Something Happened

My wife is unhappy

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.

If I argue with someone who stammers badly, I am in serious trouble; for I have a slight stammer of my own at times and the conversation soon threatens to disintegrate hopelessly into bursts of meaningless syllables. I am in absolute dread of talking to people who stutter; I have a deathly fear I will want to stutter too, will be lost for life if I ever have to watch the mouth of someone who stutters for more than a sentence or two; when I am with a stutterer, I can, if I let myself, almost feel a delicious, tantalizing quiver take shape and grow in both my lips and strive to break free and go permanently out of control. I am not comfortable in the presence of homosexuals, and I suspect it may be for the same reason (I might be tempted to become like them). I steer clear of people with tics, squints, and facial twitches; these are additional characteristics I don't want to acquire. The problem is that I don't know who or what I really am.

If I am with people who are obscene, I am obscene.

Who am I? (I'll need three guesses.)

My daughter is not obscene, but her speech is dirty now when she talks to her friends and growing dirty also when she talks to us. (I talk dirty too.) She is trying to establish some position with us or provoke some reaction, but my wife and I don't know what or why. She wants to become a part too, I guess, of what she sees is her environment, and she is, I fear, already merging with, dissolving into, her surroundings right before my eyes. She wants to be like other people her age. I cannot stop her; I cannot save her. Something happened to her, too, although I don't know what or when. She is not yet sixteen, and I think she is already lost. Her uniqueness is fading. As a child, she seemed to us to be so different from all other children. She does not seem so different anymore.

Who is she?

It amuses me in a discouraging way to know I borrow adjectives, nouns, verbs, and short phrases from people I am with and frequently find myself trapped inside their smaller vocabularies like a hamster in a cage. Their language becomes my language. My own vocabulary fails me (if it is indeed mine), and I am at a loss to supply even perfectly familiar synonyms. Rather than grope for words of my own, I fasten upon their words and carry their phraseologies away with me for use in subsequent conversations (even though the dialogue I steal may not be first rate).

If I talk to a Negro (spade, if I've been talking to a honky who calls a spade a spade), I will, if I am not on guard, begin using not only his vernacular (militant hip or bucolic Uncle Tom), but his pronunciation. I do the same thing with Puerto Rican cab-drivers; if I talk to cabdrivers at all (I try not to; I can't stand the whining malevolence of New York cabdrivers, except for the Puerto Ricans), it will be on their level rather than mine. (I don't know what my level is, ha, ha.) And the same thing happens when I talk to boys and girls of high school and college age; I bridge the generation gap; I copy them: I employ their argot and display an identification with their tastes and outlooks that I do not always feel. I used to think I was doing it to be charming; now I know I have no choice. (Most of my daughter's friends, particularly her girl friends, like me and look up to me; she doesn't.)

If I'm with Andy Kagle, I will limp. "You were with Andy Kagle today," my wife says.

We are in the kitchen.

I have indeed been with Andy Kagle; I stop walking with Andy Kagle's limp; and I consider prudently if I have not been talking to my wife in a Spanish accent as well, for the girls Kagle and I were with this time were both Cuban and unattractive. They were prostitutes. Nobody likes to call a prostitute a prostitute anymore (least of all me. They are hookers, hustlers, and call girls), but that's what they were. Prostitutes. And I have taken the high-minded vow again (even as I was zipping up my pants and getting back into my undershirt, which smelled already under the sleeves from the morning's output of perspiration) that from this day forward, I am simply not going to make love anymore to girls I don't like.

We have done better with our whores, Kagle and I, than we have done this afternoon, and we have also done worse. Mine was the better looking of the two (Kagle always wants me to take the better looking of the two), with bleached red hair and black roots. She was not well-educated; but her skin was smooth (no pimples, cysts, or sores), and her clothes were neat. Her nature was gentle, her manner tender. She wanted to save up enough money to open a beauty parlor. She was friendly and obliging (they aren't always), and wanted to please me. "Do you like to be teased?" she asked me softly. When Kagle cannot run away from his home and the office by going on a business trip (like the one to Denver he has just got back from), he likes to run away to New York whores in dark hotels or walk-up efficiency apartments with thin walls. He asks me to accompany him. I always refuse. "Oh, come on," he says. And I always go.

I don't enjoy it. (Although I definitely do enjoy my sessions with one of those extraordinary, two-hundred-dollar call girls that are sent my way as a gift every now and then by one of the suppliers I buy from. I tell Kagle about these; all he does is smile. I don't believe he wants a pretty girl in a lovely apartment. I think he wants a whore.) I feel unclean. (I am inevitably repelled by the odor of my undershirt when I put it back on, even though it is my own odor and usually slight. On days when I don't wear an undershirt, the smell is there in my shirt, faint but unmistakable, even if I've used a deodorant. The smell is me — I? — and I guess I can't get away from myself for very long.) I know there is something unholy, something corrupt and definitely passй, about grown men, successful executives like Kagle and me, going cold sober to ordinary whores in our own home town. They aren't pretty or necessary, and they aren't much fun. I don't think Kagle enjoys it, either; we have never gone back to the same girls (although we have gone back to the same sleazy hotels).

Kagle always pays and charges it to the company as a legitimate business expense. (One of the things I do enjoy is the idea of fucking the company at the same time.) I pay for the taxi sometimes and buy the bottle of whiskey he likes to bring along. Once I'm there I'm all right (I fit right in); but once I finish, I want to be gone. Generally, I'm ready to leave before he is and depart alone. Kagle hates to go home (even more than I do). If things are going smoothly for him (they don't always, because of his bad leg), I leave him there with his whiskey and his whore. I never really want to go with him at all. He asks. And I do.

I began biting my fingernails pretty much that same way, because someone asked me to. (Lord knows, it wasn't my idea. I didn't even know people did such things. And I don't think I was inventive enough to come upon the habit on my own.) I was in the second half of my first year in elementary school, seven years old and already fatherless. (I don't remember much about my father. I did not grieve for him when he died; I acted as though he had not gone, which meant I had to act as though he had not been. I didn't miss him, since I didn't remember him, and I've never thought about him much. Till times like now.) All of my friends in the first grade (I had many friends in the first grade; I have always worked hard to be popular and I have always succeeded) began to bite their fingernails the same week, for no better purpose than to exasperate the teacher (Miss Lamb; in the second grade, it was Mrs. Wolf. I have an uncanny memory for names and similar petty details) and their parents and older sisters. (It originated as a childhood conspiracy.)

"C'mon, bite your nails," they told me.

So I did. I began biting my nails. In a little while, they all stopped. But I didn't. (They grew up and went away, leaving their bad habit with me.) I didn't even try (I know now that I didn't try to stop because I didn't want to and because I understood even then that I would not be able to). And for all these years since, I have been nibbling and gnawing away aggressively, swinishly, and vengefully at my own fingertips, obtaining an enormous satisfaction from these small assaults. (It's not so much a habit, of course, as a compulsion, vicious, uncouth, and frequently painful, but I like it. And I don't think, at this stage, that I would want to live without it, and nobody has been able to tell me why.) And I know now that I will continue chewing away at my fingernails and my surrounding flesh until I die (or until I have all my teeth pulled and am no longer able to. Ha, ha).

Even my handwriting is not my own!

I borrowed it (and never gave it back). I actually copied the handwriting I have now from an older boy who used to work with me in the file room of the automobile casualty insurance company and liked to while away the time between busy periods inventing, practicing, and perfecting a brand-new handwriting. (His own was not good enough.) His name was Tom, or Tommy, depending on who was talking to him or calling for him. He was twenty-one, tall, and very complacent and mature. (He had a good deal to be complacent and mature about, for in addition to creating a new handwriting, he was laying Marie Jencks, the biggest blonde that our casualty company had to offer.) He studied art lackadaisically in the evening and tended to take things easy during the day while he waited for the army to draft him into World War II. Between chores and errands and smokes in the men's room, Tom would sit at the desk in the rear of the file room (out of sight of everyone who went by, for the file room was a cage of cyclone fence that rose from floor to ceiling and jutted right out into the center of the office, where everybody who did pass could look inside at us) and devote himself industriously to his handwriting. And I would sit beside him at that desk in back, tucked out of sight behind a bank of green metal file cabinets containing indexes by name to the accident folders filed by number in the taller banks of larger, greener cabinets standing near the front, to learn and copy and practice his handwriting with him.

It wasn't always easy work. Tom would experiment tirelessly with the arcs and slants and curlicues of a capital R or Y or H or I, speaking little, until he had achieved precisely the effect he thought he wanted, and then he would say: "I think that's it now." And if he didn't change his mind in a minute or two with a sober shake of his head, I would slide his sheet of paper with the finished product closer to me and set to work learning and practicing that letter, while he moved ahead with the foundations of design for another member of the alphabet. (Sometimes, with a downcast, disappointed air, he would reverse his judgment about a certain letter after a week or two had elapsed, reject it, and start all over again from scratch.) Some of the letters were simple, but others proved incalculably hard and took an immeasurably long time. We were a pair of dedicated young calligraphers, he and I (I, of course, the apprentice), when we weren't scheming secretly and separately to satisfy the stewing miseries of our respectively emerging lusts; for he, like me (I was to discover one day entirely by coincidence), also had a very hot thing going with one of the women (girls?) in the office (and here, too, he was way ahead of me. He had big, bossy Mrs. Marie Jencks, of all people, who was twenty-eight and married, and he was already getting in regularly down, of all places, in the storeroom. Wow! What a mixed-up maelstrom of people, I felt, when I finally found out about all of us, not realizing then, as I do realize now, that the only thing unusual about any of it was me). By the time old Mrs. Yerger was transferred all the way across the company offices into the file room to get us to do more work or clear us out (even though there was not that much more work to be done. It was Tom, in fact, who taught me that if I just walked around with a blank piece of paper in my hand, I could spend all the time I wanted to doing nothing. I spent a great deal of time doing plenty, or trying to, at a corner of that desk underneath the big Western Union clock, very close to Virginia, that pert and witty older girl of twenty-one, who wore her round breasts loose some days even then, knowing they looked fine that way too if the breasts were good, and liked to arch her back and twist her shoulders slowly with a sleepy sigh, just to roll her breasts from side to side for my pleasure or thrust them toward me), I had Tom's handwriting down pat, and I have been using his handwriting ever since.

