Something Happened

by Джозеф Хеллер

  "I'm afraid, Virginia. I must go slowly, darling. Let me call you darling. You must help me see where I am."

  I felt nausea instead of desire, and immense, mortal desolation. I think she knew it and pitied me, and I hated her and hoped she'd be crippled and die. Tom with the flowery, affected handwriting was sticking it routinely into big, blond, gruff, bossy, and horsey Marie Jencks on demand three or four times a week on the desk in the storeroom (and sometimes she made him do it to her standing up against a wall, he told me later, or against the walls in a corner, where it was easier). And I was scared stiff of gentle, short Virginia. I didn't want to see it. I still don't really enjoy having to look at it. They still set me back for a moment or two. I have to steel myself, make ready (unless I'm rollicking drunk and bobbing along on a tide of ebullient self-confidence that might carry me right through into it without pause). I wasn't scared stiff: I was scared soft (ha, ha). But Tom was older than I was, and when I was his age, I was doing it too, and they still astound me. The sight. They are distinct. No two are the same. No one is the same way twice. If I live to be a hundred and fifty years old (and if it please God, I will), I don't think I will be used to the sight of a naked girl, unless I become a physician. I still steal peeks at my wife. It's more likely I'll become a peeping Tom. Snatches vary. I am always tense and somewhat disbelieving as they undress. No two are alike. (Why are they doing this for me?) There is always still at least one second of awe, of raw curiosity in which I am breathless at the possibilities of what is about to be disclosed and offered me. I have to accept it, whether I like it or not. (While I counterfeit nonchalance all the while and appear to be gazing elsewhere at something infinitely more engrossing. Like my trousers folded over a chair, the grille of an air conditioner, or my woolen socks, with my garters still attached, lying in my shoes.) I wonder if we are as interesting and peculiar a spectacle to them. I think we are. I get compliments for cleanliness and symmetry, and for the cute pliability of my foreskin (which more and more girls in recent years are finding as novel a decoration as my garters. They don't see many of either anymore. I'm damned if I'll cut it off now. I'll give up garters. I may look a little bit Jewish to some people, and think Jewish a great deal of the time, but it's proof I'm not if I ever want to use it against someone like Green, who is. That same elusive imp dodging around so artfully inside me somewhere that urges me at times to kick Kagle in his leg, or my daughter in her ankle, also often gives me a throbbing, delectable wish in my upper palate, along with a tickling yen in one nostril to — the wish and that exhilarating tickle join forces virtually to exhort: "Go ahead. Do it, sweetheart. See how good it feels" — to — how shall I say it? — Jew-bait). Moles, birthmarks, pimples, crimped scars, and untended dark hair in filaments or clumps in unexpected places on women sicken me with disappointment and leave me morose and queasy unless I take a Spartan grip on myself at the start and go right at these things as though with an uncontrollable desire. (I must make myself seem to adore with the passion of a fetish what I find so repugnant. Else I might quit entirely. I don't want to hurt their feelings. Or mine.) I hope for silken perfection every time and am relentlessly unforgiving of blemishes. (I feel swindled, injured.) I must make myself look past them at the whole picture. Some have hair — growing down the sides so long it curls out of their bathing suits. They don't seem to notice or mind. I do. I don't know where to look away from. (They must know it's there.) You can't just say:

  "Pardon me, Mrs. I think your hair is showing."

  Because you might get back:

  "So what?"

  Or:

  "Don't you think I know it?"

  Or:

  "Don't look, if you don't like it so much."

  Slightly more judicious, and less risky, would be:

  "Pardon me, madam. But do you know your hair is showing?"

