Read The Work Is Innocent for Free Online Page B

serious, almost stern, look and said, “Be sure to go over it very carefully.” Aaron crossed out sentences in the air with an imaginary pen. “Thoroughly weed it out. That’s very important. It’s slow, annoying work, but you mustn’t be impatient.”
    “Don’t worry. I won’t be unprofessional.” Richard smiled ingratiatingly. He hoped to make his father be more cheerful. Aaron got up and walked over to his son with an abstracted air, putting his arm around him. “So you’re all done, eh kiddo?” His father hugged Richard to his side and pulled him off balance. “It’s terrific that you’ve finished it so fast. You know it’s a terrible habit of mine to get most of it done and then prevaricate forever over the ending.”
    Richard laughed. “That’s funny. I was thinking what a fake I am. I just wrote the ending unconsciously.”
    His father looked down at him, his face, it seemed to Richard, suddenly distant. It wore his father’s formal mask and Richard was frightened by it: had Aaron taken his comment as a confession of amateurism? “You know what I mean,” Richard continued in a rush. “I started out having an apocalyptic vision for an ending. It was almost as if I wrote the whole thing for the ending. But after a while I forgot what hideous idea I had, and in fact finished with the right thing.” This speech erased his father’s conventional look, but now Richard felt he was running off at the mouth about his book. He knew he had to avoid that. After all he was just a pretentious kid in the eyes of the world. His father was a respected playwright. He didn’t really know if his parents believed in his book. Let him finish it, he imagined them saying, when it’s turned down he’ll go to school quietly.
    “So how does it feel to be a writer?”
    “I don’t know. Am I a writer?”
    Aaron exaggerated his surprise. “Sure. You know your mother and I were very casual about it but what you showed us was extraordinary.” His voice had an unnatural seriousness. “I was just thinking about one of your scenes. I’m very eager to read it.”
    Richard thought, he’s being careful to make me realize that he respects my work. “I’ll give it to you now.”
    “Okay. But why don’t we go out to lunch first?”
    They both relaxed once out in the street and in the restaurant where they used to have their intimate talks. “You know, Dad,” Richard said after ordering, “I always felt I was becoming an adult when you would bring me here.”
    “To this dump? What about when we went to Europe? That’s when I felt I was showing you the world like a Henry James character.”
    “Well, of course, there too, but that was more exalted. There was something about not having a sandwich at home but making it into an excursion. We go into the bookstores after—”
    “Admit it. That’s what you liked. You’d con me into buying you all those books.”
    Richard laughed with him. “That’s true. That’s more true than you can imagine. But I was always conscious of who bought me those books.”
    “And that’s what’s led you into this disgraceful career.”
    Richard waited for the waitress to leave after serving their food before speaking. “It doesn’t do any good to discourage me now after a lifetime of hyping Dickens, Tolstoy, et cetera. It’s just a pose.”
    Aaron smiled and then was quickly reserved. He looked at Richard, his eyes signaling that this was serious. “You know I have made it a family joke. My complaints about writing. But it really is a terrible life. If your work wasn’t so good I should discourage you.” He let this sink in and then said, “That’s why I hope a university will have the sense to ask you in. Because at least, if you get a teaching job eventually, then you have the money, the time to work. You’re too young to have the pressure of proving yourself at this age. You’re going to live a long time, I hope, and you may wish to do something other than