Beautiful Days: Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

Pig-woman screamed, screamed. His co-workers screamed at him, pulling him off her.

  It was the end. All of Ganymede would rejoice, a new martyr would enter the firmament.

  The night before, this had happened.

  Riki who’d loved to cuddle with Saidu shrank from him now seeing something in Saidu’s face that was beginning to twitch, splotch, and peel like sunburn. The iris of one eye was inflamed, half again the size of the other iris. And the strange smell like something rotted.

  Riki laughed uneasily, and sucked his thumb, and began to cry when Maada stooped to play with him.

  Yet, Maada had no clear idea when this was. Riki was running away from him before he’d run toward him.

  No! Go away, I don’t like you.

  Reached for the child who was screaming with laughter. Or, screaming. Reached for the child, and the child’s legs thrashed wildly.

  Far away, on a moon of the great planet Jupiter, a remote control was being pressed. The detonation would be instantaneous though traveling at the speed of light, it would take some minutes to arrive.

  Donald Barthelme Saved from Oblivion

  “I often think that not enough attention is paid to dead writers.”

  Donald Barthelme

  *HIGH WIRE, DREAM OF.

  Climbing, he is. The steep ladder’s steps. Up-upward climbing, thirty-seven, -eight, -nine feet with a gay reckless smile for the motley crowd below. Climbing upward in jester’s red-striped costume, miniature bells on cap tinkling gaily. In triumph climbing the steep narrow ladder toward the “sky”—(of course he is not such a fool to think that that Kodak-cerulean papier-mâché sky could be “real”)—and with remarkable agility managing to straighten his (creaking) knees and stand (shakily) erect on the small platform.

  Pole in hand! Six feet six inches long, a very special wand with gilt monogram D.B.

  And there, the tight-strung high wire he must cross—(why?)—to a small (identical) platform forty feet away.

  Cheers, whistles from below.

  Isolated handclaps, each distinctive.

  “We’re with you, Don! You are the greatest—we love you!”

  *THE ART OF ART, IN ARTIST’S OWN UNMINCED WORDS

  “Nothing to it. Just open an artery and bleed.”

  *TECHNIQUE OF THE ARTIST

  Tell your story in iambs. Then remove the “ambs.”

  Tell your story in sequiturs. Then insert non.

  Tell your story in “collage”—i.e., the juxtaposition of discrete and banal ideas, images, words and things that, “artfully juxtaposed,” achieve a startling freshness and originality.

  *AWKWARD MATTER OF ARTIST’S REMUNERATION

  Prose is (normally) typed to the right-hand margin of the page while poetry (though not a “lesser” thing) is (normally) centered on the page, with wide left- and right-hand margins as required; for that reason, prose is paid more-for.

  *ANATOMY OF THE ARTIST

  Don is a force of nature. Don is a born rebel. Don is a prodigy. Don has “squandered his gifts.” Don is a genius. Don is an idiot savant. Don is a raving lunatic. Don is a saint. Don is a con-man. Don is an artiste mauve. Don exudes sand freud. Don is inimitable and Don is unfathomable—except at those times when Don is fathomable and those are times you do not, repeat do not want to be around him. And sometimes Don is imitable and sometimes Don is the “ept” of “inept.” Don is a consummate fraud. Don is an imposter. Don’s drivel is pure, but also (sometimes) impure. Don has sacrificed his sanity to his art. “Art for art’s sake” has dried up Don’s (once juicy) heart. “Still waters run deep.” “You can’t make an omelet without breaking legs.” Don is both the knife in the back and the knife’d back. Don is the wolf in sheep’s clothing and Don is the sheep in wolf’s clothing. Don is a man of short “fiery” temper. Don is a scalawag in Mephistophelean beard. Don does not suffer fools gladly. Don is the soul of modesty. Don is self-effacing to a fault. Don is generous to a fault. Don can’t say “no”—to a fault. Don will not turn his back on you in your hour of need. But if you turn your back on him—well, don’t! Don will not hurt a fly—but Don would give you the shirt off his back. Don is honest, Don is kind. Don is devious, Don is deep. Don is polar. Don is bi-, tri-polar. Don is old beyond his years but Don is young at heart. Don is happy-as-the-day-is-long. Don is deep, inscrutable. Don “broods.” Don is toujours gai. Don is the saltpeter of the earth. Don is a regular guy. Don is an irregular guy. Don is a mensch. Don is “quite a character.” Don is a man among men. Don is a man among women. Don is a man among children. Don is a man’s man. Don is a woman’s man. Don is a womanizer and Don is a manizer. Don is a titan. Don is a pygmy. Don “does not know his own strength.” Don is a postmodernist without having been a modernist. Don is the Avis of avant-garde. Don is not to be underestimated and Don is not to be trifled with. Don “puts himself last”—except when Don “puts himself first.” Don is both both archy & mehitabel of archy & mehitabel. Don is both Abbott & Costello of Abbott & Costello. Don is Kukla, Fran & Ollie—all. Don is all Three Stooges. If he has but one bottle of port, in a storm Don will give it to you. Don has gotten to the A of AA—and back. Don has lived to tell the tale. Don has helped an undisclosed number of women and children into lifeboats during the course of his “controversial” career. Don has swum in icy waves with a prayer on his lips. Don has not ever “jumped ship.” Don is said to have jumped queues in ambiguous circumstances like lining up for movie tickets when (it appears) there are two loose-formed lines and it isn’t clear who is in which line. Don is burning hot. Don is icy cold. Don is a gentleman par excellence. Don is je ne sais pas. Don is a fête accompli. Don is a one-man folie à deux. Don is a feast for the eyes. Don is above, beneath, and beside reproach. Don is “too smart for his own good”—except when Don “can’t see his nose for the trees.” Don is an outlier—when Don is not a maverick. Don’s smile is disarming. Don’s smile is armed to the teeth. Don’s smile twinkles. Don’s smile is ruthless. Don’s smile is artless. Don is artless.

