Something Happened

by Джозеф Хеллер

  I don't enjoy it. (Although I definitely do enjoy my sessions with one of those extraordinary, two-hundred-dollar call girls that are sent my way as a gift every now and then by one of the suppliers I buy from. I tell Kagle about these; all he does is smile. I don't believe he wants a pretty girl in a lovely apartment. I think he wants a whore.) I feel unclean. (I am inevitably repelled by the odor of my undershirt when I put it back on, even though it is my own odor and usually slight. On days when I don't wear an undershirt, the smell is there in my shirt, faint but unmistakable, even if I've used a deodorant. The smell is me — I? — and I guess I can't get away from myself for very long.) I know there is something unholy, something corrupt and definitely passй, about grown men, successful executives like Kagle and me, going cold sober to ordinary whores in our own home town. They aren't pretty or necessary, and they aren't much fun. I don't think Kagle enjoys it, either; we have never gone back to the same girls (although we have gone back to the same sleazy hotels).

  Kagle always pays and charges it to the company as a legitimate business expense. (One of the things I do enjoy is the idea of fucking the company at the same time.) I pay for the taxi sometimes and buy the bottle of whiskey he likes to bring along. Once I'm there I'm all right (I fit right in); but once I finish, I want to be gone. Generally, I'm ready to leave before he is and depart alone. Kagle hates to go home (even more than I do). If things are going smoothly for him (they don't always, because of his bad leg), I leave him there with his whiskey and his whore. I never really want to go with him at all. He asks. And I do.

  I began biting my fingernails pretty much that same way, because someone asked me to. (Lord knows, it wasn't my idea. I didn't even know people did such things. And I don't think I was inventive enough to come upon the habit on my own.) I was in the second half of my first year in elementary school, seven years old and already fatherless. (I don't remember much about my father. I did not grieve for him when he died; I acted as though he had not gone, which meant I had to act as though he had not been. I didn't miss him, since I didn't remember him, and I've never thought about him much. Till times like now.) All of my friends in the first grade (I had many friends in the first grade; I have always worked hard to be popular and I have always succeeded) began to bite their fingernails the same week, for no better purpose than to exasperate the teacher (Miss Lamb; in the second grade, it was Mrs. Wolf. I have an uncanny memory for names and similar petty details) and their parents and older sisters. (It originated as a childhood conspiracy.)

  "C'mon, bite your nails," they told me.

  So I did. I began biting my nails. In a little while, they all stopped. But I didn't. (They grew up and went away, leaving their bad habit with me.) I didn't even try (I know now that I didn't try to stop because I didn't want to and because I understood even then that I would not be able to). And for all these years since, I have been nibbling and gnawing away aggressively, swinishly, and vengefully at my own fingertips, obtaining an enormous satisfaction from these small assaults. (It's not so much a habit, of course, as a compulsion, vicious, uncouth, and frequently painful, but I like it. And I don't think, at this stage, that I would want to live without it, and nobody has been able to tell me why.) And I know now that I will continue chewing away at my fingernails and my surrounding flesh until I die (or until I have all my teeth pulled and am no longer able to. Ha, ha).

  Even my handwriting is not my own!

  I borrowed it (and never gave it back). I actually copied the handwriting I have now from an older boy who used to work with me in the file room of the automobile casualty insurance company and liked to while away the time between busy periods inventing, practicing, and perfecting a brand-new handwriting. (His own was not good enough.) His name was Tom, or Tommy, depending on who was talking to him or calling for him. He was twenty-one, tall, and very complacent and mature. (He had a good deal to be complacent and mature about, for in addition to creating a new handwriting, he was laying Marie Jencks, the biggest blonde that our casualty company had to offer.) He studied art lackadaisically in the evening and tended to take things easy during the day while he waited for the army to draft him into World War II. Between chores and errands and smokes in the men's room, Tom would sit at the desk in the rear of the file room (out of sight of everyone who went by, for the file room was a cage of cyclone fence that rose from floor to ceiling and jutted right out into the center of the office, where everybody who did pass could look inside at us) and devote himself industriously to his handwriting. And I would sit beside him at that desk in back, tucked out of sight behind a bank of green metal file cabinets containing indexes by name to the accident folders filed by number in the taller banks of larger, greener cabinets standing near the front, to learn and copy and practice his handwriting with him.