I found out about Tom and Marie Jencks only by coincidence one day about five weeks before he left the company to go into the army. (I left the same day he did for a job that I didn't like in a machine shop.) Mrs. Marie Jencks (that was what the brass nameplate on her desk called her) worked in the Personal Injury Department for mild, short Len Lewis, who was head of the Personal Injury Department and who had fallen politely in love, romantically, sexually, idealistically, with my own incorrigible Virginia. (She encouraged him.) I was amazed to find out about all of us, especially amazed about Marie and Tom (more amazed even than I'd been to find my big brother on the floor of that wooden coal shed with Billy Foster's skinny kid sister so many murky years back. Mrs. Marie Jencks was a much bigger catch than Billy Foster's skinny, buck-toothed kid sister). Marie Jencks was one great big whale of a catch, and I was in awe.

To me, once I knew about her, she was a fantasy fulfilled (although for somebody else), a luscious enormous, eye-catching, domineering marvel. (And I could not stop staring at her.) She was married. She was tall, blond, and buxom. She was almost twenty-eight. She was striking and attractive (although not pretty. Virginia was prettier). And she was humping lucky, twenty-one-year-old Tom Johnson, whenever she wanted to. (What a gorgeous spot for lucky twenty-one-year-old Tom Johnson to be in. It gave little seventeen-year-old Bobby Slocum something good to look forward to.) When Len Lewis was away from his desk, Marie was boss of the whole Personal Injury Departntent. She was sometimes good-humored, sometimes officious, and I and most of the men and their secretaries who had to deal with her were always a little afraid of her. She was bossy with Tom too; she bossed him down one floor into the moldering storeroom for cabinets of dead records whenever she felt the urge; she bossed him right back upstairs when she was through.

It was because of that storeroom with its two unshaded bulbs dangling overhead from thick black wires like a pair of staring spiders that I found out about Tom and Marie. (I had taken the key; I wanted to meet Virginia; he needed the key to meet Marie.) They did it on the desk. I found that nearly impossible to believe, even though Tom assured me they did it there, and so did Virginia (once I began talking to her about it), and I knew it had to be true. There was no other place but the floor, and that was always dirty. I still couldn't picture it all taking place on the desk. There didn't seem room enough for a woman so tall. (I have since discovered that a thimble is room enough when they really want to, and that the planet itself may prove too small when they really don't.)

There was only one key to the door of the storeroom (which made the place ideal for just the sort of thing so many of us, it turned out, had on our minds for so much of the normal business day), and I would not give it to him. I had already made my own plans for another one of the two- or three-minute assignations with Virginia to kiss her and feel her up (before she grew tense and furious all at once with a stark, mysterious terror that always seemed to seize her without warning and for which I was never prepared and could not understand. Her face would blanch, her eyes would darken and dart about anxiously like frightened little mice, and she would tear herself away from me, emitting low, wild, angry gasps and whimpers as she fled in panic and bolted back upstairs. By the time I followed, she would be sitting at her desk beneath the big clock again as though nothing had happened, and she would smile and wink at me salaciously exactly as before. I know now that she was more emotional than I thought and at least a little bit insane. I suppose I loved her then but was too naпve to recognize it. I thought love felt like something else).

"Come on," said Tom. "Gimme the key."

"I can't," I answered.

"I need it."

"So do I."

"I need it now," he said.

"Me too."

"I'm meeting someone there."

"So am I."

"A girl," he explained.

"Me too." (I colored with pride, grinning.)

"Who?" he asked, stepping back to look at me.

"Should I tell you?"

"Why not? I'm your coach, ain't I? Virginia?"

"How do you know?"

"I'm not blind. And I'm not deaf."

"It shows?"

"It shows right out between your legs whenever you stand there and talk to her. You oughta try taking your hand out of your pocket once in a while so we can all get a good look. I'd really like to see that. You oughta carry an accident folder in front of you instead just in case you do have an accident. Pow — what a property damage case that would be. Are you laying her yet?"

"Not yet."

"Do you know how?"

"I'm getting there."

"She can show you how!"

"How do you know?" I asked jealously.

"I can tell. Just do it, that's the best way to learn how. Don't think about it. Just shove it in. You oughta come down now and watch me work it out."

"With who?"

"You'll scream it out all over the place if I tell you."

"No, I won't."

"Gimme the key."

"Tell me who it is."

"Will you keep it quiet?"

"Virginia?" (I felt another pang of jealousy.)

"Marie."

"Jencks?"

"You're screaming."

"Are you laying Marie Jencks?"

"We're laying each other. Don't turn around! She's looking right at us, waiting for you to give me the key, so you better do it — or she'll chop your head off."

"She's married!" I told him with astonishment.

"Can I please have the key?"

I relinquished the key obediently, in deference to his superior achievements; and as soon as he (then she) had gone, I hurried excitedly to the old wooden desk underneath the old, big Western Union clock to postpone my own meeting with Virginia and let her in on what I had just found out. (She was really the best friend I had in the company, and perhaps anywhere else. On days when I was unaccountably sad and lonely or had no money, she would notice and set right about trying to cheer me up or insist on lending me the two or three dollars I needed until payday, even when she had to borrow it from one of the other girls.)

"Why?" she wanted to know, when I asked her to meet me on the staircase instead of in the storeroom.

"Can you keep a secret?"

"Sure," she responded brightly. "What do you want to do to me?"

"No, it's about Tom. Would you believe that Tom Johnson and —»

"Of course," she said.

"With —»

"Sure."

"Right now?"

"The more often the better, I always say."

"In the storeroom?"

"Sometimes they do it in an apartment on Second Avenue. She has a divorced friend who lives there."

"How do you know?" I demanded.

"She tells me."

I was flabbergasted. Virginia's cheeks were red with delight and her eyes were twinkling with merriment at my expression of amazement.

"How do they do it?" I wanted to know.

"Well, she has this thing of hers, and he has this thing of his, and he takes his —»

"I mean down there! Where do they lie down?"

"On the desk," she told me. "Haven't you ever tried it?"

"I'm going to as soon as they're through."

"Not with me, you aren't. I need a big hotel room. I like to move around a lot."

"You didn't move around so much in that canoe at college," I reminded her.

"I was a dope then," she laughed. "I didn't know I was supposed to. Do you want to know a secret?" She motioned me closer. "Come around to here so I can whisper and put my knees against you."

Holding a blank slip of paper, I moved around to her side of the desk and began fussing with folders in a tray there, as though hunting for a particular one. As soon as I drew near her, she swung her knees around against my leg and began rubbing me with them methodically, watching me steadily with a knowing, kind of mocking smile.

"What's the secret?" I asked.

"Take your hand out of your pocket."

"Fuck you."

"Okay."

"On the desk?"

"Pretend you're working."

"I am. What's the secret?"

Mrs. Yerger was outside the entrance of the file room (Mrs. Yerger was always outside the file room), observing me balefully.

I took my hand out of my pocket, picked up a property damage accident folder, and held it over my hard-on. Virginia saw, of course, and laughed out loud, showing the tiniest tip of shiny tongue between bright red lips and wet white teeth. Her cheeks were touched with red too — they wore them rouged then — and she had dimples. I felt the strongest undertow of affection for her, but it was so inadequate; she was twenty-one, and I was seventeen, and I found myself wishing I were as old as Tom and had a better idea of what to do with her.

"Len Lewis and I," she told me, "meet for drinks and dinner every Thursday night after work. He wants to tell his wife he wants a divorce, but I won't let him. He says that nobody in his whole life ever kissed him the way I do."

I was surprised again, but excited to find this out. I was always fascinated by her sex adventures with other men. (She had a fondness for sheer, silky blouses, and I often had an urge to put my hands on her shoulders when she wore one and delicately caress her. When she wore a sweater, I wanted to put my hands inside and squeeze.)

"Do you sleep with him?" (I was always greedy for details.)

"He's afraid. He's been married all his life and never did anything with anyone else. I feel sorry for him. I don't know what I'll say when I finally get him to ask me to. I like him. But I'm not sure I want to."

I liked Len Lewis too. And I had no doubt that nobody had ever kissed him the way Virginia did, for I had seen him at the office Christmas party with his wife, who was a short, shapeless, soundless woman, as old and meek as he was, and much more wrinkled and gray. For that matter, nobody in my whole life had ever kissed me the way she did or touched and fondled me the way she could and did over and over again in the storeroom downstairs or on the staircase between floors. I wanted more and more of her; I never got all I wanted. She did not like me to do things to her; she liked to do things to me. We met on the staircase between floors several times each working day, where we would kiss and pet and clutch frantically for the few seconds before she always imagined she heard someone coming and bolted away; or we would meet downstairs in the storeroom for three, four, or five minutes, where she would also pale suddenly and whirl away from me in violent alarm.

I was never angry with her when she ran from me, never felt resentful or cheated; I always felt lucky that I'd had any of her at all. (And I was always sorry to see her so scared. I always wished there were some way I could help.) She told me once (more than once, because I kept bringing it up in order to hear about it again) that in her freshman year at college (she attended Duke University for two years and never went back after her father killed himself one summer) she had been laid in a floating canoe by the backfield star of the varsity football team. I didn't believe her. (I don't think I honestly believed then that anybody really got laid, that a boy like me took my thing and put it inside her thing and then went on to do the rest, even though I had seen the drawings and photographs and listened to the dirty jokes and stories.) She kept asking me to get a room. I didn't know how. I asked Tom how to go about renting a hotel room, and he told me, but even after he told me, I still didn't feel I knew how. I had an idea the desk clerk would start beating me up right there in the lobby if I ever tried to register for a hotel room for Virginia and me. And I didn't have the money for something like that. I was only a file clerk. (I didn't even know how to take her to dinner!)

