Something Happened

It is not true

It is not true that retarded (brain-damaged, idiot, feeble-minded, emotionally disturbed, autistic) children are the necessary favorites of their parents or that they are always uncommonly beautiful and lovable, for Derek, our youngest child, is not especially good-looking, and we do not love him at all. (We would prefer not to think about him. We don't want to talk about him.)

All of us live now — we are very well off — in luxury with him and his nurse in a gorgeous two-story wood colonial house with white shutters on a choice country acre in Connecticut off a winding, picturesque asphalt road called Peapod Lane — and I hate it. There are rose bushes, zinnias, and chrysanthemums rooted all about, and I hate them too. I have sycamores and chestnut trees in my glade and my glen, and pots of glue in my garage. I have an electric drill with sixteen attachments I never use. Grass grows under my feet in back and in front and flowers come into bloom when they're supposed to. (Spring in our countryside smells of insect spray and horseshit.) Families with horses for pets do live nearby, and I hate them too, the families and the horses. (This is a Class A suburb in Connecticut, God dammit, not the wild and woolly West, and those pricks have horses.) I hate my neighbor, and he hates me.

And I have plenty more I could let myself hate (if I were the type to complain and run off at the mouth, ha, ha, or yield contemptibly to impulses of self-pity, ha, ha, ha). I can even hate myself — me — generous, tolerant, lovable old Bob Slocum (in a kindly and indulgent way, of course) — for staying married to the same wife so long when I've had such doubts that I wanted to, molesting my little girl cousin once in the summertime when no mothers were looking and feeling depraved and disgusted with myself immediately and forever afterward (as I knew, before I did, I would — I didn't enjoy it. I can still recall her vacant, oblivious little girl's stare. I didn't hurt her or frighten her. I only touched her underpants a moment between the legs, and then I touched her there again. I gave her a dime and was sorry afterward when I realized she might mention that. Nobody said anything. I still keep thinking they will. I didn't get my dime's worth. She was a dull, plain child. I wonder what became of her. Nothing. She is still a dull, plain child in my archives. That's the way she stops. The branches of my family have grown apart — I can kick myself for fumbling all those priceless chances I had with Virginia at the office for more than half a year, and with a couple of Girl Scout sisters I knew from high school earlier. I thought they were only kidding in their giggling insinuations. And they were having genuine sex parties with older boys from tougher neighborhoods who would crash parties in our neighborhood they had not been invited to and break them up. It was rumored they raped girls), seeing my big brother with his fly open on the floor of that shadowy coal shed beside our brick apartment house with a kid named Billy Foster's skinny kid sister, who was in my own class in grade school but not as smart (my big brother wasn't even that big then), had nipples you could notice but no breasts, but was doing it anyway (Geraldine was not as smart as I was in geography, history, or math but was going all the way already with guys as old and big as my big brother. While I wasn't even jerking off yet!), abusing and browbeating my children (I have seen them turn dumbfounded and aghast when they thought I was annoyed, observed how insurmountable their plight in trying to talk normally. Their heart clogs their mouth. I see them trembling in such debilitating anxiety and want to hit them for being so weak. Later, I condemn myself, and I am even angrier at them), dishonoring my wife (I no longer want to tyrannize her and I try not to make passes at anyone who knows her), capitulating in craven weakness and camouflaged shame so often in the past to my possessive, domineering mother-in-law (who bossed me around a lot in the beginning) (while I had to make believe she didn't) and my shrewish, domineering sister-in-law (who is pinched and nasty now and whose face is drying up into lines as hard and deep as those on a peach pit), for surrendering so totally, despairingly, fatalistically to broad and overbearing unforgettable Mrs. Yerger in the automobile casualty insurance company, who towered over me then, it seemed (and comes to mind always now when I'm fuming over Derek's nurse — I don't know why we call her a nurse. She does no nursing. She's a caretaker. She takes care of my mentally retarded son), when she hove into view like a smirking battleship, moving out of one indistinct department of the company to take command of the file room — I knew on sight with a chill in my blood and bones and a feeling of frost on my fingertips that she would fire me soon if I didn't quit sooner — and again and again for fumbling it so thoroughly with luscious, busty Virginia back there in the office I worked in as a dumb, shy, frightened, and idiotically ingenuous virgin little boy, who felt like a waif, and sometimes worse.

What a dope I was.

"Do you remember Mrs. Yerger?"

There will be no one I know in this whole world who will have an inkling of what I am talking about. Virginia might understand, but Virginia will not be in earshot when I lose control of my reason in senility or delirium and begin pressing upon strangers such puzzles of ancient, germinal importance to me as:

"Do you remember Mrs. Yerger?"

(I remember Mrs. Yerger, and I remember Virginia is dead too now and would be a peeling water bag of emphysema and phlebitis if she were not. What a feeble-minded idiot: I could have had her then. She was hot. I was petrified. What in hell was inhibiting me so long, strangulating me? No wonder when I finally tore free it was with a vengeance.)

The company is still there. (She isn't.) It hasn't grown. Nobody ever hears of it. And life has pretty much been one damned sterile office desk after another for me ever since, apart from those few good years I spent away from home in the army.

What a deal I blew. (I was a moron. I have laid my wife on the desk of my study more than once and on the desk in my office in the city one Sunday afternoon while the kids were off on their own watching the holiday show at the Radio City Music Hall. They thought that was corny.) What good tits I could have been nibbling on all those months, instead of those soggy canned salmon and tomato or baloney and mustard sandwiches my mother made for me to take to the city for lunch to save money. I enjoyed those sandwiches too. I'd lick her lips and large breasts now with my salmon-and-tomato tongue. No, I wouldn't; everything would be the same; if I had her now and I was the one who was older, I would probably be calculating my ass off trying to keep free of her, squirm loose unscarred with a fairly clear conscience, as I find myself doing habitually with all my Pattys and Judys, Karens, Cathys, and Pennys, and even with my slim, smiling, tall, supple very young Jane, a kid, my refreshing new temptation in the Art Department, who would be putty in my hands. (But how long can you remain entranced with putty?) I break dates with girls with the same proud feelings of accomplishment I enjoy when I make them. (It is easier to break dates than keep them and takes up less time. All we really have is time. What we don't have is what to do with it. So I make dates.) Most of my girls have been very good to me. (That's what I feel girls are for.) But I don't want to see any of them frequently and can't bear being with them long. They want to talk afterward, get close, and I want to sleep or go home. I tell lies. (I like to date working girls for lunch in Red Parker's apartment because I know they'll have to leave shortly to get back to their jobs.) I procrastinate. I procrastinate with Jane (take three steps forward and three steps back); I hedge; I know beforehand what I will not like about Jane later (she'll be too thin, of course. And immature. They're'll be blades of bone everywhere. What will I find to talk to her about? Love? Her painting? She'll think we've been intimate. How awful. How will I ever get my emotions unmixed?); I move closest to Jane when there is no chance of moving closer; I never joke with her about meeting after work unless I know it's impossible. There is method to my madness. I am only rash when I'm safe. I throw caution to the wind when there isn't a breeze. I know I'll be sorry someday about all of my discarded ladies, the way I'm so sorry now about Virginia and even about Marie Jencks. I'm sorry about them already.

"Do it to me like you did to Marie," Virginia sang.

I did it to neither.

I'm always sorry about all of them, whichever way I move. Sorrow is my skin condition. Otherwise, I'm healthy and feel and look pretty good, although I've gotten a little paunchy and carry a bit of a sack beneath my jaw. I can lose the weight in a month if I really try. I think I may have been one of those pretty, young boys some of my girl friends brag about picking up now on bored or reckless afternoons or evenings. (They brag about picking up fags, spades, or each other, too. I don't care. I do care. But that makes it easier for me to dump them finally when I judge I want to. I like a girl who's going with someone else.) Virginia told me often I was handsome, cute, sexy, and smart, and guaranteed I would be able to get all the girls I wanted when I grew up.

She was wrong. I haven't gotten all I wanted. And have gotten a number I didn't.

"Take it in your hand, Mrs. Murphy," I sang back at her, gushing with joy, basking innocently in her sweet compliments and the affectionate warmth of her friendship.

Virginia was wide open for me then and I didn't know it. Virginia was wide open for me then and I did know it. That's probably the reason I always shrank back from her in such solemn ineptitude whenever she seemed to be sweeping me past a point I felt able to go. (As soon as I realized I could do whatever I wanted with Virginia, I lost my power to do anything at all. I could not say what was necessary. It came down to a matter of words, and I could not speak the right ones.) I would lose my power of speech (as I lost it with Mrs. Yerger — I never once believed I could ever say anything that would make Mrs. Yerger smile — and as my children, I think, and my wife, lose it with me). I don't know why it hit me that way. Kids today are doing it all over town with older girls and women (if you can believe the kids, or believe the older women). Truthful girls boast about seducing pretty or grimy young boys on summer weekends in places like Martha's Vineyard or Fire Island (it's Arabs, Greeks, and Slavs on vacations in Europe), or picking them up on city streets afternoons when they have nothing to do. They are sexually liberated (they say). They have no compunctions (they claim). They are slaves to no social or psychological restrictions. Anything goes. Then why are they anxious, hysterical, tense, and dejected? They are lonely. They have nothing to do.

"I have nothing to do," my boy says.

"I wish I had something to do," my daughter says.

"Can't you think of something to do?" my wife says. "Isn't there anyone we can go see?"

Sundays are deadly. Spare time is ruinous.

Women my wife's age with broken marriages take up robustly with fellows much younger than themselves, sometimes boys, and their husbands don't like that part of it at all. (It's a means they have of really sticking it to us. The husbands can do without the money and kids. But they can't abide their wives' humping a younger dick and letting everyone know.) Our dicks are so pathetic. (I felt that way early and was close to a truth. I felt need, not power. I felt yearning. I never thought of it as an instrument of domination.) They can always find a hardier one for special occasions. (A girl can always find a man to lay her at least once.) I think they feel safer with teen-agers and young college kids or carpenter's helpers in vacation spots they visit and leave, grabbing the initiative with their tense, sharpened fingertips (if they haven't been chewing their fingernails down blunt, as more and more of us seem to be doing) and keeping control. Everybody wants to keep control. (I want to keep control. Penny makes me lose control, and often my wife does too. Penny diminishes me into a gargling, blabbering imbecile every time, and I love it.) I've got one girl who goes way out of control every time she has an orgasm and hates me and everybody else in the whole world bitterly and ferociously for five or ten minutes afterward (until she regains control of herself), until her scrambled senses start to reorganize. (Then she sucks her thumb.) She is humbled, vanquished, resentful, subdued. She is ashamed. She curls herself up away from me like a catatonic child and will not let me pet her, unless my touch and whispers are consoling. She'd rather not experience it (unless she's by herself, with her vibrator or her finger); she resists response; she'd rather just give them; she sees herself as the laughingstock of whoever watches her. I watch her. I'd just as soon not have to give them. (She and I are compatible that way. But I do taste what power over another human being is when I succeed in doing that to her. I do feel potent. We take leave of our character and are transformed into something else.) Were it not for the element of status, I really would rather not give orgasms to any of them but my wife, and there's even an element of sadistic cruelty (not consideration, not understanding) in that. Some of them change so grotesquely. They ought to be ashamed. There really is something disillusioning and degenerate, something alarming and obscene, in the gaudy, uncovered, involuntary way they contort. It's difficult not to think lots less of them for a while afterward, sometimes twenty years. At least we go in horny and bestial from the start; we want it, like lusting apes, and we let them know. Many of them start out that way too now, and I'm not all that comfortable with those (even though I know it's a sure thing. Maybe getting laid should never be so sure a thing. It isn't with this girl I know, or even with my wife. She gets aches, upset stomachs, and fatigue. It is with Penny. I don't see Penny as often as I used to). I don't like women who are that decisive and commanding.

"Okay, let's have it," they seem to be ordering. "You've been using it your way long enough."

Those assertive bitches. Generally speaking, I prefer to make them do all the doing and giving; that way, I feel I have done something to them: I've gotten away with something. Many of them prefer that too. They blow their young boys. That must seem easier to them. They don't have to undress and show themselves. They don't have to be able to come or pretend to. They don't have to be "good." They don't have to go through motions. (Everybody wants to feel safe, not just me. Older, rancorous, divorced ones, though, do want to get laid, insist on it, demand it. I prefer my women with milder insecurities. I feed on submissive feminine loneliness like a vulpine predator. I'm drawn by the scent. My ravenous snout is insatiably passionate, for an evening or two. Bellicose women whose husbands have been philanderers will hatchet you for it: they are affronted if you do not wish to fuck them.) Then they throw them out.

"What the fuck would I have to talk to him about?" one of them told me about an eighteen-year-old she picked up in a record shop, brought home, and threw out before morning.

No wonder so many of our virile young men have trouble getting it up nowadays. (It serves them right.) I would too. I did. Virginia was certainly safe with me because I couldn't feel at all safe with her. (I certainly couldn't seize control. I had not the confidence or the know-how.) And Virginia, in her turn, could not ever feel safe again with the adjuster who threatened to throw her out of his car (or with Ben Zack either, for that matter, who tried to rape her in his car, despite his crutches, canes, wheelchair, and all) on the deserted street near the cemetery in Queens alongside which they were parked if she didn't put out for him.

"That's just the way he said it too," she complained to me in a tone of petulant protest that was not typical of her. Her poise was shaken each time she spoke of it. "He just took it right out without even asking. I thought he was crazy. I just looked down and it was there. I was sure insulted, I'll tell you. I wonder what Ben Zack told him about me."

I didn't have the confidence and know-how to go too far with her even in my sex reveries without losing heart unexpectedly (and much more). Just like that, my little, rigid, dime-sized prick would dissipate into thinnest air. She scared me (the thought of her all naked scared me. I could never conjure up pictures of her that way). Pretty as she was, she could turn as grisly to me all at once as that separated head of Medusa, that evil, hairy, peristaltic nest of countless crawling adders and vipers arching out to fang me for no good reason.

"Let's do it all the way today," she'd say.

And convert me into lead, wood, or stone every time she appeared to be trying to skate me closer than I wanted to go (into what used to be called sexual intercourse. Today it's called fucking). I'd feel dehumanized and castrated; things would feel gone. There'd be a thumping blow in my chest, and my heart would stop. I would feel ill. With tendons and muscles fluttering weakly, I would long to sneak out of sight for a while, in order to creep back later and begin all over again with her from a distant and more secure footing, inching back cautiously. (I think I enjoyed just flirting with her more than anything else: flirting was an end in itself and still often is. I'm still not always sure I really want to get laid.) I would lose my urge, go numb; I would have a lump in my throat instead of my pants. I lost my cock and balls; they'd go away. They lost their sensitivity. I would have to squeeze or hold or look to be positive those limp and wrinkled sausage casings were still sticking there, still mine. I felt absence; no density or weight. I feel no density or weight there now. What an odd and derogatory thing to have to say about our masculine genitalia.

It is our weakest reed.

I can feel my feet in my shoes when I pause to concentrate on them, and I can feel my thigh bone connected to my ass bone on this wooden chair. I can feel this hand and forearm of mine lying on my brown desk blotter. I can feel my other hand resting overturned on my thigh against the worsted fabric of my trousers and can feel my back turned and angled uncomfortably, the lower part (sacrum) aching steadily but tolerably, but I cannot, for the very life and dignity of me, feel anything inside my undershorts where my exterior sexual organs are supposed to be (and probably are). All I can feel, without touching, is something like sandpaper in one spot where my undershorts are pulled too tight. I try to force a stir and can't. I know I had something there a little while ago. I know they belonged to me. I think I'm entitled to them. I know I will have to open my pants and look if I wish to make certain that what is hanging there is hanging there. I do. It is; they are. What a minor relief. Where else would they go if they went away from me? They feel lost now (I've been robbed!), even as I watch, like sloughed-off skin from a blister or sunburn or the cellophane wrapping from a crumpled, discarded cigarette pack, as though they already have gone away from me to work for somebody better and left only these flaccid parings behind to jeer at me. Until I scratch slowly, rub, tickle, and then — ah! — take a hearty grip. Now I've got him, now I know I've got him back, sturdy, upright, alert, obedient, eager, loyal, ambitious. (I think I'll hire him right now for my department. Such attributes of prickiness are much esteemed in companies and governmental organizations.) That's because its natural state is always so very, very small, negligible, puny, slothful, not just mine, all, unless one's growing somewhere on some kind of human zoological freak, and even then it's large only in comparison with others, unless that human freak is a full-grown horse. There are big heads, bellies, and backsides, I suppose, and God knows there are tremendous, full breasts (although I find I am losing my taste for those and already prefer the smaller, shapelier ones of my wife, Penny, Mary, Betty, and Laura, all of whom wish they had bigger ones), even a brain weighs at least a whole pound or two, I think, but I guess there really is no such thing as a big human dick.

(Women don't suffer from penis envy. Men do.)

They are such fractional parts of the total construction they might easily be overlooked if we did not dwell on them. They are arrogant and absurd in their haughty, sniffing, pushy, egotistical pretensions. (We let them get away with an awful lot.) They can't even hold their lordly pose for half a day a week. What a feeble weapon indeed for establishing male supremacy, a flabby, collapsing channel for & universal power drive ejaculated now and then in sporadic spoonfuls. No wonder we have to make fists and raise our voices at the kitchen table.

Mine would pop right up dependably in the days of my youth every time I stopped (or even thought of stopping) to resume joking salaciously with Virginia at her desk beneath the big circular office clock whose slender, pointy minute hand (symbolizing a long, phallic sword or lance for me in those days and a lancet or proctoscope now) sliced ahead with a twitch every sixty seconds. It would project embarrassingly. (I could not even dance with schoolgirl friends in those molten pubic days without launching haplessly into an instantaneous erection that had nothing at all to do with me or with them — I might just as well have shrugged my shoulders and claimed:

"It's not mine. There's nothing I can do about it."

And walked off the dance floor and left it floating there — in midair, disowned — and would have to draw back a bit at the waist in an attempt to conceal it. Now I shove it forward to let them see it's there. That is, I have found, an effective gambit with mature women who have let you know they want it.) I kept myself covered with accident folders I made certain to bring with me whenever I went to Virginia's desk to pretend to search for others as we bantered lewdly.

"Meet me outside."

If she agreed — she always would if she could — she'd smile and dip her face almost imperceptibly. I would go out of the office into the hallway alone. My pulse would race, my hands were sweaty, and I would want to run past the bank of elevators down to the staircase landing between floors, even though I knew I would have to wait. Virginia was more discreet than I; she took her time. I was consumed with haste. I couldn't stand still as I waited. It never failed me then. It never let me, or itself, down when she joined me finally, hurrying also, and I began kissing her clumsily on the nose, cheekbone, and mouth, crashing teeth with hers so hard I thought my own must break, and squeezing and grabbing her in different places, pressing and rubbing it against her so savagely it hurt — she was panting too, but laughing as well — for the four or five seconds or one-eighth of a minute she'd allow me before she'd lie:

"Someone's coming."

Those were swift, incredible trysts we enjoyed sometimes every two or three hours a day on the landing between floors of the office of living people working above and the cramped, dingy, unoccupied storeroom below filled with cabinets of dead records that must have seemed important to somebody sometime in the past, or they would not have been kept. Hardly anybody ever looked at them anymore. They were accidents, old, forgotten casualties in blanched folders with blue or purple data on the outside and sheets of various types of legal and medical information inside. From folder to folder the facts were similarly old and uninteresting. (I soon stopped snooping into them.) They were settled cases of people who were closed.

"Somebody's coming," she would exclaim to me with a panic-stricken gasp when she decided my time was up, and be out of my hands and gone, even though nobody ever was.

I always wanted much more of her then, right there on the staircase, when I knew I couldn't have it. (I have gotten laid in bizarre and illogical places since — my wife goes for that kind of adventure too — but never, sad to say, on a staircase. We have a good staircase in our home in Connecticut now, but my wife's back condition might be aggravated, and I would chip my knees.) I always felt satisfied afterward, though. And very pleased with myself. Those were my first good feels of grown-up woman; she was twenty-one, after all, nearly twenty-two when I saw her for the last time. I would crowd myself upon her from head to toe and try to seize or shove against her everywhere: if I had gone slower and been less gluttonous, I think now, she might have let me have more. In the storeroom once she instructed me:

"Slower. Slower." Her voice was cooing, soothing. "That's better, darling. You scare me."

I was flushed and perspiring like a feverish baby. I wanted to lie on my back, gurgle cherubically, and kick my feet. I had never been called darling by anyone before.

"Darling."

(It goes a long way still.)

I was usually hindered in these frenzied assaults by those damned accident folders I'd brought, for I'd invariably forgot to put them down. I'd have to slide them behind her shoulders and brace her against the wall as I kissed and licked, snorted and groped; they would fall to the floor and spill open when she wrung herself away from me. I can still remember the cool, slick feel of her panties each time I touched them, my sense of miraculous astonishment that I was able to touch them at all.

"Somebody's coming," she'd repeat in a growl.

(In another two seconds it would have been me.)

I would have to let her go, for she herself would suddenly turn wild with fright. There was boiling lunacy around us. The glint in her eyes was penetrating and slightly insane as she tugged her skirt down and made ready to run off, endeavoring to smile, I think she was more greatly aroused by my touch beneath her skirt than she had expected. And I was too rough. (She could have been wide open for me then if I knew how.) She is closed now. Virginia is closed now, like those people in the storeroom whose cases had been settled in one way or another. So am I. And lying among them like flaked stains now in that dreary storeroom for dead records are my own used-up chances for attaining sexual maturity early, for getting laid young (or what we considered young). I could have had her there. I could have done it to her right on the desk top or floor of the storeroom (she all but asked me to. But I didn't know what to say) or in one of her friends' apartments or in a hotel room while still a gawking, young, moronic, skinny teen-age kid bringing momma's soggy sandwiches into the city to eat for lunch almost every working day of the week while I pored over the sports section, comics, and sex stories in the New York Mirror, which is out of business now — everything is going away. (The old order changeth. There is no new.) There is nothing new and good under the sun. Everything you buy has to be brought back for repairs or exchanged at least once. All of us tell lies. We call that initiative — although I remember it accurately (as though fearful to forget. If I forget thee, O New York Mirror, where will you be? And all those industrious hours of intent diversion I spent with that shitty tabloid) and the New York Doily News. I worked for sixty cents an hour. I earn more now. Ask the people who work for me. Ask my kids. (One of them won't answer.) I wolfed down two of those sandwiches every day on seeded rolls, then three. I could have eaten four. I could have lost my cherry in her juicy box at age seventeen right there on that same desk top between Property Damage-1929 and Personal Injury-1930. I could have done it to her lying down and sitting up, frontwards or backwards, sideways frontwards and sideways backwards too, the way I'm able to do now with girls who are slim and agile and don't get cramps (if I don't put on more weight. And I hope I don't lose more hair, or I soon might not be able to do it any way with anyone but my wife. I used to be praised for my lush wavy hair. Now curls are the thing, and I don't have any), several times a day most days of the week — and had my sandwiches and Mirror on the desk top there too — with my leather shoes propped firmly against the Personal Injury-1929 file cabinets for greater drive and mobility and my folded elbows cushioning our heads against a smash into Property Damage-1930. That image of us fornicating on that old desk comes back to me often. We have our clothes on. Her makeup's smeared, her face is lax and lopsided, her clothes are always in disarray, torn, pulled open, up, down, brushed aside. We are not nude. It's deformed, distorted, a desecrated sketch in colored chalk and wax. Some of those people in the Personal Injury files had been killed. It was hard to believe that cars had been colliding in the Property Damage files as far back as 1929. It was hard to believe that there were even cars. No, I couldn't. I could not have done anything different. I did what I could. It would be the same. It would be no different if I were that sairie hesitant, backward teen-age file clerk still bringing momma's sandwiches with him to work for lunch. Then it did let me down. It went away, thawed, resolved itself into an unfeeling flap of a foreskin and receded timorously whenever she rode me smack up to that immediate next step of registering at a hotel — I didn't even know how to register at a God-damned hotel. I was only seventeen and a half — or going to her friend's apartment with her after work, whenever I could not wisecrack and postpone any longer but had to look straight at her and say Yes to that bewildering and truly repelling situation in which I would have to be alone with her, get undressed beside her, take it out, and try to stick it in before it went soft. (I knew it would go soft before I even got it out.) I couldn't do it. I did not want it. I would get headaches. All I wanted to do was joke with her, listen to her tell stories of sex experiences with other people, and feel her up a few times a day a few seconds at a time. I was too young. I would lose my bravado, personality, ambition, wit. I had no sense of humor. I would lose my will to say Yes. I would lose all energy and soul and be left with almost no substance I could feel. That lump would come to my throat — that's what I'd be left with, a lump in my throat instead of my pants — and I would lose my power to speak and be unable even to confess to her and plead:

"I'm afraid, Virginia. I must go slowly, darling. Let me call you darling. You must help me see where I am."

I felt nausea instead of desire, and immense, mortal desolation. I think she knew it and pitied me, and I hated her and hoped she'd be crippled and die. Tom with the flowery, affected handwriting was sticking it routinely into big, blond, gruff, bossy, and horsey Marie Jencks on demand three or four times a week on the desk in the storeroom (and sometimes she made him do it to her standing up against a wall, he told me later, or against the walls in a corner, where it was easier). And I was scared stiff of gentle, short Virginia. I didn't want to see it. I still don't really enjoy having to look at it. They still set me back for a moment or two. I have to steel myself, make ready (unless I'm rollicking drunk and bobbing along on a tide of ebullient self-confidence that might carry me right through into it without pause). I wasn't scared stiff: I was scared soft (ha, ha). But Tom was older than I was, and when I was his age, I was doing it too, and they still astound me. The sight. They are distinct. No two are the same. No one is the same way twice. If I live to be a hundred and fifty years old (and if it please God, I will), I don't think I will be used to the sight of a naked girl, unless I become a physician. I still steal peeks at my wife. It's more likely I'll become a peeping Tom. Snatches vary. I am always tense and somewhat disbelieving as they undress. No two are alike. (Why are they doing this for me?) There is always still at least one second of awe, of raw curiosity in which I am breathless at the possibilities of what is about to be disclosed and offered me. I have to accept it, whether I like it or not. (While I counterfeit nonchalance all the while and appear to be gazing elsewhere at something infinitely more engrossing. Like my trousers folded over a chair, the grille of an air conditioner, or my woolen socks, with my garters still attached, lying in my shoes.) I wonder if we are as interesting and peculiar a spectacle to them. I think we are. I get compliments for cleanliness and symmetry, and for the cute pliability of my foreskin (which more and more girls in recent years are finding as novel a decoration as my garters. They don't see many of either anymore. I'm damned if I'll cut it off now. I'll give up garters. I may look a little bit Jewish to some people, and think Jewish a great deal of the time, but it's proof I'm not if I ever want to use it against someone like Green, who is. That same elusive imp dodging around so artfully inside me somewhere that urges me at times to kick Kagle in his leg, or my daughter in her ankle, also often gives me a throbbing, delectable wish in my upper palate, along with a tickling yen in one nostril to — the wish and that exhilarating tickle join forces virtually to exhort: "Go ahead. Do it, sweetheart. See how good it feels" — to — how shall I say it? — Jew-bait). Moles, birthmarks, pimples, crimped scars, and untended dark hair in filaments or clumps in unexpected places on women sicken me with disappointment and leave me morose and queasy unless I take a Spartan grip on myself at the start and go right at these things as though with an uncontrollable desire. (I must make myself seem to adore with the passion of a fetish what I find so repugnant. Else I might quit entirely. I don't want to hurt their feelings. Or mine.) I hope for silken perfection every time and am relentlessly unforgiving of blemishes. (I feel swindled, injured.) I must make myself look past them at the whole picture. Some have hair — growing down the sides so long it curls out of their bathing suits. They don't seem to notice or mind. I do. I don't know where to look away from. (They must know it's there.) You can't just say:

"Pardon me, Mrs. I think your hair is showing."

Because you might get back:

"So what?"

Or:

"Don't you think I know it?"

Or:

"Don't look, if you don't like it so much."

Slightly more judicious, and less risky, would be:

"Pardon me, madam. But do you know your hair is showing?"

Unless you want to go after it, and then you can make whatever clever gutter gambit you want to. I don't usually like that kind (although I have had to welcome them with manufactured enthusiasm on many occasions when it turned out to be the kind I'd been dating and sucking around after). I don't like excess black face or body hair on anyone, men or women, even when it's been shaved. It seems aberrant to me, infernal, revolting. (It's there to revile me.) My wife has black hair. By now, though, I know where it all is. No coiled, fuzzy surprises from her. (I have stumbled over hairs in my time that I could dissertate about for hours if I were the type to dwell compulsively upon past failures. Mrs. Yerger had a wen. Betty Stewart had a cast in her eye, but I continued to copulate with her weekly anyway for several months until she met a younger man she thought she might want to marry. My mother started sprouting bristly, dark gray hairs on her face when she was no longer able to tweeze them out herself. Her pores turned gaping and coarse. I looked past the hairs at her face, when I forced myself to look at her face at all. I could not say to her:

"Mother, I think you have some hairs growing on your face."

By then, she might not have heard or understood, and I would have had to say, more loudly and crabbedly:

"Hey, Ma. Gee whiz. You got hair on your face."

Not ever. How could you ever say that to your own sick mother? On the Rorschach test I took to get this job, it was observed that I was able to look at the whole picture and did not digress to delve wastefully into unrelated details. The probability was that I'd succeed, and I have.) In the early years of our marriage, my wife did not like me to see her naked unless she was in the bathtub, did not want to watch me stare at her while she undressed. (She still does not want me to see her on the toilet, and I'm not keen anymore about seeing her there, either. Once or twice a year is enough.) But now she enjoys having me watch her, strips like a teaser and flops down in bed and lies there like Goya's duchess. I enjoy it and laugh with her. I'd enjoy it more if she hadn't been tippling all day and was still not partially drunk. (She could have been killed while driving, or killed someone else. She could be stripping with just as much giddy and inebriated anticipation for somebody else.) My wife and I do enjoy ourselves together much more than I tend to remember. We often have fun. I'm not sure that things can get better for me. She had a technique for changing clothes that never exposed her bottom parts. Nightgown over panties or girdle, panties or girdle pulled on under nightgown. One caught glimpses only. That heartless, unfeeling bitch. In bed, she'd take it off anyway as soon as I asked. She'd even dress and undress inside the closet. No wonder I won't wake her from her bad dreams. Let her die in them or be mangled into a thousand bloody pieces by the illusion she's going to be. If my wife dreams of a prowler approaching her bed is it the same prowler I'm dreaming of?

"What were you dreaming about?"

"It was awful," she answers in the morning, still shaken. "Something terrible was happening to you."

"Horseshit."

"I swear."

"People don't dream about other people. They only dream about themselves."

"Something happened to you, and I couldn't stop it and was afraid."

"You were dreaming about yourself."

She must have been taught to dress and disrobe that way at summer camp, where males could peek between the bunk boards, or by her mother or divorced jealous-faced sister who got knocked up as a college kid before that became fashionable and grew up frigid and ill-natured. She lives by herself now with her liver-hued freckles in a small house nearby and advertises she would not have it otherwise. I believe her. (I also believe that nothing would please her more than for me or the husband of some other woman to fall in love with her. We would fail. She would spurn us. She would love that chance to.) I also believe she will always want to live nearby. I think she hates me, is envious of my wife, and contaminates my wife's trusting, abject nature with doses of guileful animosity. She spouts bigotry and reactionary political comment. She is childless. Her first husband has married again and has children. She has a store. There is much in the world of which she disapproves. She wishes my wife would be more like her and chides her because she is not. She criticizes our children and volunteers advice to my wife on how to turn me into a more submissive husband.

"I wouldn't let him get away with it. That's why I threw Don out."

She is glad that John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy were killed and that the girls in the family have crooked teeth. She wants my wife to agree with her. She wants me to put in a swimming pool. I feel rivalry between us. (I used to feel rivalry with her mother.) I didn't let my wife know how much it pained me to see her undress that way. (How often I cursed her and swore to get even. I do get even. We Slocums have our family honor.) It was a matter of high principle (as well as of low prurience. I cherished seeing her in ungraceful positions. Still do). She never guessed the effect it had on me (she is not mean), and I was too sensitive and proud to complain. (I did not want to beg. While she did not even know what was going on.)

"Don't you ever dream I'm dead?" she likes to ask.

"Did you dream I was dead?"

"I think so. I think that's what was happening."

"Thanks."

"I was sorry."

"I don't remember. My dreams are about me, and you're not me."

"I dream about you."

"You're in my dreams. Do you want me to return the favor? To promise?"

"You couldn't keep it."

"Then why bring it up?"

I'm grateful she doesn't ask me if:

I ever dream about her and another man, because I do, and that dream is about me also. (They are coming together in sexual union for the sole purpose of denigrating me.) And I don't like it. I don't want my wife to commit adultery. I don't think she wants to, either, ribald and vulgar as she sometimes gets at large parties now (although she may think she wants romance. I'd like some too. Where do you get it?); more likely, she is reacting against being the kind of old-fashioned person who doesn't want to (while so many other women we hear of do want to and are). She would have to be drunk and more stupefied than she's ever been (that I know of) and fall into very bad, greedy hands. She would have to be led away without knowing it to someplace remote and be overcome in silence by somebody wicked and unmerciful. (Conversation would eliminate his chances. She'd recognize he wasn't me.) I hate that man (all of them who've ever calculated their chances with her) and want to kill him, especially with this foreknowledge I have that she would probably enjoy it more with him than she ever has with me.

