Something Happened

I was so distracted to hear from Ben Zack that I was not in the file room anymore that I left work early to drink alone in Red Parker's apartment. I began making phone calls.

I called an airline stewardess I'd met who was out of town. Her roommate had a date. I tried a model I met at a photographer's party last week who said she was desperate for help in finding some kind of temporary work, but I wasn't sure of her last name or even that she was really a model, and I was unable to locate her in the phone book or obtain a number on what I thought was her street from directory assistance. (Telephone companies are putting more and more a

"I don't feel well," I could hear her bleat. "Can't you understand?")

So I called a widow with two children in private school instead who sounded doomed: she told me in a flat, barren voice that she was going to try getting by alone from now on rather than waste any more time going out with men like me who had no intention of ever marrying her. (She didn't enjoy sex anyway.) It was getting her nowhere. I called Jane. She was out (I was relieved). Her roommate sounded younger than my daughter and dumber than my secretary and seemed squeaky and disappointed, as though I had interrupted her timetable for putting her hair up in large pink rollers. I didn't leave my name. (I would have been ashamed to.)

"Did I interrupt you? I'm sorry."

"I thought you were somebody else."

"Were you very busy?"

"I was doing something."

"Were you putting your hair up in pink rollers?"

"That's for me to know and you to find out."

I called Pe

"Please, baby," she requested gently. I had opened her robe. "Go a little slow. I still get scared when I see you start so fast."

Pe

I really don't like spending the whole night with anybody but my wife, not even Pe

(That was a good one.)

Maybe I do love my wife. I think I would have been stricken sightless and mute and turned into a dangling form of dingy cement or sodden papier-mвchй from the top of my head down if I'd ever been forced to mate with Marie's. (She was so large and domineering.)

"I asked for number six."

I asked for Marie Jencks.

"Oh, yes," Ben Zack remembered immediately. "I'll always remember Marie."

"The sperm began to mix."

"Her husband passed away from heart trouble at a very early age. They didn't have heart surgery in those days. She married again soon after and moved with her husband to Florida to cash in on the land boom."

I was not ready for Marie Jencks then. I was not ready for Virginia. My wife has brown nipples as lovely as any I've ever seen in the movies or still photographs and a nest of curly black hair I can rest my head on snugly. I feel safe with her. I feel safe with Pe

There's no getting away from it. I've got to get rid of him. There's no getting away from it. (He is so sweet. People who meet him tell us how sweet he is. They are being sweet when they say so.)

I've got to get rid of him and don't know how. And there's no one I can ask. There's no one I can tell I even want to, not even my wife, who wants to get rid of him also (but doesn't dare say so to me). Especially not my wife. We blame each other for him, when we aren't blaming ourselves, and that's another thing we haven't been able to say to each other yet.

"It's your fault, not mine."

We have to try to make believe he was nobody's fault, that he was a circumstantial twist of nature, a fluke. (A fluke is a fish.) All of us want to get rid of him, but only my daughter is honest enough to say so (and is set upon like a pariah by one or the other of us).

"Is he going to have to be with us forever?" she'll complain in a temper.

"What do you care?" I'll lash back at her, as though she had said that just to wound me. "You'll be away at college."

(She might stay home, just to torture me. I sometimes feel that if not for Derek we would never quarrel with each other. I know it's a lie.)

He does not seem to be mine. He may be my wife's.

There is no idiocy in my family that I know of (or in hers). My wife has begged me not to use that word (which may be why I do. She winces every time).

"How would you like me to describe it?" I inquire, with a lordly air of inexhaustible tolerance. "Do you think it would help him much if I called it genius?"

"It's heartless." She shudders, pale and close to tears. "Mean. I get so frightened when I see you so cold."

It is ungodly the way I am able to forget about him for long periods of time, even when he is close by. (I blot him out and try to keep him out.) I think of myself as having just two children. One says: