fidel!”

“He said Fidel was a stooge for the Soviet Union.”

“What are you talking about? He didn’t say that.”

“That’s what he said. Read it.”

“I have read it. Come on!”

“Well, he says that Fidel is only doing this because he needs the Soviet Union right now because of the crop failures.”

Richard stared at her, surprised that her argument made sense and stunned that she had the nerve to say it. Lisa seemed ecstatic to have reduced him to silence. She smiled broadly and delightedly at him, almost as if he should share in her pleasure at his defeat. “Right?” she said, and looked at the others.

“You’re out of your fucking mind!” Richard said quickly. He had seen Joan’s look of discomfort and he sensed that an attempt would be made to end the discussion. It was obviously unpleasant for the other three. “I can’t believe that the one thing in the article which is written to defuse the criticism of Fidel is what you consider so bad.”

“What?” Lisa said loudly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Lisa, what is this shit?” Salvatore said.

“Yeah,” Mark said. “I think it would be better if you two—”

“Oh no!” Richard yelled. “I want her to deal with what I said.”

“Fine,” Lisa looked at Richard calmly. “I didn’t hear what you said.”

“Dad explained the relationship between Fidel and the Soviet Union in order to show Fidel’s side of it. Clearly Fidel thinks it’s more important that the Cuban people eat than that their artists be free to write avant-garde junk.”

“Isn’t that saying that Fidel is a stooge?”

“
You
are concluding that Fidel is a stooge because he depends on the Soviet Union for food.
You
make that judgment, not Dad.”

“Not Dad,” she mimicked.

He felt his heart pound and the room’s light close in. Lisa even paused momentarily at the ferocity of his expression.

“Well,
Dad,”
she went on with a humorous emphasis, “isn’t making much sense. Because that proves Fidel was right. It’s not important what happens to Padilla if it means Cubans will starve.”

“And I suppose it doesn’t matter that the Soviet—”

“Stop shouting, Richard,” Lisa said with an air of innocence that doubled Richard’s fury.

“Don’t you dare tell me to stop shouting! I’ll scream—” He knew he had lost the others from the embarrassment on their faces, and Joan’s interruption was a galling confirmation: “Richard. Calm down, it’s not worth it.”

“Shut up!” he yelled, opening his throat and ripping the sounds out. “Shut up!”

“I can’t take this,” Joan said, and left.

Mark called after her and followed her out, and Richard watched Salvatore do the same with surprise. He had never had walkouts by observers during a tantrum. Lisa still sat on the floor with her legs crossed and her feet tucked beneath her body, smiling somewhat pityingly at him. “This is silly,” she said.

“Will you listen! You’re into scoring points. Listen!”

“Okay.”

“It means nothing to you that the Soviet Union applies this pressure. You don’t care about that. Anything to justify Fidel. Does the Cuban Revolution amount to anything if it’s merely an excuse for Soviet power? If they’re going to influence tiny decisions such as the status of poets, then what else will they influence? They didn’t support Che. I mean, do I have to run down the number of fucked up things Russia has done in terms of leftist movements in other countries. Like the CP in France?”

“You’re so confused. I don’t know what you’re saying.” She scored with every line, touching on things about him or his ideas that he felt were embarrassing or irrational. He tried over and over to force her into discussing his points, but she remained personal, saying he was defensive, that he was too upset to think clearly.

He heard the other three laughing in one of the adjoining rooms, and occasionally a head would pop in to see if they were still fighting. He imagined he heard them comment on his stubbornness, and every laugh sounded derisive.

As Richard became more desperate, he began to return Lisa’s personal remarks. He called her manipulative when she accused him of defensiveness. His escalation must have caused her really explosive charge. “You’re just an intellectual,” she said at last. “You don’t like the idea of a poet being censored. It’s just a liberal hangup.”