  Has it been said that Don broods?

  *A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST

  Don broods.

  *FUNAMBULISM I

  Oh is Don again on the high wire?

  Yes Don is again on the high wire.

  Why is Don again on the hire wire?

  We are so afraid for Don on the high wire . . .

  *DETRACTORS OF THE ARTIST

  “Dreamed my father told me my work was garbage.”

  *SOUL OF THE ARTIST

  “Try to be a man about whom nothing is known.”

  *THE SLEEP OF REASON

  Recycled fairy tales. Fable, farce.

  “Narcissist culture.” “Private realm of . . . self.”

  At first the artist is shocked to be blamed for the “moral rot” of “moral relativism” contributing mightily to the “decline of Western civilization”—then, thinks Heigh-ho! and you’ll see him rubbing his hands together gleefully and gloating.

  Believing himself unobserved on one of those “assault days” Don would run and skip to his car in the parking lot, on the most gleeful days we would observe him sniggering and chortling like the little boy he was in his heart.

  *RESPONSIBILITY OF ARTISTS FOR 9/11

  Has to be considerable. “Moral rot”—“moral relativism.”

  Repeat.

  *THUMBNAIL SKETCH OF THE ARTIST

  Frankly, it was difficult to “see” him. You’d look but Don wasn’t actually there. Sometimes he’d walk behind us—we thought Don was walking behind us. But when we turned—he wasn’t there!

  Of course being MFA graduates we are tempted to allude to quantum physics—“quarks”—that when you fix on them, assuming that there’s a “them,” they are not there; so too with Don. But we don’t know the first thing about “quarks”—(as, it should be conceded, we don’t know the first thing about “black holes” either)—so it is difficult to communicate the uncanny gravitas of Don.

  Some said that Don was very han
dsome. Especially women and girls would say this. Others had never actually “seen” him. (See above.)

  With your thumb smear the handsome face. That blurredness is the essence of Don.

  Moderate height. Moderate features—“Nothing to jump out and grab you.” Moderate myopia corrected by lenses. Moderate weight—(but probably some flaccid flesh about the waist). Moderate hair loss by early forties. Moderate neat-trimmed bristly-saltpeter beard. Moderate male scowl, abashedness. Puckish.

  All things in immoderation—he’d quote his favorite ancient philosopher Aristotle, first in the original Greek or Latin or whatever it was, then in English with a broad Texan drawl.

  We loved him.

  *INSCRUTABLE MOTIVE OF THE ARTIST

  “Negotiating between the treacherous poles of déjà vu and jamais vu. That is the ‘high wire’ of art.”

  *PLEA TO THE ARTIST

  Appealing to his reason, common sense, shame.

