Donald Barthelme - Paradise

A: German?

Q: Dutch.

Dore sitting in the back of the house, watching a bird-fight. Two black birds are struggling in midair near the ailanthus.

“That one sucker is going to get the other sucker,” she says. “Going to clean his clock for him.”

“That’s the way it is in this world,” says Tim. “What does he win if he wins?”

“Don’t know.”

“You think Simon’s been all right lately?”

“Morose,” she says. “I get a definite moroseness.”

“Yeah. That’s kind of what I was talking about. Some people can’t stand prosperity.”

“You think he wants to go back to Philadelphia?”

“He hasn’t said yea or nay. I gather things weren’t so wonderful in Philadelphia.”

“Where did you go to school?”

“Cornell.”

“What did you study?”

“Electrical engineering.”

“Is that a good place for it?”

“It’s okay.”

“What’s your wife’s name?”

“Carol.”

“Everybody’s wife is named Carol. You ever notice that?”

“I didn’t know that, no.”

“Is she pretty?”

“No. Maybe kind of.”

“Oh. What’s she like?”

“I can see her in long red robes with a little red yarmulke on her head and a big gold cross on a chain around her neck and a ring that you have to kiss. Standing just to the left of the throne and whispering into the ear of the king.”

“Is that Machiavelli?”

“I was thinking more of that guy who worked for Nixon.”

“What does she think of you?”

“Not much. I work at the car wash, remember?”

“But that’s only temporary.”

“By me everything’s temporary. Good things and bad things.”

“That must be fascinating. The indeterminacy.”

“It’s fascinating.”

He lost nine pounds (a great blessing) during the eight months they lived in the apartment. They had not been slow to criticize his toes, teeth, belly, hair, or politics. “It seems to me,” Veronica had said one day, “that you have no social responsibility.” “My first social responsibility,” he had said, “is that the building doesn’t collapse.” “Right right right,” she said, “but you are after all a creature of the power structure. You work for the power structure.” This was true enough, revolutionaries didn’t build buildings, needed only closets to oil their Uzis in, no work for architects there. On the other hand Veronica and the others derived their own politics from a K-Mart of sources, Thomas Aquinas marching shoulder-to-shoulder with Simone de Beauvoir and the weatherbeaten troopers of Sixty Minutes. They were often left and right during the same conversation, sometimes the same sentence.

His headaches had gone away but had been replaced by early-morning vomiting. A few ounces of yellow bile produced each morning. He meditated on too much, thought carefully about a sufficiency. When the women had been living with him he had thought of himself, very often, as insufficiently virile, or insufficiently ambitious. Who needed this much excitation? On the other hand, who could resist it? Anne sometimes looked like a twenty-year-old, especially when she’d just bathed, the small breasts, the small hips, the dark hair. Dore was tall and bossy, there was no other word for it, and Veronica was, take your choice, sassy or critical, great lip on that kid, never without a spiked remark. He had the sense that he was a hotel, didn’t mind being a hotel, okay I’m a hotel. Two of them sucking his cock in the early mornings, taking turns, five or six o’clock, he was drinking white wine, not very good white wine, and smoking, this went on for a long while, sometimes they’d turn to one another and one would begin to lick the inside of the other’s legs up near the cunt, quite near, Simon with his hands on that one’s buttocks, around her waist and then moving down over the buttocks with slow appreciative strokes, raking them with his nails at intervals, but softly, little bites, but softly, the flesh is so delicious Dore said, or Anne said.

“You’ve been bad Veronica.”

“No I haven’t that’s not bad that’s hardly bad at all.”

“I agree with her. You’ve been bad.”

“No I haven’t I don’t call that —”

“Very bad.”

“I don’t call that bad that’s not hardly bad at all you should see what I’ve seen if you want to talk about —”

“Yes Veronica yes of course of course Veronica I didn’t think you’d admit it why should you? C’mon Anne there’s no reasoning with her.”

“Dore don’t go I haven’t been bad she’s just trying to tell you I’ve been bad but I mean are you going to believe her? Just because she says —”

“Well how do you feel?”

“Bad.”

“You see.”

“Oh God Dore now you’ve made her feel bad just talking about everything you’ve made her feel bad that she’s done something some little something she shouldn’t have done some little something that warrants horrible contrition —”

“I don’t mind making her feel bad. She’s bad.”

“Veronica, are you essentially what she says you are? Bad? You can tell me I’m your friend. I have other bad friends, if that —”

“Well spit. That’s what I think.”

“You’re not going to talk is that it?”

“Hit her.”

“I’m not going to hit her she’s a sister you can’t hit a sister even a bad sister that’s one of the eternal rules not even a terribly, terribly bad sister. Like Veronica.”

“I’m about as bad as I want to be, so far. I haven’t thought about haven’t grasped how bad I might want to be in the future when my ship comes in or something. Something, then, may be released in me that will allow —”

“I don’t think she’s going to acknowledge the clear facts. I don’t think she has the humility. I give up I absolutely give up.”

“Hang me if you want to I don’t care. Where’s the rope? Get the rope. Hang me.”

“Oh hit her go ahead and hit her I can’t stand this mewling.”

“I don’t want to hit her.”

“Hit me.”

“Hit her.”

“What with?”

“God I don’t know use your fist kick her what do I care it’s not my problem is it. Hit her.”

“You don’t think that’s a little severe?”

“It’s gonna take a goddamn presidential order to get you to hit her?”

“Why me?”

“Okay I’ve been bad. I admit it. But others have been worse. I could point some fingers.”

“Lord I’m tired of listening to this drivel if you don’t get it together in the next three to five minutes I’m going to —”

“What?”

Simon’s father died and he flew back to California for the funeral. He had to buy a dark suit, went to Barney’s and picked the first one that seemed to fit him. In San Francisco he stood next to his mother, their arms entwined, while the Presbyterian minister said what he could. The chapel was empty except for the two of them and an elderly couple his mother had introduced as Connie and Bill and who turned out to be golfers, part of a mixed foursome his father had played with once a week. The other woman was unable to be present because of a daughter giving birth in Corvallis, Oregon. His mother didn’t play.

Afterward, back at her handsome Pacific Heights house, his mother said: “What are you doing?”

“Taking a little time off.”

“It’s been months now.”

“Excellent months.”

“Just asking.”

“What’s the money situation?”

“Your father was very good about that, as you know. That Carbide he bought years ago at twelve? He sold it just before he died at seventy-three. When they were having that trouble. He had almost ten thousand shares. Actually it went up to seventy-eight last week but he did very well, very well. We have some other stuff that’s looking good.”