Джозеф Хеллер - Something Happened

My wife is a good person, really, or used to be, and sometimes I'm sorry for her. She drinks now during the day and flirts, or tries to, at parties we go to in the evening, although she really doesn't know how. (She is very bad at flirting — poor thing.) She is not a joyful woman, except on special occasions, and usually when she is at least a little bit high on wine or whiskey. (We don't get along well.) She thinks she has gotten older, heavier, and less attractive than she used to be — and, of course, she is right. She thinks it matters to me, and there she is wrong. I don't think I mind. (If she knew I didn't mind, she'd probably be even more unhappy.) My wife is not bad looking; she's tall, dresses well, and has a good figure, and I'm often proud to have her with me. (She thinks I never want her with me.) She thinks I do not love her anymore, and she may be right about that, too.

"You were with Andy Kagle today," she says.

"How can you tell?"

"You're walking with a limp."

There is this wretched habit I have of acquiring the characteristics of other people. I acquire these characteristics indiscriminately, even from people I don't like. If I am with someone who talks loud and fast and assertively, I will begin talking loud and fast right along with him (but by no means always assertively). If I am with someone who drawls lazily and is from the South or West, I will drawl lazily too and begin speaking almost as though I were from the South or West, employing authentic regional idioms as though they were part of my own upbringing, and not of someone else's.

I do not do this voluntarily. It's a weakness, I know, a failure of character or morals, this subtle, sneaky, almost enslaving instinct to be like just about anyone I happen to find myself with. It happens not only in matters of speech, but with physical actions as well, in ways I walk or sit or tilt my head or place my arms or hands. (Often, I am struck with fear that someone I am with will think I am aping him deliberately in order to ridicule and insult him. I try my best to keep this tendency under control.) It operates unconsciously (subconsciously?), whether I am sober or intoxicated (generally, I am a happy, pleasant, humorous drunk), with a determination of its own, in spite of my vigilance and aversion, and usually I do not realize I have slipped into someone else's personality until I am already there. (My wife tells me that at movies now, particularly comedies, I mug and gesticulate right along with the people on the screen, and I cannot say she is wrong.)

If I am lunching or having cocktails after work with Johnny Brown (God's angry man, by nature and coincidence), I will swear and complain a lot and talk and feel tough and strong. If I am with Arthur Baron, I will speak slowly and softly and intelligently and feel gentle and astute and dignified and refined, not only for the time I am with him but for a while afterward; his nature will be my nature until I come up against the next person who has more powerful personality traits than any of my own, or a more formidable business or social position. (When I am with Green, though, I do not feel graceful and articulate; I feel clumsy and incompetent — until I am away from him, and then I am apt to begin searching about for glib epigrams to use in my conversations with somebody else.) I often wonder what my own true nature is.

Do I have one?

I always dress well. But no matter what I put on, I always have the disquieting sensation that I am copying somebody; I can always remind myself of somebody else I know who dresses much that same way. I often feel, therefore, that my clothes are not my own. (There are times, in fact, when I open one of my closet doors and am struck with astonishment by the clothes I find hanging inside. They are all mine, of course, but, for a moment, it's as though I had never seen many of them before.) And I sometimes feel that I would not spend so much time and money and energy chasing around after girls and other women if I were not so frequently in the company of other men who do, or talk as though they wanted to. I'm still not sure it's all that much fun (although I am sure it's an awful lot of trouble). And if I'm not sure by now, I know I never will be.

If I argue with someone who stammers badly, I am in serious trouble; for I have a slight stammer of my own at times and the conversation soon threatens to disintegrate hopelessly into bursts of meaningless syllables. I am in absolute dread of talking to people who stutter; I have a deathly fear I will want to stutter too, will be lost for life if I ever have to watch the mouth of someone who stutters for more than a sentence or two; when I am with a stutterer, I can, if I let myself, almost feel a delicious, tantalizing quiver take shape and grow in both my lips and strive to break free and go permanently out of control. I am not comfortable in the presence of homosexuals, and I suspect it may be for the same reason (I might be tempted to become like them). I steer clear of people with tics, squints, and facial twitches; these are additional characteristics I don't want to acquire. The problem is that I don't know who or what I really am.

If I am with people who are obscene, I am obscene.

Who am I? (I'll need three guesses.)

My daughter is not obscene, but her speech is dirty now when she talks to her friends and growing dirty also when she talks to us. ( I talk dirty too.) She is trying to establish some position with us or provoke some reaction, but my wife and I don't know what or why. She wants to become a part too, I guess, of what she sees is her environment, and she is, I fear, already merging with, dissolving into, her surroundings right before my eyes. She wants to be like other people her age. I cannot stop her; I cannot save her. Something happened to her, too, although I don't know what or when. She is not yet sixteen, and I think she is already lost. Her uniqueness is fading. As a child, she seemed to us to be so different from all other children. She does not seem so different anymore.

Who is she?

It amuses me in a discouraging way to know I borrow adjectives, nouns, verbs, and short phrases from people I am with and frequently find myself trapped inside their smaller vocabularies like a hamster in a cage. Their language becomes my language. My own vocabulary fails me (if it is indeed mine), and I am at a loss to supply even perfectly familiar synonyms. Rather than grope for words of my own, I fasten upon their words and carry their phraseologies away with me for use in subsequent conversations (even though the dialogue I steal may not be first rate).

If I talk to a Negro (spade, if I've been talking to a honky who calls a spade a spade), I will, if I am not on guard, begin using not only his vernacular (militant hip or bucolic Uncle Tom), but his pronunciation. I do the same thing with Puerto Rican cab-drivers; if I talk to cabdrivers at all (I try not to; I can't stand the whining malevolence of New York cabdrivers, except for the Puerto Ricans), it will be on their level rather than mine. (I don't know what my level is, ha, ha.) And the same thing happens when I talk to boys and girls of high school and college age; I bridge the generation gap; I copy them: I employ their argot and display an identification with their tastes and outlooks that I do not always feel. I used to think I was doing it to be charming; now I know I have no choice. (Most of my daughter's friends, particularly her girl friends, like me and look up to me; she doesn't.)

If I'm with Andy Kagle, I will limp. "You were with Andy Kagle today," my wife says.

We are in the kitchen.

I have indeed been with Andy Kagle; I stop walking with Andy Kagle's limp; and I consider prudently if I have not been talking to my wife in a Spanish accent as well, for the girls Kagle and I were with this time were both Cuban and unattractive. They were prostitutes. Nobody likes to call a prostitute a prostitute anymore (least of all me. They are hookers, hustlers, and call girls ), but that's what they were. Prostitutes. And I have taken the high-minded vow again (even as I was zipping up my pants and getting back into my undershirt, which smelled already under the sleeves from the morning's output of perspiration) that from this day forward, I am simply not going to make love anymore to girls I don't like.