  It wasn't always easy work. Tom would experiment tirelessly with the arcs and slants and curlicues of a capital R or Y or H or I, speaking little, until he had achieved precisely the effect he thought he wanted, and then he would say: "I think that's it now." And if he didn't change his mind in a minute or two with a sober shake of his head, I would slide his sheet of paper with the finished product closer to me and set to work learning and practicing that letter, while he moved ahead with the foundations of design for another member of the alphabet. (Sometimes, with a downcast, disappointed air, he would reverse his judgment about a certain letter after a week or two had elapsed, reject it, and start all over again from scratch.) Some of the letters were simple, but others proved incalculably hard and took an immeasurably long time. We were a pair of dedicated young calligraphers, he and I (I, of course, the apprentice), when we weren't scheming secretly and separately to satisfy the stewing miseries of our respectively emerging lusts; for he, like me (I was to discover one day entirely by coincidence), also had a very hot thing going with one of the women (girls?) in the office (and here, too, he was way ahead of me. He had big, bossy Mrs. Marie Jencks, of all people, who was twenty-eight and married, and he was already getting in regularly down, of all places, in the storeroom. Wow! What a mixed-up maelstrom of people, I felt, when I finally found out about all of us, not realizing then, as I do realize now, that the only thing unusual about any of it was me). By the time old Mrs. Yerger was transferred all the way across the company offices into the file room to get us to do more work or clear us out (even though there was not that much more work to be done. It was Tom, in fact, who taught me that if I just walked around with a blank piece of paper in my hand, I could spend all the time I wanted to doing nothing. I spent a great deal of time doing plenty, or trying to, at a corner of that desk underneath the big Western Union clock, very close to Virginia, that pert and witty older girl of twenty-one, who wore her round breasts loose some days even then, knowing they looked fine that way too if the breasts were good, and liked to arch her back and twist her shoulders slowly with a sleepy sigh, just to roll her breasts from side to side for my pleasure or thrust them toward me), I had Tom's handwriting down pat, and I have been using his handwriting ever since.

  I found out about Tom and Marie Jencks only by coincidence one day about five weeks before he left the company to go into the army. (I left the same day he did for a job that I didn't like in a machine shop.) Mrs. Marie Jencks (that was what the brass nameplate on her desk called her) worked in the Personal Injury Department for mild, short Len Lewis, who was head of the Personal Injury Department and who had fallen politely in love, romantically, sexually, idealistically, with my own incorrigible Virginia. (She encouraged him.) I was amazed to find out about all of us, especially amazed about Marie and Tom (more amazed even than I'd been to find my big brother on the floor of that wooden coal shed with Billy Foster's skinny kid sister so many murky years back. Mrs. Marie Jencks was a much bigger catch than Billy Foster's skinny, buck-toothed kid sister). Marie Jencks was one great big whale of a catch, and I was in awe.

  To me, once I knew about her, she was a fantasy fulfilled (although for somebody else), a luscious
enormous, eye-catching, domineering marvel. (And I could not stop staring at her.) She was married. She was tall, blond, and buxom. She was almost twenty-eight. She was striking and attractive (although not pretty. Virginia was prettier). And she was humping lucky, twenty-one-year-old Tom Johnson, whenever she wanted to. (What a gorgeous spot for lucky twenty-one-year-old Tom Johnson to be in. It gave little seventeen-year-old Bobby Slocum something good to look forward to.) When Len Lewis was away from his desk, Marie was boss of the whole Personal Injury Departntent. She was sometimes good-humored, sometimes officious, and I and most of the men and their secretaries who had to deal with her were always a little afraid of her. She was bossy with Tom too; she bossed him down one floor into the moldering storeroom for cabinets of dead records whenever she felt the urge; she bossed him right back upstairs when she was through.