"Oh, darling," she exclaims to him over and over again in sighing adoration. "I never knew it could be this way. I will do everything you ask."

She would have no real need for me after that except to pay certain bills. (She does not like to write checks for things like insurance premiums and mortgage payments.) I hang within earshot at parties (unless I am off on my own taking soundings of somebody else's drunken wife. I prefer them comelier and better-tempered than my own) to lead her away before an insult or assignation becomes inevitable.

("Come along, dear. Come on now. This way, dear. There's an elegant man here who wants to meet you."

"Who?"

"Me."

In these dreams of mine in which she abandons me for somebody else, I seem to dissolve while dreaming them and am left with nothing but my eyes and a puddle of tears.)

Divorce, however, is a different matter. We like to try each other on that.

"Do you want a divorce?" she will ask. "Do you?"

(I've thought about it. What happily married man of any mettle hasn't?)

"What would I do?" she speculates with a long face. "I couldn't find another man. Who would want me?"

"Don't be too sure."

"I'm too old."

"Nah. I'm older."

"It's different for you."

"Yes, you could."

"It's too late."

"No, it isn't."

"You're eager, aren't you?"

"You're the one who brought it up."

"You're the one who's always thinking about it. I can tell. You get so happy every time a marriage breaks up. Why don't you come right out and say so?"

"Why don't you?"

"You're the one who's unhappy."

"Who says so?"

"I know how you feel."

"Aren't you? You do a lot of complaining. You're complaining right now."

"Don't you want a divorce? You can tell me if you do."

"No, I can't."

"You can."

"I can't even tell you if I don't." Almost from the first week of our marriage we have been jostling each other this way over divorce. (Almost from the first week of our marriage I have found these squabbles sexually arousing, and I am in haste to hump her and reconcile. She always gives in.

"Say you're sorry."

"I'm sorry.")

She would like me to say: "I love you." I won't. I can't.

I shouldn't. This is a matter of principle (and manhood) too. (I can say it easily enough to other girls if I have to, when it does not mean I will have to give up anything. It means I will get, not give.) I couldn't even say Sure to Virginia when it would have gotten me a great deal; instead, I would twist away from her sideways, recoiling lamely with some face-saving wisecrack, and slink out of sight miserably like an exiled dog.

"Come outside," I could say.

Or:

"Meet me downstairs," I could propose like a carefree buccaneer (when I knew we would not have much time).

But never:

"Yes."

When she said:

"Get a room."

And always when I began inching back to her tremulously (that's the perfect word) I did not know if she would let me back into her voluptuous and smutty good graces. (I would have felt penniless without them.) She always did. She could have cut me off at the knees with a single, slicing sentence (she could have told people about me); and I might have remained like that forever, no legs, just stumps. (Somebody would have had to move me about, lift me up from one spot, like a chess piece or checker, and place me down in another.) She liked me. She was not impressed by Tom.

"You're better," she told me.

"Then why doesn't she do it to me?"

"Do it to me like you did to Marie on Saturday night, Saturday night."

Tom had no sense of humor. (What he did have was a handwriting I wanted and took from him.) He was getting laid, but I could make Virginia laugh. (Ha, ha.) I was pleased with myself when I did. (I told stories about her to teen-age friends back in my neighborhood.) We teased each other lubriciously all day long. I leaked (lubriciously. Lubricious is a lubricious word). Nobody teases me now. They say Yes if they come along at all and are out of their clothes before I can even get my shoelaces unknotted.

"That was good," they sigh afterward.

"I really needed that," they declare.

As if I believe them. Or even care. All I'm thinking about is when I ought to leave or how I'll be able to get them out of Red Parker's apartment in time to take a nap before returning to the office or catching my train. They're as obtuse as my wife in her naпve good moods, still trying to work out ground rules for a happier marriage, while I am wondering how much longer I will have to remain with her before I pack my bags and get my divorce. That sanguine stupidity of hers (that utter lack of connection with my deeper feelings) is maddening.

"I'd like to know," she'll sometimes say, "what you're really thinking."

(No, she wouldn't.) "About my speech."

"I mean all the time."

"My speech. I may have to make a much different one if I get the promotion."

"All of us think you're angry when you get so quiet. We try to guess what it is."

Virginia would tilt her head backwards and to the side, eyeing me lewdly with a knowing, taunting look, a festive leer, her powerful breasts (girls with big breasts sometimes wore very tight bras then too) elevated like artillery pieces on weapons carriers and thrust out brashly just for me. She knew what I was thinking.

"These," she'd announce proudly, "are what Mr. Lewis likes about me." The tip of her tongue would glide for an instant between the edges of her shiny teeth as she watched me stare. "You do, too."

"Come outside."

"Come inside."

"You're a tease."

"You're a tease. You keep a girl all hot and bothered all day long and then won't even take her to a hotel."

"I don't know how."

"I'll tell you."

"You do it."

"They'd lock me up. They'd lock me up as a prostitute. We'll do it together. Register as Mr. and Mrs. Bang."

Today, twenty-one is too young for me, childish, pesty. I wouldn't lay one like that on a bet now if she worked in the same office. The whole company would know. (They talk about you now to their friends. They talk about you to their parents!) I don't even like them working for me that young or hearing their strident gibberish (with defective pronunciations that give their neighborhoods and working-class background away). They lack refinement. Most of those that don't wear bras have pendulous breasts that look awful. I don't often envy youth. I detest it. Kids don't hear noise. They make so much. I wish they'd all keep their mouths shut in public and turn down their phonographs and transistor radios. My daughter will soon be the same age as Virginia. She looks older now, because she's taller, when she stands up straight. I wish she'd realize that and wear more than just a nightgown when she comes out of her room. I wish my wife would tell her. It's hard for me to say anything about it to either one. (I don't think I will ever be able to sleep in a double bed again with a male. I would choose the floor or a chair. And that would be equally suspect.) I am not a fanny patter. There are times I don't even want to handle my wife. I just want to put it in and get it over with. Or I don't want sex at all. I make excuses. There is a barrier of repugnance. It's shelter. It dissolves when I want it to. They've got nothing there but something missing. I think filthy. That's shelter too. (Other times I want it and my wife doesn't, and it's like receiving a blow across the forehead, eyes, and the bridge of my nose.) Virginia was twenty-one and older than I was (and that's the way I will have to keep thinking about her if I want to be able to keep thinking about her with romantic nostalgia and devotion).

She would have lapped me up, turned me topsyturvy (as Penny can do), spilled me head over heels into a sea of winy, rippling vibrations, whirled me backwards quivering into a hailstorm of palpitating infancy and insanity, sent me scrambling up the walls with sensation and rocketing through the ceiling like a surface-to-heaven missile with the flaming tip of her crimson, naughty tongue. I would have begged for mercy as soon as I recollected who I was and found myself able to speak again. (I do that with Penny now. I do it with my wife.) And she would have looked lovingly at me with sated sweetness afterward, resting on her knees between my own, satisfied herself by how beautifully she had done, how prodigiously she had pleased me. I'd like that now.

"Isn't he jealous?" I had to ask. "He can see us right now."

"He wants to leave his wife and marry me. We go to empty restaurants and have drinks and dinner. He likes the way I kiss."

"So do I."

"So do I. It took a lot of practice for me to get it just right. You should try me when I'm all naked and really feel in the mood. I don't know what you're waiting for."

I lowered an accident folder over my groin (in case another one took place). "Come outside."

"I see, said the blind man. Something's happening."

"Is this case yours?" I inquired boldly. "I bet I know the cure."

"Meet me?"

"Did you ever go to bed with a stiff problem and wake up with the solution in your hands?"

"You made it hard for me but I can't hold it against you."

"Go first. I'll meet you."

"I'm coming, Virginia."

"Do it to me like he does to Marie," she sang back softly, as I moved past her out into the hallway.

I was Captain Blood the pirate on that staircase, a dauntless freebooter. I bore the accident folders before me prudently like a gallant shield. (I had something to hide.) I was carrying hot pellets.

I always yearned to take it out and ask her to hold it a little while. I didn't dare. Mrs. Yerger was in charge before I was able to, and I quit soon after. I practiced the words but couldn't say them; interchangeable first ones jammed in my larynx and pharynx; there was a multitude of syllables with which I might have begun:

"Will —»

"Take —»

"Would —»

"How about —»

"Don't be —»

"I —»

"Please."

I could not speak any of them. I did not know what pose to adopt. (I had no choice.) Now I know it would not have mattered. (She either would or wouldn't. The thing to have done was to whip it right out, mumbling anything. Please would have done fine.) How I wanted her to. It would have been laden with need almost beyond endurance, swollen to bursting with tenderness, gone lunging off rabidly like an epileptic relative I would soon attempt unsuccessfully to repudiate, self-centered, an embarrassment, a connection of some distance I might have to mutter an apology for. I don't get that hot anymore. Apathy, boredom, restlessness, free-floating, amorphous frustration, leisure, discontent at home or at my job — these are my aphrodisiacs now. I never got that far. It ended before I learned how. "All that's required is one or two years of specialized training," say the military recruiting posters. I got that specialized training in the armed forces. I came out of the army a handsome captain, and Virginia was dead. I was glad. (I was surprised I was glad, but that's what I was.) I tried to make a date with her from a telephone booth in Grand Central Station and failed. It's hard to succeed that way with someone who's dead. I liked hearing her tell me about sex. (It was like watching a dirty movie.) It was hard picturing someone as gentle, moderate, and considerate as Len Lewis being incited by her in a restaurant, movie, or automobile.

"I make him," she boasted. "I lead him on slowly. I know how."

"How?"

Her father had killed himself too. "We never knew why. We had lots of money. He was a quiet man. Like Mr. Lewis."

"What does he do to you?"

"Whatever I ask him to. Or show him. He isn't sure how far he can go with me yet. He can't believe it," she praised herself with a grin. "He's very sweet. I like to make him happy. He's easy. You're easy too."

"I'm hard."

"Easy."

"See?"

"I see, said the blind man."

"You're making things very hard for me."

"Should I meet you?"

"Hurry up."

"I can only stay a second."

"Hurry up."

Her face wreathed in pink, blissful smiles of contentment whenever she saw me get an erection. (I think I got more hard-ons from her in my twelve months at that automobile casualty insurance company than I've had in the twenty or thirty years since.) I wish I had her smooth, round cheeks in my hands right now. I would stroke them languidly with pinky and thumb, stimulating her slowly, instead of grabbing and racing. (I know how to do that now.) It would be I who picked the mood and did the delectable tantalizing.

"Cover up," she'd say.

"Come outside," I'd beg.

"You won't have time," she'd laugh. "Better shoot to the men's room."

"Meet me there."

"I've got no key."

"I'll sneak you in."

"I've never done it in a men's room."

"You did it in a canoe once at Duke University."

"I did it in a men's dormitory once also at Duke University. With five football players. They made me. I was expelled. The one I liked so much brought me there. They sent me home. I was afraid to go. I never found out if they told my father."

"Did they rape you? Is that what happened?"

"No. They didn't have to. I didn't want to. But they made me. They just held me down and kept talking. I knew them all. But it was fun once we started and I stopped worrying about it. I would have told the other girls. I think I hoped we'd get caught. I think I'd like to do something like that again sometime soon. It's exciting."

"It's exciting me right now."

"I see, said the blind man."

"Come outside."

"For a minute."

"On the staircase?"

Sometimes she'd give me about three and one third seconds.

"Someone's coming!" she'd hiss with vehemence, and tear herself away. "Let me go."

I should have guessed from her educational curriculum at Duke that she was a little bit nuts and would probably kill herself sooner or later. I am able to spot propensities like that in people now (and I keep my distance). A friend in need is no friend of mine.

I envied and abominated those five football players at Duke. They thought so little of her. They treated her like crap. And she did not mind. There were days I found myself detesting her on my long, drab subway rides back and forth. There were mornings I would not talk to her and could not force myself to look at her, she seemed so foul. (I was betrayed. She was trash, that fatal kind of trash that can make you want to die. I'm glad I didn't die. I'm glad I outlived her.) I felt — and knew I felt correctly — that she still would have preferred them to me.

I am gifted with insights like that and able to prophesy with conviction in certain morbid areas. I know already, for example, that my wife (as she foresees also) will probably die expensively of cancer (she'll need a private room, of course, and private nurse) if she doesn't outlive me and we do not divorce because of drunkenness or adultery (hers, of course). If we're apart, or if I'm already dead, who cares what she dies of? (I'll probably miss my boy every now and then for a little while if I do move out for a divorce. I like it so much when he smiles. I'll have to leave so many things behind. My golf clubs. How can I rationally make time and room for my golf clubs and new golf shoes when I am breaking away from home and family in an irrational rage?) Will I be happy when my wife is dying of cancer? No. Will I be sorry for her? Probably. (Will I be sorry for myself? Definitely.) Will I still be sorry for her after she's gone? Probably not.

I am especially good on suicides and breakdowns. I can see them coming years in advance. Kagle is close to his breakdown now; his God won't save him, but maybe his boozing and whores will (supplemented by fortifying compounds of vitamin B-12 and self-pity mixed with self-righteous claims of mistreatment. If nothing else, everybody will agree he has been a nice guy). Kagle won't kill himself; he'll enjoy his wronged status too much for anything like suicide (he'll enjoy smiling gamely, forgiving generously). I'll have to get rid of him. I try to help him now. He grins incorrigibly (and I want to kick him in his leg). I know something he doesn't know, while Green, Brown, Black, and others watch mistrustfully and theorize (I feel. I know I don't feel honest with them). I want Arthur Baron to note my efforts to aid Kagle. Kagle's job will be given to me; it's all but inevitable now. Kagle welcomes my criticism (and ignores it. It's the attention he welcomes. If I threw spitballs at him he'd be just as grateful). He thinks I am a doting parent fussing over an appealing child. It does not cross his mind that I am a zealous heir grown impatient to supplant him. (I'd like to spit in his face. Won't he be surprised?) Martha, the typist in our department, will go crazy eventually (probably in my presence. I'll get rid of her deftly and be the talk of the floor for a few days), and I won't lay Jane, although I'll continue to flirt with her (fluctuate and vacillate, hesitate and saturate) and ferry the prurient interest she stimulates in me home (like melting ice cream or cooling Chinese food) to my wife in Connecticut or uptown to old girl friend Penelope, my weathering, reliable Penny, who still studies music, singing, and dance diligently (while working as a cocktail waitress in one place or another) and still likes me better than any of the younger men she successively falls in love with for a few months three or four times a year. (She should like me better. I am better. They're jerks.) My wife loves doing it with me in Red Parker's apartment in the city, and I like doing it there with her too. It's different than at home. We go at each other full force. I have grim premonitions now for Penny, who traveled through her thirtieth birthday still unmarried (with much deeper emotional changes than she seems to recognize) and is not as jolly as she used to be. I've known and liked her now for nearly ten years. I don't know what will become of my daughter. I make no firm predictions for teen-age girls today. (The boys, I know, will all fail. They've failed already. I don't think they were given a fair chance.) She'll want to take driving lessons even before she reaches sixteen. Then she'll want a car. She'll have duplicate keys made and steal one of ours. I wish she were grown up and married already and lived in Arizona, Cape Kennedy, or Seattle, Washington. Someone older will advise her to steal our car keys and have an extra set made. She steals money now from my wife and me to chip in with friends for beer, wine, and drugs on weekends. I don't think she uses the drugs. I think she's afraid and I'm glad. I'm glad they seem to be going out of fashion in our community, along with spade boyfriends. I'm glad she's afraid of Blacks too.

"If you'd give me my own car, I wouldn't have to steal it," she'll argue when we catch her, and believe she's right.

I'm in the dark:

(My lucid visions bleed together.)

Something terribly tragic is going to happen to my little boy (because I don't want it to) and nothing at all will happen to Derek. Police and ambulances will never come for him. I see no future for my boy (the veil won't lift, I don't get a glimmer, I see no future for him at all) and this is always a heart-stopping omen. When I look ahead, he isn't there. I can picture him easily the way he is today, perhaps tomorrow, but not much further. He is never older, never at work or study as a doctor, writer, or businessman, never married (the poor kid never even goes with a girl), never in college or even in high school; he is never even an adolescent with a changing voice, erupting skin, and sprouts of sweating hair discoloring his upper lip and jaws. I mourn for him (my spirit weeps. Where does he go?). He doesn't pass nine. He stops here. (This is where he must get off. Every day may be his last.) Either he has no future or my ability to imagine him present in mine is blunted. I view the empty space ahead without him dolorously. Silence hangs heavily. I miss him. I smell flowers. There are family dinners, and he is not present. What will I have to look forward to if I can't look forward to him? Golf. My wife's cancer? A hole in one. And after that? Another hole in one.

"I made a hole in one," I can repeat endlessly to people for years to come.

When obscurity and old age descend upon me like thickest night and shrivel me further into something small and unnoticeable, I can always remember:

"I made a hole in one."

On my deathbed in my nursing home, when visitors I don't recognize arrive to pay their respects with gifts of very sweet candy and aromatic slices of smoked, oily fish, I may still have it in my power to recall I made a hole in one when I was in my prime — I'm in my prime now and I haven't made one yet. It's something new to start working toward — and it may cause me to smile. A hole in one is a very good thing to have.

"Will you believe it?" I can say. "I once made a hole in one."

"Have another piece of smoked fish."

"A hole in one."

I don't know what else one can do with a hole in one except talk about it.

"I made a hole in one."

"Eat your fish."

"Hello, girls."

"Did you ever hear the one about the amputee without arms and legs outside the whorehouse door?"

"I rang the bell, didn't I?"

I can picture such scenes of myself in a nursing home easily enough. I can picture Derek out front easily too, slobbering, a thickset, clumsy, balding, dark-haired retarded adult male with an incriminating resemblance to a secret me I know I have inside me and want nobody else ever to discover, an inner visage. (I think I sometimes see him in my dreams.) I bet Arthur Baron doesn't suspect he's there (that I have the potential for turning myself inside out into a barbarous idiot) or that I am stricken chronically with a horror — a horror so acute it's almost an exquisite appetite — of stuttering (or experiencing a homosexual want. Perhaps I already have) or having my tongue swell and stick to the roof of my mouth and be unable to talk at all. (No wonder I am terrified of being condemned behind closed doors, without my even knowing sentence has been passed. Perhaps it's already happened.) But not one day more of life can this fertile imagination of mine provide for my poor little boy.

(What work will he do? What clothes will he wear? Oh, God, I don't want to have to live without him.)

And Kagle's job will be proffered to me and I will accept it. By now, I want it. (By now, I no longer misrepresent to myself that I don't.) Kagle is an enemy: he is blocking my path, and I want him out of my way. I hate him. The need to kick him grows stronger every day, to yawp with contempt right in his hollowing, astounded face. (It would turn to a human skull. I would steam the flesh away in a second.) I'll never be able to do that. Civilization won't allow me to. But I might kick him in the leg if the temptation persists and my self-control flags. I will kick him before I can stop myself. I will be at an utter loss afterward to explain. I might want to die of embarrassment (and I'll feel like a caught little boy).

"Why did you do it?" people will demand.

I'll have to shrug and hang my head. I'll weigh eighty-four pounds.

"He kicked me in the leg," Kagle will protest to everybody.

"He kicked Kagle's leg."

"Did you see that?"

"He kicked Kagle in the leg."

There's nobody else whose leg I want to kick except my daughter's ankle at the dinner table at times when it would be easier for me to do that than reach out to smack her in the face. She flinches as though I already have as soon as I feel I want to and raise my voice. My wife makes me want to hurl her back a foot or two to give me room to cock my arm and punch her in the jaw at least twice with my fist. I shake my finger at my boy. Derek I smother with a huge hand over his mouth to stifle his inarticulate noises and hide his driveling eyes, nose, and mouth. (It is not to put him out of his misery that I do it; it is to put me out of mine.) He's a poor, pathetic, handicapped little human being, but I must not think about him as much as I could if I let myself, and I hate his nurse, whom I propel over the threshold — throw her out of my house — bracing her below with one arm to prevent her from falling to the ground and suing me. She falls anyway and sues me. The repulsive woman exudes an unpleasant odor of rancid grease mixed with dust and perfumed bath powder. She bathes mornings and evenings. Her hair is ghastly white. Her cleanliness is reproachful. I can't bear her intrusive familiarity. She treats me with no more solicitude than I get from my family, and she's a salaried employee.

I know what hostility is. (It gives me headaches and tortured sleep.) My id suppurates into my ego and makes me aggressive and disagreeable. Seepage is destroying my loved ones. If only one could vent one's hatreds fully, exhaust them, discharge them the way a lobster deposits his sperm with the female and ambles away into opaque darkness alone and unburdened. I've tried. They come back.

It's all Kagle's fault, I feel by now: I blame him. Minute imperfections of his have become insufferable. Irritability sizzles inside me like electric shock waves, saws against the bones of my head like a serrated blade. I can quiver out of my skin, gag, get instant, knifing headaches from the way he sucks on a tooth, drums his fingers, mispronounces certain words, says byootefool instead of beautiful and between you and I instead of between you and me, and laughs when I correct him — I have an impulse to correct him every single time and have to stifle it. The words spear through my consciousness and slam to a stop against bone, the inside of my skull. I can restrain myself from saying them, but I cannot suppress the need to want to. I am incensed with him for provoking it. He bubbles saliva in the corner of his mouth and still wears the white smudge on his chapped lips of whatever antacid pill or solution he has been taking for his stomach distress.

"Heh-heh," he has fallen into the habit of saying, with lowered, escaping eyes.

"Heh-heh," I want to mock back. I loathe Andy Kagle now because he has failed. I'd like to hit him across the face with the heavy brass lamp on his desk. I tell him.

"Andy," I tell him, "I'd like to hit you across the face with that lamp."

"Heh-heh," he says.

"Heh-heh," I reply.

I chuckle kindly when I see him, joke with him snidely about Green's vocabulary and well-tailored, showy clothes, help him dutifully in ways he can observe. I weighed one hundred and ninety-eight pounds this morning, down four and a half since Monday (when I decided to begin losing weight), and am nearly a whole foot taller than he'll ever be.

"Heh-heh," he wants to know. "How you getting along with that kid in the Art Department?"

"Fine."

"The one with those small titties."

"She's young enough to be my daughter."

"What's wrong with that? Heh-heh."

"Heh-heh. I've got these call reports for you from Johnny Brown."

"Didn't think I noticed, did you? Going to cut me in?"

"How would you like a kick in the leg?"

"My good one or my bad one? Heh-heh."

"Andy, this time I think you ought to look at them and make some comments before you pass them on."

"Clamming up? Heh-heh."

"Heh-heh."

"Heh-heh-heh. What good are they? Salesmen lie."

"Catch 'em. You'll make a good impression on Arthur Baron and Horace White."

He pays no attention. "Ever go two on one?"

"Two on one what,"

"I do that now in Las Vegas. I know the manager of a hotel. Two girls at the same time. I did it again last week. You ought to try it."

"I don't want to."

"Two coons?"

"How about these call reports?"

"You do that for me. You're better at it. What do you hear about me?"

"Don't travel."

"Do I need a haircut?"

"You need a kick in the ass."

"You're sure doing a lot of kicking today, aren't you?"

"Heh-heh."

"I'll let you in on something. Green is finished. How would you like his job?"

"Bullshit."

"I'll recommend you. They're cutting his budget."

"How much?"

"You won't get a raise. I will. I made a killing in Xerox last week."

"That's more bullshit. You're always making a killing in Xerox and always complaining about all the money you owe."

"Heh-heh."

All he's got is his home in Long Island and a house in the mountains, to which he sends his wife and two children every summer. He goes there some weekends. I inquire after Kagle's family as periodically as Arthur Baron inquires about mine.

"All fine, Art," I always reply. "Yours?" (Green never asks. He isn't interested in my family and won't deign to pretend.)

I have dwelt wistfully more than once on the chances of his being killed in an automobile accident driving back or forth to work one lucky day. Kagle is careless in a car and usually sluggish or drunk when he leaves the city at night. Kagle is one of the very few upper-middle-echelon executives left in the country who still make their homes in Long Island, and this gaucherie too has scored against him, along with the white-tipped hairs growing out of his nostrils and the tufts in his ears. Nobody has hair growing out of nostrils or ears anymore. (He ought to see a barber now just for that.) This is something I've not been able to bring myself to mention to him. (I fear it would hurt him.) It has become difficult for me to look at him. He senses a change. I think that is why he heh-hehs me so much now. I pity him. (He does not know what to do about everything that is happening.)

"Heh-heh."

"Heh-heh."

"Heh-heh-heh. What's so funny?"

"Why are you wearing covert cloth, for Christ sakes?" I admonish him instead.

"What's that?" he asks in alarm.

"It went out of style thirty years ago."

"Covert cloth?"

"Switch to worsted."

"I've got a blue blazer now," he says proudly.

"It's double knit."

"How would I know?"

"It would look terrific in Erie, Pennsylvania. Have we got any big accounts in Erie, Pennsylvania?"

"I'm going to L.A. next week. From there I sneak to Las Vegas. Two on one," he explains with a wink.

"And it doesn't fit. It's loose and lopsided."

"I'm lopsided too, you know," he reminds me gravely, with the shade of a crafty and hypocritical smile I've seen on him before. "I was born this way, you know. It didn't just happen, you know. It was God's will. Don't laugh. It isn't funny. It isn't so funny, you know, being born with this deformed hip and leg."

"I know, Andy."

"It's nothing to laugh about."

"I wasn't laughing."

"This is the way He wanted me."

"Hallelujah," I think of replying cynically. "I wish He'd given as much thought to me as you feel He gave to you."

When Kagle draws upon his leg or God for deference and sympathy, he becomes those odious strands and bushy tufts of hair in his nose and ears — intimate, obscene, and revolting — and I have wished the poor man dead many times lately just for filling me with ire, shame, and disgust. Worsteds won't help him. Everything is going wrong. I have wished other unsuspecting human beings I know and like dead also for most-trivial slights and inconveniences. Let them all die. (I'm liberal: I really don't care how.) I visit fatal curses on slow salesgirls and on strangers who get in my way and delay me when I'm walking hurriedly.

"Die," I think. "Pass away. Let me step over you." I can find many men — they are always men — in public life I'd like to see assassinated (and I can't stand bums anymore. I don't feel sorry for them), although I'd never think (I haven't yet) of doing that kind of work myself. I feel I understand why other people beat, kick, and set fire to bums and panhandlers. (We have too many of them.) I do not grieve at the death of Presidents: (usually, I'm glad): they're finally getting what they deserve. Not since F.D.R., I think, which was the last time in my life, if memory is correct, I was able to raise a tear. I have to choke back sobs now and then (usually at bad movies), but my tears are bottled away somewhere deep inside me. Nobody can tap them. That was a man, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the last time I had a President I could look up to (the rest have not been mine), or maybe I only thought so because I was gullible. No — the whole country wept when he died. My mother wept.

"One third of the nation," said he, "is ill-housed, ill-clothed, and ill-fed."

By now, with our improved technology and humane social and political reforms, it must be more than half. When it hits a hundred percent (the millionaires will have Swiss nationality by then and live in France), trumpets will play, the heavens will open, and everybody will hear Handel's music free. Last night I dreamed again my mother was alive, thin with age but in perfect health, clothed attractively in a cool print dress and thin white sweater, chatting naturally with me without a grudge at some cordial holiday festival in the nursing home. It was Christmas, Easter, or Thanksgiving. She beamed at me often, as she used to do when I was little. I was forgiven everything. I missed her like a forsaken child when I awoke in the morning — I had a sticky, crusted sensation of tears drying on my cheeks — emerging gratefully from sleep once more in my entirety, bringing my memory and all of my physical parts back with me successfully one more time from wherever it was I had been when I was not here.

"What were you dreaming about?" my wife always wonders.

"Me."

"You were groaning."

"My mother."

"Still?"

"You will too."

"I do already. Ever since she got arthritis. Her fingers curled. Won't it ever stop? The dreams?"

"It hasn't for me."

"Will I get arthritis too?"

"I will too."

"I hope I don't get it in the spine. I wouldn't want to curl up there."

"Fuck me."

"I'm not in the mood. The children are up."

I miss my mother again when I remember how poignantly I missed her when I woke this morning. I miss the forsaken child. He's me. But I'm not he. I think he may be hiding inside my head with all the others I know are there and cannot find, playing evil tricks on my moods and heartbeat also. I have a universe in my head. Families huddle there in secret, sheltered places. Civilizations reside. The laws of physics hold it together. The laws of chemistry keep it going. I have nothing to do with it. No one governs it. Foxy emissaries glide from alleys to archways on immoral, mysterious missions. No one's in charge. I am infiltrated and besieged, the unprotected target of sneaky attacks from within. Things stir, roll over slowly in my mind like black eels, and drop from consciousness into inky depths. Everything is smaller. It's neither warm nor cold. There is no moisture. Smirking faces go about their nasty deeds and pleasures surreptitiously without confiding in me. It gives me a pain. Victims weep. No one dies. There is noiseless wailing. I take aspirins and tranquilizers. I am infested with ghostlike figurines (now you see them, now you don't), with imps and little demons. They scratch and stick me. I'd like to be able to flush the whole lot of them out of my mind into the open once and for all and try to identify them, line them up against a wall in the milky glare of a blinding flashlight and demand:

"All right, who are you? What were you doing in there? What do you all want from me?"

They wouldn't reply. They'd be numberless. I'd find 1,000 me's. (I like to fuck my wife when she's not in the mood. I like to make her do it when she doesn't want to.) I'd like to be able to photograph all my dreams with a motion picture camera and nail the guilty bastards in them dead to rights. I'd have the evidence. I'd like to wiretap their thoughts. I'd like to photograph their dreams to find out what's going on in their minds while they are going around at liberty in mine. (A man's head is his castle.) I don't hear voices. (I sometimes wish I did.) I'm not crazy. I know people do talk about me behind closed doors but I don't imagine I hear what they are saying. Yesterday, a little boy was found dead in the cellar of an apartment building, sexually mutilated. The murderer is still at large. Another child was found dead in the airshaft of a different apartment house, thrown from the top. Nobody knows why. (A girl. The police have not yet determined if she was sexually abused.) Another child is missing from home after several days, and no one knows why. Family and neighbors wait for word in pessimistic suspense, lighting religious candles for the soul already in solemn expectation of the worst. I too believe she's been murdered (and I wonder why she has been. In Oklahoma today farmers decided not to deliver cotton at the price agreed to, because the price of cotton had doubled between the time the sales were made and the time the contract forms were prepared. Buyers will take them to court. Bodies of other people's children are found in airshafts and stairwells all the time, and I'm not even sure what an airshaft or stairwell is). I wonder also what narrow, reedlike Horace White really feels about me. He's such an influential prick. (I hate that influential prick, and he means so much to me.)

"Well, well, well — here comes our company nail biter now," he'll say when I enter his office, and think it's funny. "How are you today?"

He's usually clipping, filing, or buffing his own translucent fingernails behind his enormous walnut desk whenever he summons me to request some kind of new work from me or discuss corrections. (He calls the changes he wants me to make corrections.)

"If you ever write a book," he has repeated to me, "put me in. I'll buy a lot of copies."

I'd like to wiretap his head too. I'd like to know if I range about impertinently in his dreams the way he roams about in mine (as though he owns them). I doubt I symbolize enough. Horace White strolls into my dreams often with his nearly featureless face, hangs around awhile, and turns into florid, fleshier Green, who fumes and glares scathingly at me as he starts to make a cutting remark and then clears out as rapidly as I'd like to as soon as the menacing, dark stranger enters and draws near with his knife I never see, either waking me up moaning in primordial fright or quitting the scene graciously to make way for someone like my wife's mother or sister, Forgione, or Mrs. Yerger. Or my daughter, boy, and/or Derek. Or someone else I haven't invited. What a pleasant interval it is when I can hump my wife or Penny in my dreams. I come a lot with Penny and wake up just in time. I come a lot with my wife. I'll fondle my wife sometimes after I awake until she turns over amorously and do it to her for real. (It was usually better in the dream.) Dreams of Virginia never move toward climax. I fiddle with her blouse and fumble with her thumb-smeared garter snaps. I have so many people to cope with at night. Many are made of varnished glass wax. There's no such thing. Ghouls are there, and midgets. Carcasses. I have my wife, mother, children, sister, dead brother, and even my dead father to bother about in my dreams (even though I don't know what he looks like. The photographs he left behind don't convince), all of them but my dead father petitioning me for some kind of relief that I cannot give them because I am in such helpless need myself. No wonder my dreams all seem to unreel in the same stuffy, choking atmosphere of a chapel in a funeral home. Only Arthur Baron provides some solace, but he is busy and never stays for long, and I'm not even sure it is my father or able to understand why he is so displeased. (I haven't done anything.) My staring, waiting nine-year-old boy becomes staring, speechless Derek. Both are motionless. I was speechless once. I did not know what would become of me. Now I've derived some idea. I have only to sit down to holiday dinner with the full family and have something arise that recalls my dead father or older brother and my dying, wordless mother and I can see myself all mapped out inanimately in stages around that dining room table, from mute beginning (Derek) to mute, fatal, bovine end (Mother), passive and submissive as a cow, and even beyond through my missing father (Dad). I am an illustrated flow chart. I have my wife, my daughter, and my son for reference: I am all their ages. They are me. (But I'm not them. They'll run through sequences obligingly for me as many times as I want to view them.) The tableau is a dream. The scene is a frieze.

"Freeze."

None of them moves. All of them sit like stuffed dolls. And I can perceive:

"This is how I am when I was then."

And:

"That was how I will feel when."

Now they can move.

I think I know how it must feel for my wife to be married to a philandering executive like me to whom she can no longer make much difference unless she gets cancer or commits adultery. (Suicide won't do.) It must feel cold. Shifting my eyes left or right, I can transfer myself into my mother's, brother's, sister's past to see my present and my future. I shift my glance into the future of my children and can see my past. I am what I have been. I incorporate already what I am going to become. They inform me like highway markers. And here is another dream I imagine as I see myself hunched over the smoking, roasted turkey with my bone-handled carving knife, poised for severing, after separating the second joints, that first dramatic slice of white meat from the breast while they all watch and wait silently in high-backed chairs like skeptical shadows, unbreathing: they're mine. I own them. They belong to me. I'm in command (and hope the white meat will be toothsome and the dark meat juicy). Now we are frozen again and do not move. (Get the picture?) We cannot move. I stand over my turkey; they sit rigid. And I feel weirdly in that arrested dumb show in which we are all momentarily statues that even if I'd never had them, had never married, sired children, had parents, I would have had them with me anyway. Given this circle, no part could be different. Given these parts, the circle was inevitable. Only Derek deviated, and that was an accident, somebody else's. (We played our parts.) Now he is fixed in place with the rest of us. They have been in my head for as long as I've had one (the stork didn't bring them) and I cannot remember myself without them. (So much of me would be missing.) They bump against brain and give me headaches. Occasionally, they make me laugh. They're in my plasm. Now we can move. They don't. They wait like stumps. They sit like ruins in a coffin in their high-backed chairs. The turkey's carved; white meat, dark meat, second joints, wings, and legs lie laid out neatly like tools on a dentist's tray or surgical instruments of an ear-nose-and-throat man about to remove tonsils. But the platter's not been passed. There are spiced apples, chilled cranberry molds, and imported currant jams. It's a gelid feast, a scene of domesticity chiseled on cold and rotting stone. I'm in control, but there's not much I can do. (I can pass the platter of meat to my wife.) My mother's there with hair that's white as soap. My father's elsewhere. She'll die. I know she will because she already has. (I was so offended by my father when he died that I did not want to go to his funeral. I wanted to teach him a lesson. I taught him a lesson.) My wife is the only wife I could have had till now (I had no choice) till death, divorce, or adultery do us part. My children were the only ones permissible. (Other people's belong to them.) No dimpled, freckle-faced smiles, no cheerleaders, gladhanders, backslappers, or starlike overachievers were ever in the cards, for them or for me. They became what they were; if I had to imagine them better they would be no different. It was not within my scrotum to father a child who would ever be invited to the White House to pose for a picture with the President exemplifying all that's shimmering and wholesome in national life. Soon they will have to invite a porcelain bowl of strawberries and cream. The people have started to look accursed. (The strawberries will be tinted redder with synthetic coloring. The cream will be adulterated with something whiter. The porcelain bowl will be made of painted rubber.) All but Derek, who sits with us — we give his nurses family holidays off and hope to God they take them. I can imagine him otherwise. I could not conceive of him this way. Now we can move. I can pass the platter of turkey meat to my wife and offer the others some sweet potato pie, which is made of yams. There are no sweet potatoes anymore. (They're gone too. I don't know what became of them.) I don't know why my father comes into these dreams of mine in which I cannot speak or move but only stay and hear, since I hardly know the man, except to turn into someone fearsome as a nigger or Horace White, who, in my dreams, uncovers a scarlet underside of erotic cruelty to the insipid outerface I know. Horace White owns stock. I wonder if I miss a memory of having been spanked at least once on the bottom by a father. I don't own one. There is a closeness in that, a stable understanding, a promise for the past and assurance for the future. Perhaps I ought to start spanking both my sons every fortnight for their own good. My daughter is too old. My wife isn't, and I do. She likes to scratch with her fingers and toes or bite mildly. We let each other.

It's more fun for both of us now if we sting at least a little. I wonder if I'm the only middle-aged man in the whole world who still contains within himself his distant childhood fear of homosexual rape? Is that why that man invades my dreams?

"Get out!" I order clearly.

But what comes out are croaking grunts of pain that alarm my wife.

"What's the matter?"

"It's okay."

"You were screaming."

"What?"

"I don't know. Sounds."

"I was only groaning. I'm all right now."

My wife and children are never in danger then. They aren't even home. There's only me. He's coming after me. I've got no one I can ask about this but my family religious adviser or my psychiatrist. My psychiatrist enlightens me on this question by replying:

"Why do you ask that?"

"Because —»

"You bite your fingernails," he guesses.

"— I'm afraid. I have dreams and thoughts that trouble me, even when they're pleasant. I get headaches. I'm dissatisfied. I believe I suffer from thought disorders. I don't hear voices —»

"Ah," he observes in a long sigh.

"— and I never have hallucinations."

"What would you call this?"

"I smell excrement often."

"Ah?"

"But there is always dog shit on my shoe."

"You will have to learn," he says, "to walk more carefully."

I don't have a psychiatrist (the company takes a disapproving view of executives who are not happy) and my family religious adviser belongs to my wife. (He takes a disapproving view of people who are.)

I know I will have to stop biting my fingernails soon if I ever want to go much higher in the company than Kagle's job or grow up to be President of the United States of America someday when the job falls vacant and no one else wants it. I know I was sorry when John F. Kennedy was killed because he was shot in the head when neither he nor I expected him to be and because of the magazine and newspaper photos. They were gruesome. (They could have sold a million of them as souvenirs if they had thought of it.) Poor man. I hope that I am never shot in the head. He's scaled much smaller now in my imagination (but he's there. It's him. I'll take care of him for as long as I can); it's necessary he be reduced to miniature to fit inside my thoughts and move about in memories, whimsies, and night dreams and do unnoticed things on his own when I'm too busy with other duplicates and shades to bring him out and play with him. Other people might have him on half dollars; I've got him saved in my head. He's clean, glazed, handsome, grinning. His hair is glossy. I like him now. My wife's sister doesn't. His kid brother didn't live as long as he did. It isn't generally appreciated that Lyndon Baines Johnson was only forty-six and still a U.S. senator when he had the first of his heart attacks. It was all over for him right then. He never amounted to much after that. Eisenhower got better after his. His golf game improved. (So will mine.) Harry Truman died too. I knew he would. My own head hurts a good deal these days, and I haven't even been shot there. I get pains in the back of my neck too, very close to the top of my spine. Aspirins help. My wife's tranquilizers help me sleep. Three layers of tissue envelop my brain and spinal cord and are called, collectively, meninges. I was delighted to find out I had three. I didn't know I had any. Meningitis, then, is an inflammation of the head. Infectious meningitis is an infectious inflammation of the head. Meningitis appears frequently on military installations. Civilians get encephalitis, which is an inflammation of the substance of the brain and is often mistaken for sleeping sickness. People doze off into paralysis. It is another good cure for insomnia. I have grown too old now to worry foolishly about something like meningitis. I don't have chest pains yet. I have exchanged my infantile fears of meningitis for more adult infantile fears. I never give meningitis a thought anymore. (Ha, ha.) Meningitis kills. So do bullets in the head. Martin Luther King got one: several months after he died, our alert FBI stopped tapping his telephone (and started tapping mine). Meningitis ravages the nervous system, leaves one deaf, dumb, blind, paralyzed, and dead. I was even sorrier when Bobby Kennedy was killed because he was younger than John and the photos of him on the floor of that hotel kitchen were worse. He looked so weak and confused with his immense eyeballs adrift in their sockets and his outflung arms and legs lying angular and spindly. His shoes were still on. He was dressed in black for the occasion. He is covered with glaze now too. He will never sneeze. He is in my head now also. I have him tucked away. I will keep him warm. And there he will lie, until I die — or the day comes when I forget to remember him again. I don't know what will happen to him after that. He'll have to fend for himself. I don't know how he'll survive when I'm no longer able to take care of him. Or where. It used to be when I was hot for a girl there was torrid heat. Now I'm only horny. There's just an erection. My wife's sister does not approve of violence, she says, but was pleased when the Kennedys were killed, seeing grim justice prevail,

"They only got what they deserved," she said. "In a way, they'd really been asking for it."

My wife was sorry for the children.

I must remember not to smile too much. I must maintain a faзade. I must remember to continue acting correctly subservient and clearly grateful to people in the company and at the university and country clubs I'm invited to who expect to find me feeling humble, eager, lucky, and afraid. I travel less, come home more. (I'm keeping myself close to home base, which isn't home, of course, but the company.) My wife is pleased to have me around, even though we quarrel. My daughter suspects I'm checking on her. We suspect she's been using one of the cars when we're out — she has older friends with junior driving licenses — and that she's been threatening my boy with disfigurement and blindness if he tells. (I think I might kill her if I found out she's been threatening him with death or mutilation.) Derek can't say anything. I wonder what impressions flow through his mind (he does have one, I must force myself to remember, and ears and eyes that see and hear) and what sense he is able to make of any of them. I would not care to wiretap his head. I would hear much crackling, I think. I think of him as receiving stimuli linearly in unregulated currents of sights and sounds streaming into one side of his head and going out the other into the air as though like radio signals through a turnip or through some finely tuned, capstan-shaped, intricate, and highly sensitive instrument of ceramic, tungsten, and glass that does everything but work. I can't call it a terminal, because nothing ends there. I think of my own thoughts as circular, spherical, orbicular, a wheel turning like the world in a basin of sediment into which so much of what I forget to think about separates and drops away into the bottom layers of murk and sludge. (I even forget the things I want to try to remember.) Like a vacuum tube, he can peak suddenly into fiery heat. Like a transistor, he is affected invisibly by jarring and by variations in humidity and temperature. I have a son with a turnip in his head. I think there must be static and other kinds of interference there, and possibly then is when he has his tantrums. (I have static in my own that leads to cranky outbursts at home and wish my head would break open and let the crackling pressure escape.) He does have a sweet face. All my children do, and my wife is more attractive for her age than any other woman her age I know. I wonder what architectural connections stand unfinished in his brain. Is he too ignorant to apprehend yet that he is an idiot and will grow up to be an imbecile? Does he know he's supposed to be wishing me dead and reacting with fear I'll murder or castrate him for experiencing that hope? He'd better learn to keep his filthy designs on my wife to himself. He is blameless. I dream he's dead also and am inconsolable when I awake because I'm sorry for him and know I'm dreaming of me and don't entirely want him gone.

"What were you dreaming about last night?" my wife wants to know as she fixes breakfast.

"Derek."

"You were laughing."

"You. I dreamed you were fucking another man."

"You were laughing."

"You were funny. A big black spade. You grabbed me by the prick. I like girls who grab my prick."

"Should I grab it now?"

"I have to get to work. Make dinner tonight."

"I had a horrible dream."

"You were crying."

"In your dream?"

"In yours."

"Why didn't you wake me up? I dreamt I was crying and couldn't stop."

"I was busy in my dream. Maybe it was the same dream. Did you dream you were fucking a big black nigger last night?"

"I don't have to. I get all I want from you."

"I think the bitch is stealing one of our cars. He started to say something at dinner last night and she gave him a look."

"I'll ask her."

"I'll trap her. Make dinner tonight. I like trapping her."

"You're sure coming home a lot these days."

"So what?"

"I didn't mean anything. I'm glad."

"Neither did I."

"And you don't have to yell."

"And I'm not yelling. I don't see why I can't raise my voice around here once in a while without being accused of yelling. Everyone else does. You do. I don't know what you're so edgy about."

"You're the one who's edgy this morning. I'm glad when you come home. You even whistle. Maybe you're starting to enjoy being here with us."

"Of course I do."

"Is everything all right?"

"Everything's fine. And would be even better if you stopped asking me if everything's all right."

"I knew it wouldn't last until you got out of the kitchen."

"No wonder I can't wait to get to work."

"If anything's wrong at the office I wish you'd tell me."

"Everything is fine."

"What's wrong?" Green demands of me bluntly as soon as I get to work.

"Wrong?"

"I said it loudly enough." (Oh, Christ — he's in a mood also, and he's taken me unawares.)

"Nothing."

"Don't lie to me."

His exophthalmic eyes are glaring at me with moist and sadistic petulance, and his sensual face is hot and beady around the brows and mouth. Green will normally not allow himself to perspire where other people can see him. (I wonder if he is bothered more this morning by his thyroid deficiency or his enlarged prostate.) He is wearing a large, soft, box-plaid camel suit with notched, wide lapels and a gray vertical weave and fine violet lines, and can get away with it. The rest of us have to wait for festivals and expositions, although box-plaid slacks are okay on weekends at barbecues, marinas, and country clubs. Green is a flamboyant presence with an overwhelming vocabulary that keeps most of his superiors in the company aloof and ill at ease. Horace White shuns him like the plague. Green courts Horace White; White flees from him toward Black, who despises Green and vilifies him openly; Green retreats, nursing his wounds.

"Black is an animal," Green has complained to me. "An ape. There's no point talking to him."

Black is an anti-Semite. Green waits and regards me truculently from behind his desk as though I were to blame for his thyroid, prostate, colitis, or Black.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Don't lie to me unconvincingly," he begins almost before I finish, as though he can anticipate my replies. "It's all right to lie if I don't suspect you. I'm your boss. Don't lie to anyone around here unconvincingly if you want to keep working for me. I don't want anyone working for me to be held in contempt by anyone but me."

"My fucking wife."

"Don't use that word with me."

"You asked me, didn't you?"

"I'm not Andy Kagle."

"I wouldn't tell that to Andy Kagle."

"I like your wife."

"No, you don't, Jack. So do I. What's wrong?"

"I've had four wives and you've never heard me say anything uncomplimentary about any one of them, even though I've hated them all."

"She's not so crazy about you."

"Don't tattle."

"She thinks you're a bastard because you wouldn't let me speak at the convention."

"Stop using her."

"Oh, come on, Jack. You don't like her that much."

"I don't like her at all, if you want to stay on that subject. Would you like me to tell you why?"

"No."

"She drinks too much at some parties and not enough at others. She's stiff and uncomfortable and makes other people that way. She gives off clouds of social uneasiness at company affairs the way other people give off smells."

"I said I didn't want you to."

"She isn't much. She isn't rich and she isn't famous or social and she won't help you and she won't help me."

"You asked me what was wrong, didn't you?"

"And you're using your wife to avoid telling me."

"I'm not. What are you in such a bad mood about?"

"Why are you in a good mood?"

"I'm not, now."

"You're sulking, now," he retorts, grimacing, in a cadence of echoing ridicule, and I surmise that he too may be vulnerable to that squirting impulse to mimic hatefully someone who is vexing him unbearably.

It's called echolalia.

It's called echolalia (the uncontrollable and immediate repetition of words spoken by another person. I looked it up. Ha, ha).

Ha, ha.

Ha, ha.

(It can go on forever.)

It can go on forever.

"Shouldn't I be?" I ask.

"Shouldn't you be?" he asks.

"What's up, Jack?"

"What's up, Jack?" I expect to hear him reply to me in my own voice, as in a nightmare (as I often hear myself lashing back at my wife or daughter in their own voices when I am too riled up and discombobulated to think of a more mature way of hurting).

"Have you been out somewhere sniffing around after a better job?" I hear him inquire instead.

"Better job?"

"You won't find one without my help."

"Should I be?"

"You wouldn't even know where to look."

"What's wrong with my position here?" I feel myself beginning to perspire.

"You're starting to sweat," he says.

"I'm not."

"It's on your face and coming through your shirt. Why do you give me asinine denials? You know I wasn't asking you what was wrong before when I asked you what was wrong. I didn't mean wrong. I was asking you what was right. I was being sarcastic. You've been acting funny. And I don't mean funny when I say funny. I mean strange. And I don't mean strange, either. I mean buoyant. You've been doing a lot of whistling around here lately."

"I didn't realize."

"And you don't stay on key. You must think you're the only one in the company who ever heard of Mozart. You've been making yourself pleasant to a lot of people here I don't like. Kagle, Horace White, Arthur Baron. Lester Black. Even Johnny Brown, and you make more money than he does."

"It's my job. I do work for them."

"Fawning? Let me handle all the fawning for the department. I'm better at it than you. They enjoy watching me fawn. Nobody cares about you."

"Kagle?"

"Kagle's through," he snaps impatiently with a glow of satisfaction. "He spits when he talks and walks with a limp. I could have his job. I probably could. I wouldn't take it. I don't want to sell. Peddling is demeaning. Peddling yourself is most demeaning. I know. I've been trying to peddle myself into a vice-presidency and haven't been able to, and that's most demeaning of all, when you peddle yourself and fail. If you tell anyone I said that, I'll deny it and fire you. The company won't fire you, but I will. I will, you know. Red Parker."

"What about him?"

"Steer clear of him. He's been going downhill ever since his wife was killed in that automobile crash."

"I feel sorry for him."

"I don't. He wasn't that fond of her when she was alive. He drinks too much and does no work. Steer clear of people going downhill. The company values that. The company values rats that know when to desert a sinking ship. You've been using his apartment."

"I wash up. I bring my wife there too."

"You've been acting like a simpering college fool with that young girl in the Art Department."

"No, I haven't," I reply defensively. (Now my pride is stung.) "Jack, that's only kidding." (I can feel my eyes welling with tears. They must be moist as his own.)

"She isn't pretty enough. Her salary's small."

"You flirt."

"I have a reputation for arrogance and eccentricity to protect me. You haven't. You're only what you're doing. I have rose fever. If I look like crying, it's allergenic. What's so funny?"

"I wish I could use a word like that."

"You can't. Not while I'm around to use a better one. You can't think as quickly as I can, either. You don't have style enough to be as eloquent and glib as I am, so don't even try. That girl won't help you. Go for wealthy divorcees, other men's wives, and attractive widows."

"Widows aren't that plentiful to come by."

"Read the obituary pages. You're smiling again."

"You're funny."

"But you aren't supposed to be laughing now. Slocum, you're in trouble and you don't seem to know it. And I don't like that."

"Why am I in trouble?"

"Because you work for me. And you've been too 'fucking' cheerful for my taste."

"I thought you didn't want that word."

"You don't seem as much afraid of me as you used to be."

"I am, right now."

"I don't mean, right now."

"Why should I be afraid?"

"And I don't like that. It makes me afraid. The last thing this Jack Green wants is someone secure enough in his job with me to walk around whistling Mozart's Great Mass in C Minor — I looked it up. Don't grin. You're as easy to impress as the rest of them. What baffles me is how you know it."

"I know a girl who —»

"I can be that pretentious here. You can't. I don't want whistlers working for me. I want drunkards, ulcers, migraines, and high blood pressure. I want people who are afraid. I'm the boss and I'm supposed to get what I want. Do you know what I want?"

"Good work."

"I want spastic colitis and nervous exhaustion. You've been losing weight too, haven't you? I've got spastic colitis. Why shouldn't you? I take these pills. I want you to take them. Want one?"

"No."

"You will, if you want to keep working for me and ever make a speech at the convention. God dammit, I want the people working for me to be worse off than I am, not better. That's the reason I pay you so well. I want to see you right on the verge. I want it right out in the open. I want to be able to hear it in a stuttering, flustered, tongue-tied voice. Bob, I like you best of all when you can't get a word out because you don't know what that word should be. I'm not going to let you speak at the convention this year either. But you won't know that, even though I'm telling you. You won't be sure. Because I'm going to change my mind and let you prepare and rehearse another three-minute speech on the chance I might not change my mind again. But I will. Don't trust me. I don't trust flattery, loyalty, and sociability. I don't trust deference, respect, and cooperation. I trust fear. Now, that's a fluent demonstration of articulation and eloquence, isn't it? You could never do something like that, could you?"

"What's wrong, Jack?" I repeat lamely, almost whining, with a weakness that makes me abject. "Why are you doing this?"

"I have the best paid department in the company. You're stuck here."

"I know that."

"I get criticism for the high salaries I pay."

"I know that."

"Unless I decide to fire you. I'm stuck here too. Do you know that also? I want inferior people with superior minds who feel in their bones their lives would be over if they lost their jobs with me. And I want that to be true. Now it's visible, now it's coming right out in the open where I want it. Now you're afraid. Yes. Go ahead, Bob, relax — hide your hands in your pockets. They're trembling."

(I would kill him if I dared.) "Why do you want me to be afraid?"

"You work for me! I can fire you, you damned idiot. And so can two hundred other people neither one of us even knows about. Do you doubt it?"

"Christ, no."

"Isn't that reason enough? I can bully and degrade you anytime I want."

Oh, Christ, yes — he's got the whammy on me still. He can't fire me; but every cell inside me is convinced he can and bursts open in panic. (My mind has a brain. My glands don't.)

And I do not trust myself to reply without stuttering disgracefully, effeminately, a sissy. I do not feel I can unblock my mouth, unlock my tongue, and unlimber all my cheek and lip muscles to try a single word until I have sorted through all possible sounds and selected what that first word should be, and at least the one behind it, which might guide me safely to the next. (If I keep my sentence short, I might get out a complete one. I must begin with a one-syllable word. All possible sounds go clumping about in my mind like a jumble of lettered wooden blocks in a noiseless children's classroom.) Otherwise, there might merely come from me an unintelligible gabble or shriek. I feel like a slice of scorching toast ablaze in a toaster, and then my pores gush open in a massive flow of sweltering perspiration before I even have time to recollect that they don't have to. I don't need to be afraid of Jack Green anymore. I merely have to pretend. But I am.

(And I fear I always will be.) I hate him so and wish him dead as Kagle. I wish he had cancer of the thyroid, prostate, and colon. He hasn't. Him I probably would visit in the hospital just to hear him speechless and see him wasting away. I'll probably be in a hospital before he will, and he will not stoop to visit me. (Perhaps he will — just because he'll know I'll think he won't.) I wish I could be like him. I envy and idealize him, even now as he gazes away from me with a look of studied indifference that approaches boredom. He will not even give me the satisfaction of gloating victoriously. (I am not that important to him. How marvelous.) I wish I could do that. Maybe someday, if I practice regularly (when he is not around to observe with excoriating contempt that it is he I am training myself to emulate), I'll be able to carry off similar things with other people with the same disdainful composure.

Green is not going to fire me now — he merely wants to abuse. He is having one of his tantrums. (He has static in his head.) But my fear blows hot and my fear blows cold. And I sometimes think I am losing my mind. The fear (and the mind I am losing) does not even seem to be mine (they seem to be his) — broiling on my insides one moment like a blast furnace, chilling my whole skin like foggy whiter wind the next, alternating out of control against me from within and without inside the sagging pavilion of my tapered, made-to-measure, Swiss voile, powder-blue shirt, the very finest shirt fabric there is, Green has told me. It's almost funny. I could have worn a dark broadcloth or heavier oxford weave to work today that would have contained without blotches the flows of telltale sweat spreading beneath my arms and trickling down my chest and belly from my breastbone.

"Try wearing a sweater next time," I can almost hear Green saying, reading my mind. "Cashmere. A cardigan. Like mine. That's why I wear one," I can hear him add, reading his.

It's almost uncanny the way he's still got the whammy on me. I wish he would die. But this one, I feel with some basis, I might eventually be able to lick. I have age, Arthur Baron, and spastic colitis on my side.

But not as easily as I'd hoped.

I'd like to shoot him in the head.

I wish I could make a face at him and stick my tongue out. (I wish I could have a hot sweet potato again or a good ear of corn.)

"Do you want to fire me?" I ask awkwardly instead.

"I can humiliate you."

"You are."

"I can be a son of a bitch."

"Why should you want to fire me?"

"Without even giving you a reason."

"You'd have to replace me with somebody else."

"To make you remember I can. You're not a free citizen as long as you're working for me. You sometimes seem to forget."

"Not anymore."

"Neither am I. To let you feel what true subjugation is. You wouldn't be able to get a better job without my help, and you wouldn't be able to take it if you did. You'd have to give up your pension and profit sharing here and start wondering all over again if they like you there as much as we do here. You'd spend three years and still not be sure. You're dependent on me."

"I know that."

"And I'm not sure you always know that. I always want to know you are. I always want to be sure you know you have to grovel every time I want you to. You're a grown-up man, a mature, talented, middle-level, mediocre executive, aren't you? You don't have to stand there sweating like that and take this from me, do you? You do have to stand there and take it, don't you? Well?"

"I'm not going to answer that."

"Or I can give you another big raise and humiliate you that way."

"I'll take the raise."

"I can make you wear solid suits and shirts and striped ties."

"I do."

"I've noticed," he answers tartly. "You're also playing golf."

"I've always played golf."

"You haven't been."

"I play in the tournament at the convention every year"

"With a big handicap. You're in there as a joke, along with those other drunken charlatans from the sales offices. And that's another thing I don't like. You don't belong to the Sales Department."

"I have to work for them."

"Would you rather belong to Kagle?"

"You."

"Why?"

"You're better."

"At what?"

"What do you want from me?"

"Who do you work for, me or Kagle?"

"You."

"Who's nicer?"

"He is."

"Who's a better person?"

"He is."

"Who do you like better?"

"You."

"Now we're talking intelligently. You shouldn't be thinking of a better job now, Bob." His pace slows, his voice softens. He is almost friendly, contrite. "I really don't think you could find one outside the company."

"I'm not, Jack. Why should I want to?"

"Me."

"You're not so bad."

"Even now?" His eyes lift to look at me again, and he smiles faintly.

"You do things well."

"Everything?"

"Not everything. Some things, Jack, you do terribly. I even like the way you've been talking to me now. I wish I could be rude like that."

"It's easy. with someone like you. You see how easy it is? With someone like you." He sighs, a bit ruefully, sardonically. "I'm not going to fire you. I don't know why I even started. I get scared sometimes when I think about what would become of me if I ever had to leave the company. Do you know what's happening to the price of meat?"

"It's high, isn't it?"

"I don't, either. But I worry what would happen to me if I did have to know. They've cut my budget."

"How much?"

"That's not your business yet."

"Kagle said they were going to."

"You're thick with Kagle."

"It might help."

"Thicker than with me?"

"He needs me more."

"I don't need you at all."

"You'd have to replace me, wouldn't you?"

"No. As far as the company is concerned, no one needs anyone. It goes on by itself. It doesn't need us. We need it."

"Should I talk to Kagle?"

"Kagle's a damned fool. It doesn't help him to downgrade us. You'll get your raise, if I get mine."

"I'll talk to him."

"I'm not begging you to."

"I'll cut the leg out from under him."

"That isn't funny," Green retorts.

"I know."

My smirk feels alien and bizarre, as though someone else had smirked for me and stuck it on.

"You're supposed to be his friend."

"It just came out," I apologize in confusion. "I didn't even know I was saying it. I'll go talk to him."

"I haven't asked you to. I don't know why I even care. None of us are going anywhere far. Kagle limps. I'm Jewish. Nobody's sure what you are."

"I'm nothing. My wife's a devoted Congregationalist."

"Devotion isn't good enough. She'd have to be a celebrity or very rich. You've got a crippled child of some kind you don't talk about much, haven't you?"

"Brain damaged."

"Serious?"

"Hopeless."

"Don't be too sure. I've heard —»

"So have I."

"I know a doctor —»

"I've seen him."

"Why —»

"Cut it out, Jack. I mean it."

"I've been wondering if you had limits," Green replies. "I just found out." He looks sorry, reflective. Green has problems with his children, but none like Derek, which gives me an effective advantage over him I might want to use again. (The kid comes in handy after all, doesn't he?) "You'll get your raise," Green tells me finally, "and I'll probably get mine. I might even let you make your speech this year."

"I don't believe it."

"You shouldn't."

"I won't believe it until I do it."

"It's part of my strategy. You wouldn't be able to handle this job if they decide to give me Kagle's. I could do better. Better than him. I might be able to make vice-president that way."

"Kagle's not."

"Kagle limps and has hair in his nose and ears. Nobody with a limp or a retarded child is ever going to be president."

"Roosevelt limped."

"I mean of the company. The company is more particular than the country. They cut my budget. That's what I'm sore about. And I don't trust you. I'll get it back. But I'll have to fight for it. I'll have to grovel. That's the way I have to fight, and that's the part I hate. That's the reason I wouldn't recommend you to replace me. You're not qualified. You can't grovel."

"I grovel."

"You grovel, but not gracefully. It's like your fawning."

"I could learn how."

"I know how. See Green, Green says. See Green grovel, Green jokes. That's the reason they cut my budget. They like the way I grovel. They cut it every year. Just to see me grovel."

I will cut it even more, for I know how much of the expensive and truly urgent work we produce is not needed or used. I must remember to seem humble and unexcited and trustworthy. Green is right. Nothing any of us does affects matters much. (We can only affect each other.) It's a honeycomb; we drone. Directors die; they're replaced. I'll retire Ed Phelps. I must look innocent and act reserved. If I feel like kicking my heels, I must kick them in my study at home or in Red Parker's apartment in the city. I must stop using Red Parker's apartment. It shows. What will I do with Red Parker? He's younger than Ed Phelps. I must be nice to everybody. (I must act dumb.)

"What the hell are you so God-damned peppy about these days?" Johnny Brown demands, with one of his light, big-fisted pokes in the arm.

(It isn't difficult to imagine that fist in my face.)

"You," I jolly him back. "You're giving me call reports."

"Have you checked them against the sales figures?"

"These are what count."

"They're full of shit."

"As long as they sound good."

"Don't count on it," Johnny Brown answers. "There are better ways the salesmen could spend their time than making up lies like this. I'd know how to handle them. I'd make sure the bastards were out on sales calls all day long. I'd take the chairs out of their offices. They hate writing up these."

"Arthur Baron wants them for Horace White and Lester Black."

"Ask him why."

"The computer breaks down and cries if it doesn't get good news."

"You're a card."

I grovel gracefully with Johnny Brown and get the call reports I want for Arthur Baron. I'll get a raise. (My wife and children will have more money.) What will happen to me if Arthur Baron has a stroke soon? (He is overweight and smokes cigarettes, and I don't know a damn thing about his blood pressure, blood lipids, or cholesterol count. I don't even know what blood lipids are, or what they're supposed to do.) Who would look after me if Arthur Baron died? (Who would get his job?) Horace White? I'd hate to have to rely on that stingerless wasp for protection while sleek, Semitic Green with envy was burrowing away at me from below with his quicker mind and brilliant vocabulary and Johnny Brown was bunching his fist to punch me in the jaw. I hope he doesn't. A punch in the jaw would just about ruin me: it would damage not only my face but my reputation for efficiency and authority. It would be much worse for me than kicking Kagle in the leg. I could, conceivably, kick Kagle in the leg and pretend it was a joke or do it when just the two of us were together in his office and not many people would have to know. But everyone in the company would know if Johnny Brown punched me in the jaw. (I wish I were the one who was strong and courageous and he was puny and craven. He makes me feel two feet shorter than I am, and sexually impotent.) How would top management feel about someone in middle management who'd been punched in the jaw and felt sexually impotent? Not good, I think. My wife would lose respect for me. I wouldn't want my children, my neighbors, or even Derek's nurse to find out. No one with a limp, a retarded child, or a punch in the jaw will ever be president of the company or of the world. If someone had punched Richard Nixon in the jaw, he would never have made it to President. Nobody wants a man who's been punched in the jaw. It's hard to put much faith in the intelligence of someone who's been punched in the jaw. It would do me no good if Brown were fired afterward; it wouldn't unpunch my jaw. What will I do if he does? (How will I handle it?) I know what I will do. I'll fall down. But suppose, to my wonderment, I didn't fall down? I'd have to try to punch him back. Which would be worse? I know which would be worse.

Both.

I have sudden failures of confidence that leave me without energy, will, or hope. It happens when I'm alone or driving back from somewhere with my wife and she is at the wheel. (I just want to stop, give up.) It often follows elation. Everything drains away, leaving me with the apathetic outlook that I have arrived at my true level and it is low. There are times now when I have trouble maintaining my erections. They don't always get and stay as hard as they used to. I worry. And sometimes they do — it all charges back vigorously — and makes me feel like the heavyweight champion of the world. That's a good sensation. There are times when I'd not be afraid to fuck anybody, when there is not even the thinnest curtain of doubt to weave myself through in order to start doing the job. I don't even think of it as a job. It's a pleasure. I will not hesitate to make Ed Phelps retire.

"Oh, boy," says my wife, impressed. "Where is it all coming from? You're like a young boy again."

"What do you know about young boys?" I banter, smarting a little in jealous recoil from the comparison.

"I know more than you think I do. Come on."

"I think you do."

"You're even younger now than you were when you were younger," she says with a reveling laugh.

"So are you."

"Any complaints?"

"Of course not."

"Come on. Why do you always like to wait?"

"Again?" Penny asks, with an exclamation of flattered delight. (She is so honored and appreciative when I want her.) "How come you have so much time for me lately? Wait," she laughs, in the throaty voice of a sensuous contralto. "Wait, baby. You don't give a young girl a chance."

Penny is thirty-two now and I have been going with her for nearly ten years. She is no longer in love with me. I was never that way about her.

Penny and my wife are just about the only two left with whom I feel completely at ease (and also the two I find least intriguing). With every other girl I can call (I have a coded list of twenty-three names and numbers in my billfold, my office, and in a bedside drawer in Red Parker's apartment, and I might get a Yes from any one of them on any given evening or afternoon) each time is like the first time all over again (a strain. It's a job. I'll have to do well. I liked it better when they thought they were doing us a favor. I'm sorry they ever found out they could have orgasms too. I wonder who told them).

