Джозеф Хеллер - Something Happened

But so what?

It would have passed, sooner or later, just as she has passed already, just as I am passing now. (Fuck her, she's dead.) Her case is closed. If she didn't kill herself, she'd be older than I am now and probably a pest; she would be stout and wrinkled and suffer from constipation, gallstones, menopause disturbances, and bunioned feet, and I more than likely would not wish to see her. Everything passes. (That's what makes it endurable.)

But the memory lives (but not for long. Ha, ha).

Her record may be dead, but it isn't buried; and I remember also how she used to urge me on after Marie Jencks once she saw me lusting for that baby too. I could not stop thinking about Marie that way after I found out about her and Tom and that desk in the storeroom. (I used to eat my lunch at that desk two or three times a week and read the sports sections of the New York Daily News and Mirror .) I wanted her too. I didn't know how to get her.

"Bang her," Virginia would exhort me. "Go get her."

"How?"

"Goose her."

"You're nuts."

"Grab her by the nipple."

"You're crazy."

All I could decide to do was keep my eye on Tom and see what he did to get her; and all he did was nothing. He practiced his handwriting. (He knew enough to wait and never approach her.) He sat unperturbed for days at a time, working on his handwriting with me, and waited tactfully and patiently for her to summon him into her office by buzzer or telephone or by ordering one of the other file clerks (it might be me) to send Tom in.

"Are you busy now?" she would ask.

He would answer: "No."

"Get the key," she would command.

And down to the storeroom they would go (where records and folders of people in accidents were crumbling with age in the file cabinets).

Virginia and I kept track of their comings (ha, ha) and goings. She was truly a stupendous catch for a lucky young man to make (or be made by), although I liked Virginia more (and so, for that matter, did Tom). She seemed twice as large as Virginia, four or eight times as much in pure female bulk, that towering, sarcastic, frequently sympathetic bleached blonde of a twenty-eight-year-old married woman in Personal Injury, who looked solicitously after poor little old Len Lewis (who was suffering seriously from kidney trouble and dangerous related ailments and in all likelihood didn't really want to divorce his poor, old, little wife, to whom he had been married all his life and of whom he was probably still very fond) and did what she could to make his job easier. She was married to a cost accountant with a weak heart (weakened, probably, by her) and she bluntly took control of Tom whenever she wanted to and put him to work banging her down in the storeroom or in her divorced friend's apartment after business hours, in much the same autocratic manner she might use to call him into her office and order him to do some filing.

(Tom never knew when she sent for him the kind of task to which he was going to be put, but he was perfectly willing to take the good with the bad.)

The farthest Tom would ever go toward getting her would be to put himself on display in her office by pretending to hunt for some file. She knew exactly what he was hunting for. Sometimes she would frown, and he would move off immediately, as though in preoccupied continuation of his search for some specific accident folder. Other times she would react as he had hoped, smiling caustically, almost grimacing, and demand:

"Is there something in here you want?"

"Yes."

"Get the key."

And down into the storeroom they would go again.

"I'm not even sure she likes me," Tom confided indifferently to me one afternoon in the file room, focusing much more emotion on the P 's and Q 's of the handwriting he was practicing than in the statement he was making. "But she sure likes doing it with me."

I could not help wondering if she might not like doing it with me.

So I tried to seduce her. (And failed.) I tried to steal her away from him — not steal her away, actually, but merely to get, if I could, my own fair share of that musky, estrous, overpowering, inexhaustibly marvelous and voluptuous blond married Viking (who was really just an overgrown, rawboned Scotch-Irish brunette from Buffalo with very large pores). And I got nowhere. Virginia spurred me on energetically with outrageous counsel.

"Go give her a fast bang," she would advise. "She's dying for it right now. A lady can tell. Walk right into her office and get her."

"How?"

"She'll be good for you."

"How?"

"Tell her."

"What?"

"What you want. Come right to the point. That's the best way."

"Oh, sure."

"Grab her by the nipple. Slide your hand up under her dress —»

"She'll kill me."

"No, she won't. Look — Mr. Lewis is out. Go in right now and tell her you've decided you'd like to put it to her."

"She'll lock me up."

"She'll fall in love with you. You'll sweep her off her feet."

"She'll break my head. And put me in jail."

"She won't be able to resist you. You're better looking than Tommy. And more fun, too. You've got nice curly hair."

"She'll tell Len Lewis, or Mrs. Yerger, and have me fired."

"She'll pull her dress up right there, throw open her arms and legs, and sing: 'Oooooooh, come on, baby. Do it to me, like you did to Marie, on Saturday night, Saturd —»

"Pull up your dress and sing," I countered, "if you find me so irresistible. I want to put it to you, too."

"Get a hotel room."

"Marie does it on the desk downstairs."

"Marie's got a big round ass."

"So've you."

"I like you, darling," she declared unexpectedly, looking up straight into my eyes. (I was almost swept away by surprise.) "An awful lot. Really, I do. Even though I'm smiling now when I say it — I do mean it."

I was almost too stunned to reply. "What are you talking about?" I whispered fiercely.

"I wish we were older," she continued wistfully in a tone close to some boding lament. "That's what I wish. You know what I wish? I wish you were old enough to knock me around a little."

I was shocked and terrified, almost enraged with her in my confusion and embarrassment. "Why do you talk like that?" I demanded indignantly, afraid that something fateful I did not understand and could not cope with was already taking place. "Why do you say things like that to me now? Right out here in the middle of the office?"

"Because nobody who hears me will believe me," Virginia continued blithely without lowering her voice or altering her expression of beaming innocence. "Not even you. Not a single person around us would take me seriously if I just let my voice get louder and louder steadily until it was almost a shout" — her voice rose clearly and deliberately until it was almost a shout and everybody nearby was watching us with amusement — "and suddenly called out, 'I love you, Bobby Slocum!»

(And she had to go and kill herself. Why? She was no longer an employee of the automobile casualty insurance company because she had committed suicide shortly after the war and was no longer employable.)

"You're a riot," I muttered awkwardly with an artificial smile.

"See?" she resumed in her normal voice, as all the people around us bent back to their work. "Nobody believes me. Not even you, do you?"

"What do you want?" I begged of her in bewilderment. "Tell me what to do. Look, Virgin-for-Short, I'm only seventeen years old. And I'm scared. I don't know what's going to happen to me."

"Don't be scared," she answered, and now her voice did go soft with a tender care and affection. "We'll be alone soon in a hotel room, and I'll do things to you that no girl ever did to you before. I promise." (We were never alone in a hotel room. A little while ago in New Orleans, a whore in a nightclub made that same promise to me in exactly those words, and then had nothing different to offer when she came to my room.) "Now go get Marie."