Something Happened (69 page)

Green is not able to keep the flush of anger from climbing into his cheeks. “If I did,” he retorts hotly, “I’d probably find you in the way, anointing his cheeks.”

And for a moment, I am the one with superior poise. “You’re starting,” I chide gently.

“It’s hard not to.”

“Now you’re starting again.”

“It gets harder. How will you treat me?”

“With deference. Better than Kagle did. With fear—I don’t want to fight with you yet, not this year. I’ll be very nice to you with everyone, if you don’t make me look ridiculous for being so.”

“You’ll be nice? That’s a humiliation for me right there.”

“That’s a part I’ll enjoy,” I agree affably. “I’m smiling now because I know it’s true. Not because I’m enjoying it yet. Jack, there’s been a big change. I don’t work for you anymore. You have to be afraid of me now,” I remind him. “You know that.”

“I’m afraid I can’t be.”

And Green still has the whammy on me! I can stomp all over him, spit in his eye, beat him down into nervous collapse, send him, clutching his bowels, into a hospital bed with his spastic colitis; I am younger, stronger, bigger, and in better health than he is and can punch him in the jaw as easily as Johnny Brown can give me my punch in the jaw—and he still has the whammy on me. I am still afraid of him and perspiring copiously under the arms again. No wonder I am more and more prey to weird visions and experiences. (Some tickle my fancy. Some do not.)

The day before yesterday, I walked into a luncheonette for a rare roast beef sandwich on a seeded roll and thought I found my barber working behind the counter.

“What are you doing in a luncheonette?” I asked.

“I’m not your barber,” he answered.

I was afraid I was losing my mind.

A week ago I looked out a taxi window and saw Jack Green begging in the street in the rain, dressed in a long wet overcoat and ragged shoes. He was a head taller, thinner, pale, and gaunt. It wasn’t him. But that’s what I saw.

I was afraid I was losing my wits.

Yesterday I looked out the window of a bus and thought I saw Charlie Chaplin strolling along the avenue and believed I knew him. It wasn’t Charlie Chaplin and I didn’t know him.

My memory may be starting to fail me. I have trouble with names now and with keeping in correct order the digits of telephone numbers that have long been familiar to me. Pairs of digits from other telephone numbers push their way in. After all these years, I am not always certain anymore whether the seven-seven belongs in the first segment of Penny’s phone number and the eight-seven in the latter or vice versa. I don’t know every time if Red Parker’s phone number is two-eight-o-two or two-o-eight-two. I do know Penny is pregnant again—not by me. I have given her money for the abortion. She will insist on paying me back when she’s saved enough from the money she receives monthly from her parents in Wilmington. It used to be that every cocktail waitress I ran into had one divorce and two children who lived outside the city with the girl’s mother. Now they’ve had two abortions. College students and young models, secretaries, stewardesses, and acting students have had one. Graduate students may have two, depending on their field of study. Jane is gone, along with the entire Art Department. (It was unprofitable.)

“Call me,” I asked her. “As soon as you’re settled. Or even before.”

She did. When she called, I said I was busy and would call her back. I haven’t. Sometimes when I’m asleep, I try to wake up and can’t. Sleep has me in its grip, and that is my dream.

I am trying to get my affairs in order. I have written a list.

“Listen,” I say to my wife one day in a quietly decisive manner. “We’re going to have to sit down together soon and do some serious thinking about Derek. We’re not going to be able to keep him forever, you know.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Neither do I.

I think I’m in terrible trouble. I think I’ve committed a crime. The victims have always been children.

“Are you angry with me?” I inquire of my boy with an appraising smile, in a voice I keep as bland as possible.

“No. I’m not angry.”

A flicker of some kind has crossed his face. My question is disturbing him. I’m almost afraid to go on.

“You don’t talk to me much anymore.”

“I talk.” He shrugs. “I’m talking now.” He wiggles with unease, a downcast mood darkening his features. He will not look at me.

“Not as much as you used to. You’re always in your room.”

He shrugs again. “I like it there.”

“You don’t like me to ask you questions, do you?”

“Sometimes.”

“What do you do in there?”

