Something Happened

by Джозеф Хеллер

  "I have nothing to do," my boy says.

  "I wish I had something to do," my daughter says.

  "Can't you think of something to do?" my wife says. "Isn't there anyone we can go see?"

  Sundays are deadly. Spare time is ruinous.

  Women my wife's age with broken marriages take up robustly with fellows much younger than themselves, sometimes boys, and their husbands don't like that part of it at all. (It's a means they have of really sticking it to us. The husbands can do without the money and kids. But they can't abide their wives' humping a younger dick and letting everyone know.) Our dicks are so pathetic. (I felt that way early and was close to a truth. I felt need, not power. I felt yearning. I never thought of it as an instrument of domination.) They can always find a hardier one for special occasions. (A girl can always find a man to lay her at least once.) I think they feel safer with teen-agers and young college kids or carpenter's helpers in vacation spots they visit and leave, grabbing the initiative with their tense, sharpened fingertips (if they haven't been chewing their fingernails down blunt, as more and more of us seem to be doing) and keeping control. Everybody wants to keep control. (I want to keep control. Penny makes me lose control, and often my wife does too. Penny diminishes me into a gargling, blabbering imbecile every time, and I love it.) I've got one girl who goes way out of control every time she has an orgasm and hates me and everybody else in the whole world bitterly and ferociously for five or ten minutes afterward (until she regains control of herself), until her scrambled senses start to reorganize. (Then she sucks her thumb.) She is humbled, vanquished, resentful, subdued. She is ashamed. She curls herself up away from me like a catatonic child and will not let me pet her, unless my touch and whispers are consoling. She'd rather not experience it (unless she's by herself, with her vibrator or her finger); she resists response; she'd rather just give them; she sees herself as the laughingstock of whoever watches her. I watch her. I'd just as soon not have to give them. (She and I are compatible that way. But I do taste what power over another human being is when I succeed in doing that to her. I do feel potent. We take leave of our character and are transformed into something else.) Were it not for the element of status, I really would rather not give orgasms to any of them but my wife, and there's even an element of sadistic cruelty (not consideration, not understanding) in that. Some of them change so grotesquely. They ought to be ashamed. There really is something disillusioning and degenerate, something alarming and obscene, in the gaudy, uncovered, involuntary way they contort. It's difficult not to think lots less of them for a while afterward, sometimes twenty years. At least we go in horny and bestial from the start; we want it, like lusting apes, and we let them know. Many of them start out that way too now, and I'm not all that comfortable with those (even though I know it's a sure thing. Maybe getting laid should never be so sure a thing. It isn't with this girl I know, or even with my wife. She gets aches, upset stomachs, and fatigue. It is with Penny. I don't see Penny as often as I used to). I don't like women who are that decisive and commanding.

  "Okay, let's have it," they seem to be ordering. "You've been using it your way long enough."

  Those assertive bitches. Generally speaking, I prefer to make them do all the doing and giving; that way, I feel I have done something to them: I've gotten away with something. Many of them prefer that too. They blow their young boys. That must seem easier to them. They don't have to undress and show themselves. They don't have to be able to come or pretend to. They don't have to be "good." They don't have to go through motions. (Everybody wants to feel safe, not just me. Older, rancorous, divorced ones, though, do want to get laid, insist on it, demand it. I prefer my women with milder insecurities. I feed on submissive feminine loneliness like a vulpine predator. I'm drawn by the scent. My ravenous snout is insatiably passionate, for an evening or two. Bellicose women whose husbands have been philanderers will hatchet you for it: they are affronted if you do not wish to fuck them.) Then they throw them out.

  "What the fuck would I have to talk to him about?" one of them told me about an eighteen-year-old she picked up in a record shop, brought home, and threw out before morning.

  No wonder so many of our virile young men have trouble getting it up nowadays. (It serves them right.) I would too. I did. Virginia was certainly safe with me because I couldn't feel at all safe with her. (I certainly couldn't seize control. I had not the confidence or the know-how.) And Virginia, in her turn, could not ever feel safe again with the adjuster who threatened to throw her out of his car (or with Ben Zack either, for that matter, who tried to rape her in his car, despite his crutches, canes, wheelchair, and all) on the deserted street near the cemetery in Queens alongside which they were parked if she didn't put out for him.

