Donald Barthelme - Paradise

Q: Where does all this guilt come from? The extra-adulterous guilt?

A: I keep wondering if, say, there is intelligent life on other planets, the scientists argue that something like two percent of the other planets have the conditions, the physical conditions, to support life in the way it happened here, did Christ visit each and every planet, go through the same routine, the Agony in the Garden, the Crucifixion, and so on… And these guys on these other planets, these life-forms, maybe they look like boll weevils or something, on a much larger scale of course, were they told that they shouldn’t go to bed with other attractive six-foot boll weevils arrayed in silver and gold and with little squirts of Opium behind the ears? Doesn’t make sense. But of course our human understanding is imperfect.

Q: You haven’t answered me. This general guilt —

A: Yes, that’s the interesting thing. I hazard that it is not guilt so much as it is inadequacy. I feel that everything is being nibbled away, because I can’t get it right —

Q: Would you like to be able to fly?

A: It’s crossed my mind.

Q: The women were a little strident don’t you think?

A: No I don’t think that.

Q: Sometimes a little strident?

A: Everybody’s a little strident sometimes.

Q: Sometimes you have to scream to be heard. Isn’t that what you think?

A: I don’t think that.

Q: I never scream. I’m a doctor.

A: Your good fortune.

Q: It has nothing to do with good fortune. It has to do with years of the most strenuous intellectual effort. Were they strident in bed?

A: Different styles in bed as elsewhere. I guess you could call Veronica strident. Stridency is a response to dissatisfaction.

Q: Where is satisfaction?

A: In sleep?

What if they all lived happily ever after together? An unlikely prospect. What was there in his brain that forbade such felicity? Too much, his brain said, but the brain was a fair-to-middling brain at best, the glucose that kept it marching, metabolized crème brûlée, was present but there was not enough vinegar in this brain, it lacked vinegar. Simon drank vinegar in the mornings from bottles sold to him as white wine and thought of Paris, where every fifteen-franc bottle was good, better than anything else he’d ever tasted. In Switzerland, in the summer, in Zurich and Basel, he’d found chilled red wine not bad either, a learning experience, also that he did not want to live in a country so ferociously tidy. The prostitutes in Zurich were handsome well-dressed zebras, favoring stark black and white, street furniture ornamental as the staid perfect cops or the show windows of the Bahnhofstrasse, much gold winking behind heavy glass. He did not want a watch or cufflinks or a gold-plated coffee service, he was at a disadvantage. What was there to do with these women? He’d send them all to MIT, make architects of them! Women were coming into the profession in increasing numbers. The group could chat happily about mullions, in the evening by the fireside, tiring of mullions, turn to cladding, wearying of cladding, attack with relish the problems of blast-cleaned pressure-washed gun-applied polymer-cement-coated steel. Quel happiness!

Someone would get pregnant, everyone would get pregnant. At seventy he’d be dealing with Pampers and new teeth. The new children would be named Susannah, Clarice, and Buck. He’d stroll out on the lawn, in the twilight, and throw the football at Buck. The football would rocket about two feet, then head for the greensward. The pitiful little child would say “Kain’t anybody here play this game?”

Lightning. Four o’clock in the afternoon. The women are in the kitchen, enjoying the display in the big windows.

Anne says, “What are we going to do about this bozo?”

“What’s to do?” Veronica asks.

“He hasn’t hurt anything. Yet,” says Dore.

“He’s been very circumspect.”

“I think too circumspect.”

“I think he thinks he’s doing the right thing.”

“I don’t think he’s a nut.”

“I don’t think he’s a nut either.”

“He likes those Windham Hill records.”

“I don’t think that makes him a nut.”

“He uses too much butter when he cooks. He’s making pasta, he throws half a stick of butter in just before he serves it.”

“Butter makes everything taste better.”

“He looks around to see if anyone’s watching before he throws it in. Then he whips it around in there real quick. Hoping it will melt before anybody sees it.”

“It’s just an effort to raise the level. That kind of shows I think an effort to raise the level of life that’s not too terrible. Typically American.”

A majestic crash. They jump.

“That was a biggie.”

“Not too bad.”

“But what of us? What are we going to do?”

“Bide our time.”

“I like that expression.”

“Have you ever hung out with an architect before?”

“I knew this guy he was a contractor he contracted Port-O-Sans.”

“What are they?”

“Movable outhouses.”

“Good Lord this man is old.”

“Fifty-three. Old enough to be our father.”

“Yet he has a certain spirit.”

“We’ve got to get something going.”

“Like what?”

“Something.”

“This town is creepy.”

“It’s so big and vast.”

“What about the rabid skunks?”

“They found another one.”

“Where?”

“At the Cloisters.”

“Is that far away?”

“Way uptown. Fort Tryon Park.”

“What was it doing?”

“It was eating rat food. The stuff they put out to kill the rats. In the basement. I read it in the paper.”

“Did it bite anybody?”

“No. But the rat food didn’t hurt it, it’s stronger than a rat much stronger and the rat food didn’t affect it, it was in good condition when found, they said.”

“Well what about its mate?”

“Well maybe it didn’t have a mate. There was nothing in the paper about finding its mate.”

“So its mate is probably lurking around the Cloisters waiting to bite someone.”

“Probably no one will go to the Cloisters until they find its mate.”

“Maybe it didn’t have a mate. Maybe it was a bachelor or something.”

“Well you can’t just assume that.”

“Maybe it was seeking its mate. That got lost in the vast basements of the Cloisters.”

“I don’t know why you have to romanticize a rabid skunk.”

“I was just thinking.”

“He’s indifferent.”

“I don’t think he’s indifferent. He fucks well enough. Not the best I’ve ever seen.”

“He can’t tell us apart.”

“Oh I don’t think that’s true. He asked me when my birthday was.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“I told him. July third.”

“Well what does that prove?”

“He’s thoughtful. He can tell one from another. He’s interested in us as individuals.”

“Maybe it’s just a façade. Maybe he just knows what to do to make us think he cares about us as individuals and is doing it.”

“Why would he do that? If he cares about us as individuals?”

“Because he likes us to have the feeling that he cares about us as individuals? Because it makes things more warm?”

“Well if he wants to make things more warm I’d say that was something in his favor.”

“Yes but you have to make a distinction between making things seem a certain way and having them really be a certain way.”

“Well even if he’s only interested in making things seem a certain way that means he’s not indifferent. To the degree that he makes the effort.”

“That’s true.”

“But maybe, on the other hand, he really cares. About us as individuals.”