Something Happened

by Joseph Heller

  (Women don't suffer from penis envy. Men do.)

  They are such fractional parts of the total construction they might easily be overlooked if we did not dwell on them. They are arrogant and absurd in their haughty, sniffing, pushy, egotistical pretensions. (We let them get away with an awful lot.) They can't even hold their lordly pose for half a day a week. What a feeble weapon indeed for establishing male supremacy, a flabby, collapsing channel for a universal power drive ejaculated now and then in sporadic spoonfuls. No wonder we have to make fists and raise our voices at the kitchen table.

  Mine would pop right up dependably in the days of my youth every time I stopped (or even thought of stopping) to resume joking salaciously with Virginia at her desk beneath the big circular office clock whose slender, pointy minute hand (symbolizing a long, phallic sword or lance for me in those days and a lancet or proctoscope now) sliced ahead with a twitch every sixty seconds. It would project embarrassingly. (I could not even dance with schoolgirl friends in those molten pubic days without launching haplessly into an instantaneous erection that had nothing at all to do with me or with them--I might just as well have shrugged my shoulders and claimed: "It's not mine. There's nothing I can do about it."

  And walked off the dance floor and left it floating there--in midair, disowned--and would have to draw back a bit at the waist in an attempt to conceal it. Now I shove it forward to let them see it's there. That is, I have found, an effective gambit with mature women who have let you know they want it.) I kept myself covered with accident folders I made certain to bring with me whenever I went to Virginia's desk to pretend to search for others as we bantered lewdly.

  "Meet me outside."

  If she agreed--she always would if she could--she'd smile and dip her face almost imperceptibly. I would go out of the office into the hallway alone. My pulse would race, my hands were sweaty, and I would want to run past the bank of elevators down to the staircase landing between floors, even though I knew I would have to wait. Virginia was more discreet than I; she took her time. I was consumed with haste. I couldn't stand still as I waited. It never failed me then. It never let me, or itself, down when she joined me finally, hurrying also, and I began kissing her clumsily on the nose, cheekbone, and mouth, crashing teeth with hers so hard I thought my own must break, and squeezing and grabbing her in different places, pressing and rubbing it against her so savagely it hurt--she was panting too, but laughing as well--for the four or five seconds or one-eighth of a minute she'd allow me before she'd lie: "Someone's coming."

  Those were swift, incredible trysts we enjoyed sometimes every two or three hours a day on the landing between floors of the office of living people working above and the cramped, dingy, unoccupied storeroom below filled with cabinets of dead records that must have seemed important to somebody sometime in the past, or they would not have been kept. Hardly anybody ever looked at them anymore. They were accidents, old, forgotten casualties in blanched folders with blue or purple data on the outside and sheets of various types of legal and medical information inside. From folder to folder the facts were similarly old and uninteresting. (I soon stopped snooping into them.) They were settled cases of people who were closed.

  "Somebody's coming," she would exclaim to me with a panic-stricken gasp when she decided my time was up, and be out of my hands and gone, even though nobody ever was.

  I always wanted much more of her then, right there on the staircase, when I knew I couldn't have it. (I have gotten laid in bizarre and illogical places since--my wife goes for that kind of adventure too--but never, sad to say, on a staircase. We have a good staircase in our home in Connecticut now, but my wife's back condition might be aggravated, and I would chip my knees.) I always felt satisfied afterward, though. And very pleased with myself. Those were my first good feels of grown-up woman; she was twenty-one, after all, nearly twenty-two when I saw her for the last time. I would crowd myself upon her from head to toe and try to seize or shove against her everywhere: if I had gone slower and been less gluttonous, I think now, she might have let me have more. In the storeroom once she instructed me: "Slower. Slower." Her voice was cooing, soothing. "That's better, darling. You scare me."

  I was flushed and perspiring like a feverish baby. I wanted to lie on my back, gurgle cherubically, and kick my feet. I had never been called darling by anyone before.

  "Darling."