  "That's just the way he said it too," she complained to me in a tone of petulant protest that was not typical of her. Her poise was shaken each time she spoke of it. "He just took it right out without even asking. I thought he was crazy. I just looked down and it was there. I was sure insulted, I'll tell you. I wonder what Ben Zack told him about me."

  I didn't have the confidence and know-how to go too far with her even in my sex reveries without losing heart unexpectedly (and much more). Just like that, my little, rigid, dime-sized prick would dissipate into thinnest air. She scared me (the thought of her all naked scared me. I could never conjure up pictures of her that way). Pretty as she was, she could turn as grisly to me all at once as that separated head of Medusa, that evil, hairy, peristaltic nest of countless crawling adders and vipers arching out to fang me for no good reason.

  "Let's do it all the way today," she'd say.

  And convert me into lead, wood, or stone every time she appeared to be trying to skate me closer than I wanted to go (into what used to be called sexual intercourse. Today it's called fucking). I'd feel dehumanized and castrated; things would feel gone. There'd be a thumping blow in my chest, and my heart would stop. I would feel ill. With tendons and muscles fluttering weakly, I would long to sneak out of sight for a while, in order to creep back later and begin all over again with her from a distant and more secure footing, inching back cautiously. (I think I enjoyed just flirting with her more than anything else: flirting was an end in itself and still often is. I'm still not always sure I really want to get laid.) I would lose my urge, go numb; I would have a lump in my throat instead of my pants. I lost my cock and balls; they'd go away. They lost their sensitivity. I would have to squeeze or hold or look to be positive those limp and wrinkled sausage casings were still sticking there, still mine. I felt absence; no density or weight. I feel no density or weight there now. What an odd and derogatory thing to have to say about our masculine genitalia.

  It is our weakest reed.

  I can feel my feet in my shoes when I pause to concentrate on them, and I can feel my thigh bone connected to my ass bone on this wooden chair. I can feel this hand and forearm of mine lying on my brown desk blotter. I can feel my other hand resting overturned on my thigh against the worsted fabric of my trousers and can feel my back turned and angled uncomfortably, the lower part (sacrum) aching steadily but tolerably, but I cannot, for the very life and dignity of me, feel anything inside my undershorts where my exterior sexual organs are supposed to be (and probably are). All I can feel, without touching, is something like sandpaper in one spot where my undershorts are pulled too tight. I try to force a stir and can't. I know I had something there a little while ago. I know they belonged to me. I think I'm entitled to them. I know I will have to open my pants and look if I wish to make certain that what is hanging there is hanging there. I do. It is; they are. What a minor relief. Where else would they go if they went away from me? They feel lost now (I've been robbed!), even as I watch, like sloughed-off skin from a blister or sunburn or the cellophane wrapping from a crumpled, discarded cigarette pack, as though they already have gone away from me to work for somebody better and left only these flaccid parings behind to jeer at me. Until I scratch slowly, rub, tick
le, and then — ah! — take a hearty grip. Now I've got him, now I know I've got him back, sturdy, upright, alert, obedient, eager, loyal, ambitious. (I think I'll hire him right now for my department. Such attributes of prickiness are much esteemed in companies and governmental organizations.) That's because its natural state is always so very, very small, negligible, puny, slothful, not just mine, all, unless one's growing somewhere on some kind of human zoological freak, and even then it's large only in comparison with others, unless that human freak is a full-grown horse. There are big heads, bellies, and backsides, I suppose, and God knows there are tremendous, full breasts (although I find I am losing my taste for those and already prefer the smaller, shapelier ones of my wife, Penny, Mary, Betty, and Laura, all of whom wish they had bigger ones), even a brain weighs at least a whole pound or two, I think, but I guess there really is no such thing as a big human dick.

  (Women don't suffer from penis envy. Men do.)

