Something Happened

  (I do not know anymore whether he tells me things like this because they are true, or because he observes how strongly they affect me. Mistrust and acrimony are starting to cloud my emotions toward him. More and more frequently, I am incited to react toward him contentiously and competitively, the way I do toward my daughter. I try not to.

  "Are you angry?" he will ask.

  "No," I will lie.)

  Or, as he asked of us one day when we dressed him in a shirt, knitted tie, and jacket to take him to what we told him was the circus (it was to the circus, although he did not seem to believe it, and he looked so lovable, wholesome, and neat in the pink tattersall shirt I had bought for him in the Boys' Shop at Brooks Brothers and miniature blue blazer we had also bought him from Brooks Brothers, with his shiny, silken hair--which was his own and not from Brooks Brothers, ha, ha--clean, wet, parted, and combed.

  "Am I clean enough?" he asked, turning from the full-length mirror after he had been scrubbed and dried and dressed.

  "Clean as a whistle," I assured him.

  "Shiny clean," added my wife):

  "Are you going to put me in a taxi and leave me there?"

  "No, of course not!" I retort with anger, appalled.

  "Now why in the world would we want to do that?"

  He responds with a self-effacing shrug. "I don't know."

  But he does seem to know.

  "Are you playing games with me?" I demand. "Or do you really mean that? Do you really think we would leave you in a cab? What would the cabdriver say?"

  "Can I ask you?" he requests meekly.

  "What?"

  "What I want to."

  "I won't get angry."

  "You're angry now."

  "I won't get angrier."

  "Go ahead," my wife says.

  "If you do want to get rid of me, how will you do it?"

  "With hugs and kisses," I answer in exasperation. "You're ruining the whole day. This is a hell of a conversation to be having with a handsome boy who's all dressed up in a tattersall shirt, tie, and blazer. And we're taking you to lunch at a fine restaurant too."

  "I don't want to go."

  "Yes, you do."

  "You'll enjoy it."

  "I don't even want to go to the circus."

  "Yes, you do."

  "You'll enjoy it."

  I don't like the subway. (I have had scared terrifying fantasies centered around him in which he does get lost, or has been misplaced, on a subway, but never thoughts or dreams in which I leave him someplace deliberately, or even want to. The door closes between us before we can both get on or off together, separating us. Or we are walking together and I turn my head away for an instant, and when I turn it back, he is gone. Or I forget about him: he slips my mind: and I remember only afterward, when he is no longer present and has disappeared without trace from my dream, that he is supposed to be with me. I am unable to guess where he has gone. There is only void. I feel lonely then, and it is not possible to be certain which one of us has been lost. I feel lost too.) He withdraws from bad smells (he thinks, perhaps, of rot, poison gas, or suffocation. He does not want to fly to the moon, ever, and neither do I) and is alarmed by unexpected loud noises (or creeping, mystifying, stealthy ones. So am I, and so, for that matter, are antelopes. He tends to believe that he is the only one who reacts to such things, and that he is the only one who ever feels in danger). He cannot understand why wars, muggings, bees, math, spiders, basketball, rope climbing, nausea, ferocious, menacing men (real and deduced), and public speaking all have to be there for him to contend with, lying in wait for him visibly, stinking, inevitable, unmovable, and unappeasable (and, frankly, neither do I, although there does not seem to be much that I or anyone else can do about it. It is the custom); why he is expected to work harder at math and learn much more and attach more importance to it just because he is good at it, and why his classroom teachers (most of them female), who used to be so delighted with him because of his precocious insight into numbers, are now disappointed with him because he has lost interest in math for math's sake and why they let him know they are displeased (they feel he has rejected them. He has let them down); or why he must try harder, strive to excel, determine to be better than all other boys in pushball, kickball, throwball, shoveball, dodgeball, baseball, volleyball. (It all does seem indeed like an awful lot of balls for a young little man like him to have to carry around, doesn't it?) He particularly hates basketball. He does not know what he is supposed to do (and will not let me explain to him. He will ask a specific question and accept only the answer to that question and no more. He cuts me off curtly if I try to go on. He rebuffs me). He is never sure when to shoot and when to pass, and he is too self-conscious and ashamed to confess his predicament and ask. He has never made a basket; he is afraid to try; he never shoots unless people on his team all yell at him: "Shoot! Shoot!" Then he shoots and misses. He is never able to keep straight in his mind when he is supposed to block and obstruct and when he is supposed to catch, pass, cooperate, and shoot. He relies on his instincts, and his instincts are not reliable. In the bewildering disintegration of his judgment, he tends to lose track of which of the other kids are on his team and which are on the other as the thumping action swarms and slithers around him (like the grasping, unfurling long legs of a large spider, I would imagine. He has never told me this). He passes the ball away to opponents and commits other errors just as conspicuous, and he is pushed and yelled at as a result (and often does not know why. He does not learn from these mistakes because he does not understand what they are. The danger that he may repeat them hobbles his thinking and increases the chances that he will). Forgione shakes his head in disgust. My boy takes it all in. (I imagine all of this too and melt with pity for him.) My boy would like to make baskets and be able to pass and dribble flawlessly. (He doesn't want to shoot because he knows he will miss.) He is afraid to play basketball and wishes he didn't have to.

