Something Happened (60 page)

“No.”

Feet were scuffling on the floor and heels were kicking against the legs of chairs and the bottoms of file cabinets.

“Sure.”

“Come on.”

Clusters of little frightened cries and groans were sounding in her as she tried with all her might to keep her feet and maintain a smiling face. Everyone but me, it seemed, was trying to smile. Images flashed and persisted, returning under layers of each other like double exposures: glimpses of garter snaps, thighs, and stretched eggshell underthings, a masculine,
crawling hand with weeds of curling, black hair on the knuckles moving briefly for a zipper, then covering her lower belly, the pinky hiking her skirt up by the hem.

“Let me go now. I mean it. Please.”

“Uh-uh.”

“I’m coming, Virginia.”

“You’ve got to do it.”

“You said you would.”

“You know that.”

“Not until you do it.”

“No. I won’t. Stop now. Please.”

“No.”

“No.”

“No. Not until you do it. You’ve got to do it with one of us.”

“You’ve got to do it with one of us.”

“Do what?”

“You know.”

“Anything.”

“Just one.”

“Which one?”

“You pick.”

“Just one?”

“Then me. You said you could handle us all, Ginny. Prove it. Why not?”

“You’re lying.”

“You’ll see.”

“Where’s that good time?”

“Be a sport.”

“Be a big sport.”

“Don’t forget that life is short.”

“It’s only human nature after all.”

“When a fellow gets a girl against the wall.”

“Stop that. You’ll break it.”

“Did you ever take it into your head to make money?”

“Just one,” she agreed dubiously. Her nostrils and bloodless lips were flaring and shaking skeptically and pugnaciously. “Remember.”

“Just one.”

“I mean it. I’ll scream. I’ll tell the police.”

“Horseshit. There’s no need to do that.”

“Pick.”

She picked me.

“Him.”

She looked at me for help with plaintive eyes. I thought my knees would buckle.

“Him?”

“Help me,” she said.

Hands pushed me toward her.

“Let her go,” I cried.

“She wants you.”

“We’ll watch.”

“Go outside,” she bargained. “Not while you’re here.”

“No, sir. We want to make sure.”

“It’s a free show.”

“We may have to show him how.”

“You’ll lock us out.”

They were still touching her all over with greedy hands, taking things that did not belong to them.

“Let her go!” I screamed threateningly, in a voice that cracked and must have quavered with hopeless cowardice and resignation. “I mean it.”

(I was her hero.)

My fists were clenched in adolescent fury (and my heart was fluttering in adolescent dismay). They could have beaten me up easily, either one (taken an arm and twisted it, broken it in its socket). I felt faint with misgivings. They stared at me with amazement and scorn. She slipped free of them. I hardly noticed her leave. When I heard the door click closed, I loosened my fists and waited. I did not want to fight. I did not want them to beat me up. I don’t think I would have fought to defend myself. (I would have preferred to succumb. I was like my boy in the play group. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to fight with anyone except my wife, my daughter, my boy, and Derek, and with Derek’s nurses.) I waited to see if they would beat me up.

“You prick,” they said (and I was relieved when I saw they were not going to beat me up. I was being set free). “We could have had her.”

“We’ll get her without him.”

That thought struck pathos into my soul. I was
not allowed to feel like her hero for long. By the time I returned upstairs, she was at her desk chatting with both of them over what had happened, flirting brashly with them again, especially with the tough, coarse, sinewy one she hadn’t liked (mending her torn silk stocking with colorless nail polish, lifting her breasts for him as she had always done for me, tilting her head and tempting him with her ruby, saucy smile. He was a tough, swarthy Italian, like Forgione, and I felt he had just shoved me out of the way again, as he had downstairs. I hated her. My feelings were hurt. I felt she would have fucked for him from that time on sooner than she ever would for me, if he was smart enough to pose and wait—“I’m on my back, he’s in my crack,” was part of another bawdy song she liked to sing to me—even though she still liked me better), and I felt pangs of jealousy. (What good did it amount to, being liked, if she wanted to fuck for people she didn’t like?)

“You were jealous,” she said. “Weren’t you?”

