Donald Barthelme - Paradise

“Blimpie’s?”

“You’re not going to Blimpie’s in that suit?”

“Our cash flow is not on line as yet.”

He’s chopping garlic. Six big cloves of garlic. He minces the garlic and sautés it in olive oil. Meanwhile he’s cooking a package of frozen broccoli in a half-cup of salted water. He drains the broccoli and places it in the sauté pan for two or three minutes, at the same time heating a can of chicken broth and half a can of water. He adds chopped parsley to the pan, lets it cook for a bit, then scoops the contents of the sauté pan into the chicken broth and adds a number of slices of hot cooked Italian sausage. He cooks this for a time and then pours it into bowls and adds generous portions of grated parmesan.

A simple soup. Anne says she likes it. “The best soup I’ve had in decades. I thought I hated broccoli but it just kind of falls apart in this soup and becomes vague green stuff, very tasty. Is it artificially colored?”

“Why do you ask?”

“It’s too green.”

“That’s God’s own sun.”

“You’re sure it’s not Union Carbide.”

“I don’t think Carbide does broccoli.”

“This household is a classic case of exploitation by inadversion.”

Simon scratches his head like Lionel Barrymore in an old movie. “Tarnation take it,” he says, “if I get your drift.”

“The male manipulation of every dimension of experience for the suppression and domination of female-kind.”

“Right,” Simon says. “A big subject.”

“Getting bigger every day,” she says, suddenly cheerful.

“You see a lot of suppression and domination around here?”

“No this setup doesn’t fit the model because it’s so laissez-faire. But if we got into its deep structure —” She stops and begins again. “You don’t care about anything, Simon. You just go along cooking dinner and fucking us indiscriminately and reading The Wall Street Journal. Your vital interests are not involved here. You don’t give a shit.”

“How do you know?”

Once he’d been in the kitchen with Anne in the early morning. She was wearing a thin transparent shift, nothing else. They had already made love and in the kitchen scuffled for a long time alternately embracing and struggling, Simon running his hands over her breasts, her back, between her legs, Anne hugging him and then jumping up and wrapping her legs around his waist. “This is a female fantasy,” she had said, “love in the kitchen.” “Love instead of the kitchen,” he said, and she said, “But I like the kitchen.” Her buttocks were such as to drive men wild, drive men wild, he said, and she said that when she’d been in high school she’d worn extremely short shorts with just that in mind, had in fact been sent home a time or two. “My mother couldn’t control me,” she said, “I was uncontrollable.” He picked her up and seated her on top of the refrigerator and she threw an avocado at him and he caught it as it smushed in his hand. He spread her legs and ate her as she sat atop the refrigerator, her arms cradling his head. “Play is what it’s all about,” she said, “what does it taste like?” “Little bit salty,” he said, his tongue laving her belly button, “must be those blackeyed peas we had last night or maybe just your temperament in general.”

“So she kicked you out,” Anne says.

“She didn’t kick me out, exactly.”

“Was she better than we are?”

“It was kind of a detour.”

“Are you sorry?”

“No.”

“It would be nice if you were sorry.”

“Everybody always wants somebody to be sorry. Fuck that.”

“Veronica had a little thing with a fireman.”

“Where’d she get the fireman?”

“A & P. His name was Salvatore. He let her slide down the pole.”

“Did he.”

“He was married.”

“That’s tragic. Is it tragic?”

“Just a detour.”

He hugs her. “Frolic and detour, the lawyers say.”

“But a real poet.”

“She’s no realer than you are.”

“Do you like women more than music?”

“A little.”

“You came back because you love us more than you loved her.”

“Well, I do.”

A: I thought people weren’t supposed to have more than three or four nightmares a year. I have them every night, there is no night in which I don’t have something that can fairly be described as a nightmare. Many of them have to do with clothes.

Q: The wrong clothes.

