Something Happened

  "It's your fault, not mine."

  We have to try to make believe he was nobody's fault, that he was a circumstantial twist of nature, a fluke. (A fluke is a fish.) All of us want to get rid of him, but only my daughter is honest enough to say so (and is set upon like a pariah by one or the other of us).

  "Is he going to have to be with us forever?" she'll complain in a temper.

  "What do you care?" I'll lash back at her, as though she had said that just to wound me. "You'll be away at college."

  (She might stay home, just to torture me. I sometimes feel that if not for Derek we would never quarrel with each other. I know it's a lie.) He does not seem to be mine. He may be my wife's. There is no idiocy in my family that I know of (or in hers). My wife has begged me not to use that word (which may be why I do. She winces every time).

  "How would you like me to describe it?" I inquire, with a lordly air of inexhaustible tolerance. "Do you think it would help him much if I called it genius?"

  "It's heartless." She shudders, pale and close to tears. "Mean. I get so frightened when I see you so cold."

  It is ungodly the way I am able to forget about him for long periods of time, even when he is close by. (I blot him out and try to keep him out.) I think of myself as having just two children. One says: "What would you do if I came home with a Black boyfriend? And wanted to marry him."

  The other asks:

  "What would you do with me if I couldn't speak?"

  "But you can," I've answered.

  "If I fell down the ropes one day in the gymnasium when I was trying to climb them and hurt my head and Mr. Forgione had to carry me home and I couldn't speak anymore, either?"

  "I used to be afraid of rope climbing and falling down too," I try to explain encouragingly. "And of swimming naked in the pool in the high school also."

  "I never said anything about swimming naked in a pool," he protests firmly (as though that fear had not yet taken root in him, and I had just implanted it). "Did I?" he demands.

  I am embarrassed.

  "Suppose I had an extra set of car keys made after I got my license," says my daughter, "and used the car when you were away. You couldn't stop me, could you? What would you do, have me arrested?"

  The third one doesn't speak to me at all.

  I have conversations that do not seem to be mine.

  I feel afloat (legless). Legless, I walk around with headaches that do not seem to be mine (on feet that do. Arches ache and seem to be crumbling, I have a spur on one heel, middle toes are hammered, others are gnarled and require Band-Aids or corn plasters frequently, the tender pads of flesh on the bottom of my toes chafe and inflame if I do not switch pairs of socks and shoes, the soles itch dryly in cold weather, the tissue between the gnarled end toes splits and peels and I have to pour talcum powder in. There is no limit to the ills I could describe). I do not always feel securely connected to my legs or to my own past. The cable of continuity is not unbroken; it is not thick and strong; it wavers and fades, wears away in places to slender, frayed strands, breaks. Much of what I remember about me does not seem to be mine. Mountainous segments of my history appear to be missing. There are yawning gulfs into which large chunks of me may have fallen. I do not always know where I am at present. I sit in my office and think I am at home. I sit in my study and think I am at my office firing Johnny Brown or retiring Ed Phelps, in Penny's or some other girl's underthings, rolling them off, or in a bank, hotel lobby, or police station searching my pockets for some form of evidence or identification required of me. It may be that I talk to myself already without being aware of it. How debasing. No one has said so, but I don't think I do it when I'm with someone who might. I think I do it only when I think I'm alone. Maybe I am senile already and people are too kind to tell me. People are not kind and would tell me. (Maybe people have told me, and I'm too senile to remember. Ha, ha.) "What? Did you say something?" one or the other of the members of my family has shot at me when I assumed I was alone and unobserved in my study or in some other room in my house, deep in thought.

  "What? Nothing," I reply, startled and shamefaced. "I was just thinking."

  Or:

  "I was just reading the paper."

  (Probably I was deep in thought imagining myself orchestrating rhythmic, polysyllabic replies to Green's thrusts without tripping over a single vowel or consonant.) "You were laughing in your sleep again last night," my wife will say.

  And I won't know if she's toying with me or not.