“Read. Watch television. I do my homework. Think.”

“Alone?”

“I like it.”

“You didn’t use to.”

“Now I do.”

“Are you always able to do all of your homework without me?”

“Not always.”

“What do you do?”

“It’s all right if it’s wrong.”

“Wouldn’t it be better, though, if it were always correct?”

“The teachers don’t care. Can I go now?”

“Where?”

He smiles apologetically, anticipating the humor of his reply. “To my room.”

“Sure,” I consent genially, with a heartiness that is false. “I just wanted to make sure you weren’t angry with me.”

“You stay in your room a lot,” he pauses near the staircase to argue over his shoulder defensively. “Mommy stays in her room. You don’t think there’s something wrong with me, do you?”

“But I always let you come into mine.”

Oh, God—here he is, a sensitive, candid, alert little boy, no larger now, it seems, than he was as a toddler; and I am quarreling with him, near tears (and with a lump in my throat), as though I were a rejected suitor, fencing with him selfishly as I would with my wife or my daughter.

How shall I die? Let me count the ways. (No, I won’t.) I’ve been through that juvenile exercise before and won’t waste time. None is good. I’m unable to eradicate from my mind the image of that vigorous, prosperous, large, handsome man who fell dead in the lobby of my office building a few weeks ago as we were nearly abreast of each other. I saw him clearly as he fell forward. Even as he was doubling over and crumpling he looked the epitome of radiant and robust indestructibility until his face hit the floor with a soggy whack and blood from the impact shot out of his mouth. I continued walking past him without a hitch in my stride. I made believe I didn’t see. When I got back from lunch, he wasn’t there. He had been taken away. I was disappointed. Someone had distorted reality for the sake of neatness. (I have things organized very neatly now upstairs.) I still catch myself looking for him in the spot where he fell. I still remember him falling. This morning on my way to work I saw an unconscious derelict lying on the steps of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, staining the stone platforms with a fluid that could have been urine or whiskey. Policemen were there and had the situation in hand. They didn’t need my help.

It’s a good thing they didn’t.

Woe, woe, alas, and alack. My wife is unhappy too again. We have arrived at a reasonable understanding:
it isn’t all my fault and there’s not much I can do to improve things (even though I still won’t tell her I love her and she refuses pointedly to ask). She makes no difference to anyone.

“I wish I had a career at something exciting.”

“It isn’t too late.”

She lifts her eyes to study me in steadfast gaze. “It is too late.”

“Of course it is.”

She accepts the fact that Kagle was fated to go no matter what I did, and that if I had not gone in to replace him, I would never have been allowed to go anywhere else.

“You’d get a housekeeper, wouldn’t you?” she says dreamily. “And put Derek in a home. Or you’d send the children away to boarding school and move into the city.”

“If what?”

“If I committed suicide or died of cancer or just moved away alone or with some other man.”

“Are you thinking of any of those?” I ask with healing indulgence.

“And I wouldn’t blame you. I just don’t make a difference to anyone.”

“Neither do I,” I have to confess intimately. “Except to you and the children. Not even Derek.”

“I’d be satisfied with that. No, don’t lie to me about it,” she adds with dignity and a very small, regretful smile. “I wouldn’t believe you.”

My wife feels she makes no difference to anyone anymore and she is probably right.