I must have been gazing at her moon-eyed with all the pain of my broken heart flooding into my expression. I have never been able to cope with jealousy. (I wish someone would teach me how.) It leaves me weak and at a loss for honest words. I can’t make jokes. My eyes water and I want to cry. (Marie Jencks would accuse me of staring at her like a mooncalf. Perhaps I did, especially after I found out about her and Tom in the storeroom. I wanted to be absorbed into her embraces also. I didn’t like feeling left outside. I still do stare at girls who are attractive, and look away quickly if they stare back. Today, I chuck brassy, overpowering women of twenty-eight like Marie Jencks under the chin nimbly and pass them by with a half-hearted falsehood. Today, girls of twenty-eight don’t try to boss me around. Derek’s nurses do.) Other men go berserk with jealousy and fly into Herculean rages. I produce tears.

I was never jealous of her and Len Lewis. (I felt he should be jealous of me.)

“He wants to leave his wife,” she confided about him. “He used to think I was too young. By now I’ve showed him I’m old enough. I like him, he’s so
shy. I like older men. I like younger men too. It’s the ones in between I have trouble with. I don’t like football players anymore. Maybe I do. Now I can teach
them
a few things.”

“Teach me.”

“Get a room.”

“I’ve got no money.”

“I’ll chip in.”

“Where do you go?”

They went to empty restaurants for dinner one evening a week, sometimes two, and then sat in his car awhile and talked and petted. He lived far out in Queens and had to start back early. He didn’t drink. She was teaching him how.

“He enjoys it. I make him feel young.”

“How?”

“I kiss him very softly and slowly like this … all over his face for a long time. Then I do it harder and faster. I breathe hard. He thinks I can’t control myself. I like doing that to him. He says nobody ever kissed him the way I do.”

“I’ll bet he’s right.”

“I’ll bet nobody ever kissed you the way I can.”

“Do it now.”

“His wife wouldn’t know how. He’s never had a modern girl friend. I slip my hands inside his shirt and rub my fingers against his chest. His hair is soft and curly. Like a kitten. Nobody ever did that to him before. He’s fifty-five years old. I tickle him with my tongue. Soon I’ll let him touch these.”

“Come outside.”

“He doesn’t know I’ll let him if he wants to. I talk a little dirty to him. He likes it. So do you. Don’t you like my nipples? If you’d go slow once in a while, you’d see how pointy and hard they get. I like to talk dirty too. I love to say words like nipples, pointy, and hard. And tongue.”

I had my hard-on again.

“Come outside.”

“Well, hello, dear,” she greeted, winking at it. “Good to see you again.”

I reached for an accident folder with one hand
and slid the other into the side pocket of my trousers. I blushed with pleasure.

She grinned, pleased with her prowess, widening her eyes with mock astonishment and pursing her lips into an open pink circle of admiration and surprise. I know now what that open circle was intended to suggest. (I’ve seen it since on gorgeous faces of photographers’ models in the best fashion magazines.) I didn’t believe then that girls really did such things (although I’d seen comic-strip drawings). Now I know they do and I’m glad. I love it more than ice cream. (I am anaclitic, I guess, when I’m not sadistically aggressive. When the telephone rings at home, I want someone else to answer it.) You can’t get good ice cream anymore. (Everything is getting worse or going away.
The Woman’s Home Companion is gone
, and so is
The Saturday Evening Post
, and
Look
and
Life
, and soon even
Time
may run out for all of us as well. Colleges are going into bankruptcy. Restaurants I like are closing.) It tastes like gum and chalk. Virginia was peaches, strawberries, and cream with touches of rouge on her ripe, lustrous cheeks. She shaped her lipstick often by pressing her mouth together. Her legs were smooth and glistening in unruffling silk stockings, and even her somewhat chubby feet seemed rich and sweet as butter compressed into her shiny tight shoes with their high spiked heels. Women wore shiny black pumps with high spiked heels when I was young, and evil-looking, skinny men were unshaven and wore loose black socks in the dirty movies I saw. (Penny and other girls make me take my socks off for just that reason. My wife never saw any of these movies and doesn’t. I often leave them on with her as a ruse. I am an evil-looking, skinny man in an old dirty movie, and I am defiling her. My wife has no idea that she is a character actress in a dirty movie of mine. She may, however, for all I know, be the leading performer in one of her own.)