I never really made it with her (I never laid her), and I'm sorry. After Tom and I left the company together, I never went back, and I never saw or spoke to her again. I tried. I'm sorry. I miss her. I love her. I want her back. I remember her clearly now when I try to remember everything important that ever happened to me. I think of her often as I sit at my desk in my office and have no work for the company I want to do. And I think of her often in the evenings, too, when I sit at home with my wife and my children and the maid and the nurse and have nothing better I want to do there, either, biting my nails addictively like a starving hunchback as I slump in a chair in my living room or study and wish for something novel to occur that will keep me awake until bedtime. I liked the fact that she was short and slightly plump (and wherever my hands fell, there was something full to hold and feel). I remember how clear and smooth and bright her skin was; her dimples deepened when she laughed. She laughed and smiled a lot. I miss that gaiety. Now I would know what to do with her. I want another chance. Then I remember who I am; I remember she would still be four years older than I am now, short, overweight, and dumpy, probably, and perhaps something of a talkative bore, which is not the girl I'm yearning for at all. (That person isn't here anymore.) Then I remember she's dead.

(She killed herself, too, just like her father. I tried telephoning her at the office after I got back from overseas. I tried telephoning her again after I'd been married a few years. I was already missing her way back then. She wasn't there. There was somebody new in charge of Property Damage also. I spoke to a crippled man in Personal Injury named Ben Zack.

"Virginia Markowitz?" he said. "Oh, no. She killed herself a year and a half ago. She's not employed here anymore. Didn't you know?")

It was after the war, I think, that the struggle really began.

So that was where the tin lizzie had already carried us to by then, this industrial revolution, to the third largest automobile casualty insurance company in the whole world, with a coarse, tough-talking, married bleached blonde in Personal Injury (PI) and a flirting black-haired girl with thick glasses and very weak eyes in Property Damage (PD), and all of us frying in lechery but poor old Mr. Len Lewis, who was beguiled and fortified by juvenile notions of romance that had no possibility of ever coming true. (By now, he certainly must be dead. He had nothing left coming to him but those kisses from Virginia.) It was a pretty tangled (and funny) (and doleful) situation there in that automobile casualty insurance company, and I didn't begin to learn about most of it until just before Mrs. Yerger came barging into the scene like a hunk of destiny, disguised as new boss of the file room, and scared me out a few weeks later. There were so many startling secrets then that everybody seemed to know but me. Today, I don't think there's a single thing I might find out about anybody in this whole world that would cause me anything more than mild surprise or momentary disappointment. Sudden death, though, still shakes me up, particularly when it strikes somebody who has always been in robust health. (Like my brother.)

Once I did find out about Tom and Marie Jencks, turned more persistent in my advances to Virginia; it got me nowhere. (I don't think I even knew then what it was I wanted to force her to do.) The funny thing about each of these women (girls?) (women) (girls) was that neither one wanted either of us ever to take the initiative. I had much more freedom with Virginia than Tom enjoyed with Marie Jencks (and got fewer results). I could go to her desk beneath the big clock whenever I chose and talk as dirty as I wanted to, or ask her to meet me on the staircase or in the storeroom; most times she would; sometimes, with her naughty smile, she would be the one to suggest we meet. But she would never let me force her down onto the desk, although she continued to tempt me far enough to try — before she broke away from me and fled. (Why was that? What was there that made her so frightened with me and not frightened at all with the many older boys and men for whom, she claimed, she did put out and always had?) I think it all would have worked out well with Virginia and me if we ever had gotten together in an apartment or hotel room and had plenty of time, worked out beautifully. (So what?) She would have taught me to go slow. If I did go slow, she might not have become frightened; and if she did not grow frightened, she would have let me do everything to her and showed me how.

But so what?

It would have passed, sooner or later, just as she has passed already, just as I am passing now. (Fuck her, she's dead.) Her case is closed. If she didn't kill herself, she'd be older than I am now and probably a pest; she would be stout and wrinkled and suffer from constipation, gallstones, menopause disturbances, and bunioned feet, and I more than likely would not wish to see her. Everything passes. (That's what makes it endurable.)

But the memory lives (but not for long. Ha, ha).

Her record may be dead, but it isn't buried; and I remember also how she used to urge me on after Marie Jencks once she saw me lusting for that baby too. I could not stop thinking about Marie that way after I found out about her and Tom and that desk in the storeroom. (I used to eat my lunch at that desk two or three times a week and read the sports sections of the New York Daily News and Mirror.) I wanted her too. I didn't know how to get her.

"Bang her," Virginia would exhort me. "Go get her."

"How?"

"Goose her."

"You're nuts."

"Grab her by the nipple."

"You're crazy."

All I could decide to do was keep my eye on Tom and see what he did to get her; and all he did was nothing. He practiced his handwriting. (He knew enough to wait and never approach her.) He sat unperturbed for days at a time, working on his handwriting with me, and waited tactfully and patiently for her to summon him into her office by buzzer or telephone or by ordering one of the other file clerks (it might be me) to send Tom in.

"Are you busy now?" she would ask.

He would answer: "No."

"Get the key," she would command.

And down to the storeroom they would go (where records and folders of people in accidents were crumbling with age in the file cabinets).

Virginia and I kept track of their comings (ha, ha) and goings. She was truly a stupendous catch for a lucky young man to make (or be made by), although I liked Virginia more (and so, for that matter, did Tom). She seemed twice as large as Virginia, four or eight times as much in pure female bulk, that towering, sarcastic, frequently sympathetic bleached blonde of a twenty-eight-year-old married woman in Personal Injury, who looked solicitously after poor little old Len Lewis (who was suffering seriously from kidney trouble and dangerous related ailments and in all likelihood didn't really want to divorce his poor, old, little wife, to whom he had been married all his life and of whom he was probably still very fond) and did what she could to make his job easier. She was married to a cost accountant with a weak heart (weakened, probably, by her) and she bluntly took control of Tom whenever she wanted to and put him to work banging her down in the storeroom or in her divorced friend's apartment after business hours, in much the same autocratic manner she might use to call him into her office and order him to do some filing.

(Tom never knew when she sent for him the kind of task to which he was going to be put, but he was perfectly willing to take the good with the bad.)

The farthest Tom would ever go toward getting her would be to put himself on display in her office by pretending to hunt for some file. She knew exactly what he was hunting for. Sometimes she would frown, and he would move off immediately, as though in preoccupied continuation of his search for some specific accident folder. Other times she would react as he had hoped, smiling caustically, almost grimacing, and demand:

"Is there something in here you want?"

"Yes."

"Get the key."

And down into the storeroom they would go again.

"I'm not even sure she likes me," Tom confided indifferently to me one afternoon in the file room, focusing much more emotion on the P 's and Q 's of the handwriting he was practicing than in the statement he was making. "But she sure likes doing it with me."

I could not help wondering if she might not like doing it with me.

So I tried to seduce her. (And failed.) I tried to steal her away from him — not steal her away, actually, but merely to get, if I could, my own fair share of that musky, estrous, overpowering, inexhaustibly marvelous and voluptuous blond married Viking (who was really just an overgrown, rawboned Scotch-Irish brunette from Buffalo with very large pores). And I got nowhere. Virginia spurred me on energetically with outrageous counsel.

"Go give her a fast bang," she would advise. "She's dying for it right now. A lady can tell. Walk right into her office and get her."

"How?"

"She'll be good for you."

"How?"

"Tell her."

"What?"

"What you want. Come right to the point. That's the best way."

"Oh, sure."

"Grab her by the nipple. Slide your hand up under her dress —»

"She'll kill me."

"No, she won't. Look — Mr. Lewis is out. Go in right now and tell her you've decided you'd like to put it to her."

"She'll lock me up."

"She'll fall in love with you. You'll sweep her off her feet."

"She'll break my head. And put me in jail."

"She won't be able to resist you. You're better looking than Tommy. And more fun, too. You've got nice curly hair."

"She'll tell Len Lewis, or Mrs. Yerger, and have me fired."

"She'll pull her dress up right there, throw open her arms and legs, and sing: 'Oooooooh, come on, baby. Do it to me, like you did to Marie, on Saturday night, Saturd —»

"Pull up your dress and sing," I countered, "if you find me so irresistible. I want to put it to you, too."

"Get a hotel room."

"Marie does it on the desk downstairs."

"Marie's got a big round ass."

"So've you."

"I like you, darling," she declared unexpectedly, looking up straight into my eyes. (I was almost swept away by surprise.) "An awful lot. Really, I do. Even though I'm smiling now when I say it — I do mean it."

I was almost too stunned to reply. "What are you talking about?" I whispered fiercely.

"I wish we were older," she continued wistfully in a tone close to some boding lament. "That's what I wish. You know what I wish? I wish you were old enough to knock me around a little."

I was shocked and terrified, almost enraged with her in my confusion and embarrassment. "Why do you talk like that?" I demanded indignantly, afraid that something fateful I did not understand and could not cope with was already taking place. "Why do you say things like that to me now? Right out here in the middle of the office?"

"Because nobody who hears me will believe me," Virginia continued blithely without lowering her voice or altering her expression of beaming innocence. "Not even you. Not a single person around us would take me seriously if I just let my voice get louder and louder steadily until it was almost a shout" — her voice rose clearly and deliberately until it was almost a shout and everybody nearby was watching us with amusement — "and suddenly called out, 'I love you, Bobby Slocum!»

(And she had to go and kill herself. Why? She was no longer an employee of the automobile casualty insurance company because she had committed suicide shortly after the war and was no longer employable.)

"You're a riot," I muttered awkwardly with an artificial smile.

"See?" she resumed in her normal voice, as all the people around us bent back to their work. "Nobody believes me. Not even you, do you?"

"What do you want?" I begged of her in bewilderment. "Tell me what to do. Look, Virgin-for-Short, I'm only seventeen years old. And I'm scared. I don't know what's going to happen to me."

"Don't be scared," she answered, and now her voice did go soft with a tender care and affection. "We'll be alone soon in a hotel room, and I'll do things to you that no girl ever did to you before. I promise." (We were never alone in a hotel room. A little while ago in New Orleans, a whore in a nightclub made that same promise to me in exactly those words, and then had nothing different to offer when she came to my room.) "Now go get Marie."