  (It goes a long way still.)

  I was usually hindered in these frenzied assaults by those damned accident folders I'd brought, for I'd invariably forgot to put them down. I'd have to slide them behind her shoulders and brace her against the wall as I kissed and licked, snorted and groped; they would fall to the floor and spill open when she wrung herself away from me. I can still remember the cool, slick feel of her panties each time I touched them, my sense of miraculous astonishment that I was able to touch them at all.

  "Somebody's coming," she'd repeat in a growl.

  (In another two seconds it would have been me.)

  I would have to let her go, for she herself would suddenly turn wild with fright. There was boiling lunacy around us. The glint in her eyes was penetrating and slightly insane as she tugged her skirt down and made ready to run off, endeavoring to smile. I think she was more greatly aroused by my touch beneath her skirt than she had expected. And I was too rough. (She could have been wide open for me then if I knew how.) She is closed now. Virginia is closed now, like those people in the storeroom whose cases had been settled in one way or another. So am I. And lying among them like flaked stains now in that dreary storeroom for dead records are my own used-up chances for attaining sexual maturity early, for getting laid young (or what we considered young). I could have had her there. I could have done it to her right on the desk top or floor of the storeroom (she all but asked me to. But I didn't know what to say) or in one of her friends' apartments or in a hotel room while still a gawking, young, moronic, skinny teen-age kid bringing momma's soggy sandwiches into the city to eat for lunch almost every working day of the week while I pored over the sports section, comics, and sex stories in the New York Mirror, which is out of business now--everything is going away. (The old order changeth. There is no new.) There is nothing new and good under the sun. Everything you buy has to be brought back for repairs or exchanged at least once. All of us tell lies. We call that initiative--although I remember it accurately (as though fearful to forget. If I forget thee, O New York Mirror, where will you be? And all those industrious hours of intent diversion I spent with that shitty tabloid) and the New York Daily News. I worked for sixty cents an hour. I earn more now. Ask the people who work for me. Ask my kids. (One of them won't answer.) I wolfed down two of those sandwiches every day on seeded rolls, then three. I could have eaten four. I could have lost my cherry in her juicy box at age seventeen right there on that same desk top between Property Damage--1929 and Personal Injury--1930. I could have done it to her lying down and sitting up, frontwards or backwards, sideways frontwards and sideways backwards too, the way I'm able to do now with girls who are slim and agile and don't get cramps (if I don't put on more weight. And I hope I don't lose more hair, or I soon might not be able to do it any way with anyone but my wife. I used to be praised for my lush wavy hair. Now curls are the thing, and I don't have any), several times a day most days of the week--and had my sandwiches and Mirror on the desk top there too--with my leather shoes propped firmly against the Personal Injury--1929 file cabinets for greater drive and mobility and my folded elbows cushioning our heads against a smash into Property Damage--1930. That image of us fornicating on that old desk comes back to me often. We have our clothes on. Her makeup's smeared, her face is lax and lopsided, her clothes are always in disarray, torn, pulled open, up, down, brushed aside. We are not nude. It's deformed, distorted, a desecrated sketch in colored chalk and wax. Some of those people in the Personal Injury files had been killed. It was hard to believe that cars had been colliding in the Property Damage files as far back as 1929. It was h
ard to believe that there were even cars. No, I couldn't. I could not have done anything different. I did what I could. It would be the same. It would be no different if I were that same hesitant, backward teen-age file clerk still bringing momma's sandwiches with him to work for lunch. Then it did let me down. It went away, thawed, resolved itself into an unfeeling flap of a foreskin and receded timorously whenever she rode me smack up to that immediate next step of registering at a hotel--I didn't even know how to register at a God-damned hotel. I was only seventeen and a half--or going to her friend's apartment with her after work, whenever I could not wisecrack and postpone any longer but had to look straight at her and say Yes to that bewildering and truly repelling situation in which I would have to be alone with her, get undressed beside her, take it out, and try to stick it in before it went soft. (I knew it would go soft before I even got it out.) I couldn't do it. I did not want it. I would get headaches. All I wanted to do was joke with her, listen to her tell stories of sex experiences with other people, and feel her up a few times a day a few seconds at a time. I was too young. I would lose my bravado, personality, ambition, wit. I had no sense of humor. I would lose my will to say Yes. I would lose all energy and soul and be left with almost no substance I could feel. That lump would come to my throat--that's what I'd be left with, a lump in my throat instead of my pants--and I would lose my power to speak and be unable even to confess to her and plead: "I'm afraid, Virginia. I must go slowly, darling. Let me call you darling. You must help me see where I am."

