Something Happened

by Джозеф Хеллер

  I can't fall in love. That's probably what holds my marriage together. If I didn't have this wife, I would have another. It's lots of trouble to leave. I don't like to be alone. Red Parker needs a wife and ought to marry one fast before I have to fire him. I guess there's really not much more one can do easily with a human dick than what we have been doing. Everything else stinks or hurts. So much of the quality of response seems a matter of chance. In the army, I would rent my girls by the hour and go three-and-a-half times in those sixty minutes — I got bargains leasing them that way — that final half time signaling a valorous raising of my standard as I made ready to ride off. I'd win applause, even from blondes from Bologna, for my virile performances and for my good looks and lean, firm, sun-tanned body. I used to be lean, and hungry. I had appetites. I used to have a full head of hair. I had strong teeth. I once had tonsils. We scarcely need them at all. I know I've had wet dreams that were more delicious and satisfying than anything I've experienced at complicated orgies I've attended in London, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles, and much less trouble. My wife would like me to take her along on business trips to Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Chicago, San Francisco, and New Orleans. She thinks I get laid there. I usually do; I feel the country, the company, and society expect me to. I usually don't enjoy it. I enjoy the local newspapers more. I remember wondering when I was finally able to do it the first time, even as I was doing it, if that's all there was to it. There was more, I learned the second time, and still is, there is enough to launch me into unrestrainable fervors all over again — even now I'll rape my wife, only my wife, force her at times when she doesn't want to and I feel I have to have it from her at once; but there's no sublime relationship, no reciprocal contact; like a mad chemist, I knew I was carrying the whole magical process and potential along with me like a pair of bubbling retorts inside my head and my vesicles. If my balls ever exploded, I knew it would not be because of a female; the mixtures inside me would have made up their own independent mind to detonate. They would not consult even me. Bang! They would decide to go. They do look queer to me still, hairier than me, many of them. Some look like Van Dykes, and these I'm tempted to tug. Others have sideburns and shock me a moment like card number eight on the Rorschach test again. I was struck speechless when that damned color shock card appeared. I was stupefied. Others vegetate profusely with more rotund and corpulent growths of wiry foliage and look like Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, or Joseph Conrad. They affect me too. I sometimes want to quail. Will my wife turn white? She'll have to. So will I. We have adenoids and vesicles and never get to see them while they're alive. I think a good ear-nose-and-throat man today doesn't dirty his fingers much with them either. His skill lies in popping his head into the hospital room afterward to tell us everything went well — that's all he does and leaves the whole gory, grisly, repelling procedure to his Oriental anesthetist and ambitious apprentices. Why should he be disgusted? By now I'm used to the way my wife looks.

  "How was New Orleans?"

  "Dull."

  "You should have brought me along."

  "There was nothing to do."

  "I'd have given you things to do. You know how hot I get in a place like that. What'd you bring me back?"

  "Clap."

  "Good."

  My wife is usually much better for me than most. Only Penny does it with a consistent, keen, unbearable beauty every single time and has me begging her helplessly to stop, my eyes blind and my mouth glutting incoherently with babbles, giggles, gasps, and spasms. Penny knows where to hit and strikes like an eagle. She knows exactly how much longer it's safe to go on after I feel positively I will die in pieces if she continues at all. And I'm glad she goes on. Penny makes it dance like an angel and sprint like a whippet every single time. I comprehend then why owners and whole cultures have worshiped it. It's an ironic master-servant association: I am the master; she serves me by reducing me to a writhing, pleading blob of chaotic, giggling blackness and a single burning nerve that cuts like a blade. I think I whimper with hilarity. I'm not sure what noises I make as I wait for my vision to recover and my power to speak to reassemble. I would not want anybody else in the world to see me that way, in the collapsed state of what is called ecstasy. I would not want to be photographed. She gives me scotch and makes hot coffee for me afterward. Penny has a hazel muff, with no scraggly hairs migrating and never any surprises or disappointments. I do not phone her much anymore), motorists driving at high speed swerve out of their way deliberately to kill nutrias dazed by their headlights standing hypnotized in the service lanes at the sides of the highway. In the morning, there are too many furry, dead bodies to count lying along the road from Hammond into New Orleans. Seen quickly from certain angles they look like cozy muffs. Seen from others, they look like crushed wild animals with bloody beaks and talons. During the morning, I suppose, local fur trappers arrive in pickup trucks to remove the bodies for their valuable pelts. This is called hunting. (Other people, I think, might veer away to avoid killing an animal, even a sleeping frog.)

  (Man is a carnivore, a swift, accurate, rapacious hunter, and he ought never try to compete with the electric vibrator. It tires you out, and there isn't a chance of winning. Ask a girl who owns one.)

  Green was right about Jane too.