Dirty movies have gotten better, I’m told. Smut and weaponry are two areas in which we’ve improved. Everything else has gotten worse. The world is winding down. You can’t get good bread anymore even in
good restaurants (you get commercial rolls), and there are fewer good restaurants. Melons don’t ripen, grapes are sour. They dump sugar into chocolate candy bars because sugar is cheaper than milk. Butter tastes like the printed paper it’s wrapped in. Whipped cream comes in aerosol bombs and isn’t whipped and isn’t cream. People serve it, people eat it. Two hundred and fifty million educated Americans will go to their graves and never know the difference. (I wish I could get my hands on a good charlotte russe again.) That’s what Paradise is—never knowing the difference. Even fancy bakeries now use a substitute for whipped cream that looks more like whipped cream than whipped cream does, keeps its color and texture longer, doesn’t spoil, and costs much less, yielding larger profits.

“It tastes like shit.”

It tastes like shit. Nobody cares but me. From sea to shining sea the country is filling with slag, shale, and used-up automobile tires. The fruited plain is coated with insecticide and chemical fertilizers. Even pure horseshit is hard to come by these days. They add preservatives. You don’t find fish in lakes and rivers anymore. You have to catch them in cans. Towns die. Oil spills. Money talks. God listens. God is good, a real team player. “America the Beautiful” isn’t: it was all over the day the first white man set foot on the continent to live. The Fuggers were all right as long as they stayed in Germany: then they sent their mothers here. Depreciating motels, junked automobiles, and quick-food joints grow like amber waves of grain. The faces of the rich and the poor age from nativity into the same cramped, desiccated lines of meanness and discontent. Women look like their husbands. God had no computer. He had to use clay, which was hard to work with, and a human rib, which was a little easier. God was just and fairly ambitious, but in a rudimentary way. He had to use the flood once (He couldn’t think of smog or nerve gas) and fire and brimstone. People between rich and poor radiate uneasiness. They don’t know where they belong. I hear America singing fuck off.

The peregrine falcon is just about gone (done in
by DDT. The shells of the eggs laid by the female, of course, grew too thin to survive incubation without cracking). The hot dog is going too. Soon there’ll be no more whales; my wife and I will just have to make do without them. The good old American hot dog is filled with water, chicken innards, and cereal (the same cereal they divert from bread and rolls and replace with synthetics and additives). Mom’s apple pie is frozen. Mom went public several years ago. There is no Pa. She did it with gas.

“He did it with gas,” she told me about her father, when I could bring myself to ask. “The rest of us were away in the country for the summer. He did it all alone in the garage in his car. I’ll never forget it. I didn’t want to go to the funeral. I heard somebody say he turned all red. My mother made me. I’ve always hated my mother for the way she treated him. ‘Look what he did to me,’ she kept wailing all week long to whoever would listen. I don’t like to talk about her.”

She did it with gas also, in the kitchen of her mother’s house in New Jersey, which was most inconsiderate of her, since we had better ways of killing ourselves by then. We had plastic bags. (Last night, my wife had another one of her bad dreams. I didn’t wake her. Afterward, after all the smothered moaning and spastic shuddering, she began to snore lightly, and I did wake her, to tell her she was snoring and complain she was not letting me sleep. She apologized penitently in a drowsy, cranky voice and turned over on her side while I looked at her ass. I smiled and slept well.) She was no longer at the office when I telephoned on my first furlough home after returning from overseas. Ben Zack told me. She was no longer on the premises. (Neither was I. Ben Zack didn’t know who I was. I keep the old codger guessing.) She was no longer on the payroll. Whoever was at the switchboard had never heard of her (has still not, probably, heard of me) and gave me Ben Zack, who
was
still on the payroll in the Personal Injury Department as an assistant to Len Lewis, who was still there then too.

“Virginia Markowitz?” Ben Zack repeated in a
tone of bemused surprise. “Oh, yeah. Didn’t you know?”

“What?”

I didn’t tell him who I was but felt he could see me anyway. I told him I was an old college friend of hers from Duke University, a football player, and wanted to get in touch with her. That last part was true. I was an officer. I had wings, and I wanted her to see them. I wanted to station myself erect before her in my uniform and suntan and exclaim: