Donald Barthelme - Paradise

Carol was gripping his hand. The doctor glanced at Simon and said, “Gross, isn’t it?” The circulating nurses exchanged pained looks.

“No no,” he had said, “doing fine, keep going.”

Zernikie had run eighteen blocks in a blizzard to get to the hospital after discovering that his car wouldn’t start. He took hold of the head with the forceps and pulled, calmly and steadily. The head, bright with blood, emerged to the level of the eyes. The doctor rotated the shoulders, pulled the baby out and placed it on the mother’s stomach. A nurse began sponging the baby’s face as the doctor cut and tied off the cord. The baby had dark bruises on either side of her head. A nurse picked her up. “Here’s Sarah,” she said. Simon said, “Hello, Sarah.”

When he found a pipe bomb wired under his Volvo Simon left Philadelphia. He’d been working on transforming an old armory in a rundown area into a school and had just ordered the contractor to rip out and replace six thousand square feet of expensive casement windows. Probably the man’s profit on the job, he figured. On the other hand, the bomb might have come from any one of a half-dozen small suppliers who were not allowed to bid the project because they couldn’t make a performance bond. Or, he told himself, it could have been the ghost of Louis Kahn, mad with jealousy. The Volvo had been leaking oil and he’d gotten into the habit of bending down to check the pavement for oil traces after he’d been parked for any length of time.

The bomb was tied neatly to the tailpipe. The bomb squad came, big burly men in aprons like goalies wear with the difference that these were made of Kevlar. They had a barrel-shaped truck draped in wire mesh. “An extremely well-done bomb,” a sergeant told him, after the device was safely in the truck. Simon had turned the job over to one of his partners and given himself a sabbatical, his first in fourteen years. In reality, it wasn’t the bomb but the prospect of listening to his wife’s voice for another hour, another minute.

When she was a child Sarah would occasionally stick a 9D battery in Simon’s ear and he would then make a sound like a fire engine, or, alternately, a garbage truck. When the women were living with him Simon and one or another of them would sometimes go together to the A & P, at the appropriate hour, just to watch the firemen buy supper for the firehouse. The double-jointed engine was double-parked outside the store with a fireman in the cab, waiting, and inside four or five tall healthy young men in dark blue FDNY t-shirts would be arguing about what to put in the spaghetti sauce. “I’m up to here with mushrooms,” Shorty would say, fiercely, and another guy would lobby for hot Italian sausage. The firemen were goodlooking, Simon noticed, appeared strong and trustworthy and very decent. He wondered about the fireman-population, where all this decency and goodness came from. The firemen gazed at Veronica or Dore and then looked away, abashed. Later Veronica, or Dore, would say, “Don’t be jealous, Simon.” Then, after a pause, “We’re not harpies.” Did she mean that the firemen were too young or rather in some sense sacrosanct? He had given Sarah a fire engine she could sit in when she was four and she had put out many exciting fires with it.

Bridges should not be painted blue, Simon thought, the horrible Izod blue of the Ben Franklin bridge in Philadelphia ever in his mind. Concrete, he felt, wonderfully useful and wonderfully ugly, should never be seen in public unless covered with ivy, or, better still, wallpaper. Steel was pretty, he did not know why. Brick was good and wood best, for all purposes under the sun. As a student he had submitted a project to redo Rockefeller Center in pickled pine. He had also, on formal occasions, worn a dog collar instead of a tie, most sportif.

He’d dreamed that he was supposed to be on television for five hours and had prepared nothing. The television people, young men with clipboards, were friendly, were standing around waiting for him to get dressed and proceed to the studio. They seemed confident that he could do what he had contracted to do. There were some notes in another building, a building far from the building in which he was getting dressed, which might help him if he could reach them in time. His gray pinstriped coat was binding his arms like a straitjacket and Simon struggled against it as the clock indicated that time was passing. When he had missed the opening of the program — he had removed and replaced the jacket several times, each time with enormous exertion — the television people became unfriendly and began making supercilious remarks. He had the sense that he could still salvage the situation if he could get to the building where his notes rested in a manila folder. Yes, he’d be late, but the notes were of value, incomplete to be sure but enough to allow him to bullshit his way through the performance, the second, third, fourth, and fifth hours, or, now, the third, fourth, and fifth hours, because time was passing and he had, somehow, put on his blue Oxford shirt over the gray pinstriped jacket, which was, he understood, wrong —

“Simon, you’re famous!” Veronica says. She’s waving a copy of Progressive Architecture.

“You saw the piece.”

“Looks beautiful. Big building.”

“Four million something.”

“It’s got a very fancy outside.”

“Some of that’s fiberglass. We had to take molds to reproduce a lot of the capitals, that stuff on top of the columns. It drives you crazy because you’ve got to add a fire-retardant to the gel coat and that can change the color and you’re trying to match the color of the existing building.”

“Do architects make a lot of money?”

“You can go broke,” he says. “You can do very well. The more time you put into a job, the less money you make. My partners kept me solvent.”

“What’s it feel like to be famous?”

“Feels very much like not being famous.”

“Are you going to fall in love with one of us?”

She’s serious.

“How could I not?”

“It could all come to nothing,” she says.

They’re in the back of the house, sitting at the bar in the kitchen, looking out of the windows. It’s getting warmer, Simon thinks.

“You’re what, fifty-three?”

“Yes.”

“That’s pretty old.”

“And life is short.”

“When I was in high school,” Veronica says, “they dedicated the yearbook every year to the guys from our school who had been killed in Vietnam. They had pictures, every year, of the latest bunch. Every year for four years. So you’re married, huh?”

“Yes. More or less.”

“I was married. Wasn’t so bad, wasn’t so great. We used to screw every morning before he went to work.”

“Every damn morning?”

“Well not every morning Simon don’t be so literal-minded.”

“In the morning I got the clenched jaw,” Simon says. “I knew that something had happened the night before.”

“Like what?”

“A fight.”

“You couldn’t remember?”

“I was drinking. I cooked a lot in the evening and when I cooked I drank. Mingling two pleasures.”

“Are you a good cook?”

“Getting there. Give me another ten years.”

“Look! In the sky!”

A silver blimp, then another, like two silver buildings majestically horizontal.

“When I got married,” she says, “I married this guy who was a Catholic. So we had to get a priest to do the job. So I called this priest and explained the situation. I said I was not a Catholic. And the priest says, ‘Well, we can work with you on that.’ Then I told him I was still married to another guy, the guy I was married to before I met this guy. And the priest says, ‘Well, we can work with you on that.’ So I just thought I’d tell him that I was born without a vagina, that I just had this sort of marble insert where the vagina was supposed to be, to see if he would say, ‘Well, we can work with you on that.’ “