"Mrs. Yerger is watching," I noticed.

"She doesn't like me," said Virginia.

"She doesn't like me, either."

"She doesn't like me because I try to have fun with everybody I know. Especially with you."

"I better look busy."

"I'll keep you busy — here." Virginia wrote the number of an accident folder on a sheet of paper. "Find this accident for me," she instructed. "It's a large property damage case with three personal injuries. You can probably get it from Marie Jencks," she added mischievously.

"Yes, Miss Markowitz," I responded heartily enough for Mrs. Yerger to hear me, and started away briskly.

"Oh, and Bobby! Remember — " She beckoned me back to her desk with an important look. In a low voice, she instructed: "Grab her by the nipple."

So, with Virginia goading me on, I set out to seduce Marie Jencks. I tried in the only way I could think of: by loitering. I loitered on her premises for two or three minutes at a time whenever Len Lewis was away from his desk and I saw her sitting in their office alone. I lurked and hovered in her view perpetually, pretending to search for accident folders, expecting her to look at me one time and perceive suddenly, in a moment of effulgent revelation, that I had dark curly hair and was a better-looking boy than Tom Johnson and much more fun, and that she would then say to me also:

"Are you busy now? Get the key."

I never even came close. The most I ever got from her was, "Are you going to spend the rest of your life in here?" or "Why do you keep staring at me all the time like a moonstruck cow?" or, shrewdly (she knew what I was after, all right, the sapient bitch), "Is there anything in here you want?" or, most unkindest cut of all:

"You get out of her now. Send Tom in."

And down to the storeroom Tom would go with her again, leaving his handwriting behind in the back of the file room for me to work on alone, and it is his handwriting that I still use. (I wonder who's using Marie.) Tom relied on me to cover for him in case Mrs. Yerger or anyone else came calling for him. And I did.

("Tom."

No answer.

"Tom."

Still no answer.

"Where is that boy, I wonder."

"Downstairs in the storeroom, Mrs. Yerger, laying Marie Jencks on a desk," I could fancy myself replying.)

It was pretty hard, I confess, keeping my thoughts on Tom's handwriting when I knew he was down in the storeroom with her. Usually, my imagination wandered right down there with him (and I was more inclined to make dirty drawings of the two of them instead). That got to be a pretty steamy meeting place, that gloomy, silent, dingy mausoleum for dead and decaying records on the floor below. Occasionally, someone else in the company would really wish to go there in search of an old accident, and barely miss colliding with Tom or me in a new one. It was only one floor down, but descending the two staircases of that one floor to the musty storeroom was like escaping from scrutiny into some dark, cool, not unpleasant underworld, into the safe and soothing privacy of a deep cellar or dusty, wooden coal shed. I enjoyed going there often, even just to eat my sandwiches alone and read the Mirror and Daily News, or to steal away for a long smoke in the morning or afternoon and meditate over which teams would win the college football games that coming Saturday or what would eventually become of me and my mother and my brother and sister. (My brother is dead already: his heart attacked him one day without warning in the waiting room of his business office, and it was all over for him in a matter of seconds. My mother is dead too. My sister lives far away. We sometimes talk on the telephone.) I imagine ill-humored Mrs. Yerger, who took note of everything, gave that storeroom a very thorough airing once Virginia, Tom, Marie, and I were all gone.

I remember also a rape that nearly took place there one lunchtime when Virginia was trapped with me and two older, bigger boys who also worked in the file room. They would not let her out. She had gone too far, joked and boasted about too much, and now they would not let her go, they said, until she "took care" of the three of us. Virginia grew nervous quickly. We all kept talking and wisecracking compulsively, as though nothing unusual were occurring. One of them had his arms around her shoulders from behind, seeming to hug her playfully, but actually holding her almost helpless and trying to press her to the floor; and the other was soon busy with both hands under her skirt, trying to unsnap her stockings and roll her panties down. I watched, with dread and keen anticipation. All of us were breathing heavily (even I, who was just watching). We wore strained, sick, determined smiles and forced husky laughter out between quick comments in order to sustain for as long as possible the charade that it was all really in fun. It was obviously not in fun. Virginia was terrified after the first few seconds. Her cheeks were chalk white and quivering as she struggled to wrest free. (I never could bear the sight of terror, not in anyone, not in my whole life, not even in people I hate.) Her eyes fell upon mine in wordless panic and appeal. I intervened and let her get away. I was terrified also as I stood up to those two older, bigger boys and insisted they let her go.

"Let her go," I said hesitantly.

"She wants you," one of them said.

"Let her go!" I screamed, with clenched fists.

After Virginia had fled, they shook their heads in unbelieving contempt and told me I was stupid for letting her go just as she was getting ready to put out for the three of us.

Was I stupid?

(I know that by the time we got back upstairs, she was serene and gay again, and not nearly as grateful to me as I took it for granted she would be. And there was no change in her friendliness toward the others. She joked and flirted with them as before, with a show of flattering respect, as though she thought much more of them now. I couldn't understand that. I still can't. I do wonder, though, what would have happened between her and me if I had kept my mouth shut and joined with the others in making her put out for the three of us. Would she have thought more of me too? How could she? But would she? She used to tell me that on her tombstone she wanted an inscription that read:

"Here lies Virginia Markowitz. She was a very good lay, even though she was Jewish."

I bet it isn't there.)

I bet I was stupid.

(I know I never got to lay her. And I should have. I think I wanted to. I'd like to lay her now. I wish she hadn't killed herself and was still around for me to call up and make love to, to tell her I care for her and how much she has always meant to me. I'm glad she's not, because I'm not sure I would want her now. I don't know what I want.)

I know I was much more encouraged about my own future because of Virginia, Tom, and Marie Jencks. It was reassuring to learn that so many people were getting laid, that the activity was indeed so widespread. It augured well. Tom was twenty-one years old and had a big blond married woman of almost twenty-eight who let him make love to her. I took it for granted that when I was twenty-one, I would have a big blond married woman of twenty-eight who would let me make love to her on a desk also. I thought such women came along automatically.

It never happened, of course.

There was no Marie Jencks for me when I was twenty-one. All I got when I was twenty-one was the right to vote. And by the time I finally did get around to screwing a woman of twenty-eight, it was my wife, and I was thirty-two and already married to her, and that was not what I had been daydreaming about at all.

Today when I have anything to do with a woman of twenty-eight, she generally turns out to be not a woman, but a girl, and often just a little girl; she is unmarried and unhappy, or married and lonely. And it isn't the same as it would have been if I had that same girl and were still only seventeen. It is sometimes pleasant, sometimes sad; it is never pleasant for long without turning sad (and uncomfortable, at least for me. Often, they wish to become more devoted to me than I want them to be. I find close relationships suffocating). There is usually something drunken about it (that's my fault, I guess — I like to drink and to get them drinking too), something forlorn and pathological (perhaps in both of us). They like to talk a lot, and they like to listen, to be talked to seriously. (More than anything else, I think, they crave to be spoken to.) I know one or two or three girls near thirty with whom I have become very good friends by now; I don't see any of them too often because our meetings are uneventful (at least for me) and soon turn dull. I meet many young girls I like an awful lot for a while and feel I could love loyally for the rest of my life if I didn't know beforehand that I would grow so bored quickly. That Cuban girl this afternoon was about twenty-six or twenty-eight, and now that I think of her again, she wasn't really so bad. She wasn't really unattractive. She would have been a great girl to have if I were still only a kid of seventeen and knew I could have her whenever I wanted to, and didn't have to pay. She had a small child somewhere being brought up by somebody else. She wanted enough money someday to have her child back and to open her string of beauty parlors.

"Do you like to be teased?" she asked me softly. And when I nodded, she said: "Who doesn't?"

Now that I think of it, she wasn't bad at all.

I don't know what happened to Tom (he could have been killed, for all I know or care); he left me his handwriting, and I still sit at a desk, in my office at the company or in my study at home, and use it. I don't know what finally became of Marie Jencks. I never even found out what happened to me.

Mrs. Yerger, I sense, is still there. (The name is different, but the character is indestructible.) The Mrs. Yergers always survive, unattracted as they are to folly or indiscretion, and so do their grim-faced Mr. Yergers, if there are any (the Mrs. Yergers don't need them), who are indistinguishable from them by everything but gender and dress. The Mrs. Yergers become not only heads of the file room, but mayors, school principals, college deans, majors, judges, government attorneys, colonels, Selective Service board members, American Legion officials, attorney generals, Presidents of the United States of America, and managers of minor departments in companies like mine. Along with Green and Black and Horace White, I have played the part of tyrant myself at times with people in the company who are subordinate to me, and I play it often at home with my wife and my daughter and my son, and even at times with my idiot child, who also doesn't understand what's going on.

("How can you call him that?" my wife will lash out at me with strong emotion. "How can you talk about him that way? He's your own flesh and blood!"

"By definition," I will inform her coldly, "an idiot is any person who lacks the capacity to develop beyond a mental age of three or four, even if he is my own flesh and blood.")

I abandon Kagle's limp for the time being and start around in back of her, observing her closely, through the corner of my eye, trying to see how closely she has been observing me (through the corner of her eye). She is not wearing her girdle (which is normally a reliable sign that she is in a cordial mood). The round-shouldered colored maid we have now is concealing herself in a far corner of our large kitchen, working noiselessly over a black wooden salad bowl we bought from a different round-shouldered colored woman in Jamaica during a vacation there. She is afraid of me (I think, and I am afraid of her). My wife stands at the stove, stirring red wine into a pan of dark meat that might be chicken livers or chunks of beef. The bottle of wine is more than half empty (or less than half full. Ha, ha). I move behind my wife very carefully toward a glass and some ice cubes (although I am tempted to shout Olй! when I think of my Cuban), and I try my best to remember on what terms she and I parted this morning, or went to sleep last night, in order to know if she is still angry with me for something I did or didn't say or do that I am no longer even aware of.

