Something Happened

'In the storeroom?'

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

'How do you know?' I demanded.

'She tells me.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'What's the secret?' I asked.

'Take your hand out of your pocket.'

'Fuck you.'

'Okay.'

'On the desk?'

'Pretend you're working.'

'I am. What's the secret?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once I did find out about Tom and Marie Jencks, turned more persistent in my advances to Virginia; it got