Джозеф Хеллер - Something Happened

"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 changes 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.