  I felt nausea instead of desire, and immense, mortal desolation. I think she knew it and pitied me, and I hated her and hoped she'd be crippled and die. Tom with the flowery, affected handwriting was sticking it routinely into big, blond, gruff, bossy, and horsey Marie Jencks on demand three or four times a week on the desk in the storeroom (and sometimes she made him do it to her standing up against a wall, he told me later, or against the walls in a corner, where it was easier). And I was scared stiff of gentle, short Virginia. I didn't want to see it. I still don't really enjoy having to look at it. They still set me back for a moment or two. I have to steel myself, make ready (unless I'm rollicking drunk and bobbing along on a tide of ebullient self-confidence that might carry me right through into it without pause). I wasn't scared stiff: I was scared soft (ha, ha). But Tom was older than I was, and when I was his age, I was doing it too, and they still astound me. The sight. They are distinct. No two are the same. No one is the same way twice. If I live to be a hundred and fifty years old (and if it please God, I will), I don't think I will be used to the sight of a naked girl, unless I become a physician. I still steal peeks at my wife. It's more likely I'll become a peeping Tom. Snatches vary. I am always tense and somewhat disbelieving as they undress. No two are alike. (Why are they doing this for me?) There is always still at least one second of awe, of raw curiosity in which I am breathless at the possibilities of what is about to be disclosed and offered me. I have to accept it, whether I like it or not. (While I counterfeit nonchalance all the while and appear to be gazing elsewhere at something infinitely more engrossing. Like my trousers folded over a chair, the grille of an air conditioner, or my woolen socks, with my garters still attached, lying in my shoes.) I wonder if we are as interesting and peculiar a spectacle to them. I think we are. I get compliments for cleanliness and symmetry, and for the cute pliability of my foreskin (which more and more girls in recent years are finding as novel a decoration as my garters. They don't see many of either anymore. I'm damned if I'll cut it off now. I'll give up garters. I may look a little bit Jewish to some people, and think Jewish a great deal of the time, but it's proof I'm not if I ever want to use it against someone like Green, who is. That same elusive imp dodging around so artfully inside me somewhere that urges me at times to kick Kagle in his leg, or my daughter in her ankle, also often gives me a throbbing, delectable wish in my upper palate, along with a tickling yen in one nostril to--the wish and that exhilarating tickle join forces virtually to exhort: "Go ahead. Do it, sweetheart. See how good it feels"--to--how shall I say it?--Jew-bait). Moles, birthmarks, pimples, crimped scars, and untended dark hair in filaments or clumps in unexpected places on women sicken me with disappointment and leave me morose and queasy unless I take a Spartan grip on myself at the start and go right at these things as though with an uncontrollable desire. (I must make myself seem to adore with the passion of a fetish what I find so repugnant. Else I might quit entirely. I don't want to hurt their feelings. Or mine.) I hope for silken perfection every time and am relentlessly unforgiving of blemishes. (I feel swindled, injured.) I must make myself look past them at the whole picture. Some have hair growing down the sides so long it curls out of their bathing suits. They don't seem to notice or mind. I do. I don't know where to look away from. (They must know it's there.) You can't just say: "Pardon me, Mrs. I think your hair is showing."

  Because you might get back:

  "So what?"

  Or:

  "Don't you think I know it?"