  It's the sort of lie I might make up for her, if I had thought of it first. I can never remember what it was I was laughing about when she tells me I laugh in my sleep. I wish I could. I could use a big laugh on days when I have these headaches that do not seem to be mine.

  I get the willies in my spare time; I don't normally sleep well (although my wife tells me I do); I get the blues I can't lose; they decide when to leave (I either talk to myself or believe I might); I get depressed and don't know why; I mourn for something and don't know what; (legless) I walk around with jitters, headaches, and sadnesses ballooning and squiggling about inside me that seem to belong to somebody else. Is this schizophrenia, or merely a normal, natural, typical, wholesome, logical, universal schizoid formation? (I could plead temporary insanity. They would call it a mercy killing. There would be testimony under oath that it was done to put him out of his misery. He isn't miserable.) I have these perfectly controlled conversations with Arthur Baron about Andy Kagle and with Andy Kagle about Arthur Baron, and I find myself wondering even while they are taking place, just what the fuck I am doing in them. (Is that really me there talking and listening?) I'll float away outside them a few yards to watch and eavesdrop and begin to feel I am looking down upon a pornographic puppet show of stuffed dolls in which someone I recognize who vaguely resembles me is one of the performers, and I have no more idea of why I am taking part in them, even as this separated spectator, than I do of these weird melancholies, tensions, and arid impressions of desolation that come upon me when they choose in my spare time.

  "I have nothing to do," I whimper also in my spare time.

  I have too much spare time. The same thing often happens with sex. I like to try to move outside our bodies and watch me. I go blind. I allow myself to be obliterated and am resurrected so slowly it takes a while to remember who I think I am and resume the role effectively. (It's all so silly it can't really be me.) I used to be able to watch me all the way through. That was nice too. Am I demented already, in what I genuinely feel to be the prime of my life? Or maybe I am that somebody else Ben Zack keeps declaring I am.

  I feel strange.

  "You look strange," my wife says, trying guardedly to draw me out.

  "No, I'm not."

  "Funny."

  "You are."

  "You've got that funny look on your face I can never figure out."

  "Why aren't you laughing?"

  "You look depressed."

  "I'm not."

  "Is anything wrong?"

  "No."

  "I'd love to know what you're really thinking," the hazards with a frowning smile.

  No, you wouldn't.

  (I'm thinking of death and divorce.)

  Today at lunchtime a man fell dead in the lobby of my office building as he was coming toward me. He was a large, portly, elderly man with woolly white hair and a gray pinstripe suit, and he was carrying a slim, black umbrella in one hand and a brown attache case in the other. He was a majestic, attractive figure who looked great enough to be president of General Motors until his face hit the floor. He was too old to be me.

  I don't think I feel different now than I've ever felt. She's the one who seems to be changing: she fidgets more noticeably when I'm silent and she thinks I am angry or dissatisfied. (Am I silent more often? She is afraid of me.) She is rattled when I'm feeling too good. (She thinks I harbor secrets. I do.) I'm glad I've got golf to turn away to now. I want a hole in one someday so I can talk about it forever. I don't want to
go to movies or plays, and my wife concludes I don't love her anymore. I don't even want to go to parties. We see the same people. I wish I had an interesting friend. My wife is bored too. My wife likes variety and movement and would prefer to mix around her different kinds of boredom. I'm content with the boredom I have. (If I kill my wife, who will take care of the children? If I kill my children, my wife can take care of herself. A prudent family man must plan ahead toward possibilities like that in order to provide for his loved ones.) I almost wish my wife would go ahead and commit adultery already so I can get my divorce.

  (I'm not sure I can do it without her.)

  My wife is at that stage now where she probably should commit adultery--and would, if she had more character. It might do her much good. I remember the first time I committed adultery. (It wasn't much good.) "Now I am committing adultery," I thought.

  It was not much different from the first time I laid my wife after we were married:

  "Now I am laying my wife," I thought.

