Джозеф Хеллер - Something Happened

"How was New Orleans?"

"Dull."

"You should have brought me along."

"There was nothing to do."

"I'd have given you things to do. You know how hot I get in a place like that. What'd you bring me back?"

"Clap."

"Good."

My wife is usually much better for me than most. Only Penny does it with a consistent, keen, unbearable beauty every single time and has me begging her helplessly to stop, my eyes blind and my mouth glutting incoherently with babbles, giggles, gasps, and spasms. Penny knows where to hit and strikes like an eagle. She knows exactly how much longer it's safe to go on after I feel positively I will die in pieces if she continues at all. And I'm glad she goes on. Penny makes it dance like an angel and sprint like a whippet every single time. I comprehend then why owners and whole cultures have worshiped it. It's an ironic master-servant association: I am the master; she serves me by reducing me to a writhing, pleading blob of chaotic, giggling blackness and a single burning nerve that cuts like a blade. I think I whimper with hilarity. I'm not sure what noises I make as I wait for my vision to recover and my power to speak to reassemble. I would not want anybody else in the world to see me that way, in the collapsed state of what is called ecstasy. I would not want to be photographed. She gives me scotch and makes hot coffee for me afterward. Penny has a hazel muff, with no scraggly hairs migrating and never any surprises or disappointments. I do not phone her much anymore), motorists driving at high speed swerve out of their way deliberately to kill nutrias dazed by their headlights standing hypnotized in the service lanes at the sides of the highway. In the morning, there are too many furry, dead bodies to count lying along the road from Hammond into New Orleans. Seen quickly from certain angles they look like cozy muffs. Seen from others, they look like crushed wild animals with bloody beaks and talons. During the morning, I suppose, local fur trappers arrive in pickup trucks to remove the bodies for their valuable pelts. This is called hunting. (Other people, I think, might veer away to avoid killing an animal, even a sleeping frog.)

(Man is a carnivore, a swift, accurate, rapacious hunter, and he ought never try to compete with the electric vibrator. It tires you out, and there isn't a chance of winning. Ask a girl who owns one.)

Green was right about Jane too.

I have stopped flirting with Jane (what would I do with her afterward?) and started flirting platonically with Laura, Arthur Baron's secretary (which makes a much better impression). Laura is older and unhappily married. She is highly regarded by everyone but her husband, who is three years younger than she and perhaps homosexual, and my attentions are clearly friendly and humanitarian (although she does have a thick ass I think now and then I might like to toss over onto my lap and paddle bare with stinging, tingling noises. It's good I don't try, for I forget how heavy she'd be, and I would risk a hernia or slipped spinal disk. If I did that once to someone, I might want to do it always — and then I would be a pervert. Girls would talk about me unfavorably to their friends. I think I feel that way too about stuttering. I think I may want to stutter. What a liberating release it might be from the lifelong, rigorous discipline of speaking correctly. I'd feel tongue-tied and free. I might spank and stutter at the same time. I feel I might never want to stop once I started and would let my tongue wobble as it wanted to for the rest of my life and never have to say anything intelligible to anyone again. I would lose my job. I would lose my wife and friends. I don't have close friends anymore. I have friends, but I don't feel close to them. Some feel close to me. Red Parker is my friend, and I don't feel close to him). I really don't know how I would have disposed of Jane after taking her to bed with me in Red Parker's apartment early one evening probably after cocktails. She's only twenty-four. I can't imagine what in the world I would want to talk to her about once we no longer had to talk about going to bed. She's probably too young to understand there'd be nothing personal in the enmity and disgust I'd feel toward her afterward and in my never wanting to see or speak to her again. That's happened to me before. She'd probably conclude it had something to do with her. I'd have her lovely blue eyes fastened upon me in wondering, repentant apology. I could not say to her outright — I like her too much for:

"Nothing — nothing — nothing, dammit. You didn't do anything wrong. It has nothing at all to do with you. You aren't important enough to affect me. Don't you see?"

That might hurt her feelings too.

I would have to overcompensate with pleasantries and consideration: I might even have to lay her again, just because I'm a real nice guy. That's happened before too. (Or I might tell her my wife is undergoing tests for cancer and win some pity for myself that way. I've done that before also.) It's why I don't like to get involved with girls in the same office anymore. They're there. (If only she worked somewhere else. I could use her often these days. But then I might not have her.) She would have Red Parker to contend with. (I've already told him I was thinking of laying her. He's already told me he's thinking of following me.) He hurts his women sometimes; he hits them now. He'll get in trouble. The funniest part is that he really did not like his wife while she was alive and expected she would throw him out and ask for a divorce. He did not expect her to die in an automobile accident and leave him with three temperamental children. He tries to keep them away in boarding school. One or the other is always coming home. He doesn't know what else to do with them except send them away to boarding school in the winter and to his wife's relatives, camp, or on group journeys in the summer. Parker's got money too, and so does his wife's family. He used to have stronger connections in the company. He goes with prostitutes too now. I've caught him in bed with two at one time (two on one with him also? Is everyone but me doing it?), one of them white and one of them dark.

"Come on in buddy," he invited convivially, and started to move from the bed. "I'll go eat."

Both naked girls waited for me with blank, phlegmatic smiles. The white one had a sore on her jaw that looked bleached with calamine lotion. I left.

I have stopped using Red Parker's apartment in the city and no longer go to his noisy cocktail parties there on the chance of striking it lucky with one of the large number of girls he is still able to persuade to attend. (I have made out well more times than I can remember with girls I've met through Red. I met Penny through Red and still have her. And soon I will have to fire him or design some gentler means of getting rid of him. Like an antiquated building with white X's on the front, he must be demolished shortly. He has a naturally disrespectful way with women I've always envied. It's effective. They mean nothing to him; they mean dramatic things to me. It's really hard to be indifferent laying somebody new the first time. His girls have gotten older, though, blowsy, thicker about the waist and chin. But so, for that matter, have he and I. His wizened cheeks are veinous jowls now, and his lips are blistered. He chortles as much as ever, as though his wife were not dead and his job not in jeopardy. He heh-heh-hehs a lot now too. He's been warned by Kagle. The apartment is garish and sleazy. Furniture is stained and needs cleaning and upholstering. Will it be with someone like him that my wife decides to cheat on me? I hope not. I would like it at least to be with someone I can look up to, a man to whom she'll mean a little more than just another married piece of ass. I'd hate her to do it with that arrogant, obstreperous, bad-mannered, flamboyant type. I am that type. I would not like them to think I am married to just another piece of ass.) The last time in town I took my wife to a big room at an expensive hotel. My wife loves it in expensive hotels. So do I. There's something about my own wife in a luxurious hotel that beats everything else in the world.