Is she mad or is she glad? I can't remember. And I am unable to tell. So I remain on guard. I bend a bit nearer to her with a cracker and rolled anchovy and perceive suddenly that she is neither mad nor glad. It will make not the slightest difference to her whether we parted on good terms or bad, because she has forgotten too.

She has been drinking again, and I can tell, from her downcast look of furtive uncertainty, that she also is trying to recall whether we are friends tonight or not. (Am I mad or am I glad?) She is waiting for some sign from me. (Am I mad at her for something she said or did wrong or glad with her because she didn't?) I don't know why she is so afraid of me when I am so afraid of her. She is rigid and alert, contrite already (for what? God knows), tense as a bowstring as she stirs her simmering pan and hopes that I'm not angry with her for something she did or didn't say or do that she is unable to remember. It's almost enough to make me laugh.

"You're right," I say, just to get things going for both of us.

"About what?"

"Kagle," I say, and feign Kagle's limp for one step. "We had a few drinks."

"I'm glad they put you in a good mood."

The maid takes it all in spookily with averted eyes. My apprehensions gone, I move to my wife's side and kiss her lightly on the cheek. She turns her face up diffidently, still not completely sure. She smells of wine and expensive perfume.

"Hungry?" she asks.

"I will be. Looks good."

"Let's hope."

The maid glides past us to carry the salad bowl into the dining room.

"How is this one working out?" I ask.

"All right," my wife says. "I had some wine," she adds hastily. "I was using it to cook the chicken livers with. So I thought I'd better try some to make sure it's good."

"Is it good?"

"Good enough." She smiles. "Do you want some?"

"I'll have some bourbon."

"I'll have more wine."

"Kids all right?"

"Yes."

I am off to a fairly good start, I feel, and it may yet turn out that this evening at home will be pleasant. My wife is slightly on the defensive (which will make things easier for both of us). The children (thank heavens) have not come flying at me with grievances and demands. My daughter is in her room, on the telephone. My boy is in his room, watching television. (The set is on loud and I can hear it.) Neither has been much affected by the fact that I am there, that Daddy is home (and I am vaguely hurt by their neglect. A dog would have greeted me with more love). The maid still seems properly subjugated and gives no indication of any incipient Black rebellion. (We pay her well and treat her courteously, and she is probably more at ease in her position with me than I am in my position with her. I am not totally comfortable having maids.) Derek is not nearby, yawping or whimpering or trying to talk, and the nurse (or governess) we have for him now is not hanging around glaring at us as though he were our fault, as though we wanted him that way. (Her job, really, is not to nurse or govern, but to keep herself out of sight, and to keep him out of sight as much as possible, even though he is not disagreeable to look at or have around when he is playing quietly with some brightly colored book or infantile doodad.) They are leaving me be. I have my whiskey. Wife has her wine.

"What did you do today?" I ask routinely (before she can ask me).

"Nothing," she replies with a shrug, a confession of failure, a penitent admission that another day has been wasted. "Stayed home. Shopped. Rested. I slept."

"Anybody come over?"

"No."

That is good, if she is telling the truth, for it means that she has been drinking only wine, and probably no more than a little bit at a time, for too much wine makes her sick. I believe she is telling the truth, for I don't think my wife has learned how to lie to me yet. (My wife doesn't know how to flirt and doesn't know how to lie to me.) When she does have something she hopes to conceal, she remains silent about it and hopes I will not inquire. (If I ask, she will always tell me. She doesn't like to lie.) I cooperate by not prying when I sense she has a secret she wants to protect. I try to keep away from whatever I think she is trying to hide. I suspect she does the same for me (I suspect she knows a great deal more about me than she discloses). Our conversations, therefore, are largely about nothing, and frequently restrained.

"See you soon," I say, and start away in back of her with my drink. "I want to read the mail."

She nods. I pat her softly on the fanny as I pass. She is pleased, grateful, and presses her ungirdled ass back into my hand with a leer of lewd and tipsy delight.

"Later?" she says. "I hope you're in the mood."

"You know me," I laugh.

I'm sorry to see her this way. (It's not the way she used to be.) I may not love her anymore, but I've known her a long time now, and I do not feel like shouting Olй.

I'm sorry my wife drinks now in the afternoon, and perhaps takes a drink or two in the morning as well. I try not to say anything to her about it. That would be humiliating, and I would not want her to fear I was going to start bullying her about that, too. Usually, she will use some offhand way of informing me she's had a little something to drink that afternoon; she met her sister, or the wife of somebody, for lunch or fabric-shopping and had a cocktail or double scotch before coming home, or, as she did just now, she has been cooking with wine. Sometimes she will want to tell me but wait too long and won't, and I will have the feeling then that she is trembling inside herself, wondering if I have noticed and will criticize. (My wife is afraid of me; I don't particularly want her that way, but it makes things easier.) At times I pity her.

She has never been drunk in the daytime (she does get drunk at parties and have a good time — although never at any of our own. My wife is a superior hostess), and neither of the children has ever remarked about her drinking at home during the day, so it may be that she has not let them notice. But I remember that she never used to drink at all; I remember that she never used to flirt. (She never used to swear.) And she is still religious; she goes to church most Sundays and tries to make the rest of us go too. (None of us want to. Once in a while we will, when I decide it's a small enough way of paying her a favor we owe. She isn't quite sure about the minister we have now, and neither am I.)

My wife is also starting to learn how to use dirty words (in much the same self-conscious way other women take up painting at an advanced age or enroll in adult education courses in psychology, art history, or Jean-Paul Sartre). She is not much good at that, either. Her hell 's and damn 's carry too much emphasis, although her Oh shit 's have the ring of authority by now. She is not as convincing as the rest of the men and women in our several social groups in the jaded indifference we affect toward obscenity. My fifteen-year-old daughter is already much better than my wife with dirty words. My daughter uses dirty language with us liberally in order to impress us with her intelligence; often, she uses it directly at us (especially at my wife), probing to see how far she will be allowed to go. (She's not allowed to go far by me.) And my boy, I can tell, is working up the courage to experiment at home with a dirty word or two. (He isn't sure what the word fuck means, although he knows it's dirty. He was under the impression fuck was the word for sexual intercourse, until I told him it usually wasn't.)

It is painful for me to recall how my wife was, to know the kind of person she used to be and would have liked to remain, and to see what is happening to her now, as it is painful for me to witness the deterioration of any human being who has ever been dear (or even near) to me, even of chance acquaintances, or total strangers. (A spastic can affect me profoundly, and a person with some other kind of facial or leg paralysis can immobilize me with repugnance. I want to look away. I resent blind people when I see them on the street, grow angry with them for being blind and in danger on the street, and glance about desperately for somebody else to step alongside them before I have to guide them safely across the intersection or around the unexpected sidewalk obstruction that throws them abruptly into such pathetic confusion. I will not let myself cope with such human distress; I refuse to accept such reality; I dump it all right down into my unconscious and sit on it as hard as I can. Let it all come out in bad dreams if it has to. I forget them anyway as soon as I wake up.) Martha the typist, that young, plain girl in our office who has bad skin and is going crazy, is a total stranger to me and was already well on her way toward going crazy when she was sent upstairs to us by Personnel (to finish going crazy); I am not responsible, I do not know her; I do not know her mother in Iowa who has married again and will not take her back, or her father (if she still has a father), or anyone else among the many people in this world who should be close to her; yet, if I let it, it could break my heart that she is going crazy. I say nothing to her about how I feel (or could feel). But I always speak kindly to her. My manner is undiscerning. I try not to let her see I care anything at all about what is happening to her (she might turn to me for help, if she knew I knew), and I try not to let myself care. I try not to let her see I know. (She might not know it yet herself.) It would probably be upsetting for her to learn that everyone around her knew she was going crazy.

So I am silent with Martha, and I am silent with my wife, out of the same coarse mixture of sympathy and self-interest, about her drinking and flirting and dirty words, as I was silent also with my mother when she had the first of her brain strokes, and am silent also with everyone else I know in whom I begin to perceive the first signs of irreversible physical decay and approaching infirmity and death. (I write these people off rapidly. They become dead records in my filing system long before they are even gone, at the first indications that they have begun to go.) I say nothing to anybody about anything bad once I see it's already too late for anyone to help. I said nothing to my mother about her brain stroke, even though I was with her when it happened and was the one who finally had to make the telephone call for the doctor. I did not want her to know she was having a brain stroke; and when she did know, I didn't want her to know I knew.

I pretended not to notice when her tongue began rattling suddenly against the roof of her mouth during one of my weekly visits to the apartment in which she lived alone. The same splintered syllable, the same glottal stutter, kept coming out. I masked my surprise and hid my concern. She broke off, that first time, with a puzzled, almost whimsical look, smiled faintly in apology, and tried again to complete what she had started to say. The same thing happened. It happened the next time she tried. And the next. And the time after that, her attempt was not wholehearted; she seemed to know in advance it was futile, that it was too late. She felt all right otherwise. But she nodded when I suggested we get a doctor; and as I telephoned, the poor old woman sat down and surrendered weakly with a mortified, misty-eyed, bewildered shrug. (She was frightened. And she was ashamed.)

The doctor explained patiently afterward that it was probably not a clot but only a spasm (there was no such things as strokes, he said; there were only hemorrhages, clots, and spasms) in a very small blood vessel in her brain. (Had the affected blood vessel been a larger one, she would have suffered paralysis too on one side and perhaps loss of memory.) But she never spoke again for as long as she lived, although she continued, forgetfully, to try (out of habit, I suppose, rather than from any expectations of success) until the second in her series of spasms (or strokes), and then stopped trying. I would visit her in the nursing home (where she hated to be); I would do all the talking and she would listen and motion for the things she wanted or rise from her chair or bed (until she could no longer stand up, either) and go for them herself. Occasionally, she would jot a request on a scrap of paper. I never mentioned her stroke to her or referred to any of the other growing disabilities that appeared and crept over her remorselessly (arthritis, particularly, and a pervasive physical and mental indolence that blended finally into morbid apathy) as I sat by her bedside during my visits and talked to her about pleasant matters, soon running out of things to say about me, my wife, my children, and my job that I thought might make her feel good. She never knew that Derek had been born with serious brain damage, although she did know he had been born. I always told her he was fine. (I always told her everybody was fine.) We didn't know it either about Derek until he was a few years old, and by then it was too late: we'd already had him; he had already happened. (I wish I were rid of him now, although I don't dare come right out and say so. I suspect all of us in the family feel this way. Except, possibly, my boy, who may reason that if we did get rid of Derek, we could get rid of him, too, and is already concerned that we secretly intend to. My boy watches and absorbs everything having to do with us and Derek, as though waiting to see how we finally dispose of him, which is something, he senses, that sooner or later we will probably have to do.)