  I have stopped flirting with Jane (what would I do with her afterward?) and started flirting platonically with Laura, Arthur Baron's secretary (which makes a much better impression). Laura is older and unhappily married. She is highly regarded by everyone but her husband, who is three years younger than she and perhaps homosexual, and my attentions are clearly friendly and humanitarian (although she does have a thick ass I think now and then I might like to toss over onto my lap and paddle bare with stinging, tingling noises. It's good I don't try, for I forget how heavy she'd be, and I would risk a hernia or slipped spinal disk. If I did that once to someone, I might want to do it always — and then I would be a pervert. Girls would talk about me unfavorably to their friends. I think I feel that way too about stuttering. I think I may want to stutter. What a liberating release it might be from the lifelong, rigorous discipline of speaking correctly. I'd feel tongue-tied and free. I might spank and stutter at the same time. I feel I might never want to stop once I started and would let my tongue wobble as it wanted to for the rest of my life and never have to say anything intelligible to anyone again. I would lose my job. I would lose my wife and friends. I don't have close friends anymore. I have friends, but I don't feel close to them. Some feel close to me. Red Parker is my friend, and I don't feel close to him). I really don't know how I would have disposed of Jane after taking her to bed with me in Red Parker's apartment early one evening probably after cocktails. She's only twenty-four. I can't imagine what in the world I would want to talk to her about once we no longer had to talk about going to bed. She's probably too young to understand there'd be nothing personal in the enmity and disgust I'd feel toward her afterward and in my never wanting to see or speak to her again. That's happened to me before. She'd probably conclude it had something to do with her. I'd have her lovely blue eyes fastened upon me in wondering, repentant apology. I could not say to her outright — I like her too much for:

  "Nothing — nothing — nothing, dammit. You didn't do anything wrong. It has nothing at all to do with you. You aren't important enough to affect me. Don't you see?"

  That might hurt her feelings too.

  I would have to overcompensate with pleasantries and consideration: I might even have to lay her again, just because I'm a real nice guy. That's happened before too. (Or I might tell her my wife is undergoing tests for cancer and win some pity for myself that way. I've done that before also.) It's why I don't like to get involved with girls in the same office anymore. They're there. (If only she worked somewhere else. I could use her often these days. But then I might not have her.) She would have Red Parker to contend with. (I've already told him I was thinking of laying her. He's already told me he's thinking of following me.) He hurts hi
s women sometimes; he hits them now. He'll get in trouble. The funniest part is that he really did not like his wife while she was alive and expected she would throw him out and ask for a divorce. He did not expect her to die in an automobile accident and leave him with three temperamental children. He tries to keep them away in boarding school. One or the other is always coming home. He doesn't know what else to do with them except send them away to boarding school in the winter and to his wife's relatives, camp, or on group journeys in the summer. Parker's got money too, and so does his wife's family. He used to have stronger connections in the company. He goes with prostitutes too now. I've caught him in bed with two at one time (two on one with him also? Is everyone but me doing it?), one of them white and one of them dark.

  "Come on in buddy," he invited convivially, and started to move from the bed. "I'll go eat."

  Both naked girls waited for me with blank, phlegmatic smiles. The white one had a sore on her jaw that looked bleached with calamine lotion. I left.

  I have stopped using Red Parker's apartment in the city and no longer go to his noisy cocktail parties there on the chance of striking it lucky with one of the large number of girls he is still able to persuade to attend. (I have made out well more times than I can remember with girls I've met through Red. I met Penny through Red and still have her. And soon I will have to fire him or design some gentler means of getting rid of him. Like an antiquated building with white X's on the front, he must be demolished shortly. He has a naturally disrespectful way with women I've always envied. It's effective. They mean nothing to him; they mean dramatic things to me. It's really hard to be indifferent laying somebody new the first time. His girls have gotten older, though, blowsy, thicker about the waist and chin. But so, for that matter, have he and I. His wizened cheeks are veinous jowls now, and his lips are blistered. He chortles as much as ever, as though his wife were not dead and his job not in jeopardy. He heh-heh-hehs a lot now too. He's been warned by Kagle. The apartment is garish and sleazy. Furniture is stained and needs cleaning and upholstering. Will it be with someone like him that my wife decides to cheat on me? I hope not. I would like it at least to be with someone I can look up to, a man to whom she'll mean a little more than just another married piece of ass. I'd hate her to do it with that arrogant, obstreperous, bad-mannered, flamboyant type. I am that type. I would not like them to think I am married to just another piece of ass.) The last time in town I took my wife to a big room at an expensive hotel. My wife loves it in expensive hotels. So do I. There's something about my own wife in a luxurious hotel that beats everything else in the world.

  "I'll fuck like a racehorse in a room like this," she glories, a vibrant strumpet lying eager for more as soon as I'm ready to supply it. "Don't I?"

  "Ride, racehorse."

  "You jockey me."

  "Or I'll whip you some more."

  "Do what you want, darling."

  "Stop talking so much."

  "Put me in a bed in a hotel like this and I feel I can fuck the whole world."

  "Put your knees up."

