Something Happened

'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?'