My conversation to my mother, like my visits, was of no use to her. I pretended, by not speaking of it, for my sake as well as for hers (for my sake more than for hers) that she was not seriously ill and in a nursing home she hated, that she was not crippled and growing older and more crippled daily. I did not want her to know, as she did know (and I knew she knew), as she knew before I did, that she was dying, slowly, in stages, her organs failing and her faculties withering one by one. I brought her food (which, toward the end, when her mind was gone almost entirely and she could barely recollect who I was for more than a minute or two, she would seize with her shriveled fingers and devour ravenously right from the wrapping paper like some famished, caged, wizened, white-haired animal — my mother). I pretended she was perfect and said nothing to her about her condition until she finally died. I was no use to her (except to bring her food), as I am no help now to our typist who is going insane right before my eyes, and am no help either to my wife with her drinking and her flirting and her other rather awkward efforts to be vital and gay. (I have visions these days when I am lying alone in strange beds in hotels or motels, trying to put myself to sleep, of being assailed by filthy hordes of stinging fleas or bedbugs against which I am utterly inept because I am too squeamish to endure them and have no other place to go.) I don't want my wife ever to find out she drinks too much at parties and sometimes behaves very badly with other people and makes an extremely poor impression when she thinks she is making a very good one! If she did (if she ever had even an inkling of how clumsy and overbearing she sometimes becomes), the knowledge would crush her (she would be destroyed), and she is already dejected enough.

At home during the day, she drinks only wine; in the evening, before or after dinner, she might drink scotch if I do. Many evenings we will not drink at all. She doesn't really like the taste of whiskey (although she is starting to enjoy the taste of martinis and to welcome that numbing-enlivening effect they mercifully produce so quickly) and doesn't know how to mix cocktails. At parties now, she will drink whatever's handed her as soon as we walk in and try to get a little high as quickly as she can. Then she will stick to that same drink for the rest of the evening. If things have been fairly comfortable between us that day and she is feeling secure, she will have a loud, jolly, friendly good time, with me and everyone else, until she gets drunk (if she does), and sometimes dizzy and sick, and no real harm will be done, although she used to be a quiet, modest girl, somewhat shy and refined, almost demure, always tactful and well-mannered.

If things are not so good, if she is not happy that day with me, my daughter, or herself, she will flirt belligerently. She will usually frighten away the man (or men) she flirts with (they almost never hang around long enough to flirt back) because she doesn't know how; her approach is threatening, her invitation to seduction a challenging attack, and there may be something of a scene if I don't step in quickly enough. It will always be with some man she knows and feels thoroughly safe with (she doesn't really want to flirt at all, I suppose) and usually one who appears to be enjoying himself and bothering no one. (Perhaps he seems smug.) It is saddening for me to watch her; I do not want other people to dislike her.

She will challenge the man openly, sometimes right in the presence of his wife, with a bald and suggestive remark or enticement, sliding her hand heavily up his shoulder blade if he is standing or squeezing the inside of his thigh if he is seated; and then, as though he had already rejected her, turn taunting, vengeful, and contemptuous before he can respond at all. As neatly and promptly as I can, before much damage is done, I will move in to rescue her, to guide her away smoothly with a quip and a smile. I never rebuke her (although I am often furious and ashamed); I humor her, praise her, flatter. I want her to feel pleased with herself. (I don't know why.)

"You're just jealous," she will accuse defiantly, when I have led her away.

"Damned right, I am," I reply with a forced laugh, and sometimes I will put my hands on her intimately to help persuade her I am.

"You'd better be," she'll gloat triumphantly.

We have had better times together, my wife and I, than we are having now; but I do not think we will have them again.

Dinner, my wife says, will be ready soon. My mood is convivial (so many times when I am home with my family, I wish I were somewhere else) and I decide, magnanimously, that tonight (at least) I will do everything I can to make them all happy.

"Hello," I say as my children assemble.

"Hi," says my daughter.

"Hi," says my son.

"What's the matter?" I ask my daughter.

"Nothing," she says.

"Was that a look?"

"No."

"It was a look, wasn't it?"

"I said hello, didn't I?" she retorts, lowering her voice, maliciously, to a tone of unconcerned innocence. "What do you want me to do?"

(Oh, shit, I meditate pessimistically, my spirits sinking, what the hell is bothering her now?)

"If something's wrong," I persist tolerantly (feeling myself growing incensed), "I wish you'd tell me what it is."

She grits her teeth. "Nothing's wrong."

"Dinner's ready," says my wife.

"I won't like it," says my boy.

"What's bothering her?" I ask my wife loudly, as we move together into the dining room.

"Nothing. I don't know. I never know, Let's sit down. Let's try not to fight tonight. Let's see if we can't get through just one meal without anybody yelling and screaming and getting angry. That shouldn't be too hard, should it?"

"That would suit me fine," says my daughter, emphasizing her words to indicate that it might not suit somebody else (me). (She has not looked at me directly yet.)

"It's okay with me," says I.

"I still won't like it," says my boy.

"What does that mean?" I ask.

"I want two hot dogs."

"You can at least taste it," argues my wife.

"What?" asks my daughter.

"You can't keep eating hot dogs all your life."

"If you want them, you'll get them," I promise my son. "Okay?"

"Okay."

"Okay?" I ask my wife. "No fights?"

"All right."

"Amen," I conclude with relief.

"What does that mean?" my boy asks me.

"Olй," I answer facetiously.

"What does that mean?"

"Okay. Have you got it?"

"Since when?" intrudes my daughter.

"Olй," my boy replies.

"No, it doesn't," says my daughter in her soft, weary monotone without looking up, attempting (I know) to keep the bickering going. "Olй doesn't mean okay."

"If you were in a better frame of mind," I josh with her, "I would threaten to wring your neck for that."

"There's nothing wrong with my frame of mind," she replies. "Why don't you threaten to wring my neck anyway?"

"Because you wouldn't realize I was kidding now, and you'd probably think I really wanted to harm you."

"Ha."

"Can't we have a peaceful meal?" pleads my wife. "It shouldn't be so hard to have a peaceful meal together. Should it?"

(I grit my teeth.)

"It would be a lot easier," I tell her amiably, "if you didn't keep saying that."

"Forgive me," my wife answers. "Forgive me for breathing."

"Oh, Jesus."

"That's right," says my wife, "swear."

"I didn't mean it that way," I tell her harshly (lying, of course, because that was exactly the way I did mean it). "Honest, I didn't. Look, we all agreed not to argue tonight, didn't we?"

"I know I did," says my daughter.

"Then let's not argue. Okay?"

"If you don't shout," says my daughter.

"Olй," says my boy, and we all smile.

(At last we have agreed about something.) Now that we have agreed to relax, we are all very tense. (Now I am sorry I'm there — although I do enjoy my boy. I can think of three girls I like a lot and know a long time — Penny, Jill, and Rosemary — I would rather be with, and the new young one in our Art Department, Jane, who, I bet, I could be having dinner and booze with instead if I had taken the trouble to ask.) None of us at our dining room table seems willing now to risk a remark.

"Should we say grace?" I suggest jokingly in an effort to loosen things up.

"Grace," says my boy, on cue.

It's an old family joke that really pleases only my boy; and my daughter's lips droop deliberately with disdain. She holds that scornful expression long enough to make sure I notice. I make believe I don't. I try not to let it rankle me (I know my daughter often finds me childish, and that does rankle me. I have a bitter urge to reproach her, to shout at her, to reach out and hit her, to kick her very sharply under the table in the bones of her leg. I have an impulse often to strike back at the members of my family, even the children, when I feel they are insulting me or talcing advantage. Sometimes when I see one of them in the process of doing something improper, or making a mistake for which I know I will be justified in blaming them, I do not intercede to help or correct but hold back in joy to watch and wait, as though observing from a distance a wicked scene unfold in some weird dream, actually relishing the opportunity I spy approaching that will enable me to criticize and reprimand them and demand explanations and apologies. It horrifies me; it is something like watching them back fatally toward an open window or the edge of a cliff and offering no warning to save them from injury or death. It is perverse and I try to overcome it. There is this crawling animal flourishing somewhere inside me that I try to keep hidden and that strives to get out, and I don't know what it is or whom it wishes to destroy. I know it is covered with warts. It might be me; it might also be me that it wishes to destroy) and, succeeding in stifling my anger beneath a placid smile, say:

"Pass me the bread, will you, dear?"

My daughter does.

My wife sits opposite me at the head (or foot) of the table, my boy on my left, my daughter on my right. The maid pads back and forth without talking, delivering bowls of food from the kitchen. My wife spoons large portions out into separate plates and passes them. We are silent. We do not feel free any longer to converse without inhibition in front of our colored maids. (I am not even certain of this one's name; they do not stay with us long anymore.)

"The salad is good, Sarah," my wife says.

"I did what you told me."

I am not comfortable having our maids serve us our food at our places (neither are the children), and I won't allow it (even though my wife, I suspect, would still prefer to have it done that way, as it was done in her own family when she was a child, as she still sees it done in good middle-class homes on television and in the movies, and as she imagines it is also done at Buckingham Palace and the White House). I am not comfortable being served by maids anywhere, even less so in other people's homes (where I am never certain how much food I am supposed to take, always have difficulty manipulating the serving forks and spoons from a sideways position, and am in continual anxiety that I am going to bump the meat and vegetable platters with my shoulder or elbow and send them spilling to the floor. Of course, that's never happened — yet). I suffer the same discomfort even when they are white (the maids, I mean, not the friends. I don't have any Black friends and probably never will, although I do see more and more pretty Black girls these days that whet my appetite. They're all out of reach for me by now, I guess, unless they're Cuban or Puerto Rican).