  It would mean much more to her (I think), for I went into my marriage knowing I would commit adultery the earliest chance I had (it was a goal; committing adultery, in fact, was one of the reasons for getting married), while she did not (and probably has not really thought of it yet. It may be that I do all the thinking about it for her). I did not even give up banging the other girl I'd been sleeping with fairly regularly until some months afterward. I hit four or five other girls up at least once those first two years also just to see for myself that I really could.

  I think I might really feel like killing my wife, though, if she did it with someone I know in the company. My wife has red lines around her waist and chest when she takes her clothes off and baggy pouches around the sides and bottom of her behind, and I would not want anyone I deal with in the company to find that out. (I would want them to see her only at her best. Without those red marks.) My wife is not as wanton and debauched as most of the young girls and women we're apt to find ourselves with today (and I would not want any of the men I work with to know that about her, either. I don't want anyone I know in the company to be able to blab to anyone else I know that my wife has red marks on her body and just might not be the most versatile piece of ass in the world), although I like that about her--I would not want her the other way--and repay her virtue and restraint with frequent overflows of affection and esteem and frequent acts of kindness. (I'll take her to church.) Sober, my wife is a lady (and makes me proud). Especially when we entertain. She does that beautifully. (We had Arthur Baron and his wife to dinner once last year and she was superb. Everyone there had a good time.) We do not entertain as much anymore because of Derek. (He produces strain. We have to pretend he doesn't.) I used to like him when I still thought he was normal. I was fond of him and had fun. I joked with him. I used to call him Dirk, and Kiddo, Steamshovel, Dinky Boy, and Dicky Dare. Till I found out what he was. Now it's always formal: Derek. (You prick.) (Why won't you leave us alone?)

  My wife is happiest of all when I'm simply relaxed and kind, and responds to my acts of consideration with lively gratitude and astonished gaiety. It is so easy to make my wife happy it's really a crime we don't do it more often. (She's even prettier when she's feeling good, her face lights up. She doesn't hide it.) I try. When I can. (It isn't always easy to want to.) I'll make the children come along with us to church when I go, and we'll generally have a joyful time. (It isn't always easy to want to be kind and make her happy when I'm thinking of death, murder, adultery, and divorce.) I feel tense, poor, bleak, listless, depressed (and she calls that strange). I have jagged, wracking inner conflicts filing, slicing, hacking, and sawing away inside me mercilessly like instruments of bone, stone, glass, or rusty, blunted iron butchering their own irreducible muscular mass, and so does she (but won't acknowledge it) almost everywhere we go now but church, which is one reason she might be so eager to go. (The world just doesn't work. It's an idea whose time has gone.) My wife is a cheerful Congregationalist now (when she isn't getting drunk and crude at parties or humping me on floors or against the butcher-block table in the kitchen or outside at night on our redwood patio furniture). My wife is a devout and cheerful Congregationalist now because the building is airy and the people friendlier than the Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians she has gotten to know since we moved from the city to Connecticut.

  "Episcopalians," she has told me, "are the ones who go shush in movies."

  And I laughed.

  (My wife can often make me laugh.) She will bake for cake sales. She will even stop drinking in the daytime well in advance of church socials, and she will grow more reserved in bed. (I can almost always tell when some spectacular social gala is in the offing at church by the waning initiative in her sex drive.) I am a registered Republican (who nearly always votes Democratic sneakily) and believe I am nearer to God than she.

  "The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want," says the new minister, who has been with us just about a year and seems to want a good deal more than he has in the way of social contact and community influence. (He strikes me as a man with his eye out for a better job in a growth industry.) No registered Republican would go quite that far. We'll let the Lord be our shepherd readily enough, but there's plenty we'll want, no matter how much we've already got. Otherwise we'll fire Him, retire Him, or ease Him aside.

