Flying to America

by Donald Barthelme

  “Oh I say.”

  “Glasses are discouraging,” he said.

  “Even harlequin glasses?”

  “Especially harlequin glasses.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “But you have a grand behind,” he said.

  “Also a lively sense of humor,” she said.

  “Lively,” he said. “Whatever possessed you to use that word?”

  “I thought you might like it,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “Definitely not.”

  “Do you think you ought to stand around and look at girls?” she asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Bloomsbury said. “I think it’s indicated.”

  “Indicated,” she cried. “What do you mean, indicated?”

  “Tell me about your early life,” Bloomsbury said.

  “To begin with I was president of the Conrad Veidt fan club,” she began. “That was in, oh, I don’t remember the year. His magnetism and personality got me. His voice and gestures fascinated me. I hated him, feared him, loved him. When he died it seemed to me a vital part of my imagination died too.”

  “I didn’t mean necessarily in such detail,” he said.

  “My world of dreams was bare!”

  “Fan club prexies are invariably homely,” Bloomsbury said.

  “Plain,” she suggested. “I prefer the word plain. Do you want to see a picture of Conrad Veidt?”

  “I would be greatly interested,” Bloomsbury said (although this was not the truth).

  The girl or woman then retrieved from her purse, where it had apparently remained for some time, perhaps even years, a page from a magazine. It bore a photograph of Conrad Veidt who looked at one and the same instant handsome and sinister. There was moreover printing on the photograph which said: If CONRAD VEIDT offered you a cigarette, it would be a DE REZKE — of course!

  “Very affecting,” Bloomsbury said.

  “I never actually met Mr. Veidt,” the girl (or woman) said. “It wasn’t that sort of club. I mean we weren’t in actual communication with the star. There was a Joan Crawford fan club, and those people now, they were in actual communication. When they wanted a remembrance . . .”

  “A remembrance?”

  “Such as Kleenex that had been used by the star, for instance, with lipstick on it, or fingernail clippings, or a stocking, or a hair from the star’s horse’s tail or mane . . .”

  “Tail or mane?”

  “The star naturally, noblesse oblige, forwarded that object to them.”

  “I see,” Bloomsbury said.

  “Do you look at a lot of girls?”

  “Not a lot,” he said, “but quite a number.”

  “Is it fun?”

  “Not fun,” he said, “but better than nothing.”

  “Do you have affairs?”

  “Not affairs,” he said, “but sometimes a little flutter.”

  “Well,” she said, “I have feelings too.”

  “I think it’s very possible,” he said. “A great big girl like you.”

  This remark however seemed to offend her, she turned on her heel and left the room. Bloomsbury himself felt moved by this meeting, which was in fact the first contact he had enjoyed with a human being, of any description, since the beginning of the period of his proprietorship of the radio, and even before. He immediately returned to the control room and introduced a new commercial announcement.

  “I remember” (he enunciated), “the quarrel about the ice cubes, that was a beauty! That was one worth . . . remembering. You had posted on the notice board the subject Refrigeration, and I worried about it all day long, and wondered. Clever minx! I recalled at length that I had complained, once, because ice cubes were not frozen. But were in fact unfrozen! watery! useless! I had said that there weren’t enough ice cubes, whereas you had said there were more than enough.

  “You said that I was a fool, an idiot, an imbecile, a stupid!, that the machine in your kitchen which you had procured and caused to be placed there was without doubt and on immaculate authority the most accomplished machine of its kind known to those who knew about machines of its kind, that among its attributes was the attribute of conceiving containing and at the moment of need whelping a fine number of ice cubes so that no matter how grave the demand, how vast the occasion, how indifferent or even hostile the climate, how inept or even treacherous the operator, how brief or even nonexistent the lapse between genesis and parturition, between the wish and the fact, ice cubes in multiples of sufficient would present themselves. Well, I said, perhaps.

  “Oh! how you boggled at that word perhaps. How you sweated, old girl, and cursed. Your chest heaved, if I may say so, and your eyes (your eyes!) flashed. You said we would, by damn, count the damn ice cubes. As we, subsequently, did.

