Something Happened (9 page)

“You’re still a liar.”

“A diplomat, Johnny.”

“But I’ll find out.”

“Should I start looking for another job?” asks Jane.

“I’ve got a job you can do, right here at hand.”

“You’re terrible, Mr. Slocum,” she laughs, her color rising with embarrassment and pleasure. She is aglow, tempting. “You’re worse than a boy.”

“I’m better than a boy. Come into my office now and I’ll show you. What boy that you go with has an office with a couch like mine and pills in the file cabinet?”

“I’d like to,” she says (and for a second I am in terror that she will). “But Mr. Kagle is waiting for you there.”

“What did Arthur Baron want?” Kagle asks as soon as I step inside my office and find him lurking anxiously in a corner there.

I close the door before I turn to look at him. He is shabby again, and I am dismayed and angry. The collar of his shirt is unbuttoned, and the knot of his tie is inches down. (For a moment, I have an impulse to seize his shirt front furiously in both fists and begin shaking some sense into him; and at exactly the same time, I have another impulse to kick him as hard as I can in the ankle or shin of his crippled leg.) His forehead is wet with beads of perspiration, and his mouth is glossy with a suggestion of spittle, and dry with the powdered white smudge of what was probably an antacid tablet.

“Nothing,” I tell him.

“Didn’t he say anything?”

“No. Nothing important.”

“About me?”

“Not a word.”

“You mean that?”

“I swear.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Kagle marvels with relief. “What did he talk about? Tell me. He must have wanted to see you about something.”

“He wants me to put some jokes in a speech his son has to make at school.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“And he didn’t say anything about me, anything at all?”

“No.”

“Or the call reports or the trip to Denver?”

“No.”

“Ha! In that case, I may be safe, you know. I might even make vice-president this year. What did he talk about?”

“Just his son. And the speech. And the jokes.”

“I’m probably imagining the whole thing,” he exclaims exultantly. “You know, maybe I can use those same jokes someday if one of
my
kids is ever asked to make a speech at school.” He frowns, his face clouding suddenly with a distant distress. “Both my kids are no good,” he reminds himself aloud abstractedly. “Especially the boy.”

Kagle trusts me also. And I’m not so sure I want him to.

“Andy,” I call out to him suddenly. “Why don’t you play it safe? Why don’t you behave? Why don’t you start doing everything everybody wants you to do?”

He is startled. “Why?” he cries. “What’s the matter?”

“To keep your job, that’s why, if it’s not too late. Why don’t you start trying to go along? Stop telling lies to Horace White. Don’t travel so much. Transfer Parker to another office if you can’t get him to stop drinking and retire Ed Phelps.”

“Did somebody say something?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know all that?” he demands. “Who told you?”

“You did,” I bark back at him with exasperation and disgust. “You’ve been telling me about all those things over and over again for months. So why don’t you start doing something about them instead of worrying about them all the time and taking chances? Settle down, will you? Control Brown and cooperate with Green, and why don’t you hire a Negro and a Jew?”

Kagle scowls grimly and broods in heavy silence for several seconds. I wait, wondering how much is sinking in.

“What would I do with a coon?” he asks finally, as though thinking aloud, his mind wandering.

“I don’t know.”

“I could use a Jew.”

“Don’t be too sure.”

“We sell to Jews.”

“They might not like it.”

“But what would I do with a coon?”

“You would begin,” I advise, “by finding something else to call him.”

“Like what?”

“A Black. Call him a Black.”

“That’s funny.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve always called them coons,” Kagle says. “I was brought up to call niggers coons.”

“I was brought up to call Negroes coons.”

“What should I do?” he asks. “Tell me what to do.”

“Grow up, Andy,” I tell him earnestly, trying with all my heart now to help him. “You’re a middle-aged man with two kids and a big job in a pretty big company. There’s a lot that’s expected of you. It’s time to mature. It’s time to take it seriously and start doing all the things you should be doing. You know what they are. You keep telling me what they are.”

Kagle nods pensively. His brow furrows as he ponders my advice without any hint of levity. I am getting through to him. I watch him tensely as I wait for his reply. Kagle, you bastard, I want to scream
at him desperately as he meditates solemnly, I am trying to help you. Say something wise. For once in your mixed-up life, come to an intelligent conclusion. It’s almost as though he hears me, for he makes up his mind finally and his face brightens. He stares up at me with a slight smile and then, while I hang on his words hopefully, says:

“Let’s go get laid.”

The company has a policy about getting laid. It’s okay.

And everybody seems to know that (although it’s not spelled out in any of the personnel manuals). Talking about getting laid is even more okay than doing it, but doing it is okay too, although talking about getting laid with your own wife is never okay. (Imagine: “Boy, what a crazy bang I got from my wife last night!” That wouldn’t be nice, not with gentlemen you associate with in business who might know her.) But getting laid with somebody else’s wife is very okay, and so is talking about it, provided the husband is not with the company or somebody anybody knows and likes. The company is in favor of getting laid if it is done with a dash of élan, humor, vulgarity, and skill, without emotion, with girls who are young and pretty or women who are older and foreign or glamorous in some other way, without too much noise and with at least some token gesture toward discretion, and without scandal, notoriety, or any of the other serious complications of romance. Falling in love, for example, is
not
usually okay, although marrying someone else right after a divorce is, and neither is “having an affair,” at least not for a man.

