Something Happened

"No feelings."

"Feelings," I maintain. "Plenty of feelings. Feel my feelings."

"No, I'm not glad."

"What do you want?"

"I don't know. I'm ready."

"I'll lock the door."

"I'll start looking around."

"I think he's getting much better, isn't he?"

"No."

"Don't you?"

"He isn't. You always say that."

"If I don't, you do."

"I know," she admits.

"I think he listens more. He understands now. He keeps himself cleaner."

She shakes her head firmly. "I don't think she's doing him any good at all."

"Don't you see it?"

"No. He's not supposed to get better. He's never going to. That's what they say."

"Then let's fire that fucking old cunt. None of us like her. She doesn't like us. She reminds me of old Mrs. Yerger, falling into decay."

"Who's Mrs. Yerger?"

"A woman I used to work for. When I was a kid."

"Did you ever do it to her?"

"Christ, no. She was worse than my mother."

"I'm ready, I said. Why do you keep doing that?"

"I like it. You're supposed to like it too. All bosom and no breasts."

"Like me?"

"Unlike you."

"I've got small breasts. You keep telling me."

"They're big enough. I like them small."

"You've tried any other kind?"

"Never."

"Did you lock the door?"

"Yeah. How come you're so worried?"

"Locked it?"

"Open up."

I close my eyes sometimes when I'm making love to my wife and try to think of somebody better than Mrs. Yerger or Derek's old hag of a nurse to spice things up. I try to think of pink and fecund Virginia and can't: she is all silk and exotic fragrance when we begin, but my imagination lets me down and she withers rapidly in my mind into what she would be today if she hadn't gassed herself in her prime (although I doubt she thought of it as her prime, ha, ha), a short, dumpy pain-in-the-ass (like just about all the rest. I wish these women's-lib people would hurry up and liberate themselves and make themselves better companions for sexists like me. And for each other) of an offensively chattering woman ten years older than my wife, nearly (Oh, God dammit, why can't some things other than stone remain always as they used to be?), and much less attractive physically, with large pores, a shrill, grating, demanding voice, low-cut dresses with tops of wrinkling boobs, and too much giggling and red makeup. I am much better off with my wife, I know; so I open my eyes and look at her (and that delays my coming until I am ready. I wish I did have some sensational young sexpot in the city I could use in my erotic reveries at home. But I don't: just about all the girls I do succeed in getting and keeping are sad in one way or another and faintly insipid. So I tend to utilize my own wife in my sex fantasies, even while I'm right there fucking her. That's the kind of faithful husband I am. Sometimes when I'm in bed with another girl in the city or out of town and find I'm already sorry I started, I close my eyes and pretend I'm fucking my wife. Such fidelity. My wife should be honored to learn she rises in my thoughts on such occasions when we are apart, but I don't think I'll tell her. She might not like it as much as I do).

I know my boy doesn't like it when our bedroom door is locked (and used to say so before he began to intuit secret sex inside. I think my daughter said to him once:

"They fuck in there.").

Or when Derek's nurse reaches out to snare him in gnarled fingers on bloated hands and crush him against her musty, collapsing bodice (neither would I. Like Mrs. Yerger's, there is massive, slovenly, thrusting front with no suggestion of anything else in back but stale and folding space), and more than once, in debased supplication, he has wretchedly admonished my wife:

"It's your fault. Why do you let her do it to me? I wish she'd stop touching and pushing and squeezing me like that. I don't even like her. Can't you make her leave me alone?"

"Please try to leave him alone," my wife has said to the nurse countless times politely and awkwardly. It has done no good. "It upsets him. He doesn't like anyone to pay too much attention to him. Don't do things for him. He'd rather do them himself. And try not to touch and hug him so much if you can. He's fu

"He doesn't mind it from me," the warted witch cackles back. "I have a way with children. He likes me. I can tell. He likes the way I cuddle him and he likes the way I smell. I always keep myself very clean because I know how children feel about smells."

He doesn't like to be hugged or kissed or touched by anyone, in or out of our family, although he has the ma

"When you were in Puerto Rico," he says, "three years ago, were you very sad?"

His question was unexpected. "That was two years ago," I correct.

"Three."

"I think you're right."