Donald Barthelme: Paradise

After the women had gone Simon began dreaming with new intensity. He dreamed that he was a slave on a leper island, required to clean the latrines and pile up dirty-white shell for the roads, wheelbarrow after wheelbarrowful, then rake the shell smooth and jump up and down on it until it was packed solid. The lepers did not allow him to wear shoes, only white athletic socks, and he had a difficult time finding a pair that matched. The head leper, a man who seemed to be named Al, embraced him repeatedly and tried repeatedly to spit in his mouth. He dreamed that his wife, Carol, had driven a large bus, a Metro bus filled with people, into the front of his building. It was not her fault, she told him, a Japanese man who had not had exact change when he got on the bus, in fact had asked her to change a fifty-dollar bill and had, moreover, insisted that she stuff nine fives into little envelopes printed with colorful out-of-register scenes from the Bible for his First Presbyterian contributions over the next nine Sundays, was the true culprit. Simon woke early, five o’clock and six o’clock, cracked new bottles of white wine and smoked tasteless Marlboro Light 100s and wondered what to do next.

He put all the extra beds in one room, the room Anne had had toward the front of the house. Stacked on top of one another they looked like a means test for a princess. He bought a new plant, a gold-flecked acuba, and a pot for it at Conran’s, a glazed off-white ceramic number. He cleaned the refrigerator, throwing out seven half-full containers of Dannon Strawberry and Dannon Blueberry as well as four daikon in various stages of reduction. They did love salads. He added the remains of an osso buco, capers and red wine, to his dark roiling sauce base. He found a red wrinkled bra hanging like a cut throat over the shower rail and not knowing what else to do with it, threw that out too. He shifted four thousand dollars from stocks into his Keogh account to help upholster his enfeebled retirement years. He called his wife in Philadelphia but got no answer — still, he’d called. He trimmed his toenails, the monstrous left and the even more frightening right big toes knocked back into civility. He inspected his prick and said, “My you’re looking fresh and pretty this morning.”

This so good of you,” Dore says, “this is Anne and this is Veronica. This is so good of you. Boy is this place empty.”

“I put two of the beds in the back room and one in the front,” Simon says, “I thought I’d get some plants maybe tomorrow are you guys hungry let me go see what I’ve got in the kitchen.”

“Booze I hope,” Dore says dropping her bags in a corner. “Boy is this place empty. I don’t mean that as a criticism.”

“The owners left the couch and those two chairs and that’s about it. Who would like what? I have beer…”

“Beer for me,” Veronica says, “where do you sleep, Simon?”

“In the middle room. I have vodka, Scotch, white wine…”

“Vodka for me,” Dore says, “and vodka for my horse here, no that’s a joke, Anne will have vodka too. Plants are a good idea. Big plants. Rocks with that, just rocks. Anne will have just rocks too. Really this is so good of you. I guess we figured it a little close in terms of funds —”

“Bloody assholes is what we were,” Veronica says. “Believing what they told us.”

“So you made a miscalculation,” Simon says.

“But this is dumber than necessary don’t you think? Dumber than absolutely necessary? Where can I put this?”

She shows him a round thing three feet in diameter, in a canvas case.

“My trampoline. I bounce on it. That’s how I keep in shape.”

“Anywhere,” he says, handing around the drinks, “lean it against the wall. I’ve got some ribs I can broil you guys eat ribs?”

“God that tastes good,” she says, “I was at my wit’s end, we were at our wits’ ends, that jerk at the agency I could kill him —”

“We were dumb,” Anne says.

“No point in flagellating ourselves,” says Dore. “I drink to Simon. What did you think, Simon? Honestly. When you first walked into the bar.”

“I was stunned. Conservatively speaking.”

In white lingerie, hand on hip, the three of them, chatting with the patrons, they’d just finished the show the bartender told him, fashion show every Friday, next week, nightgowns.

“The hell of it is, we gave all this money to Africa. Before we came,” Dore says. “That’s why we’re so low. We each sent three thousand bucks to Africa. To alleviate hunger. We saw this thing on television.”

“Probably you can sell the beds after we go,” Anne says.

“It’s got high ceilings,” Veronica says, looking at his Dover White-painted ceilings. “You could hang yourself in here.”

Q: You’re how tall?

A: Six foot and a bit.

Q: Not much hair.

A: Lucky to have what I’ve got.

Q: You’re not fat. Except for the gut itself. Some few red freckles around the shoulders. One-inch gash in the left lower back, result of falling upon a half-brick in childhood. Slight hemorrhoidal tissue manifested at the flowering of the anus. Wretched-looking toenails.

A: I don’t see how you can do this.

Q: What?

A: Practice.

Q: It’s not bad. I don’t have any special expectations.

A: It would drive me crazy.

Q: Ever been subject to epilepsy?

A: I had seizures when I was a child. They stopped. I think it was petit mal.

Q: Scarlet fever?

A: No.

Q: A severe headache every day at approximately eleven-thirty.

A: Sometimes a little earlier.

Q: What do you think about the Knicks?

A: King’s knee has got me worried.

Q: Are the women gone?

A: Been gone for a week.

Q: Well I can give you some Extra-Strength Tylenol. That’s supposed to be good. You acquired them, maybe that’s not the word, in a bar.

A: At five o’clock in the afternoon. The day was quite beautiful. The light, afternoon light —

Q: This bar was where?

A: In a hotel on Lexington. I don’t remember the name of the hotel.

Q: What kind of a hotel? Was it seedy, or was it —

A: Seemed to me quite okay. Not a luxury hotel by any means, more of an ordinary tourist place.

Q: You walked into the bar.

A: Which was just off the street. And there were these three women, tall, statuesque even. In a crowd of people. People were sitting at tables and sitting at the bar, and the women were chatting with them. Wearing this marvelous white lingerie. Modeling it. And everyone was being very calm, very cool.

Q: You too?

A: I sat at the bar and stared. Discreetly.

Q: Did you order a drink?

A: Of course I ordered a drink. I said to the bartender, What’s this? He said, Fashion show. Every Friday.

Q: They’d finished when you came in.

A: The show was over, they were moving about the room chatting with the customers.

Q: Bikini pants burning at eye level.

A: Were you there?

Q: I’m imagining.

A: White merry widows and white teddys and white this and that. It was quite stunning. I couldn’t believe it. Two of them were blond, one darkhaired.

Q: Then what?

A: One of them came and sat down next to me. There was an empty seat.

Q: You offered to buy her a drink.

A: She accepted. She wanted a Rob Roy.

Q: What in the name of God is a Rob Roy?

A: Some kind of thing they drink in Denver.

Q: They were from Denver?

A: The Denver area. Two from Denver and one from Fort Lupton, which is nearby.

Q: The white lacy Büstenhalter encompassing the golden breasts nudging your arm.