Something Happened (20 page)

“You were reading a magazine,” my wife remarks.

“You too?” I jeer.

“We’re going.”

“This
is
my study,” I remind her caustically (and desperately) in a surly, rising voice, as she turns to leave. “Isn’t it? And now that I think of it, just what the hell are both of you doing in here right now—in
my
study—when I’ve got so many important things I want to get done?”

“Which is more important?” my wife makes the mistake of asking. “Your own wife and daughter, or those other important things?”

“Please get out,” I answer. “That’s the kind of question I never want to be asked again the rest of my life.”

“All right. We’ll go.”

“So go.”

“Come on.”

“No, stay!” I blurt out suddenly at both of them.

“We’re going.”

“You stay!” I demand.

“Aren’t we?”

(All at once, it is of obsessive importance to me—more important to me now than anything else in the whole world—that
they
stay, and that
I
be the one who is driven out. Out of
my
study. My eyes fill with tears; I don’t know why; they are tears not of anger but of injured pride. It’s a tantrum, and I am obliged to give myself up to it unresistingly.)

“
I’ll
go!” I cry, as both of them stare at me in bafflement. I stride toward the door with tears of martyred grief. “And stop sneaking these extra chairs in,” I add, with what sounds like a sniffle.

“What?”

“You know what I mean. And all of you always take all my pencils and never bring them back.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Whenever you redecorate. This God-damned house. You dump chairs in here. As though I won’t notice.”

My wife is bewildered. And I am pleased. (I am enjoying my fit exquisitely. I am still a little boy. I am a deserted little boy I know who will never grow older and never change, who goes away and then comes back. He is badly bruised and very lonely. He is thin. He makes me sad whenever I remember him. He is still alive, yet out of my control. This is as much as he ever became. He never goes far and always comes back. I can’t help him. Between us now there is a cavernous void. He is always nearby.) And when I whirl away again exultantly to storm out, leaving my silent wife and daughter standing there, in
my
study, at such a grave moral disadvantage, I see my son watching in the doorway. And I stamp on him before I can stop.

“Ow!” he wails.

“Oh!” I gasp.

He has been waiting there stealthily, taking everything in.

“It’s okay!” he assures me breathlessly.

Clutching his foot, hopping lamely on the other, he shrinks away from me against the doorjamb, as though I had stepped on him on purpose, and intend to step on him again.

“Did I hurt you?” I demand.

“It’s
okay
.”

“But did I hurt you? I’m sorry.”

“It’s
okay!
I mean it. It doesn’t hurt!”

“I didn’t mean to step on you. Then why are you rubbing your ankle?”

“Because you hurt me a little bit. Before. But it’s okay now. I mean it. Really, it’s okay.” (He is supplicating anxiously for me to believe he is okay, pleading with me to stop pulverizing him beneath the crushing weight of my overwhelming solicitude. “Leave me alone—please!” is what I realize he is actually screaming at me fiercely, and it slashes me to the heart to acknowledge that. I take a small step back.) “See?” he asks timorously, and demonstrates.

He puts his foot to the floor and tests it gingerly, proving to me he is able to stand without holding on. I see a minute bruise on the surface of his skin, a negligible, white scrape left by the edge of my shoe, a tiny laceration of the dermatological tissue covering the ankle, no injury of any seriousness. (He is probably the only person in the world for whom I would do almost anything I could to shield from all torment and harm. Yet I fail continually; I can’t seem to help him, I do seem to harm him. Things happen to him over which I have no power and of which I am often not even aware until the process has been completed and the damage to him done. In my dreams sometimes he is in mortal danger, and I cannot move quickly enough to save him. My thighs weigh tons. My feet are anchored. He perishes, but the tragedy, in my dreams, is always mine. In real life, he is suffering already from secret tortures he is reluctant to divulge, and from so many others he is unable to comprehend and describe. He is afraid of war and crime. Anyone in uniform intimidates him. He is afraid of stealing: he is afraid to steal anything and afraid of having things stolen from him.) He seems out of breath and waxen with fright as he stands below me now watching me stand there watching him (the delicate oval pods beneath his eyes are a pathological blue), and he is trembling in such violent consternation as he waits for me to do something that it seems he must certainly shake himself into broken little pieces if I don’t reach out instantly to hold him together. (I don’t reach out. I have that sinking, intuitive feeling again that if I do put my hand out toward him, he will think I am going to hit him and fall back from me in dread. I don’t know why he feels so often that I am going
to hit him when I never do; I never have; I don’t know why both he and my daughter believe I used to beat them a great deal when they were smaller, when I don’t believe I ever struck either one of them at all. My boy can hurt me in so many ways he doesn’t suspect and against which I have no strength to defend myself. Or maybe he does suspect. And does do it with motive. When I think of him, I think of me.) And I know why he is quaking now, squirming awkwardly and plucking nervously and obliviously at the small bulge of penis inside his pants as though he is tingling to urinate. I know I must have seemed enormous to him as I spun wrathfully to storm away and stamped down blindly upon him. I must have seemed inhuman, gigantic, like that monstrous, dark hairy, splayfooted tyrant (that flying cock elsewhere is not the only fur-bearing blot) on that ugly father-card in the Rorschach test.

