Something Happened

  And my wife will reply:

  "You don't have to raise your voice to me."

  What happened to us? Something did. I was a boy once, and she was a girl, and we were both new. Now we are man and woman, and nothing feels new any longer; everything feels old. I think we liked each other once. I think we used to have fun; at least, it seems that way now, although we were always struggling about one thing or another. I was always struggling to get her clothes off, and she was always struggling to keep them on. I remember things like that. I remember the many times I had to pull my wife's dress up and her panties down because she didn't like to make love outdoors, or even indoors if anyone else was even remotely in the vicinity: in the same house or apartment, in the next room (even at hotels! She would be petrified if she heard someone stirring in the adjoining room), in the next apartment, in the next house! I remember the way I'd unbutton her blouse almost anywhere to get at her bra and breasts. (Pale blue brassieres still do drive me crazy more than black; she used to wear them.) She was always afraid we'd be caught. I didn't care (although I might have cared if we'd ever been caught). I was always ripping open her slacks or tearing off her bathing suit or tennis shorts and flinging them away somewhere over my back as I went at her as hard and fast as I could every chance I had. I was a pretty hot kid once. I didn't care whether she enjoyed it or not; just as long as I got mine. I was always trying to jump her. We were with her parents and her younger sister a lot then, and I would grab at her the second they all went out and try to bang her before any of them got back. In the country, during the summer, or at the seashore, I would try to lure her outside the rented house after dark and do it to her on the porch or right down on the ground or sand (although I didn't like the sand in my clothes and hair afterward--and she didn't like the ground, because it hurt her ass and made it black and blue). I was always pulling at her buttons and zippers and clutching and scratching at the snaps and elastic of her underthings. I was absolutely wild for her when she was a girl and I was a boy, absolutely out of my head with volcanic lust. I was all cock and hard-on. I wanted to come, come, come. I would give her no warning, no time to deliberate or converse or prepare or find any excuses for delay, and often she did not understand fully what was happening to her until I had her half undressed and was already swarming all over her, wholly on fire and stone deaf to all her objections and premonitions, and it was too late for her to make me stop. (Sometimes I would sit scheming about her all through family dinner, plotting where and how I would spring at her the moment I had the opportunity and selecting the way in which I would ravish her this time.) No matter where it was I trapped, seized, and finally overcame her (if it was anywhere outside the bolted door of our own bedroom; often it was even behind the locked door of our own bedroom), she would recline and heave submissively beneath me with her eyes wide open in gleaming fright, turning her gaze from one side to the other rapidly and distressfully to make certain no one was seeing, listening, or approaching. (I think now that I probably enjoyed her terror and my violence.) I didn't mind that her eyes were open and darting all about and that her strongest emotions were not those of passion or entirely on me, just as long as I had her when I wanted her and got what I wanted; it might, in fact, have added something, that tangy, triumphant sense of frenzied danger, that ability to dominate rather than merely persuade, and I often wish I were driven now by that same hectic mixture of blind ardor, haste, and tension. (It might, in fact, have added a great deal.) Maybe that's what's missing. I lay girls now that are as young as she was then, and much more nimble, profligate, and responsive but it isn't as rich with impulse and excitement and generally not as satisfying afterward. (There is no resistance.) I have more control and maturity now and can manipulate and exploit them coolly and skillfully, but it isn't nearly as much fun anymore as it used to be with her, and I miss her greatly and love us both very deeply when I remember how we used to be then. I have large rooms now with big beds and all the privacy and time I want; the girls have places of their own, or I have Red Parker's apartment in the city and hotel rooms and suites on business trips out of town; but it's all rather tame now, rather predictable and matter-of-fact, even with someone I am with for the very first time (and I often wonder, even while I am in the act of doing it, why I bother. I am no sooner in than I'm thinking about getting out. I no sooner come than I want to go).

  "Let's go into the bedroom now," I will say (or they will say).

  "All right."

  I think it was better the other way with me and my wife when we were both so much younger. "Hurry, hurry," she would urge, beg, moan, pant, demand, murmur, pray, implore frantically as she lay and churned in my grasp, doing everything she could think of to help bring me to an end quickly before we were discovered. And I would work away at her, sometimes grinning when she couldn't see me, and have the time of my life.

  That was fun we used to have together. It was fun then (more for me than for her), and it is fun now for both of us to recall and laugh about (when we are laughing). We often reminisce together warmly about some of the crazy times and places I did get her. My wife enjoys looking back even more than I do and has a better memory for separate occasions.

