Something Happened

by Джозеф Хеллер

  I'd recognize now that she was slightly crazy and likely to kill herself too when the brazen euphoria ran out. (She would not know how to subsist without it.) I'd also understand she was moody and that much of her exuberance was forced. I think Penny might kill herself without much fuss a few years from now if something engrossing and lasting doesn't happen to her soon — I can't help much. She knows now I won't marry her if my wife dies or if I get a divorce. I don't get close to her anymore. I come and go, ha, ha — and I think my wife will probably kill herself also when the children grow up and move away if I've left also. Maybe Derek will keep her going if we haven't sent him away by then. (The kid might come in handy for me that way too. He'll be older, though, and won't be a kid.) I wish we could do that soon. (I won't want him when he's older.) When I go, I won't look back for a second. I won't even want them to have my phone number. I'd like to change cities. Except my boy, and maybe not even him. He'll change. I'm not sure how much longer I'll want him to talk to me. If I am ever in a hospital, I will not want any of them to pay me visits and add to my distress (and I have told them so. Except my boy. I may miss him and worry he's worrying too much about me. I will be lying there dying or recuperating with a tube in my nose like a tortured political prisoner, and they will want me to make them feel better. I will not want her sister. I will not be able to keep her sister out. My small secretary will send a get-well card. And I will have to thank her). I should have known she was crazy just from that football game she played at Duke and her swift, sullen emotional changes when we had been going at each other for a minute or two like shaggy bears with clothes on against a wall of the staircase landing between floors or in the storeroom downstairs, from the frenzied terror that erupted without warning and swept over her like a storm. We met there so many times. I did want to take it out and rest it in her hand. I outlined different plans for months.

  "There's something I want to do. Please let me," I said to her in a choked voice many times on the crowded subway train riding back and forth from my home to the office. (It was not always clear in my mind which was my home and which my office: I often felt more at home at the office.) "I want to put it in your hand."

  (My heart was heavy and I was not able to joke.) I imagined it soft but swelling when I took it out and felt it hardening fast in her fingers.

  Things always sped right by that point of negotiation. We met on the staircase landing and plunged right in. We began without words: no deals could be struck, no more subtle stratagems executed by me than to wedge my accident folders in behind her ass or back to prevent their falling. And: "Someone's coming."

  And it was too late again. She'd wrench herself from my hands with little growls and mewing whimpers that seemed to originate in her mind instead of her throat, shaking free as though I were trying to restrain her. (I wasn't.) With flushed bewilderment, her bosom heaving, her breath rasping and whistling in her mouth and nose, she would glare at me in savage outrage as though I were someone new who was trying to cheat her, as though she did not know how she'd got there with me. It was panic or orgasm. (I'll compromise.) I think she dreaded the start of the inrush toward orgasm there on the staircase or even in the storeroom downstairs. I think she wanted a bed or a car. (I knew a young college girl once who told me she used to do it against the bedpost in her room before she was old enough to go away from home. I know other girls now with vibrators and rape fantasies.) She did not have to fight me so. I was a lamb. Her eyes were sharp and damning, her face accusing, her mouth poison. She hated in hectic irrationality. She would have hit me with a dagger. (It's a face I would throw away today. If that's the way she was affected, I would not want her.) She wanted me passive (as a bedpost or vibrator). She seemed unaware I was touching her inside her skirt until I had been doing it awhile. Then she was thunderstruck; she was tricked, seduced, and violated. That part of her panties still feels slick and puckered to me when I slide my thumb over my fingertips. (I have fun with it now.)

  "Someone's coming," she would blurt out tearfully in a frantic, pleading whisper, grimacing at me cruelly, wishing to smash and kill, smoothing herself for a second or two, and hastening away. In the mirror of a small, round compact she brought with her she'd be checking and shaping her lipstick as she vanished in desperate flight.

  I keep forgetting she was only twenty-one.

  I wasn't going to harm her. I was only seventeen and a half and adored her. There would be no smile for me again until she was back in the office in her swivel chair behind the desk under that large, twitching, black and white Western Union clock, a mirthful, composed, sophisticated, experienced sex queen again. (Western Union has cut down drastically on telegram service and makes its money doing something else.) I think I was jealous and unforgiving of those hulking, primitive football players at Duke who were able to have intercourse with her in front of each other that way (make love, q. v., op. cit., ibidibibidi) and think so little of her afterward (while I thought so much. That was worse than unkind. Did they realize how mean they were being to me?).

  She was cuckoo. She sometimes wore a girdle and panties both, and I still have not been able to figure out why. She was a short, kind of roly-poly pretty girl in shiny stockings and smooth, tight skirts, and I think I am still in love with her (and glad she is dead, because otherwise I might not be, and then I would have no one). She sought trouble — the rape in the storeroom was all her idea. (I use rape loosely and boldly to relieve my fear of it. Rape intrigues and excites me slightly in a sinister way that also makes me feel a little bit ill. Girls I've met are titillated by the phenomenon of rape also and have been since their teens. Stories of rape in newspapers hold my attention hypnotically if they do not involve children or beatings. I enjoy them and continue staring at the paragraphs of type after I've stopped reading. Stories of orgies are as delightful as livestock reports. What can be rare once everything is permitted? I have never wanted to rape. I have wanted to stroke, follow the contours of flesh and female clothing on strange women with my hand. The girls I find myself eyeing grow younger and younger and someday I'm afraid I might want to do what I'm afraid I might want to do.) She brought it up and led all three of us on. She did not even like one of the other two: she told me he was homely, dumb, and coarse.

  "I could handle you all. I could show you a good time. I could show you what it's really all about," she taunted pertly with a speculative smile. "If you weren't all so afraid."

  It was lunchtime. The other two weren't afraid, and when she came to her feet with gripping, rigid, insensible arms to begin by kissing me (for them. I remember elbows like angle irons), showing off (for them. I knew it was as far as she wanted to go. It was an awful, corrupt, inane performance on her part — I was being used like a bedpost or stage prop, while she showed off for them — unworthy of her, an unemotional, almost malign procedure speeded up for the occasion like an old movie film into a grotesque and sterile parody of muddled, bumping, fumbling motions. A marble, nonhuman tongue was knocking about my mouth and the fingers scratching wildly at my head and neck were brittle and cold. She ground her face against mine; perhaps that looked good to them. I grabbed her breast because I did not know what else I was expected to do), they went at her from the rear and sides and were under her skirt with their dozens of hands and infinity of mechanized fingernails before she knew what was happening. They were at her buttons, snaps, and elastic waistbands. They were forcing her knees in from behind and trying to press her to the floor. They had her down for a moment nearly into a squatting position. She struggled back up. "You tore my stocking."

  Her face looked frantic. They kept kidding ruthlessly with hard smiles, muttering inaudible remarks incessantly to sustain the pretense it was all only a pleasant bit of horseplay that ought not to be misunderstood. (I learned for the future how to execute variations on the same masquerade from them.) I saw flashes of pale flesh and eggshell lingerie. I saw no twat or bush. I looked and was disappointed (although I did not want to). I imagined it h
uge, thick, and snarled. I imagine it now. The tough, gruff one she didn't like left off for a moment with one hand to go for his zipper — I flinched and tried to shut my eyes and turn away. I did not want to see his oily tube flop out. My feeling now is that it would have been soft. I knew it would be long: I'd urinated with him in the men's room. (I didn't want her to have to see it. Not in front of me.) Where was passion? Why were all of us doing it? There was not even a genuine sex drive at work — but grabbed her again when she nearly squirmed free.

  "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. A
nd 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.)