Something Happened

who wore her round breasts loose some days even then, knowing they looked fine that way too if the breasts were good, and liked to arch her back and twist her shoulders slowly with a sleepy sigh, just to roll her breasts from side to side for my pleasure or thrust them toward me), I had Tom's handwriting down pat, and I have been using his handwriting ever since.

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

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

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

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

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

'I can't,' I answered.

'I need it.'

'So do I.'

'I need it now,' he said.

'Me too.'

'I'm meeting someone there.'

'So am I.'

'A girl,' he explained.

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

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

'Should I tell you?'

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

'How do you know?'

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

'It shows?'

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

'Not yet.'

'Do you know how?'

'I'm getting there.'

'She can show you how!'

'How do you know?' I asked jealously.

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

'With who?'

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

'No, I won't.'

'Gimme the key.'

'Tell me who it is.'

'Will you keep it quiet?'

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

'Marie.'

'Jencks?'

'You're screaming.'

'Are you laying Marie Jencks?'

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

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

'Can I please have the key?'

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

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

'Can you keep a secret?'

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

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

'Of course,' she said.

'With —»

'Sure.'

'Right now?'

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