  ("Remember the time in that boathouse when my father--"

  "And your kid sister was doing it all summer--"

  "You sound envious."

  "She probably got more than I did."

  "You had no complaints."

  "I did when I found out about her."

  "Were you hot for her?"

  "Only when I knew about her."

  "Are you hot for her now?"

  "Don't be crazy. She's a God-damned reactionary bitch now."

  "You don't ever say anything to her about--"

  "I hardly ever talk to her."

  "Remember the time on the lake in that rowboat?"

  "Do I!")

  I remember the time I once tried to do it to her right on the bottom of a rowboat, far out on a lake. (I remember dead Virginia from my automobile casualty insurance company, and I bet I could do it now also in a canoe to a carefree young coed like Virgin-for-Short, but I don't think I would want to anymore, not at my age, not in a canoe.) I did almost everything else to her that day while she wriggled and kissed and fought and hugged and fretted against the bottom of that rowboat, but when it came to the nudeness of it, to the pulling of her things off and my things down, she was terror-stricken by the thought that people might be seeing us from the houses along the shore and, almost weeping miserably, made me stop. So I rowed furiously to a small island a little farther out (I think I must have broken the speed record for rowing that day) and laid her on the ground just inside the woods. She rolled her head from side to side with wide-open eyes flashing in anguish and fear, pleading with me desperately please to stop or please to hurry up and finish before someone came trudging up through the trees and caught us. We were already married then.

  It was fun, even though we often fought about it bitterly: she would cry, and I would rage if I could not have my way with her in matters of sex and just about everything else. (My feelings were easily hurt.) I used to want to jump her everywhere. We are both glad now that I did. I was always throwing her halters off then or shoving her blouses and sweaters up to go for her breasts and lips like someone starved, suffering the aching, compulsive need and joy in my heart and head and mouth and throat and in the palms of my hands. (What a nutty kid I was, even then.) "Not now," she would say, or "Do you love me?" she would ask. And I would say anything, or nothing, as I pushed and forced myself upon her. It took very little to get me excited then, usually nothing more than the sight of her, or just the thought, when I had been away, that I would be back with her soon. (Then I knew what being horny really meant.) When we were alone indoors and knew we had time, I could be different, and so could she; but there were many times when we could not be alone. And the trouble with my wife then was that she did not like to make love anywhere outdoors. She did not like to screw in parks,
or on beaches, or in bushes, or standing up against walls, doors, or trees (and I did). She did not want to screw in the back of my car (or the front), and I always had to force her. (There was frequently no better place we had for it then; and when there was, I often did not want to wait.) My wife was something of a lady then, and I liked her for that (more than I like her drinking and flirting now, or her raucous tones when she is having a good time at parties and dinners). But I also liked getting laid. There was one whole summer at the lake when she did not want to make love at all because we were sharing the house with her mother and father and sister, and one person or another was always around. That was the summer, I remember, that her sister got knocked up near the end and almost drove her mother and father insane before she would agree to the abortion (it was not that she wanted the baby; she was afraid of surgery), although it could have happened at college the first week she went back. My wife and I were married then, and what was clear (at least to me) was that her kid sister had been making out effortlessly all summer long, while I was having so much trouble, which made me wonder if I had not wasted the better part of that summer trying to get into the wrong sister, my wife. Once I found out about her sister, I wanted to lay her too, even though I didn't like her.