  I'll let my wife drive us to church some Sundays when I'm feeling especially benign and charitable (the children exchange cryptic, supercilious signals during the service but do so inconspicuously, because they do not want to embarrass my wife) and then, often, feel like breaking her neck afterward for making me go and ruining my whole day. (I could have slept late, or phoned around for golf invitations. After all, how many years' worth of Sundays do I have left? Thirty? Two?) "That new minister of yours," I might announce sonorously on the way back, pausing to make certain the two children in the rear of the open convertible are brought in as accomplices, "gives me a sharp pain in the ass."

  The children crane forward delightedly.

  My wife purses her lips with a sidelong smile and decides to pretend to whistle. It will take more than a little routine baiting this fine sunny morning to crinkle the state of euphoria she's in as a result of having shown up in church with her husband and children. At moments like this, we are suddenly very close. (They don't last.) My wife even had the hope not long ago of walking unashamedly into church one day with Derek too. I killed that one quick.

  "What say, Dad?" inquires my daughter, to help things along, when she sees my wife intends to remain silent.

  "I really don't think," chastises my wife amiably, going along with the game against us in a manner of placid contemplation, "you ought to say things like that in front of the children."

  "Like what?" I am all contrived innocence.

  "If you don't know."

  "Minister?"

  "No."

  "What then?"

  "You know."

  "I've no idea."

  "What?" demands my boy, bouncing on his haunches in anticipation as the three of us close in on her.

  "Donkey," exclaims my wife in triumph, evading his snare nimbly.

  "No fair. He didn't say donkey."

  "I know, dear."

  "He said ass," says my daughter.

  "I know, darling. And I think he's depraved."

  "And I'm inclined to agree," I second immediately.

  "And his English is terrible. And I don't think it's healthy to bring the children to church to listen to a depraved minister."

  "I'm not talking about him!"

  "His vocabulary's pretentious and his syntax is frequently wrong."

  "I'm talking about you. I'm not talking about his language. I'm talking about yours."

  "Well, it is."

  "And yours?"

  "All right," I yield, with a gesture of liberal acquiescence. "I'll change the subject. What do you think of the rectum as a whole?"

  "That's even worse!"

&nb
sp; "I don't get it."

  "Don't you get it?"

  "Now I get it."

  "Pretty shitty, huh?"

  "I thought we agreed," says my wife, with an exaggerated politeness that sometimes gets my goat, "to try not to disagree anymore in front of the children."

  "A-men," says my daughter sarcastically, and claps her hands.

  "That's the kind of remark," I reply good-naturedly, because I really do not want to upset her, "that can only lead to a disagreernent. But, I surrender. I yield. That new minister of yours doesn't give me a pain in the ass."

  The children explode with laughter.

  "You show me one doctor," says my wife, when she can be heard, "who'll say it's healthy to use such language in front of your own son and daughter."

  "Name one we've seen who'd say it isn't."

  "I thought you agreed," interjects my daughter cynically, "not to fight in front of us anymore."

  "We aren't fighting," my wife responds automatically.

  "I know," scoffs my daughter. "You were discussing."

  "With emphasis," adds my son in friendly mockery. All of us smile but my wife, who nibbles on her lip in distracted gloom. She is extremely uneasy.

  "What's wrong?" I inquire softly.

  She is silent a moment, seems burdened with a knowledge almost too enormous to express. "He's coming to the house," she blurts out sheepishly.

  "Who?"

  "Him."

  "When?"

  On the part of the rest of us, there is massive shock.

  "Today."

  "Today?"

  "I invited him for lunch."

  "You're crazy!"

  "I'm getting out!"

  "I don't want him."

  "And I," announces my wife in an expansive bellow of glowing self-congratulation, turning pointedly to gloat at each of us, "was making that up! Do you think," she continues in her rare flight of exultation, "I would expose a respectable man of the cloth to a gang of idiots like you?"

  "Oh, Mom!" My daughter flings her arm around my wife's neck and hugs her from behind. "Mom, Mom, Mom. I just love her when she kids like that. Don't you?"

  "And so do I."

  But it doesn't last, not on a Saturday, Sunday, or holiday, unless all of us have already made plans, for Derek is waiting at home.