  They are such fractional parts of the total construction they might easily be overlooked if we did not dwell on them. They are arrogant and absurd in their haughty, sniffing, pushy, egotistical pretensions. (We let them get away with an awful lot.) They can't even hold their lordly pose for half a day a week. What a feeble weapon indeed for establishing male supremacy, a flabby, collapsing channel for & universal power drive ejaculated now and then in sporadic spoonfuls. No wonder we have to make fists and raise our voices at the kitchen table.

  Mine would pop right up dependably in the days of my youth every time I stopped (or even thought of stopping) to resume joking salaciously with Virginia at her desk beneath the big circular office clock whose slender, pointy minute hand (symbolizing a long, phallic sword or lance for me in those days and a lancet or proctoscope now) sliced ahead with a twitch every sixty seconds. It would project embarrassingly. (I could not even dance with schoolgirl friends in those molten pubic days without launching haplessly into an instantaneous erection that had nothing at all to do with me or with them — I might just as well have shrugged my shoulders and claimed:

  "It's not mine. There's nothing I can do about it."

  And walked off the dance floor and left it floating there — in midair, disowned — and would have to draw back a bit at the waist in an attempt to conceal it. Now I shove it forward to let them see it's there. That is, I have found, an effective gambit with mature women who have let you know they want it.) I kept myself covered with accident folders I made certain to bring with me whenever I went to Virginia's desk to pretend to search for others as we bantered lewdly.

  "Meet me outside."

  If she agreed — she always would if she could — she'd smile and dip her face almost imperceptibly. I would go out of the office into the hallway alone. My pulse would race, my hands were sweaty, and I would want to run past the bank of elevators down to the staircase landing between floors, even though I knew I would have to wait. Virginia was more discreet than I; she took her time. I was consumed with haste. I couldn't stand still as I waited. It never failed me then. It never let me, or itself, down when she joined me finally, hurrying also, and I began kissing her clumsily on the nose, cheekbone, and mouth, crashing teeth with hers so hard I thought my own must break, and squeezing and grabbing her in different places, pressing and rubbing it against her so savagely it hurt — she was panting too, but laughing as well — for the four or five seconds or one-eighth of a minute she'd allow me before she'd lie:

  "Someone's coming."

  Those were swift, incredible trysts we enjoyed sometimes every two or three hours a day on the landing between floors of the office of living people working above and the cramped, dingy, unoccupied storeroom below filled with cabinets of dead records that must have seemed important to somebody sometime in the past, or they would not have been kept. Hardly anybody ever looked at them anymore. They were accidents, old, forgotten casualties in blanched folders with blue or purple data on the outside and sheets of various types of legal and medical information inside. From folder to folder the facts were similarly old and uninteresting. (I soon stopped snooping into them.) They were settled cases of people who were closed.

  "Somebody's coming," she would exclaim to me with a panic-stricken gasp when she decided my time was up, and be out of my hands and gone, even though nobody ever was.

  I always wanted much more of her then, right there on the staircase, when I knew I couldn't have it. (I have gotten laid in bizarre and illogical places since — my wife goes for that kind of adventure too — but never, sad to say, on a staircase. We have a good staircase in our home in Connecticut now, but my wife's back condition might be aggravated, and I would chip my knees.) I always felt satisfied afterward, though. And very pleased with myself. Those were my first good feels of grown-up woman; she was twenty-one, after all, nearly twenty-two when I saw her for the last time. I would crowd myself upon her from head to toe and try to seize or shove against her everywhere: if I had gone slower and been less gluttonous, I think now, she might have let me have more. In the storeroom once she instructed me:

  "Slower. Slower." Her voice was cooing, soothing. "That's better, darling. You scare me."

  I was flushed and perspiring like a feverish baby. I wanted to lie on my back, gurgle cherubically, and kick my feet. I had never been called darling by anyone before.

  "Darling."

  (It goes a long way still.)

  I was usually hindered in these frenzied assaults by those damned accident folders I'd brought, for I'd invariably forgot to put them down. I'd have to slide them behind her shoulders and brace her against the wall as I kissed and licked, snorted and groped; they would fall to the floor and spill open when she wrung herself away from me. I can still remember the cool, slick feel of her panties each time I touched them, my sense of miraculous astonishment that I was able to touch them at all.

