Donald Barthelme - Paradise

“So clean it.”

“It’s a matter of setting an example. You’re the jefe grande around here.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Big chief.”

“Not what I feel like.”

“I’m talking basic reality.”

A: I sometimes think of myself as a person who, you know what I mean, could have done something else, it doesn’t matter what particularly. Just something else. I saw an ad in the Sunday paper for the CIA, a recruiting ad, maybe a quarter of a page, and I suddenly thought, it might be interesting to do that. Even though I’ve always been opposed to the CIA, when they were trying to bring Cuba down, the stuff with Lumumba in Africa, the stuff in Central America… Then here is this ad, perfectly straightforward, “where your career is America’s strength” or something like that, “aptitude for learning a foreign language is a plus” or something like that, I’ve always been good at languages, and I’m sitting there thinking about how my resume might look to them, starting completely over in something completely new, changing the very sort of person I am, and there was an attraction, a definite attraction. Of course the maximum age was thirty-five. I guess they want them more malleable.

Q: So, in the evenings or on weekends —

A: Not every night or every weekend. I mean this depended on the circumstances. Sometimes my wife and I went to dinner with people, or watched television —

Q: But in the main —

A: It wasn’t that often. It was once in a while.

Q: Adultery is a sin.

A: It is classified as a sin, yes. Absolutely.

Q: The Sixth Commandment says —

A: I know what it says. I was raised on the Sixth Commandment. But.

Q: But what?

A: The Sixth Commandment is wrong.

Q: It’s wrong?

A: It’s wrong.

Q: The whole Commandment?

A: I don’t know how it happened, whether it’s a mistranslation from the Aramaic or whatever, it may not even have been Aramaic I don’t know, I certainly do not pretend to scholarship in this area but my sense of the matter is that the Sixth Commandment is an error.

Q: Well if that were true it would change quite a lot of things, wouldn’t it?

A: Take the pressure off, a bit.

Q: Have you told your wife?

A: Yes, Carol knows.

Q: How’d she take it?

A: Well, she liked the Sixth Commandment. You could reason that it was in her interest to support the Sixth Commandment for the preservation of the family unit and this sort of thing but to reason that way is, I would say, to take an extremely narrow view of Carol, of what she thinks. She’s not predictable. She once told me that she didn’t want me, she wanted a suite of husbands, ten or twenty —

Q: What did you say?

A: I said, Go to it.

Q: Myself, I think about being just sort of a regular person, one who worries about cancer a lot, every little thing a prediction of cancer, no I don’t want to go for my every-two-years-checkup because what if they find something? I wonder what will kill me and when it will happen and how it will happen, and I wonder about my parents, who are still alive, and what will happen to them. This seems to me to be a proper set of things to worry about. Last things.

A: I don’t think God gives a snap about adultery. This is just an opinion, of course.

Q: So how do you, how shall I put it, pursue —

A: You think about this staggering concept, the mind of God, and then you think He’s sitting around worrying about this guy and this woman at the Beechnut Travelodge? I think not.

Q: Well He doesn’t have to think about every particular instance, He just sort of laid out the general principles —

A: He also created creatures who, with a single powerful glance —

Q: The eyes burn.

A: They do.

Q: The heart leaps.

A: Like a terrapin.

Q: Stupid youth returns.

A: Like hockey sticks falling out of a long-shut closet.

Q: Do you play?

A: I did. Many years ago.

Q: You find them in parks. You blunder upon them in parks.

A: I’ve noticed that.

Q: They sit in parks a lot. Especially when they’re angry. The solitary bench. Shoulders raised, legs kicking —

When he was in school at Penn, the resident master was Louis Kahn. Kahn was given to muttering. Once he stood behind Simon’s draughting table and muttered for almost five minutes. The young architect was too intimidated to ask him what he was saying. The story was told of Kahn that when he was a young architect he had worked for Paul Cret, the French maestro who presided at Penn in the 20s. When the other draughtsmen, thirty of them, quit for the day Kahn would take a roll of tracing paper and go from board to board, leaving critiques of each architect’s work as an overlay. He did not neglect the boards of the firm’s three principals.

I love the excesses of my profession, Simon thought, heroics and mock-heroics. Michael Graves and Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction as a text. All those form-givers enjoying themselves as Michelangelo, Wright and his cape, Mies and his pinstripes. Michelangelo most of all: “Where I steal I leave a knife.” An appropriate High Renaissance sentiment. The walls of the architecture labs at Penn had been covered with graffiti. “This is hell, nor are we out of it.” “Hell is other architects.” “The road to hell is paved with naugahyde.”

White underwear with golden skin. Acres and acres of it. Was it golden? Conventionally described as golden. The color of white birch stained with polyurethane. What do we think of this color combination? Some people vote for black underwear with such skin but these people are the same people who paint their bathrooms black. Walking in the garden, Modigliani said to Saint-Gaudens, about Renoir, “This roughneck will never be a painter.” Dressed women, half-dressed women, quarter-dressed women. Simon was, as the women repeatedly told him, existing in a male fantasy, in hog heaven. He saw nothing wrong with male fantasies (the Taj Mahal, the Chrysler Building) but denied that he was in hog heaven. Where did they get such expressions? A Southernism that he’d not heard in thirty years.

In the mornings, large figures shrouded in terrycloth lurch back and forth between the several bedrooms and the single bathroom. Dore runs, in the mornings, picks up breakfast at the market on the way back, fresh Italian rolls, green garlicked Krauterbutter, a quarter-pound of breast of veal. She has become the manager of breakfast, takes pride in varying the fare, fine cheeses one day, a decadent kidney stew the next, blueberry crepes and then chicken-fried steak with beaten biscuits. “This breaded burlap,” Veronica says, “nicely done, but what are you, trying to kill us, or what?”

“Try more pepper.”

Still in her sweats, she washes the dishes and stows them away, then settles down with the Business Day section of the Times, Revco Gets $1.16 Billion Buyout Bid, Troubled Farm Banks to Get Regulatory Aid, Japanese Setback on Chip Prices. Scratching a bare foot with one hand, flipping pages with the other. Then she showers, dips into MTV (shoulder to shoulder with Anne for fifteen minutes). Then’s she off to the New School for her Tuesday class, Investment Strategies for the Eighties.

“How’d you get in?” Simon asks.

“I’m auditing,” she says. “I go early and get a seat. The class is so big they never take the roll.”

“You getting anything out of it?”

“You can’t play unless you have something to play with. Still, it’s educational.”

After class, her nap. She throws herself on her bed and is dead to the world for an hour and a half, wearing only spun-sugar V-shaped briefs by Olga. Simon stares, on occasion, at the beautiful body at rest, face down on the bed. What miracles of bawdiness it can perform without thinking, the operator quite unaware. In sleep, she scratches her belly. He feels the urge to sit on the edge of the bed (hurl himself into the bed), but does not. At night, she either puts herself together for Fizz or reads Dickens. She’s bought four Dickens novels in worn Everyman editions at the Strand and is moving through them methodically. “The thing about Dickens is,” she tells him, “he knew the value of a pound, when you didn’t have one. All his people are scrambling for money.”