Джозеф Хеллер - Something Happened

"Selling."

"Selling what?" asks my boy.

"Selling selling."

For an instant, my boy is confused, almost stunned by the riddle of my reply. Then he understands it was meant as a joke, and he bursts into laughter. His eyes sparkle, and his face lights up joyously. (Everybody likes my boy.)

"Do you mean it?" probes my wife, studying me. She is still unsure whether to be pleased or not.

"I think so."

"Will you have to travel more than you have to travel now?"

"No. Probably less."

"Will you make more money?" my daughter asks.

"Yes. Maybe a lot more."

"Will we be rich?"

"No."

"Will we ever be rich?"

"No."

"I don't want you to travel more," my boy complains.

"I'm not going to travel more," I repeat for him, with a trace of annoyance. "I'm going to travel less ." (I begin to regret that I brought it up at all. The questions are coming too swiftly; I can feel my self-satisfaction ebbing away, and an army of irritations mobilizing too rapidly for me to keep track of and control. I am already replying to them with my slight stammer.)

"Are you going to start talking to yourself again?" my boy cannot resist baiting me mischievously.

"I wasn't talking to myself," I declare firmly.

"Yes, you were," my daughter murmurs.

"Like last year?" my boy persists.

"I was not talking to myself," I repeat loudly. "I was practicing a speech."

"You were practicing it to yourself," my boy points out.

"Will they let you make a speech this year?" my daughter asks. "At the company convention?"

"Oh, yes," I respond with a smile.

"A long speech?"

"Oh, yes, indeed. I imagine they might let me make a speech as long as I want to at the company convention this year."

"Will you be working for Andy Kagle?" my wife asks.

The question brings me to a halt.

"A little something like that," I stammer evasively.

(The fun goes out of my family guessing game, and now I am sorry that I started it.) I laugh nervously. "It isn't definite yet. And it's all a pretty long way off. Maybe I shouldn't even have mentioned it."

"I'm glad you'll be working for Andy Kagle," my wife asserts. "I don't like Green."

"I didn't say I'd be working for Kagle."

"I don't trust Green."

"Don't you listen?"

"Why are you snapping at me?"

"I don't want you to be a salesman," my daughter exclaims with unexpected emotion, almost in tears. "I don't want you to have to go around to other people's fathers and beg them to buy things from you."

"I'm not going to be a salesman," I protest impatiently. "Look, what's everybody talking about it so much for? I haven't got it yet. And I'm not even sure I'm going to take it."

"You don't have to shout at her," my wife says.

"I'm not shouting."

"Yes, you are," she says. "Don't you hear yourself?"

"I'm sorry I shouted."

"You don't have to snap at everybody, either."

"And I'm sorry I snapped."

My wife is right, this time. Without my realizing it, I have moved from optimistic conceit into a bad temper; and without my being conscious of it, my voice has risen with anger, and I have been shouting at them again. We are all silent at the table now. The children sit with their eyes lowered. They seem too fearful even to fidget. I am guilty. My forehead hurts me (with tension. Another headache is threatening). I am numb with shame. I feel so helpless and uncertain. I wish one of them would say something that would give me a clue, that would point the way I must follow toward an easy apology. (I feel lost.) But no one will speak.

I pounce upon an energetic idea. I whirl upon my son without warning, shoot my index finger out at him, and demand:

"Are you mad or glad?"

"Glad," he cries with laughter and delight, when he recognizes I am joking again and no longer irate.

I spin around toward my daughter and shoot my index ringer out at her.

"Are you mad or glad?" I demand with a grin.

"Oh, Daddy," she answers. "Whenever you make one of us unhappy, you always try to get out of it by behaving like a child."

"Oh, shit," I say quietly, stung by her rebuff.

"Must you say that in front of the children?" my wife asks.

"They say it in front of us," I retort. I turn to my daughter. "Say shit."

"Shit," she says.

"Say shit," I say to my son.

He is ready to start crying.

(I want to reach out instinctively to console and reassure him and rumple his soft, sandy hair. I am deeply fond of my boy, although I am not sure anymore how I feel about my daughter.)

"I'm sorry," I tell him quickly. (I have the shameful, shocking apprehension that if I did put my hand out to comfort him, he would cringe reflexively, as though afraid I were going to strike him. I recoil from that thought in pain.) I turn to my daughter. "I'm sorry," I say to her too, earnestly. "You're right, and I'm sorry. I do act like a child." Now it is my eyes that are down. "I think I want another drink," I explain apologetically, as I stand up. "I'm not going to eat anymore. You go on, though. I'll wait in the living room. I'm sorry."

They continue eating after I leave, their voices subdued.