I know I can make a good impression on Arthur Baron by forcing Ed Phelps to retire. And unlike Kagle, I've had no close relationship with the kindly, prattling old man who's been with the company more than forty years and whose duties are now reduced to obtaining plane and hotel reservations through the Travel Department for anyone who wants to use him, and following up on shipping, transportation, and room arrangements for the convention. He has to make certain enough cars have been rented and enough whiskey ordered. His salary is good, although his raises the past ten years or so (ever since he grew obsolete and became superfluous and expendable) have been nominal.

"It will be in Puerto Rico again, I'm sure," he repeats incessantly, and whispers, "Lester Black's wife's family owns a piece of the hotel there. As soon as they hurry up and make it official, I can begin. I wish they would."

I have ducked around file cabinets to avoid hearing him say that to me again. He could retire with a fortune in pension and profit-sharing benefits: he doesn't want to go. I'll make him. But what about Red Parker, who's just about my own age and isn't old enough to retire? How will I get rid of him? He has indeed been going downhill fast since his wife was killed in that automobile crash — the girls he goes with now are not nearly as pretty as the ones he went with when she was alive — but he might not crack up in time to do me any good. The announcement will have to be made soon.

"How are you, Bob?" Arthur Baron asks every time now when we pass in the hallway.

"Fine, Art. You?"

"That's good."

Otherwise, the changes will dominate attention at the convention. I must remember to be modest, bland, and congenial to one and all for the time being. I sometimes feel I have Arthur Baron over a barrel. This is known as a delusion of grandeur. (He could change his mind and keep Kagle for years and nothing consequential would result. Or someone else could fire Arthur Baron and me together without an instant's notice and there would not be a ripple in the total operation of the company. It would not falter.) And I don't entertain this thought seriously. But who will replace Arthur Baron when he does fall ill, dies, retires, is promoted, or runs out of ability and is eased away to the side? It won't be me. (Maybe it will.) I don't think they think I ever could replace Arthur Baron, just as Arthur Baron could never become Horace White when Horace White falls ill (it will be of a much different kind of disease from the ones that will put Arthur Baron, Green, Kagle, and me away — I sense that already — it will be something lingering and tediously progressive. Horace White is not the outgoing, wholesome type to fall ill and die rapidly. He will come creaking into the office on aluminum-alloy canes and wheelchairs for years after he is disabled, smiling, chortling dryly, looking ghastly, and alluding to old times familiarly, oppressing us all despotically right to the end, for he will still own stock), dies, or retires. (Horace White already has been eased aside.) Horace White can go no further in the company because there is nothing more he can do than be Horace White. He can be named to prestigious government commissions that issue reports on matters of grave national importance that are methodically ignored. (Arthur Baron and I can't do that.) His name looks good in the newspapers and on certain letterheads, for he is not merely Horace White but Horace White III, and his wife — she is his third; one died of cancer of the lymph and the second was crippled in a sporting accident — and his mother — she is now in the very high eighties (like the company's common stock again, ha, ha, after the most recent two-for-one split) — come out looking good enough in photographs of people who raise dogs or sponsor charity balls and prominent benefit performances of musical comedies, operas, and ballets. Arthur Baron can move up past Horace White (and so, in theory, might I), for the company does, in its own biologically deterministic and unpitying way, elevate ability over ownership, but he can never become Horace White (and neither, in practice, can I). Only another Horace White, a brother, cousin, son, nephew, or husband of an undistinguished sister, could move right into the corporate structure and meet all the requirements of being another Horace White. (Every company needs one.) He is such a small-minded, oblivious prick, a self-satisfied simpleton (I wonder why I do have such haunting dreams about him in which his thin features turn despotic and carnal and he seems so viciously out of character); he buys puzzles, perpetual-motion gimmicks, and other novelties in Brentano's book store and has his secretary send for me and other employees of the company to show them off (as though we could not afford to buy them ourselves if we wanted them. He wore a red blazer of nappy wool at the convention one night last year and took us all by surprise. It looked good. This year there will be other red blazers).

"Look at this," he will command, beaming, as though he had just chanced upon something of vast benefit to all mankind. "Isn't it something? Just stand still there and look at it. It will never stop as long as you keep doing this. Each one is always different."

"That's really something," I have to respond, and have to remain standing still until he grows tired of having me in his office and sends me back.

I hate to have to stand still.

I have had to stand still for the longest time now, it seems, for nearly all of my life. Nearly every time I search back I come upon myself standing still inside some memory, sculpted there, or lying flattened as though by strokes from the brush of an illustrator or in transparent blue or purple chemical stains on the glass slide of a microscope or on the single frame of a strip of colored motion picture film. Even when the film moves, I am able to view the action only in arrested moments on single frames. And yet I must have moved from where I was to where I've come, even while standing still. Was I brought here? I have this full country acre in Connecticut. I think I was. Who did it? Only in the army do I think I had more freedom of choice, more room in which to move about. At least I felt I did. I did. I was outside my family, had no wife, job, parent, children, met no one I cared for. I had no ties. I had no one anywhere I cared for. I got laid a lot. Overseas I went with prostitutes and enjoyed that too. I had fun. I enjoyed being away (at least it was something to do. If you sat home alone Saturday night, at least you were sitting home in a barracks, which was better than sitting alone in your own home on a Saturday night. One New Year's Eve in the army I had nothing to do and didn't care. We take weekend drives now to people I don't want to be with and can't wait to leave. A long weekend will break up my family one day. I stroke my dick. I stroked it often then too. I was often lonely and wished I had someone I could care for. I would have liked a pen pal, a pin-up girl in a cashmere sweater and chaste pleated skirt, a sweetheart I adored who photographed beautifully and mailed me snapshots. I still would. I felt cheated, underprivileged. I wanted to be the nice boy in the Hollywood movie the nice girl was crazy about, that fellow in the love songs the girls were all singing to on the radio. I wasn't); and I know already that I'll be standing still again after I've been moved one giant step forward into Andy Kagle's position and have nailed down the job. I'll make my speech. I'll have important new work to do (nailing down the job), but I'll do it standing still. (And after I've done it and know I'm not in danger of being kicked out for a while, my interest will abate and my work will grow monotonous again.

I will not want what I have and will be in fear of losing it. I will not ever be convinced my illegal thoughts and dreams are not apparent to the authorities in the company, and I will still slither numbly into dismay at sight of a closed office door of a higher executive from behind which something small as a mouse might emerge that will bear my secrets out into the open and leave me worse off than dead. For everyone to see.) Everything dead lies still unless winds ruffle the feathers, fur, or hair. (I have the feeling now that I have already been everywhere it has been possible for me to go.) The sight of a dead dog on a highway is enough to turn my stomach and wrench my heart with pity. It reminds me of a dead child. And I never even had a dog. Children and dead dogs evoke sympathy. Neither can speak. No one else. Two dead dogs on a highway seconds apart lead me to think my sanity is finally going and that it is no longer possible for me to separate what I see from what I remember or what I don't want to see. In flickers of disorientation I often glimpse in silhouette from the rear or side people I did not know well and have not seen or thought about in decades (total strangers take on the identity for a second of kids I remember from elementary or high school or people I was acquainted with briefly in other jobs or brushed against uneventfully in the army. I was once beaten up by an enlisted man who didn't know I was an officer). They are always people I was not close to and do not want to see again. (I don't catch unreal glimpses of people I do want to see.) Real and imagined events overrun each other in my mind in hazy indistinction. I sometimes find it hard to be certain whether I have done something I intended to or only thought of doing it but didn't. I have answered letters twice. I have no system. Others I don't answer at all because I remember wanting to promptly and think I have. There's much I think of doing and saying I know I'd better not. I'd lose my job or go to jail. I am growing forgetful. My eyesight is deteriorating: I wear reading glasses now and require a stronger prescription every year. Periodontal work will save my teeth only for a while. I know I repeat myself at home with my children and my wife (my children point that out with unkindness): soon I'll be repeating myself with everyone everywhere and be shunned as a prattling old fool. In southern Louisiana, I learned recently (on a business trip to New Orleans, where, because I found myself alone in a strange, big city, I picked up a chunky, Negro whore in a bar and asked her to follow me to my hotel room. I figured if she could make her way through the hotel lobby into my room, I could make my way into her. I get so lonesome in glamorous cities in which I have nobody I can call. Everybody else, I feel, is having a good time. I get the blues when it rains. The blues I can't lose when it rains. I've never learned how to make friends in strange cities. Men who strike up conversations with me appear homosexual and drive me off.

"I've got to go now. I have this friend I have to meet."

"Take care."

All I know how to do in a strange city is read the local newspapers. Late at night, I'm good at that in bed. I'm good at eating candy bars in bed too. I get the feeling when I'm alone in strange American cities that I have no inner resources and no cock. She was just under thirty. She said she was a mixture of French, Chinese, and Mexican parentage and could therefore do sweet things to me in bed no one had ever done before. She said it only half seriously in a husky southern drawl. I knew she was Black. I haven't been with Black girls much in this country, only twice before, but I knew that much. I've been afraid of them, first for my dignity, now for my life.

"I don't dig," I said, "French, Chinese, and Mexican girls." I was kidding back with her in the bar. "I want someone Black."

"I'm a little of that too," she chuckled heartily. She was simple, good-natured, guileless, and I felt myself in charge. She asked for fifty dollars, grinning. I got her to agree to twenty. Then I threw in ten dollars more to inspire her by my generosity and make her like me and really do sweet things to me no one had ever done before.

"I can show you a good time," she vowed.

By the time I returned to my hotel room I no longer wanted her and hoped she wouldn't follow. I had all the evening newspapers for New Orleans and Baton Rouge and was raring to take my clothes off and get to work on them. I have this clinging fear of catching a venereal disease somewhere and bringing it home to my wife. How would I get out of that one when she found out she was infected? Easily. Lie and deny. She did. She paid off the desk clerk, she said. She rapped softly on the door and came in smiling, and I had to stare at her as she undressed in order to get interested again. She wasn't pretty.

"Do it slowly," I requested. "Take them off slow. And shimmy a little."

"Sure."

I don't like girls who get out of their clothes too quickly. I get the feeling they've been getting out of those same few clothes all day long for other men before they came to me. "Okay."

"Sure. Some men —»

"Not now."

"Huh?"

"Come here. Shhhh."

"Sure."

She was still grinning. She had nothing different to offer. In San Francisco not long ago a stunning, willowy blonde who looked like royalty whispered the same alluring promise and turned out to be lying also. She made me give her a hundred dollars. Whores in Naples, Rome, and Nice after the war had uttered the same exotic guarantees and had been no more successful in filling them. I guess there's really not that much variety around for normal degenerates like me. It was flat, and over quickly.

"Where's all those sweet new tricks of yours?" I taunted, and was pleased I was justified in doing so.

She was hurt and looked a little frightened, and that was gratifying to me also. "I did what you asked, hon," she apologized hesitantly. "Didn't I?"

"You're supposed to do things I don't ask. It's okay."

"Didn't I?"

"You were fine."

"Did I show you a good time?"

"Really. You can go now if you want."

"I thought you wanted me the whole night."

"So did I." I forced a laugh. "But I can't go that distance anymore. I must be getting old. I thought I could when I was looking you over in that bar. Those are some knockers you have. Mmmm. And some big ass."

"You like it?"

"And how. I like them big on a short girl."

"I'm short, all right." She was pleased as punch with my compliments. "You want some more?"

"But I can't. I guess my eyes are bigger than my dick."

She was relieved I wasn't angry.

"You're all right down there too," she complimented me.

"I know. You can keep the money. I enjoyed it."

"Did I show you a good time? Was I really good?"

"As good as the best. And I've been to Paris."

"Really?"

"I've even been to Bologna."

"I don't know about that."

"That's where they really know how to slice it."

"You sure you don't want me to stay till morning, mister? You're nice. I got no place I have to go."

"I've got an early plane."

"I could stay in the other bed until you want me. I don't even snore. I'll bet you'll want some in the morning." She giggled. "I'll do what you want. I do everything."

"You should put your legs up higher."

"It hurts. I get cramps here."

"And you really don't do anything new."

"I did what you wanted. You got to ask, hon."

"I am not bizarre."

"I don't know about that."

"I'm never sure what I want." I felt positively regal using a word like bizarre with her. "You're supposed to help me find out what I want. I'm not saying that because I'm unhappy. It will help you with other men."

"Some men beat me up."

And I have no compelling fetishes, although certain silken undergarments get me hot and are more attractive to me than the parts they cover. Big tits in bras and jersey can get me hot. Small ones make me romantic. Small asses on slim girls are starting to draw appreciating gazes from me. Many of these are on very young girls, and this is something new. The only woman I've ever wanted to beat up was my wife, and that — to my shame — was over money. She insinuates I give too little but won't take more. I felt most content as I watched her dress to leave, lofty. She looked comical and naпve stuffed into flowered bikini underpants. I thought a moment of flipping her over my knees and paddling her smooth muscular bottom but remembered she'd be heavy. That's the trouble with so many of our damned picturesque sex fantasies: they hurt. I've pampered myself before with the temptation of spanking a nice ass someday but never got one beautiful enough. Maybe there are no beautiful ones outside of magazines. I'm in love with a four-color magazine page. She still smiled; I was sorry for her, in a patronizing, uncommitted way. I wonder what happens to squat, homely Black and Puerto Rican whores with one missing molar when they grow too old — who takes care of them — and ugly to attract handsome, pinstriped libertines like me. I know what happens. They attract me anyway if I'm alone in New Orleans where everyone else seems to be having a good time. I ought to know by now that hardly anyone over the age of four ever has a good time anymore. Women do, at weddings and movies. It was a waste. The hundred-dollar beauty in San Francisco was a waste. She didn't look like an aristocrat once I had her. She looked like a skinny girl in need of sunshine or more red corpuscles. I'm glad I never had to see either of them again. I wonder what happens to homely white whores when they grow older and lose their figures and lose their teeth. They become public drunkards with gravelly, masculine voices who quarrel with each other loudly on sidewalks in warm weather. I still had all my newspapers after my little Black beauty left — thank God — and I ate three sticky candy bars and drank two cans of soda from a vending machine in the hall as I read them. I would have felt self-conscious going down into the lobby again that night. I went to sleep with caramel and nut crumbs in my mouth. I had what might have been the start of a homosexual dream, stopped it in time, and switched reels into the middle of a different dream I barely remembered in which I was a failing history student at the University of Bologna striving to find my way out of the yellow rock tangle of school buildings in time to catch a plane back home to my wife. There was a hatchet-faced, bleached-blond, scrawny actress I was trying to flee who kept sliding along the opposite sides of the stone walls in stealthy pursuit. She carried an icon of some kind cradled in her hands that was smaller than herself and could have been a human figure carved out of a penis — feces? — or a stick of African sculpture. I seemed able to identify all and wanted none, and that's why I was running from her. Her face was Horace White's. The next day I worried intermittently on the plane going back about carrying syphilis, gonorrhea, or crabs home to my wife from New Orleans. In the dream, I was failing in Bologna because I had been unable to find my way to any of the classrooms all year, although I had tried repeatedly. I itched. I scratched. I always itch afterward. Guilefully, I would deny to my wife I'd even had it and accuse her of having given it to me. Both statements could not be true, of course, but she would be intimidated by my yelling and unable to grasp that, and I would yell in sanctimonious outrage and convince her. There are no convenient army prophylactic stations around anymore dispensing soapy absolution by the pint for our sins of the flesh. They're gone too. So is sin. Most of my favorite restaurants are closing. There is only crime. I often don't enjoy it. My climaxes often aren't. Other times there's this gigantic, spurting leap. The difference is me. It's got nothing to do with them. They all do pretty much the same things by now. So do we. Sometimes it really dances. Other times it only stirs as much as necessary to get the ridiculous ritual over with. In Italy after the war, girls from Bologna stated they were the best in all Europe and wheedled for premium fees; they were no different from lower-class girls in Naples and Rome. They did the same things. They were interchangeable. They still are.

I can't fall in love. That's probably what holds my marriage together. If I didn't have this wife, I would have another. It's lots of trouble to leave. I don't like to be alone. Red Parker needs a wife and ought to marry one fast before I have to fire him. I guess there's really not much more one can do easily with a human dick than what we have been doing. Everything else stinks or hurts. So much of the quality of response seems a matter of chance. In the army, I would rent my girls by the hour and go three-and-a-half times in those sixty minutes — I got bargains leasing them that way — that final half time signaling a valorous raising of my standard as I made ready to ride off. I'd win applause, even from blondes from Bologna, for my virile performances and for my good looks and lean, firm, sun-tanned body. I used to be lean, and hungry. I had appetites. I used to have a full head of hair. I had strong teeth. I once had tonsils. We scarcely need them at all. I know I've had wet dreams that were more delicious and satisfying than anything I've experienced at complicated orgies I've attended in London, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles, and much less trouble. My wife would like me to take her along on business trips to Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Chicago, San Francisco, and New Orleans. She thinks I get laid there. I usually do; I feel the country, the company, and society expect me to. I usually don't enjoy it. I enjoy the local newspapers more. I remember wondering when I was finally able to do it the first time, even as I was doing it, if that's all there was to it. There was more, I learned the second time, and still is, there is enough to launch me into unrestrainable fervors all over again — even now I'll rape my wife, only my wife, force her at times when she doesn't want to and I feel I have to have it from her at once; but there's no sublime relationship, no reciprocal contact; like a mad chemist, I knew I was carrying the whole magical process and potential along with me like a pair of bubbling retorts inside my head and my vesicles. If my balls ever exploded, I knew it would not be because of a female; the mixtures inside me would have made up their own independent mind to detonate. They would not consult even me. Bang! They would decide to go. They do look queer to me still, hairier than me, many of them. Some look like Van Dykes, and these I'm tempted to tug. Others have sideburns and shock me a moment like card number eight on the Rorschach test again. I was struck speechless when that damned color shock card appeared. I was stupefied. Others vegetate profusely with more rotund and corpulent growths of wiry foliage and look like Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, or Joseph Conrad. They affect me too. I sometimes want to quail. Will my wife turn white? She'll have to. So will I. We have adenoids and vesicles and never get to see them while they're alive. I think a good ear-nose-and-throat man today doesn't dirty his fingers much with them either. His skill lies in popping his head into the hospital room afterward to tell us everything went well — that's all he does and leaves the whole gory, grisly, repelling procedure to his Oriental anesthetist and ambitious apprentices. Why should he be disgusted? By now I'm used to the way my wife looks.

"How was New Orleans?"

"Dull."

"You should have brought me along."

"There was nothing to do."

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

"Clap."

"Good."

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

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

Green was right about Jane too.

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

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

That might hurt her feelings too.

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

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

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

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

"I'll fuck like a racehorse in a room like this," she glories, a vibrant strumpet lying eager for more as soon as I'm ready to supply it. "Don't I?"

"Ride, racehorse."

"You jockey me."

"Or I'll whip you some more."

"Do what you want, darling."

"Stop talking so much."

"Put me in a bed in a hotel like this and I feel I can fuck the whole world."

"Put your knees up."

"Oh, good. God. Goodness gracious, deary me,"

My damned dumb wife still can't remember to put her knees up after all these years — and she feels she is ready to fuck the whole world.

I wonder what I would feel like if my wife ever did come home smelling of another man's semen. I think I would die a sudden, shriveling death inside. (Would it excite me?) I would wither and curl up inside my skin and spend the rest of my dull, spiritless life hiding my dead, small self inside a head and torso now many sizes too large. I would pray my wife and children would let me keep it secret. (I'm not sure what other men's semen smells like, unless it smells like my own. I'd guess it smells of sweat and hair. I've caught the scent of sweat and hair on my wife a hundred times when she's not had time to wash and change before I plant my perfunctory kiss on her cheek, but it's only sweat and hair, I think.) She does not guess what I'm thinking as my eyes examine her critically these days. (It would not excite me.) It would fill me with saddest resignation and lifelong self-disgust. Judgment will have been rendered against me by her and someone else behind another closed door I did not know was even there, and the judgment will be irreversible. I hope it will not be with someone crass and repellent like Andy Kagle or Red Parker. I would not want their hands or fluids on her. (Someone like Green might be better for me.) Sometimes on my train ride home from work — I even have trouble sleeping when commuting — I have the clairvoyant certainty I am going to catch her that very day within the next forty-five minutes, and just that way: by a stain. She'll hurry into the house after I do, dinner will be late reaching the table, and there it will be, that smudge, that stain on her slip, her belly, her skirt. The details of sequence are disorderly — but they won't matter. I will not be able to say anything in the dining room because of the children. Later, I will not be able to say anything anyway. I will not want her to know I know (and hope she doesn't make a point of telling me. I would have to do something if she knows I found out, and there'd be nothing I'd really want to. I would even have to fake the anger and unhappiness I was experiencing. I could not let it emerge so vulnerably. It would be easier for me to rot and decompose in hidden torment for the rest of my life than to let her see how cruelly she hurt me and how easily she could do it again every time she chose. I do not want her to). I must never let her see I care.

"I love my wife, but, oh, you kid."

I am not as big a shot as she and the children think I am (but must not let them find that out). I have horrendous visions of her being felt up greedily on packed subway trains, and enjoying it, and my wife doesn't even have to ride the subway trains. Penny does. A man came on her dress in the rush hour during the summer. She didn't know it until she was off the train and the fingers holding her pocketbook brushed against the sticky substance on the back of her hip. I began in a random glob shot like that and will end, if I'm lucky, decaying like Red Parker with white-washed X's splashed across my eyes and a sign on my chest or forehead reading: COMING DOWN SOON. FORGIONE DEMOLITION CO. While Negro junkies, winos, and dealers in stolen wallets, cameras, and wristwatches hang out in my squalid, dimly lit hallways.)

"I knew it was either that or phlegm," Penny told me with a snorting laugh she has I often find grating. "And no one was doing any coughing. Was I ever embarrassed. Imagine the nerve."

I can't.

I miss my mother, sister, and brother more and more often lately and regret we did not remain closer as a family when we were all still together. On balmy evenings in spring and summer, my mother would send down to the drugstore for a container of bulk ice cream, and we would eat it together. She let me get it when I grew big enough to go. We liked strawberry best of all, and it was good. Sometimes we had strawberry mixed with vanilla.

I don't think I have ever had a homosexual experience that counted. I was molested twice as a child, once by an older boy, but I don't think that counted. The other time was by an older girl in the same apartment house who pretended to wrestle with me but was really intent on giving me an erection and feeling it bounce against her. That does count because it felt so nice. I was lucky. I was eager to have her do it to me again and lurked around her optimistically.

She didn't. Poor me. It's hard to believe one can experience such acute sensitivity and still be unable to come. How does it end? We can't remember. It peters out. Penny never has to be reminded to put her legs up and keeps them up for the longest time without complaining of aches or strains. She's good. She takes dancing lessons still (which might help), along with her singing lessons and exercise classes. At age thirty-two, she still wants to be Shirley Temple. For a little while last spring I had a nice-looking, slightly nutty, twenty-six-year-old, tall, ex-college kid from Ann Arbor, Michigan, I met at an office Christmas party who would start to come as soon as we began and raise her legs from feet to hips straight up toward the ceiling for as long as it took. I liked that: I liked her quick response and that feel of ass against my knees; it let me think I was getting away with something extra. She made shrill noises and I would have to muffle her mouth. (It was soon very tiresome listening to her. I do not think of it as doing something together and don't believe anyone else really does, either.) She got to be a nuisance and a bore. She had spare time. She's the one that made fun of my garters. I could not brook such churlish insolence to the Slocum name from such a woozy upstart (she did take drugs, which made her even more vapid still), and I began to snub and neglect her. I played on her ignorance and provincialism. (She really knew almost nothing.) She thought it was beautiful.

"Isn't it beautiful?" she would say.

Anyone could please her, and she left me in the warm weather for younger men in beach houses with less money who played volleyball in the sand but had more time to spend with her. I tried to get her back but failed. She jilted me. (I had to face the fact I bored her, too.) She outgrew me, saw through me. There was degradation — oh, boy — turned down by her. She had never seen men's garters before or noticed them in fashion ads, and she had never heard of Camus, Copernicus, or Soren Kierkegaard (the three big K's, ha, ha), either. She found my garters quaint and curious; she never actually ridiculed them, but her amusement was insult enough. I guess men's garters do look funny. I had to employ some technique, though, for keeping my socks up during important business meetings. I've switched to full-length stretch socks now — always dark, except in summer at the country or shore or on weekends at somebody's club. (I won't join a club until I've got the new job and know I can keep it.) They look funny too. Stretch socks choke. I shove them down around my ankles whenever I can in order to release my calves from their abrasive grip. With my dark socks down, my ankles remind me of shifty, slimy men I used to see in dirty movies, the kind of unshaven, evil sneak who'd sidle close and feel my wife or daughter up on crowded trains or come on Penny's pretty skirt and make a mental note (perhaps even jot it down industriously on a small record pad) that his day as a molester was off to a shooting start. I bet these people organize their work week around their sly, depraved perversions. (I've got them ghosting around inside the narrow passageways of my brain also, with this difference. They aren't ghosts. I feel it when they walk about.) They try to take what doesn't belong to them. What do they do on vacations? I wonder how the poor creatures got along before there were buses and subways. What effect will growing investments in mass transportation have upon their activities, particularly in respect to productivity and competition? Will the liberated woman feel back? Will the homosexual liberated woman on crowded buses and trains start feeling my wife and daughter up also? Maybe people will begin riding the subway trains just to be felt up. They could sell tickets, raise the fare. I see a panoramic mural. (My wife thinks I have a dirty mind.) Imagine the trainloads of smiling faces. No one would want a seat. Every hour a rush hour, every rush a crush hour. That could be a partial solution to the energy crisis. (A lot of energy would be discharged.) After all, the opportunities for being felt up in one's own automobile aren't that promising, unless you're my daughter or one of her teen-age friends, or a college kid, although I've done some hearty automobile groping myself from time to time, most recently while being driven home from a party by the heavyset wife of one of our millionaire corporation executives. She wore heavy perfume I didn't like and took me by surprise.

"Do you have to go right home?" she asked unexpectedly. "Or aren't you afraid of your big, mean wifey?"

"No to both," I responded with terse bravado. "What do you have in mind?"

"Lover's lane," she announced, then tittered a moment. "Do you know where lover's lane is?" she asked. "Right here," she answered with another laugh, and touched herself.

She was a millionaire's frolicsome wife with a double chin and acrid perfume I didn't like, and I had always had to respect her (because she was a millionaire's wife. I was afraid of her husband). She was four years older than I was and had a hearty, predatory vivaciousness about her. She made fun of my shy caution and was entertained by my ignorance and naпvete.

"I've got a reputation as big as this whole county, baby. Oh, have you got a lot to learn. Didn't you know that?"

I felt like a yokel. "Does Bill know?"

"A lot I care. I'm a free spirit, puddy poo. I do what I want."

"Will Bill know about me when he finds you dropped me off?"

"Don't be such a worry wart," she chided with a squeaky titter.

My skin prickled, and I thought for a moment she might pinch my cheek or tweak my nose. She tore her stockings at the knees on the floorboard of her car and stuffed them in her purse before she started driving again.

"I can't walk in with these, can I? I'll call you in the city. I come in every Wednesday to see my mother."

"I have an apartment."

"We own a co-op."

"Will Bill know?"

"Don't be such a worry wart."

"Don't use that phrase. It makes my skin prickle."

"Your skin prickles easily, I've noticed."

"It isn't fitting for a woman of your position."

"I'll show you some new ones. Bill and I have an understanding."

"What does that mean?"

"I do what I want. And he can go to hell if he doesn't like it."

"That's some way to talk about a millionaire."

"Puddy poo."

When she called on Wednesday, I didn't want to see her again and told her I had a meeting. (I was afraid of Bill, and I didn't think I ever wanted to see again someone who had called me puddy poo.)

"I'm at the hair dresser," she said on Thursday the week after.

"I was expecting you yesterday," I lied again.

"You'll have to take me when you can get me. Let's have lunch."

"It can't he done."

"I'll pay."

"It's not that."

"You think I'm homely?"

"No. I think you're sexy as hell."

"So does he, puddy poo."

"Who?"

"The guy I'll meet instead. You're not the only fish in the sea, baby. We'll talk about you."

"Does he know me?"

"We'll have a big laugh."

"Who is it?"

"That's for me to know and you to find out."

(I began to feel she had the whammy on me.) I began to believe she would come up to the office unannounced at any time just to make a fool of me in front of the others there.

"You're afraid of me, puddy poo, aren't you?" she taunted prankishly the next time we met at a party, and she did indeed — while my wife and her husband observed from different parts of the house — tweak my nose. "Isn't he, Mrs. Slocum?"

"I wish he were afraid of me," my wife yelled back.

"Call me Wednesday," I ordered her curtly. "And I'll show you how afraid I am."

"I'm at the Plaza," she said when she called.

"I think I've got the flu," I apologized with a snuffle.

"I thought you might, baby," she chirruped pleasantly, "so I brought along a list. And I do mean baby. You come on much better at parties. You're not the only fish in the sea."

I wish I had her on her knees again right here right now. Alongside Virginia. I've done it with my wife here in my study many times. My wife and I go on honeymoon sprees still, lashing all about the house and grounds in frothing spasms. We need liquor. We've done it in all the rooms by now except the children's and Derek's nurse's. We've done it in our attached garage at night when we did not want to risk waking up anybody inside, and we've done it outside in the darkness on soaking wet grass. (If we had a swimming pool, I'm sure we'd try it in there at least once.) We've done it on our redwood patio furniture. I whiff her dense perfume again (and turn around to look). Of course her husband knew. I wonder how he stood it. I know it vexes me almost beyond toleration — I could bang bricks against my head with both hands — to recall I was called puddy poo not long ago and tweaked on the nose in public by someone tasteless and vulgar like her and that my garters were the source of innane merriment to that uninteresting Ann Arbor dropout who wore denim jeans and jackets and never seemed clean. I do not want such people to enjoy even a moment's advantage over me. I wish I had them both magnetized on computer tape and could bring them back to start all over again. It would be the same. One would tweak my nose, the other would smile and quiz me presumptuously about my garters. I called her once two months later to make a date and had to call her again to break it. I did want to see her.

"This time it's true," I explained. "I have to be out of town. Let me call you when I get back."

She sounded unexcited both times, as though all the tittering had run out of her. She didn't seem to care.

"It's all right," she said. "You're okay. My looks are gone. I lost them overnight."

She and her husband split up, and both have moved away. The children were all at college. The house stands empty and no one knows if it's for sale. I suppose my wife and I will have to split up finally too when the children are away at college. I hope it doesn't have to happen sooner while I'm changing jobs at the company or while my daughter is still mired indecisively in adolescence and high school and my boy stands rooted numbly in terror of Forgione and rope climbing and gives no sure indication yet of whether he will make his way up or down. She has nothing to do.

"I have nothing to do."

She has nothing to do but align herself unpassionately with the new women liberationists (although all that blatant discussion about orgasm, masturbation, and female homosexuality makes her uneasy).

"That's only because," I inform her, "you've been conditioned to react that way by a male-dominated society."

She is not certain whether I am siding with her or not.

"Why should you," she wonders dejectedly, "have all the advantages?"

"Do I seem to you," I answer mildly, "a person with all the advantages?"

"You've got a job."

"Get a job."

She shakes her head with a soft snicker. "I don't want to work." (She does have a sense of humor.)

"Do you want more money?"

"It's not money. You always think it's money. I've got nothing to do."

"Have love affairs. Commit adultery."

"Is that what you want?"

"It's not what I want. I can give you more money, if it will make you happier. I'll be able to."

"That's not what I want. There isn't anything I can do."

"Cure cancer. Money isn't shit, you know."

"Please don't get mad at me tonight."

"Money is love, baby, and that's no shit. I'm not getting mad."

"I'm feeling so bad."

"Don't drink whiskey after wine, and maybe you won't feel so bad."

"I may be getting my period. You even look younger than I do. And that's not fair."

"You'll live longer. Women do."

"But I'll look older."

"What do you expect, if you live longer? At least you're alive."

"I was kidding," she says. "You don't even know when I'm kidding. It's getting harder and harder to talk to you."

My own good joke about Freud, money, and excrement went right by her, and I suppose I will have to leave her for something like that someday (she has never heard of Copernicus or Kierkegaard either, although she may have heard of Camus because he was killed in an expensive sports car), although I would not want to do it while my little boy still appears in such precarious need of me. (I am not sure he needs me at all.) I do not feel he'd last if I died suddenly or moved out. (He would not know what hit him if I were gone. My daughter's wish to steal our automobile may be a wholesome development: it gives her a goal to work toward.) When he grows up and gets away from me, I will get away from him. My daughter will be away too and there'll be only Derek, if we still have him. I wouldn't want to move away and stick my wife with a retarded child. Actually, I would like to stick her with Derek. She stuck me with him. (And he won't even be a child then.) But everyone would be on her side, unless I left her for another woman, which would change everything, because that would be romantic. I think I'd elope. There'd be lots of:

"Why did he leave his wife? They have a retarded child, don't they?"

"He fell in love with another girl and ran off with her."

"Oh."

But change that to:

"Why did he leave his wife with a retarded child?"

"He didn't want to be married anymore."