  It was because of that storeroom with its two unshaded bulbs dangling overhead from thick black wires like a pair of staring spiders that I found out about Tom and Marie. (I had taken the key; I wanted to meet Virginia; he needed the key to meet Marie.) They did it on the desk. I found that nearly impossible to believe, even though Tom assured me they did it there, and so did Virginia (once I began talking to her about it), and I knew it had to be true. There was no other place but the floor, and that was always dirty. I still couldn't picture it all taking place on the desk. There didn't seem room enough for a woman so tall. (I have since discovered that a thimble is room enough when they really want to, and that the planet itself may prove too small when they really don't.)

  There was only one key to the door of the storeroom (which made the place ideal for just the sort of thing so many of us, it turned out, had on our minds for so much of the normal business day), and I would not give it to him. I had already made my own plans for another one of the two- or three-minute assignations with Virginia to kiss her and feel her up (before she grew tense and furious all at once with a stark, mysterious terror that always seemed to seize her without warning and for which I was never prepared and could not understand. Her face would blanch, her eyes would darken and dart about anxiously like frightened little mice, and she would tear herself away from me, emitting low, wild, angry gasps and whimpers as she fled in panic and bolted back upstairs. By the time I followed, she would be sitting at her desk beneath the big clock again as though nothing had happened, and she would smile and wink at me salaciously exactly as before. I know now that she was more emotional than I thought and at least a little bit insane. I suppose I loved her then but was too naпve to recognize it. I thought love felt like something else).

  "Come on," said Tom. "Gimme the key."

  "I can't," I answered.

  "I need it."

  "So do I."

  "I need it now," he said.

  "Me too."

  "I'm meeting someone there."

  "So am I."

  "A girl," he explained.

  "Me too." (I colored with pride, grinning.)

  "Who?" he asked, stepping back to look at me.

  "Should I tell you?"

  "Why not? I'm your coach, ain't I? Virginia?"

  "How do you know?"

  "I'm not blind. And I'm not deaf."

  "It shows?"

  "It shows right out between your legs whenever you stand there and talk to her. You oughta try taking your hand out of your pocket once in a while so we can all get a good look. I'd really like to see that. You oughta carry an accident folder in front of you instead just in case you do have an accident. Pow — what a property damage case that would be. Are you laying her yet?"

  "Not yet."

  "Do you know how?"

  "I'm getting there."

  "She can show you how!"

  "How do you know?" I asked jealously.

  "I can tell. Just do it, that's the best way to learn how. Don't think about it. Just shove it in. You oughta come down now and watch me work it out."

  "With who?"

  "You'll scream it out all over the place if I tell you."

  "No, I won't."

  "Gimme the key."

  "Tell me who it is."

  "Will you keep it quiet?"

  "Virginia?" (I felt another pang of jealousy.)

  "Marie."

  "Jencks?"

  "You're screaming."

  "Are you laying Marie Jencks?"

  "We're laying each other. Don't turn around! She's looking right at us, waiting for you to give me the key, so you better do it — or she'll chop your head off."

  "She's married!" I told him with astonishment.

  "Can I please have the key?"

  I relinquished the key obediently, in deference to his superior achievements; and as soon as he (then she) had gone, I hurried excitedly to the old wooden desk underneath the old, big Western Union clock to postpone my own meeting with Virginia and let her in on what I had just found out. (She was really the best friend I had in the company, and perhaps anywhere else. On days when I was unaccountably sad and lonely or had no money, she would notice and set right about trying to cheer me up or insist on lending me the two or three dollars I needed until payday, even when she had to borrow it from one of the other girls.)

  "Why?" she wanted to know, when I asked her to meet me on the staircase instead of in the storeroom.

  "Can you keep a secret?"

  "Sure," she responded brightly. "What do you want to do to me?"

  "No, it's about Tom. Would you believe that Tom Johnson and —»

  "Of course," she said.

  "With —»

  "Sure."

  "Right now?"

  "The more often the better, I always say."

  "In the storeroom?"

  "Sometimes they do it in an apartment on Second Avenue. She has a divorced friend who lives there."

  "How do you know?" I demanded.

  "She tells me."

  I was flabbergasted. Virginia's cheeks were red with delight and her eyes were twinkling with merriment at my expression of amazement.

