Something Happened (13 page)

“Here lies Virginia Markowitz. She was a very good lay, even though she was Jewish.”

I bet it isn’t there.)

I bet I
was
stupid.

(I know I never got to lay her. And I should have. I think I wanted to. I’d like to lay her now. I wish she hadn’t killed herself and was still around for me
to call up and make love to, to tell her I care for her and how much she has always meant to me. I’m glad she’s not, because I’m not sure I would want her now. I don’t know what I want.)

I know I was much more encouraged about my own future because of Virginia, Tom, and Marie Jencks. It was reassuring to learn that so many people
were
getting laid, that the activity was indeed so widespread. It augured well. Tom was twenty-one years old and had a big blond married woman of almost twenty-eight who let him make love to her. I took it for granted that when I was twenty-one, I would have a big blond married woman of twenty-eight who would let me make love to her on a desk also. I thought such women came along automatically.

It never happened, of course.

There was no Marie Jencks for me when I was twenty-one. All I got when I was twenty-one was the right to vote. And by the time I finally did get around to screwing a woman of twenty-eight, it was my wife, and I was thirty-two and already married to her, and that was
not
what I had been daydreaming about at all.

Today when I have anything to do with a woman of twenty-eight, she generally turns out to be not a woman, but a girl, and often just a little girl: she is unmarried and unhappy, or married and lonely. And it isn’t the same as it would have been if I had that same girl and were still only seventeen. It is sometimes pleasant, sometimes sad; it is never pleasant for long without turning sad (and uncomfortable, at least for me. Often, they wish to become more devoted to me than I want them to be. I find close relationships suffocating). There is usually something drunken about it (that’s my fault, I guess—I like to drink and to get them drinking too), something forlorn and pathological (perhaps in both of us). They like to talk a lot, and they like to listen, to be talked to seriously. (More than anything else, I think, they crave to be spoken to.) I know one or two or three girls near thirty with whom I have become very good friends by now; I don’t see any of them too often because our meetings are uneventful
(at least for me) and soon turn dull. I meet many young girls I like an awful lot for a while and feel I could love loyally for the rest of my life if I didn’t know beforehand that I would grow so bored quickly. That Cuban girl this afternoon was about twenty-six or twenty-eight, and now that I think of her again, she wasn’t really so bad. She wasn’t really unattractive. She would have been a great girl to have if I were still only a kid of seventeen and knew I could have her whenever I wanted to, and didn’t have to pay. She had a small child somewhere being brought up by somebody else. She wanted enough money someday to have her child back and to open her string of beauty parlors.

“Do you like to be teased?” she asked me softly. And when I nodded, she said: “Who doesn’t?”

Now that I think of it, she wasn’t bad at all.

I don’t know what happened to Tom (he could have been killed, for all I know or care); he left me his handwriting, and I still sit at a desk, in my office at the company or in my study at home, and use it I don’t know what finally became of Marie Jencks. I never even found out what happened to me.

Mrs. Yerger, I sense, is still there. (The name is different, but the character is indestructible.) The Mrs. Yergers always survive, unattracted as they are to folly or indiscretion, and so do their grim-faced Mr. Yergers, if there are any (the Mrs. Yergers don’t need them), who are indistinguishable from them by everything but gender and dress. The Mrs. Yergers become not only heads of the file room, but mayors, school principals, college deans, majors, judges, government attorneys, colonels, Selective Service board members, American Legion officials, attorney generals, Presidents of the United States of America, and managers of minor departments in companies like mine. Along with Green and Black and Horace White, I have played the part of tyrant myself at times with people in the company who are subordinate
to me, and I play it often at home with my wife and my daughter and my son, and even at times with my idiot child, who also doesn’t understand what’s going on.

(“How can you call him that?” my wife will lash out at me with strong emotion. “How can you talk about him that way? He’s your own flesh and blood!”

“By definition,” I will inform her coldly, “an idiot is any person who lacks the capacity to develop beyond a mental age of three or four, even if he
is
my own flesh and blood.”)