“Then what are you looking so unhappy about?” I want to know timidly. “If it doesn’t hurt.”

“Your yelling.”

“I’m not yelling.”

“You
were
yelling. Before.”

“I’m not yelling now. I wasn’t even yelling at
you
,” I argue with comic fervor, trying to appease him. I want to make
him
smile too. (I can’t stand to see him upset, particularly when I am the cause. I smother furious impulses against him when he fails to be as fully content with life and me as I would like him to be.) “Was I?”

“No,” he replies without hesitation, twisting in one place again (as though he would like to wrest his feet free from the floor and fly away) and patting his knees spasmodically with fluttering palms. “But you’re
going
to yell at me,” he guesses cagily, with a gleam of insight in his eyes. “Aren’t you?”

“No, no, no, no,” I assure him. “I’m not going to yell at you.”

“You will. I know you will.”

“I won’t. Why should I yell at you?”

“You see? I told you.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re yelling already.”

“I’m not yelling!”

“Ain’t he yelling?”

“I don’t think he knows
what
he’s doing.”

“That’s good,” I compliment my wife acidly. “That will cool things down.”

“You know you’re impossible?” she answers. “Whenever you get this way.”

“I’m possible.”

“He’s possible,” my daughter intones ruefully.

“Are you going to yell at me now?” my boy asks.

“I’m not going to yell at you at all,” I tell him. “I was speaking loudly only to be
emphatic
,” I explain to him almost in a whisper, forcing myself to smile and imposing on my words a scrupulous and conciliatory calm. I squat to my heels directly in front of him, bringing my face almost to a level with his own, and look instructively into his eyes. He lets me take his hands. Tissues inside his hands, I feel, are beating and lurching like little fishes. (Everybody in my family trembles at home but me, even though I don’t want them to. I brood and sulk and moan a good deal and wish I were someplace else. I tremble elsewhere. At the office. In my sleep. Alone at airports waiting for planes. In unfamiliar hotel rooms in cities I don’t like, unless I drink myself sodden and have some girl or woman I can stand who is able to spend most of the night with me. I don’t like being alone at night and always leave a small light on when I have to be. Being dead tired doesn’t help; in fact, exhaustion is worse, for I don’t sleep any sounder and my defenses are low and laggard. Repulsive thoughts swarm over them and invade my mind like streams of lice or other small, beetle-brown, biting insects or animals, and I am slow to choke them off and force them back down where they came from. There is this animal, I sometimes imagine, that creeps up on paws in the night when my eyes are closed and eats at my face—but that’s another childish story. My dreams are demoralizing. I won’t reveal them. I have castration fears. I have castration dreams. I had a dream once of my mother with black mussels growing on her legs, and now I know what it meant.) “Please don’t be afraid of me,” I urge him tenderly,
almost begging. “I’m not going to do anything to hurt you or scare you. Now or ever.”

“It’s okay,” he says, trying to comfort me.

“You can trust me. I’m not yelling at you now, am I? I’m speaking softly. Ain’t I?”