  Unless you want to go after it, and then you can make whatever clever gutter gambit you want to. I don't usually like that kind (although I have had to welcome them with manufactured enthusiasm on many occasions when it turned out to be the kind I'd been dating and sucking around after). I don't like excess black face or body hair on anyone, men or women, even when it's been shaved. It seems aberrant to me, infernal, revolting. (It's there to revile me.) My wife has black hair. By now, though, I know where it all is. No coiled, fuzzy surprises from her. (I have stumbled over hairs in my time that I could dissertate about for hours if I were the type to dwell compulsively upon past failures. Mrs. Yerger had a wen. Betty Stewart had a cast in her eye, but I continued to copulate with her weekly anyway for several months until she met a younger man she thought she might want to marry. My mother started sprouting bristly, dark gray hairs on her face when she was no longer able to tweeze them out herself. Her pores turned gaping and coarse. I looked past the hairs at her face, when I forced myself to look at her face at all. I could not say to her:

  "Mother, I think you have some hairs growing on your face."

  By then, she might not have heard or understood, and I would have had to say, more loudly and crabbedly:

  "Hey, Ma. Gee whiz. You got hair on your face."

  Not ever. How could you ever say that to your own sick mother? On the Rorschach test I took to get this job, it was observed that I was able to look at the whole picture and did not digress to delve wastefully into unrelated details. The probability was that I'd succeed, and I have.) In the early years of our marriage, my wife did not like me to see her naked unless she was in the bathtub, did not want to watch me stare at her while she undressed. (She still does not want me to see her on the toilet, and I'm not keen anymore about seeing her there, either. Once or twice a year is enough.) But now she enjoys having me watch her, strips like a teaser and flops down in bed and lies there like Goya's duchess. I enjoy it and laugh with her. I'd enjoy it more if she hadn't been tippling all day and was still not partially drunk. (She could have been killed while driving, or killed someone else. She could be stripping with just as much giddy and inebriated anticipation for somebody else.) My wife and I do enjoy ourselves together much more than I tend to remember. We often have fun. I'm not sure that things can get better for me. She had a technique for changing clothes that never exposed her bottom parts. Nightgown over panties or girdle, panties or girdle pulled on under nightgown. One caught glimpses only. That heartless, unfeeling bitch. In bed, she'd take it off anyway as soon as I asked. She'd even dress and undress inside the closet. No wonder I won't wake her from her bad dreams. Let her die in them or be mangled into a thousand bloody pieces by the illusion she's going to be. If my wife dreams of a prowler approaching her bed is it the same prowler I'm dreaming of?

  "What were you dreaming about?"

  "It was awful," she answers in the morning, still shaken. "Something terrible was happening to you."

  "Horseshit."

  "I swear."

  "People don't dream about other people. They only dream about themselves."

  "Something happened to you, and I couldn't stop it and was afraid."

  "You were dreaming about yourself."

  She must have been taught to dress and disrobe that way at summer camp, where males could peek between the bunk boards, or by her mother or divorced jealous-faced sister who got knocked up as a college kid before that became fashionable and grew up frigid and ill-natured. She lives by herself now with her liver-hued freckles in a small house nearby and advertises she would not have it otherwise. I believe her. (I also believe that nothing would please her more than for me or the husband of some other woman to fall in love with her. We would fail. She would spurn us. She would love that chance to.) I also believe she will always want to live nearby. I think she hates me, is envious of my wife, and contaminates my wife's trusting, abject nature with doses of guileful animosity. She spouts bigotry and reactionary political comment. She is childless. Her first husband has married again and has children. She has a store. There is much in the world of which she disapproves. She wishes my wife would be more l
ike her and chides her because she is not. She criticizes our children and volunteers advice to my wife on how to turn me into a more submissive husband.

  "I wouldn't let him get away with it. That's why I threw Don out."

  She is glad that John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy were killed and that the girls in the family have crooked teeth. She wants my wife to agree with her. She wants me to put in a swimming pool. I feel rivalry between us. (I used to feel rivalry with her mother.) I didn't let my wife know how much it pained me to see her undress that way. (How often I cursed her and swore to get even. I do get even. We Slocums have our family honor.) It was a matter of high principle (as well as of low prurience. I cherished seeing her in ungraceful positions. Still do). She never guessed the effect it had on me (she is not mean), and I was too sensitive and proud to complain. (I did not want to beg. While she did not even know what was going on.)