  Why at your age, eighty-fifth birthday, another time climbing the ladder to the high wire, another time entertaining yokels not worthy to finger the hem of your jester’s costume, scarcely worthy to hear the bright tinkle of the bells sewn to your cap, what is wrong with a rocking Ames chair, what is wrong with a motorized wheelchair, what is wrong with a respirator, what’ve you got (left) to prove, a hundred times you have crossed the high wire, a hundred hundred times you have crossed the high wire—and why?

  Obvious answer to (stupid) question: To get on the other side.

  *THE CRUEL DANCE MASTER

  “I think at a young and malleable age Don had a, how to put it, unhealthy relationship with one of those older personages that figure so predominantly in all of our lives—a father. And then, after the primal, so to speak, father, a non-biological father who exerted a synergistic but symbiotic spell upon the young impressionable artist eventually equivalent to the influence of the original, biological father who continued to exist, in fact.”

  The essence of the Cruel Dance Master—(there is one in the lives of all of us, I’m sure!)—is that the Master will reward the artist only when the artist performs to the Master’s liking, and not to the artist’s (own) liking; only when the artist performs according to the Master’s formula will the Master approve.

  Hey! The Master claps his hands and the artist dances.

  One-two-three

  One-two

  One-two

  One-two-three

  Dip to the right.

  Dip to the left.

  Curtsy to your partner.

  Allemande left.

  Allemande right.

  Fall flat on face.

  Prostrate.

  Repeat.

  *FUNAMBULISM II

  With gusto—again—he climbs the (shaky) rungs of the ladder reaching to Heaven. Grin of reckless white teeth cast to the adoring fools below as he up-climbs to the platform, seizes the awaiting pole, begins the delicious/precarious crossing of the high wire.

  Oh he is just slightly surprised—the caprice of the wind on this seemingly windless day.

  Gusts not guessed by the yammering crowd below.

  A hundred times he has crossed the high wire. A hundred hundred times. The danger is to forget what you have learned. The danger is to “lose” what is called “balance.”

  The danger is hubris. The danger is classic, Attic.

  Grips the wire with his toes. In the thinnest-soled slippers, Don knows how.

  Spine no longer a young spine (yet) retains its cheetah-elasticity.

  Feet no longer “young” feet. Bunion on left big toe.

  Trick is in the pole. Exquisitely calibrated motions of the pole to maintain center of balance directly below the body.

  (Yes, Don has crossed the high wire without the magic pole. Many times before many of you were born Don crossed the high wire in triumph without a pole. In fact you are allowed to use arms and hands and torso to maintain balance on the high wire but the exertions and contortions of the human figure forty feet above the gaping crowd are distasteful to the eye while the more subtle, almost at times languorous motions of the wand-like pole are deeply aesthetically pleasurable to behold.)

  Art of funambulism is maintaining balance on the high wire despite gusts of wind, swoops of incensed gulls, shouts and catcalls from the (sparse, rowdy) crowd below.

  “Give up, schmuck! Nobody gives a fuck about you.”

  *BLACK SQUARE, NOSTALGIA

  “All that a man wishes for himself, in which to dwell, is a black square, a three-dimensional representation of a two-dimensional existence most poetically rendered by Kazimir Malevich in Black Square. As for ‘what do women want’ . . .” Unexpectedly Don begins to weep, his beard grows scintillate with tears.

  *ANTIQUARIAN OF DREK; OR, THE DREK RELIQUARY

  In his atelier on Eleventh Street the artist broods. Stark white walls, ceiling. Hardwood floor. Ascetic, acerbic, acidic. Except—in the white wall a (secret) door, and beyond the door a gigantic walk-in closet, and in the closet shelves reaching to the ceiling crammed (in scrupulous alphabetic order) a vast galaxy of original, unique, and unreplicable drek—from a plastic aardvark (circa 1951) to a plastic zither (circa 1939) with every sort of novelty in between: Hula-Hoop, plaster painted figure of the Virgin Mary, TV “rabbit ears,” “sack dress,” Baltimore Catechism, poster for The Moon Is Blue, container of pungent mimeograph ink, skinny necktie, bouffant wig, blueprint and small model for “backyard bomb shelter,” table-sized artificial Christmas tree, Memoirs of a Klan Wife (1969), (emptied) bottles of arresting colors and shapes formerly containing Scotch, rum, wine, vodka, well-worn copies of Reader’s Digest, Book of the Month, Saturday Review of Literature, Peyton Place, From Here to Eternity, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death (boxed set), stained hacksaw, chopsticks to which mysterious sentiment is attached, gilt “baby shoes” (size sixteen), a still from Boudu sauvé des eaux, clip-on polka dot bow tie, Life cover of President John F. Kennedy with rouged cheeks, poorly typed chain letter, report card (all A’s except C+ in “Physical Education”), slick yellow rain-poncho, mood ring, “pet rock,” snow globe with miniature Niagara Falls inside, Librium prescription, diploma from Famous Writers School, Hallowe’en masks of Salvador Dalí, Frankenstein, Charles Manson, Ross Perot—and much more. “It isn’t madness if it’s alphabetized”—this was Don’s frequent observation, made with a sage stroking of his beard and a twinkle in his eyes, and just the slightest quaver of defensiveness—“and if it has been ‘successfully transmogrified’ into art.”

