Something Happened

'All right. Will you get it?'

'Sure. I don't know what to do about my daughter.'

'Me neither,' my wife intones in a distant, hollow voice. 'She breaks my heart,' she adds fretfully. 'She can be such a bitch when she wants to hurt me.'

'I know.'

'You too. A bastard. You can be such a bastard. You could at least try to be friendly with her when she wants to talk to you. Even if it hurts.'

'I do. And it does hurt.'

'That's why she does it. It's the only way she knows how to make you notice her.'

'What about you?'

'Maybe me too. I don't even have that way anymore. I don't think you even care anymore whether I'm nasty or not. I think you just don't care.'

(Maybe she is right.)

My wife can wring my conscience for a little while (if I decide to let her), but she does not have the power to hurt me anymore (which is why I think I feel secure with her, why I even might have decided it would be good for me to marry her). She wishes she did. She would like to know she means more to me than she thinks she does, would like to believe I need her. (I don't. I don't think I do. I don't let her know I do.) She wants me to tell her I love her, although she has stopped asking me to (I bring her a box of chocolates every Saint Valentine's Day now, and she is pleased to receive it, although we both know it is only a box of chocolates. Still, it is a box of chocolates, and everybody in the family enjoys eating chocolates but me), just as she has too much pride (or good sense) to delve into the subject of my sleeping away from home so often or hint that I might be sleeping with other girls (as she does surmise about other married men we know. If that ever hopped out into the open between us, like that little mouse I was afraid of in our apartment in the city so long ago, she would have to do something about it, she would have to act — and I know she does not want to. I know that she, like me, prefers to keep us together until time, or life, runs out). I know I don't want my daughter to grow up to become the kind of girl I run around with now (none of whom can hurt me either. I pick them for that, reject them, in fact, in advance, before I even take up with them), but I don't know what kind of girl I do want her to become. (She will never become the king of France either.) She will never dance on the stage of the Radio City Music Hall. She will be some boy's girl friend for a short while, then some other boy's, and then an unhappy wife and mother who will get along no better with her children than I get along with mine, and I don't know what else she can become or anything I can do to help her toward something better — except nothing. (There are really so few things that can happen to people in this lifetime of ours, so few alternatives, so little any of us can become, although neither my wife nor daughter realizes that yet.)

'You never like to talk to me, do you?' my daughter says to me softly and earnestly, speaking this time not merely for effect.

'Yes, I do,' I reply, avoiding her eyes guiltily. (She is vulnerable in her candor. I do not want to hurt her.)

'You don't even like to look at me.'

'I'm looking at you now.'

'Only because I just said so. You were looking over my shoulder, like you always do, until I just said so.'

'I was watching a fly. I thought I saw one. When I do look at you, you want to know why I'm staring at you. You do the same thing with Mommy. You yell.'

'If I come in here to talk to you, you always look annoyed because I'm interrupting you, even when you're not doing anything but reading a magazine or writing on a pad.'

'Sometimes you keep saying good night to me for an hour or two and keep coming back in with something else you want to take up with me. Five or six times. I keep thinking you've gone to bed and I can concentrate and you keep coming back in and interrupting me. Sometimes I think you do it for spite, just to keep interrupting me.'

'I keep thinking of other things to say.'

'I'm not always that way.'

'I'm the only one who ever comes in here.'

'Am I always that way?'

'Everybody else is afraid to.'

'Except the maid,' I say, trying a mild joke.

'I'm not counting her.'

'I do come in here to work, or to get away from all of you for a little while and relax. I don't know why everyone around here is so afraid of me when I never do anything to anybody or even threaten to. Just because I like to be alone every now and then. I know I certainly don't get the impression that people around here are afraid to come in here and interrupt me when they want to, or do or say anything else to me, for that matter. Everybody always is.'

'You spend nearly all your time at home in here. We have to come in here when we want to talk to you.'

'I have a lot of work to do. I make a lot of money. Even though it may not seem like much to you. My work is hard.'

'You keep saying it's easy.'

'Sometimes it's hard. You know I do a lot of work in here. Sometimes when I just seem to be scribbling things on a pad or reading I'm actually thinking or doing work that I'll need in the morning the next day. It isn't always easy to do it at the office.'

'If you ever do say you want to speak to me, it's only to criticize me or warn me or yell at me for something you think I did.'

'That's not true.'

'It is.'

'Is it?'

'You never come into my room.'

'Is that true?'

'When do you?'

'You told us not to come in. You don't want me to. You keep the door closed all the time and you ask me to please get out if I do knock and come in.'

'That's because you never come in.'

'That doesn't make sense, does it?'

'Yes, it does. Mommy would know what I mean. You never want to come in.'

'I thought you didn't like Mommy.'

'Sometimes I do. She knows what I mean. All you ever do when you come into my room is tell me to open a window and pick my clothes up off the floor.'

'Somebody has to.'

'Mommy does.'

'But they're still always on the floor.'

'Sooner or later they get picked up. Don't they? I don't think that's so important. I don't think that's the most important thing you have to talk to me about. Is it?'

'I'll try never to say that to you again. What is important?'

'I've got posters on my wall and some funny lampshades that I painted myself and some funny collages that I made out of magazine advertisements. And I'm reading a book by D. H. Lawrence that I'm really enjoying very much. I think it's the best book I ever read.'

'I'm interested in all that,' I tell her. 'I'd like to see your posters and your funny lampshades and collages. What's the book by D. H. Lawrence?'

'You don't like D. H. Lawrence.'