  "Don't you ever dream I'm dead?" she likes to ask.

  "Did you dream I was dead?"

  "I think so. I think that's what was happening."

  "Thanks."

  "I was sorry."

  "I don't remember. My dreams are about me, and you're not me."

  "I dream about you."

  "You're in my dreams. Do you want me to return the favor? To promise?"

  "You couldn't keep it."

  "Then why bring it up?"

  I'm grateful she doesn't ask me if:

  I ever dream about her and another man, because I do, and that dream is about me also. (They are coming together in sexual union for the sole purpose of denigrating me.) And I don't like it. I don't want my wife to commit adultery. I don't think she wants to, either, ribald and vulgar as she sometimes gets at large parties now (although she may think she wants romance. I'd like some too. Where do you get it?); more likely, she is reacting against being the kind of old-fashioned person who doesn't want to (while so many other women we hear of do want to and are). She would have to be drunk and more stupefied than she's ever been (that I know of) and fall into very bad, greedy hands. She would have to be led away without knowing it to someplace remote and be overcome in silence by somebody wicked and unmerciful. (Conversation would eliminate his chances. She'd recognize he wasn't me.) I hate that man (all of them who've ever calculated their chances with her) and want to kill him, especially with this foreknowledge I have that she would probably enjoy it more with him than she ever has with me.

  "Oh, darling," she exclaims to him over and over again in sighing adoration. "I never knew it could be this way. I will do everything you ask."

  She would have no real need for me after that except to pay certain bills. (She does not like to write checks for things like insurance premiums and mortgage payments.) I hang within earshot at parties (unless I am off on my own taking soundings of somebody else's drunken wife. I prefer them comelier and better-tempered than my own) to lead her away before an insult or assignation becomes inevitable.

  ("Come along, dear. Come on now. This way, dear. There's an elegant man here who wants to meet you."

  "Who?"

  "Me."

  In these dreams of mine in which she abandons me for somebody else, I seem to dissolve while dreaming them and am left with nothing but my eyes and a puddle of tears.)

  Divorce, however, is a different matter. We like to try each other on that.

  "Do you want a divorce?" she will ask. "Do you?"

  (I've thought about it. What happily married man of any mettle hasn't?)

  "What would I do?" she speculates with a long face. "I couldn't find another man. Who would want me?"

  "Don't be too sure."

  "I'm too old."

  "Nah. I'm older."

  "It's different for you."

  "Yes, you could."

  "It's too late."

  "No, it isn't."

  "You're eager, aren't you?"

  "You're the one who brought it up."

  "You're the one who's always thinking about it. I can tell. You get so happy every time a marriage breaks up. Why don't you come right out and say so?"

  "Why don't you?"

  "You're the one who's unhappy."

  "Who says so?"

  "I know how you feel."

  "Aren't you? You do a lot of complaining. You're complaining right now."

  "Don't you want a divorce? You can tell me if you do."

  "No, I can't."

  "You can."

  "I can't even tell you if I don't." Almost from the first week of our marriage we have been jostling each other this way over divorce. (Almost from the first week of our marriage I have found these squabbles sexually arousing, and I am in haste to hump her and reconcile. She always gives in.

  "Say you're sorry."

  "I'm sorry.")

  She would like me to say: "I love you." I won't. I can't.

  I shouldn't. This is a matter of principle (and manhood) too. (I can say it easily enough to other girls if I have to, when it does not mean I will have to give up anything. It means I will get, not give.) I couldn't even say Sure to Virginia when it would have gotten me a great deal; instead, I would twist away from her sideways, recoiling lamely with some face-saving wisecrack, and slink out of sight miserably like an exiled dog.

  "Come outside," I could say.

  Or:

  "Meet me downstairs," I could propose like a carefree buccaneer (when I knew we would not have much time).

  But never:

  "Yes."

  When she said:

  "Get a room."