“I’m an intellectual!” Richard didn’t have an angry reaction at first because it was incredible: he had railed against intellectuals in every other argument; he blamed intellectuals for the decadence of contemporary literature; he left school to avoid becoming one. He would have considered it more likely that he was a fascist. “How the hell am I an intellectual?”

For the first time during their fight he was comfortable. There was no unstoppable surge of rage to embarrass him. He smiled sarcastically at her and noticed with a thrill that she suddenly seemed at a loss. “Well, you read books—”

“I read books!” He laughed with real delight. “Boy, you have low standards. You don’t read books, I suppose.”

“I mean—”

“Only illiterates aren’t intellectuals.”

“Richard, will you stop being obnoxious? I mean, you relate to the world through books. You’re a novelist.”

She had stumbled into this line of attack but Richard could see, in her eyes, her determination to maintain it. He asked her if she meant that novelists were intellectuals and noticed, with dismay, that there wasn’t the slightest insincerity in her manner when she said yes.

He was hurt. The discussion was no longer merely tactical or excessively vehement. He was hit. “Novelists aren’t intellectuals. Don’t you know what intellectual means?” He was whining. “An intellectual perceives the world through ideas. A novelist observes and feels experience and then relates it.”

He was so obviously upset that even Lisa hesitated before continuing. “Why are you so defensive about it?” she said once more. It was apparently a favorite question, but this time it seemed more apologetic than offensive. “It’s not a terrible thing to say, Richard.”

He noticed the disturbance before he spoke. He had said how can you say that, twice, before he turned to look at what had gotten Lisa laughing. Joan was entering the room, riding on Salvatore’s back. “We come in peace,” she kept saying, addressing it to Richard mostly. Mark was behind them, smiling benignly.

“What the fuck do you two assholes think you’re doing!” Richard’s words broke up the carefree tableau quickly. To abuse them was satisfying. He felt his voice rumble into a storm of words that refreshed his self, his sense of self. “Don’t you come fucking around in here while I’m fighting! I don’t care how unimportant it seems to you. You think you’re cool and intelligent for not being involved. What are you? Too fucking civilized to be able to stand an argument?” Joan had slid off Salvatore and he had looked abashed. Sal muttered that Richard obviously didn’t think it was funny. And Joan had said Richard twice in protest. They all looked at him and he thought, Do they think I’m going to stop? “Get the fuck outta here. Right now! I’m tired of patronizing your sensibilities. I’m fighting with Lisa! So fuck off!”

Lisa allowed him to ramble on about how intellectuals weren’t artists when they were alone again. She was quite content with what had already been said and she began to say that it was foolish to go on discussing it. He knew he was through. He couldn’t judge which was more painful, continuing to talk to Lisa, or facing the others when it was over.

Mark made a joke about the heavyweight championship finally ending when Richard emerged and said to Joan, “I wanna go.”

“Do you want me to go with you?” she asked. “I’m an asshole, remember?”

“That’s hilarious,” Richard said. “Can we go?”

“All right.” She looked suddenly vulnerable and walked over to hug him. His mind told him to hold her and that would relieve most of his humiliation and hers, but his body pulled away against orders. She managed a look of pain and annoyance that was remarkable for its complexity.

“Come on,” he said, his voice twisted into a whine.

Her eyes stopped pleading. “All right! Calm down.”

He knew they would ride home in silence and that he would turn on the television as soon as they arrived. He didn’t want to behave peevishly, but he did. He hoped that after an hour or so he would be able to start talking to her and straighten it out, but she fell asleep almost immediately and he was left alone with ceaseless slow-motion replays of the fight.

He lay on his side, slipping into sleep. His mind was busy repeating his argument when he suddenly felt his body slide into space. He fell rapidly and wanted to wake up and move, but couldn’t. Fear rushed in on top of the struggle to move and pushed him up with a start.

“Sweetheart, are you all right?” Joan asked. Her eyes were red and one side of her face was streaked from the pillow.

“No. I woke up with a start.” He laughed. “I never knew what that meant. That’s heavy. It’s really unpleasant.”