Something Happened

"They're really such good kids," my wife murmurs pensively in my ear, so that only I will hear.

I nod in agreement, feeling wistful and pleased (with myself, too, and with her). I slip my arm around her waist and draw her to my side. She moves willingly, her body limber, and fits herself against me compliantly. I get an erection. (I would lay her now if we were alone. We would lay each other.) I slide my hand down over her ass and follow the curve in at the bottom toward her box. She stretches away.

"Later," she cautions guardedly.

"No, now," I demand, teasingly.

"You're crazy."

"I might not have it later."

"You will. You'd better," she laughs. "I'll see that you do." I laugh too.

And that is the needful service performed for us so regularly and artlessly by this angelic little boy of mine ("He isn't real," my daughter has complained about him enviously. "He's never mean. He never gets mad."), who is no better off than the rest of us (who may be considerably worse off, in fact, because he is only nine and has already been frightened of just about everything, heights and kidnapping, sharks, crabs, drunks, adults who stare, sheriffs, unkempt handymen, wars, Italians, and me. He isn't afraid of monsters or ghosts so much, because monsters and ghosts are silly. He is afraid of human beings. He veers away from cripples. He welcomes the phenomenon of cops, because he has the dim hope they will safeguard him from all the rest, even from me), to draw us together again by reminding us who we are and what we know of each other, to stop the three of us just in time and make us step back — by evoking and recalling to us the great need and capacity for affection each of us has hidden away very deep inside, like a yawning wound, affection for him, and perhaps for each other — from mangling each other willfully, brutally, and irreparably, with much malice and happiness aforethought, if we have not maimed each other permanently already. I believe he pulls us together as a family and keeps us together. (I often think of leaving and always have. My daughter can't wait to get away, or says she can't.) I think we will fall apart as a family when he grows up and moves away. (I love him so much I just know he is going to die.)

"You like him more than me," my daughter has said.

"No," I answer, lying, because I do not always wish to outfox her, and because she sometimes seems so barren of hope that I find myself grieving silently alongside her, as though at an open coffin or grave in which her future is lying dead already. (She is not yet sweet sixteen, but it sometimes seems to both of us that she has already missed all boats. When?) "But you must admit, darling, that in many ways, he is much more likable."

"I know."

They are not so fu

But she can't stop.

(It's her compulsion.)

She must continue to agitate, like some dark and moody burrowing creature with a drive to undermine and destroy. I (we) do not know what it is she wants that she feels we can give her (she wants to be beautiful, willowy, brilliant, famous, rich, and talented — and who can blame her? We would like her to be all that too. Perhaps she knows it. But we don't insist), and she does not tell us. She does not know. Sometimes she confides in us without belligerence or guile. She confesses. She stands before us listlessly, her head bowed in disgrace, and, in words that force their way out from her soul and flow from her lips in a low, pining, abject monotone, she says:

"I have nothing to do."

It breaks my wife's heart when my daughter has nothing to do. I will not let it break mine.

My daughter bites her fingernails, and I suppose that is my fault too. (At least it's something to do. My boy has poor posture, and so do I.) She began biting her nails around the age of five. My boy used to suck his thumb in his sleep and raised a swollen white lump (it was the color of fungus or peeling, dead skin) on the joint of his finger that handicapped him at play and stigmatized him in the daytime by reminding him of its cause. We couldn't make him stop. We put casings of evil-odored bandages on his thumb at bedtime, but he sucked at it anyway. We even tried the vile-tasting liquid we had used without avail years before to discourage my daughter from biting her fingernails. That didn't work, either, so she still bites them. I don't know how he finally stopped: I don't know how he ever made himself stop doing things in his sleep. (Often, I can stop unpleasant dreams from developing by bounding wide awake alertly at their first portentous overtures as though in response to some well-recognized primal alarm — like a good censor or movie director I can yell "Cut!" at the first specter of something askew in my dream scripts and make them start all over again in another direction. The words I actually speak to myself are "Oh, no! None of that again" — and keeping guard vigilantly over my slumbering intelligence until my dreams rewrite themselves into scenes and themes that are more to my taste. Then I can relax securely, fall back into sleep, and give them free rein. I can stop these unwelcome dreams from proceeding only if they start as I am sifting down into sleep and am still in touch with myself. Often, I ca

(I know so many things I'm afraid to find out.) She is a poor sleeper, my daughter, and, except for short-lived, unfounded spells of euphoric gaiety and plan-making (which flare so suddenly and extravagantly as to seem almost feverish), prefers to cling to the tragic view she takes of her own possibilities. She is easily alarmed and often jittery. She is probably a virgin. (If she weren't, she would tell me. When she isn't, she will — I visualize that approaching occasion reluctantly more and more frequently — and I look ahead grimly to the day or evening she marches into my study to mock me with that. What am I supposed to say? I will laugh it off, of course, minimize its importance, so as not to send her into promiscuity and perversion on one side or frigidity and abstinence on the other. What a dilemma.

"Well, I'm sure other girls your age do it too, my dear," I can hear myself saying with suave insouciance, flicking the white ash off a cigar I do not smoke. "I imagine you're not the first. Don't they?"

What will I really feel?) She lacks confidence in herself and, like my boy (and me), is wary of strangers and ill at ease with people to whom she has just been introduced. (I, on the other hand, am a good sleeper at times — although I like to pretend I'm not — especially when I am sleeping at home with my wife, although I usually wait until I can no longer keep awake before I go to sleep. Ha, ha. When I sleep away from home with my wife, I will have a nightmare the first or second night, usually the same one: a strange man is entering illegally through the door, which I have locked, and drawing near, a burglar, rapist, kidnapper, or assassin; he seems to be Black but changes; I think he is carrying a knife; I try to scream but can make no sound. I have this same bad dream at home often, even though I carefully lock all my doors before going to sleep. I have had it dozens and dozens of times. I have always had it. I must make some sound, though, while I am having the dream and trying in vain to scream, for my wife awakens with the noise of my struggles and rouses me by calling my name and tells me, as though I didn't know, that I was having a nightmare. Sometimes, even when I am trapped deep in my agony and whatever menaces me is moving right up to my bedside, some different section of me is tuned in omnisciently to the nature of the experience, knows and reassures me it is all just a very bad dream and watches from outside it tranquilly and smugly and waits expectantly, with enjoyment, for my wife to be disturbed by my noises and motions and to call to me by my name and shake me awake by the shoulder to tell me I was having a nightmare. I think people have more than one brain. I like the idea of scaring my wife with my nightmares. Sometimes, when she is having a nightmare, I revenge myself on her by not waking her up and allowing it to torture her for as long as it wants to, while I watch her from outside, idly and smugly, leaning on my elbow. I have piss dreams too, but they are fu