"I think it's good," my wife says. "I hope it's good."

"I won't like it," my boy says.

"That's enough," I tell him.

"Okay." He retreats quickly. He cannot stand it when I am displeased with him.

"What is it?" my daughter asks.

"Chicken livers and noodles in that wine sauce you like with beef. I think you'll like it."

"I won't," mumbles my boy.

"Will you at least taste it?"

"I don't like liver."

"It isn't liver. It's chicken."

"It's chicken liver."

"Please taste it."

"I'll taste it," he answers. "And then I'll want my hot dogs."

"Can I have mine?"

My wife and I watch with bated breath as my daughter pokes at the meat solemnly, almost lugubriously, with her fork and touches a small piece to her mouth.

"It's good," she says without enthusiasm and begins eating.

My wife and I are relieved.

(My daughter is somewhat tall and overweight and should be dieting; but my wife, who reminds her endlessly to diet, makes such things as noodles and serves large portions, and my daughter will probably ask for more.)

"It's delicious," I say.

"Can I have my hot dogs?"

"Sarah, put up two frankfurters."

"Can I have the bread back?"

I give my daughter the bread.

"I've got some good news," I begin, and each of them turns to look at me. I am still brimming with excitement (and conceit) over Arthur Baron's conversation with me; and in a sudden, generous welling of affection for them, for all three of them (they are my family, and I am attached to them), I decide to share my joyful feelings. "Yes, I think I may have some very important news for all of us."

The three of them gaze at me now with such intense curiosity that I find myself forced to break off.

"What?" one of them asks.

"On second thought," I hesitate, "it may not be that important. In fact, now that I think of it, it isn't important at all. It isn't even interesting."

"Then why did you say it?" my daughter wants to know.

"To tantalize you," I kid.

"What in hell does that mean?" my boy asks.

"Do you have something?" my wife asks.

"Oh, maybe yes," I tease her jovially, "and maybe no."

"To tease us," my daughter exclaims to my boy with mockery and distaste.

(My daughter makes me feel foolish again. And again I have that powerful, momentary, spiteful impulse to injure her, to wound her deeply with a cutting retort, to reach out over the dining room table and smack her hard on the side of the face or neck, to kick her viciously under the table in her ankle or shin. I can do nothing, though, but ignore her and try to maintain my faзade of paternal good humor.)

"Then why don't you tell us?" my wife inquires. "Especially if it's good."

"I will," I say. "All I wanted to say," I announce, and my spirit turns manifestly arch and tantalizing again as I pause to butter a piece of bread and take a bite, "is that I think I may have to start playing golf again."

There is a thoughtful, puzzled, almost rebellious silence now as each of them tries to figure out before the others what it is I am waggishly withholding from them and presently intend to disclose.

"Golf?" asks my nine-year-old boy, who is still not certain what kind of game golf is, whether it is a good game or a bad one.

"Yes."

"Why golf?" asks my wife with surprise. (She knows I hate the game.)

"Golf," I repeat.

"You don't even like golf."

"I hate golf. But it may have to be golf."

"Why?"

"I bet he's getting a better job!" my daughter guesses. (In many ways, she is the smartest and most devious of all of us.)

"Are you?" asks my wife.

"Maybe."

"What kind of job?" My wife's reaction is suspicious, almost morose. I know she has assumed secretly for several years that I have been longing for a different job that would take me away from home more often.

"Selling."

"Selling what?" asks my boy.

"Selling selling."

For an instant, my boy is confused, almost stunned by the riddle of my reply. Then he understands it was meant as a joke, and he bursts into laughter. His eyes sparkle, and his face lights up joyously. (Everybody likes my boy.)

"Do you mean it?" probes my wife, studying me. She is still unsure whether to be pleased or not.

"I think so."

"Will you have to travel more than you have to travel now?"

"No. Probably less."

"Will you make more money?" my daughter asks.

"Yes. Maybe a lot more."

"Will we be rich?"

"No."

"Will we ever be rich?"

"No."

"I don't want you to travel more," my boy complains.

"I'm not going to travel more," I repeat for him, with a trace of annoyance. "I'm going to travel less." (I begin to regret that I brought it up at all. The questions are coming too swiftly; I can feel my self-satisfaction ebbing away, and an army of irritations mobilizing too rapidly for me to keep track of and control. I am already replying to them with my slight stammer.)

"Are you going to start talking to yourself again?" my boy cannot resist baiting me mischievously.

"I wasn't talking to myself," I declare firmly.

"Yes, you were," my daughter murmurs.

"Like last year?" my boy persists.

"I was not talking to myself," I repeat loudly. "I was practicing a speech."

"You were practicing it to yourself," my boy points out.

"Will they let you make a speech this year?" my daughter asks. "At the company convention?"

"Oh, yes," I respond with a smile.

"A long speech?"

"Oh, yes, indeed. I imagine they might let me make a speech as long as I want to at the company convention this year."

"Will you be working for Andy Kagle?" my wife asks.

The question brings me to a halt.

"A little something like that," I stammer evasively.

(The fun goes out of my family guessing game, and now I am sorry that I started it.) I laugh nervously. "It isn't definite yet. And it's all a pretty long way off. Maybe I shouldn't even have mentioned it."

"I'm glad you'll be working for Andy Kagle," my wife asserts. "I don't like Green."

"I didn't say I'd be working for Kagle."

"I don't trust Green."

"Don't you listen?"

"Why are you snapping at me?"

"I don't want you to be a salesman," my daughter exclaims with unexpected emotion, almost in tears. "I don't want you to have to go around to other people's fathers and beg them to buy things from you."

"I'm not going to be a salesman," I protest impatiently. "Look, what's everybody talking about it so much for? I haven't got it yet. And I'm not even sure I'm going to take it."

"You don't have to shout at her," my wife says.

"I'm not shouting."

"Yes, you are," she says. "Don't you hear yourself?"

"I'm sorry I shouted."

"You don't have to snap at everybody, either."

"And I'm sorry I snapped."

My wife is right, this time. Without my realizing it, I have moved from optimistic conceit into a bad temper; and without my being conscious of it, my voice has risen with anger, and I have been shouting at them again. We are all silent at the table now. The children sit with their eyes lowered. They seem too fearful even to fidget. I am guilty. My forehead hurts me (with tension. Another headache is threatening). I am numb with shame. I feel so helpless and uncertain. I wish one of them would say something that would give me a clue, that would point the way I must follow toward an easy apology. (I feel lost.) But no one will speak.

I pounce upon an energetic idea. I whirl upon my son without warning, shoot my index finger out at him, and demand:

"Are you mad or glad?"

"Glad," he cries with laughter and delight, when he recognizes I am joking again and no longer irate.

I spin around toward my daughter and shoot my index ringer out at her.

"Are you mad or glad?" I demand with a grin.

"Oh, Daddy," she answers. "Whenever you make one of us unhappy, you always try to get out of it by behaving like a child."

"Oh, shit," I say quietly, stung by her rebuff.

"Must you say that in front of the children?" my wife asks.

"They say it in front of us," I retort. I turn to my daughter. "Say shit."

"Shit," she says.

"Say shit," I say to my son.

He is ready to start crying.

(I want to reach out instinctively to console and reassure him and rumple his soft, sandy hair. I am deeply fond of my boy, although I am not sure anymore how I feel about my daughter.)

"I'm sorry," I tell him quickly. (I have the shameful, shocking apprehension that if I did put my hand out to comfort him, he would cringe reflexively, as though afraid I were going to strike him. I recoil from that thought in pain.) I turn to my daughter. "I'm sorry," I say to her too, earnestly. "You're right, and I'm sorry. I do act like a child." Now it is my eyes that are down. "I think I want another drink," I explain apologetically, as I stand up. "I'm not going to eat anymore. You go on, though. I'll wait in the living room. I'm sorry."

They continue eating after I leave, their voices subdued.

I do such things to them, I know, even when I don't intend to. But I cannot admit this to my wife or children. My wife would not understand. I cannot really say to my wife: "I'm sorry." She would think I was apologizing. My wife and I cannot really talk to each other about the same things anymore; but I sometimes forget this and try. We are no longer close enough for honest conversation (although we are close enough for frequent sexual intercourse). She would respond with something as vacuous and frustrating and galling as "You should be," or "You didn't have to snap at everybody," or "You don't have to shout at me that way." As though my snapping or her snapping at me (she can snap too), were any part of the problem. She would say something exactly like that; and I would be brought to a stop again, as though slapped sharply; I would be stunned; I would feel abandoned and isolated again, and I would sink back for safety again inside my dense, dark wave of opaque melancholy; I would feel lonely and I would be brought face to face again with the fact that I have nobody in this world to confide in or reach toward for help; I would miss my mother (and my father?) and my dead big brother, and I would begin daydreaming once again about some new job with a different company that would take me far away from home more often. Someday soon someone may be dropping bombs on us. I will scream:

"The sky is falling! They are dropping bombs! People are on fire! The world is over! It's coming to an end!"

And my wife will reply:

"You don't have to raise your voice to me."