  And always when I began inching back to her tremulously (that's the perfect word) I did not know if she would let me back into her voluptuous and smutty good graces. (I would have felt penniless without them.) She always did. She could have cut me off at the knees with a single, slicing sentence (she could have told people about me); and I might have remained like that forever, no legs, just stumps. (Somebody would have had to move me about, lift me up from one spot, like a chess piece or checker, and place me down in another.) She liked me. She was not impressed by Tom.

  "You're better," she told me.

  "Then why doesn't she do it to me?"

  "Do it to me like you did to Marie on Saturday night, Saturday night."

  Tom had no sense of humor. (What he did have was a handwriting I wanted and took from him.) He was getting laid, but I could make Virginia laugh. (Ha, ha.) I was pleased with myself when I did. (I told stories about her to teen-age friends back in my neighborhood.) We teased each other lubriciously all day long. I leaked (lubriciously. Lubricious is a lubricious word). Nobody teases me now. They say Yes if they come along at all and are out of their clothes before I can even get my shoelaces unknotted.

  "That was good," they sigh afterward.

  "I really needed that," they declare.

  As if I believe them. Or even care. All I'm thinking about is when I ought to leave or how I'll be able to get them out of Red Parker's apartment in time to take a nap before returning to the office or catching my train. They're as obtuse as my wife in her naпve good moods, still trying to work out ground rules for a happier marriage, while I am wondering how much longer I will have to remain with her before I pack my bags and get my divorce. That sanguine stupidity of hers (that utter lack of connection with my deeper feelings) is maddening.

  "I'd like to know," she'll sometimes say, "what you're really thinking."

  (No, she wouldn't.) "About my speech."

  "I mean all the time."

  "My speech. I may have to make a much different one if I get the promotion."

  "All of us think you're angry when you get so quiet. We try to guess what it is."

  Virginia would tilt her head backwards and to the side, eyeing me lewdly with a knowing, taunting look, a festive leer, her powerful breasts (girls with big breasts sometimes wore very tight bras then too) elevated like artillery pieces on weapons carriers and thrust out brashly just for me. She knew what I was thinking.

  "These," she'd announce proudly, "are
what Mr. Lewis likes about me." The tip of her tongue would glide for an instant between the edges of her shiny teeth as she watched me stare. "You do, too."

  "Come outside."

  "Come inside."

  "You're a tease."

  "You're a tease. You keep a girl all hot and bothered all day long and then won't even take her to a hotel."

  "I don't know how."

  "I'll tell you."

  "You do it."

  "They'd lock me up. They'd lock me up as a prostitute. We'll do it together. Register as Mr. and Mrs. Bang."

  Today, twenty-one is too young for me, childish, pesty. I wouldn't lay one like that on a bet now if she worked in the same office. The whole company would know. (They talk about you now to their friends. They talk about you to their parents!) I don't even like them working for me that young or hearing their strident gibberish (with defective pronunciations that give their neighborhoods and working-class background away). They lack refinement. Most of those that don't wear bras have pendulous breasts that look awful. I don't often envy youth. I detest it. Kids don't hear noise. They make so much. I wish they'd all keep their mouths shut in public and turn down their phonographs and transistor radios. My daughter will soon be the same age as Virginia. She looks older now, because she's taller, when she stands up straight. I wish she'd realize that and wear more than just a nightgown when she comes out of her room. I wish my wife would tell her. It's hard for me to say anything about it to either one. (I don't think I will ever be able to sleep in a double bed again with a male. I would choose the floor or a chair. And that would be equally suspect.) I am not a fanny patter. There are times I don't even want to handle my wife. I just want to put it in and get it over with. Or I don't want sex at all. I make excuses. There is a barrier of repugnance. It's shelter. It dissolves when I want it to. They've got nothing there but something missing. I think filthy. That's shelter too. (Other times I want it and my wife doesn't, and it's like receiving a blow across the forehead, eyes, and the bridge of my nose.) Virginia was twenty-one and older than I was (and that's the way I will have to keep thinking about her if I want to be able to keep thinking about her with romantic nostalgia and devotion).