Donald Barthelme - Paradise

Some days they were angry with him, some days they were angry with each other. Four people, many possibilities. Each person could be angry at any given point with one, two, or three others, or angry at the self. Two people could be angry at a third, three people at a fourth. He reached forty-nine possibilities before his math expired.

Their movement through the world required young men, a class to which he did not belong. Simon liked young men, within reasonable limits, and approved, in general, of the idea of young men and young women sleeping together in joyous disregard of history, economics, building codes. Let them have their four hundred square feet. Veronica liked garage apartments. Perhaps the young men would do well in the world, attend the new branch of Harvard Business in Gainesville, market a black bean soup that would rage through Miami like rabies or a voice attenuator capable of turning crackers into lisping Brits, and end up with seven thousand square feet in Paris on the Ile de la Cité. Young men had stiff pricks and smelled good, by and large, almost as good as babies. Young women bounced up and down on your chest and dazzled you with a thousand unexpected attacks. Simon counted the ways in which he was God-visited.

Sarah calls. “Do you know what she’s done?” she asks. She’s referring to her mother.

“What?”

“Fallen in love.”

Simon is astonished. “With whom?”

“The mayor. And he’s married.”

“Good God that’s terrible.”

“She was crying on my shoulder all last night.”

“Oh Lord. Can I do anything?”

“Talk to her?”

“Would she want to talk to me about this?”

“I guess not. She said you were what she was trying to get away from.”

“I understand that. I understood that a long time ago.”

“Don’t be bitter.”

“Simple statement of fact. People get too much of each other. Civility goes away, finally.”

“Yeah I think you’d better butt out. Not that you’ve had so much to do with the affairs of your Philadelphia group lately.”

“Well. Do you have enough money?”

“Daddy you’ve been asking me that since I was thirteen.”

“It’s a reflex. Listen, Sarah, is there anything I can do for her, do you think? Or would it be better if I didn’t know about it?”

“I think she wants you to know about it. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

“Is he in love with her?”

“He’s a mayor. He needs a lot of love. More than other people. Oceans.”

How does she know so much? “Keep me posted,” he says.

“I dropped Ways of Being, the East.”

“Why?”

“It was boring and the guy lectured into his tie, mostly.”

Veronica’s trampoline is leaning against the wall and Veronica is throwing books at it to see how far they will bounce. Buddenbrooks in a paper edition bounces a good twelve feet. Dore is painting her legs red, with a two-inch brush and a big jar into which she has crumbled bright red Easter-egg glazes. Anne is threatening to cut off her long hair. She stands poised, a hank in one hand, scissors in the other, daring anyone to interfere. “Anybody messes with me gets the scissors in the medulla.” Simon senses unrest.

A terrible night. Simon is in bed by ten, taking a Scotch for company. Anne and Dore are now watching television. Veronica is out somewhere. About ten-thirty Anne comes into the room, strips, and gets into bed with him.

“I’m chilly,” she says.

He turns her on her stomach and begins to stroke her back, gently. A very sculptural waist, narrowing suddenly under the rib cage and then the hipbones flaring.

When Anne leaves to go back to her own bed, at two, Dore appears in the doorway.

“Are you all tired?” she asks.

“Probably.” Dore climbs into the bed, clumsily, peels off her jeans and bikini pants, retaining the tank top which she’s cut raggedly around the neck in the style of the moment. She takes his cock in hand and regards it thoughtfully.

“I’m sad and depressed,” she says. “I feel useless. All I do is sit around and watch MTV.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Something. But I don’t know what.”

“Lot of people in the same position,” Simon says.

“I don’t want to be a lawyer and I don’t want to be a wife. I don’t want to be a musician. What does that leave?”

“Be bad. Imagine something bad.”

“Like what?”

“I have to tell you what to imagine?”

She looks at him. “There was this guy once. He asked me, are you a swallower or a spitter?”

“What’d you say?”

“He was a doctor. They tend to be crude.”

He struggles around the bed and begins to kiss the insides of her thighs. “This is a terrible night.”

“Why?”

“You guys aren’t solving your problems. I can’t help you very much.” His hands are splayed out over her back, moving up and down, over the shoulders and down to the splendid buttocks. Thinking of buttercups and butterflies and flying buttresses and butts of malmsey.

“Veronica has a rash,” she says, coming up for air.

“What kind of a rash?”

“Dark red. Looks like a wine stain.”

“Where is it?”

“You’ll see.”

Saliva is running down his cock, token of enthusiasm.

Veronica walks in. “What is taking place here?” she asks, in a voice like thunder.

After the women had departed Simon set up a small office in a barely renovated building on West Broadway. He was on the fourth floor, there was no air conditioning, and the big open windows brought in the clamor of the street, sirens, rape, outrage. His partners in Philadelphia sent him small jobs, much as one might UPS a fruitcake or a brace of pheasant to one recovering from an illness, with the implication that they were to be enjoyed not now but later, when he was stronger. He sat at his draughting table, a hollow-core door resting on carpenters’ sawhorses, sketching on tracing paper with a felt pen. The problem was an office for a small foundation which had leased space in a very good block in the East Seventies. The difficulty was that although there were floor-to-ceiling windows facing the street in the existing building, very little light reached the nether regions. He had designed a light scoop to be affixed to the rear of the building, but figured that the cost would be prohibitive. The fire escape was placed precisely where the tubing for the light scoop would have to go, and light scoops don’t work very well anyhow, as both the tygers of wrath and the horses of instruction had taught him. Blake also had something to say about foundations:

Pity is become a trade, and generosity a science, That men get rich by …

But that’s a little hard, he thought, these people are doing the best they can, piloting worthy projects through the swamps of Inanition. To be working again felt very good.

Simon thinks about Paradise. On the great throne, a naked young woman, her back to the viewer. Simon looks around for Onan, doesn’t see him. Onan didn’t make it to Paradise? Seems unfair. Great deal of marble about, he notices, shades of rose and terra-cotta; Paradise seems to have been designed by Edward Durell Stone. Science had worked out a way to cremate human remains, reduce the ashes to the size of a bouillon cube, and fire the product into space in a rocket, solving the Forest Lawn dilemma. Simon had once done a sketch problem on tomb sculpture, for his sophomore Visual Awareness course. No more tomb sculpture.

Paradise unearned. It was, rather, a gift, in this way theologically unsound. It was a state or condition visited upon him, like being in the Army. Simon had walked around in green fatigues for most of two years, doing the best he could from day to day, sometimes carrying drunken comrades back to the barracks at night, outside Stuttgart, in a fireman’s lift. His days were spent in meaningless maneuvers with giant weapons which the Army was afraid to fire for fear they wouldn’t work. Mostly, when tested, they didn’t. Simon read Stars & Stripes and very good mystery novels by John D. Macdonald. On leave in Berlin he tried to find buildings by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, whose work had not been lost on Mies. The women would soon be gone. The best thing he could do was to listen to them.