Something Happened (68 page)

“I heard the good news the little birdies are chirping.” Ed Phelps chortles to me softly by way of offering congratulations.

I elude Green. I don’t see Red. I feel tense and exhausted on the train ride home. I could use one of my wife’s tranquilizers. Even before I walk in the house I am feeling sorry for myself and don’t know why. I go to our bathroom for a tranquilizer before I enter my study and close the door.

“What’s wrong with Daddy?” I hope the children are murmuring downstairs in grave consternation, along with Derek’s nurse, and that Derek too can perceive in some way that I am upstairs in my study with the door closed.

“He isn’t feeling well,” I hope my wife replies with sharp compunction.

I would like to feel that the closed door of my study or office produces the same ominous, excluding effect on others that the closed doors of certain people still create in me. (I am still affronted that my daughter always keeps the door to her room shut when she’s inside. My boy does that too, now.)

I’m sorry I ever told my wife what I think my mother said to me before she died. (I’m also sorry I said “puddy poo” in my sleep. Now she’ll have
that
on me, also.) I don’t know what ever made me feel I
could trust her. (A man must make a resolution
never
to reveal anything personal to his wife.) I was not even sure my mother said it. I wasn’t sure she recognized me for more than an instant the last few times I went to visit her in the nursing home or remembered I was there as I sat at her bedside without talking for the twelve, then ten, minutes I stayed. I brought no more gifts of spicy meats and fish and honeyed candies; she couldn’t eat. I gave her no gossip. She couldn’t hear. I was not even certain most times that she was able to see anyone sitting there when her eyes were upon me.

“You’re no good.” she said. There was no voice. It was more a shaping of the words with her lips and a faint rustle of breath. I was surprised, and I bent forward over the cavity of her mouth that I was no longer able to look at straightly and asked her to repeat what she had said. “You’re just no good.”

Those were the last words I think I heard her speak to me. If I live to be a hundred and ninety years old, I will never hear any more from her. If the world lasts three billion more, there will be no others.

Those are some last words for a dying mother to tell a child, aren’t they? Even a grown-up family man with a wife and three children. I felt sorrier for myself when I heard them than I did for her. She was dying anyway.

But I had to go on.

I don’t know what made me think it was safe to confide in my wife. A long time passed before I did. I was feeling so sad. The world was a rusty tin can. We used to curl ourselves up inside discarded old automobile tires and try to roll down slanting streets. We never could. We made pushmobile scooters out of ball-bearing roller skates. It was easier to walk. Mommy caught me when I fell, kissed the place to make it well.

I should never have told the bitch. The bitches remember things like that.

The linings of the brain. (The linings of my brain, they give me such a pain.) The linings of my brain are three in number and called collectively the
meninges
. They surround it on the outside. The innermost is called the pia mater. It is a delicate, fibrous, and highly vascular membrane (gorged with veins and capillaries, I suppose). I feel pressure against it from inside. Things bubble and shove against it as though they might explode. It reminds me at times of a cheese fondue. The pia mater, reinforced by the two supporting layers, the arachnoid and the dura mater, holds fast against the outward expanding pressure of my brain, pushes back. At times, there is pain. The name pia mater derives from an imperfect translation into Latin of Arabic words that meant (ha, ha)
tender mother
.

My boy has stopped talking to me, and I don’t think I can stand it. (He doesn’t seem to like me.) He no longer confides in me.

There are times he rebuffs me and I want to cry. I remember the rebuff and it tears at my heart. Why should he want to stop talking to me? I want to be his best friend. Doesn’t he know I probably love him more than anyone else in the world? He used to have dreams, he said, in which the door to our room was closed and he could not get in to see us. Now I have dreams that the door to his room is closed and I cannot get in to see him.

He goes to bed without even saying good night to me, closing his door.

My head spins, my emotions reel downward into whirlpools. He no longer comes to me for information as often as he used to, and I have no way of knowing anymore what he’s thinking, who his friends are, what games he enjoys most, how much trouble he’s having at school and with his homework. I hang on news of Forgione. He acts angry with me. It is impossible to get more from him than he wants to tell without offending him or finding out about him surreptitiously by asking someone else. (I wonder if he feels I’m spying on him.)

“I climbed the rope in school today,” he announces one evening when he comes home late for dinner after dark, with his eyes shining warmly and his cheeks
and lips colored a healthy, handsome crimson with exercise and excitement. “I made it almost all the way up to the top. Dammit. I bet I could have touched the ceiling if I’d only had the nerve to let go and try.”

“Did you touch the ceiling yet?” I ask him.

“Why do you keep asking me that?” he blurts out at me resentfully, and goes into his room.

He is moving away from me and I don’t want him to. He is shutting me out. I see the doors closed to his and my daughter’s rooms and think of the closed doors at the company and am reminded squeamishly of all those closed cupboard and closet doors I had to open each morning and evening back in the apartment in the city with those baited spring traps concealed behind them when we were trying to catch or kill those mice. Those were not the good old days.

“Remember,” I reminisce with my wife, “those mice back in the city? That one time we had them?”

“They weren’t mice,” says my wife. “They were roaches.”

“We had those too.”

“We never had mice.”

“And I was afraid I would have to kill one with a magazine?”

“And you were afraid to kill them. You didn’t like to step on them. You didn’t like the way they squashed. I had to do it most of the time with one of my house slippers. And neither did I.”

She may be wrong.