  “How I enjoyed, although I concealed it from you, the counting! You were, as they say, magisterial. There were I observed twelve rows of three, or three of twelve, in each of four trays. But this way of counting was not your way of counting. You chose, and I admired your choice, the explicitness and implicitness of it, to run water over the trays so that the cubes, loosened, fell into the salad bowl, having previously turned the trays, and thus the cubes, bottoms up, so that the latter would fall, when water was upon the former, in the former direction. That these matters were so commendably arranged I took to be, and even now take to be, a demonstration of your fundamental decency, and good sense.

  “But you reckoned wrong, when it came to that. You were never a reckoner. You reckoned that there were in the bowl one hundred forty-four cubes, taking each cube, individually, from the bowl and placing it, individually, in the sink, bearing in mind meanwhile the total that could be obtained by simple multiplication of the spaces in the trays. Thus having it, in this as in other matters, both ways! However you failed on this as on other occasions to consider the imponderables, in this instance the fact that I, unobserved by you, had put three of the cubes into my drink! Which I then drank! And that one had missed the bowl entirely and fallen into the sink! And melted once and for all! These events precluded sadly enough the number of cubes in the bowl adding up to a number corresponding to the number of spaces in the trays, proving also that there is no justice!

  “What a defeat for you! What a victory for me! It was my first victory, I fear I went quite out of my head. I dragged you to the floor, among the ice cubes, which you had flung there in pique and chagrin, and forced you, with results that I considered then, and consider now, to have been ‘first rate.’ I thought I detected in you . . .”

  But he could not continue this announcement, from a surfeit of emotion.

  The girl or woman, who had become a sort of follower of the radio, made a practice during this period of sleeping in the former reception room underneath the piano, which being a grand provided ample shelter. When she wished to traffic with Bloomsbury she would tap on the glass separating them with one finger, at other times she would, with her hands, make motions.

  A typical conversation of the period when the girl (or woman) was sleeping in the foyer was this:

  “Tell me about your early life,” she said.

  “I was, in a sense, an All-American boy,” Bloomsbury replied.

  “In what sense?”

  “In the sense that I married,” he said.

  “Was it love?”

  “It was love but it was only temporary.”

  “It didn’t go on forever?”

  “For less than decade. As a matter of fact.”

  “But while it did go on . . .”

  “It filled me with a somber and paradoxical joy.”

  “Coo!” she said. “It doesn’t sound very American to me.”

  “Coo,” he said. “What kind of an expression is that?”

  “I heard it in a movie,” she said. “A Conrad Veidt movie.”

  “Well,” he said, “it’s distracting.”

  This conversation was felt by Bloomsbury to be not very satisfactory, however he bided his time, having if t
he truth were known no alternative. The word matriculate had engaged his attention, he pronounced it into the microphone for what seemed to him a period longer than normal, that is to say, in excess of a quarter-hour. He wondered whether or not to regard this as significant.

  It was a fact that Bloomsbury, who had thought himself dispassionate (thus the words, the music, the slow turning over in his brain of events in the lives of him and her), was beginning to feel, at this time, disturbed. This was attributable perhaps to the effect, on him, of his radio talks, and also perhaps to the presence of the “fan,” or listener, in the reception room. Or possibly it was something else entirely. In any case this disturbance was reflected, beyond a doubt, in the announcements made by him in the days that, inevitably, followed.

  One of these was:

  “The details of our housekeeping, yours and mine. The scuff under the bed, the fug in the corners. I would, if I could, sigh to remember them. You planted prickly pear in the parlor floor, and when guests came . . . Oh, you were a one! You veiled yourself from me, there were parts I could have and parts I couldn’t have. And the rules would change, I remember, in the middle of the game, I could never be sure which parts were allowed and which not. Some days I couldn’t have anything at all. Is it remarkable, then, that there has never been another? Except for a few? Who don’t count?

