Donald Barthelme - Paradise

Q: The Eiffel Tower?

A: About women in the sense of being addressed to women.

Q: Who speaks for the male?

A: Monks.

Q: Is the bicycle about women?

A: Speeds us toward women as twilight time descends and the lamplighters go about their slow incendiary tasks.

Q: What about coveting your neighbor’s wife?

A: Well on one side, in Philadelphia, there were no wives, strictly speaking, there were two floors and two male couples, all very nice people. On the other side, Bill and Rachel had the whole house. I like Rachel but I don’t covet her. I could covet her, she’s covetable, quite lovely and spirited, but in point of fact our relationship is that of neighborliness. I jump-start her car when her battery is dead, she gives me basil from her garden, she’s got acres of basil, not literally acres but — Anyhow, I don’t think that’s much of a problem, coveting your neighbor’s wife. Just speaking administratively, I don’t see why there’s an entire Commandment devoted to it. It’s a mental exercise, coveting. To covet is not necessarily to take action.

Q: I covet my neighbor’s leaf blower. It has this neat Vari-Flo deal that lets you —

A: I obey the Commandments, the sensible ones. Where they don’t know what they’re talking about I ignore them. I keep thinking about the story of the two old women in church listening to the priest discoursing on the dynamics of the married state. At the end of the sermon one turns to the other and says, “I wish I knew as little about it as he does.”

Q: God critiques us, we critique Him. Does Carol also engage in dalliance?

A: How quaint you are. I think she has friends whom she sees now and again.

Q: How does that make you feel?

A: I wish her well.

Q: What’s in your wallet?

A: The usual. Credit cards, pictures of Sarah, driver’s license, forty dollars in cash, Amex receipts —

Q: It seems to me that we have quite a great deal to worry about. Does the radish worry about itself in this way? Yet the radish is a living thing. Until it’s cooked.

A: Carol is mad for radishes, can’t get enough. Rachel gave us radishes, too.

Q: I am feverishly interested in these questions. Ethics has always been where my heart is. Moral precepting stings the dull mind into attentiveness.

A: I’m only a bit depressed, only a bit.

Q: A new arrangement of ideas, based upon the best thinking, would produce a more humane moral order, which we need. Apple honey, disposed upon the sexual parts, is not an index of decadence. Decadence itself is not as bad as it’s been painted. As for myself, I am content with too little, I know this about myself and I do not commend myself for it and perhaps one day I shall be able to change myself into a hungrier being, one who acts decisively to grasp —

A: The leaf blower, for example.

The poet gives him a picture of herself posed naked as a Maja on a couch. The Polaroid is ill-lit, badly composed, unflattering to her stomach, and she is shiny of nose. Furthermore, the couch is ugly, done in inch-square black-and-white hound’s-tooth check. “Who took the picture?” Simon asks. “Someone,” she says, and snatches it away from him.

He is a layman, not a figure in her world. “You’re not a poet, you’re a real person,” she says. “Of course poets are funnier than real people.” She names for his entertainment the second, third, fourth, and fifth most beautiful male poets in the country. “But who’s the first?” the layman asks. “We keep the position open so that the guys will have something to aspire to,” she says. Does she know all of these beautiful poets? Are they all present or former lovers? Simon has no idea how poets behave. Outrageously would be his best guess, but what does that mean in practice? The poet’s long red hair strays out over the pale-blue pillowcase; her right foot taps time to a Pointer Sisters record. “The dust in your poems,” Simon asks, “is it always the same dust? Does it always mean the same thing? Or does it mean one thing in one poem and another thing in another poem?” The poet places a hand under a bare breast, as if to weigh it. “My dust,” she says, “my excellent dust. You’re a layman, Simon, shut up about my dust.”

She was raised in Kansas, where her father is a wholesale grocer. “He gave me this,” she says. She opens a book and removes a twenty-thousand-dollar bond. “It was supposed to put me through medical school. I didn’t want to go to medical school.” The bond is pretty and blue with some kind of noble statuary on it. “Shouldn’t this be in a money-market fund or something?” asks the layman. “I guess so,” she says. “If you’re not from Kansas, people in Kansas ask you: What do you think about Kansas? What do you think about our sky? What do you think about people in Kansas? Are we dumb?” She replaces the bond in the book. “You find a high degree of sadness in Kansas’.”

“Well it’s just what I thought would happen what I thought would happen and it happened.”

“He’s a free human individual not bound to us.”

“Maybe we’re too much for him maybe he needs more of a one-on-one thing see what I’m saying?”

“It may be just a temporary aberration that won’t last very long like when suddenly you see somebody in a crowded Pizza Hut or something and you think, I could abide that.”

“But if she’s a poet then she won’t keep him poets burn their candles down to nubs. And then find new candles. That’s what they do.”

“I don’t know I still feel threatened I mean I’m as generous as the next man but I still feel emphatically that our position here has radically altered for the worse. Somehow.”

“Poets eat up all of experience and then make poems of it is she any good?”

“He thinks so.”

“What does he know he’s an architect.”

“He was doing Comp Lit before he got kicked out of USC.”

“What’d he get kicked out for?”

“Slugged a dean in a riot, it was a First Amendment thing he says.”

Tim comes in wearing a dark-blue flannel suit with a faint pinstripe. He leaks prosperity.

“Tim!” Veronica says. “What’s happened to you?”

“This is from Paul Stuart,” Tim says. “Seven hundred bucks. Do you like it?”

“You look like a new man. A new and better man.”

“I got something going,” Tim says. “I’m president of this new outfit we’re putting together. Medlapse. It’s a law firm.”

“But you’re not a lawyer,” Dore says. “Are you?”

“The concept was mine,” he says, “lawyers you can Xerox on any street corner. We’re specializing in malpractice, it’s everywhere. I estimate that forty-seven percent of all patient-physician encounters have elements that would tend to support a successful action. We project a ninety-eight percent rate of recovery over two years.”

“Veronica’s been going to this guy over on Hudson Street,” Anne says, “he’s kind of peculiar.”

“You think he’s peculiar I don’t think he’s peculiar,” says Veronica.

“What’s…” Tim reaching into his jacket for a notebook.

“He insists on being paid in cash only.”

“Diddling his taxes.”

“He doesn’t have a nurse.”

“Violation of AMA guidelines on sexual oversight, he’s OB-GYN?”

“His name is Linh pronounced Ling he’s Vietnamese he was a general in Vietnam.”

“They were all generals in Vietnam,” Tim says,

“What’re you seeing him for if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Just various things he’s cheap, twenty dollars for an office visit.”

“When you’re ready, Medlapse is ready, can I take you ladies out to lunch, rip up a chop?”

“Where did you have in mind?”