The Work Is Innocent by Rafael Yglesias Read Free Book Online Page B

muscle with great deliberation, his freckled angular face tightening with pained joy.
    Richard was nervous, but having two madmen in one car was hilarious enough to cheer him up. He cautiously looked straight ahead, but hearing more tones of reasonable argument to his left, he looked past SHAFT’S LAST LAUGH 86 to the old man. He was looking right into Richard’s eyes. “How can you say that? It’s rude!” the old man said.
    Like a clock figurine, Richard’s head went right to watch the redhead triumphantly flex his muscles, left to the old man’s discussion, until finally Richard lost his fear of reprisal and he got up and left the car.
    For the rest of the ride and for his walk to the movie on the East Side, he adopted a new attitude. Looking down, he walked very fast, brushing past couples strolling arm in arm, knocking an outstretched hand away and not looking at the face it belonged to that asked for spare change. He slammed his shoulder into a lamppost as he veered away from a blind man with a cane and a cup rattling with coins. He was so intent on avoiding the insane that when Ann touched him on the arm to slow him up he yelled, afraid of an assault.
    But what had seemed to him a loud shriek of horror had only been a gasp. “It’s me,” Ann said, amused. “Why were you going so fast?”
    “Hi,” Joan said.
    Richard smiled and nodded at them. There was a line of people waiting to get into the theater and Richard noticed that they were looking. “I was thinking very intensely about something really important,” Richard said, as he moved to the end of the line with Ann and Joan. “You know, like football.” Well done, he thought.
    “I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t seen you.”
    “We’ll never know,” Richard said. “Isn’t that sad?” He was carrying this facetiousness too far, he realized. Also he hadn’t kissed them and now it was too late.
    “Have we got news,” Ann said.
    “Oh, God, Ann. I can’t understand why you’re so excited about it.”
    “About what?” Richard asked.
    “Raul has run away,” Ann said. She bounced on the balls of her feet. “Isn’t that incredible?”
    “Oh, come on,” Richard said. “He didn’t.”
    “Ann’s exaggerating,” Joan said with a glance of disapproval. “He left his parents, but he’s obviously gone to Alec, so it doesn’t make it as running away.”
    Richard restrained his contempt for Raul because he was afraid of offending Joan. “That’s so funny. Because if my parents had insisted I go to school, I’d have done the same thing.”
    “Really?” Ann said. “Where would you have gone?”
    “To a friend. That’s why it’s so funny.”
    Ann looked worried. “You’re not kidding? You really would have run away?”
    “Sure I would have run away. I’m glad I didn’t have to, but I wasn’t gonna go to school.”
    Joan looked at Ann with a smile of victory. “Thank God I’ve come across a reasonable human being.”
    “Why?” Richard asked. “Have people been putting Raul down for going?”
    “Well,” Ann said, “it’s a little silly, isn’t it? I mean when you were going to run away, did you plan to tell all your friends, even people who’d be likely to tell, where you were going?”
    “Raul told everybody where he was going,” Richard repeated, behaving as if it were a wildly funny thing to do, though he really didn’t feel it was. He was torn between making fun of Raul and defending him. It was apparent that Raul was his rival, and Richard was unable to guess which attitude would win Joan. “Well,” Richard said to Joan, “you must admit that’s a little—well, it’s not wise.” Ann laughed and Richard found himself joining her. Her laughter was coarse, he thought, and his fears were confirmed when Joan looked away in irritation. Joan said, “Forget it. It’s ridiculous to think about it.”
    Richard searched desperately for an apology that wouldn’t embarrass, but the line had reached the