  "Oh, good. God. Goodness gracious, deary me,"

  My damned dumb wife still can't remember to put her knees up after all these years — and she feels she is ready to fuck the whole world.

  I wonder what I would feel like if my wife ever did come home smelling of another man's semen. I think I would die a sudden, shriveling death inside. (Would it excite me?) I would wither and curl up inside my skin and spend the rest of my dull, spiritless life hiding my dead, small self inside a head and torso now many sizes too large. I would pray my wife and children would let me keep it secret. (I'm not sure what other men's semen smells like, unless it smells like my own. I'd guess it smells of sweat and hair. I've caught the scent of sweat and hair on my wife a hundred times when she's not had time to wash and change before I plant my perfunctory kiss on her cheek, but it's only sweat and hair, I think.) She does not guess what I'm thinking as my eyes examine her critically these days. (It would not excite me.) It would fill me with saddest resignation and lifelong self-disgust. Judgment will have been rendered against me by her and someone else behind another closed door I did not know was even there, and the judgment will be irreversible. I hope it will not be with someone crass and repellent like Andy Kagle or Red Parker. I would not want their hands or fluids on her. (Someone like Green might be better for me.) Sometimes on my train ride home from work — I even have trouble sleeping when commuting — I have the clairvoyant certainty I am going to catch her that very day within the next forty-five minutes, and just that way: by a stain. She'll hurry into the house after I do, dinner will be late reaching the table, and there it will be, that smudge, that stain on her slip, her belly, her skirt. The details of sequence are disorderly — but they won't matter. I will not be able to say anything in the dining room because of the children. Later, I will not be able to say anything anyway. I will not want her to know I know (and hope she doesn't make a point of telling me. I would have to do something if she knows I found out, and there'd be nothing I'd really want to. I would even have to fake the anger and unhappiness I was experiencing. I could not let it emerge so vulnerably. It would be easier for me to rot and decompose in hidden torment for the rest of my life than to let her see how cruelly she hurt me and how easily she could do it again every time she chose. I do not want her to). I must never let her see I care.

  "I love my wife, but, oh, you kid."

  I am not as big a shot as she and the children think I am (but must not let them find that out). I have horrendous visions of her being felt up greedily on packed subway trains, and enjoying it, and my wife doesn't even have to ride the subway trains. Penny does. A man came on her dress in the rush hour during the summer. She didn't know it until she was off the train and the fingers holding her pocketbook brushed against the sticky substance on the back of her hip. I began in a random glob shot like that and will end, if I'm lucky, decaying like Red Parker with white-washed X's splashed across my eyes and a sign on my chest or forehead reading: COMING DOWN SOON. FORGIONE DEMOLITION CO. While Negro junkies, winos, and dealers in stolen wallets, cameras, and wristwatches hang out in my squalid, dimly lit hallways.)

  "I knew it was either that or phlegm," Penny told me with a snorting laugh she has I often find grating. "And no one was doing any coughing. Was I ever embarrassed. Imagine the nerve."

  I can't.

  I miss my mother, sister, and brother more and more often lately and regret we did not remain closer as a family when we were all still together. On balmy evenings in spring and summer, my mother would send down to the drugstore for a container of bulk ice cream, and we would eat it together. She let me get it when I grew big enough to go. We liked strawberry best of all, and it was good. Sometimes we had strawberry mixed with vanilla.

  I don't think I have ever had a homosexual experience that counted. I was molested twice as a child, once by an older boy, but I don't think that counted. The other time was by an older girl in the same apartment house who pretended to wrestle with me but was really intent on giving me an erection and feeling it bounce against her. That does count because it felt so nice. I was lucky. I was eager to have her do it to me again and lurked around her optimistically.

  She didn't. Poor me. It's hard to believe one can experience such acute sensitivity and still be unable to come. How does it end? We can't remember. It peters out. Penny never has to be reminded to put her legs up and keeps them up for the longest time without complaining of aches or strains. She's good. She takes dancing lessons still (which might help), along with her singing lessons and exercise classes. At age thirty-two, she still wants to be Shirley Temple. For a little while last spring I had a nice-looking, slightly nutty, twenty-six-year-old, tall, ex-college kid from Ann Arbor, Michigan, I met at an office Christmas party who would start to come as soon as we began and raise her legs from feet to hips straight up toward the ceiling for as long as it took. I liked that: I liked her quick response and that feel of ass a
gainst my knees; it let me think I was getting away with something extra. She made shrill noises and I would have to muffle her mouth. (It was soon very tiresome listening to her. I do not think of it as doing something together and don't believe anyone else really does, either.) She got to be a nuisance and a bore. She had spare time. She's the one that made fun of my garters. I could not brook such churlish insolence to the Slocum name from such a woozy upstart (she did take drugs, which made her even more vapid still), and I began to snub and neglect her. I played on her ignorance and provincialism. (She really knew almost nothing.) She thought it was beautiful.