Something Happened

by Joseph Heller

  "Right indeed, my darling daughter. You got it again. I'm glad to see you're learning something more in school than pocket pool and rolling drugs, and how to walk around the house without any clothes on."

  I am more startled than she is when I see her gasp and turn white. (I don't know why I said that then. I swear to Christ I don't know where those words came from. I know they didn't come from me.) Her voice is a whispered plea.

  "Did you have to say that?"

  I murmur no. "I didn't."

  "Yes, you did," she charges. "You always do, don't you?"

  "I'm sorry."

  "You always spoil things. You ruin things for everybody. Doesn't he?"

  My wife looks like she's going to cry.

  "You knew I was kidding."

  "Should I go?"

  "No. We both were. But I've told you before not to walk around the house without a robe on."

  "May I please leave the table?"

  "No, stay. I'll go." (I feel inept, clumsy.) "Can't we make up? I have to go anyway. Heh-heh."

  She's ruining my whole day too (even though it's all my fault. And it isn't even ten o'clock). That octopus of aversion had been there in bed with me and my wife again this morning when she awoke me with languorous mumbles and by snuggling close, that meaty, viscous, muscular, vascular barrier of sexual repugnance that rises at times (when she takes the initiative. It may be that I prefer to do the wanting). I eluded it spryly: before my wife knew what was happening, I was downstairs in the kitchen halving oranges, making coffee, and breaking eggs. I don't know where it comes from or why it does (and I don't ever want to find out). It seems to come from the brain, the heart, and the small intestines in a coordinated assault. (Men with heart attacks, I know, use them to avoid having sexual relations with their wives, though not with their girl friends, unless they are tiring of them. I make coffee and break eggs. I get a feeling of tremendous personal satisfaction whenever I hear that someone I know has left his wife. It serves the bitches right. Yesterday in a gourmet store I overheard one woman tell another that some man I didn't even know had left his wife, and my mood soared. I feel despondent afterward, sorry for myself, left out of things again.

  "What are you looking so pleased about?" I could hear my wife saying, as I returned to the car.

  "The price of artichokes," I offer in reply, or better still:

  "A man left his wife.")

  The wall of aversion was there again in my head and my breast even as I came awake (and would not go away), and I did not want her to touch me or have to touch her. (It has nothing to do with her.) I felt I might crumble to something dry and moldy where she pressed, I was soft dough or clay and would be deformed by indentations where her hands and knees pushed. I would stay that way. It is invisible and unyielding. It is heavy. It is living and it is dead. I am living and I am dead. There is grainy paralysis. It is hollow and dense. It is airless, making breath seem doubtful, arousing head pains, nausea, and sickening reminiscences of disagreeable, musty smells. It isn't fun. I have no will to overcome it. I can't confess it to her.

  "I don't feel well," I'll whine. "I think it's my stomach."

  "Is your chest all right?"

  "I think so."

  "You work too much. We never take a real vacation."

  "You go away every summer."

  "I don't call that a vacation. Why can't the two of us just go to Mexico? I've never been."

  I would rather surrender to it and lie docile and enslaved. I would rather succumb. I would rather bide my time and wait for it to relent and recede like some risen demon returning to an underground lair somewhere inside my glands than engage it in battle or try to squeeze my way through an opening with batrachian strivings of my feet. I am a tail-less amphibian again. I have warts, but they are small, because I am small. I see myself struggling to squeeze my way through head first like a miniature white swimmer or frogman in black rubber, and the free-floating aches in my temples filter into throbbing pains in the occipital regions behind. I might never be able to come back if I ever forced my way through an opening of revulsion that pressed closed behind me. To where? There might be no here to come back to if I were there. I have wormed my way through aversion before and it has disappeared without hurting me, as though it were not even there. I imagine conversations. I wish I never had to experience it.

  "C'mon, tell me," I coax my daughter. "Heh-heh. You can talk. Are you using drugs or doing dirty things with lots of boys and girls? I'll understand."

  "If you really understand," my daughter reproaches me in a calm monotone, "you'd understand that you wouldn't have to ask me if I wanted you to know."

  "That's smart. I'm proud of you."

  "Do I have to be smart? Would you still be proud?"

  "Of course."

  "Of what?"

  Maybe that's why her father killed himself. (She ruined his whole day.) He was probably a modest, introverted man no taller than Len Lewis who had sent the apple of his eye away to a very good southern university from which she had been kicked out for fucking football players en masse and in formation.

  "En masse and in formation," she said to me with lilting gaiety, her dark eyes twinkling. "They made me do it," she went on, with flaunting radiance (so that I was never certain if she was telling the truth. She knew I loved to hear her talk about her dirty experiences. I was stirred to question her by an irresistible and ambivalent fascination. Rape enthralls). "They held me down at the beginning. But then I began to enjoy it. I showed him."

  "Were you scared?"

  "No. I was really crazy about that quarterback. Was he conceited. We did it once in a canoe. Did you ever do it in a canoe?"

  "Weren't you mad?"

  "Of course not. But he was. At me. He didn't think I'd enjoy it, but I showed him. He was the biggest thing on campus, and I had him for a while. I think I was the only Jew there. He wouldn't see me after that."

  "Show me."

  "I bet you'd faint."

  "I bet I wouldn't."

  "I bet they still remember it at Duke. They should put up a statue. I gave them a winning season."

  It did not please me entirely to hear her talk about it all that way (I missed at least a shadow of repentance), and I would have rebuked and punished her severely if I had the right and the means. I would have slapped her face. (There was jealousy.) My wife and I started to try it once in a rowboat after we were married, but she turned shy and made me row her to an island.

  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 cha
nges 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 huge, 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.