  Later, when we had our own place, my wife didn't want to make love until she was certain all of the children were sound asleep and the door to the bedroom was locked and the door to the apartment was double-locked. (God knows who she imagined might sneak in and catch us at it then. Burglars?) There was a long, long period, even when we had our own place, when she did not want to screw any time during the day, even before we had children, and when there was no one else around. (Nowadays, she'll do it with me just about any place, any time, especially if she's had a drink or two.) She needed darkness, even at night; she wanted to be hidden; the lights had to be out, the shades drawn, the doors closed, even the closet doors. She would rather I did not watch her undress and did not gaze at her when she was walking or lying naked; often she came to the bed with her nightgown already on, having removed her clothes privately in the bathroom or closet, even though she knew I would slip it up and off her immediately. Then, though, when conditions were exactly right, once she had made certain she was safe from interruption and concealed from watching eyes, when everything around us was just the way she wanted it, she could be absolutely fine in just about every way and feel proud of herself and me afterward and in between. And she wasn't so bad all those other times when I had to force her and we had to do it fast (she learned rapidly that the more zealously she pitched in to give me what I wanted, the sooner it would be over), although she was never nearly as good at age twenty-eight as my Cuban whore was this afternoon. ("Do you like to be teased?" she purred, and I can hear her purring again. Of course I do. Maybe I never left my wife enough time to tease me then, or even to learn how.) Nowadays, my wife is much better. Nowadays, my wife is completely different about this whole matter of sex; but so am I. She is almost always amorous nowadays, it seems, and ready to take chances that horrify even me. I can usually tell when she's been thinking about it the instant I walk in, by a bold, questioning, determined look in her eyes and a funny, self-satisfied, slightly twisted smile. I know I am right if she has left her girdle off. (Her girdle is off tonight. I remember when she didn't need a girdle and wouldn't wear one; now she'll seldom go out of the house without a girdle, even though she still doesn't need one.) When she is in the mood, I have only to grip her elbow or nudge her gently toward a couch or bed and I can have her any time I want to and just about anywhere. Or she will come after me. She is always in the mood when she drinks (unless she is sick), and she drinks almost every day now. I have only to pass within arm's reach of her in the kitchen when she is cooking or meet her by accident in one of the hallways and she moves right up against me and is ready to sink down on the spot (she has even had me do it to her on the kitchen floor), in the dark or in brilliant daylight. She lifts her own skirt now, and fumbles impatiently with my pants if I am not removing them quickly enough. (I'm not sure I like her this way, although I would have liked it back then, but I'm not so sure about that, either. I'm really not sure I want my wife to be as lustful and compliant as one of Kagle's whores or my girl friends, although I know I am dissatisfied with her when she isn't.) "Do you really have a chance at a better job?" she asks me later, when we are upstairs in our bedroom.

  "I think so."

  "Much better?"

  "And how."

  "Will you make more money?"

  "And how."

  "Oh, boy," she responds.

  And she swarms all over me irrepressibly, her arms and legs and mouth opening and entwining, with our bedroom door open and the children probably still awake. And I am the one now who wiggles free and rises from the bed to close and lock the door and extinguish the overhead light.

  "You're some girl," I tell her admiringly, after a long, deep embrace during which we are both practically still.

  "You did it," she agrees readily, with a boastful laugh, sitting astride me now and rocking back and forth. "You made me this way."

  I can't believe it was all my fault.

  My daughter's unhappy

  Both our children are unhappy, each in his (or her) separate way, and I suppose that is my fault too (although I'm not sure I understand how or why). I no longer think of Derek as one of my children. Or even as mine. I try not to think of him at all; this is becoming easier, even at home when he is nearby with the rest of us, making noise with some red cradle toy or making unintelligible sounds as he endeavors to speak. By now, I don't even like his name. The children don't care for him, either. No one really cares for him, not even the nurses we hire, and they are paid to care for him and to pretend to like him; they are nearly always unmarried women in their late thirties or older; they are very expensive and usually pretend to love him in the beginning; they act adoring and jealously protective of him for just the first few weeks and then turn negligent toward him and impudent and reproachful with the rest of us. We turn nasty with them. They go. They either leave on their own or are fired. My wife and I take turns telling them they must go. I begin to detest all of them almost from the moment we hire them; they don't like me. I hate and fear the one we have now, who is older than I am, superstitious, and forcefully opinionated; she reminds me of Mrs. Yerger. I want to yell dirty things at this nurse now for the debasement Mrs. Yerger made me suffer then. Every older woman I find myself afraid of reminds me of Mrs. Yerger. Every feeble old woman I see reminds me of my mother. Every young girl who attacks my pride reminds me of my daughter. No one reminds me of my father, which is okay with me, I guess, since I don't remember a father for anyone to remind me of. Except Arthur Baron. I think I may feel a little bit about Arthur Baron the way I might have felt about my father if he had lived a little longer and been nice to me. I hope this one quits soon. I want to be rid of her. If she doesn't quit soon, my wife or I will have to fire her, which never seems to upset any of them as much as it does us, and as much as it would upset me if I were ever fired. This will leave things at home dismal and disorganized for a while. I will go out of town on a business trip until a new one is found. I always like to leave things like that for my wife and her sister to take care of. Her sister is good at things like that. I always like to be out of town when we have to look for a new nurse or move from one house to another. I always like to be somewhere else when anything unpleasant is taking place. We will feel glad to be rid of her when we finally do make her go; but each one has to be replaced; we always have to find another; or we will have to send Derek away early to a home for retarded people and never look at him again. We will erase him, cross him out, file him away--even though we go to visit him three or four times the first year, one or two times the second, and after that perhaps not at all, we will never really look at him again. We will put him out of sight, think of him less and less. He will visit us, maybe, in dreams.