  By now, he does not want to go to school at all on days he has gym. (Or public speaking. Or knows he must make an oral report or read a written one.) He has gym three days a week; he worries about gym three of the other four days. (Saturdays he takes off. One-day school holidays afford no surcease. Unless they fall on a day he has gym. Then he is ecstatic.) By now, he is afraid of Forgione, and feels despised, and of the assistant gym teacher (whose name he doesn't know; nor does anyone, he seems to indicate, and he does not describe him, so I have no idea how old or large he is), which must be another ghastly danger for him to have to stave off. (How would you like to be a tame, somewhat shy and unaggressive little boy of nine, somewhat shorter and thinner than average, and find yourself put three times a week, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, as regularly and inexorably as the sun sets and the sky darkens and the globe turns black and dead and spooky with no warm promise that anyone anywhere ever will awaken again, into the somber, iron custody of someone named Forgione, older, broader, and much larger than yourself, a dreadful, powerful, broad-shouldered man who is hairy, hard-muscled, and barrel-chested and wears immaculate tight white or navy-blue T-shirts that seem as firm and unpitying as the figure of flesh and bone they encase like a mold, whose ferocious, dark eyes you never had courage enough to meet and whose assistant's name you did not ask or were not able to remember, and who did not seem to like you or approve of you? He could do whatever he wanted to you. He could do whatever he wanted to me.) "He doesn't try to win," Forgione asserts to me in reproach about my boy after I can no longer, in good conscience, postpone going to the school to remonstrate with him privately on behalf of my boy.

  (My wife has been nagging me to speak to Forgione or to complain about Forgione to the principal, which I hesitate to do because that would be sneaky and perhaps unnecessary and perhaps even produce disastrous repercussions.

  "It's your child, isn't it?"

  It is my child, and I suppose I really can't, in good conscience, have him suffering such nauseating sorrow three mornings a week, as systematically
as clockwork, can I, although there may prove to be nothing I can do about alleviating the situation without making a raucous pest of myself, and I am not like that. There must be something I can do. I have a shaming feeling there is something other fathers would do.) "I'm sure he does his best."

  "He doesn't want to beat the next fellow."

  "That's his nature, I guess," I murmur apologetically.

  "That's not his nature, Mr. Slocum," Forgione persists sententiously. "He wasn't born that way."

  "That's his nature now."

  "He doesn't have that true competitive spirit. He doesn't try his best to win. He lacks a will to win."

  "You aren't going to give him one by picking on him, Mr. Forgione," I venture timidly, in as harmless a tone as I can manage.

  "I don't pick on him, Mr. Slocum," he protests earnestly. "I try to help."

  "He's afraid of you, Mr. Forgione. He used to enjoy coming to gym and have fun playing games. When he was little, he always liked to play. Now he doesn't. Now he doesn't want to come here at all."

  "He has to come here. Unless he has a medical excuse."

  "I'll have to get him one."

  "You're not blaming that on me?" he protests defensively.

  "I'm not trying to blame it on anyone." The advantage, I feel, is now mine, and I continue with more confidence. "I'm trying to find some way of making the situation here easier for him."

