Джозеф Хеллер - Something Happened

"Then what are you looking so unhappy about?" I want to know timidly. "If it doesn't hurt."

"Your yelling."

"I'm not yelling."

"You were yelling. Before."

"I'm not yelling now. I wasn't even yelling at you," I argue with comic fervor, trying to appease him. I want to make him smile too. (I can't stand to see him upset, particularly when I am the cause. I smother furious impulses against him when he fails to be as fully content with life and me as I would like him to be.) "Was I?"

"No," he replies without hesitation, twisting in one place again (as though he would like to wrest his feet free from the floor and fly away) and patting his knees spasmodically with fluttering palms. "But you're going to yell at me," he guesses cagily, with a gleam of insight in his eyes. "Aren't you?"

"No, no, no, no," I assure him. "I'm not going to yell at you."

"You will. I know you will."

"I won't. Why should I yell at you?"

"You see? I told you."

"I'm not."

"You're yelling already."

"I'm not yelling!"

"Ain't he yelling?"

"I don't think he knows what he's doing."

"That's good," I compliment my wife acidly. "That will cool things down."

"You know you're impossible?" she answers. "Whenever you get this way."

"I'm possible."

"He's possible," my daughter intones ruefully.

"Are you going to yell at me now?" my boy asks.

"I'm not going to yell at you at all," I tell him. "I was speaking loudly only to be emphatic," I explain to him almost in a whisper, forcing myself to smile and imposing on my words a scrupulous and conciliatory calm. I squat to my heels directly in front of him, bringing my face almost to a level with his own, and look instructively into his eyes. He lets me take his hands. Tissues inside his hands, I feel, are beating and lurching like little fishes. (Everybody in my family trembles at home but me, even though I don't want them to. I brood and sulk and moan a good deal and wish I were someplace else. I tremble elsewhere. At the office. In my sleep. Alone at airports waiting for planes. In unfamiliar hotel rooms in cities I don't like, unless I drink myself sodden and have some girl or woman I can stand who is able to spend most of the night with me. I don't like being alone at night and always leave a small light on when I have to be. Being dead tired doesn't help; in fact, exhaustion is worse, for I don't sleep any sounder and my defenses are low and laggard. Repulsive thoughts swarm over them and invade my mind like streams of lice or other small, beetle-brown, biting insects or animals, and I am slow to choke them off and force them back down where they came from. There is this animal, I sometimes imagine, that creeps up on paws in the night when my eyes are closed and eats at my face — but that's another childish story. My dreams are demoralizing. I won't reveal them. I have castration fears. I have castration dreams. I had a dream once of my mother with black mussels growing on her legs, and now I know what it meant.) "Please don't be afraid of me," I urge him tenderly, almost begging. "I'm not going to do anything to hurt you or scare you. Now or ever."

"It's okay," he says, trying to comfort me.

"You can trust me. I'm not yelling at you now, am I? I'm speaking softly. Ain't I?"

He nods mistrustfully (and I want to raise my voice and begin yelling at him again to make him believe I never yell at him at all. But I don't. I don't want to scare him again. I don't ever really want to frighten any of them and am always sorry and disgusted with myself afterward when I do. Almost always. But only after I succeed in bullying them; if I try to bully them and fail, I am distraught. And frightened. I am sorry now that I have just intimidated them all; and in speaking to my boy, I am trying to apologize to my wife and daughter as well. I want them to see I am sorry; but I don't want to say so. I want to be forgiven).

"Why do you look that way?" I ask him, in a troubled, slightly nagging voice (pleading with him to relax and feel free and safe and happy with me). "Why do you look so worried?"

"It's okay."

"You can trust me," I promise.

"It's just the way I look."

"And I wasn't yelling at you before, either," I continue uncontrollably. "Sometimes when a person raises his voice and speaks loudly, it isn't because he's yelling at you or even angry, but only because he wants you to believe what he's saying. He does it for. emphasis. He wants to be. emphatic. That's what the word emphatic means." I pause in annoyance as I see my boy catch my daughter's eyes for an instant and then roll his gaze upward with a dramatic look of tedium (as both my children are apt to do ostentatiously when one of us is lecturing them at length for doing something we deem hazardous, or inundating them with unnecessary directions or repetitious questions. I would rather have him bored with me now and making fun than panic-stricken. So I continue peaceably, persuasively, instead of reprimanding him tartly, although my dignity was offended for a second). "Now that's what I was doing when I raised my voice a bit before," I continue. "I was being. emphatic . I wanted you to believe that I wasn't going to yell at you and that I wasn't angry with you. And it was exactly the same when I was speaking with them," I lie. "I wasn't yelling at them, either."

"I know," he says. "I know it now."

"And I'm not yelling at you now, am I?"

"No."

"So I was right, wasn't I?"

"Yes. It's okay."

"Good. I'm glad you understand. And that's why. " I conclude wryly, with a smile — and somehow I know he guesses the joke I'm about to make and that he is going to interrupt and make it for me. I pause, to give him time.

". you yelled at me!" he says.

"Right!" I guffaw.

(Our minds are very much alike, his and mine, in our humor and our forebodings.)

"Does it," he ventures ahead boldly on his wave of success, with a sidelong glance at my wife that glitters with impish intent, "give you a pain in the ass, too?"

"Oh, my!" I exclaim. (My first impulse is to guffaw again; my next is to protect him from any sanctimonious reproof that might come from my wife for his using the word ass. Quickly, clowning, laughing, mugging with grossly burlesqued alarm, before my wife can react at all, I cry:) "Now, she's going to yell at you!"

"She's not!"

"No?"

"Are you?"

But my wife is glad (not mad) and laughs merrily with relief (because she sees I am glad now, too, and not mad at her or my daughter anymore).

"No, but you're a devil and a rascal," she upbraids him affectionately. "Because you knew I wouldn't yell at you this time if you said that word."

"What word?" asks my boy, with a feigned look of innocence. "Ass?"

"Don't say it again!"

"Ass?"

"You're not going to make me say it!"

"What? Ass?" asks my daughter, joining in friskily.

"I give up." My wife throws her arms out mirthfully in exasperation. "What am I going to do with them?"

"Say ass," I advise.

"Ass!" my wife blares obligingly, extending her face out toward both of them like an elephant's trunk. They roar with gulping laughter. "Ass! Ass, ass, ass, ass, ass!"

All of them are laughing hysterically now.

My daughter is unable to keep her balance in the sweeping exhilaration she experiences at finding herself released so unexpectedly, without penalty, from the excoriating conflict she had devised and in which she had so swiftly found herself the tortured victim. She falls against my boy joyously; they hug each other with immense delight and go staggering wildly all about my study, bumping into us and each other and into the superfluous chairs my wife keeps sneaking in when she has no better place to put them. My boy is pleased with himself beyond measure, beside himself with glee and ecstasy at having used his dirty word with impetuous imagination and gotten away with it and at having transported us all to a spirit of warmth and generous good feeling from the savage rancor with which we had been smashing each other. We are close now, intimate, respectful, and informal. The children bump and hug each other and continue to laugh hilariously. I watch them with affection (feeling complacent and benign). I am glad they are mine.