And there'd be plenty of:

"He was only thinking of himself, wasn't he?"

And:

"How selfish. That poor woman. He left her alone with a retarded child just because he didn't want to be married to her. What will the poor woman do?"

I can hear those choruses of opprobrium reverberating to the four comers of the company. Not that I'm much help to her now when it comes to him. I don't have the strength. I'd rather slink off or look away. Someone will have to make the decision for me: she will, without even realizing she is doing it, or a doctor will have to aid us with an unambiguous recommendation based on anything but our own selfishness. (Our conscience must be clear.)

"He'll be much better off there, safer. They have good ones now. It's best for all of you, the other children too. It hasn't been fair to them. You deserve a rest. You've both been marvelous. I know it will be hard to give him up."

Or an illness or accident will have to occur.

Till then, I'm powerless. (I don't have the guts even to want to talk about it. I've got no answers to the unspoken criticism I imagine I'll hear. I do not want to listen for the rest of my life to my wife's second thoughts. I could forgive myself in a second for putting him away. She would not forgive either of us.) I am not the pillar of support she wants. I keep my mouth shut and my sentiments suppressed, and I adamantly refuse to merge my feelings with hers. (I won't share my sorrows. I don't want her to have a part in them. They're all mine.) I wish I had no dependents. It does not make me feel important to know that people are dependent on me for many things. It's such a steady burden, and my resentment is larger each time I have to wait for her to stop crying and clinging to me and resume placing the silverware in the dishwasher or doing her isometric hip and thigh exercises. (I can't stand a woman who cries at anything but funerals. I feel used.)

"For God sakes, what do you want from me of all people, Jesus Christ?" I roar at her. "They're my children, too. Do you really expect me to feel sorry for you?"

"I need someone to talk to. I wasn't asking you to feel sorry for me. Can't I even say how I feel?"

"Call your sister. You know damn well I can't stand crying anymore." I don't want to hear how she feels. I don't want to have to talk to anyone about Derek. I don't want to have to hear anyone talk about his own troubles. (I find it harder and harder to feel sorry for anyone but myself.) "I can't help you with this. I don't know how. I didn't order it this way and I don't know what to do, either."

And I saw it happening before anyone. Someone cursed us. I am ashes and stale air inside when it comes to him, have the fortitude and fiber of dried mushrooms and wet fallen leaves. I am cold. I could have prophesied. When pediatricians said he was slow, I saw he was clumsy. His knees and feet and fingers seemed angled slightly out of kilter. I discerned he could not seem to hold his head up straight for long. I had a feeling of disaster about him even before he was born (but I had that anxious feeling about the others too). I expected a Mongoloid. I would have settled readily beforehand for a harelip or cleft palate and trusted to surgery — with all three — although I can't visualize either my boy or my daughter wading through life even this far with any kind of serious birth defect. They've had trouble enough without it. I can't see how my wife really expects me to feel sorry for her when I have so many good reasons for feeling sorry for myself. Among them, her.

I want to get free of her before her health fails. I see an ailing wife in my future. There are eloquent forerunners now of chronic invalidism. (She's sure she has, is getting, will get cancer, and maybe she will.) I know her health will degenerate before mine does. She's better at it. I don't want to be tied to her by sickness (hers, that is). I will. I'll get battered by continuing hurricane warnings of bursitis, arthritis, rheumatism, diabetes, varicose veins, dizziness, nausea, tumors, cysts, angina, polyps, the whole fucking shebang of physical dissolution. (I can do without everyone else's but my own.) I'll be caught on that barb. And my grown-up children will keep me there.

"Dad, how can you even think of leaving her, when she's feeling so bad?" they'll say to me in reproof.

"But how can I ever leave her, when she never feels better?"

They'll get away from it all quickly enough (the self-centered fuckers).

"I don't feel well," my wife wakes up whimpering some mornings in a little girl's voice (when she feels someone wants something from her).

As if I care.

("I was watching you sleep," a girl will tell you while she's still in love with you. "You were snoring."

When she's not in love with you, it's revolting, and she will not want to see you again unless she's lonely or needs your money.)

My wife snores now sometimes, and occasionally her breath is bad in the morning. But, so is mine, and so do I, so we are already in a headlong race toward decrepitude. The children join in with sniveling complaints of their own.

My daughter gets sore throats and stomach pains. My boy pleads tiredness and nausea and will sleep past noon some days if we let him. I use headaches. So does my wife. I've got chest pains I can draw upon, for everybody has great respect for a heart attack, and a liver up my sleeve I can play in a clutch. My wife can counter with cancer scares, and it's even-Stephen down to the wire in the shadow of the valley of Blue Cross major medical benefits. Wouldn't it be a laugh if my wife died of chest pains and I was the one who got cancer? When my wife is depressed and my daughter drops innuendoes of suicide, I can plunge into thick, sepulchral silences for days and feign such absorbed distraction that every remark to me has to be repeated — I can out-ail any of them at anything but hysterectomies if I want to make the effort, any of them but Derek, who begins with certain congenital handicaps that are impossible for me to overcome. (Ha, ha.) All of us boast of insomnia, not always truthfully. Were we taken at our word, not one member of the family has ever enjoyed a good night's sleep. Except, perhaps, Derek, who just can't bring himself to complain. (Ha, ha.) I wonder what's done with them in homes when they reach sexual maturity and discover they might just as well masturbate as do anything else. I'm glad he's not a girl. Castration's inhuman. So they cut off their arms. I wonder how they control attendants. How do they keep them away from the idiot boys and girls? My thoughts go haywire when I try to think of him. Tell me he'll not progress to a mental age past five: and I find myself thinking again if people at five know how to clean themselves properly after defecating. Of course not. My boy of nine still leaves stains on his undershorts, and so do I. (So does everyone, probably, so why must I single out us?) I see him now so lovely, touching, and pitiful I can't bear to look. I see him next at thirty moving toward sixty, and he is appalling. I am dazed, horrified, stricken dumb. Dark hair is growing on his face and on the backs of his hands, and his eyebrows are bushy. Will he look like me? He'll be balding. His suit won't fit. No one will groom him. His dandruff falls like fish scales. I color his sweaters and jackets dark and his face pale. He is slack-jawed and flabby as they steer him about, he is repulsive, lame, and monstrous. He still won't be able to speak. He will not know how to diet or play tennis, squash, or golf, and his build and muscle tone will be sickly. He'll be ungainly. People would stare with hostility if he were anywhere else. They'll forget to clip his fingernails. People will want to kill him. They'll call him Benjy. I will not want to visit him. I hope I can't remember him. I hope I don't find out my wife is committing adultery, even though she probably should.

"Do it," I'd advise, if she were someone else's.

"Okay. I will."

It might do wonders for her morale, if she didn't expect too much. It's also time she struck back. Wouldn't it be funny if my boy is the one who turns out to be homosexual and I do not? It would be tragic. I, at least, have inhibitions of steel. It would be worse than tragic for me: it would be socially embarrassing. A suicide, a fag, and an idiot, the Slocum offspring from the Slocum loins. And an alcoholic, neurasthenic, adulterous wife. God bless the girl — she'd come in handy. I'd blame the children on her. Until someone as astute as I am pointed an accusatory finger at me and inquired:

"Hey, wait a minute, buddy. Buddy, wait a minute. Was she always this way?"

"I don't know. All of this takes time to mature and emerge. You'll have to ask some reliable, revolutionary, evolutionary, psychological historian, an experienced botanist of the psyche. Was I this way?"

"You made me this way."

"You made me make you."

"You made me make you make me. Why can't I talk to you?"

"Call your sister."

"I need a sympathetic ear."

"You drink too much."

"You make me."

"Call your sister and complain to her."

"I hate my sister. You know it."

"She has a sympathetic ear."

"You bastard," she blurts out. "You just can't wait to get away from me, can you? I know what you're thinking. I can tell by the way you look."

More and more often lately, I find myself looking her over critically evenings for stains and bite marks of illicit sexuality. I feel cheated when I don't find any.

"What'd you do today?" I'm the one who's likely to ask.

"Nothing."

"Shopping."

"Went to the beauty parlor."

"Saw my sister."

"Saw some friends. Why?"

"Just curious."

"What'd you do?"

"Worked. Nothing."

"Anything happen?"

"It's moving along, I think. I don't want to talk about it."

"Jinx?"

"That's talking about it."

"I'll knock wood."

There are even mornings now when I catch myself scrutinizing her for stains and blemishes obsessively with the same aggressive and scavenging suspicions, and this, I know, is irrational, for she has spent the night in bed with me. I don't want to go crazy. I like to keep tight rein on my reason, thoughts, and actions, and to know always which is which. I don't want to lose my inhibitions. I might hit people if I did (strangers, friends, and loved ones), commit murder, spout hatred and bigotry, scratch eyeballs, molest teen-age girls and younger ones with trim figures, come on crowded subway trains against the side of a hefty buttock on someone like my wife or Penny. Dreams are merciless; they come upon you when you're asleep.

I might start stuttering.

Waking up is such a peculiar and extraordinary process that I'm surprised we are able to manage it successfully so many times while we are still half asleep.

I think I might get used to the idea of my wife's copulating with other men, but never to the specifics, the mechanics, to all that probing and liquid, all those grunts and strenuous bendings. Everything gets wet. Places are raw or bruised afterward. I don't like to picture my wife ever doing with another male the things she does with me. Or my daughter. (Will he put — of course. Will she — why not?) Everything does get so wet and smelly, and this is called making love. Beasts do it. It has no connection with love, q.v., op. cit. (But better wet and smelly, for my taste, than dry and perfumed. I hate those artificial, candy-store scents. I want to embrace human flesh with musky, natural odors, not a bar of soap.) Even business handshakes these days have turned wet and smelly. Show me a young man with a dry, pumping handshake today and I'll show you an unscrupulous young man on the make. I wish my daughter would stop leaving her bra around where I can see it and stop leaving her nightgown hanging on the door of the bathroom. She's developed fast and knows it. I see the way she dresses sometimes to go out, and I am furious. (She has bigger breasts now than my wife.) I can barely look at her as she pauses in front of me to wait for the money she says she needs. (There isn't anything I can say that wouldn't be derogatory and crushing to her self-esteem at a moment when she might be feeling good about herself. I wish she'd always wear her bra instead of leaving it tossed around. She'll wear blue denim jeans and doesn't always look clean. She reminds me of Ann Arbor. Every girl I meet these days reminds me of a different one I've known.)

"No wonder they say dirty things to you when you walk past. You're asking for it. If you get raped you deserve it."

She'd break down immediately into sobbing hysteria.

"You always do that," she'd accuse shrilly (while my boy watches from a corner in apprehensive deliberation, and I am already sorry I started). "You always say something to spoil everything."

"I have spoken to her," my wife replies in wilted exasperation. "She thinks I'm mean and jealous. She thinks I'm envious because I've got no tits."

"You've got tits."

If anything does happen to my daughter these days, it will probably happen with that college graduate she's mentioned who works on a land-fill track and has offered to give her driving lessons evenings and weekends if we let them have one of our cars.

"No."

My wife nods in agreement. "You have to be sixteen."

"I can get a little head start. Everyone else does. You want me to pass, don't you?"

I want her to pass geometry, English, French, social studies, and science — not driver education. And I want her to get at least a B average so she'll be able to go off to college when she's through. (I won't want her here.) I don't see how I'll ever be able to make conversation with a simpering, clever son-in-law much younger than I who I know is humping my daughter quietly in another part of the house when they come to visit us weekends. My wife will bake cakes for them and look forward to grandchildren. (She's the one with the dirty mind.) They'll want things from us and lie to me.

"Maybe she won't. Maybe she'll be different. Maybe she'll grow up by the time she's married."

"We didn't."

"What do you mean?"

My wife doesn't understand me. I don't think she ever thinks I'm thinking she might be out screwing another man or that I am inspecting her belly, hair, thighs, neck, chest, panties, slips, and blouses systematically and belligerently for semen stains that aren't mine. (My wife has one of those light and softly sloping bellies you often see in photographs of attractive, long-waisted girls.) Often when I'm inspecting her hair and belly closely my antagonism turns into passion (to antagonistic passion, of course, otherwise known as lust, and I will want to make love). I'll have to leave her if I find one. I have something more potent than an ordinary hypocritical, male chauvinist double standard to give me the strength and determination to walk out: I have insecurity.

I have forgotten all about brain tumors, the thirteenth largest killer of undivorced men my age in Connecticut with three children, two cars, and an opportunity for promotion to a better job. No wonder I have to yell a lot at home to make my identity felt. (I don't really want to be feared; I want to be nursed and coddled. I don't get the love and sympathy from my family that I used to get as a child from my mother and certain women teachers. God dammit — I want to be treated like a baby sometimes by my wife and kids. I've got a right. I need that feeling of security. I'm not one of these parents that expect to be taken care of by their children in their old age: I want my children to take care of me now.) My wife believes I enjoy being home with her these days; she cannot detect that I can hardly wait to get out of the house to the office to be near Arthur Baron (with whom I am exchanging glances these days, I think, that are of more than ordinary significance).

The convention's in Puerto Rico again (to do rightful honor to Lester Black's wife's family), and Kagle's away in Toledo. My wife will find it hard to forgive me for firing Andy Kagle (until I tell her unequivocally it's him or me. Then she'll look over my shoulder into a distance and not wish to know anything more about it). My wife feels sorry for Kagle's leg, wife, and two children. My wife empathizes easily with all religious families, except Black ones, and except Jewish ones, whose foreign language ("It isn't even Latin.") and incomprehensible praying seem crude and offensive to her. (She thinks they are praying about us.) Even their holidays fall on different days. (They are a perverse and stiff-necked people. She does not want our daughter to marry one, although she'd prefer that to a Puerto Rican or Negro.) Kagle won't improve. He still goes to church with his family when he's home on a Sunday and to places like Toledo on business for a week and to low-class whores in the late afternoon. He is still a bigot and won't hire a Jew or fuck a Black girl, unless he's away at some business meeting on an island in the Caribbean. Then he likes them young; he's had them fifteen and would take them thirteen and eleven, I think, but would feel abnormal. I have to fire him; I've been to whores with him and can't forgive him or forget. He'll hover. He'll bump shoulders with me, snigger indecorously. "Aw, come on, Bob. Cut it out. I know you. Remember when.»

"It never happened. And if it did, I don't remember and you have to pay."

I will shift his hard-drinking cronies in out-of-town offices around to new positions in different cities and hope they quit. Arthur Baron and I do not talk much about matters like this when we meet by chance in corridors, but there is a diplomatic understanding now, I feel, in the small talk he makes.

"How are you, Bob?" he'll always stop me now to say.

"Fine, Art. You?"

"That's good. Horace White tells me he gets a big kick out of you."

"I like Horace White a lot, Art. He's a fine man."

(My facts are wrong but my answer is right.)

Horace White approves. Does Lester Black? Johnny Brown will go growling to him in dissension when he learns I'm his boss. Black probably won't care. It's out of his area, and Black is ready to retire anyway and spends much time out of the office sailing.

I did my best to dissuade Kagle from going to Toledo (and knew, of course, I would fail. My conscience is almost clear.

"Stay in town, Andy. You know Arthur Baron wants you here."

"I'll tie it in with a supermarket promotion," he responds with one of his conspiratorial winks. "Heh-heh. You'll see.").

"Kagle in Chicago, Bob?"

"Toledo."

"There? He told Laura Chicago. What's there?"

"He might come back with a supermarket promotion."

"He shouldn't be the one to do that."

"He phones in every day. I know where I can reach him. He asked me to cover the office."

"Good, Bob. We'll have to start making our preparations for the convention. I'd like it to go very smoothly this year."

"I think it will, Art."

"So do I. Horace White gets back to town next week and he and I'll start setting up our meetings upstairs. Are you ready to make some enemies?"

"If I have to."

"You'll have some friends."

I'll have some speeches, too. I'll need Kagle for the convention. He'll do that well, claiming credit for having engineered the changes himself and professing gladness at having shed administrative responsibilities he did not want and being free at last to do the type of work he really enjoys. No one will believe him. But that won't matter. After that, I won't want him around.

"What will you want to do about Andy Kagle?" Arthur Baron will ask.

"I think I'd want him to open the convention."

"I think that's good."

"I think he'll do that well. He'll smile enough without being told."

"And afterward?"

"I don't want him around."

"Would you want to keep him on as a consultant or use him on special projects?"

"No, Art."

"He could be useful."

"But not here. I think it might be a bad idea to have him around."

"I think you're right, Bob."

"Thanks, Art."

Of course, I can't fire Kagle. (If I could fire people, I would fire Green, and I would fire the typist Martha, who is still going crazy slowly but not fast enough to suit me.) I can merely indicate that I don't want him around and the company will move him somewhere else. I wish somebody else would fire her before I have to make Green do it.

"Art," I might say. "Have you got a minute?"

"How are you, Bob?"

"Fine, Art. You?"

"That's good, Bob."

"There's a girl in Green's department with a serious mental problem. She's going crazy. I think she talks to herself in imaginary conversations. She laughs to herself. It doesn't really help the appearance of the department to have her there."

"Is she happy?" he might ask.

"Only when she laughs," I answer. "But she stops typing then and her productivity suffers."

"Tell Green to get rid of her."

If he says that, it will signify he wants me to start issuing instructions to Green and take dominion over his department. If he says:

"I'll talk to Green."

That means he wishes us to maintain our departments separately (and I will not be downcast, for there's an advantage in having Green's department to shift blame to).

If, with an expression of sobriety, he asks:

"What would you do?"

"She probably has a fair amount of sick leave coming to her," I'll answer. "And after that her major medical hospitalization insurance can take over, if she wants to use it. People who go on voluntary sick leave for mental disorders almost never try to come back."

"That's good, Bob. It sounds like the kindest way for her."

"The jobs aren't held open. We can tell her that, if she reapplies. One of the nurses can tell her she needs a rest."

"But I'm happy here. I smile and laugh all day."

"It's just for a little while, dear. We — they — have to cut down."

(Sick leave is what I am holding in reserve for Red Parker.)

(He'll think I'm slipping him a favor.)

(Wait till he tries to come back.)

(I'm so smart I ought to be President.)

I might even start using Red Parker's apartment again when he's no longer with the company. It will not dawn on him for a while that he's not with the company but outside it, and there will be major medical benefits for me in his major medical insurance policy. His job will be filled. (He will be filed.) The opening he left will be closed if he tries to come back. (He probably won't. He'll get used to doing nothing and jumping about aimlessly on reckless vacations.)

People who go on voluntary extended sick leave for anything but surgery or serious accidents almost never try to come back. They don't feel up to it. (Even people who've been out awhile with hepatitis or mononucleosis have a hard time making their way back. They lack pep.) (Long after they've left, somebody who enjoys keeping track of people (in the army, it was our public relations officer) drops by to tell us they're dead (or suffered a "cerebral vascular accident," and then we know they really are gone for good. Or bad, ha, ha).

"Did you hear about Red Parker? Or Andy Kagle? Or Jack Green?" someone like Ed Phelps will stop by to say, if Ed Phelps isn't dead by then too. Ed Phelps will be dropping in often after he's retired (like Horace White with his wheelchair and metal canes after he falls ill, or pushed into the office on a stretcher on wheels, waving hello limply as he rolls past, by an inscrutable Black chauffeur in meticulous gray livery. How will I look when I'm eighty and toothless? I'll have no teeth — periodontal work will not preserve my deteriorating jawbone forever — and my ankles and arches grow worse. My nose will be closed, and I'll breathe through an open mouth. My fingers will roll pills. I've met me already in hospitals and photographs. How will I smell? I know how I will smell. I smell that smell now and don't like it) because he will have no place else to go. It would not surprise me if Ed Phelps began showing up at my army reunions (in place of me. I've never gone) as another surplus survivor. (We really have no need for that many survivors anymore.) "I'm not sure what it was," he'll keep repeating about Red Parker. "I wonder who'll take care of the children. How many did he have?"

No one will know or care. With everyone else at the company these days I try to maintain an artless and iridescent neutrality. Jane knows I've stopped flirting with her.

"What's the matter, big boy?" I hear her on the verge of baiting me. "Get cold feet? Afraid your mean little wifey might find out? Or maybe you're just afraid you can't get it up often enough for a young girl."

Jane is not a person to say anything like that, or even think it, but I witness the scene anyway and wonder how I can get out of it. Outside the office, I have begun training myself assiduously and realistically for the higher responsibilities that lie ahead: I am organizing speeches and I am playing golf. I am outlining the speeches I will need for the convention (mine and Kagle's) and for the corridors at the company.

"Gee whiz," goes one. "You're surprised? How do you thinkI felt? You could have knocked me over with a feather."

(I wrote that one in a minute.) And I have got myself new golf clubs and clothes. My daughter thinks I look good in my whites and pastels and in my peaked caps. (My daughter is most pleased with me when I look handsome.) My wife is perplexed. She thinks I've gone back to golf because I want to flirt with college girls at the different clubs I'm invited to. I don't know how to flirt with college girls anymore and wouldn't want to if I did. They're kids. (And none seem to be sending out signals to me or any other golfer my age. They send them out to good tennis players. I have decided not to flirt at parties or anywhere else if my wife is with me and might be embarrassed, and I wish she would stop flirting when drunk and stop embarrassing me.) I'll give her more money. I take private lessons secretly on public courses weekends and accept invitations I get to private clubs. My wife won't take up golf again because she knows she won't excel at it, and she hates going to a club for lunch or dinner because of the people she finds there. All of them are divorcing. Everyone everywhere seems to be coming to an end. I'll buy another house. My wife wants that. It will please my daughter, who is keenly sensitive to friends in families with more money and not mindful at all of those with less, like the college graduate on the land-fill truck who says he wants to get her into a car at night in order to give her driving lessons. (I know the kind of lessons he wants to give her. I'd like to kick him in his stomach and jaw with my knee. How dare be deal in dirty thoughts about my buxom sixteen-year-old? How can she know so many people and still be lonely?) We'll have to buy a bigger house because the kitchen table in this one is too small.

"Golf?" says my boy, in squinting confusion.

"It's a game."

"He's playing again," my wife says. My boy looks hurt, my wife is crabby. He isn't used to seeing me all dolled up and raring to get away from home so early on a Sunday morning.

"If I wasn't going," I say to him, "is there anything you would want me to do with you?"

He shakes his head pensively. "You can go. Swimming, maybe."

"It won't be hot enough. Mommy can drive you to the beach club."

"I don't like it there."

"Do you have anything else to do?"

"Watch television. I saw some golf on television."

"You hit a ball in a hole."

"Like pool?" he ventures hopefully.

"Pocket pool," I joke.

"Don't start," warns my wife.

"What's pocket pool?"

"Not on Sunday. Not at breakfast."

"The Lord's day," my daughter intones in mocking solemnity.

"I'll tell you Monday."

"I know," my daughter brags.

"I'll bet you do."

"Are you getting angry?" she asks me with surprise.

"Of course not," I answer, dissembling a bit. It doesn't please me that she knows. (And I remember again that I saw her the night before riding around town in the back of a car with boys. I'm just not able to talk to her long these days without wanting to say something stinging. There is latent animosity between us always. I don't know why.)

"I'll leave the table if you are."

"Don't be silly."

"I am," my wife declares.

"I've made my date. I can't help you today. I'll go to church with you next week."

"We're away next week."

"Do you like it?" my boy asks.

"Church?"

"Golf."

"No."

"He hates it," my daughter tells him.

"You got it," I praise her. "I even hate the people I play with."

"Why do you go?" His face furrows with puzzlement.

"It's good for me."

"For your health?"

"For his business," my daughter guesses correctly, mimicking me with comical accuracy.

"You got it again, daughter," I praise her again. "It gets me better jobs. It helps me make money, for all of you honeys."

"Will you buy me my own car, since you're making so much money?"

"When I lower my handicap. This table's too small. I don't see why we can't eat in the dining room."

"I didn't know we'd all get here at the same time. Usually I have to eat breakfast alone, along with everything else."

"You sound bitchy."

"I don't see why you have to play on Sunday morning."

"It's when I'm invited."

"You go for lessons."

"It's when I can. Go alone, can't you?"

"I don't want to go alone. I have a family, haven't I?"

"You're going with God, remember?"

"Don't make jokes about it."

"Go with them."

"They won't go either unless you go. You influence them."

"You'll go with her, won't you?"

"Don't make them."

"Don't be a hypocrite, Dad."

"We'll all go on Mother's Day."

"And that will make it Father's Day."

"We hate the people we have to pray with," my daughter wisecracks brightly, and my boy giggles.

"That's good," I compliment her, laughing also. "I'm proud of you for that."

"I love it," my wife says, "when the three of you find me so funny. They get that from you. They think they can be funny about anything."

"They can." (She is starting to ruin my whole day.) It's been close to a very delightful family meal for everyone but my wife, and I wish I were through with it and out of there. "You know, I don't get any of this at the office."

"I don't get it at the beauty parlor."

"Good."

"You aren't married to people at the office."

"I got it the first time. Why must you repeat everything?"

"You really do stink."

"We're only kidding, kids. You do this every week."

"Have some eggs," she answers in a low voice.

"You're ruining my whole day."

"You're ruining mine."

"I'll have some juice. You do this every week, don't you? Every time I have a day off."

It isn't true, but she doesn't answer. Her face is set in lines of stubborn silence. Her hand is quivering on the handle of the large glass pitcher. We'll have fresh orange juice when I take the trouble to make it, from a cold glass pitcher instead of the lighter gummy plastic one she and the maid find easier to use. The children sit as still as replicas in a store, hiding inside their own faces as they wait to see what will happen. And my day had begun so auspiciously: I had made love to her at night when I'd wanted to and had avoided doing so in the morning when I didn't by scooting downstairs and starting to prepare breakfast while she was in the bathroom. (She had given me signals I didn't want.) I will find it difficult to forgive her for spoiling my morning. Even fresh oranges taste fraudulent today. Oranges aren't good anymore. It may be something in the soap we use to clean glasses or something in the water. Soda fountains serve ice cream sodas now in paper cups or clouded plastic glasses that don't get cold and don't give back flavor. Nothing stands up. London Bridge is falling down and was shipped to Arizona as a tourist attraction. I make better eggs and bacon than anyone because I take more trouble than anyone else does. I make garlic toast the way my mother used to, and it's just as good. That's easy. Everyone likes it. Nothing's pure anymore. Not even people. I decide to use jokes.

"Be honest now, honey," I begin to cajole her.

"They'll go if you go," she breaks in curtly.

My boy shakes his head.

"I won't," announces my daughter.

"You told me not to make them."

"I feel all alone in the whole world."

"Will I have to?" complains my boy.

"Be honest, honey," I begin again, touching her arm. (I'll have to leave her, if only for making me do that.) "Would you rather be poor and go to heaven, or rich and go to hell?"

"That isn't the question," my wife argues.

"It's my question."

"How poor?" my daughter quips tentatively.

"I don't care as much about money as you think I do."

"I do," croons my daughter. "I like to have all I can get."

"You want a new house, don't you?"

"What's criminal about that?"

"Nothing. Would you rather be poor and go to heaven or rich and — go to hell."

She smiles resignedly. "Go to hell," she tells me, picking up my cue.

And I sense that the storm has passed and I might yet succeed in sailing away from them all unscathed. I feel like celebrating.

"That's my girl," I exclaim affectionately to my wife.

"I'm tired anyway," she admits without a grudge.

"Go alone."

"I don't like to. I'll stay in bed and read the papers. I'll watch Gilbert and Sullivan. Sounds exciting. Doesn't it?"

"I love money," my daughter declares in a manner of robust cheer. "I think I really do."

"Do all poor people," my boy asks seriously, "go to heaven?"

"Do you believe in heaven?"

"No."

"Then how can they go there?"

"Very funny," he observes wryly, frowning. "If I did believe in heaven, would all poor people go there?"

"They haven't a chance."

"No. Really."

"They haven't a chance in hell. What kind of place would heaven be if all those poor people were around?"

"Are we poor?" he wants to know.

"No."

"Then why can't you buy her a car?"

"That's the boy."

"I can. Let her learn how to drive."

"I'm almost sixteen."

"Then we'll talk about it. I've got the money. So don't worry about being poor. And I'll soon have more."

"I think I love money," my daughter brags daringly, "more than anything else in the world. I love it more than ice cream."

"Someone, my daughter, might think that ungracious."

"I don't care. I love it like the last spoon of ice cream on a plate."

"Money really talks, young lady, doesn't it?"

"It sure does."

"How come?"

"Because money, young man, is everything."

"What about health?" says my wife.

"It won't buy money. And that's why you shouldn't give your dimes and nickels away."

"I don't anymore."

"I would never give it away," my daughter asserts self-righteously.

"I don't think, daughter dear, that you ever have, heh-heh. Money makes the world go round, young man, and money makes history too."

"How come?"

"You take history, don't you?"

"It's called social studies."

"Money makes social studies. Without money there would be no social studies."

"How come?"

"What Dad means," explains my daughter, "is that the love of money and the quest for gold and riches in the past is what caused most of the events we read about today in all our history books. Right, Dad?"

"Right indeed, my darling daughter. You got it again. I'm glad to see you're learning something more in school than pocket pool and rolling drugs, and how to walk around the house without any clothes on."

I am more startled than she is when I see her gasp and turn white. (I don't know why I said that then. I swear to Christ I don't know where those words came from. I know they didn't come from me.)

Her voice is a whispered plea. "Did you have to say that?"

I murmur no. "I didn't."

"Yes, you did," she charges. "You always do, don't you?"

"I'm sorry."

"You always spoil things. You ruin things for everybody. Doesn't he?"

My wife looks like she's going to cry.

"You knew I was kidding."

"Should I go?"

"No. We both were. But I've told you before not to walk around the house without a robe on."

"May I please leave the table?"

"No, stay. I'll go." (I feel inept, clumsy.) "Can't we make up? I have to go anyway. Heh-heh."

She's ruining my whole day too (even though it's all my fault. And it isn't even ten o'clock). That octopus of aversion had been there in bed with me and my wife again this morning when she awoke me with languorous mumbles and by snuggling close, that meaty, viscous, muscular, vascular barrier of sexual repugnance that rises at times (when she takes the initiative. It may be that I prefer to do the wanting). I eluded it spryly: before my wife knew what was happening, I was downstairs in the kitchen halving oranges, making coffee, and breaking eggs. I don't know where it comes from or why it does (and I don't ever want to find out). It seems to come from the brain, the heart, and the small intestines in a coordinated assault. (Men with heart attacks, I know, use them to avoid having sexual relations with their wives, though not with their girl friends, unless they are tiring of them. I make coffee and break eggs. I get a feeling of tremendous personal satisfaction whenever I hear that someone I know has left his wife. It serves the bitches right. Yesterday in a gourmet store I overheard one woman tell another that some man I didn't even know had left his wife, and my mood soared. I feel despondent afterward, sorry for myself, left out of things again.

"What are you looking so pleased about?" I could hear my wife saying, as I returned to the car.

"The price of artichokes," I offer in reply, or better still:

"A man left his wife.")

The wall of aversion was there again in my head and my breast even as I came awake (and would not go away), and I did not want her to touch me or have to touch her. (It has nothing to do with her.) I felt I might crumble to something dry and moldy where she pressed, I was soft dough or clay and would be deformed by indentations where her hands and knees pushed. I would stay that way. It is invisible and unyielding. It is heavy. It is living and it is dead. I am living and I am dead. There is grainy paralysis. It is hollow and dense. It is airless, making breath seem doubtful, arousing head pains, nausea, and sickening reminiscences of disagreeable, musty smells. It isn't fun. I have no will to overcome it. I can't confess it to her.

"I don't feel well," I'll whine. "I think it's my stomach."

"Is your chest all right?"

"I think so."

"You work too much. We never take a real vacation."

"You go away every summer."

"I don't call that a vacation. Why can't the two of us just go to Mexico? I've never been."

I would rather surrender to it and lie docile and enslaved. I would rather succumb. I would rather bide my time and wait for it to relent and recede like some risen demon returning to an underground lair somewhere inside my glands than engage it in battle or try to squeeze my way through an opening with batrachian strivings of my feet. I am a tail-less amphibian again. I have warts, but they are small, because I am small. I see myself struggling to squeeze my way through head first like a miniature white swimmer or frogman in black rubber, and the free-floating aches in my temples filter into throbbing pains in the occipital regions behind. I might never be able to come back if I ever forced my way through an opening of revulsion that pressed closed behind me. To where? There might be no here to come back to if I were there. I have wormed my way through aversion before and it has disappeared without hurting me, as though it were not even there. I imagine conversations. I wish I never had to experience it.

"C'mon, tell me," I coax my daughter. "Heh-heh. You can talk. Are you using drugs or doing dirty things with lots of boys and girls? I'll understand."

"If you really understand," my daughter reproaches me in a calm monotone, "you'd understand that you wouldn't have to ask me if I wanted you to know."

"That's smart. I'm proud of you."

"Do I have to be smart? Would you still be proud?"

"Of course."

"Of what?"

Maybe that's why her father killed himself. (She ruined his whole day.) He was probably a modest, introverted man no taller than Len Lewis who had sent the apple of his eye away to a very good southern university from which she had been kicked out for fucking football players en masse and in formation.

"En masse and in formation," she said to me with lilting gaiety, her dark eyes twinkling. "They made me do it," she went on, with flaunting radiance (so that I was never certain if she was telling the truth. She knew I loved to hear her talk about her dirty experiences. I was stirred to question her by an irresistible and ambivalent fascination. Rape enthralls). "They held me down at the beginning. But then I began to enjoy it. I showed him."