I abandon Kagle’s limp for the time being and start around in back of her, observing her closely, through the corner of my eye, trying to see how closely she has been observing me (through the corner of
her
eye). She is not wearing her girdle (which is normally a reliable sign that she is in a cordial mood). The round-shouldered colored maid we have now is concealing herself in a far corner of our large kitchen, working noiselessly over a black wooden salad bowl we bought from a different round-shouldered colored woman in Jamaica during a vacation there. She is afraid of me (I think, and I am afraid of her). My wife stands at the stove, stirring red wine into a pan of dark meat that might be chicken livers or chunks of beef. The bottle of wine is more than half empty (or less than half full. Ha, ha). I move behind my wife very carefully toward a glass and some ice cubes (although I am tempted to shout
Olé
! when I think of my Cuban), and I try my best to Temember on what terms she and I parted this morning, or went to sleep last night, in order to know if she is still angry with me for something I did or didn’t say or do that I am no longer even aware of.

Is she mad or is she glad? I can’t remember. And I am unable to tell. So I remain on guard. I bend a bit nearer to her with a cracker and rolled anchovy and perceive suddenly that she is neither mad
nor
glad. It will make not the slightest difference to her whether we parted on good terms or bad, because she has forgotten too.

She has been drinking again, and I can tell, from her downcast look of furtive uncertainty, that
she
also is trying to recall whether we are friends tonight or not. (Am
I
mad or am I glad?) She is waiting for some sign from me. (Am I mad at her for something she said or did wrong or glad with her because she didn’t?) I don’t know why she is so afraid of me when I am so afraid of her. She is rigid and alert, contrite already (for what? God knows), tense as a bowstring as she stirs her simmering pan and hopes that I’m not angry with her for something
she
did or didn’t say or do that
she
is unable to remember. It’s almost enough to make me laugh.

“You’re right,” I say, just to get things going for both of us.

“About what?”

“Kagle,” I say, and feign Kagle’s limp for one step. “We had a few drinks.”

“I’m glad they put you in a good mood.”

The maid takes it all in spookily with averted eyes. My apprehensions gone, I move to my wife’s side and kiss her lightly on the cheek. She turns her face up diffidently, still not completely sure. She smells of wine and expensive perfume.

“Hungry?” she asks.

“I will be. Looks good.”

“Let’s hope.”

The maid glides past us to carry the salad bowl into the dining room.

“How is this one working out?” I ask.

“All right,” my wife says. “I had some wine,” she adds hastily. “I was using it to cook the chicken livers with. So I thought I’d better try some to make sure it’s good.”

“Is it good?”

“Good enough.” She smiles. “Do you want some?”

“I’ll have some bourbon.”

“I’ll have more wine.”

“Kids all right?”

“Yes.”

I am off to a fairly good start, I feel, and it may yet turn out that this evening at home will be pleasant. My wife is slightly on the defensive (which will make
things easier for both of us). The children (thank heavens) have not come flying at me with grievances and demands. My daughter is in her room, on the telephone. My boy is in his room, watching television. (The set is on loud and I can hear it.) Neither has been much affected by the fact that I am there, that Daddy is home (and I am vaguely hurt by their neglect. A dog would have greeted me with more love). The maid still seems properly subjugated and gives no indication of any incipient Black rebellion. (We pay her well and treat her courteously, and she is probably more at ease in her position with me than I am in my position with her. I am not totally comfortable having maids.) Derek is not nearby, yawping or whimpering or trying to talk, and the nurse (or governess) we have for him now is not hanging around glaring at us as though he were our fault, as though we
wanted
him that way. (Her job, really, is not to nurse or govern, but to keep herself out of sight, and to keep him out of sight as much as possible, even though he is not disagreeable to look at or have around when he is playing quietly with some brightly colored book or infantile doodad.) They are leaving me be. I have my whiskey. Wife has her wine.

“What did you do today?” I ask routinely (before she can ask me).

“Nothing,” she replies with a shrug, a confession of failure, a penitent admission that another day has been wasted. “Stayed home. Shopped. Rested. I slept.”

“Anybody come over?”

“No.”

That is good, if she is telling the truth, for it means that she has been drinking only wine, and probably no more than a little bit at a time, for too much wine makes her sick. I believe she
is
telling the truth, for I don’t think my wife has learned how to lie to me yet. (My wife doesn’t know how to flirt and doesn’t know how to lie to me.) When she does have something she hopes to conceal, she remains silent about it and hopes I will not inquire. (If I ask, she will always tell me. She doesn’t like to lie.) I cooperate by not prying when I sense she has a secret she wants to
protect. I try to keep away from whatever I think she is trying to hide. I suspect she does the same for me (I suspect she knows a great deal more about me than she discloses). Our conversations, therefore, are largely about nothing, and frequently restrained.

