Something Happened

'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