Getting laid (or talking about getting laid) is an important component of each of the company conventions and a decisive consideration in the selection of a convention site; and the salesmen who succeed in getting laid there soonest are likely to turn out to be the social heroes of the convention, though not necessarily the envy. (That will depend on the quality of whom they find to get laid with.) Getting
laid at conventions is usually done in groups of three or four (two decide to go out and try and take along one or two others). Just about everybody in the company gets laid (or seems to), or at least talks as though he does (or did). In fact, it has become virtually
comme il faut
at company conventions for even the very top and very old, impotent men in the company—in fact,
especially
those—to allude slyly and boastfully to their own and each other’s sexual misconduct in their welcoming addresses, acknowledgments, introductions, and informal preambles to speeches on graver subjects. Getting laid is a joking matter on all levels of the company, even with people like Green and Horace White. But it’s not a matter for Andy Kagle to joke about now.

“Andy, I’m serious,” I say.

“So,” he says, “am I.”

I close the door of my office after Kagle leaves, sealing myself inside and shutting everybody else out, and try to decide what to do about my conversation with Arthur Baron. I cancel my lunch appointment and put my feet up on my desk.

I’ve got bad feet. I’ve got a jawbone that’s deteriorating and someday soon I’m going to have to have all my teeth pulled. It will hurt. I’ve got an unhappy wife to support and two unhappy children to take care of. (I’ve got that other child with irremediable brain damage who is neither happy nor unhappy, and I don’t know what will happen to him after we’re dead.) I’ve got eight unhappy people working for me who have problems and unhappy dependents of their own. I’ve got anxiety; I suppress hysteria. I’ve got politics on my mind, summer race riots, drugs, violence, and teen-age sex. There are perverts and deviates everywhere who might corrupt or strangle any one of my children. I’ve got crime in my streets. I’ve got old age to face. My boy, though only nine, is already worried because he does not know what he wants to be when he grows up. My daughter tells lies. I’ve got the decline of American civilization and
the guilt and ineptitude of the whole government of the United States to carry around on these poor shoulders of mine.

And I find I am being groomed for a better job.

And I find—God help me—that I want it.

My wife is unhappy. She is one of those married women who are very, very bored, and lonely, and I don’t know what I can make myself do about it (except get a divorce, and make her unhappier still. I was with a married woman not long ago who told me she felt so lonely at times she turned ice cold and was literally afraid she was freezing to death from inside, and I believe I know what she meant).

My wife is a good person, really, or used to be, and sometimes I’m sorry for her. She drinks now during the day and flirts, or tries to, at parties we go to in the evening, although she really doesn’t know how. (She is very bad at flirting—poor thing.) She is not a joyful woman, except on special occasions, and usually when she is at least a little bit high on wine or whiskey. (We don’t get along well.) She thinks she has gotten older, heavier, and less attractive than she used to be—and, of course, she is right. She thinks it matters to me, and there she is wrong. I don’t think I mind. (If she knew I didn’t mind, she’d probably be even more unhappy.) My wife is not bad looking; she’s tall, dresses well, and has a good figure, and I’m often proud to have her with me. (She thinks I
never
want her with me.) She thinks I do not love her anymore, and she may be right about that, too.

“You were with Andy Kagle today,” she says.

“How can you tell?”

“You’re walking with a limp.”

There is this wretched habit I have of acquiring the characteristics of other people. I acquire these characteristics indiscriminately, even from people I don’t like. If I am with someone who talks loud and fast and assertively, I will begin talking loud and fast right along with him (but by no means always assertively). If I am with someone who drawls lazily and is from the South or West, I will drawl lazily too and begin speaking almost as though I were from the South or West, employing authentic regional idioms as though they were part of my own upbringing, and not of someone else’s.

I do not do this voluntarily. It’s a weakness, I know, a failure of character or morals, this subtle, sneaky, almost enslaving instinct to be like just about anyone I happen to find myself with. It happens not only in matters of speech, but with physical actions as well, in ways I walk or sit or tilt my head or place my arms or hands. (Often, I am struck with fear that someone I am with will think I am aping him deliberately in order to ridicule and insult him. I try my best to keep this tendency under control.) It operates unconsciously (subconsciously?), whether I am sober or intoxicated (generally, I am a happy, pleasant, humorous drunk), with a determination of its own, in spite of my vigilance and aversion, and usually I do not realize I have slipped into someone else’s personality until I am already there. (My wife tells me that at movies now, particularly comedies, I mug and gesticulate right along with the people on the screen, and I cannot say she is wrong.)

If I am lunching or having cocktails after work with Johnny Brown (God’s angry man, by nature and coincidence), I will swear and complain a lot and talk and feel tough and strong. If I am with Arthur Baron, I will speak slowly and softly and intelligently and feel gentle and astute and dignified and refined, not only for the time I am with him but for a while afterward, his nature will be my nature until I come up against the next person who has more powerful personality traits than any of my own, or a more formidable business or social position. (When I am with Green, though, I do not feel graceful and articulate;
I feel clumsy and incompetent—until I am away from him, and then I am apt to begin searching about for glib epigrams to use in my conversations with somebody else.) I often wonder what my own true nature is.

Do I have one?

I always dress well. But no matter what I put on, I always have the disquieting sensation that I am copying somebody; I can always remind myself of somebody else I know who dresses much that same way. I often feel, therefore, that my clothes are not my own. (There are times, in fact, when I open one of my closet doors and am struck with astonishment by the clothes I find hanging inside. They are all mine, of course, but, for a moment, it’s as though I had never seen many of them before.) And I sometimes feel that I would not spend so much time and money and energy chasing around after girls and other women if I were not so frequently in the company of other men who do, or talk as though they wanted to. I’m still not sure it’s all that much fun (although I
am
sure it’s an awful lot of trouble). And if I’m not sure by now, I know I never will be.