“See you soon,” I say, and start away in back of her with my drink. “I want to read the mail.”

She nods. I pat her softly on the fanny as I pass. She is pleased, grateful, and presses her ungirdled ass back into my hand with a leer of lewd and tipsy delight.

“Later?” she says. “I hope you’re in the mood.”

“You know me,” I laugh.

I’m sorry to see her this way. (It’s not the way she used to be.) I may not love her anymore, but I’ve known her a long time now, and I do not feel like shouting
Olé
.

I’m sorry my wife drinks now in the afternoon, and perhaps takes a drink or two in the morning as well. I try not to say anything to her about it. That would be humiliating, and I would not want her to fear I was going to start bullying her about that, too. Usually, she will use some offhand way of informing me she’s had a little something to drink that afternoon; she met her sister, or the wife of somebody, for lunch or fabric-shopping and had a cocktail or double scotch before coming home, or, as she did just now, she has been cooking with wine. Sometimes she will want to tell me but wait too long and won’t, and I will have the feeling then that she is trembling inside herself, wondering if I have noticed and will criticize. (My wife is afraid of me; I don’t particularly want her that way, but it makes things easier.) At times I pity her.

She has never been drunk in the daytime (she does get drunk at parties and have a good time—although never at any of our own. My wife is a superior hostess), and neither of the children has ever remarked about her drinking at home during the day, so it may be that she has not let them notice. But I remember that she never used to drink at all; I remember that
she never used to flirt. (She never used to swear.) And she is still religious; she goes to church most Sundays and tries to make the rest of us go too. (None of us want to. Once in a while we will, when I decide it’s a small enough way of paying her a favor we owe. She isn’t quite sure about the minister we have now, and neither am I.)

My wife is also starting to learn how to use dirty words (in much the same self-conscious way other women take up painting at an advanced age or enroll in adult education courses in psychology, art history, or Jean-Paul Sartre). She is not much good at that, either. Her
hell
’s and
damn
’s carry too much emphasis, although her
Oh shit
’s have the ring of authority by now. She is not as convincing as the rest of the men and women in our several social groups in the jaded indifference we affect toward obscenity. My fifteen-year-old daughter is already much better than my wife with dirty words. My daughter uses dirty language with us liberally in order to impress us with her intelligence; often, she uses it directly
at
us (especially at my wife), probing to see how far she will be allowed to go. (She’s
not
allowed to go far by me.) And my boy, I can tell, is working up the courage to experiment at home with a dirty word or two. (He isn’t sure what the word
fuck
means, although he knows it’s dirty. He was under the impression
fuck
was the word for sexual intercourse, until I told him it usually wasn’t.)

It is painful for me to recall how my wife was, to know the kind of person she used to be and would have liked to remain, and to see what is happening to her now, as it is painful for me to witness the deterioration of any human being who has ever been dear (or even near) to me, even of chance acquaintances, or total strangers. (A spastic can affect me profoundly, and a person with some other kind of facial or leg paralysis can immobilize me with repugnance. I want to look away. I resent blind people when I see them on the street, grow angry with them for being blind and in danger on the street, and glance about desperately for somebody else to step alongside them before I have to guide them safely
across the intersection or around the unexpected sidewalk obstruction that throws them abruptly into such pathetic confusion. I will not let myself cope with such human distress; I refuse to accept such reality; I dump it all right down into my unconscious and sit on it as hard as I can. Let it all come out in bad dreams if it has to. I forget them anyway as soon as I wake up.) Martha the typist, that young, plain girl in our office who has bad skin and is going crazy, is a total stranger to me and was already well on her way toward going crazy when she was sent upstairs to us by Personnel (to finish going crazy); I am not responsible; I do not know her; I do not know her mother in Iowa who has married again and will not take her back, or her father (if she still has a father), or anyone else among the many people in this world who should be close to her; yet, if I let it, it could break my heart that she is going crazy. I say nothing to her about how I feel (or could feel). But I always speak kindly to her. My manner is undisceming. I try not to let her see I care anything at all about what is happening to her (she might turn to me for help, if she knew I knew), and I try not to let myself care. I try not to let her see I know. (She might not know it yet herself.) It would probably be upsetting for her to learn that everyone around her knew she was going crazy.