  “There has, I don’t doubt, never been anything like it. The bed, your mother’s bed, brought to our union with your mother in it, she lay like sword between us. I had the gall to ask what you were thinking. It was one of those wonderful days of impenetrable silence. Well, I said, and the child? Up the child, you said, ’twasn’t what I wanted anyway. What then did you want? I asked, and the child cried, its worst forebodings confirmed. Pish, you said, nothing you could supply. Maybe, I said. Not bloody likely, you said. And where is it (the child) now? Gone, I don’t doubt, away.

  “Are you with me, old bush?

  “Are you tuned in?

  “A man came, in a hat. In the hat was a little feather, and in addition to the hat and the feather there was a satchel. Jack, this is my husband, you said. And took him into the bedroom, and turned the key in the lock. What are you doing in there? I said, the door being locked, you and he together on the inside, me alone on the outside. Go away and mind your own silly business, you said, from behind the door. Yes, Jack said (from behind the door), go away and don’t be bothering people with things on their minds. Insensitive brute! you said, and Jack said, filthy cad! Some people, you said, and Jack said, the cheek of the thing. I watched at the door until nightfall, but could hear no more words, only sounds of a curious nature, such as grunts and moans, and sighs. Upon hearing these (through the door which was, as I say, locked), I immediately rushed to the attic to obtain our copy of Ideal Marriage, by Th. H. Van De Velde, M.D., to determine whether this situation was treated of therein. But it was not. I therefore abandoned the book and returned to my station outside the door, which remained (and indeed why not?) shut.

  “At length the door opened, your mother emerged, looking as they say ‘put out.’ But she had always taken your part as opposed to my part, therefore she said only that I was a common sneak. But, I said, what of those who even now sit in the bed? laughing and joking? Don’t try to teach thy grandmother to chew coal, she said. I then became, if you can believe it, melancholy. Could not we two skins, you and me, climb and cling for all the days that were left? Which were not, after all, so very many days? Without the interpolation of such as Jack? And, no doubt, others yet to come?”

  After completing this announcement and placing “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the turntable, and a cup of soup on the hotplate, Bloomsbury observed that the girl in the reception room was making motions with her hands, the burden of which was, that she wanted to speak to him.

  “Next to Mr. Veidt my favorite star was Carmen Lambrosa,” she said. “What is more, I am said to resemble her in some aspects.”

  “Which?” Bloomsbury said with interest. “Which aspects?”

  “It was said of Carmen Lambrosa that had she just lived a little longer, and not died from alcohol, she would have been the top box office money-maker in the British Cameroons. Where such as she and me are appreciated.”

  “The top box office money-maker for what year?”

  “The year is not important,” she said. “What is important is the appreciation.”

  “I would say you favored her,” Bloomsbury observed, “had I some knowledge of her peculiarities.”

  “Do I impress you?”

  “In what way?”

  “As a possible partner? Sexually I mean?”

  “I haven’t considered it,” he said, “heretofore.”

  “They say I’m sexy,” she noted.

  “I don’t doubt it,” he said. “I mean it’s plausible.”

  “I am yours,” she said, “if you want me.”

  “Yes,” he said, “there’s the difficulty, making up my mind.”

  “You have only,” she said, “to make the slightest gesture of acquiescence, such as a nod, a word, a cough, a cry, a kick, a crook, a giggle, a grin.”

  “Probably I would not enjoy it,” he said, “now.”

  “Shall I take off my clothes?” she asked, making motions as if to do so.

  With a single stride, such as he had often seen practiced in the films, Bloomsbury was “at her side.”

  “Martha,” he said, “old skin, why can’t you let the old days die? That were then days of anger, passion, and dignity, but are now, in the light of present standards, practices, and attitudes, days that are done?”

  Upon these words from him, she began to weep. “You looked interested at first,” she said (through her tears).

  “It was kind of you to try it,” he said. “Thoughtful. As a matter of fact, you were most appealing. Tempting, even. I was fooled for whole moments at a time. You look well in bullfighter pants.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “You said I had a grand behind. You said that at least.”

