Джозеф Хеллер - Something Happened

"Come outside."

"Come inside."

"You're a tease."

"You're a tease. You keep a girl all hot and bothered all day long and then won't even take her to a hotel."

"I don't know how."

"I'll tell you."

"You do it."

"They'd lock me up. They'd lock me up as a prostitute. We'll do it together. Register as Mr. and Mrs. Bang."

Today, twenty-one is too young for me, childish, pesty. I wouldn't lay one like that on a bet now if she worked in the same office. The whole company would know. (They talk about you now to their friends. They talk about you to their parents!) I don't even like them working for me that young or hearing their strident gibberish (with defective pronunciations that give their neighborhoods and working-class background away). They lack refinement. Most of those that don't wear bras have pendulous breasts that look awful. I don't often envy youth. I detest it. Kids don't hear noise. They make so much. I wish they'd all keep their mouths shut in public and turn down their phonographs and transistor radios. My daughter will soon be the same age as Virginia. She looks older now, because she's taller, when she stands up straight. I wish she'd realize that and wear more than just a nightgown when she comes out of her room. I wish my wife would tell her. It's hard for me to say anything about it to either one. (I don't think I will ever be able to sleep in a double bed again with a male. I would choose the floor or a chair. And that would be equally suspect.) I am not a fanny patter. There are times I don't even want to handle my wife. I just want to put it in and get it over with. Or I don't want sex at all. I make excuses. There is a barrier of repugnance. It's shelter. It dissolves when I want it to. They've got nothing there but something missing. I think filthy. That's shelter too. (Other times I want it and my wife doesn't, and it's like receiving a blow across the forehead, eyes, and the bridge of my nose.) Virginia was twenty-one and older than I was (and that's the way I will have to keep thinking about her if I want to be able to keep thinking about her with romantic nostalgia and devotion).

She would have lapped me up, turned me topsyturvy (as Penny can do), spilled me head over heels into a sea of winy, rippling vibrations, whirled me backwards quivering into a hailstorm of palpitating infancy and insanity, sent me scrambling up the walls with sensation and rocketing through the ceiling like a surface-to-heaven missile with the flaming tip of her crimson, naughty tongue. I would have begged for mercy as soon as I recollected who I was and found myself able to speak again. (I do that with Penny now. I do it with my wife.) And she would have looked lovingly at me with sated sweetness afterward, resting on her knees between my own, satisfied herself by how beautifully she had done, how prodigiously she had pleased me. I'd like that now.

"Isn't he jealous?" I had to ask. "He can see us right now."

"He wants to leave his wife and marry me. We go to empty restaurants and have drinks and dinner. He likes the way I kiss."

"So do I."

"So do I. It took a lot of practice for me to get it just right. You should try me when I'm all naked and really feel in the mood. I don't know what you're waiting for."

I lowered an accident folder over my groin (in case another one took place). "Come outside."

"I see, said the blind man. Something's happening."

"Is this case yours?" I inquired boldly. "I bet I know the cure."

"Meet me?"

"Did you ever go to bed with a stiff problem and wake up with the solution in your hands?"

"You made it hard for me but I can't hold it against you."

"Go first. I'll meet you."

"I'm coming, Virginia."

"Do it to me like he does to Marie," she sang back softly, as I moved past her out into the hallway.

I was Captain Blood the pirate on that staircase, a dauntless freebooter. I bore the accident folders before me prudently like a gallant shield. (I had something to hide.) I was carrying hot pellets.

I always yearned to take it out and ask her to hold it a little while. I didn't dare. Mrs. Yerger was in charge before I was able to, and I quit soon after. I practiced the words but couldn't say them; interchangeable first ones jammed in my larynx and pharynx; there was a multitude of syllables with which I might have begun:

"Will —»

"Take —»

"Would —»

"How about —»

"Don't be —»

"I —»

"Please."

I could not speak any of them. I did not know what pose to adopt. (I had no choice.) Now I know it would not have mattered. (She either would or wouldn't. The thing to have done was to whip it right out, mumbling anything. Please would have done fine.) How I wanted her to. It would have been laden with need almost beyond endurance, swollen to bursting with tenderness, gone lunging off rabidly like an epileptic relative I would soon attempt unsuccessfully to repudiate, self-centered, an embarrassment, a connection of some distance I might have to mutter an apology for. I don't get that hot anymore. Apathy, boredom, restlessness, free-floating, amorphous frustration, leisure, discontent at home or at my job — these are my aphrodisiacs now. I never got that far. It ended before I learned how. "All that's required is one or two years of specialized training," say the military recruiting posters. I got that specialized training in the armed forces. I came out of the army a handsome captain, and Virginia was dead. I was glad. (I was surprised I was glad, but that's what I was.) I tried to make a date with her from a telephone booth in Grand Central Station and failed. It's hard to succeed that way with someone who's dead. I liked hearing her tell me about sex. (It was like watching a dirty movie.) It was hard picturing someone as gentle, moderate, and considerate as Len Lewis being incited by her in a restaurant, movie, or automobile.

"I make him," she boasted. "I lead him on slowly. I know how."

"How?"

Her father had killed himself too. "We never knew why. We had lots of money. He was a quiet man. Like Mr. Lewis."

"What does he do to you?"

"Whatever I ask him to. Or show him. He isn't sure how far he can go with me yet. He can't believe it," she praised herself with a grin. "He's very sweet. I like to make him happy. He's easy. You're easy too."

"I'm hard."

"Easy."

"See?"

"I see, said the blind man."

"You're making things very hard for me."

"Should I meet you?"

"Hurry up."

"I can only stay a second."

"Hurry up."

Her face wreathed in pink, blissful smiles of contentment whenever she saw me get an erection. (I think I got more hard-ons from her in my twelve months at that automobile casualty insurance company than I've had in the twenty or thirty years since.) I wish I had her smooth, round cheeks in my hands right now. I would stroke them languidly with pinky and thumb, stimulating her slowly, instead of grabbing and racing. (I know how to do that now.) It would be I who picked the mood and did the delectable tantalizing.

"Cover up," she'd say.

"Come outside," I'd beg.

"You won't have time," she'd laugh. "Better shoot to the men's room."

"Meet me there."

"I've got no key."

"I'll sneak you in."

"I've never done it in a men's room."

"You did it in a canoe once at Duke University."

"I did it in a men's dormitory once also at Duke University. With five football players. They made me. I was expelled. The one I liked so much brought me there. They sent me home. I was afraid to go. I never found out if they told my father."

"Did they rape you? Is that what happened?"

"No. They didn't have to. I didn't want to. But they made me. They just held me down and kept talking. I knew them all. But it was fun once we started and I stopped worrying about it. I would have told the other girls. I think I hoped we'd get caught. I think I'd like to do something like that again sometime soon. It's exciting."