Donald Barthelme: Paradise

“You don’t care about anything.”

“Listening to the radio.”

“You do love your radios.”

“I’m thinking of getting another one. They have these waterproof jobs for the bath —”

“I like a quiet reflective bath.”

“I’ll come in and put toads in the water.”

“Where would you get toads in New York City?”

“Toad store. They got big toads, little toads, horned toads, no-horn toads —”

“It’s a great city.”

“It’s a great argument for cities.”

Simon wanted very much to be a hearty, optimistic American, like the President, but on the other hand did not trust hearty, optimistic Americans, like the President. He had considered the possibility that the President, when not in public, was not really hearty and optimistic but rather a gloomy, obsessed man with a profound fear of the potentially disastrous processes in which he was enmeshed, no more sanguine than the Fisher King. He did not really believe this to be the case. He himself had settled for being a competent, sometimes inventive architect with a tragic sense of brick. Brick was his favorite material as the fortress was the architectural metaphor that he had, more and more, to resist. To force himself into freshness, he thought about bamboo.

Getting old, Simon. Not so limber, dear friend, time for the bone factory? The little blue van. Your hands are covered with tiny pepperoni. Your knees predict your face. Your back stabs you, on the left side, twice a day. The belly’s been discussed. The soul’s shrinking to a microdot. We’re ordering your rocking chair, size 42. Would you like something in Southern pine? Loblolly? Send the women away. They’re too good for you. Also, not good for you. Are you King Solomon? Your kingdom a scant two hundred fifty-nine thousand, two hundred square inches. Annual tearfall, three and one-quarter inches. You feedeth among the lilies, Simon. There are garter snakes among the lilies, Simon, garter belts too. Your garden is over-cultivated, it needs weeds. How’s your skiwear, Simon? Done any demolition derbies lately? You run the mile in, what, a year and a half? We’re sending you an electric treadmill, a solid steel barbell curl bar, a digital pedometer. Use them. And send the women away.

When he asked himself what he was doing, living in a bare elegant almost unfurnished New York apartment with three young and beautiful women, Simon had to admit that he did not know what he was doing. He was, he supposed, listening. These women were taciturn as cowboys, spoke only to the immediate question, probably did not know in which century the Second World War had taken place. No, too hard; it was, rather, that what they knew was so wildly various, ragout of Spinoza and Cyndi Lauper with a William Buckley sherbet floating in the middle of it. He’d come in one evening to find all three of them kneeling on the dining room table with their rumps pointing at him. Obviously he was supposed to strip off his gentlemanly khakis and attend to all three at once, just as obviously an impossibility. He had placed a friendly hand on each cul in turn and said, “Okay, guys, you’ve had your fun, now get back to the barracks and polish the Renoirs.” That boy has no talent, muttered Manet to Monet one afternoon in the garden, about Renoir. “Out, out, out,” he’d shouted, and they’d scattered, giggling. One night on his back in bed he’d had six breasts to suck, swaying above him, he was poor tattered Romulus. When they couldn’t get a part of him they’d play with each other.

Simon and Dore sitting in the kitchen. The radio making music.

“They play the best music late at night,” Dore said. “When they think nobody’s awake.”

“That’s Keith Jarrett.”

“Who’s he?”

“Piano player. Very famous.”

“What’s that funny noise?”

“He kinds of sings when he plays.”

“Oh. I guess you old guys know a lot of different stuff, don’t you. How old are you?”

“Fifty-three.”

“You don’t look it. You look maybe fifty, fifty-one. That was good chicken we had.”

“Thank you.”

“I wrung a neck once. In Fort Lupton. It was a mess.”

“By hand?”

“All the way off. It was a mess.”

“Now they use electrocution.”

“I read about it.”

“All the chickens hooked into this moving contrivance —”

“Their heads dangling in water —”

“Then whfft! whfft! whfft!”

“It’s horrible.”

“The father chicken says to the son chicken, Son, I’ve got bad news for you.”

“Then, whfft!”

“This country runs on chicken.”

“Just think of it. A little bird like that. Fueling the nation.”

“At night, in the great chicken factories, whfft! whfft! whfft! whfft! All through the night.”

“They don’t do it in the daytime?”

“Under cover of night. So people don’t realize the extent.”

“If I was a chicken I’d fly away. Before they got me.”

“They’re bum fliers. A ham can fly better.”

“How do they kill the hams?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Simon. You’re not a serious man.”

“Yes I am.”

Dore likes to scold people. When anyone in the house does anything that does not meet her specifications for appropriate behavior, Dore scolds.

“Simon you’re not supposed to talk to Anne like that.”

“Like what?”

“You were condescending.”

“In what way?”

“Okay, she never heard of the Marshall Plan. You don’t have to explain it to her. In that way.”

“Was I pompous?”

“Not more than usual. It was that incredulous look. Like you couldn’t believe that somebody’d never heard of the Marshall Plan.”

“It was a big deal, historically.”

“Simon you are twice as old as we are.”

“That does not absolve you of the necessity of knowing your own history.”

“That’s pompous. That’s truly pompous. That’s just what I’m talking about. And another thing.”

“Oh Lord, what?”

“When you made that joke about George Gershwin and his lovely wife, Ira.”

“Well?”

“Anne didn’t know it was a joke. You can’t make jokes that are based on people not knowing things. It’s not fair. It’s demeaning to women.”

“Why to women?”

“Women don’t pay that much attention to silly things like that. All that detail. And there’s one more thing.”

“Which is?”

“You should take the laundry sometimes. Just because we’re women doesn’t mean that we have to take the laundry all the time.”

“Okay. Good point.”

“We don’t like sitting in that tacky laundromat any better than you do.”

“I told you to leave it and let them do it.”

“You save for four people’s clothes eight to ten dollars. I think that’s significant.”

“But you don’t have to do it that way.”

“Also I met this interesting guy there last time. He’s a professional whistler.”

He’s listening to one of his three radios, this one a brutish black Proton with an outboard second speaker. The announcer is talking about drummers. “Cozy Cole comes straight out of Chick Webb,” he says. Simon nods in agreement. “Big Sid Catlett. Zutty Singleton, Dave Tough. To go even further back, Baby Dodds. All this before we get to Krupa and Buddy Rich.” Simon taxes his memory in an attempt to extract from it the names of ten additional drummers. Louis Bellson. Shelly Manne. Panama Francis. Jo Jones, of course. Kenny Clarke. Elvin Jones. Barrett Deems. Mel Lewis. Charlie Persip. Joe Morello. Next, twenty bass players. Our nation is rich in talent, he thinks.

He calls his mother in California.

“What do we do with brisket?” he asks.