  "I wonder how he's doing," one of
us might think of speculating from time to time, if either of us dared to face the consequences of a reply.

  And later:

  "Whatever happened to him? You know, that kid we used to have? Derek. I think his name was. The one with something wrong. Are we still in touch with him?"

  My wife and I are not able to send him away yet. He is still too little. There is no hope. He is lots of trouble. He has let us down. He needs care constantly, and no one wants to give it to him, not his father, his mother, his sister, or his brother. None of us really even wants to play with him anymore. Although we take turns making believe).

  My daughter, who is past fifteen, is a lonely and disgruntled person. (She is much more than disgruntled, I know. She is unhappy; but that's the form her unhappiness tends to take, and that's the nature of the criticism and complaints with which we generally have to contend. I wouldn't mind so much, I think, if she were unhappy and obliging. Like my son. It would make things easier for me. Although it does not seem to make things easier for him.) She is dissatisfied with us and dissatisfied with herself. She is a clever, malicious girl with lots of insight and charm when she isn't morose and rude. She is often mean, often depressed. She resents my wife and me terribly and as much as tells us frequently that she wishes one or both of us were gone or dead. (In fact, she does tell us that, in exactly those words.) And it's a lucky thing my wife and I are both sensible enough to remind each other that she really doesn't mean it. (Even though I know she often does mean it, and that deep inside her, probably, she often wishes, in melodramatic fantasy, that she were dead also, and that we were at her graveside and sorry.) At least I'm sure she may mean it at the time she says it and perhaps, subconsciously, she harbors that evil wish in regard to us always. Perhaps she really does wish that my wife or I will die soon. It would not be so unnatural for her to do so; it would not be so difficult for me to understand (for didn't I have that same repugnant wish for my mother after she fell sick, and perhaps even earlier, when she began to grow old, once I no longer needed her, and she began to need me? I was impatient for her to die. And told myself she'd be better off). If my daughter is poised, if she is looking smug and wearing her thin-lipped half-smile of calculating villainy when she remarks to my wife or me that she really doesn't think she would mind very much if my wife and/or I fell sick and/or died, I know she does not mean what she is saying; she is speaking for effect; she is merely searching, immaturely and compulsively, for a painful, punishing clash with us (making sadistic family small talk, so to speak) and slicing out at a sensitive old wound that she knows intuitively will open freely and bleed with pain. (My daughter likes to hurt us. She sometimes professes remorse, but lets us know she doesn't really feel it.) If, however, the statements gush from her in a high shriek or tumble out brokenly in gulping, hysterical sobs, then there is no ignoring the sincerity of her passionate hatred and bottomless misery. She is not, as I said, happy. (In these moments she is pathetic. She would break my heart, if she were somebody else's.) She has a very pretty face but doesn't believe it. (She has what I believe is called a low--or poor--self-image.) And nothing my wife or I can do will help. I realize now that I have not always given replies to her questions and comments that were appropriate. When she tells me she wishes she were dead, I tell her she will be, sooner or later. When she tells me life is empty and monotonous and that there does not seem to be any point to it, I tell her everybody feels that way now and then, particularly at her age, and that she's probably right. When she told me, in tones of solemn importance, that she hoped to have a lover before she was eighteen and would want to live with him for several years even though she is never going to get married, I nodded approvingly and wisecracked I hoped she'd find one--and was astounded when her face went bloodless with shock and she seemed about to cry. When she asks me if I ever thought of killing myself when I was young, I answer yes. And when she came to me, even that first time, to say she wasn't happy, I told her that I wasn't either and that nobody ought to expect to be. By now, she is able to anticipate many of my sardonic retorts and can mimic my words before I say them. Sometimes this annoys me; other times it amuses me--I don't know why there is a difference in my reaction. My error, I think, is that I always speak to her as I would to a grown-up; and all she wants, probably, is for me to talk to her as a child.