The Work Is Innocent by Rafael Yglesias

ticket booth and it was only until they were squeezing their way to seats that Richard realized he’d forgotten to pay for the girls’ tickets.
    Richard became more and more unhappy while they waited for the movie to start. He looked at the seedy elegance of the East Side crowd filling the theater. He loathed them. The men who seemed to be homosexual—it annoyed him even more that they probably weren’t—and the women, whose makeup was so liberal that decadence was too mild a word to damn them with. It was no relief to find young people dressed simply in dungarees and sweaters, because Richard saw in their faces a paler and more foolish bankruptcy.
    They were silent while waiting, and Richard got a chance to notice how much prettier Joan was than he had remembered her being. She had put on heavy makeup for the party and it had emphasized her plain features. The low forehead, high cheekbones, and small eyes had turned her into a Mongoloid. Without makeup, these imperfections remained, of course, but Richard was growing fond of the toughness they suggested. It was her figure that had sold him the night of the party, and now, with the dress replaced by jeans and a black leotard, he understood why Balzac had bankers lose fortunes over women. They saw Diary of a Mad Housewife, a movie that was both confusing and exaggerated for Richard, but apparently good for the audience and the girls. They left without saying much, Richard particularly disgusted by the press of gaudy sick people with their silly comments. Across the street there was a coffee shop and they went there.
    After ordering, Joan turned excitedly to Ann. “She was really great, wasn’t she? Especially in those scenes with the writer.”
    “I didn’t like him,” Ann said, with a small pout of distaste.
    “Yeah,” Richard said. “He was unreal.” The heroine’s lover, a famous young novelist, had been cast as a tall, dark, languorous young man, whose emotional aggressiveness was matched only by his sudden fits of vulnerability.
    “Really?” Joan said with an inoffensive air of superiority. “He seemed quite real to me. There are men like that.”
    Her assurance about any type of man was stunning to Richard.
    “No,” Ann said. “That’s a bourgeois man’s idea of a man. You know, the tortured artist.”
    Joan looked at Ann with her eyes unpleasantly small and hard. “How do you know the director or the screen writer or anybody else connected with the movie is bourgeois?”
    “It’s a natural assumption,” Richard said. He was pleased by the wise, bemused tone he adopted. Ann laughed and looked at him confidingly. Joan, indignant, shrugged her shoulders expressively. Richard decided he didn’t care if he angered her: for some reason he suddenly felt masterful. “Come,” he said to Joan. “One usually has money if one is making a film.”
    “I just meant their background could be working-class.”
    Richard laughed. “But what does that mean? Their attitude would have become bourgeois.”
    “Well,” Joan said with a smile, “this is something between Ann and me. She’s always putting things down by calling them middle-class. Anyway, I know what she really means.”
    Ann covered her face with exaggerated shame. “I didn’t mean anything,” she said in a small voice.
    “Come on, honey. You meant Raul thinks he’s like that.”
    Richard was dismayed that Raul was so controversial, and therefore important, a subject for them. He must have clearly shown his unhappiness, because Joan, after a glance in his direction, said, “I’m glad you didn’t run away also. We’d be arguing all night.”
    “Yes,” Ann said. “You little boys are a lot of trouble.”
    Richard laughed. “You know, I don’t think I ever recovered from the time, I guess it was in fourth grade, that a girl my age kept taunting me with the fact that girls mature more quickly than boys.”
    “So that’s why you hang out with older women,” Ann said.
    “Well,