Something Happened by Joseph Heller

Author:Joseph Heller
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307803610
Publisher: Dell
Published: 1974-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

What a nice kid.

I am so pleased. And I have to laugh along with him to let him know the risk was a good one and that I am not going to make him pay for it.

We have brisk, Socratic dialogues, he and I, on just about everything (the lines fly crisply in rhythmic questions and answers), and we both enjoy them. (With my daughter, I have arguments and demoralizing discussions that tend to become overladen with personal imputations and denials, even when she starts out discussing, objectively and dispassionately, life and its meaning or her friends or mine. She has many comments to make about the people my wife and I know, as though they were any of her business.) I am Socrates, he is the pupil. (Or so it seems, until I review some of our conversations when I am alone, and then it often seems that he is Socrates. I know I love him. He loves me. He is nice. I am not.

“You’re nice, Daddy,” he exclaims to me frequently. He hugs me a lot.

“You know, Daddy, you’re really nice sometimes,” even my daughter remarks to me every now and then.

So maybe I’m not really always as bad as I think I am. I enjoy being praised, by anyone, even by members of my family. It makes me feel important; I grow expansive. Nobody is good always. Everybody is good sometime.) And there is no predicting it what directions our words will fly, for there is no telling in advance what closely guarded observations of his might suddenly spring to his tongue and flash out almost involuntarily, or what preoccupations, deliberately, after tense, inner centuries of concentrated brooding and speculation, he might choose without preliminaries to bring out into the open. (And once he does decide, there will be no deterring him.

“Did you have to fuck Mommy to get me?” he has asked.

“That’s not why,” I told him.

“Why what?”

“Why we did it or why we got you.”

“It’s how, though, isn’t it?” He doesn’t seem to like the idea.)

He won’t take chances he doesn’t have to. (Neither will I. Except with girls, and even then I tend to play it very safe.) He has never, to my knowledge, been in a fist fight. (I wouldn’t get in one now either unless it was clearly a matter of life or death. The apple has not fallen far from the tree.) He has no taste for bullying or beating children smaller or weaker. He tries as best he can to avoid associating with anyone he’s afraid of, even at the cost of giving up activities he enjoys or forfeiting the companionship of other children he likes. He does not know what to do when an older or tougher or even smaller kid shoves him or shouts at him or when a roving band takes away his bicycle or his baseball bat (as did happen to him in the park in the city on successive days that first time I was

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