  "How is he at home?"

  "Fine. When he doesn't have to worry about coming here."

  "It's no good to make things too easy for him."

  "I don't want to make things too easy."

  "He has to learn to cope."

  "With what? Rope climbing?"

  "He has to do that here. He'll have to do it other places."

  "Where?"

  "In high school. In the army, maybe. He has to do lots of things he doesn't want to if he wants to get ahead."

  "I don't want to argue with you."

  "I don't."

  "I want to try to help him try to work things out."

  "I help him," Forgione maintains. "I try to encourage him, Mr. Slocum. I try to give him a will to win. He don't have one. When he's ahead in one of the relay races, do you know what he does? He starts laughing. He does that. And then slows down and waits for the other guys to catch up. Can you imagine? The other kids on his team don't like that. That's no way to run a race, Mr. Slocum. Would you say that's a way to run a race?"

  "No." I shake my head and try to bury a smile. (Good for you, kid, I want to cheer out loud. But it's not so good for him.) "I guess not."

  I have to chuckle softly (and Forgione grins and chuckles softly also, shaking his trim, swarthy head complacently in the mistaken belief that I am chuckling because I share his incredulity), for I can visualize my boy clearly far out in front in one of his relay races, laughing that deep, reverberating, unrestrained laugh that sometimes erupts from him, staggering with merriment as he toils to keep going and motioning liberally for the other kids in the race to catch up so they can all laugh together and run alongside each other as they continue their game (after all, it is only a game). I am gratified, I am thrilled, by this picture of my boy but I know I must not reveal this to Forgione (or display any mockery or superiority), for Forgione does have him totally at his mercy three times a week and can get back at me effectively by inflicting all sorts of threats and punishments on him (while I am safely encapsulated in my very good job in my office at the company, smothering in accumulating hours, aging and suffocating in stultifying boredom or quivering intolerably with my repressed hysteria, or otherwise ambitiously preoccupied in something idle or sensual. Who can possibly imagine all the vicious crimes and atrocious accidents that might befall my boy or my wife or my daughter or Derek while I am biting my nails at my desk or peeing in a urinal here or ducking encounters with Green or feeling Betty's, Laura's, or Mildred's tit in Red Parker's apartment or flirting with Jane in the narrow corridor outside the Art Department? I can. I can imagine them all, and then fabricate new ones without end. Disasters troop across my mind unbidden and unheralded like independent members of a ghoulish caravan from hell or from some other sick and painful place. I seek skeletons in decaying winding sheets as I study company reports, and they aren't grinning. I smell strange dust. I shudder and am disgusted. I am often contemptuous of myself for imagining the catastrophes I do. They are not worthy of me, and I will often catch myself at it with a scornful rebuke and make myself get busy on something immediately to evade the sinking feeling in my chest and the network of tremors I experience coming alive inside me like a wicker basket of escaping lizards. Or a gale of colorless moths beating their wings. Or I telephone home in order to make sure that everyone is all right, as far as whoever answers the telephone there knows. The most I can generally find out, though, is that there has been no news of anything bad. Even if I undertook daily the fantastic effort of calling each member of my family in turn at the different places they are, I would have no binding assurance that some tragedy had not struck the first one I called by the time I had finished talking to the last one. Of course, I could use three or four telephones and get them all on at the same time. At least that way I could be sure--until I hung up. At least a policeman or ambulance attendant does not pick up the telephone when I call home, and I am thankful for that. In these situations, it's a case of no news being good news, I always say. Until the bad news comes. Ha, ha. I'll bet I haven't said that once. Until just now. Ha, ha again). And I therefore dare not risk offending Forgione, or cause him to dislike me, for my little boy's sake (if not, eventually, for my own. What troubles him troubles me). So I am meek, humble, respectful.

  "Does he have to race?" I inquire. I am deferential and disarming with Forgione. I control my urge to be sarcastic: I do feel superior to him, and afraid; I know I am better than he is, and that I am weaker. "Isn't there something else they can do? Or him?"