  "Somebody's coming," she'd repeat in a growl.

  (In another two seconds it would have been me.)

  I would have to let her go, for she herself would suddenly turn wild with fright. There was boiling lunacy around us. The glint in her eyes was penetrating and slightly insane as she tugged her skirt down and made ready to run off, endeavoring to smile, I think she was more greatly aroused by my touch beneath her skirt than she had expected. And I was too rough. (She could have been wide open for me then if I knew how.) She is closed now. Virginia is closed now, like those people in the storeroom whose cases had been settled in one way or another. So am I. And lying among them like flaked stains now in that dreary storeroom for dead records are my own used-up chances for attaining sexual maturity early, for getting laid young (or what we considered young). I could have had her there. I could have done it to her right on the desk top or floor of the storeroom (she all but asked me to. But I didn't know what to say) or in one of her friends' apartments or in a hotel room while still a gawking, young, moronic, skinny teen-age kid bringing momma's soggy sandwiches into the city to eat for lunch almost every working day of the week while I pored over the sports section, comics, and sex stories in the New York Mirror, which is out of business now — everything is going away. (The old order changeth. There is no new.) There is nothing new and good under the sun. Everything you buy has to be brought back for repairs or exchanged at least once. All of us tell lies. We call that initiative — although I remember it accurately (as though fearful to forget. If I forget thee, O New York Mirror, where will you be? And all those industrious hours of intent diversion I spent with that shitty tabloid) and the New York Doily News. I worked for sixty cents an hour. I earn more now. Ask the people who work for me. Ask my kids. (One of them won't answer.) I wolfed down two of those sandwiches every day on seeded rolls, then three. I could have eaten four. I could have lost my cherry in her juicy box at age seventeen right there on that same desk top between Property Damage-1929 and Personal Injury-1930. I could have done it to her lying down and sitting up, frontwards or backwards, sideways frontwards and sideways backwards too, the way I'm able to do now wit
h girls who are slim and agile and don't get cramps (if I don't put on more weight. And I hope I don't lose more hair, or I soon might not be able to do it any way with anyone but my wife. I used to be praised for my lush wavy hair. Now curls are the thing, and I don't have any), several times a day most days of the week — and had my sandwiches and Mirror on the desk top there too — with my leather shoes propped firmly against the Personal Injury-1929 file cabinets for greater drive and mobility and my folded elbows cushioning our heads against a smash into Property Damage-1930. That image of us fornicating on that old desk comes back to me often. We have our clothes on. Her makeup's smeared, her face is lax and lopsided, her clothes are always in disarray, torn, pulled open, up, down, brushed aside. We are not nude. It's deformed, distorted, a desecrated sketch in colored chalk and wax. Some of those people in the Personal Injury files had been killed. It was hard to believe that cars had been colliding in the Property Damage files as far back as 1929. It was hard to believe that there were even cars. No, I couldn't. I could not have done anything different. I did what I could. It would be the same. It would be no different if I were that sairie hesitant, backward teen-age file clerk still bringing momma's sandwiches with him to work for lunch. Then it did let me down. It went away, thawed, resolved itself into an unfeeling flap of a foreskin and receded timorously whenever she rode me smack up to that immediate next step of registering at a hotel — I didn't even know how to register at a God-damned hotel. I was only seventeen and a half — or going to her friend's apartment with her after work, whenever I could not wisecrack and postpone any longer but had to look straight at her and say Yes to that bewildering and truly repelling situation in which I would have to be alone with her, get undressed beside her, take it out, and try to stick it in before it went soft. (I knew it would go soft before I even got it out.) I couldn't do it. I did not want it. I would get headaches. All I wanted to do was joke with her, listen to her tell stories of sex experiences with other people, and feel her up a few times a day a few seconds at a time. I was too young. I would lose my bravado, personality, ambition, wit. I had no sense of humor. I would lose my will to say Yes. I would lose all energy and soul and be left with almost no substance I could feel. That lump would come to my throat — that's what I'd be left with, a lump in my throat instead of my pants — and I would lose my power to speak and be unable even to confess to her and plead: