Something Happened   ::   Хеллер Джозеф

The ladies run out of sanitary napkins. The world is running out of good maids and qualified laundresses, cobblers, and tailors. The wheels are falling off this gyroscoping toy. It hasn't stood the test of time. I can't get a maid to remember to put fresh towels in my bathrooms after she removes the old ones. I can't get my wife to serve dinner on time unless there's company.) It is very important to me where I sleep in relationship to her. I want more pillows under my head than she has so that I will be above her. I sleep almost against the headboard so that she will be below me. It is very important to me that my wife seem small. She isn't. We are nearly the same height, unless she kicks her shoes off. That was uncomfortable when we used to dance, still is when we want to kiss (we bunk foreheads and noses); and I still cannot walk with my arm around her shoulders without experiencing twinges of tendonitis. My wife just doesn't seem to fit. I want my wife's face on a line with my shoulder or lower when we sleep, make love, walk, or eat; I do not want it confronting me on a level equal to my own. (When we're out in public, though, I'm glad she's straight and handsome. She cuts a stately figure when she's all dressed up and makes a dazzling impression for me if she isn't drunk and obnoxious.) She is starting to snap her chewing gum again when she sits beside me in the car or movies. She goes back to chewing gum when she's trying to stop drinking. It drives me up the wall, nearly out of my mind with pent-up rage, some nights to see and hear her sleeping soundly in futile battles against worry, hurt, grievance, and overstimulation. (There are nights after drinking while I am lying wide awake lot or thinking very hard about matters at the office that I am unable to turn off my mind for hours or even slow to a governable tempo the free-flight of disjointed ideas from all sources that go racing through my brain. I never think of anything good. I sometimes think of something good.) I want to pummel her. I want to hiss vitriol. It is there in the darkness of sleep, when no one is looking, not even ourselves, that our true rudimentary spirits emerge. Like furled and eyeless embryos, we wage war murderously over areas of quilt and corners of pillow; bumps of knee and hip are the weapons we use; mewing grunts and moans are the curses and battle cries. (We are babies, although we probably did not feel this way when we were babies.) It infuriates me that she does not even know I'm awake. I feel martyred by neglect.