  “And so you do.”

  “You can’t forget,” she asked, “about Dudley?”

  “Dudley?”

  “Dudley who was my possible lover,” she said.

  “Before or after Jack?”

  “Dudley who in fact broke up our ménage,” she said, looking at him expectantly.

  “Well,” he said, “I suppose.”

  “Tell me about joy again.”

  “There was some joy,” Bloomsbury said. “I can’t deny it.”

  “Was it really like you said? Somber and paradoxical?”

  “It was all of that,” he said gallantly, “then.”

  “Then!” she said.

  There was a moment of silence during which they listened, thoughtfully, to “The Star-Spangled Banner” playing softly in the other room behind them.

  “Then we are, as they say, through?” she asked. “There is no hope for us?”

  “None,” he said. “That I know of.”

  “You’ve found somebody you like better?”

  “It’s not that,” he said. “That has nothing to do with it.”

  “Balls,” she said. “I know you and your letchy ways.”

  “Goodbye,” Bloomsbury said, and returned to the control room, locking the door behind him.

  He then resumed broadcasting, with perhaps a tremor but no slackening in his resolve not to flog, as the expression runs, a dead horse. However the electric company, which had not been paid from the first to the last, refused at length to supply further current for the radio, in consequence of which the broadcasts, both words and music, ceased. That was the end of this period of Bloomsbury’s, as they say, life.

  This Newspaper Here

  Again today the little girl come along come along dancing doggedly with her knitting needle steel-blue knitting needle. She knows I can’t get up out of this chair theoretically and sticks me, here and there, just to make me yell, nice little girl from down the block somewhere. Once I correct
ed her sharply saying “don’t for God’s sake what pleasure is there hearing me scream like this?” She was wearing a blue Death of Beethoven printed dress and white shoes which mama had whited for her that day before noon so white were they (shoes). I judged her to be eleven. The knitting needle in the long thrust and hold position she said “torment is the answer old pappy man it’s torment that is the game’s name that I’m learning about under laboratory conditions. Torment is the proper study of children of my age, class, and median income, and you don’t matter in any case you’re through dirty old man can’t even get out of rotten old chair.” Summed me up she did in those words which I would much rather not have heard so prettily put as they were nevertheless. I hate it here in this chair in this house warm and green with Social Security. Do you know how little it is? The little girl jabbed again hitting the thin thigh that time and said “we know exactly how little it is and even that is money down the drain why don’t you die damn you dirty old man what are you contributing?” Then I explained about this newspaper here sprinkled with rare lies and photographs incorrectly captioned accumulated along a lifetime of disappointments and some fun. I boasted saying “one knows just where nerves cluster under the skin, how to pinch them so citizens jump as in dreams when opened suddenly a door and there see two flagrantly . . .” But I realize then her dreams are drawn in ways which differ so that we cannot read them together. I threw then jam jar (black currant) catching her nicely on kneecap and she ran howling but if they come to object I have jab marks in extenuation. Nice little girl from down the block somewhere.

  The reason I like to read this newspaper here the one in my hand, is because I like what it says. It is my favorite. I would be pleased really quite if you could read it. But you can’t. But some can. It comes in the mail. I give it to a fellow some time back, put it in his hand and said “take a look.” He took a look took a look but he couldn’t see anything strawdinary along this newspaper here, couldn’t see it. And he says “so what?” Of course I once was in this business myself making newspapers in the depression. We had fun then. This fellow I give it to take a look some time back he that said “so what” is well educated reads good travels far drinks deep gin mostly talks to dolphins click click click click. A professor of ethnology at the University of California at Davis. Not in fine a dullard in any sense but he couldn’t see anything strawdinary along this newspaper here. I said look there page 2 the amusing story of the plain girl fair where the plain girls come to vend their wares but he said “on my page 2 this newspaper here talk about the EEC.” Then I took it from his hand and showed him with my finger the plain girl fair story. Then he commences to read aloud from under my finger there some singsong about the EEC. So I infer that he is one who can’t. So I let the matter drop.