Donald Barthelme - Paradise

“Serious music. Big music. Entire string sections bending to the work.”

“You could study that.”

“I could. Where is this Juilliard place?”

“I think you have to play something before you can get in.”

“Tambourine? Naw that’s a joke I know tambourine is no good.”

“Do you think we started too late?”

“It’s never too late. In principle.”

“Chase has a plan for bank tellers.”

“I don’t want to be a bank teller.”

“Well it’s a start.”

“Toward what?”

“I don’t want to think we’re fucked. I really don’t want to think that.”

“We could go out and marry some more people.”

“The last thing I have in mind.”

“Yeah it does sound a little retrograde.”

Anne is in a retrospective mood.

“I won the Colorado Miss Breck,” she says. “I didn’t win the National, though.”

“Can’t win ‘em all,” Simon says.

“It was very exciting. This stuff is very exciting when you’re a kid, people making a fuss over you. It becomes less exciting. I wanted to be a doctor.”

“Everybody wants to be a doctor. Veronica’s old man the child-beater wanted to be a doctor.”

“I know,” she says. “Helping people. Your existence is justified.”

Simon looks at his khakis; they’re a bit on the filthy side. Buy another pair. “You could still do that,” he says. “Medical school.”

“Do you want to get married again?”

“Hadn’t thought about it.”

“Probably somebody’d marry you.”

“Like who?”

“Some dumb woman. A commodity with which the world is amply supplied. Me, for example.”

“That would be pretty dumb. You need a young soldier.”

“You telling me what I need?”

“Trying to.”

“I feel affectionate toward you, Simon.”

“I feel the same thing. Not a good idea.”

“Who says?”

“Aetna Life and Casualty.”

Veronica is missing. Not precisely missing, absent, rather. For several days nobody mentions the fact. Then on a Monday Anne says, “I wonder where the hell Veronica is.”

“Probably with Thag,” Dore says.

“Thag? Who is Thag?” Simon asks.

“Guy she met at the laundromat,” Anne says. “He’s a broker. He’s with Smith Barney.”

“If he’s a broker what’s he doing at the laundromat?”

“So he’s thrifty. She should have called, though.”

“Probably having a great time. The time of her life,” says Dore. “They’re probably sitting there drinking Dom Perignon and buying and selling Carbide right now.” Dore reads the financial pages of the newspapers carefully and has fifty shares in a concern that is marketing a corrective for dry eye, or the inability to tear, a painful and depressing condition that afflicts hundreds of thousands of Americans and countless foreigners, she says.

“What kind of a name is Thag?” Simon asks irritably.

“I think it’s a beautiful name,” Dore says. “Very Scandinavian.”

“Well if she doesn’t get her ass back here pretty damn quick I’m going to give her bed away.”

“Simon!” Anne exclaims. “You’re being possessive!”

“I don’t mean it.”

“I know. That’s the hell of it.”

“You don’t want me to be possessive.”

On the street Simon and Anne gaze at a brand-new Honda, the paint a glittering candy red.

“I don’t like what Honda did with the front end this year,” he says.

“Yeah, it’s insensitive.”

Simon makes a shaping gesture with his hand.

“That snout.”

Anne nods.

“Very wrong. Still —” He puts an arm around her. “The first car I ever bought was a Hillman Minx. Ever see one of those?”

“Before my time,” she says.

“A boxy little ragtop. Had all the power of a lawn-mower. Never had a car after that I liked as much.”

“During which marriage was that?”

“You getting on me?”

“Not me.”

“And I was going to take us for oysters at the Oyster Bar.”

“I’m ready.”

“A certain dryness sets in. The situation dries out, as it were.”

“I didn’t mean to pry.”

“When I was young I thought everything was very funny. I cracked up a lot. Don’t do that anymore.”

“Youthful arrogance.”

“I’d still like to think everything was funny.”

“I used to work with children,” Anne says.

“Disturbed children?”

“Not more disturbed than any other children. Just ordinary children.”

“What did you do?”

“I worked with them. We worked together, me and the children.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“I just worked with them. Ordinary children. The children need a lot of work. They’re just like anybody else. They need a lot of work. They’re not finished. We glued things to paper plates. I worked with them. Daily. On a daily basis.”

“You had a place where you worked with them?”

“Yeah it was a kind of nursery. Painted greige. Gray-beige. The color is thought to have a bearing on how the children feel. Some places have a lot of bright colors, that’s another theory, this was a soothing calming color. Greige.”

“So what were the children like?”

“You can’t generalize, they were all different. Not every child feels the same thing at the same time. They were all different. For example, some of them were male.”

At the Oyster Bar under Grand Central they sit at a table next to four men in business suits. One of the men has no arms and has removed his shoes. He has mittenlike socks on his feet and holds, between the big toe and the next of the right foot, what looks to Simon like a Gibson.

Q: You must be tired. Fatigued.

A: No I’m not a bit tired.

Q: All of that… activity must have left you a bit tired.

A: Yes I suppose you could think that.

Q: You’re not tired.

A: You mean mentally tired?

Q: Physically.

A: No I’m not tired. I feel fine.

Q: How are the headaches?

A: Haven’t been having them.

Q: That doesn’t mean they won’t come back.

A: The aspirin did the job.

Q: It wasn’t aspirin it was Tylenol. Extra-Strength Tylenol.

A: Did the job.

Q: Yes it’s supposed to be quite good. The drug houses send people around, detail men, they leave me samples of all sorts of things, I give them to patients. Free.

A: That’s extremely generous.

Q: Well otherwise they’d just rot, wouldn’t they? I mean I have buckets and buckets. All brightly colored.

A: I assume you don’t drink. Except in moderation.

Q: Also, I’ve given up smoking. It was quite a battle. The second finger on my right hand used to be brown, a yellow-brown. Now it’s not.

A: You feel better.

Q: I feel a little less stupid. So you were pretty much in hog heaven, there, with the three women, for all those months…

A: As a situation, as a domestic situation, it was not unstressful. There were, naturally, competing interests, people whose interests at any one time were not congruent —

Q: You mean they fought.

A: They were sisterly most of the time. Once in a while they fought.

Q: Using what means?

A: Mouth, mostly.

Q: Not laceration of the skin by fingernails, hair-tearing, bosom-bashing…

A: None of that. They were, most of the time, very good to one another.

Q: Remarkable.

A: I thought so.

Q: When I was first married, when I was twenty, I didn’t know where the clitoris was. I didn’t know there was such a thing. Shouldn’t somebody have told me?

A: Perhaps your wife?

Q: Of course she was too shy. In those days people didn’t go around saying, This is the clitoris and this is what its proper function is and this is what you can do to help out. I finally found it. In a book.