My memory does get faulty of late, merges indistinguishably with imagination, and I must make efforts to shake them apart. I remember waking up as a child, howling from a dream my bed was crawling with roaches and I continued to see them scurrying away into invisibility all over the room for minutes after the lights blazed on and I was wide awake. It was my brother who had come to console me (who once threw a lump of coal at me), and he sat with me tenderly until I was able to stop quailing. Now I have no big brother. One of my children—I forget which one—had a bad dream years ago about snapping
fishes swimming in the bed, and I remembered instantly I had suffered those too.

“There were fishes in my bed,” I sobbed, shivering. “Swimming around on the blankets.”

“They aren’t there now,” my brother comforted me patiently. “Keep looking and you’ll see.”

“They weren’t there before,” I exclaimed, still sobbing. “But I saw them anyway.”

I see things that aren’t there. I used to lie awake listening to people coming to steal me away. I was afraid of the dark. I heard drugged moaning and sobbing from a different part of the apartment when I crept from my room, it stopped. When I returned to my room it started again and continued at irregular intervals until I was stolen away into sleep. My boy used to be afraid of the dark but isn’t anymore. (I’m not sure I didn’t like him better when he was. I think I was happier with him when he needed me more.) He’ll stay out now after dark, sometimes until I worry, and won’t tell us where he’s been or with whom unless we ask. I don’t want him to shut me out.

“In open school week this year,” I begin to scheme with my wife, “I’m going to try to sneak away to speak to Forgione and the principal and find out all I can about him.”

“He doesn’t want you to come this year. And he doesn’t want me to stay more than an hour.”

“Why didn’t he tell me?”

“He told me.”

And my daughter stole the car with one of her friends by telling my wife I’d given them permission to take it and alibiing to me that my wife had misunderstood. She started to cry when we trapped her between us. She said we were always picking on her. She said I was nicer to my boy than I was to her. She said she couldn’t wait to graduate from high school and go to college, just to get away from us. She said she could tell we didn’t want her living there.

“If you’d buy me my own car,” she said through ber sniffles, “I wouldn’t have to tell lies to get one.”

I suppose I’ll have to, sooner or later (for my sake more than hers). She’ll wear me down. I’m glad the price of gasoline is going up so that poor working
people won’t have any and there’ll be more than enough for people like my daughter and me.

“At least she’s not seeing that boy anymore,” my wife says. “And she doesn’t take drugs.”

“You think I believe her?”

“She drives with her friends. She’s home early. She doesn’t go out as much on weekends anymore. Haven’t you noticed?” She lowers her head in dismay, hesitating sadly. “I wish she would. She has nothing to do.”

I feel locked inside a hopeless struggle. Forecasts are coming true. I am better off these days at the office. I feel safer, even when at home (I don’t feel safe at home. I feel things are going inexorably out of control. Things are not out of control at the company), if I can concentrate all my attention on the office, where the tasks are discernible, the obligations all cut and dried. I know what I must do: for the time being, I must be cordial and close to everyone here, even those who are disposable, and cool and distant to everyone under me in all the out-of-town offices. No one must feel secure. Everyone must be kept in suspense about new decisions that might emerge from meetings behind closed doors in which I am now a participant. (I am a kingmaker.) Plans for the convention are moving ahead efficiently because no one entrusted with executing any of them feels secure. I am regarded with envy, hope, fear, ambition, suspicion, and disappointment. My small secretary congratulates me and hopes I will take her with me. I won’t. I tell her she is too valuable where she is. I’ll have better safeguards with Kagle’s girl, who’s more persuasive at lying and more adroit at covering things up. In my former department, I have Schwoll the wise guy and Holloway the weak guy, a new, bright young fellow who isn’t going to stay and an elderly plodder who isn’t going to go, along with three other underlings who do what they’re told to industriously enough, and I leave them all behind with pleasure on moving day. My new, temporary office is a windowless one across from Kagle’s. Kagle’s been told by Arthur Baron and Horace White that he’ll be allowed to remain in his spacious executive office
for as long as he stays. (He hasn’t been told how short a time he’ll be allowed to stay.) Green will’ have to replace me. I wonder with who (whom). I haven’t decided yet how to handle Green. (He isn’t as afraid of me yet as I feel he should be.)

“Have you anyone in mind you can recommend to take your place?” he asks me pleasantly enough on moving day, but with a taint in his manner that puts me on guard. “I’d like someone better than you,” he adds with breezy malice the moment I nod.

“You’ll have to pay him much more,” I joke.

“I’ll be happy to,” he scores. “He’ll be worth it.”

Green is not afraid of me at all yet, and I may have to handle him, for a while, by groveling.

“What about Kagle?” he inquires sweetly. “Do you think he’d be good enough to take your place?”

“He wouldn’t want to. I’m afraid he’d interpret it as a big step down.”

“Not from where you’re planning to put him.”

“Special projects?”

“For you?”

“Of course.”

“After working for you he’d interpret it as a big step up.”

“Jack,” I entreat him in a conciliatory tone, “you’re supposed to be afraid of me now. At least a little.”

“You knew about this when I was threatening you last time. Didn’t you?”

“It had to be quiet.”

“And you were afraid of me anyway.”

“I wasn’t afraid.”

“My judgment may be bad but my eye isn’t. I couldn’t be that wrong about you.”

“You had the whammy on me then.”

“There was all that sweat. And you’re afraid of me now. Right now.”

I grin submissively. “You’ve got the whammy on me still.”

“And you always will be.”

“I’m not sure about that. I won’t have to go to meetings with you alone. I can criticize you to others. I can kill your projects and reject your work.”

“Would you?”

“I’d rather not. I’d rather have your help. Just don’t make a fool of me.”

“It will be hard to resist, with someone like you.”

“I know. You’re tempted right now. Fly into somebody else’s face if you want to be squashed. Try Lester Black. He’ll do it quickly enough.”