Donald Barthelme - Paradise

Howls from outside the front windows. It’s past midnight. Simon goes down the stairs to the street.

A man in an old Army field jacket is screaming something about the Supreme Court. He’s been screaming, up and down the block, for the past six months. He has an exceptionally deep voice and projects with an actor’s skill. Simon has learned from other people in the neighborhood that he’s called Hal and sleeps on a grate in front of the hospital.

“Chickenfuckers!” Hal screams.

“Hal,” Simon calls.

“Kissass mother!”

“Hal,” Simon calls again. “Take this five bucks. Go eat something.”

Hal approaches. He’s taller than Simon, about forty, and wearing a zippered jump suit under the field jacket.

“Up your giggy fuckface,” he screams, but a quieter scream.

“Time for breakfast, Hal.”

“Thank you,” Hal says in a normal conversational tone, and takes the bill.

He wheels and marches off down the street, screaming “Cunts cunts cunts cunts cunts!”

Simon goes back upstairs.

Veronica comes into his room looking very gloomy,

“We have to talk,” she says. She’s wearing a rather sedate dark-blue nightgown, one he hasn’t seen before.

“What’s the matter?”

“Dore. She’s falling apart.”

“In what way?”

“She’s lost her joy of life.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“She tries to hide it from you.”

“Maybe it’s just temporary.”

“I’ve never seen her like this. She’s been reading terrible books. Books about how terrible men are and how they’ve kept us down.”

“That should make her feel better, not worse. I mean, knowing the causes.”

“Don’t need your cheapo irony, Simon. She’s very upset.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Talk to her.”

“What can I say? I agree with half that stuff and think the other half is garbage.”

“Well it’s not for you to decide, is it? Whenever we say something you don’t like you say we’re hysterical or crazy.”

“Me?”

“Men in general.”

“Have I ever said you were hysterical or crazy?”

“Probably you didn’t want to stir us up. Probably you were thinking it and were just too tactful to say it.”

“Are you sure it’s Dore who’s got this problem?”

“She’s been lending us the books. What else do we have to do with our time?”

“So you’re all upset.”

“The truth shall make you free.”

“What makes you think this stuff is the truth?”

“Thirty-five percent of all American women aren’t allowed to talk at dinner parties. Think about that.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s in a book.”

In hog heaven the hogs wait in line for more heaven. No, not right, no waiting in line, it’s unheavenly, unhogly. The celestial sty is quilted in kale, beloved of hogs. A male hog walks up to a female hog, says “Want to get something going?” She is repulsed by his language, says “Bro, unless you can phrase that better, you’re chilly forever.” No, that’s not right, this is hog heaven, they fall into each other’s trotters, nothing can be done wrong here, nothing wrong can be done…

“Aha!” Simon says.

“Not too bad,” says Veronica.

“I’ll have another,” Ralph says. He puts a ten on the bar.

“Me too,” says Veronica.

“I’ll go along,” Simon says.

“You two getting it on, or what?” Ralph asks.

“Just acquaintances,” Veronica says. “Mere acquaintances.”

“Don’t look like mere acquaintances to me,” Ralph says. “I have a feel for that sort of thing. There’s a way people look. They kind of lean toward each other.”

“This music is a little muddy,” Simon says. The jukebox is playing a Madonna number, “Into the Groove”.

“You mean conceptually?” Veronica asks.

“I mean the sound.”

“I don’t care,” Ralph says. “If you two are getting it on. I’m just an old friend. If you two are getting it on, I’m happy for you. This kid is not my type, actually. I love her, but she’s not my type. We spent the night together once, and it was a damp, damp evening. Many, many tears. You remember?”

“Don’t remind me. I remember.”

“The Brown Palace,” Ralph says. “Denver’s finest.”

“You were trying very hard,” Veronica says.

“I always try very hard. One of the nicest things about me. But you just sat there and wept, all night long. First I said to myself, Ralph, what is this? Is this a tactic? Is this a maneuver? If it’s a tactic, what’s the objective? I couldn’t see an objective. So I decided it was grief, real grief.”

“It was grief.”

“So I said to myself, how am I to deal with this real, genuine grief? Room service? Booze? What?”

“Booze we already had.”

“Stuff a cold, starve a fever,” Ralph says. “I decided this was more in the cold area. We had their twenty-two dollar prime rib, if you remember.”

“I had just busted up with Jack.”

“So we’re sitting there tearing up this twenty-two-dollar prime rib in the Brown Palace at four o’clock in the morning and she tells me I have a relentlessly pedestrian mind. Remember that?”

“I guess I was in a bad mood or something.”

“I was not unaware of that,” Ralph says. “Nevertheless it hurt me, at the time. Now I can laugh about it.”

“I was probably too drunk to be as sensitive as I am when I’m not drunk,” she says.

“You were pretty unhappy. You were probably thinking, what am I doing in this hotel room with this bozo?”

“I never thought of you that way. I always thought of you as kind of a friend.”

“I just bought a new Mazda, gold in color,” Ralph says. “People who are referred to as ‘kind of a friend’ tend to buy cars that are gold in color.”

“Now you’re feeling sorry for yourself,” Veronica says. “Stop it.”

“Back to Denver,” Ralph says. “Denver and my gold Mazda.”

“This round’s on me,” Simon says. “The same again? Everybody?”

In the first dream he was grabbed by three or four cops for firing a chrome-plated.45 randomly in the street. He had no idea where he had gotten the.45 or why it was chrome-plated. In the second dream he awoke sitting on a lounge in a hotel lobby wearing pants and shoes but bare-chested. “I’ve got to find a shirt,” he thought. Then he was in an apartment, which he recognized, trying to find a shirt. People were sleeping in the apartment and he kept banging into cymbals on stands placed here and there. He couldn’t find a shirt. His mother came out of a closet and asked him to be a little quieter.

A sober conversation with Anne. “Tim asked Dore to come to work for Medlapse,” she says. “He’ll make her a vice-president. To begin with, though, she’ll have to be the secretary.”

“It’s got crash-and-burn written all over it.”

“She’ll be a vice-president.”

“Like being vice-president of a bag of popcorn.”

“I know,” Anne says, sighing. “God I hate being a secretary. I did it for three years in Denver. These assholes telling you what to do.”

“If you could do whatever you wanted —”

“I’d like to be an independent oil operator. There were a lot of those at home. Real party guys. Great hearts.”

“Well,” Simon says, “that’s a skill too. You have to know how to con banks.”

“I had one semester of geology.”

“Maybe law school?”

“Terrible.”

“You don’t know that for a fact.”

“I’m a total failure.”

“Begin.”

When the women began to get angry, Simon had not known quite how to react. They surprised him. He had, after all, done little more than give them a place to stay, feed them, sleep with them and talk to them, extending good Christian fellowship. But they had to be mad at somebody, he understood that, and even if they were mad at themselves still that was only starting the engine, as it were, the vehicle still had to go somewhere, win a race, explode, even. Veronica had come in one day with a headline from the National Enquirer,