Something Happened

Brown were fired afterward; it wouldn't unpunch my jaw. What will I do if he does? (How will I handle it?) I know what I will do. I'll fall down. But suppose, to my wonderment, I didn't fall down? I'd have to try to punch him back. Which would be worse? I know which would be worse.

Both.

I have sudden failures of confidence that leave me without energy, will, or hope. It happens when I'm alone or driving back from somewhere with my wife and she is at the wheel. (I just want to stop, give up.) It often follows elation. Everything drains away, leaving me with the apathetic outlook that I have arrived at my true level and it is low. There are times now when I have trouble maintaining my erections. They don't always get and stay as hard as they used to. I worry. And sometimes they do — it all charges back vigorously — and makes me feel like the heavyweight champion of the world. That's a good sensation. There are times when I'd not be afraid to fuck anybody, when there is not even the thinnest curtain of doubt to weave myself through in order to start doing the job. I don't even think of it as a job. It's a pleasure. I will not hesitate to make Ed Phelps retire.

'Oh, boy,' says my wife, impressed. 'Where is it all coming from? You're like a young boy again.'

'What do you know about young boys?' I banter, smarting a little in jealous recoil from the comparison.

'I know more than you think I do. Come on.'

'I think you do.'

'You're even younger now than you were when you were younger,' she says with a reveling laugh.

'So are you.'

'Any complaints?'

'Of course not.'

'Come on. Why do you always like to wait?'

'Again?' Penny asks, with an exclamation of flattered delight. (She is so honored and appreciative when I want her.) 'How come you have so much time for me lately? Wait,' she laughs, in the throaty voice of a sensuous contralto. 'Wait, baby. You don't give a young girl a chance.'

Penny is thirty-two now and I have been going with her for nearly ten years. She is no longer in love with me. I was never that way about her.

Penny and my wife are just about the only two left with whom I feel completely at ease (and also the two I find least intriguing). With every other girl I can call (I have a coded list of twenty-three names and numbers in my billfold, my office, and in a bedside drawer in Red Parker's apartment, and I might get a Yes from any one of them on any given evening or afternoon) each time is like the first time all over again (a strain. It's a job. I'll have to do well. I liked it better when they thought they were doing us a favor. I'm sorry they ever found out they could have orgasms too. I wonder who told them).

I know I can make a good impression on Arthur Baron by forcing Ed Phelps to retire. And unlike Kagle, I've had no close relationship with the kindly, prattling old man who's been with the company more than forty years and whose duties are now reduced to obtaining plane and hotel reservations through the Travel Department for anyone who wants to use him, and following up on shipping, transportation, and room arrangements for the convention. He has to make certain enough cars have been rented and enough whiskey ordered. His salary is good, although his raises the past ten years or so (ever since he grew obsolete and became superfluous and expendable) have been nominal.

'It will be in Puerto Rico again, I'm sure,' he repeats incessantly, and whispers, 'Lester Black's wife's family owns a piece of the hotel there. As soon as they hurry up and make it official, I can begin. I wish they would.'

I have ducked around file cabinets to avoid hearing him say that to me again. He could retire with a fortune in pension and profit-sharing benefits: he doesn't want to go. I'll make him. But what about Red Parker, who's just about my own age and isn't old enough to retire? How will I get rid of him? He has indeed been going downhill fast since his wife was killed in that automobile crash — the girls he goes with now are not nearly as pretty as the ones he went with when she was alive — but he might not crack up in time to do me any good. The announcement will have to be made soon.

'How are you, Bob?' Arthur Baron asks every time now when we pass in the hallway.

'Fine, Art. You?'

'That's good.'

Otherwise, the changes will dominate attention at the convention. I must remember to be modest, bland, and congenial to one and all for the time being. I sometimes feel I have Arthur Baron over a barrel. This is known as a delusion of grandeur. (He could change his mind and keep Kagle for years and nothing consequential would result. Or someone else could fire Arthur Baron and me together without an instant's notice and there would not be a ripple in the total operation of the company. It would not falter.) And I don't entertain this thought seriously. But who will replace Arthur Baron when he does fall ill, dies, retires, is promoted, or runs out of ability and is eased away to the side? It won't be me. (Maybe it will.) I don't think they think I ever could replace Arthur Baron, just as Arthur Baron could never become Horace White when Horace White falls ill (it will be of a much different kind of disease from the ones that will put Arthur Baron, Green, Kagle, and me away — I sense that already — it will be something lingering and tediously progressive. Horace White is not the outgoing, wholesome type to fall ill and die rapidly. He will come creaking into the office on aluminum-alloy canes and wheelchairs for years after he is disabled, smiling, chortling dryly, looking ghastly, and alluding to old times familiarly, oppressing us all despotically right to the end, for he will still own stock), dies, or retires. (Horace White already has been eased aside.) Horace White can go no further in the company because there is nothing more he can do than be Horace White. He can be named to prestigious government commissions that issue reports on matters of grave national importance that are methodically ignored. (Arthur Baron and I can't do that.) His name looks good in the newspapers and on certain letterheads, for he is not merely Horace White but Horace White III, and his wife — she is his third; one died of cancer of the lymph and the second was crippled in a sporting accident — and his mother — she is now in the very high eighties (like the company's common stock again, ha, ha, after the most recent two-for-one split) — come out looking good enough in photographs of people who raise dogs or sponsor charity balls and prominent benefit performances of musical comedies, operas, and ballets. Arthur Baron can move up past Horace White (and so, in theory, might I), for the company does, in its own biologically deterministic and unpitying way, elevate ability over ownership, but he can never become Horace White (and neither, in practice, can I). Only another Horace White, a brother, cousin, son, nephew, or husband of an undistinguished sister, could move right into the corporate structure and meet all the requirements of being another Horace White. (Every company needs one.) He is such a small-minded, oblivious prick, a self-satisfied simpleton (I wonder why I do have such haunting dreams about him in which his thin features turn despotic and carnal and he seems so viciously out of character); he buys puzzles, perpetual-motion gimmicks, and other novelties in Brentano's book store and has his secretary send for me and other employees of the company to show them off (as though we could not afford to buy them ourselves if we wanted them. He wore a red blazer of nappy wool at the convention one night last year and took us all by surprise. It looked good. This year there will be other red blazers).

'Look at this,' he will command, beaming, as though he had just chanced upon something of vast benefit to all mankind. 'Isn't it something? Just stand still there and look at it. It will never stop as long as you keep doing this. Each one is always different.'

'That's really something,' I have to respond, and have to remain standing still until he grows tired of having me in his office and sends me back.

I hate to have to stand still.

I have had to stand still for the longest time now, it seems, for nearly all of my life. Nearly every time I search back I come upon myself standing still inside some memory, sculpted there, or lying flattened as though by strokes from the brush of an illustrator or in transparent blue or purple chemical stains on the glass slide of a microscope or on the single frame of a strip of colored motion picture film. Even when the film moves, I am able to view the action only in arrested moments on single frames. And yet I must have moved from where I was to where I've come, even while standing still. Was I brought here? I have this full country acre in Connecticut. I think I was. Who did it? Only in the army do I think I had more freedom of choice, more room in which to move about. At least I felt I did. I did. I was outside my family, had no wife, job, parent, children, met no one I cared for. I had no ties. I had no one anywhere I cared for. I got laid a lot. Overseas I went with prostitutes and enjoyed that too. I had fun. I enjoyed being away (at least it was something to do. If you sat home alone