There is so much torment around, even for her. I have to make a speech. My boy will probably perish without me (or I without him. I think I may always have felt that way about him). Oh, my God—we go into torment long before we even know what suffering is. We are saddled with it before we can even see. There is so much inner fright. I was born, I was told, with a mashed face and red and blue forcep bruises on my shoulders and arms but felt not one message of pain because I had no nervous system yet that could register any. But I knew what loneliness was. I was already afraid of the dark. Or the light. If I
knew what cold and sleet were I would have been afraid of those too. (Are we afraid of what we can’t see or of what we will see when we do?) I was afraid I would open my eyes and it would still be dark. (It was that way in that hospital the night they took my tonsils out.) I am afraid of that happening now. And no one would come. Fear. Loss of love, loss of the loved one, loss of love of the loved one. Separation. We don’t want to go, we don’t want them to go, we can’t wait for them to leave, we wish they’d return. There seem to be conflicts. I was in need of whatever nipple succored me and whatever arms lifted me. I didn’t know names. I loved the food that fed me—that’s all I knew—and the arms that held and hugged and turned me and gave me to understand, at least for those periods, that I was not alone and someone else knew I was there. Without them, I would have been alone. I am afraid of the dark now. I have nightmares in strange beds, and in my own. I have apparitions underneath my bed waiting to stream out. I have spirits in my bedroom closets. I am anxious as a four-year-old child. I am afraid of the light. I am afraid I will open my eyes someday and it will still be dark. And no one will come. (I woke up without tonsils and adenoids in the hospital one thousand times that night and it was always dark, and I thought there would never be light again. And no one came.) What will I have to look forward to if morning comes one day and there is no light? What will I be like when I am senile? Will I molest children, break wind, defecate on living room floors, say nigger, bait Jews? I say nigger now occasionally; it slips out. I could bait Green. I think I know expressly how to cope with Green.

“Jack,” I could begin, with an air of disarming joviality, “I think I’d like to hire a Jew. Do you know of any? I’d want a smart one.”

“I’m afraid that would be impossible,” he might reply, with the same pretense of amiability.

“Aren’t there any smart ones left?” I could follow up, tauntingly.

“Oh, yes,” he would answer. “But a smart one
wouldn’t work for you. And if you’re going to hire the other kind, you’d might as well stick with a Protestant. They’d make a better appearance, for you.”

And I’d discover once more that I’d still not been able to cope with him at all. I’ll bet I’m probably one of the very few people in the entire world who know (not
knows
) that
livid
means blue and
lurid
means pale. A lot of good that knowledge has done me. (Green may be one of the others who know, and it’s done him even less.) My boy’s complexion is pale again, and his eyes are blue and deep. I wish I could look all the way inside them to see what is going on in his mind.

“Why are you staring at me?” he asks uncomfortably.

“I’m not staring.”

“You were.”

“I’m sorry. I was thinking.” He intends to remain silent. “And if you asked me what I was thinking about, do you know what I’d say?”

“What?” he asks, to oblige me.

“I was thinking about when you were going to ask me why I was staring at you.”

He grins with a small noise of appreciation as a token of acknowledgment, and goes into his room, closing the door.

I don’t want him to go. My memory’s failing, my bladder is weak, my arches are falling, my tonsils and adenoids are gone, and my jawbone is rotting, and now my little boy wants to cast me away and leave me behind for reasons he won’t give me. What else will I have? My job? When I am fifty-five, I will have nothing more to look forward to than Arthur Baron’s job and reaching sixty-five. When I am sixty-five, I will have nothing more to look forward to than reaching seventy-five, or dying before then. And when I am seventy-five, I will have nothing more to look forward to than dying before eighty-five, or geriatric care in a nursing home. I will have to take enemas. (Will I have to be dressed in double-layer, waterproof undershorts designed especially for incontinent gentlemen?) I will be incontinent. I don’t
want to live longer than eighty-five, and I don’t want to die sooner than a hundred and eighty-six.

Oh, my father—why have you done this to me?

I want him back.

I want my little boy back too.

I don’t want to lose him.

I do.

“Something happened!” a youth in his early teens calls excitedly to a friend and goes running ahead to look.

A crowd is collecting at the shopping center. A car has gone out of control and mounted the sidewalk. A plate glass window has been smashed. My boy is lying on the ground. (He has not been decapitated.) He is screaming in agony and horror, with legs and arms twisted brokenly and streams of blood spurting from holes in his face and head and pouring down over one hand from inside a sleeve. He spies me with a start and extends an arm. He is panic-stricken. So am I.

“Daddy!”

He is dying. A terror, a pallid, pathetic shock more dreadful than any I have ever been able to imagine, has leaped into his face I can’t stand it. He can’t stand it. He hugs me. He looks beggingly at me for help. His screams are piercing. I can’t bear to see him suffering such agony and fright. I have to do something. I hug his face deeper into the crook of my shoulder. I hug him tightly with both my arms. I squeeze.