What happened to us? Something did. I was a boy once, and she was a girl, and we were both new. Now we are man and woman, and nothing feels new any longer; everything feels old. I think we liked each other once. I think we used to have fun; at least, it seems that way now, although we were always struggling about one thing or another. I was always struggling to get her clothes off, and she was always struggling to keep them on. I remember things like that. I remember the many times I had to pull my wife's dress up and her panties down because she didn't like to make love outdoors, or even indoors if anyone else was even remotely in the vicinity: in the same house or apartment, in the next room (even at hotels! She would be petrified if she heard someone stirring in the adjoining room), in the next apartment, in the next house! I remember the way I'd unbutton her blouse almost anywhere to get at her bra and breasts. (Pale blue brassieres still do drive me crazy more than black; she used to wear them.) She was always afraid we'd be caught. I didn't care (although I might have cared if we'd ever been caught). I was always ripping open her slacks or tearing off her bathing suit or tennis shorts and flinging them away somewhere over my back as I went at her as hard and fast as I could every chance I had. I was a pretty hot kid once. I didn't care whether she enjoyed it or not; just as long as I got mine. I was always trying to jump her. We were with her parents and her younger sister a lot then, and I would grab at her the second they all went out and try to bang her before any of them got back. In the country, during the summer, or at the seashore, I would try to lure her outside the rented house after dark and do it to her on the porch or right down on the ground or sand (although I didn't like the sand in my clothes and hair afterward and she didn't like the ground, because it hurt her ass and made it black and blue). I was always pulling at her buttons and zippers and clutching and scratching at the snaps and elastic of her underthings. I was absolutely wild for her when she was a girl and I was a boy, absolutely out of my head with volcanic lust. I was all cock and hard-on. I wanted to come, come, come. I would give her no warning, no time to deliberate or converse or prepare or find any excuses for delay and often she did not understand fully what was happening to her until I had her half undressed and was already swarming all over her, wholly on fire and stone deaf to all her objections and premonitions, and it was too late for her to make me stop. (Sometimes I would sit scheming about her all through family dinner, plotting where and how I would spring at her the moment I had the opportunity and selecting the way in which I would ravish her this time.) No matter where it was I trapped, seized, and finally overcame her (if it was anywhere outside the bolted door of our own bedroom; often it was even behind the locked door of our own bedroom), she would recline and heave submissively beneath me with her eyes wide open in gleaming fright, turning her gaze from one side to the other rapidly and distressfully to make certain no one was seeing, listening, or approaching. (I think now that I probably enjoyed her terror and my violence.) I didn't mind that her eyes were open and darting all about and that her strongest emotions were not those of passion or entirely on me, just as long as I had her when I wanted her and got whatI wanted; it might, in fact, have added something, that tangy, triumphant sense of frenzied danger, that ability to dominate rather than merely persuade, and I often wish I were driven now by that same hectic mixture of blind ardor, haste, and tension. (It might, in fact, have added a great deal.) Maybe that's what's missing. I lay girls now that are as young as she was then, and much more nimble, profligate, and responsive but it isn't as rich with impulse and excitement and generally not as satisfying afterward. (There is no resistance.) I have more control and maturity now and can manipulate and exploit them coolly and skillfully, but it isn't nearly as much fun anymore as it used to be with her, and I miss her greatly and love us both very deeply when I remember how we used to be then. I have large rooms now with big beds and all the privacy and time I want; the girls have places of their own, or I have Red Parker's apartment in the city and hotel rooms and suites on business trips out of town; but it's all rather tame now, rather predictable and matter-of-fact, even with someone I am with for the very first time (and I often wonder, even while I am in the act of doing it, why I bother. I am no sooner in than I'm thinking about getting out. I no sooner come than I want to go).

"Let's go into the bedroom now," I will say (or they will say).

"All right."

I think it was better the other way with me and my wife when we were both so much younger. "Hurry, hurry," she would urge, beg, moan, pant, demand, murmur, pray, implore frantically as she lay and churned in my grasp, doing everything she could think of to help bring me to an end quickly before we were discovered. And I would work away at her, sometimes grinning when she couldn't see me, and have the time of my life.

That was fun we used to have together. It was fun then (more for me than for her), and it is fun now for both of us to recall and laugh about (when we are laughing). We often reminisce together warmly about some of the crazy times and places I did get her. My wife enjoys looking back even more than I do and has a better memory for separate occasions.

("Remember the time in that boathouse when my father —»

"And your kid sister was doing it all summer —»

"You sound envious."

"She probably got more than I did."

"You had no complaints."

"I did when I found out about her."

"Were you hot for her?"

"Only when I knew about her."

"Are you hot for her now?"

"Don't be crazy. She's a God-damned reactionary bitch now."

"You don't ever say anything to her about —»

"I hardly ever talk to her."

"Remember the time on the lake in that rowboat?"

"Do I!")

I remember the time I once tried to do it to her right on the bottom of a rowboat, far out on a lake. (I remember dead Virginia from my automobile casualty insurance company, and I bet I could do it now also in a canoe to a carefree young coed like Virgin-for-Short, but I don't think I would want to anymore, not at my age, not in a canoe.) I did almost everything else to her that day while she wriggled and kissed and fought and hugged and fretted against the bottom of that rowboat, but when it came to the nudeness of it, to the pulling of her things off and my things down, she was terror-stricken by the thought that people might be seeing us from the houses along the shore and, almost weeping miserably, made me stop. So I rowed furiously to a small island a little farther out (I think I must have broken the speed record for rowing that day) and laid her on the ground just inside the woods. She rolled her head from side to side with wide-open eyes flashing in anguish and fear, pleading with me desperately please to stop or please to hurry up and finish before someone came trudging up through the trees and caught us. We were already married then.

It was fun, even though we often fought about it bitterly: she would cry, and I would rage if I could not have my way with her in matters of sex and just about everything else. (My feelings were easily hurt.) I used to want to jump her everywhere. We are both glad now that I did. I was always throwing her halters off then or shoving her blouses and sweaters up to go for her breasts and lips like someone starved, suffering the aching, compulsive need and joy in my heart and head and mouth and throat and in the palms of my hands. (What a nutty kid I was, even then.) "Not now," she would say, or "Do you love me?" she would ask. And I would say anything, or nothing, as I pushed and forced myself upon her. It took very little to get me excited then, usually nothing more than the sight of her, or just the thought, when I had been away, that I would be back with her soon. (Then I knew what being horny really meant.) When we were alone indoors and knew we had time, I could be different, and so could she; but there were many times when we could not be alone. And the trouble with my wife then was that she did not like to make love anywhere outdoors. She did not like to screw in parks, or on beaches, or in bushes, or standing up against walls, doors, or trees (and I did). She did not want to screw in the back of my car (or the front), and I always had to force her. (There was frequently no better place we had for it then; and when there was, I often did not want to wait.) My wife was something of a lady then, and I liked her for that (more than I like her drinking and flirting now, or her raucous tones when she is having a good time at parties and dinners). But I also liked getting laid. There was one whole summer at the lake when she did not want to make love at all because we were sharing the house with her mother and father and sister, and one person or another was always around. That was the summer, I remember, that her sister got knocked up near the end and almost drove her mother and father insane before she would agree to the abortion (it was not that she wanted the baby; she was afraid of surgery), although it could have happened at college the first week she went back. My wife and I were married then, and what was clear (at least to me) was that her kid sister had been making out effortlessly all summer long, while I was having so much trouble, which made me wonder if I had not wasted the better part of that summer trying to get into the wrong sister, my wife. Once I found out about her sister, I wanted to lay her too, even though I didn't like her.

Later, when we had our own place, my wife didn't want to make love until she was certain all of the children were sound asleep and the door to the bedroom was locked and the door to the apartment was double-locked. (God knows who she imagined might sneak in and catch us at it then. Burglars?) There was a long, long period, even when we had our own place, when she did not want to screw any time during the day, even before we had children, and when there was no one else around. (Nowadays, she'll do it with me just about any place, any time, especially if she's had a drink or two.) She needed darkness, even at night; she wanted to be hidden; the lights had to be out, the shades drawn, the doors closed, even the closet doors. She would rather I did not watch her undress and did not gaze at her when she was walking or lying naked; often she came to the bed with her nightgown already on, having removed her clothes privately in the bathroom or closet, even though she knew I would slip it up and off her immediately. Then, though, when conditions were exactly right, once she had made certain she was safe from interruption and concealed from watching eyes, when everything around us was just the way she wanted it, she could be absolutely fine in just about every way and feel proud of herself and me afterward and in between. And she wasn't so bad all those other times when I had to force her and we had to do it fast (she learned rapidly that the more zealously she pitched in to give me what I wanted, the sooner it would be over), although she was never nearly as good at age twenty-eight as my Cuban whore was this afternoon. ("Do you like to be teased?" she purred, and I can hear her purring again. Of course I do. Maybe I never left my wife enough time to tease me then, or even to learn how.)

Nowadays, my wife is much better. Nowadays, my wife is completely different about this whole matter of sex; but so am I. She is almost always amorous nowadays, it seems, and ready to take chances that horrify even me. I can usually tell when she's been thinking about it the instant I walk in, by a bold, questioning, determined look in her eyes and a funny, self-satisfied, slightly twisted smile. I know I am right if she has left her girdle off. (Her girdle is off tonight. I remember when she didn't need a girdle and wouldn't wear one; now she'll seldom go out of the house without a girdle, even though she still doesn't need one.) When she is in the mood, I have only to grip her elbow or nudge her gently toward a couch or bed and I can have her any time I want to and just about anywhere. Or she will come after me. She is always in the mood when she drinks (unless she is sick), and she drinks almost every day now. I have only to pass within arm's reach of her in the kitchen when she is cooking or meet her by accident in one of the hallways and she moves right up against me and is ready to sink down on the spot (she has even had me do it to her on the kitchen floor), in the dark or in brilliant daylight. She lifts her own skirt now, and fumbles impatiently with my pants if I am not removing them quickly enough. (I'm not sure I like her this way, although I would have liked it back then, but I'm not so sure about that, either. I'm really not sure I want my wife to be as lustful and compliant as one of Kagle's whores or my girl friends, although I know I am dissatisfied with her when she isn't.)

"Do you really have a chance at a better job?" she asks me later, when we are upstairs in our bedroom.

"I think so."

"Much better?"

"And how."

"Will you make more money?"

"And how."

"Oh, boy," she responds.

And she swarms all over me irrepressibly, her arms and legs and mouth opening and entwining, with our bedroom door open and the children probably still awake. And I am the one now who wiggles free and rises from the bed to close and lock the door and extinguish the overhead light.

"You're some girl," I tell her admiringly, after a long, deep embrace during which we are both practically still.

"You did it," she agrees readily, with a boastful laugh, sitting astride me now and rocking back and forth. "You made me this way."

I can't believe it was all my fault.