Donald Barthelme - Paradise

He remembered Carol jumping on him for using the mitt to hold the end of the veal bone while he tried to cut meat from it. “That’s not what the mitt is for!” He had told her to shut up, it was his mitt, he’d use it for any damned thing he cared to including cleaning the grease trap if he cared to. Mitt nights. After dinner she told him not to eat onions from the pot. The baby standing on the kitchen table and singing

I’m pretty

I’m pretty

And I don’t care

Memories of mitt.

“This guy slapped Veronica.”

“Why?”

“She doesn’t know. She went out for pizza and stopped at the Korean market. She had a big cauliflower in her hands, she was kind of feeling it to see if it was —”

“And he slapped her?”

“A black guy. Walked up to her and slapped her in the face. Knocked her sunglasses off.”

“What’d she do?”

“He was a Vietnam vet.”

“How do you know?”

“He said so. He said, ‘I’m a Vietnam vet and I’m crazy.’ Then he slapped her. Then he asked her for money.”

“Did she give him any?”

“Of course not, she threw the cauliflower at him.”

“Did it hit him?”

“No it hit an old lady. Right in the mush. She didn’t throw it so well?”

“What happened then?”

“The Korean guy behind the counter had a fit. Fell down and foamed at the mouth.”

“Is he okay?”

“The paramedics took him away.”

“What happened to the black guy?”

“He split.”

“Is Veronica okay?”

“Sure. She’s used to it. Being bashed around. This is a great town you have here.”

Dore is angry. She’s holding the box that the frozen pizza came in.

“You’re actually going to feed us this pizza?”

“What’s the matter with it?”

“This frozen pizza?”

“So it’s frozen.”

“Do you know what it’s got in it? Enriched flour.”

“What’s the matter with enriched flour?”

“The enriched flour has in it flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamine mononitrate, and riboflavin.”

“All great stuff. I remember riboflavin from my childhood. They put it in Wheaties or something.”

“We’re just getting started. We’re just going into our windup here. We get water, hydrogenated soybean oil, yeast, salt, and something called dough conditioner. The dough conditioner’s got sodium stearoyl lactylate, calcium sulfate and sodium sulfite.”

“Soybeans are good. Invented by Martin Luther King.”

“Moving right along, we get cooked pork and mozzarella cheese substitute. The mozzarella cheese substitute contains water, casein, hydrogenated soybean oil — you notice the soybean is doing a lot of work here — salt, sodium aluminum phosphate, lactic acid, natural flavor whatever that is, modified cornstarch, sodium citrate, sorbic acid, sodium phosphate, artificial color, guar gum, magnesium, oxide, ferric orthophosphate, zinc oxide, B-12, folic acid, B-6 hydrochloride, niacinamide, vitamin A palmitate, xanthan gum, thiamine mononitrate — I ask you.”

“What?”

“Is this food or a chemistry set?”

“Doesn’t taste too bad.”

“I could make a nuclear weapon with less stuff than this pizza has in it.”

A bare leg against a purplish sheet.

The thing is, they discuss him.

“He could lose maybe fifteen pounds.”

“I think it’s kind of cute. Like Santa Claus with what does it say a bowl full of jelly.”

”Good shoulders. Deep chest. That’s in his favor.”

“And he’s got good posture. Were you ever in the service, Simon?”

“Two years.”

“When was that?”

“In the 50s.”

“You do anything?”

“Of a military nature? No, I just put in my time.”

“A little bowlegged don’t you think?”

“It’s not bowlegs it’s just that the knees are too close together.”

“Big feet.”

“Well he’s a big boy.”

“The hands look a little toilworn to my eye.”

“You need to use some kind of lotion, Simon, Lubriderm or —”

“But he’s still got pretty much hair for a guy his age, that’s a plus.”

“I think you need a haircut, Simon, get away from that shaggy look, that’s not the look of today.”

“Veronica can cut it for you. Veronica knows how to cut hair.”

“A five-buck tip, Simon, that’s all it takes. Thirty for the haircut and five for the tip.”

They say, over and over:

“Catch my drift?”

“Catch my drift?”

“Catch my drift?”

Anne says, “You never had to stand around in your frillies with all those guys looking at you.”

“Well, that’s true.”

“Also, my boobs are too small.”

“By what standard?”

“Generally accepted standards.”

Her breasts are in fact quite perfect. “Look, dear friend,” he says, “one would have to journey many days, cross mighty rivers and slog up and down towering mountains, cut through thick mato grossos with machetes in each hand, to find a more beautiful woman than your sweet self.”

“Do you really think that?”

“Of course.”

“Doesn’t do me any good if I’m dumb, does it?”

“What makes you think you’re dumb?”

“If I wasn’t dumb I wouldn’t be a professional model.”

“Doesn’t follow. Look at —” He gropes for the name of a model who is also amazingly intelligent but his knowledge of the field is inadequate. “Lauren Hutton,” he says.

“She makes movies too.”

“Tons of intelligence there,” he says. “A glance convinces. Probably dreams three-dimensional chess. Q.E.D.”

“You’re very supportive, Simon.”

“I love you guys.”

“That’s the first time you’ve said that.”

“I slipped.”

“We’re in March now. This is March, right?”

“The sixteenth.”

“We’ve been here what, a month?”

“Just about.”

“So. Are you satisfied?”

“In what regard?”

“With us. Being here.”

“Of course. Very much so.”

“You’re not going to boot us out.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Maybe you don’t like the deal.”

“Do I seem itchy?”

“I can’t tell with you. You’ve got a hard shell.”

“Look, I’m fine. I don’t think Veronica is too happy.”

“Yeah, it’s a problem. She’s always been that way. She kind of expects the worst, you know? She’s got an affinity for the worst. She seeks it out.”

“Why?”

“It’s her mind-set, I guess. She got knocked around a lot as a kid. She talks about it sometimes.”

“People get over it.”

“No they don’t.”

A: A dead bear in a blue dress, face down on the kitchen floor. I trip over it, in the dark, when I get up at 2 a.m. to see if there’s anything to eat in the refrigerator. It’s an architectural problem, marriage. If we could live in separate houses, and visit each other when we felt particularly gay — It would be expensive, yes. But as it was she had to endure me in all my worst manifestations, early in the morning and late at night and in the nutsy obsessed noontimes. When I wake up from my nap you don’t get the laughing cavalier, you get a rank pigfooted belching blunderer. I knew this one guy who built a wall down the middle of his apartment. An impenetrable wall. He had a very big apartment. It worked out very well. Concrete block, basically, with fiberglass insulation on top of that and sheetrock on top of that.

Q: Well, how does it make you feel? Adultery.

A: There’s a certain amount of guilt attached. I feel guilty. But I feel guilty even without adultery. I exist in a morass of guilt. There’s maybe a little additional wallop of guilt but I already feel so guilty that I hardly notice it.