He nods mistrustfully (and I want to raise my voice and begin yelling at him again to make him believe I never yell at him at all. But I don’t. I don’t want to scare him again. I don’t ever really want to frighten any of them and am always sorry and disgusted with myself afterward when I do. Almost always. But only
after
I succeed in bullying them; if I try to bully them and fail, I am distraught. And frightened. I am sorry now that I have just intimidated them all; and in speaking to my boy, I am trying to apologize to my wife and daughter as well. I want them to see I am sorry; but I don’t want to say so. I want to be forgiven).

“Why do you look that way?” I ask him, in a troubled, slightly nagging voice (pleading with him to relax and feel free and safe and happy with me). “Why do you look so worried?”

“It’s okay.”

“You can trust me,” I promise.

“It’s just the way I look.”

“And I wasn’t yelling at you before, either,” I continue uncontrollably. “Sometimes when a person raises his voice and speaks loudly, it isn’t because he’s yelling at you or even angry, but only because he wants you to believe what he’s saying. He does it for … 
emphasis
. He wants to be … 
emphatic
. That’s what the word
emphatic
means.” I pause in annoyance as I see my boy catch my daughter’s eyes for an instant and then roll his gaze upward with a dramatic look of tedium (as both my children are apt to do ostentatiously when one of us is lecturing them at length for doing something we deem hazardous, or inundating them with unnecessary directions or repetitious questions. I would rather have him bored with me now and making fun than panic-stricken. So I continue peaceably, persuasively, instead of reprimanding him tartly, although my dignity
was
offended for a second). “Now that’s what I was doing
when I raised my voice a bit before,” I continue. “I was being … 
emphatic
. I wanted you to believe that I wasn’t going to yell at you and that I wasn’t angry with you. And it was exactly the same when I was speaking with them,” I lie. “I wasn’t yelling at them, either.”

“I know,” he says. “I know it now.”

“And I’m not yelling at you now, am I?”

“No.”

“So I was right, wasn’t I?”

“Yes. It’s okay.”

“Good. I’m glad you understand. And that’s why …” I conclude wryly, with a smile—and some-how I know he guesses the joke I’m about to make and that he is going to interrupt and make it for me. I pause, to give him time.

“… you yelled at me!” he says.

“Right!” I guffaw.

(Our minds are very much alike, his and mine, in our humor and our forebodings.)

“Do
I
,” he ventures ahead boldly on his wave of success, with a sidelong glance at my wife that glitters with impish intent, “give you a pain in the ass, too?”

“Oh, my!” I exclaim. (My first impulse is to guffaw again; my next is to protect him from any sanctimonious reproof that might come from my wife for his using the word
ass
. Quickly, clowning, laughing, mugging with grossly burlesqued alarm, before my wife can react at all, I cry:) “Now,
she’s
going to yell at you!”

“She’s not!”

“No?”

“Are you?”

But my wife is glad (not mad) and laughs merrily with relief (because she sees I am glad now, too, and not mad at her or my daughter anymore).

“No, but you’re a devil and a rascal,” she upbraids him affectionately. “Because
you knew
I wouldn’t yell at you this time if you said that word.”

“What word?” asks my boy, with a feigned look of innocence. “Ass?”

“Don’t say it again!”

“Ass?”

“You’re
not
going to make
me
say it!”

“What? Ass?” asks my daughter, joining in friskily.

“I give up.” My wife throws her arms out mirthfully in exasperation. “What am I going to do with them?”

“Say ass,” I advise.

“Ass!” my wife blares obligingly, extending her face out toward both of them like an elephant’s trunk. They roar with gulping laughter. “Ass! Ass, ass, ass, ass, ass!”

All of them are laughing hysterically now.

My daughter is unable to keep her balance in the sweeping exhilaration she experiences at finding herself released so unexpectedly, without penalty, from the excoriating conflict she had devised and in which she had so swiftly found herself the tortured victim. She falls against my boy joyously; they hug each other with immense delight and go staggering wildly all about my study, bumping into us and each other and into the superfluous chairs my wife keeps sneaking in when she has no better place to put them. My boy is pleased with himself beyond measure, beside himself with glee and ecstasy at having used his dirty word with impetuous imagination and gotten away with it and at having transported us all to a spirit of warmth and generous good feeling from the savage rancor with which we had been smashing each other. We are close now, intimate, respectful, and informal. The children bump and hug each other and continue to laugh hilariously. I watch them with affection (feeling complacent and benign). I am glad they are mine.