Donald Barthelme - Paradise

“I’ve had twenty-six years’ practice in standing up. I can do it,” Anne says.

She’s wearing sweat pants with a dark gray crewneck sweater and medium-gray Reeboks. She’s been drinking tequila and she’s terribly drunk.

“I want to tell you something.”

“What?”

“You think we’re dumb bunnies.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Your attitude.”

Simon’s been reading Audubon Action, “Arizona Dam Project Faces New Challenge.”

“What’s my attitude?”

“I see fatigue and disgust.”

“Sweetie, that’s not true.”

“Don’t call me sweetie.”

“Anne,” he says, “you want to sit down?”

“You think we’re not bright enough for you.”

“You’re as bright as anybody. I mean it.”

“You have an attitude of disdain. Sticks out all over you.”

“Just not so.”

“Veronica thinks you want us out.”

“No. Untrue.”

“She thinks your mind is wandering.”

“That’s what my mind does. Wander. Right now I’m thinking about the furniture of Paradise.”

“What is it?”

“Knoll, basically.” He pushes a sketch pad toward her. “But you see they haven’t allowed for the angels who have only one wing, so I’m trying to —”

“The angels have only one wing?” she says in astonishment.

“Some angels have only one wing.” He shows her an old engraving in which a single-winged angel is pictured.

“How can they fly with only one wing?”

“What makes you think they fly? In the literal sense?”

“I’ve always seen them with two wings.”

“Artists like symmetry.”

“He looks imperfect.”

“You can get a lot accomplished with one wing. Fan the flames and lead the orchestra. I saw Buddy Rich, the drummer, play with a broken arm one night. Did more with one hand and his two feet than —”

“But it’d be like having only one breast.” He slips a hand inside her shirt. Her breasts are bare. “If I’d spent the same amount of time worrying about my mind as I have worrying about my chest, I’d be Hegel by now,” she says. “I mean since thirteen.”

“Old Hegel.”

“Don’t be so snotty. We have Hegel in Denver.”

“Hegel is quite sexy. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis.”

“You think that’s where he got the idea?”

“Could be.”

Simon positions the white plaster egg eight feet tall in the sitting room. The women are watching. He smashes it with an iron-headed maul. Inside are three naked young men. Their names are Harry.

Q: I sometimes imagine that I am in Pest Control. I have a small white truck with a red diamond-shaped emblem on the door and a white jump suit with the same emblem on the breast pocket. I park the truck in front of a subscriber’s neat three-hundred-thousand-dollar home, extract the silver canister of deadly pest-killer from the back of the truck, and walk up the brick sidewalk to the house’s front door. Chimes ring, the door swings open, a young wife in jeans and a pink flannel shirt worn outside the jeans is standing there. “Pest Control,” I say. She smiles at me, I smile back and move past her into the house, into the handsomely appointed kitchen. The canister is suspended by a sling from my right shoulder, and, pumping the mechanism occasionally with my right hand, I point the nozzle of the hose at the baseboards and begin to spray. I spray alongside the refrigerator, alongside the gas range, under the sink, and behind the kitchen table. Next, I move to the bathrooms, pumping and spraying. The young wife is in another room, waiting for me to finish. I walk into the main sitting room and spray discreetly behind the largest pieces of furniture, an oak sideboard, a red plush Victorian couch, and along the inside of the fireplace. I do the study, spraying behind the master’s heavy desk on which there is an open copy of the Columbia Encyclopedia, he’s been looking up the Seven Years War, 1756-63, yellow highlighting there, and behind the forty-five-inch RCA television. The master bedroom requires just touches, like perfume behind the ear, short bursts in her closet which must avoid the two dozen pairs of shoes there and in his closet which contains six to eight long guns in canvas cases. Finally I spray the laundry room with its big white washer and dryer, and behind the folding table stacked with sheets and towels already folded. Who folds? I surmise that she folds. Unless one of the older children, pressed into service, folds. In my experience they are unlikely to fold. Maybe the au pair. Finished, I tear a properly-made-out receipt from my receipt book and present it to the young wife. She scribbles her name in the appropriate space and hands it back to me. The house now stinks quite palpably but I know and she knows that the stench will dissipate in two to four hours. The young wife escorts me to the door, and, in parting, pins a silver medal on my chest and kisses me on both cheeks. Pest Control!

Four o’clock in the morning. Simon listening to one of his radios, sipping white wine. Two horn players are talking about Coltrane.

“The thing is,” one says, and the other bursts in to say, “Yeah, but wait a minute.”

A Woody Shaw record is played. Simon’s using earphones so he can play the music as loud as he pleases without disturbing the women. At low volume you lose half of it, a thing his wife had never understood. Now one of the guests is praising D flat. “This is on ITC,” the host says. “ITC is a new label that’s just getting started in LA. They’re getting new guys and doing new things.” The drummer on the Woody Shaw record is wonderfully skillful if a bit orotund.

“Great one,” says one of the guys on the radio, when the Wynton Marsalis track is over.

“A lot of humility,” says the other. “I mean he can do it all.”

Simon suddenly remembers putting on his daughter’s shoes, in the morning, before his wife took her to nursery school. His wife brought in the child and the shoes, and Sarah would sit on his lap as sneaker was fitted to foot. “Make your toes little,” he’d say, and she’d perversely spread them.

“New York is a bitch,” the radio says, “but there’s more community.”

Wheat-germ bubble gum was served

At the Maniacs’ Ball

He lays himself down in bed, sleeps fitfully for an hour and a half. At six he’s up again, in a t-shirt and jeans, moving around the apartment. The women are all still sleeping. He looks out of the windows. On the street a man in violet running shorts is carrying a woman on his shoulders, she’s in fact riding him, her legs around his neck. The man is heavy, muscular, carries his rider with spectacular ease. The woman is in her early forties, the man the same age or a little younger. The man runs in circles, the woman waves like a circus performer. It’s six-thirty.

When he goes out to get the Times there is a semi-corpse in the vestibule, a barely breathing Hispanic male. He’s vomited blood and blood is all over the red tile. Simon shakes the man’s shoulder. Whiskey smell and no visible wounds. He shakes the man again. No response.

There’s a hospital at the end of the block. Simon, on the sidewalk, stops a resident on the way to work. He’s Oriental, Korean or Japanese, white-clothed, a stethoscope stuck in his right-hand jacket pocket.

“There’s a man in here. Not in good shape.”

The doctor looks annoyed.

“Call nine one one.”

“I think you’d better look at him. He looks pretty far gone.”

With clear reluctance the doctor, a small man with a mustache, follows Simon into the vestibule. He bends over the fallen man, taking care not to touch him.

“Call the hospital. Something in the —”

He moves one hand up and down his chest.