  *ALCOHOL: A CELEBRATION

  Don drinks to celebrate. Don drinks as a meditation. Don drinks as a medication. Don drinks as confabulation. Don drinks as consolation. Don drinks as prevarication. Don drinks as procrastination. Don drinks for inspiration and Don drinks in contemplation. Don is rueful. Don is “gigantic with gin.” Don “hides his sorrow in gin.” Don drinks to “feel better about myself.” Don drinks “to feel better about the world.” Don drinks whiskey, and Don drinks wine. Don drinks vodka, and Don drinks lime rickeys. Don drinks beer, ale. Don drinks what is offered. Don drinks in mourning for a misspent life. Don drinks in mourning for the world’s misspent life. Don drinks in the morning, and Don drinks in the afternoon. Don drinks in the evening, and Don drinks in the night. “I’ll drink to that”—“I’ll drink to this.” “Bottoms up!” Don drinks in moderation and Don drinks in immoderation. Don drinks alone and Don drinks in company. Don drinks you under the table. Don drinks himself under the table—to keep you company! Don drinks to celebrate. Don drinks.

  *DON’S GAIETY

  “He has given away his gaiety and now has nothing.”

  *BLACK HEART OF THE ARTIST

  “I have a black heart.”

  *DON’S POSTHUMOUS CAREER ON TWITTER

  Would’ve been King. Millions of tweets posted, and millions of followers and numbers mounting daily, hourly. Don Barthelme lived before his time when his métier would’ve found its perfect cultural equivalent. Sad.
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  *GUILT OF THE ARTIST

  Bulletin: “An atheistic relativism has crept into our serious artists like a fungoid decay. Literature of the recent past (i.e., since I have left school) has been remiss in showing us the way out of the moral labyrinth. Poetry, that once rhymed, now sways and topples like a drunken clown. Good solid prose, that was once readable, has lost all sense of purpose and careens like a runaway eighteen-rig down a mountain roadway of twists and turns. The moral compass just spins and spins—like a dervish. There can be no good conclusion to any of this. The artist has withdrawn into his cave and contemplates his entrails. The artist pares his toenails while Rome burns. The most sincere fragments of our time are found in Chinese fortune cookies.”

  *CHINESE FORTUNE COOKIE FORTUNE

  Stately plump Don deftly rents the crinkly cellophane wrapper containing his fortune cookie at Chinese Pavilion, Seventh Avenue at Ninth as admirers look on raptly. There is an aura of the premonitory here. His fortune is revealed on a little strip of white paper—Guilt is never to be doubted.

  Don laughs, laughs. The artist’s incisors glitter.

  *THE UNFINISHED MASTERPIECE

  A labor of love. Forty-two years in secret toil. Linked sestina epic to rival The Faerie Queen. A tragedy it was never completed to the satisfaction of the (perfectionist) artist.

  In a fit of despair in the late spring of 1989 Don tossed the 2,463-page manuscript into a blazing fire. With somber poker prodded the flaring pages.

  But—didn’t acolytes retrieve the manuscript from the flames?

  N-No . . .

  You mean, you guys just stood there and watched the unfinished masterpiece of the late Donald Barthelme burn to ashes?

  I—I guess . . .

  For God’s sake why didn’t you save it? Wrench the poker from the despairing writer’s hands, overrule his (evident, possibly insincere) wish for self-destruction as Max Brod famously did with his friend Franz Kafka?

  I guess we thought . . . We just didn’t think.

  Didn’t think?

  (They glance at one another sheepishly.)

  (Slow fade to dark. No curtain.)

  *A & Q