Donald Barthelme - Paradise

“Probably not.”

Tim, the professional whistler, is a sad Saab of a man about thirty. He has appeared on a number of local tv shows and plays club dates occasionally. He whistles “Twilight Time,” “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” and “My Blue Heaven,” the latter taken note-for-note from the famous record by Gene Austin. His whistling is tough, very tough, with many complicated flourishes. Tim says that the most famous whistler of all time was Fred Lowry, who whistled for both Vincent Lopez and Horace Heidt and His Musical Knights. The version of the “William Tell Overture” Lowry did with Heidt has never been surpassed, Tim says.

After dinner (roasted squab with chicken-fried potato skins) Tim talks additionally about whistling. Dore is moving nervously between the kitchen and the sitting room. Fred Lowry’s version of “Indian Love Call” sold more than two million copies, Tim tells them. He himself has had several careers other than whistling, notably high-tech electronics in California.

“I had this place in Mountain View. I had everything, projection television, walk-around no-hands telephones, stereo, a Nautilus machine, whirlpool bath, two BMWs, two dogs, PC with printer, shotguns, lots of shotguns, handguns, Alvar Aalto chairs and tables and chaises, art, some very fine art, three Diebenkorns, two Clementes, the house was by Frank Gehry, great trees, wine cellar, great California wines, I used to go around to the vineyards for the tastings, got to know a lot of the growers, thirty suits, this one is by Issey Miyake, he did it especially for me —”

“Any of this true?” Veronica whispers.

“How would I know?” Simon whispers.

Tim is drinking Black Russians. Simon has gone out to obtain Kahlua and brandy.

“What we were basically doing,” Tim says, “was voice synthesis. The first application is clearly for people who’ve lost their voices because of operations or one thing and another. Then toys, vending machines, voiceprint applications for banking and of course the whole telecommunications thing. Bell Labs is heavily, heavily into this but we were doing some things that would have scared them if they’d known.”

Dore looks at Simon. Simon inclines his head to the left, meaning Could be.

“Digital is unbelievable,” Tim says. “I can take an ordinary utterance and give it a nasty sneering tone, just by bending some numbers. I can —”

Veronica says, “So what are you doing now?”

“Car wash,” Tim says, “over on Tenth Avenue. Washing cars. What most people don’t know is that the finish on today’s cars, especially the Japanese cars, actually embraces the dirt. I mean if you wanted the dirt to adhere to the finish you couldn’t come up with a better… There are these tiny pits uniformly distributed over the surface of the car that act like traps for the grime, reach out and suck it up. It becomes like plaque on teeth. Now, you wonder why they can’t devise a solvent that would dissolve the plaque and not harm the enamel. I’m telling you, the formula exists. It is in being. But because the big dentifrice outfits don’t want to lose a very, very lucrative market, you and I get zip. Have to go in twice a year and have some dental assistant scrape away with the old hand tool for an hour. Are you familiar with the work of Buckminster Fuller? Have you read what Fuller has to say about copper wire? The earth’s supply of copper is finite. Our per capita investment in copper, for every man, woman and child on earth —”

Simon’s getting tired. “But of course you can look at it in another way,” he says.

“Look at what?”

“The whole thing. The deficit. The government is the biggest consumer in the country, right? And that’s going to be true by and large of all governments everywhere. So if every government contract were tied to a proportionate amount which would go to reduction of the deficit, if you couldn’t get government work without —”

“They’d just cost-plus you,” says Tim.

“No more cost-plus,” Simon says. “We’ve done away with it.”

“They’d just bury it somewhere else.”

“More auditors.”

“Banks wouldn’t give you your capitalization.”

“Nationalize ‘em.”

“You want an across-the-board standardization of profit? Where do you get your incentive?”

“Say three tiers of incentive tied to productivity. So there’d be a meaningful variation but not flat-out rape, if you know what I mean.”

Tim sighs and strips off his jacket. “I once heard Fuller speak for seven straight hours. I only understood a tenth of what he was saying. By the end of the evening there were only five people left in the audience. He’d started with three hundred. I went home and began to make tetrahedrons with Play-Doh and toothpicks at two o’clock in the morning. What would the three tiers be?”

“Say the prime rate is six, one, two and three times the prime rate. To get eighteen you’d have to do awfully good work.”

“Who decides?”

“Be the reverse of cost-plus. The multiplier would be how much ahead of time and how much under budget.”

“Underneath the paint, God knows what.”

“Our inspectors would take sections.”

Tim says, “That’s terribly rational, Simon. The idea of progress is philosophically dubious, you know that.”

“Not talking about progress. Talking about movement. We’re not necessarily married to the present situation.”

Tim looks at the three women.

“Too bad. Engineering is key. We haven’t even floated the subject of smoking. Every day, fifteen to twenty Americans are injured by their ashtrays.”

Simon enjoyed life as a ghost, one of the rewards of living in the great city. So many units rushing to and fro that nobody noticed anything much or had time to remark on strangers in the house, in the neighborhood. Sublets were everywhere, two men and a grand piano might pop up in your building any Wednesday. Maybe old blockwatchers of thirty years’ standing were keeping running censuses of the population, but Simon did not know the old blockwatchers and so felt comfortably anonymous. For amusement, he cooked, or went to a neighborhood movie. He saw The Benny Goodman Story and Silverado, the first with Anne and the second with Dore and Veronica. Dore and Veronica had not heard of Benny Goodman and thus weren’t interested; Anne didn’t like Westerns. “How can you not like Westerns?” Simon asked her, truly amazed, and she had said that when she was a child she had seen one in which Indians had tied a man to two bent-down saplings and then cut a rope and the saplings had rent the man into two distinct pieces and that she had never seen a Western since. Simon told her that not all Westerns had that kind of thing in them but she remained unpersuaded. Simon read, much of the time, and consulted with them on their plans.

The first plan was to return to Denver, and nobody liked it. “Be damned if I will,” Veronica had said, and Anne had said the same thing. The second plan was to go to Paris and affiliate themselves with one of the couture houses there, Saint-Laurent or Karl Lagerfeld. Although the best stuff was coming from Milan, they said. They talked knowledgeably about Memphis, at least the fabrics. The third plan was to join the Army and acquire training in a number of sophisticated electronic and computer skills. The fourth plan was Burger King.

“A lot of Americans work at Burger King. On a contingency basis.”

“Americans of every creed and stripe.”

“I’d rather go to Harvard?”

“Transferring one-and-a-half ragged years at Fort Lupton Community?”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.”

“I want to write music.”

“What kind of music?”