  Or:

  "Don't look, if you don't like it so much."

  Slightly more judicious, and less risky, would be:

  "Pardon me, madam. But do you know your hair is showing?"

  Unless you want to go after it, and then you can make whatever clever gutter gambit you want to. I don't usually like that kind (although I have had to welcome them with manufactured enthusiasm on many occasions when it turned out to be the kind I'd been dating and sucking around after). I don't like excess black face or body hair on anyone, men or women, even when it's been shaved. It seems aberrant to me, infernal, revolting. (It's there to revile me.) My wife has black hair. By now, though, I know where it all is. No coiled, fuzzy surprises from her. (I have stumbled over hairs in my time that I could dissertate about for hours if I were the type to dwell compulsively upon past failures. Mrs. Yerger had a wen. Betty Stewart had a cast in her eye, but I continued to copulate with her weekly anyway for several months until she met a younger man she thought she might want to marry. My mother started sprouting bristly, dark gray hairs on her face when she was no longer able to tweeze them out herself. Her pores turned gaping and coarse. I looked past the hairs at her face, when I forced myself to look at her face at all. I could not say to her: "Mother, I think you have some hairs growing on your face."

  By then, she might not have heard or understood, and I would have had to say, more loudly and crabbedly: "Hey, Ma. Gee whiz. You got hair on your face."

  Not ever. How could you ever say that to your own sick mother? On the Rorschach test I took to get this job, it was observed that I was able to look at the whole picture and did not digress to delve wastefully into unrelated details. The probability was that I'd succeed, and I have.) In the early years of our marriage, my wife did not like me to see her naked unless she was in the bathtub, did not want to watch me stare at her while she undressed. (She still does not want me to see her on the toilet, and I'm not keen anymore about seeing her there, either. Once or twice a year is enough.) But now she enjoys having me watch her, strips like a teaser and flops down in bed and lies there like Goya's duchess. I enjoy it and laugh with her. I'd enjoy it more if she hadn't been tippling all day and was still not partially drunk. (She could have been killed while driving, or killed someone else. She could be stripping with just as much giddy and inebriated anticipation for somebody else.) My wife and I do enjoy ourselves together much more than I tend to remember. We often have fun. I'm not sure that things can get better for me. She had a technique for changing clothes that never exposed her bottom parts. Nightgown over panties or girdle, panties or girdle pulled on under nightgown. One caught glimpses only. That heartless, unfeeling bitch. In bed, she'd take it off anyway as soon as I asked. She'd even dress and undress inside the closet. No wonder I won't wake her from her bad dreams. Let her die in them or be mangled into a thousand bloody pieces by the illusion she's going to be. If my wife dreams of a prowler approaching her bed is it the same prowler I'm dreaming of?
>
  "What were you dreaming about?"

  "It was awful," she answers in the morning, still shaken. "Something terrible was happening to you."

  "Horseshit."

  "I swear."

  "People don't dream about other people. They only dream about themselves."

  "Something happened to you, and I couldn't stop it and was afraid."

  "You were dreaming about yourself."

  She must have been taught to dress and disrobe that way at summer camp, where males could peek between the bunk boards, or by her mother or divorced jealous-faced sister who got knocked up as a college kid before that became fashionable and grew up frigid and ill-natured. She lives by herself now with her liver-hued freckles in a small house nearby and advertises she would not have it otherwise. I believe her. (I also believe that nothing would please her more than for me or the husband of some other woman to fall in love with her. We would fail. She would spurn us. She would love that chance to.) I also believe she will always want to live nearby. I think she hates me, is envious of my wife, and contaminates my wife's trusting, abject nature with doses of guileful animosity. She spouts bigotry and reactionary political comment. She is childless. Her first husband has married again and has children. She has a store. There is much in the world of which she disapproves. She wishes my wife would be more like her and chides her because she is not. She criticizes our children and volunteers advice to my wife on how to turn me into a more submissive husband.