"Were you scared?"

"No. I was really crazy about that quarterback. Was he conceited. We did it once in a canoe. Did you ever do it in a canoe?"

"Weren't you mad?"

"Of course not. But he was. At me. He didn't think I'd enjoy it, but I showed him. He was the biggest thing on campus, and I had him for a while. I think I was the only Jew there. He wouldn't see me after that."

"Show me."

"I bet you'd faint."

"I bet I wouldn't."

"I bet they still remember it at Duke. They should put up a statue. I gave them a winning season."

It did not please me entirely to hear her talk about it all that way (I missed at least a shadow of repentance), and I would have rebuked and punished her severely if I had the right and the means. I would have slapped her face. (There was jealousy.) My wife and I started to try it once in a rowboat after we were married, but she turned shy and made me row her to an island.

I'd recognize now that she was slightly crazy and likely to kill herself too when the brazen euphoria ran out. (She would not know how to subsist without it.) I'd also understand she was moody and that much of her exuberance was forced. I think Penny might kill herself without much fuss a few years from now if something engrossing and lasting doesn't happen to her soon — I can't help much. She knows now I won't marry her if my wife dies or if I get a divorce. I don't get close to her anymore. I come and go, ha, ha — and I think my wife will probably kill herself also when the children grow up and move away if I've left also. Maybe Derek will keep her going if we haven't sent him away by then. (The kid might come in handy for me that way too. He'll be older, though, and won't be a kid.) I wish we could do that soon. (I won't want him when he's older.) When I go, I won't look back for a second. I won't even want them to have my phone number. I'd like to change cities. Except my boy, and maybe not even him. He'll change. I'm not sure how much longer I'll want him to talk to me. If I am ever in a hospital, I will not want any of them to pay me visits and add to my distress (and I have told them so. Except my boy. I may miss him and worry he's worrying too much about me. I will be lying there dying or recuperating with a tube in my nose like a tortured political prisoner, and they will want me to make them feel better. I will not want her sister. I will not be able to keep her sister out. My small secretary will send a get-well card. And I will have to thank her). I should have known she was crazy just from that football game she played at Duke and her swift, sullen emotional changes when we had been going at each other for a minute or two like shaggy bears with clothes on against a wall of the staircase landing between floors or in the storeroom downstairs, from the frenzied terror that erupted without warning and swept over her like a storm. We met there so many times. I did want to take it out and rest it in her hand. I outlined different plans for months.

"There's something I want to do. Please let me," I said to her in a choked voice many times on the crowded subway train riding back and forth from my home to the office. (It was not always clear in my mind which was my home and which my office: I often felt more at home at the office.) "I want to put it in your hand."

(My heart was heavy and I was not able to joke.) I imagined it soft but swelling when I took it out and felt it hardening fast in her fingers.

Things always sped right by that point of negotiation. We met on the staircase landing and plunged right in. We began without words: no deals could be struck, no more subtle stratagems executed by me than to wedge my accident folders in behind her ass or back to prevent their falling. And: "Someone's coming."

And it was too late again. She'd wrench herself from my hands with little growls and mewing whimpers that seemed to originate in her mind instead of her throat, shaking free as though I were trying to restrain her. (I wasn't.) With flushed bewilderment, her bosom heaving, her breath rasping and whistling in her mouth and nose, she would glare at me in savage outrage as though I were someone new who was trying to cheat her, as though she did not know how she'd got there with me. It was panic or orgasm. (I'll compromise.) I think she dreaded the start of the inrush toward orgasm there on the staircase or even in the storeroom downstairs. I think she wanted a bed or a car. (I knew a young college girl once who told me she used to do it against the bedpost in her room before she was old enough to go away from home. I know other girls now with vibrators and rape fantasies.) She did not have to fight me so. I was a lamb. Her eyes were sharp and damning, her face accusing, her mouth poison. She hated in hectic irrationality. She would have hit me with a dagger. (It's a face I would throw away today. If that's the way she was affected, I would not want her.) She wanted me passive (as a bedpost or vibrator). She seemed unaware I was touching her inside her skirt until I had been doing it awhile. Then she was thunderstruck; she was tricked, seduced, and violated. That part of her panties still feels slick and puckered to me when I slide my thumb over my fingertips. (I have fun with it now.)

"Someone's coming," she would blurt out tearfully in a frantic, pleading whisper, grimacing at me cruelly, wishing to smash and kill, smoothing herself for a second or two, and hastening away. In the mirror of a small, round compact she brought with her she'd be checking and shaping her lipstick as she vanished in desperate flight.

I keep forgetting she was only twenty-one.

I wasn't going to harm her. I was only seventeen and a half and adored her. There would be no smile for me again until she was back in the office in her swivel chair behind the desk under that large, twitching, black and white Western Union clock, a mirthful, composed, sophisticated, experienced sex queen again. (Western Union has cut down drastically on telegram service and makes its money doing something else.) I think I was jealous and unforgiving of those hulking, primitive football players at Duke who were able to have intercourse with her in front of each other that way (make love, q. v., op. cit., ibidibibidi) and think so little of her afterward (while I thought so much. That was worse than unkind. Did they realize how mean they were being to me?).

She was cuckoo. She sometimes wore a girdle and panties both, and I still have not been able to figure out why. She was a short, kind of roly-poly pretty girl in shiny stockings and smooth, tight skirts, and I think I am still in love with her (and glad she is dead, because otherwise I might not be, and then I would have no one). She sought trouble — the rape in the storeroom was all her idea. (I use rape loosely and boldly to relieve my fear of it. Rape intrigues and excites me slightly in a sinister way that also makes me feel a little bit ill. Girls I've met are titillated by the phenomenon of rape also and have been since their teens. Stories of rape in newspapers hold my attention hypnotically if they do not involve children or beatings. I enjoy them and continue staring at the paragraphs of type after I've stopped reading. Stories of orgies are as delightful as livestock reports. What can be rare once everything is permitted? I have never wanted to rape. I have wanted to stroke, follow the contours of flesh and female clothing on strange women with my hand. The girls I find myself eyeing grow younger and younger and someday I'm afraid I might want to do what I'm afraid I might want to do.) She brought it up and led all three of us on. She did not even like one of the other two: she told me he was homely, dumb, and coarse.

"I could handle you all. I could show you a good time. I could show you what it's really all about," she taunted pertly with a speculative smile. "If you weren't all so afraid."

It was lunchtime. The other two weren't afraid, and when she came to her feet with gripping, rigid, insensible arms to begin by kissing me (for them. I remember elbows like angle irons), showing off (for them. I knew it was as far as she wanted to go. It was an awful, corrupt, inane performance on her part — I was being used like a bedpost or stage prop, while she showed off for them — unworthy of her, an unemotional, almost malign procedure speeded up for the occasion like an old movie film into a grotesque and sterile parody of muddled, bumping, fumbling motions. A marble, nonhuman tongue was knocking about my mouth and the fingers scratching wildly at my head and neck were brittle and cold. She ground her face against mine; perhaps that looked good to them. I grabbed her breast because I did not know what else I was expected to do), they went at her from the rear and sides and were under her skirt with their dozens of hands and infinity of mechanized fingernails before she knew what was happening. They were at her buttons, snaps, and elastic waistbands. They were forcing her knees in from behind and trying to press her to the floor. They had her down for a moment nearly into a squatting position. She struggled back up. "You tore my stocking."

Her face looked frantic. They kept kidding ruthlessly with hard smiles, muttering inaudible remarks incessantly to sustain the pretense it was all only a pleasant bit of horseplay that ought not to be misunderstood. (I learned for the future how to execute variations on the same masquerade from them.) I saw flashes of pale flesh and eggshell lingerie. I saw no twat or bush. I looked and was disappointed (although I did not want to). I imagined it huge, thick, and snarled. I imagine it now. The tough, gruff one she didn't like left off for a moment with one hand to go for his zipper — I flinched and tried to shut my eyes and turn away. I did not want to see his oily tube flop out. My feeling now is that it would have been soft. I knew it would be long: I'd urinated with him in the men's room. (I didn't want her to have to see it. Not in front of me.) Where was passion? Why were all of us doing it? There was not even a genuine sex drive at work — but grabbed her again when she nearly squirmed free.

"No."

Feet were scuffling on the floor and heels were kicking against the legs of chairs and the bottoms of file cabinets.

"Sure."

"Come on."

Clusters of little frightened cries and groans were sounding in her as she tried with all her might to keep her feet and maintain a smiling face. Everyone but me, it seemed, was trying to smile. Images flashed and persisted, returning under layers of each other like double exposures: glimpses of garter snaps, thighs, and stretched eggshell underthings, a masculine, crawling hand with weeds of curling, black hair on the knuckles moving briefly for a zipper, then covering her lower belly, the pinky hiking her skirt up by the hem.

"Let me go now. I mean it. Please."

"Uh-uh."

"I'm coming, Virginia."

"You've got to do it."

"You said you would."

"You know that."

"Not until you do it."

"No. I won't. Stop now. Please."

"No."

"No."

"No. Not until you do it. You've got to do it with one of us."

"You've got to do it with one of us."

"Do what?"

"You know."

"Anything."

"Just one."

"Which one?"

"You pick."

"Just one?"

"Then me. You said you could handle us all, Ginny. Prove it. Why not?"

"You're lying."

"You'll see."

"Where's that good time?"

"Be a sport."

"Be a big sport."

"Don't forget that life is short."

"It's only human nature after all."

"When a fellow gets a girl against the wall."

"Stop that. You'll break it."

"Did you ever take it into your head to make money?"

"Just one," she agreed dubiously. Her nostrils and bloodless lips were flaring and shaking skeptically and pugnaciously.

"Remember."

"Just one."

"I mean it. I'll scream. I'll tell the police."

"Horseshit. There's no need to do that."

"Pick."

She picked me.

"Him."

She looked at me for help with plaintive eyes. I thought my knees would buckle.

"Him?"

"Help me," she said.

Hands pushed me toward her.

"Let her go," I cried.

"She wants you."

"We'll watch."

"Go outside," she bargained. "Not while you're here."

"No, sir. We want to make sure."

"It's a free show."

"We may have to show him how."

"You'll lock us out."

They were still touching her all over with greedy hands, taking things that did not belong to them.

"Let her go!" I screamed threateningly, in a voice that cracked and must have quavered with hopeless cowardice and resignation. "I mean it."

(I was her hero.)

My fists were clenched in adolescent fury (and my heart was fluttering in adolescent dismay). They could have beaten me up easily, either one (taken an arm and twisted it, broken it in its socket). I felt faint with misgivings. They stared at me with amazement and scorn. She slipped free of them. I hardly noticed her leave. When I heard the door click closed, I loosened my fists and waited. I did not want to fight. I did not want them to beat me up. I don't think I would have fought to defend myself. (I would have preferred to succumb. I was like my boy in the play group. I don't think I've ever wanted to fight with anyone except my wife, my daughter, my boy, and Derek, and with Derek's nurses.) I waited to see if they would beat me up.

"You prick," they said (and I was relieved when I saw they were not going to beat me up. I was being set free).

"We could have had her."

"We'll get her without him."

That thought struck pathos into my soul. I was not allowed to feel like her hero for long. By the time I returned upstairs, she was at her desk chatting with both of them over what had happened, flirting brashly with them again, especially with the tough, coarse, sinewy one she hadn't liked (mending her torn silk stocking with colorless nail polish, lifting her breasts for him as she had always done for me, tilting her head and tempting him with her ruby, saucy smile. He was a tough, swarthy Italian, like Forgione, and I felt he had just shoved me out of the way again, as he had downstairs. I hated her. My feelings were hurt. I felt she would have fucked for him from that time on sooner than she ever would for me, if he was smart enough to pose and wait — "I'm on my back, he's in my crack," was part of another bawdy song she liked to sing to me — even though she still liked me better), and I felt pangs of jealousy. (What good did it amount to, being liked, if she wanted to fuck for people she didn't like?)

"You were jealous," she said. "Weren't you?"

I must have been gazing at her moon-eyed with all the pain of my broken heart flooding into my expression. I have never been able to cope with jealousy. (I wish someone would teach me how.) It leaves me weak and at a loss for honest words. I can't make jokes. My eyes water and I want to cry. (Marie Jencks would accuse me of staring at her like a mooncalf. Perhaps I did, especially after I found out about her and Tom in the storeroom. I wanted to be absorbed into her embraces also. I didn't like feeling left outside. I still do stare at girls who are attractive, and look away quickly if they stare back. Today, I chuck brassy, overpowering women of twenty-eight like Marie Jencks under the chin nimbly and pass them by with a half-hearted falsehood. Today, girls of twenty-eight don't try to boss me around. Derek's nurses do.) Other men go berserk with jealousy and fly into Herculean rages. I produce tears.

I was never jealous of her and Len Lewis. (I felt he should be jealous of me.)

"He wants to leave his wife," she confided about him. "He used to think I was too young. By now I've showed him I'm old enough. I like him, he's so shy. I like older men. I like younger men too. It's the ones in between I have trouble with. I don't like football players anymore. Maybe I do. Now I can teach them a few things."

"Teach me."

"Get a room."

"I've got no money."

"I'll chip in."

"Where do you go?"

They went to empty restaurants for dinner one evening a week, sometimes two, and then sat in his car awhile and talked and petted. He lived far out in Queens and had to start back early. He didn't drink. She was teaching him how.

"He enjoys it. I make him feel young."

"How?"

"I kiss him very softly and slowly like this. all over his face for a long time. Then I do it harder and faster. I breathe hard. He thinks I can't control myself. I like doing that to him. He says nobody ever kissed him the way I do."

"I'll bet he's right."

"I'll bet nobody ever kissed you the way I can."

"Do it now."

"His wife wouldn't know how. He's never had a modern girl friend. I slip my hands inside his shirt and rub my fingers against his chest. His hair is soft and curly. Like a kitten. Nobody ever did that to him before. He's fifty-five years old. I tickle him with my tongue. Soon I'll let him touch these."

"Come outside."

"He doesn't know I'll let him if he wants to. I talk a little dirty to him. He likes it. So do you. Don't you like my nipples? If you'd go slow once in a while, you'd see how pointy and hard they get. I like to talk dirty too. I love to say words like nipples, pointy, and hard. And tongue."

I had my hard-on again.

"Come outside."

"Well, hello, dear," she greeted, winking at it. "Good to see you again." I reached for an accident folder with one hand and slid the other into the side pocket of my trousers. I blushed with pleasure.

She grinned, pleased with her prowess, widening her eyes with mock astonishment and pursing her lips into an open pink circle of admiration and surprise. I know now what that open circle was intended to suggest. (I've seen it since on gorgeous faces of photographers' models in the best fashion magazines.) I didn't believe then that girls really did such things (although I'd seen comic-strip drawings). Now I know they do and I'm glad. I love it more than ice cream. (I am anaclitic, I guess, when I'm not sadistically aggressive. When the telephone rings at home, I want someone else to answer it.) You can't get good ice cream anymore. (Everything is getting worse or going away. The Woman's Home Companion is gone, and so is The Saturday Evening Post, and Look and Life, and soon even Time may run out for all of us as well. Colleges are going into bankruptcy. Restaurants I like are closing.) It tastes like gum and chalk. Virginia was peaches, strawberries, and cream with touches of rouge on her ripe, lustrous cheeks. She shaped her lipstick often by pressing her mouth together. Her legs were smooth and glistening in unruffling silk stockings, and even her somewhat chubby feet seemed rich and sweet as butter compressed into her shiny tight shoes with their high spiked heels. Women wore shiny black pumps with high spiked heels when I was young, and evil-looking, skinny men were unshaven and wore loose black socks in the dirty movies I saw. (Penny and other girls make me take my socks off for just that reason. My wife never saw any of these movies and doesn't. I often leave them on with her as a ruse. I am an evil-looking, skinny man in an old dirty movie, and I am defiling her. My wife has no idea that she is a character actress in a dirty movie of mine. She may, however, for all I know, be the leading performer in one of her own.)

Dirty movies have gotten better, I'm told. Smut and weaponry are two areas in which we've improved. Everything else has gotten worse. The world is winding down. You can't get good bread anymore even in good restaurants (you get commercial rolls), and there are fewer good restaurants. Melons don't ripen, grapes are sour. They dump sugar into chocolate candy bars because sugar is cheaper than milk. Butter tastes like the printed paper it's wrapped in. Whipped cream comes in aerosol bombs and isn't whipped and isn't cream. People serve it, people eat it. Two hundred and fifty million educated Americans will go to their graves and never know the difference. (I wish I could get my hands on a good charlotte russe again.) That's what Paradise is — never knowing the difference. Even fancy bakeries now use a substitute for whipped cream that looks more like whipped cream than whipped cream does, keeps its color and texture longer, doesn't spoil, and costs much less, yielding larger profits.

"It tastes like shit."

It tastes like shit. Nobody cares but me. From sea to shining sea the country is filling with slag, shale, and used-up automobile tires. The fruited plain is coated with insecticide and chemical fertilizers. Even pure horseshit is hard to come by these days. They add preservatives. You don't find fish in lakes and rivers anymore. You have to catch them in cans. Towns die. Oil spills. Money talks. God listens. God is good, a real team player. "America the Beautiful" isn't: it was all over the day the first white man set foot on the continent to live. The Fuggers were all right as long as they stayed in Germany: then they sent their mothers here. Depreciating motels, junked automobiles, and quick-food joints grow like amber waves of grain. The faces of the rich and the poor age from nativity into the same cramped, desiccated lines of meanness and discontent. Women look like their husbands. God had no computer. He had to use clay, which was hard to work with, and a human rib, which was a little easier. God was just and fairly ambitious, but in a rudimentary way. He had to use the flood once (He couldn't think of smog or nerve gas) and fire and brimstone. People between rich and poor radiate uneasiness. They don't know where they belong. I hear America singing fuck off.

The peregrine falcon is just about gone (done in by DDT. The shells of the eggs laid by the female, of course, grew too thin to survive incubation without cracking). The hot dog is going too. Soon there'll be no more whales; my wife and I will just have to make do without them. The good old American hot dog is filled with water, chicken innards, and cereal (the same cereal they divert from bread and rolls and replace with synthetics and additives). Mom's apple pie is frozen. Mom went public several years ago. There is no Pa. She did it with gas.

"He did it with gas," she told me about her father, when I could bring myself to ask. "The rest of us were away in the country for the summer. He did it all alone in the garage in his car. I'll never forget it. I didn't want to go to the funeral. I heard somebody say he turned all red. My mother made me. I've always hated my mother for the way she treated him. 'Look what he did to me, she kept wailing all week long to whoever would listen. I don't like to talk about her."

She did it with gas also, in the kitchen of her mother's house in New Jersey, which was most inconsiderate of her, since we had better ways of killing ourselves by then. We had plastic bags. (Last night, my wife had another one of her bad dreams. I didn't wake her. Afterward, after all the smothered moaning and spastic shuddering, she began to snore lightly, and I did wake her, to tell her she was snoring and complain she was not letting me sleep. She apologized penitently in a drowsy, cranky voice and turned over on her side while I looked at her ass. I smiled and slept well.) She was no longer at the office when I telephoned on my first furlough home after returning from overseas. Ben Zack told me. She was no longer on the premises. (Neither was I. Ben Zack didn't know who I was. I keep the old codger guessing.) She was no longer on the payroll. Whoever was at the switchboard had never heard of her (has still not, probably, heard of me) and gave me Ben Zack, who was still on the payroll in the Personal Injury Department as an assistant to Len Lewis, who was still there then too.

"Virginia Markowitz?" Ben Zack repeated in a tone of bemused surprise. "Oh, yeah. Didn't you know?"

"What?"

I didn't tell him who I was but felt he could see me anyway. I told him I was an old college friend of hers from Duke University, a football player, and wanted to get in touch with her. That last part was true. I was an officer. I had wings, and I wanted her to see them. I wanted to station myself erect before her in my uniform and suntan and exclaim:

"Hey, Virginia. Virginia Markowitz — look! I'm all grown up now. I'm twenty-two years old and a real smart aleck, and I get lots of good hard-ons. Let me show you."

But she wasn't there.

(She was no longer employed by the company because she was dead, you know.)

"Oh, no," Ben Zack explained with patient good humor, as though pleased to have someone to talk to about her. "She's not employed here anymore. She's dead, you know, poor kid. She killed herself about a year and a half ago."

"Was she sick?"

"Nobody knows why."

"How?"

"She did it with gas."

"Did she turn all red?" I was tempted to ask in an outburst of caustic bitterness the next time I dialed the switchboard and asked to speak to her.

"I'm afraid I don't know," I could hear him reply in the manner of serious courtesy he was developing. "I wasn't able to attend the funeral. I don't get around too easily, you see."

"Then she's really out of a job now, isn't she?" I thought of observing irreverently.

(And am not positive if I did. I sometimes think of saying something and am not certain afterward if I did. Even in conversations I know are imaginary, I'm not always sure I remember what I've imagined.)

"She doesn't work here anymore, if that's what you mean," he might have replied tartly. "I'm not sure I understand."

She was out of a job, one of the unemployed; she had been let go for committing suicide and would probably have difficulty finding a suitable position anywhere (in her new condition and without favorable references) else but in one of the file cabinets downstairs where I would have laid her if I could while she was still alive and kicking (I bet she would kick, until she got cramps) and should have done it to her right there on the desk if I only knew how. If there was room enough on that desk for titanic Marie Jencks and Tom, there was room enough for tiny us.

That was the time to have done it (if I'd wanted to). We signaled salacious caresses to each other all day long with coded phrases and patches of melody from ribald songs we shared.

"I asked for number one. She said let's have some fun. Ba-ba, ba-ba, ba-ba, ba-ba, ba-ba."

I would color a lot and feel my happiness bubble up into tingling ripples of joy and warmth. I have never been so pleased by intimacy with anyone since. She would smile and color a lot with merriment too, dimpling. She was always pleasant with me, even when she was having her period (I wish my wife was) and imagining that her face was breaking out into ugly boils and craters. (It wasn't.)

"Look what she did to me."

She killed herself before she was twenty-five, doing it with gas, as her father had done before her (and maybe his father before him — she didn't say — deserting me without two weeks' notice) and leaving me feeling destitute again in a phone booth in a train terminal. After a moment of utter shock, I found myself feeling like a foundling again, abandoned heartlessly in a soiled telephone booth in Grand Central Station (through tears, I saw banner headlines and front-page photographs in the next day's editions of the New York Daily News and Mirror, which is gone now too. O, weep for the peregrine falcon and the New York Mirror: ARMY OFFICER FOUND ABANDONED IN TERMINAL PHONE BOOTH. No Clue to Identity) in my Mediterranean, bronze suntan (which was turning yellow) and natty military officer's uniform (spotless dry-cleaned pink gabardine trousers and forest-green regulation tunic with ribbons above the breast pocket, or both pockets — I forget things like that. I had done well in the service. I was a twenty-two-year-old success) with a malodorous, black telephone instrument in my hand announcing her death. Things stank. I thought I smelled my armpits, neck, and feet stinking.

And then the air cleared (a breeze, a breath of fresh air) and I was glad — glad, God dammit — glad she was gone and dead and that I would never have to see her again. (I would not have to screw her.) And glad that I was the one who was still alive.

I had not realized how much hidden tension I was under (I had jokes massed on my lips to conceal and ameliorate it) until I watched the sweat flowing in torrents from the hand holding the telephone. I was released from my obligations. I did not have to say hello, make a sociable wisecrack (and hope she'd remember and want to see me. She could have been married, engaged, going steady, and I would have believed none of it. I would have believed she had lost interest in a seventeen-year-old file clerk like me and was going with older married men and gangsters). She was a challenge, and I did not have to meet it. I did not have to make a date, show up early, sip whiskey, look her over (while she looked me over), sound her out to see if she was still the same, move her into some kind of bedroom, undress with her (until we were both naked), and then get right down to the sheets with her and look it squarely in the eye once and for all. I had no idea what I would find, what she would look like. (And I was still afraid.) I still didn't want it from her. (And I didn't want to see. All I still wanted, I think, was to lay it in her hand and have her lead me around with it like a domesticated pet.) I would have preferred malted milk. I have cravings for food. I have a weakness for dairy products and never liked baseball. I could have handled it all with a dashing display of confidence and technique, but I was so glad I didn't have to (she was dead, God dammit. And she was also nearly twenty-six). I had a rich chocolate malted milk in a tall, cold glass at a lunch counter in the train station and called another girl who'd been crazy about me the last time I was in, but she had moved out west to marry a sheet-metal worker in an airplane factory who was making a big salary. I called another girl I'd laid once a year and a half before who didn't remember me by name and sounded so absurd in her tinny and stand-offish mistrust that I laughed and made no effort to remind her. (She was putting on airs.) I had no one else to call. I had no close friends around. Before the week was out, I went back to the air base a few days earlier than I had to. I felt more at home in the army than I did in my house. (I feel more at home in my office now than I do at home, and I don't feel at home there. I get along better with the people there.) I don't think I ever had a good time at home on a furlough. I don't think I've ever had a good time on a vacation (I'm not sure I've ever had a good time anywhere); I find myself waiting for them to end. We have too many holidays. Birthdays and anniversaries come around too often. I'm always buying presents or writing out checks. The years are too short, the days are too long. I called Ben Zack again before I went back and pretended to be somebody else. (I did that twice. I couldn't help it.)

"I asked for number two.

She showed me what to do."

"How odd," he said.

I inquired innocently about Virginia as though I had not done so before. I told him I was a former eastern intercollegiate boxing champion from Duke University.

"It's really very strange," he said.

Calling Ben Zack again like that was a malicious trick, a practical joke. It did not feel like a joke. It felt like a willful, destructive crime, a despicable act of obscene perversion. It felt thrilling and debasing. It felt like it used to feel that time I was telephoning hospitals for a while to inquire about the condition, my very words: "I am calling to inquire about the condition. " of people I knew who had just died. "I'm sorry. Mr. is no longer listed as a patient," they'd say.

I was always in fear of being discovered (have always felt myself on the very brink of imminent public exposure.

"Look, there he is! That's the one. That's who he really is," someone, a woman, will shout, pointing at me from a crowd in an open place, and all the rest will nod in accord, and everything will be over for me.

It surprises me still that they could not read my mind over the telephone, could not see my clammy sweat).

You have to call quick. Once the autopsy's over and the funeral parlor's got them they give you nothing; they say:

"We have no record of any such patient."

I could write a manual. (I think I know what a morbid compulsion is.) I had to gird myself to speak to Ben Zack, even when I did not identify myself to him the first time. (I did not want him to know who I was.) I had to disguise my voice. I was certain Ben Zack would uncover my deception, snap angrily at me from his wheelchair, demand to know what type of demented prank I thought I was playing (I've never been wholly comfortable with telephones or banks. All my life I've had this fundamental fear of being chastised over the telephone by someone who does not know who I am.)

"How odd," Ben Zack said. "I can't get over it. Somebody else called to ask about her just last week. Then somebody else yesterday. And now you. I guess all the boys must be coming home from the war."

"Could you tell me how I can reach her?"

"I'm afraid that will be impossible," he reported to me again in that same dropped octave of ceremonial awkwardness and lament. "She doesn't work here anymore, you know. She's dead, you see. She committed suicide some time ago."

"How?"

"She did it with gas."

"Her father did it that way too. Didn't he?"

"Did he?"

"Did she turn all red?"

"I'm afraid I don't know. I wasn't able to attend the funeral. I'm afraid I'm not able to get around too easily. I have to drive a special car."

"Then she's really out of a job now, isn't she?"

"She doesn't work here anymore, if that's what you mean," he snapped in a troubled voice. "Everybody keeps asking that, and I'm afraid I don't understand."

He thought I was somebody else. (I think he was probably right.) I told him I was a former wrestling champion from Duke University. (But somebody else than whom? Nameless I came and nameless I go. I am not Bob Slocum just because my parents decided to call me that. If there is such a person, I don't know who he is. I don't even feel my name is mine, let alone my handwriting. I don't even know who I'm not. Maybe I'll ask Ben Zack the next time I call.)

I have called Ben Zack since.

"I asked for number three.

She told me it was free."

"Who is this? I don't understand."

"Don't you know?"

"No."

"Then I must be somebody else," I said and hung right up.

He keeps thinking I am somebody else. (And I keep thinking he's right. I get the wheelchair and metal canes and crutches I give to Horace White from him.) He is the only one left now. Len Lewis retired years ago. (He is my personal dead record file. He had infantile paralysis in his teens and came and went in a wheelchair even then. He drove a special car and had a special permit from the police department that allowed him to park anywhere. He was a handicapped person. He had an animal's sex drive and went to whorehouses.) Sometimes I tell him I was a national intercollegiate weightlifting champion at Duke University who was once engaged to her. Sometimes I tell him I am somebody else. He is easy to lure into conversation. (I have the feeling that when I am not talking to him, no one else is. He has grown garrulous with the years. He has been grotesquely fitted all his life for work in the Personal Injury Department and will remain in that opening until his wheelchair stops rolling or until the police department takes away his special parking permit. Then he will have to park himself elsewhere. Without permission to park, you are not allowed to park.) Len Lewis left a long time ago after a serious case of influenza from which he never bounced back.

"He never really bounced back."

I knew he was dead before he told me. I can add: Len Lewis was fifty-five when I was there and that was thirty years ago.

"Then his wife passed away about a month after he did. It's odd, really odd, the way people remember and keep calling up after so many years. I'm sorry I don't remember you, but you say you only worked here a very short time, didn't you?"

Len Lewis never left his wife. He didn't really want to. Virginia didn't want him to. He was too old. She was too young. Then she was dead. And I was alive in a phone booth. I called Len Lewis once shortly after I was married when I was feeling terribly lonely and despondent (and didn't know why. Oh, that abominable cafard. I was over thirty years old before I even knew what to call that permeating, uninvited sorrow dwelling inside me somewhere like an elusive burglar that will not be cornered and exorcised).

"Won't you come up and say hello?" he invited in his reticent, soft-spoken way. "There are still a few of us left."

"I want to get in touch with Virginia," I said. "I think I'd like to keep in touch with Virginia Markowitz if I can."

"She did it with gas.»

"How terrible."

". in the kitchen of her mother's home. I was very fond of her. She was always very fond of you."

(A woman's place is in the kitchen. A man's is in the garage. If I catch my wife and leave her, it won't be out of jealousy. It will be out of spite. If she leaves me, it would be shattering. I will turn into someone nervous. I might never be able to meet anyone's eyes. I would lack confidence and lose my job.)

I called Ben Zack a month ago late one afternoon when I felt I could not make myself go home one more time to my wife and children on my country acre in Connecticut if my very existence depended on it. I do indeed know what morbid compulsion feels like. Fungus, erosion, disease. The taste of flannel in your mouth. The smell of asbestos in your brain. A rock. A sinking heart, silence, taut limbs, a festering invasion from within, seeping subversion, and a dull pressure on the brow, and in the back regions of the skull. It starts like a fleeting whim, an airy, frivolous notion, but it doesn't go; it stays; it sticks; it enlarges in space and force like a somber, inhuman form from whatever lightless pit inside you it abides in; it fills you up, spreading steadily throughout you like lava or a persistent cosmic shroud, an obscure, untouchable, implacable, domineering, vile presence disguising itself treacherously in your own identity, a double agent — it is debilitating and sickening. It foreshadows no joy — and takes charge, and you might just as well hang your head and drop your eyes and give right in. You might just as well surrender at the start and steal that money, strike that match, (masturbate), eat that whole quart of ice cream, grovel, dial that number, or search that forbidden drawer or closet once again to handle the things you're not supposed to know are there. You might just as well go right off in whatever direction your madness lies and do that unwise, unpleasant, immoral thing you don't want to that you know beforehand will leave you dejected and demoralized afterward. Go along glumly like an exhausted prisoner of war and get the melancholy deed over with. I have spells in spare time when it turns physically impossible for me to remain standing erect one second longer or to sit without slumping. They pass. I used to steal coins from my sister and my mother — I couldn't stop. I didn't even want the money. I think I just wanted to take something from them. I was mesmerized. I was haunted. I wanted to scream for help. I had only to consider for an instant the possibility of taking a penny or a nickel again from a satin purse in a pocketbook belonging to my mother or sister and it was all over: I would have to do it. I was possessed by the need to do it. I would plod home through snow a mile if necessary in order to get it then. I had to have it then. I took dimes and quarters too. I didn't enjoy it, before or afterward. I felt lousy. I didn't even enjoy the things I bought or did. I gambled much of it away on pinball machines at the corner candy store (and felt a bit easier in my mind after it was lost). I didn't feel good about a single part of it, except getting it over with — it was an ordeal — and recovering. After a while the seizures ended and I stopped. (The same thing happened with masturbation, and I gave that up also after fifteen or twenty years.)

I called Ben Zack again yesterday.

She was still not there.

"I asked for number four.

She said she wanted more."

"Although I remember her very well, of course, of course. Then you don't know what happened to her, do you?"

I told Ben Zack my name was Horace White. He didn't think he remembered me.

"I asked for number five."

I asked for Mrs. Yerger and was so glad when he said he didn't think he remembered her either.

"I felt it come alive."

"She was that very big, broad woman who was put in charge of the file room from someplace else and said she was going to fire all of us if we didn't shape up soon."