  "Life is hard, Mr. Slocum," Forgione philosophizes (and I would like to tell him to take his philosophizing and shove it up his ass). "He has to learn now that he has to be better than the next fellow. That's one of the lessons we try to teach him today to prepare him for tomorrow."

  "I feel sorry for the next fellow."

  "Ha, ha."

  "Who is the next fellow? Poor bastard."

  "Ha, ha."

  "Maybe he's the next fellow."

  "That's why we train him now. You wouldn't want that to happen to him, would you? You wouldn't want him to be the next fellow that everyone's better than, would you?"

  "No. He's this fellow to me. He's the one I care about. That's why I came to the school to speak to you."

  "Maybe I am riding him a little too hard. But that's only for his own good. It's better to be too hard than too easy. Sometimes."

  "Mr. Forgione, you have children, don't you?" I argue back in a reasoning, slightly more determined manner (inasmuch as he has not yet smitten me dead with the short-handled hammer of his fist and has retreated to a position of vindicating himself). "You know I can't just look the other way and allow a child of mine to come here if he's going to be so upset by things or because he thinks you pick on him. Would you do that?"

  "I don't pick on him, Mr. Slocum," Forgione objects quickly, swallowing uncomfortably, his neck bobbing with emotion. "Did he tell you that?"

  "No. But I think he feels that way."

  "I try to help him. I don't pick on him. It's his friends. It's all his friends that pick on him. They get angry and begin to yell at him when he slows down and starts laughing and doesn't try to win. Or when he passes the basketball deliberately--he does it deliberately, Mr. Slocum, I swear he does. Like a joke. He throws it away--to some kid on the other team just to give him a chance to make some points or to surprise the kids on his own team. For a joke. That's some joke, isn't it? He throws the ball away when someone charges at him. He gets scared. It's his friends that get angry and start to yell at him--not me. I just try to get him to do things right so the
y won't. That's when they really get sore and turn on him, and then he starts moping and looks like he's gonna cry and says he feels sick or has a sore throat and wants to see the nurse and go home. He acts like a baby. He turns green. I don't like to say this, Mr. Slocum, but sometimes he acts like a baby."

  (I could kill Forgione for that; I could kill him right there on the spot because what he says is true and I didn't want anyone to notice.) "He is only a kid, you know." I fake an indulgent laugh.

  "He's nine years old."

  "How old is that?"

  "That's time to start learning some responsibility and discipline."

  "I don't want to argue with you."

  "I don't. I tell you this, Mr. Slocum. He's got to learn to start facing things."

  "He's trying. He's trying very hard."

  "Then they don't want him on their team. They complain to me that they don't want him on their team if he's not going to try. It's no secret. They do it right in front of him. Now they complain to me that they don't want him on their basketball team because he isn't any good. That isn't such a funny joke to kids who are playing their hearts out to win. What am I supposed to do? Whose side should I take? Can't you do something?"

  "That's why I came here. To try."

  "Can't you talk to him, Mr. Slocum? And try to explain to him why he should try to do things straight and right. It would be better for him, not me."

  It would indeed. With no great effort I can picture my little boy looking scared and green with Forgione, for I have seen him often enough looking that same way with me when we are in some unfamiliar place and he thinks I'm going to leave him there or that I am going to try to make him dive from a diving board. How can I explain to Forgione that I like my little boy pretty much the way he is (do I? I'm not sure), that it's all right with me if he's not competitive, aggressive, or outstanding, although there are times, I must admit to myself, when I wish he were more so, when I am displeased with him because he isn't, and would probably be more proud of him if he were. And I guess he must know that too.

  He does not know yet that I have come to Forgione to try to obtain special favors for him, and I do not want him to find out. I think he might be too mortified, feel too nakedly degraded, ever to be able to face Forgione again. And I know that I will be peeved with him when I leave for having made it necessary for me to come (and for spoiling my morning and most of my peace of mind the evening before after I made my decision to go to Forgione once and for all and was already regretting it), and that I would like to kick all those other snarling, snapping little kids in the ass and smash their smelly, snotty, bellicose little heads together for ganging up against him. (And making it necessary for me to do something. Oh, shit--I sometimes think I could be so happy alone, but I know I would not be.) "Can't you leave him out for a little while, if he asks you to?"