I do such things to them, I know, even when I don't intend to. But I cannot admit this to my wife or children. My wife would not understand. I cannot really say to my wife: "I'm sorry." She would think I was apologizing. My wife and I cannot really talk to each other about the same things anymore; but I sometimes forget this and try. We are no longer close enough for honest conversation (although we are close enough for frequent sexual intercourse). She would respond with something as vacuous and frustrating and galling as "You should be," or "You didn't have to snap at everybody," or "You don't have to shout at me that way." As though my snapping or her snapping at me (she can snap too), were any part of the problem. She would say something exactly like that; and I would be brought to a stop again, as though slapped sharply; I would be stunned; I would feel abandoned and isolated again, and I would sink back for safety again inside my dense, dark wave of opaque melancholy; I would feel lonely and I would be brought face to face again with the fact that I have nobody in this world to confide in or reach toward for help; I would miss my mother (and my father?) and my dead big brother, and I would begin daydreaming once again about some new job with a different company that would take me far away from home more often. Someday soon someone may be dropping bombs on us. I will scream:

"The sky is falling! They are dropping bombs! People are on fire! The world is over! It's coming to an end!"

And my wife will reply:

"You don't have to raise your voice to me."

What happened to us? Something did. I was a boy once, and she was a girl, and we were both new. Now we are man and woman, and nothing feels new any longer; everything feels old. I think we liked each other once. I think we used to have fun; at least, it seems that way now, although we were always struggling about one thing or another. I was always struggling to get her clothes off, and she was always struggling to keep them on. I remember things like that. I remember the many times I had to pull my wife's dress up and her panties down because she didn't like to make love outdoors, or even indoors if anyone else was even remotely in the vicinity: in the same house or apartment, in the next room (even at hotels! She would be petrified if she heard someone stirring in the adjoining room), in the next apartment, in the next house! I remember the way I'd unbutton her blouse almost anywhere to get at her bra and breasts. (Pale blue brassieres still do drive me crazy more than black; she used to wear them.) She was always afraid we'd be caught. I didn't care (although I might have cared if we'd ever been caught). I was always ripping open her slacks or tearing off her bathing suit or tennis shorts and flinging them away somewhere over my back as I went at her as hard and fast as I could every chance I had. I was a pretty hot kid once. I didn't care whether she enjoyed it or not; just as long as I got mine. I was always trying to jump her. We were with her parents and her younger sister a lot then, and I would grab at her the second they all went out and try to bang her before any of them got back. In the country, during the summer, or at the seashore, I would try to lure her outside the rented house after dark and do it to her on the porch or right down on the ground or sand (although I didn't like the sand in my clothes and hair afterward and she didn't like the ground, because it hurt her ass and made it black and blue). I was always pulling at her buttons and zippers and clutching and scratching at the snaps and elastic of her underthings. I was absolutely wild for her when she was a girl and I was a boy, absolutely out of my head with volcanic lust. I was all cock and hard-on. I wanted to come, come, come. I would give her no warning, no time to deliberate or converse or prepare or find any excuses for delay and often she did not understand fully what was happening to her until I had her half undressed and was already swarming all over her, wholly on fire and stone deaf to all her objections and premonitions, and it was too late for her to make me stop. (Sometimes I would sit scheming about her all through family dinner, plotting where and how I would spring at her the moment I had the opportunity and selecting the way in which I would ravish her this time.) No matter where it was I trapped, seized, and finally overcame her (if it was anywhere outside the bolted door of our own bedroom; often it was even behind the locked door of our own bedroom), she would recline and heave submissively beneath me with her eyes wide open in gleaming fright, turning her gaze from one side to the other rapidly and distressfully to make certain no one was seeing, listening, or approaching. (I think now that I probably enjoyed her terror and my violence.) I didn't mind that her eyes were open and darting all about and that her strongest emotions were not those of passion or entirely on me, just as long as I had her when I wanted her and got what I wanted; it might, in fact, have added something, that tangy, triumphant sense of frenzied danger, that ability to dominate rather than merely persuade, and I often wish I were driven now by that same hectic mixture of blind ardor, haste, and tension. (It might, in fact, have added a great deal.) Maybe that's what's missing. I lay girls now that are as young as she was then, and much more nimble, profligate, and responsive but it isn't as rich with impulse and excitement and generally not as satisfying afterward. (There is no resistance.) I have more control and maturity now and can manipulate and exploit them coolly and skillfully, but it isn't nearly as much fun anymore as it used to be with her, and I miss her greatly and love us both very deeply when I remember how we used to be then. I have large rooms now with big beds and all the privacy and time I want; the girls have places of their own, or I have Red Parker's apartment in the city and hotel rooms and suites on business trips out of town; but it's all rather tame now, rather predictable and matter-of-fact, even with someone I am with for the very first time (and I often wonder, even while I am in the act of doing it, why I bother. I am no sooner in than I'm thinking about getting out. I no sooner come than I want to go).