"Perhaps she didn't stay long, Horace," Ben Zack apologized. "It was all so long ago. Somebody else called up a few weeks ago to ask about Virginia Markowitz also. Isn't it odd? Isn't it odd that there are still people who call up for her after so many years?"

I asked for Tom.

"Tom who?"

"Thumb."

"Thumb?"

"Johnson. He worked in the file room too when Virginia and Mr. Lewis and you were there. He left to go into the army."

"He isn't here now. There's hardly anybody here now."

Tom Terrific, of course, who had given me the handwriting I use and who was able to stick it to Marie Jencks whenever she wanted him to in a way I wished I could and knew I could not. I couldn't even do it to Virginia, and I wasn't really afraid of her.

I asked for me.

I was not there either. (I had never done that before.)

It made me mad to hear that.

"But I'm pretty sure I remember who you mean, Horace," he said. "He was that nice-looking, polite boy with a good sense of humor, wasn't he? No, I don't know what ever became of him."

Neither do I. (I don't feel even distantly connected to him.)

It would have made me glad to hear I was still working there in the file room as a nice-looking, polite, seventeen-year-old boy with a good sense of humor (at least I'd know where that part of me was while I scrounge around looking for the others), cracking jokes as I carried my incident folders back and forth past Virginia's desk, humming "Take it in your hand, Mrs. Murphy," or whistling:

"Johnny, come tickle me.

You know just where.

Under my petticoat,

You'll find a bush of hair.

If you don't tickle me.

In the right place,

I'll lift up my petticoat.

And pee right in your face."

We had other dirty songs we loved too.

I could find that right place now and wish I had a chance to prove it. I wish I had her on her back right now (and that I was the one who was older. She is twenty-one. I am twenty-eight). There'd be more than just bone with her. I wouldn't be afraid. (I don't think I'd be afraid.) There is just bone with so many of them now. (I get black and blue marks instead of ecstasy. I might still be afraid of Marie Jencks. I was enamored of her size and flashy good looks. After I found out about her and Tom, I was afraid. Her yellow hair seemed cold and crackly, her skin looked rough, and I often dreamed of the things growing in the cluttered junctures of her thighs as mossy crustacean claws, dark and barnacled as uncooked lobsters, if indeed they were hers. The smeared rectangular smile of vivid lipstick on the face they bore along beyond them was hers as the pincers advanced to seize, engulf, and consume me. Poor Tom. I often feared for him in that cavernous burlap wilderness that fascinated and repelled me. Maybe that's what happened to him. I envied him.) Virginia, at least, was soft and kind. More and more often lately I find myself wishing I had remained on closer terms with my sister and her family, and with my brother's wife and her children and even with her second husband. She married again and had at least one more child. She sent a card. They are nieces and nephews and might even enjoy a visit from me for a few minutes. Some people don't mind their uncles. I wish I were part of a large family circle and enjoyed it. I would like to fit in. I wish I believed in God. I liked shelled walnuts and raisins at home when I was a child and cracked the walnuts and mixed them all up with the raisins in a dish before I began eating. My mother sent out for ice cream often in the spring and summer. In the fall we had good charlotte russes. I would spin tops. I remember the faces of street cleaners.

I was so distracted to hear from Ben Zack that I was not in the file room anymore that I left work early to drink alone in Red Parker's apartment. I began making phone calls.

I called an airline stewardess I'd met who was out of town. Her roommate had a date. I tried a model I met at a photographer's party last week who said she was desperate for help in finding some kind of temporary work, but I wasn't sure of her last name or even that she was really a model, and I was unable to locate her in the phone book or obtain a number on what I thought was her street from directory assistance. (Telephone companies are putting more and more announcements on records that are no more efficient than people.) I called an actress I've known for several years and got her answering service. I called a woman I know who's divorced from a man I knew; her son told me she had driven to the shore that day to try to sell their summer house. I called a soft hooker I know who's always glad of the chance to pick up a dinner and fifty dollars, but she was already busy for dinner (or said she was) and was leaving the next morning for a week in Barbados with a man who was older than I was and had much more money. (By then I should have gone home and fucked my wife — I thought of that. She would have been a pushover, unless she hadn't sobered up graciously from the day's imbibing. Wine gives her headaches. Whiskey makes her sick. I have my problems.

"I don't feel well," I could hear her bleat. "Can't you understand?")

So I called a widow with two children in private school instead who sounded doomed: she told me in a flat, barren voice that she was going to try getting by alone from now on rather than waste any more time going out with men like me who had no intention of ever marrying her. (She didn't enjoy sex anyway.) It was getting her nowhere. I called Jane. She was out (I was relieved). Her roommate sounded younger than my daughter and dumber than my secretary and seemed squeaky and disappointed, as though I had interrupted her timetable for putting her hair up in large pink rollers. I didn't leave my name. (I would have been ashamed to.)

"Did I interrupt you? I'm sorry."

"I thought you were somebody else."

"Were you very busy?"

"I was doing something."

"Were you putting your hair up in pink rollers?"

"That's for me to know and you to find out."

I called Penny, who had just come in from another one of her singing lessons and exercise classes and begged me to give her an hour and a half to wash up and straighten the apartment. I was there in fifty minutes. She was still damp and fragrant from her bath.

"Please, baby," she requested gently. I had opened her robe. "Go a little slow. I still get scared when I see you start so fast."

Penny has an alabaster body that never fails to astonish me with its sturdy beauty every time I see it again. I think I must gasp loudly and glare voraciously. Her white neck flushes. I came three times with her (and think I could have gone four. It was just like the army again) and was back in Red Parker's apartment with the newspapers before midnight. (It was an unqualified success.)

I really don't like spending the whole night with anybody but my wife, not even Penny. (That's one reason I never take girls with me on overnight business trips and am surprised by men that do.) I guess I'm used to my wife. I like waking up with her. I like it better than waking alone. I had to use Red Parker's apartment again because I had nowhere else to go. I did not want to go home. I may have to get a small apartment of my own. I will have to lie to my wife about it. I lied to Penny, who thought I was on the last train back to Connecticut. I made her come once, the second time (when I could take my time and work on her as scientifically as she likes — it is work), and that is all she wants. Her neck and pale face flushed. The third one was all for me. She made me coffee afterward and hinted I could stay the night. (I felt so much at home I didn't want to.) Someone like Amazonian Marie Jencks would have suctioned me right back up into the womb with a single siphoning contraction, and then puffed me out on a flat trajectory into the spongy, red catacombs of a testicle belonging to a man riding the subway trains in search of a curvy backside to splash me back out against. That's what I call dismemberment. That's regression. (It wasn't so bad living in my old man's scrotum, as far as I can recall. It was warm and humid, and there was lots of companionship. I had a ball.)

(That was a good one.)

Maybe I do love my wife. I think I would have been stricken sightless and mute and turned into a dangling form of dingy cement or sodden papier-mвchй from the top of my head down if I'd ever been forced to mate with Marie's. (She was so large and domineering.)

"I asked for number six."

I asked for Marie Jencks.

"Oh, yes," Ben Zack remembered immediately. "I'll always remember Marie."

"The sperm began to mix."

"Her husband passed away from heart trouble at a very early age. They didn't have heart surgery in those days. She married again soon after and moved with her husband to Florida to cash in on the land boom."

I was not ready for Marie Jencks then. I was not ready for Virginia. My wife has brown nipples as lovely as any I've ever seen in the movies or still photographs and a nest of curly black hair I can rest my head on snugly. I feel safe with her. I feel safe with Penny. (I wonder why I always think of Penny last.) I don't think a human twat has teeth and don't believe I ever did. I've got this idiot child of mine I don't want and don't know what to do with. He belongs to me. Little Derek. (He doesn't even know what he is.) He is small, heartrending. He is unbearable. (He cannot be borne.) What threats he will pose for me later. What hazards he poses for me now. What will they do to him? Who will take care of him if I don't? How will he survive? What will become of the poor little thing if he doesn't die soon?

There's no getting away from it. I've got to get rid of him. There's no getting away from it. (He is so sweet. People who meet him tell us how sweet he is. They are being sweet when they say so.)

I've got to get rid of him and don't know how. And there's no one I can ask. There's no one I can tell I even want to, not even my wife, who wants to get rid of him also (but doesn't dare say so to me). Especially not my wife. We blame each other for him, when we aren't blaming ourselves, and that's another thing we haven't been able to say to each other yet.

"It's your fault, not mine."

We have to try to make believe he was nobody's fault, that he was a circumstantial twist of nature, a fluke. (A fluke is a fish.) All of us want to get rid of him, but only my daughter is honest enough to say so (and is set upon like a pariah by one or the other of us).

"Is he going to have to be with us forever?" she'll complain in a temper.

"What do you care?" I'll lash back at her, as though she had said that just to wound me. "You'll be away at college."

(She might stay home, just to torture me. I sometimes feel that if not for Derek we would never quarrel with each other. I know it's a lie.)

He does not seem to be mine. He may be my wife's.

There is no idiocy in my family that I know of (or in hers). My wife has begged me not to use that word (which may be why I do. She winces every time).

"How would you like me to describe it?" I inquire, with a lordly air of inexhaustible tolerance. "Do you think it would help him much if I called it genius?"

"It's heartless." She shudders, pale and close to tears. "Mean. I get so frightened when I see you so cold."

It is ungodly the way I am able to forget about him for long periods of time, even when he is close by. (I blot him out and try to keep him out.) I think of myself as having just two children. One says:

"What would you do if I came home with a Black boyfriend? And wanted to marry him."

The other asks:

"What would you do with me if I couldn't speak?"

"But you can," I've answered.

"If I fell down the ropes one day in the gymnasium when I was trying to climb them and hurt my head and Mr. Forgione had to carry me home and I couldn't speak anymore, either?"

"I used to be afraid of rope climbing and falling down too," I try to explain encouragingly. "And of swimming naked in the pool in the high school also."

"I never said anything about swimming naked in a pool," he protests firmly (as though that fear had not yet taken root in him, and I had just implanted it). "Did I?" he demands.

I am embarrassed.

"Suppose I had an extra set of car keys made after I got my license," says my daughter, "and used the car when you were away. You couldn't stop me, could you? What would you do, have me arrested?"

The third one doesn't speak to me at all.

I have conversations that do not seem to be mine.

I feel afloat (legless). Legless, I walk around with headaches that do not seem to be mine (on feet that do. Arches ache and seem to be crumbling, I have a spur on one heel, middle toes are hammered, others are gnarled and require Band-Aids or corn plasters frequently, the tender pads of flesh on the bottom of my toes chafe and inflame if I do not switch pairs of socks and shoes, the soles itch dryly in cold weather, the tissue between the gnarled end toes splits and peels and I have to pour talcum powder in. There is no limit to the ills I could describe). I do not always feel securely connected to my legs or to my own past. The cable of continuity is not unbroken; it is not thick and strong; it wavers and fades, wears away in places to slender, frayed strands, breaks. Much of what I remember about me does not seem to be mine. Mountainous segments of my history appear to be missing. There are yawning gulfs into which large chunks of me may have fallen. I do not always know where I am at present. I sit in my office and think I am at home. I sit in my study and think I am at my office firing Johnny Brown or retiring Ed Phelps, in Penny's or some other girl's underthings, rolling them off, or in a bank, hotel lobby, or police station searching my pockets for some form of evidence or identification required of me. It may be that I talk to myself already without being aware of it. How debasing. No one has said so, but I don't think I do it when I'm with someone who might. I think I do it only when I think I'm alone. Maybe I am senile already and people are too kind to tell me. People are not kind and would tell me. (Maybe people have told me, and I'm too senile to remember. Ha, ha.)

"What? Did you say something?" one or the other of the members of my family has shot at me when I assumed I was alone and unobserved in my study or in some other room in my house, deep in thought.

"What? Nothing," I reply, startled and shamefaced. "I was just thinking."

Or:

"I was just reading the paper."

(Probably I was deep in thought imagining myself orchestrating rhythmic, polysyllabic replies to Green's thrusts without tripping over a single vowel or consonant.)

"You were laughing in your sleep again last night," my wife will say.

And I won't know if she's toying with me or not. It's the sort of lie I might make up for her, if I had thought of it first. I can never remember what it was I was laughing about when she tells me I laugh in my sleep. I wish I could. I could use a big laugh on days when I have these headaches that do not seem to be mine.

I get the willies in my spare time; I don't normally sleep well (although my wife tells me I do); I get the blues I can't lose; they decide when to leave (I either talk to myself or believe I might); I get depressed and don't know why; I mourn for something and don't know what; (legless) I walk around with jitters, headaches, and sadnesses ballooning and squiggling about inside me that seem to belong to somebody else. Is this schizophrenia, or merely a normal, natural, typical, wholesome, logical, universal schizoid formation? (I could plead temporary insanity. They would call it a mercy killing. There would be testimony under oath that it was done to put him out of his misery. He isn't miserable.)

I have these perfectly controlled conversations with Arthur Baron about Andy Kagle and with Andy Kagle about Arthur Baron, and I find myself wondering even while they are taking place, just what the fuck I am doing in them. (Is that really me there talking and listening?) I'll float away outside them a few yards to watch and eavesdrop and begin to feel I am looking down upon a pornographic puppet show of stuffed dolls in which someone I recognize who vaguely resembles me is one of the performers, and I have no more idea of why I am taking part in them, even as this separated spectator, than I do of these weird melancholies, tensions, and arid impressions of desolation that come upon me when they choose in my spare time.

"I have nothing to do," I whimper also in my spare time.

I have too much spare time. The same thing often happens with sex. I like to try to move outside our bodies and watch me. I go blind. I allow myself to be obliterated and am resurrected so slowly it takes a while to remember who I think I am and resume the role effectively. (It's all so silly it can't really be me.) I used to be able to watch me all the way through. That was nice too. Am I demented already, in what I genuinely feel to be the prime of my life? Or maybe I am that somebody else Ben Zack keeps declaring I am.

I feel strange.

"You look strange," my wife says, trying guardedly to draw me out.

"No, I'm not."

"Funny."

"You are."

"You've got that funny look on your face I can never figure out."

"Why aren't you laughing?"

"You look depressed."

"I'm not."

"Is anything wrong?"

"No."

"I'd love to know what you're really thinking," she hazards with a frowning smile.

No, you wouldn't.

(I'm thinking of death and divorce.)

Today at lunchtime a man fell dead in the lobby of my office building as he was coming toward me. He was a large, portly, elderly man with woolly white hair and a gray pinstripe suit, and he was carrying a slim, black umbrella in one hand and a brown attachй case in the other. He was a majestic, attractive figure who looked great enough to be president of General Motors until his face hit the floor. He was too old to be me.

I don't think I feel different now than I've ever felt. She's the one who seems to be changing: she fidgets more noticeably when I'm silent and she thinks I am angry or dissatisfied. (Am I silent more often? She is afraid of me.) She is rattled when I'm feeling too good. (She thinks I harbor secrets. I do.) I'm glad I've got golf to turn away to now. I want a hole in one someday so I can talk about it forever. I don't want to go to movies or plays, and my wife concludes I don't love her anymore. I don't even want to go to parties. We see the same people. I wish I had an interesting friend. My wife is bored too. My wife likes variety and movement and would prefer to mix around her different kinds of boredom. I'm content with the boredom I have. (If I kill my wife, who will take care of the children? If I kill my children, my wife can take care of herself. A prudent family man must plan ahead toward possibilities like that in order to provide for his loved ones.) I almost wish my wife would go ahead and commit adultery already so I can get my divorce.

(I'm not sure I can do it without her.)

My wife is at that stage now where she probably should commit adultery — and would, if she had more character. It might do her much good. I remember the first time I committed adultery. (It wasn't much good.)

"Now I am committing adultery," I thought.

It was not much different from the first time I laid my wife after we were married:

"Now I am laying my wife," I thought.

It would mean much more to her (I think), for I went into my marriage knowing I would commit adultery the earliest chance I had (it was a goal; committing adultery, in fact, was one of the reasons for getting married), while she did not (and probably has not really thought of it yet. It may be that I do all the thinking about it for her). I did not even give up banging the other girl I'd been sleeping with fairly regularly until some months afterward. I hit four or five other girls up at least once those first two years also just to see for myself that I really could.

I think I might really feel like killing my wife, though, if she did it with someone I know in the company. My wife has red lines around her waist and chest when she takes her clothes off and baggy pouches around the sides and bottom of her behind, and I would not want anyone I deal with in the company to find that out. (I would want them to see her only at her best. Without those red marks.)

My wife is not as wanton and debauched as most of the young girls and women we're apt to find ourselves with today (and I would not want any of the men I work with to know that about her, either. I don't want anyone I know in the company to be able to blab to anyone else I know that my wife has red marks on her body and just might not be the most versatile piece of ass in the world), although I like that about her — I would not want her the other way — and repay her virtue and restraint with frequent overflows of affection and esteem and frequent acts of kindness. (I'll take her to church.)

Sober, my wife is a lady (and makes me proud). Especially when we entertain. She does that beautifully. (We had Arthur Baron and his wife to dinner once last year and she was superb. Everyone there had a good time.) We do not entertain as much anymore because of Derek. (He produces strain. We have to pretend he doesn't.) I used to like him when I still thought he was normal. I was fond of him and had fun. I joked with him. I used to call him Dirk, and Kiddo, Steamshovel, Dinky Boy, and Dicky Dare. Till I found out what he was. Now it's always formal: Derek. (You prick.)

(Why won't you leave us alone?)

My wife is happiest of all when I'm simply relaxed and kind, and responds to my acts of consideration with lively gratitude and astonished gaiety. It is so easy to make my wife happy it's really a crime we don't do it more often. (She's even prettier when she's feeling good, her face lights up. She doesn't hide it.) I try. When I can. (It isn't always easy to want to.) I'll make the children come along with us to church when I go, and we'll generally have a joyful time. (It isn't always easy to want to be kind and make her happy when I'm thinking of death, murder, adultery, and divorce.)

I feel tense, poor, bleak, listless, depressed (and she calls that strange). I have jagged, wracking inner conflicts filing, slicing, hacking, and sawing away inside me mercilessly like instruments of bone, stone, glass, or rusty, blunted iron butchering their own irreducible muscular mass, and so does she (but won't acknowledge it) almost everywhere we go now but church, which is one reason she might be so eager to go. (The world just doesn't work. It's an idea whose time has gone.)

My wife is a cheerful Congregationalist now (when she isn't getting drunk and crude at parties or humping me on floors or against the butcher-block table in the kitchen or outside at night on our redwood patio furniture). My wife is a devout and cheerful Congregationalist now because the building is airy and the people friendlier than the Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians she has gotten to know since we moved from the city to Connecticut.

"Episcopalians," she has told me, "are the ones who go shush in movies."

And I laughed.

(My wife can often make me laugh.) She will bake for cake sales. She will even stop drinking in the day-time well in advance of church socials, and she will grow more reserved in bed. (I can almost always tell when some spectacular social gala is in the offing at church by the waning initiative in her sex drive.)

I am a registered Republican (who nearly always votes Democratic sneakily) and believe I am nearer to God than she.

"The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want," says the new minister, who has been with us just about a year and seems to want a good deal more than he has in the way of social contact and community influence. (He strikes me as a man with his eye out for a better job in a growth industry.)

No registered Republican would go quite that far. We'll let the Lord be our shepherd readily enough, but there's plenty we'll want, no matter how much we've already got. Otherwise we'll fire Him, retire Him, or ease Him aside.

I'll let my wife drive us to church some Sundays when I'm feeling especially benign and charitable (the children exchange cryptic, supercilious signals during the service but do so inconspicuously, because they do not want to embarrass my wife) and then, often, feel like breaking her neck afterward for making me go and ruining my whole day. (I could have slept late, or phoned around for golf invitations. After all, how many years' worth of Sundays do I have left? Thirty? Two?)

"That new minister of yours," I might announce sonorously on the way back, pausing to make certain the two children in the rear of the open convertible are brought in as accomplices, "gives me a sharp pain in the ass."

The children crane forward delightedly.

My wife purses her lips with a sidelong smile and decides to pretend to whistle. It will take more than a little routine baiting this fine sunny morning to crinkle the state of euphoria she's in as a result of having shown up in church with her husband and children. At moments like this, we are suddenly very close. (They don't last.) My wife even had the hope not long ago of walking unashamedly into church one day with Derek too. I killed that one quick.

"What say, Dad?" inquires my daughter, to help things along, when she sees my wife intends to remain silent.

"I really don't think," chastises my wife amiably, going along with the game against us in a manner of placid contemplation, "you ought to say things like that in front of the children."

"Like what?" I am all contrived innocence.

"If you don't know."

"Minister?"

"No."

"What then?"

"You know."

"I've no idea."

"What?" demands my boy, bouncing on his haunches in anticipation as the three of us close in on her.

"Donkey," exclaims my wife in triumph, evading his snare nimbly.

"No fair. He didn't say donkey."

"I know, dear."

"He said ass," says my daughter.

"I know, darling. And I think he's depraved."

"And I'm inclined to agree," I second immediately. "And his English is terrible. And I don't think it's healthy to bring the children to church to listen to a depraved minister."

"I'm not talking about him!"

"His vocabulary's pretentious and his syntax is frequently wrong."

"I'm talking about you. I'm not talking about his language. I'm talking about yours."

"Well, it is."

"And yours?"

"All right," I yield, with a gesture of liberal acquiescence. "I'll change the subject. What do you think of the rectum as a whole?"

"That's even worse!"

"I don't get it."

"Don't you get it?"

"Now I get it."

"Pretty shitty, huh?"

"I thought we agreed," says my wife, with an exaggerated politeness that sometimes gets my goat, "to try not to disagree anymore in front of the children."

"A-men," says my daughter sarcastically, and claps her hands.

"That's the kind of remark," I reply good-naturedly, because I really do not want to upset her, "that can only lead to a disagreement. But, I surrender. I yield. That new minister of yours doesn't give me a pain in the ass."

The children explode with laughter.

"You show me one doctor," says my wife, when she can be heard, "who'll say it's healthy to use such language in front of your own son and daughter."

"Name one we've seen who'd say it isn't."

"I thought you agreed," interjects my daughter cynically, "not to fight in front of us anymore."

"We aren't fighting," my wife responds automatically.

"I know," scoffs my daughter. "You were discussing."

"With emphasis," adds my son in friendly mockery.

All of us smile but my wife, who nibbles on her lip in distracted gloom. She is extremely uneasy.

"What's wrong?" I inquire softly.

She is silent a moment, seems burdened with a knowledge almost too enormous to express. "He's coming to the house," she blurts out sheepishly.

"Who?"

"Him."

"When?"

On the part of the rest of us, there is massive shock.

"Today."

"Today?"

"I invited him for lunch."

"You're crazy!"

"I'm getting out!"

"I don't want him."

"And I," announces my wife in an expansive bellow of glowing self-congratulation, turning pointedly to gloat at each of us, "was making that up! Do you think," she continues in her rare flight of exultation, "I would expose a respectable man of the cloth to a gang of idiots like you?"

"Oh, Mom!" My daughter flings her arm around my wife's neck and hugs her from behind. "Mom, Mom, Mom. I just love her when she kids hike that. Don't you?"

"And so do I."

But it doesn't last, not on a Saturday, Sunday, or holiday, unless all of us have already made plans, for Derek is waiting at home.

He is still there. He grows older every day.

"Can't she take him out some place?" my daughter objects. "He's always home."

And so is his quacking, ill-visaged, overweight nurse with her rinsed white hair and offensive scent of bath powder, whom I've ordered my wife to get rid of once and for all, even if we have to take care of him ourselves for a little while. (It might do us some good.) And the maid can go too, for all I care. (I can't feel at home when she's tiptoeing around.)

"Get a German, for Christ sakes," I barked at my wife. "Import a Dane."

"Where will I get them?"

"How the hell should I know? Other people do."

"I get embarrassed when my friends come over."

(So do we.)

"There's no need to," I tell my daughter gently.

"I knew you'd say that," she sulks in disapproval. "I knew you wouldn't understand."

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself for saying anything like that," my wife says to her in reproof.

"Leave her alone."

"She ought to be glad she's not that way."

"She is."

"You always take her part," my wife accuses. "The doctors said you shouldn't do that."

"She thinks I take yours."

"Why does she always have to bring him in?" my daughter protests. "Can't she keep him in his own room when my friends are here?"

(We wish she would keep him out of sight also when our friends are here and have told her so. She parades him through anyway, gabbling loudly at him and pointing to our guests to show him off, or to inflict a penance on us.)

"You shouldn't mind it that much," I counsel.

"You do too."

"He isn't that bad."

"He makes us uncomfortable."

(He makes me uncomfortable too.)

"You shouldn't be," I tell her. "It wasn't the fault of any of us. It could have happened in any family."

But it happened in mine.

"We have another child also," I have been forced to reveal time and time again in ordinary social conversation to people I barely knew, "who's somewhat brain damaged. It was congenital," I add. "He's retarded."

"We also have a child who's retarded or very seriously emotionally disturbed," couples who knew about us have sought me out to reveal (as though we had something I wanted to share).

It's a club I don't want to join, and I find those clannish parents repellent. (Their suggestive intimacy makes my flesh creep and I want to shake them away from me as I would flies. I detest clannishness of every kind. It boxes me in claustrophobically. Or shuts me out. I don't like to feel boxed in.)

I saw it happening to Derek long before anyone else did (boxing me in) and said nothing about it to anyone. (Later, when others began to notice things and make hesitant, fearful observations, I denied them with emphasis. I didn't want it to be true. I had nightmarish warnings. I saw the realities assembling themselves ahead of me in mapped-out phases. I still do. I felt if no one talked about it, it would not be true. I was wrong.) He sat late, stood late, walked late, ran late. Even to a father's doting eye, his coordination was poor. We thought him clumsy and cute as a newborn puppy or foal as he staggered, stumbled, and fell. There is not harmony in his movements now. He makes no effort to open his jaws wide when he tries to speak — he does not seem to associate mouth with speech. He looks like lockjaw when he tries to talk. (Tendons stretch and bulge and I wish he'd stop.) He can open his mouth wide enough, though, when he eats or laughs or just wants to make noise. Though what he's got to laugh about I don't know, except when I offer him things in play and snatch them back, and then he's just as apt to cry.

(You can't even play normal infant's games with him anymore. I feel worthless when I try to play with him and he cries. I slink away in rejection. I am furious with myself and with him. The least he can do, it seems to me, is be decent enough to laugh when I try to play with him.)

"Is having Derek for a brother," my daughter wants to know, in a manner that is somewhat demanding and somewhat abject, "going to make it harder for me to find a husband?"

"No, of course not," we lie.

"Why should it?" my wife flashes at her belligerently. She is shocked and outraged by the directness of the question. (And now it is I who must shield my little girl against her.)

"Leave her alone," I request softly.

My daughter turns to me for the truth. "Is it?"

"Are you thinking of getting married?" I gamble in a pleasant rejoinder.

"See how he tries not to answer me?"

"You should be ashamed of yourself," my wife says to her, "for even thinking like that."

"Leave her alone," I repeat.

"Will people think my own children will turn out the same way?" my daughter persists.

My wife gasps. "That's a terrible thing to say!" she rebukes her with emotion. "He's your own brother."

"That's why I worry about it. Can't I ask?"

"Leave her alone, for Christ sakes," I shout, and whirl upon my wife to glare at her. "I worry about the same thing."

"She's the one who should be ashamed."

"And you worry about it too. For Christ sakes, stop blaming her for him."

"Stop blaming me. You're always taking her part. The doctors said you shouldn't do that."

"I'm not."

"He's nothing to be ashamed of."

"If he's nothing to be ashamed of, why the hell are we always ashamed of him?"

"We're not."

"We are."

"You're always blaming me for him."

"I'm not. Like hell I am."

"Don't yell at me," my wife says unexpectedly, with an air of indignant calm and refinement that is utterly astounding.

I turn away from her in disgust. "Oh, Christ," I mutter. "You make me laugh."

"And don't swear at me, either," she reacts mechanically. "I've told you that before. Especially in front of the children. I think you must enjoy humiliating me. I really think you do."

I am incredulous. And I find myself wondering again just what in hell I am doing married to a woman like this. Even if I had no other reason for wanting a divorce, this idiot child she gave me would be enough.

I want a divorce.

I need a divorce. I long for it. I crave a divorce. I pray for divorce.

Divorces seem impossible. They're so much work. It's hard to believe so many really take place. It's enough to stab the heart with envy, turn eyes dewy with pining and sentiment. People less proficient than I am manage to breeze right through their divorces without breaking stride, while I can't even get a foot out the door.

I want one too.

I have always wanted one. I dream of divorce. All my life I've wanted a divorce. Even before I was married I wanted a divorce. I don't think there has been a six-month period in all the years of my marriage — a six-week period — when I have not wanted to end it by divorce. I was never sure I wanted to get married. But I always knew I wanted a divorce.

"If it doesn't work out," I kept assuring myself right up to the day of the ceremony, "I can always get a divorce."

I can't always get a divorce.

I don't know how it's done.

Maybe I attach too much importance to a shirt.

I'll have undershorts at the laundry. Will she let me come for them? Or will she burn them, hide them? Will she tell me my little boy is upset when he isn't? That she cannot live without me when she can? I know she'll tell me she's thinking of killing herself. The obstacles appear insurmountable. In the summer my winter clothes are in mothballs; in the winter, my summer suits are hanging somewhere else and my sneakers are packed away. How will I ever get them all together? I'd need weeks. I don't have time to get a divorce. There's so much packing to be done (she won't help), so much talk to go through. (How does anyone ever get it finished?) There'll be fights, discussions, more fights. (Will it never end?) Bank statements will already be in the mail. A letter will be due any day, a pinstripe suit I like has just been sent to the cleaner's. There'll be books to be boxed in corrugated food cartons from the supermarket, the smaller the lighter, the lighter the better. No wonder I keep finding reasons for postponing the action: the welfare of the children (a fat lot of good it's done any of them to have us stick together so long), the money, the office, my wife's health, a dinner party for the following week or a date for the theater with another couple that will have to be broken. Neither one of us will want to call; we'd rather stay married. It's so much easier to ride things out until my mood changes and I kid myself into thinking I will never really want to leave her.

I just don't know how it's done.

Weaklings do it. Will she forward my mail? Or will I have to telephone and talk to her about that and other things. I guess it helps to have a wife who falls in love with another man and wants a divorce first. But mine is so lacking in initiative of that kind she might never come around to it. I would still have all that packing to do. I have shelves of books from college days with handwritten notes I scribbled in the margins. I probably will never look at them again. Yet I would want to take them with me. I would have to find an apartment, furnish the apartment, make my own dinner most evenings or eat out, get some girl friends I could stand, and sooner or later get married to one of them so that I could start looking forward to a divorce again.

I wish there were someone I could hire by the hour to go through the whole wearying procedure for me from beginning to end, even to experiencing those ritualistic qualms of guilt, concern, and remorse without which a conscience can never feel antiseptically pure again.

I remember a pledge: when Derek reached five, I promised myself, I would go. What irony! (All I did was fuck her once, and now I am saddled with him.) It isn't his fault. Even without him, I'd still be unable to go; and even if he were normal, I would want to. I will always want to.

I yearn to.

I do have dreams about divorce. I want to leave my home but I'm unable to. Even when they let me. (They always let me. I don't go. I don't want them to let me.) I'm unable to get anywhere. I want to speak but I'm unable to. People leave messages for me and I am unable to get back to them. I have to take a test and I am unprepared. All term long I have been unable to find my way into the correct classroom. The lessons have proceeded without me. The term is ending. I have trouble finding my way to the correct examination room. Every building I enter is wrong. Time is passing. I will fail.

I would not even know how to begin if I had to begin with a straight face. I don't think I'd be able to make all those necessary pompous statements without cracking a smile. I think I might actually burst out laughing. I think a man like me would have to fly way off the handle into the wildest emotional state to get it done, go mad, utterly berserk, for an hour or two and give no thought at all to mail, children, books, underwear, and pinstripe suits. Man can live without a pinstripe suit, if he has to. All it would take is enough rage to throw together a small suitcase, checkbook, passport, credit cards. Even then, there would be no guarantee.

Not for me.

Suppose, for example, one of the children, even Derek (perhaps especially Derek), came to the doorway to watch while I was packing. How could I go on?

Or suppose my wife, whom I've known so many years now, simply walked into the room when I was almost finished and said:

"Please don't go."

I don't think I could (I would probably miss her.) She wants me to tell her I love her. I won't. A reason I won't is that I know she wants me to. This is one advantage I have over her that I am still able to hang onto.

She used to make me say it. It seems a silly, awkward thing for a sapient human being to have to say — especially if it's true. It might make some sense on occasion when it's a lie. Now she cannot make me say it, and I have my revenge. She doesn't ask me to anymore. And between us now there is this continual underground struggle over something trivial and nebulous that won't abate and has lasted nearly as long as the two of us have known each other.

"I love you."

What funny words ever to have to say. (They become more flexible if you're allowed to add a couple of others fore and aft to round them off with some frills of humor or sarcasm that pervert the meaning. Something like:

"Gee, baby, I sure do love you a lot whe______________"

Complete the above statement in fifteen words or less.)

I have not told my wife I love her, I think, since shortly after Arthur Baron first proposed Andy Kagle's job for me, and that was at night in bed and the meaning was sexual (which is not what she means. My wife does not know yet that it will be Andy Kagle's job I'm taking). It gnaws at my wife's self-esteem, tears at her pride and vanity that I do not say:

"I love you."

