Something Happened

"Do you want to get rid of Derek?" he has asked.

"No," I have lied.

"Do you want to get rid of me?"

"No. Why should we want to do that?"

"Do you want to get rid of anyone?"

"No."

"People who work for you?"

"No. Just one. Why should we want to get rid of you? You're too good."

"Suppose I wasn't?"

"You'd still be too good."

"Sometimes," he confesses ruefully, with a soft (perhaps tricky) smile, "I dream at night that I'm all alone someplace and I don't know where to go. And I cry. When I wake up, my eyes are wet. Sometimes," he continues humbly, now that he has decided to tell, "I'm not even asleep when I have this dream."

His look is sad when he finishes, and he waits in silence for my answer with a searching, sagacious air.

(I do not know anymore whether he tells me things like this because they are true, or because he observes how strongly they affect me. Mistrust and acrimony are starting to cloud my emotions toward him. More and more frequently, I am incited to react toward him contentiously and competitively, the way I do toward my daughter. I try not to.

"Are you angry?" he will ask.

"No," I will lie.)

Or, as he asked of us one day when we dressed him in a shirt, knitted tie, and jacket to take him to what we told him was the circus (it was to the circus, although he did not seem to believe it, and he looked so lovable, wholesome, and neat in the pink tattersall shirt I had bought for him in the Boys' Shop at Brooks Brothers and miniature blue blazer we had also bought him from Brooks Brothers, with his shiny, silken hair — which was his own and not from Brooks Brothers, ha, ha — clean, wet, parted, and combed.

"Am I clean enough?" he asked, turning from the full-length mirror after he had been scrubbed and dried and dressed.

"Clean as a whistle," I assured him. "Shiny clean," added my wife): "Are you going to put me in a taxi and leave me there?"

"No, of course not!" I retort with anger, appalled. "Now why in the world would we want to do that?"

He responds with a self-effacing shrug. "I don't know."

But he does seem to know.

"Are you playing games with me?" I demand. "Or do you really mean that? Do you really think we would leave you in a cab? What would the cabdriver say?"

"Can I ask you?" he requests meekly.

"What?"

"What I want to."

"I won't get angry."

"You're angry now."

"I won't get angrier."

"Go ahead," my wife says.

"If you do want to get rid of me, how will you do it?"

"With hugs and kisses," I answer in exasperation. "You're ruining the whole day. This is a hell of a conversation to be having with a handsome boy who's all dressed up in a tattersall shirt, tie, and blazer. And we're taking you to lunch at a fine restaurant too."

"I don't want to go."

"Yes, you do."

"You'll enjoy it."

"I don't even want to go to the circus."

"Yes, you do."

"You'll enjoy it."

I don't like the subway. (I have had scared terrifying fantasies centered around him in which he does get lost, or has been misplaced, on a subway, but never thoughts or dreams in which I leave him someplace deliberately, or even want to. The door closes between us before we can both get on or off together, separating us. Or we are walking together and I turn my head away for an instant, and when I turn it back, he is gone. Or I forget about him: he slips my mind: and I remember only afterward, when he is no longer present and has disappeared without trace from my dream, that he is supposed to be with me. I am unable to guess where he has gone. There is only void. I feel lonely then, and it is not possible to be certain which one of us has been lost. I feel lost too.)

He withdraws from bad smells (he thinks, perhaps, of rot, poison gas, or suffocation. He does not want to fly to the moon, ever, and neither do I) and is alarmed by unexpected loud noises (or creeping, mystifying, stealthy ones. So am I, and so, for that matter, are antelopes. He tends to believe that he is the only one who reacts to such things, and that he is the only one who ever feels in danger). He ca

By now, he does not want to go to school at all on days he has gym. (Or public speaking. Or knows he must make an oral report or read a written one.) He has gym three days a week; he worries about gym three of the other four days. (Saturdays he takes off. One-day school holidays afford no surcease. Unless they fall on a day he has gym. Then he is ecstatic.) By now, he is afraid of Forgione, and feels despised, and of the assistant gym teacher (whose name he doesn't know; nor does anyone, he seems to indicate, and he does not describe him, so I have no idea how old or large he is), which must be another ghastly danger for him to have to stave off. (How would you like to be a tame, somewhat shy and unaggressive little boy of nine, somewhat shorter and thi