  "How do they do it?" I wanted to know.

  "Well, she has this thing of hers, and he has this thing of his, and he takes his —»

  "I mean down there! Where do they lie down?"

  "On the desk," she told me. "Haven't you ever tried it?"

  "I'm going to as soon as they're through."

  "Not with me, you aren't. I need a big hotel room. I like to move around a lot."

  "You didn't move around so much in that canoe at college," I reminded her.

  "I was a dope then," she laughed. "I didn't know I was supposed to. Do you want to know a secret?" She motioned me closer. "Come around to here so I can whisper and put my knees against you."

  Holding a blank slip of paper, I moved around to her side of the desk and began fussing with folders in a tray there, as though hunting for a particular one. As soon as I drew near her, she swung her knees around against my leg and began rubbing me with them methodically, watching me steadily with a knowing, kind of mocking smile.

  "What's the secret?" I asked.

  "Take your hand out of your pocket."

  "Fuck you."

  "Okay."

  "On the desk?"

  "Pretend you're working."

  "I am. What's the secret?"

  Mrs. Yerger was outside the entrance of the file room (Mrs. Yerger was always outside the file room), observing me balefully.

  I took my hand out of my pocket, picked up a property damage accident folder, and held it over my hard-on. Virginia saw, of course, and laughed out loud, showing the tiniest tip of shiny tongue between bright red lips and wet white teeth. Her cheeks were touched with red too — they wore them rouged then — and she had dimples. I felt the strongest undertow of affection for her, but it was so inadequate; she was twenty-one, and I was seventeen, and I found myself wishing I were as old as Tom and had a better idea of what to do with her.

  "Len Lewis and I," she told me, "meet for drinks and dinner every Thursday night after work. He wants to tell hi
s wife he wants a divorce, but I won't let him. He says that nobody in his whole life ever kissed him the way I do."

  I was surprised again, but excited to find this out. I was always fascinated by her sex adventures with other men. (She had a fondness for sheer, silky blouses, and I often had an urge to put my hands on her shoulders when she wore one and delicately caress her. When she wore a sweater, I wanted to put my hands inside and squeeze.)

  "Do you sleep with him?" (I was always greedy for details.)

  "He's afraid. He's been married all his life and never did anything with anyone else. I feel sorry for him. I don't know what I'll say when I finally get him to ask me to. I like him. But I'm not sure I want to."

  I liked Len Lewis too. And I had no doubt that nobody had ever kissed him the way Virginia did, for I had seen him at the office Christmas party with his wife, who was a short, shapeless, soundless woman, as old and meek as he was, and much more wrinkled and gray. For that matter, nobody in my whole life had ever kissed me the way she did or touched and fondled me the way she could and did over and over again in the storeroom downstairs or on the staircase between floors. I wanted more and more of her; I never got all I wanted. She did not like me to do things to her; she liked to do things to me. We met on the staircase between floors several times each working day, where we would kiss and pet and clutch frantically for the few seconds before she always imagined she heard someone coming and bolted away; or we would meet downstairs in the storeroom for three, four, or five minutes, where she would also pale suddenly and whirl away from me in violent alarm.

  I was never angry with her when she ran from me, never felt resentful or cheated; I always felt lucky that I'd had any of her at all. (And I was always sorry to see her so scared. I always wished there were some way I could help.) She told me once (more than once, because I kept bringing it up in order to hear about it again) that in her freshman year at college (she attended Duke University for two years and never went back after her father killed himself one summer) she had been laid in a floating canoe by the backfield star of the varsity football team. I didn't believe her. (I don't think I honestly believed then that anybody really got laid, that a boy like me took my thing and put it inside her thing and then went on to do the rest, even though I had seen the drawings and photographs and listened to the dirty jokes and stories.) She kept asking me to get a room. I didn't know how. I asked Tom how to go about renting a hotel room, and he told me, but even after he told me, I still didn't feel I knew how. I had an idea the desk clerk would start beating me up right there in the lobby if I ever tried to register for a hotel room for Virginia and me. And I didn't have the money for something like that. I was only a file clerk. (I didn't even know how to take her to dinner!)