I relish that. I have it on her. It has nothing at all to do with love. It has more to do with hate. We hoard pillows. We have big, fluffy, soft ones now, and she steals mine when I'm asleep. Also, she sleeps better than I do, which arouses so much wrath in me that I can hardly sleep at all, and then she maintains she's been awake all night with heartburn, headache, and humanitarian concern over the well-being of others. (I'm the one who's been awake. She won't stay in her part of the house, as my son and daughter prefer to do now. She won't answer the telephone, even though the calls are mostly for her. When one does come for me, she'll wait until I've been talking for thirty seconds and then pick up the extension breathlessly to shout: "Hello?" We run out of light bulbs.) There is face to be saved in this tug-of-war, and I want to save mine. This is one victory she cannot pluck away from me. I have the advantage, because I don't care if she never says it to me (although I might begin to care if I felt she didn't).

She wants me to say it precisely that way:

"I love you."

I prefer to sidle into it through methods of my own.

"Oh, Mom!" my daughter exclaimed in the car, pulling close to her in a hug. "I just love her when she kids around this way."

"So do I," I said, edging it in.

There it was. But that isn't good enough. It doesn't do the trick.

(I meant it when I did.)

I've said it to her also the way she wants me to and will again; but I refuse to say it when she is trying to make me. I balk. I have my masculinity and self-esteem to protect against this indecent attack. I resist.

Call it spite. Call it petty spite. But call it highly sensual and gratifying spite.

"Would I be here with you if I didn't?" I have answered.

"Then why don't you ever say so?"

"I love you — there! I did."

"You never tell me."

"I just did."

"But I had to ask you — no, don't smile, don't say anything, don't make a joke out of it," she laments (just as I am about to make a joke out of it). "I guess I expect too much."

My wife not only wants me to say:

"I love you."

She wants me to want to say it!

"I love you."

"Do you?"

"I just said so, didn't I?"

"I had to ask you. I always have to make you say it."

And I might consent to let her make me, out of the hospitable goodness of my heart, if I did not know there was this contest between us that I don't want to lose. I might make a deal with her on it anyway if she'd get me the pillows I want and stop snoring or breathing away indifferently in such slumbering, nasal contentment while I'm still lying awake trying to sleep.

"Get more pillows, for God sakes. We've got more cars and television sets than we have pillows."

We've got four pillows for our king-size bed (which is something of a mocking joke. We could move around it for years and never come in contact with each other if we didn't want to. We do not sleep entwined). And I want her to get at least four more, maybe five. She forgets. I want there to be enough for me, which means at least one or two more than there are for her. (When we do buy light bulbs, we put them in places we can't find when we need one. We run out of toilet paper. The ladies run out of sanitary napkins. The world is running out of good maids and qualified laundresses, cobblers, and tailors. The wheels are falling off this gyroscoping toy. It hasn't stood the test of time. I can't get a maid to remember to put fresh towels in my bathrooms after she removes the old ones. I can't get my wife to serve dinner on time unless there's company.) It is very important to me where I sleep in relationship to her. I want more pillows under my head than she has so that I will be above her. I sleep almost against the headboard so that she will be below me. It is very important to me that my wife seem small. She isn't. We are nearly the same height, unless she kicks her shoes off. That was uncomfortable when we used to dance, still is when we want to kiss (we bunk foreheads and noses); and I still cannot walk with my arm around her shoulders without experiencing twinges of tendonitis. My wife just doesn't seem to fit. I want my wife's face on a line with my shoulder or lower when we sleep, make love, walk, or eat; I do not want it confronting me on a level equal to my own. (When we're out in public, though, I'm glad she's straight and handsome. She cuts a stately figure when she's all dressed up and makes a dazzling impression for me if she isn't drunk and obnoxious.) She is starting to snap her chewing gum again when she sits beside me in the car or movies. She goes back to chewing gum when she's trying to stop drinking. It drives me up the wall, nearly out of my mind with pent-up rage, some nights to see and hear her sleeping soundly in futile battles against worry, hurt, grievance, and overstimulation. (There are nights after drinking while I am lying wide awake lot or thinking very hard about matters at the office that I am unable to turn off my mind for hours or even slow to a governable tempo the free-flight of disjointed ideas from all sources that go racing through my brain. I never think of anything good. I sometimes think of something good.) I want to pummel her. I want to hiss vitriol. It is there in the darkness of sleep, when no one is looking, not even ourselves, that our true rudimentary spirits emerge. Like furled and eyeless embryos, we wage war murderously over areas of quilt and corners of pillow; bumps of knee and hip are the weapons we use; mewing grunts and moans are the curses and battle cries. (We are babies, although we probably did not feel this way when we were babies.) It infuriates me that she does not even know I'm awake. I feel martyred by neglect. (Some nights I can sleep and she can't: it registers upon me that she is leaving the bed repeatedly in some state of agitation, and I doze off again more blissfully as a result of this knowledge.) I am in a turmoil of tragic insomnia, and she is lying inches away from me in a mellow stupor of oblivious tranquillity. How dare she be so insensitive to my wretchedness and distress, especially when it's all probably her fault. And I want to shake her awake roughly.

"Get up, you, dammit you! Why should you be able to sleep when I can't? And it's all your fault."

She wouldn't know what I was talking about and might think I'd gone mad.

"Do you love me?" she might ask.

She doesn't ask it anymore. She knows we are in a struggle also and has too much pride to fly a white flag of ignominious defeat. (I'm glad she doesn't. I would have to make concessions. I wish it were over.)

I think I know when it will end, how I will be able to disengage us from this stalemate and resolve the conflict in a way rewarding to both: on her deathbed.

"Don't die," I can say then. "I love you."

I will have my honor. She will be appeased. I will be a hundred and eight years old. She will be a few years younger. I will have to start doing my own shopping in supermarkets and groceries to make certain there is coffee and juice in the house for me. I will have to sell the house and move to an apartment. (And then I will miss her.)

She hasn't asked in years. Age and self-respect, I think, have stilled the question every time she wanted to ask:

"Do you still love me?"

It is in her mind, though. I can see it as a verbal sculpture. She fishes, hints. I decline to oblige. Or perhaps she believes I don't love her any longer and fears that if she were to ask:

"Do you love me?" I would answer: "No."

And then we would have to do something. (And wouldn't know what.)

I'm glad she doesn't, although I frequently feel her on the brink. It would be demeaning to have to deal with. I don't want to have fights with her about this. I don't know how I would answer now if she were to ask:

"Do you love me?"

Unresponsively, facetiously, evasively. I would not want to lie and I would not want to tell the truth (no matter how I felt). If she were to ask while we were savaging each other in sex, the answer would be easy.

"Turn over, and I'll show you."

But that would not be what she wanted, and both of us would know. And I am so pleased she doesn't ask, feel so grateful and deeply indebted to her at times, that I want to throw wide my arms in relief and proclaim:

"I love you!"

And after I made that mistake, I might never be able to get my divorce. (I believe I understand now why I get along so well with women when I want to and have so much trouble getting along with my children. I treat my girlfriends like children and expect my children to behave like grown-ups.) Arthur Baron wouldn't want me to.

"Well?" he's asked. His smile was a trace broader than ever before and there was a stronger cordiality in his expression.

"I really have no choice," I surrender with a smile, "have I?"

"You do."

"Not really. I want Kagle's job."

"That's good, Bob. Congratulations."

"Thanks, Art."

"We'll tell him early next week. You know him pretty well. How would you guess he'll take it?"

"Bad. But he'll do everything to hide it. He may ask to be the one to tell me."

"We'll let him."

"He'll want to take credit. He may even want to be allowed to issue the announcement."

"That will make things easier. You'll have much to put in order."

"I've made a list."

"I'll probably want to add to it, Bob."

"That's okay with me, Art." I laugh lightly (before tendering my gentle wisecrack) and bow my head in a gesture of self-effacement. "I'm not one of these officials who'll resent advice from his superiors."

"Ha, ha. I didn't think so, Bob. You'll run the convention."

"I've begun making plans. I think I know how."

"There's one more thing we've found out about Kagle, Bob," Arthur Baron tells me. "He goes to prostitutes in the afternoon."

"I've gone with him."

"You'll stop, though. Won't you?"

"I already have."

"That's good, Bob. I was sure you would. By the wayr " he adds, pressing my elbow with a conspiratorial wink and chuckling. "They're much better in the evening."

"Ha, ha."

Almost imperceptibly, my relationship with Arthur Baron has altered already in the direction of a closer conversational familiarity. Shrewdly, discreetly, diplomatically, I make no comment to indicate I've noticed the improvement. I've had a talent, thus far, this footman's talent, for being able to decipher what Arthur Baron and others of my betters (Green is my superior, not my better. Kagle is neither) expect of me and the subtle theatrical instinct for letting them observe they are getting it. (I have the footman's fear of losing it and being turned out of my job for betraying a spaniel's eagerness to please. Holloway in my department is that way again now, stopping people, dogging footsteps, fawning aggressively, extorting attention, demanding praise or benign admonishments. He'll break down again soon. They always break down again. I don't know why they even bother to try to come back. Holloway cannot be trusted with important business responsibilities: he lacks the fine genius for servility that I have.) I know that Arthur Baron doesn't want us to invite him back again. My wife doesn't.

"I'm sure she must be counting," my wife has repeated worriedly. "They've had us there twice since we had them here. Three times, if you count that cocktail party they gave for Horace White. I never expected to be invited to that."

"He doesn't."

"I'd be so embarrassed if I ran into them."

"I'm sure."

"I'm glad. I would like to give another nice dinner party soon. I'm glad I don't have to."

Arthur Baron lives not far away in a much better house in a much richer part of Connecticut than I do, although the part of Connecticut we do live in is far from bad. He has more land. (I own one acre, he owns four.) Most of the people around me seem to make more money than I do. Where I live now is perfectly adequate: and when I get my raise and move, it will again be among people who make more money than I do. This is known as upward mobility, a momentous force in contemporary American urban life, along with downward mobility, which is another momentous force in contemporary American urban life. They keep things stirring. We rise and fall like Frisbees, if we get off the ground at all, or pop flies, except we rise slower, drop faster. I am on the way up, Kagle's on the way down. He moves faster. Only in America is it possible to do both at the same time. Look at me. I ascend like a condor, while falling to pieces. Maybe the same thing happens in Russia, but I don't live there. Every river in the world, without exception, flows from north to south as it empties into the sea. Except those that don't, and the laws of the conservation of energy and matter stipulate harshly and impartially that energy and matter can either (sic) be created nor (sic) destroyed.

A lot that has to do with me. My dentist scraping at one tooth in my socket is more painful to me than my wife's cancer will be if she ever gets one. I get corns in the same spot on the little toe of my right foot, no matter what shoes I wear.

Arthur Baron has had us to his home for dinner half a dozen times the past two and a half years (and never serves enough food. We are hungry when we reach home). And we have had him to our house once. We have a good time. He usually will have just one other person from the company, whom I may or may not have met before, and three other amiable couples with occupations unrelated to our own. There is room for just twelve at his dining room table. The evenings are quiet and end before midnight. The subject of Derek has never come up at his house and we tend to feel we could gloss by it without discomfort there if it did. Nothing unpleasant ever comes up; no one's misfortunes are ever mentioned. The fact that they do not serve enough is a prickly trait for us to absorb, for we like both Arthur Baron and his wife and enjoy going there, even though we are uncomfortable. His wife is an unassuming woman with whom we almost feel at ease.

We had Arthur Baron and his wife to our house for dinner just about a year ago (time does fly). And we served too much food. People tend to eat more than they want to at our house. We like to offer guests a choice of meats and desserts. We also like to show we are people of lusty appetite who know how to entertain generously. My wife was troubled awhile that they might take it as a criticism.

"Do it your way, honey," I encouraged her. "Not the way someone else would."

The evening went marvelously. Intuition told me it was the proper time to invite him. (Once we invited Green. He told me he didn't want to come to my house for dinner, and we were relieved. There is an insulting honesty about Green that is refreshing afterward.) Wisely, I did not organize the evening around Arthur Baron. (We would have had the dinner anyway.)

"Yes, Bob?"

"Hello, Art. We're going to have some people over to dinner the third or fourth Saturday from now. We thought it would be nice if you and Lucille could come."

"Love to, Bob. I'll have to check."

"Fine, Art."

Before noon that same day his wife phoned mine to say they were free either weekend and were pleased we had thought of asking them.

They stayed late, and ate and drank more than we would have supposed. (I still wonder with some perplexity about the small amounts of food they prepare when they entertain. I guess they must be hungry too by the time we reach home.) I mixed tangy martinis that everyone drank, and the mood was lightened from the start. I thought of myself as courtly as I stirred and poured. I caught glimpses of myself in the mirror: I was utterly courtly. I wore a courtly smile. (I am vain as a peacock.) I had no one there from the company. I had a copyright lawyer, a television writer, an associate professor of marketing, a computer expert, the owner of a small public relations firm, and an engaging specialist in arbitrage with a leading brokerage, about whose work none of us knew much and all of us were curious (for a while). The wives were all pretty and vivacious. The conversation was lively. There was boisterous laughter. My wife gave recipe tips when asked. The Barons were nearly the last to leave.

"Thanks, Bob. We really enjoyed it."

"Thanks, Art, I'm glad you could come."

My wife and I were aglow and enchanted with our success and made love. The evening went marvelously indeed, but it was written in the atmosphere — and my wily sixth-sense tells me it is still there — that we were not to invite him again for a long time, although it was much more than just okay to have done so then. My wife, a churchgoing Congregationalist, doesn't understand; she is instructed by a minister of God in matters of duty and hospitality. As a registered Republican, though, I know more about protocol.

"Why not?" she wants to know, and there is a tinge of eagerness in her perseverance. "Aren't you getting along with him?"

"We're getting along fine."

"Don't you think they'll want to come?"

"It isn't time."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"It's written in the atmosphere. Give a dinner party without them if you want to give one."

My wife falters. Derek's a heavy presence in the home now and changes things. (Enthusiasm dwindles rapidly into lassitude and stillborn wishes. Long-range plans for joy turn dreary in contemplation of their fulfillment. Then she has nothing to do.) Then we have my daughter to cope with as well if she doesn't have a date of her own for that evening and decides to stay home to watch. Either she mingles with our guests more intimately than we want her to or passes through in silence with a countenance of rude displeasure that everyone can see, responding with the barest cold nod to the salutations of anyone there who knows her (and passes through again like that an hour later, every hour on the hour, until my wife mutters, "I'll kill her if she does that again" and goes to tell her off). The time may soon come when I'll have to order her acidly to keep out of sight completely whenever we have company, like Derek. (I don't like children hanging around when I visit other people, either.) Derek creates disturbing problems also in our relationship with our other children because of the attention we have had to concentrate on him and the large amount of money he costs. (Soon, I will have to start putting money aside for his future.)

"How are the kids?" people feel obliged to inquire whenever they come to our house, or we go to theirs.

It's a question I've learned to fear.

"Fine, all fine," I feel obliged to reply with too much alacrity (in order to get off that subject as speedily as possible). "And yours?"

Derek is a heavy presence outside the home as well, for my wife and I still nurture that special terror of walking into a frolicsome party at somebody else's house one evening and meeting socially one of the score of doctors and psychologists we've gone to in the past who know all about him, and all about us. It hasn't happened yet. We prefer large, noisy gatherings, at which public conversation is impossible; we are on guard at smaller, formal groups in which the discussion at any time might take an unpredictable turn to zero in on us. Then we must react hastily to divert it or sacrifice ourselves for a minute or so to talk evasively about something we don't want to talk about at all. (We have to admit it quickly. Admitting it may be good for other families. It isn't good for us. Everybody in the room turns uncomfortable suddenly.) Even at large parties, I have been taken aside often by someone who feels closer to me than I do to him and asked confidentially in a hawking undertone:

"That youngest boy of yours. How is he?"

"Fine, fine," I respond. "Much better than we would have hoped."

By now, my wife and I have had our fill — are sick and glutted to the teeth — of psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists, neurosurgeons, speech therapists, psychiatric social workers, and any of all the others we've been to that I may have left out, with their inability to help and their lofty, patronizing platitudes that we are not to blame, ought not to let ourselves feel guilty, and have nothing to be ashamed of. All young doctors, I'm convinced, strive to be beetle-browed, and all older ones have succeeded.

"Prick!" I have wanted to scream at them like an animal. "Prick! Prick! Prick! Prick! Prick! Prick!" I have wanted to shriek at all of them like a screech owl (whatever that is, including the two I went to see briefly in secret about myself). Why can't the simpleminded fools understand that we want to feel guilty, must feel guilty if we're to do the things we have to?

Unperturbed, they would answer equably that my screaming at them was a way of trying to relieve myself of blame and call the repetition perseveration.

And they would be right. And they would be wrong.

I could tell stories. An outsider wouldn't believe the number of conflicting opinions the different doctors gave us and the backbiting judgments they made of each other, but we did. We believed them all, the good and the bad. And disbelieved as well (we had no choice) and had no choice but to search for others, like wandering supplicants.

"It's organic."

"It's functional."

"It's largely organic with functional complications now."

"He isn't deaf but may not be able to hear."

"At least he's alive."

"The prognosis is good."

"For what?"

"The prognosis is bad."

"It would not be possible to offer a prognosis at this time."

Not one of them ever had the candor, the courage, the common sense, the character to say:

"Jesus — I really don't know."

It began with:

"You're making too much of it."

And moved to:

"He will never speak."

"He probably will not surpass a mental age of five, if he attains that. His coordination and muscular control will never be good. It will require tremendous patience."

We hate them all, the ones who were wrong and the ones who were right. After awhile, that made no difference. The cause didn't matter. The prognosis was absolute. The cause did matter. It was organic (ceramic. The transistors are there). It just doesn't work the way others do. (A radio will not work like a television set.) There was no malfunction. It worked the way it was built to (worked perfectly, if looked at their way). The architecture's finished. The circuits can't be changed. Nothing is broken; there's nothing they can find to be fixed.

"Why can't they do it with surgery?" my wife's asked me.

"They wouldn't know where to cut and stitch."

He's a simulacrum.

"If only we hadn't had him," my wife used to lament. "He'd be so much better off if he'd never been born."

"Let's kill the kid," I used to joke jauntily when I thought he was just innately fractious (I used to carry color snapshots of all three of my children in my wallet. Now I carry none), before I began to guess there might be something drastically wrong.

I don't say that anymore.

(Poor damaged little tyke. No one's on your side.)

He is a product of my imagination. I swear to Christ I imagined him into existence.

We do feel guilty. We do blame ourselves. We're sorry we have him. We're sorry people know we do. We feel we have plenty to be ashamed of. We have him.

My head is a cauldron.

My mind is an independent metropolis teeming with flashes, shadows, and figures, with tiny playlets and dapper gnomes, day and night. My days are more lucid. I never think of Derek in danger; I only think of my boy or myself.

I have melodrama in my noodle, soap operas, recurring legends of lost little children trying wretchedly to catch up with themselves, or someone else, the day before. They stare. They are too sad to move. They are too motionless to cry. There are blurred histories of myself inside requiring translation and legibility. There is pain — there is so much liquid pain. It never grows less. It stores itself up. Unlike heat or energy, it does not dissipate. It all always remains. There's always more than before. There's always enough near the surface to fuel a tantrum or saturate a recollection. Tiny, barely noted things — a sound, a smell, a taste, a crumpled candy wrapper — can mysteriously set off thrumming vibrations deep within. It's mine. I have more than enough to share with everyone I know. I have enough for a lifetime, and someday soon when I am fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, or ninety, I will overhear someone speak the word birthday, brother, father, mother, sister, son, little boy, doggie, frankfurter, or lollipop and my eyes will dissolve into tears and I will throb inside with evocations of ancient, unresolved tragedies in which I took part replayed in darkness behind curtains that have come down. That will happen. It happens to me now. Frankfurter. A poignant nostalgia befalls me. Merry-go-round. I want to cry. Cotton candy. My heart breaks. I feel I can't go on.

I want to keep my dreams.

Ball-bearing roller skates. I melt.

I want to keep my dreams, even bad ones, because without them, I might have nothing all night long.

I miss my father, they told me. As if I didn't know. (I miss my boy now too. He is pulling away from me. He does his homework in his room without my help and doesn't talk to me anymore about what is happening to him at school. I don't know if he's more unhappy or less.) They didn't tell me anything I didn't know. They couldn't help. They said I was perfectly normal — which was the most deplorable thing I have ever been told! With time and much treatment, that condition might be remedied. They envied my sex life. (So do I.) The pity, we agreed, is that I don't enjoy it more.

(The company takes a strong view against psychotherapy for executives because it denotes unhappiness, and unhappiness is a disgraceful social disease for which there is no excuse or forgiveness. Cancer, pernicious anemia, and diabetes are just fine, and even people with multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's disease may continue to go far in the company until they are no longer allowed to go on at all. But unhappiness is fatal. If my daughter or son were to commit suicide, that would be overlooked, because children do things like that, and that's the way kids are. But if my wife were to jump to her death without a prior record of psychiatric disturbance, did it only because she was unhappy, my chances for further advancement would be over. I'd be ruined.)

I have acrimony, they told me (which is also normal. I have more pain than acrimony. My mind is a storehouse of pain, a vast, invisible reservoir of sorrows as deep as I am old, waiting always to be tapped and set flowing by memory. I can discharge acrimony. I can only experience pain).

There are times when I am attacked from within by such acrimonious enmity toward people I like who have suffered serious personal tragedies or business failure that if something (or someone else) inside me were to give voice to the infamous words that leap to mind, I would be put away and reviled, with no possibility ever of absolution or apology. (The tragedies of people who are not close to me move me distantly, if at all.)

"Good for you! It serves you right!" I want to sneer.

(I want to spit.)

I'm afraid sometimes I might. (I have sat at tables with men I've known a long time and have wanted to touch their hand.)

It's not I who wants to kick Kagle in the leg. New people are hatching inside my head always, whether I want them to or not, and become permanent residents the moment I take note of them. We are often at cross purposes. They have time. They have time to work without interruption at whatever it is they came there to do, and they saunter away with great self-possession into darknesses I've not been able to penetrate. They weave back and forth in droves through a labyrinth whose tunnels I've never seen. I have a small cemetery there lying on a diagonal with orderly rows of identical headstones, an image left by a photograph, perhaps, or the reduction of one actually seen long ago. People may be buried there. Every once in a while startled three-dimensional thoughts, fancies, or series of new old recollections go flying across my mind like flocks of sparrows and disappear in unlit underground holes. I can summon them back when I want to if I can remember to make the effort, but only one at a time. The man who wants to make me kick Kagle in the leg is a worldly, relaxed fellow with black silk socks and a gray pinstripe suit. He's a man about my own age with neatly trimmed white hair. He is little, of course; he has to be to fit inside. (Even all those sinister and gigantic ogres who've been menacing me in my nightmares all my life have been small; it's just that I am so much smaller.) He seems to know his way about the stone passageways of my brain much better than I do, for he reappears in different settings, often reading a newspaper with one ankle crossed comfortably over his knee, biding his time. He thinks he's got more time than I have. (He hasn't.) I think there's a sauna, for many of the more affluent, better-bred occupants of my thoughts seem the type that likes to scorch itself leisurely after playing squash. I suspect there's a homosexual haunt located somewhere secret. Tiny shops are all about at which wicked contraband is exchanged by grimy, unshaven men who know how. Grimy, unshaven men expose themselves to me and to children of both sexes and go unpunished. All crimes go unpunished.

Vile these evil, sordid, miniature human beings who populate my brain, like living fingers with faces and souls. Some wear hats. People suffer. I suffer. Children wander. Women weep. Mothers lie on deathbeds. I am afraid — I have been afraid — a screaming, wailing, or sobbing might start at any instant inside my ears, be taken up by other tortured voices from within, and never stop. I would not know if I was imagining it. It would not matter. I would hear it. Minikins move, and I can feel them, and dirty, cynical old men with sharp crutches and pointy beards pass with insinuating glints in their cruel, unscrupulous eyes. They hurt. Ugolino eats a head: mine (that son of a bitch).

No one will help. (Only my wife's sister verges close enough to that delicate nerve of truth we want unbared, but her front is callous, her motives unkind, and I want to hit her.)

"Give the kid away," she as much as commands with taunting relish in her rasping, obtrusive way, attacking, pressing her advantage, and we must unite to resist her and beat her back.

"Good for you! It serves you right," is what I hear her snarling invidiously at us in my own voice and words. "I'm glad it happened. Ha, ha. I'm glad it happened to you because I know you, instead of to people I don't know who live far away."

I want to hit her because I feel she sees inside me and steals my thoughts, compelling me to repudiate them.

We want to get rid of him. We want to give him away. And need people in positions of respectable authority to tell us. We haven't nerve to do it alone. What will people we know think of us?

Unfeeling.

Inhuman.

We want to give him away and are afraid.

(Other people we hear about in Connecticut, New York, Long Island, and New Jersey intend to keep theirs. Why?)

"Don't," my wife's sister has warned consistently almost from the first day there was no longer any doubt (which was too soon). "Do it fast. Don't be hypocrites. The longer you wait, the worse it's going to be for everybody."

That suggestion was monstrous. (Hypocrisy was easier.)

"Don't say that again!" my wife flares up at her that last time. "I don't ever want to hear you say anything about it again to us, or I won't let you come here. I mean that."

"I've had it," I roar at my wife afterward. "I don't ever want to hear her talk about him again. Or about any of the other kids either. I'll throw her out if she does. If you won't tell her I will."

"I did tell her. You heard me. Did you think that was easy?"

"You're only reacting that way because you know I'm right," her sister had responded self-righteously.

"She was only trying to be helpful," my wife continues repentently. "Now I'm sorry I yelled at her."

"No, she wasn't. Do you think she was trying to be helpful? I wish she'd move to Arizona with your mother."

"Her store is here."

She is a seamy, murky inner lining of my wife's character that my wife has never been able to look at without retreating immediately into remorse. She is another underside of my own (that I am able to show often at home to my family and reveal to myself in daydreams with vindictive jubilation) just as Derek also is, in my occasional wish to be speechless and powerless again and wholly dependent once more on parents and big brothers and sisters. (Except that I would not want to be sent away to a home.) Everyone around me now reminds me of me. Even Kagle reminds me of me. (Green doesn't. I admire Green. Arthur Baron doesn't; I find I don't identify as readily with my betters or with people who have more attractive qualities than my own. Only with people who are worse.) Arthur Baron never mentions Derek to me. Andy Kagle does, and I hate him for it. (I could have killed him when he showed up at the house Sunday without invitation to tell me, unctuously and pretentiously, that it was God's will. I wanted to hit him too.) I resent it blazingly when anyone talks to me about him (and want to kill them), although I also hope that everyone in the world will join together soon at the identical moment to tell me:

"Give the kid away."

That isn't going to happen.

I don't have to poll the members of my family to find out what we want. Even my fair-haired, lovable, good-hearted, sensitive boy, who is appalled by the alternatives, really doesn't mean it when he pleads:

"Don't."

He means:

"Please."

"But please whisk him away too swiftly for the eye to see or the mind to record and remember."

Kagle called from the filling station in town with the lie he just happened to be driving through and would like to say hello to the family. He looked haggard. There were sleepless shadows under his eyes and it was all he could do to force even a nervous smile.

"You hear things," he confided. "This time I'm really worried. Has anyone said anything about me?"

"I hear you've been to Toledo again."

"They aren't even talking to me about the convention. By now they usually give me a theme."

"Maybe they don't have one."

"I have to meet with Horace White. With him and Arthur Baron. I never have anything to do with Horace White."

"Maybe he's got some ideas."

"Two on one," Kagle chirps at me with a wink, as soon as my wife starts back into the house again.

"Coons?"

He misses my irony.

"Not for me. Not in Toledo. I've got good connections there. You ought to tag along sometime. I'll take good care of you."

"Should I ask him to stay for dinner?" my wife asks.

"Don't."

"He looks so unhappy."

"He wants to drive around."

"I don't even care," Kagle says, wiping the back of his hand over his mouth, drying his lips. "I'm getting tired of doing the same thing anyway. Where's the kids? I'd like to say hello to them before I go."

"Out playing."

"What about the little one? The one with the brain damage?"

"He's resting. He has to."

"You know, you shouldn't blame yourself about your boy," Kagle tells me, twisting himself back into his car. "I don't blame myself about my leg. It was God's will."

"Sure, Andy," I reply with a nasty smile, gritting my teeth. "And you don't worry about your job. If you lose it, it's God's will."

"Heh-heh," he comments hollowly.

"Heh-heh."

"Why didn't you let him stay?" my wife asks.

"I didn't want him."

It is God's will.

I've got Kagle's job.

"You were with Andy Kagle today," my wife says.

"How can you tell?"

"You're walking with a limp. Is his leg getting worse?"

"No, why?"

"His limp is worse than ever. You're almost staggering."

I straighten myself from a position characteristic of one of Kagle's and lean in a slouch of my own against the newel post of the staircase leading to the second floor.

"No. He's the same."

She looks at me askance. She's been drinking wine again while helping the maid prepare dinner. Her bleary eyes are tense and patient. (I cannot meet them.) She senses something, and moves ahead carefully with mixed curiosity.

"Then you must have been with him a long time."

"I got his job."

"Did you?"

"I was promoted today."

"To what?"

"Kagle's job."

"Kagle's?"

"It finally went through."

"Was that the job?"

"Congratulate me."

"Did you know it was his job?"

"No."

"Yes, you did."

"I had a hunch."

"What happened to him?"

"Nothing."

"What will? I saw the way he looked."

"He was fired."

"My God."

"I fired him today. He doesn't know that yet. But I think he does."

"You fired him?"

"I had to, God dammit. He won't be fired. He'll be transferred somewhere else until he quits or retires. I can't keep him around. I couldn't use him after he's been in charge. He's embarrassing. He's sloppy. He'll run my work down."

"He's got two children."

"So have I."

"You've got three."

"So?"

"You're forgetting Derek again."

"So?"

"You're always forgetting Derek."

"So?"

"So's your old man." She is drunk and she is defiant.

"What the hell else am I supposed to do?"

"I'm better than you," she tells me.

"You want a new house, don't you? You liked the idea that I was getting a better job, didn't you?"

"I used to think I wasn't," she continues. "But I am. You like to think you're better than me. But you're not. I'm the one who's better."

"Yeah? And you'd be even better still if you'd lay off the wine in the afternoon."

"Your mother was right."

"Leave her out of it."

"You're just no good."

"I told you to leave her out of it."

"I never thought I was."

"You're always bothering me about money, aren't you?"

"No, I don't."

"The hell you don't."

"And neither do they. We don't bother you about money that much."

"And you wonder why I don't tell you I love you, don't you?"

"I never thought I was good at anything." There is undisguised scorn, calm, measured contempt that I've never seen in her before. "You don't help much there."

"Kagle isn't sore at me. Why are you?"

"Isn't he?"

"No. In fact, he's the one who recommended me to replace him."

"No, he didn't," she jeers, with a curling lip and a belittling shake of her head. "You knew months ago. He just found out."

"You're getting good at this."

"You taught me."

"At least you got something."

"But now I know I'm better than you are, aren't I?»

"Amn't I. There's no such construction as 'aren't'."

"Puddy poo."

"What'd you say?"

"Puddy poo."

"Where'd you get that from?"

"From you. You say it in your sleep."

"I'm going upstairs. I can't take this."

"Puddy poo. What about dinner?"

"Count me out. I'll celebrate upstairs alone. I've got to start working on my speech."

"What speech?"

"The big speech I'm going to have to make to open the convention. I'm head of the department now. That might not mean much at home but it means a hell of a lot there. I run the whole show. I can do what I want."

"Can you get Andy Kagle his job back?"

"Fuck you," I tell her.

"You're just no good, are you?"

"I told you. I warned you. I don't want you ever to say that to me again."

"I'll say anything I want," she shouts back at me heatedly. "I'm not afraid of you."

"Yes, you say that to me often," I remind her. "And then you sober up, and discover that you are."

She shatters. "You bastard." The tears form quickly and are streaming down her face. "You won another argument, didn't you?"

I don't feel I've won. I feel I've lost as I mount the stairs wearily. It's been a harrowing day at the office. The meetings were concluded at five to allow the rumors to spread and percolate through the company overnight. Kagle lingers later than the rest of us to confirm them appreciatively.

"I want you to know I had a big hand in it," he tells me. "I fought for you with Arthur Baron when he asked me to recommend someone who I thought could really handle it. They were thinking of someone like Johnny Brown or one of the branch managers. I told them you knew more about it than any of them. Now I'll be free to do the kind of troubleshooting work I like. Don't be afraid of any of it. I'll be around to help you all I can."

No, he won't.

"Thanks, Andy. What's that you've got there?"

"It's a perpetual-motion machine Horace White gave me. I'll bet you'd never be able to figure out how it works if you didn't know where the battery was hidden."

(Batteries run down. He'll have about ten days after the convention and then he'll have to take a leave of absence for a few weeks and move. Or retire. I have a plan.)

"What about me?" I maintain to Johnny Brown, who blocks my path skeptically with smoldering belligerence, his muscled jaws knotted for combat (and I wonder, perhaps, if he might not mercifully end my suspense by giving me my punch in the jaw right at the start). "You could have knocked me over with a feather when they told me, I was so surprised."

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

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

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

"He isn't feeling well," I hope my wife replies with sharp compunction.

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

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

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

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

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

But I had to go on.

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

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

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