A: Not so much the wrong clothes as not being able to get dressed. In particular, the trousers, in dreams I have great, enormous difficulty bringing the trousers up over the knees. The shoes, for some reason I have put on my shoes first and then try to put on the trousers, try to pull them over the shoes…

Q: I often dream that my rifle isn’t clean. You can clean it and clean it and then the sergeant looks down the barrel and decides it’s not clean, it’s got very little to do with whether the barrel is or is not clean, it’s a metaphysical proposition related to the Art of War, your poor place within that scheme…

A: Every night! It’s too much. What recourse? The grinding of teeth.

Q: Where do you see yourself going from here? In life.

A: More of the same, I suppose. When I was married I’d find myself looking forward to Dumbo, you know? Dumbo was going to be on television at say seven-thirty in the evening and the kid was going to watch it and that was what I had to look forward to, too.

Q: I liked it.

A: I liked it. Bizarre, when you think about it.

Q: The part I remember is when all the storks dropped all the parachutes from the sky and all the little baby tigers and hippos rolled out of the diapers — the bundles the storks were carrying were diapers, those boys don’t miss a trick — before the eyes of their astonished tiger and hippo parents. That was cute.

A: Terrifying. Because it was so well done.

Q: I don’t want to live on a farm, to go back to the farm. It’s too risky and I don’t know what to do. Some damn cow or other is yelling and I don’t know what to do to alleviate her pain. Do I put the wheat in now or do I wait two weeks? The combine, its drive chain is acting up and I ought to be able to fix it by slamming it a few times with a hammer, but I don’t know where to slam it. I don’t know how to talk to the bank. Some guys know all this stuff and I tell myself I’m not supposed to know it because I’m not a farmer. Yet I think I ought to be a farmer or at least be capable of being a farmer. Maybe it’s atavistic…

A: I’d be perfectly comfortable living in a hotel. I take that to be the opposite pole. Not necessarily a grand hotel, a shabby but still stuffy hotel.

Q: Bedford Square. In London.

A: Never been to London.

Q: Where have you been?

A: Tokyo, Mexico City, Paris, Barcelona, Stockholm, Palermo, Reykjavik —

Q: Lots of hotels in those places.

A: Stayed in the poorer ones, for the most part. Said to the chambermaid, your breasts look beautiful this morning.

Q: Shouldn’t make fun of them.

A: I wasn’t. I lusted after the chambermaids. Not every one.

Q: Nothing wrong with that.

A: But what if they stab me in the ear with the feather duster?

Q: Would you like to try some of these little yellow guys here?

Simon was a way station, a bed-and-breakfast, a youth hostel, a staging area, a C-141 with the jumpers of the 82nd Airborne lined up at the door. There was no place in the world for these women whom he loved, no good place. They could join the underemployed half-crazed demi-poor, or they could be wives, those were the choices. The universities offered another path but one they were not likely to take. The universities were something Simon believed in (of course! he was a beneficiary) but there was among the women an animus toward the process that would probably never be overcome, not only impatience but a real loathing, whose source he did not really understand. Veronica told him that she had flunked Freshman English 1303 three times. “How in the world did you do that?” he asked. “Comma splices,” she said. “Also, every time I wrote down something I thought, the small-section teacher said that it was banal. It probably was banal.” Simon found what the women had to say anything but banal, instead edged and immediate. Maybe nothing that could be rendered in a 500-word theme, one bright notion and four hundred and fifty words of hay. Or psychology: Harlow, rhesus monkeys, raisins, reward. People did master this stuff, more or less, and emerged more or less enriched thereby. Compare and contrast extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, giving examples of each. Father-beaten young women considering extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. “We all went through this,” he told them, and Dore said, “Yeah, and you smart guys did the Vietnam war.” Simon had opposed the Vietnam war in all possible ways short of self-immolation but could not deny that it was a war constructed by people who had labored through Psychology I, II, III, and IV and Main Currents of Western Thought. “But, dummy, it’s the only thing you’ve got,” he said. “Your best idea.” “I have the highest respect for education,” she said. “The highest. I’d be just as dreary when I came out as I was when I went in.”