Donald Barthelme

by Donald Barthelme

  “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 a 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 asked 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 the 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.

  The Viennese Opera Ball

  I DO not like to see an elegant pair of forceps! Blundell stated. Let the instrument look what it is, a formidable weapon! Arte, non vi (art, not strength) may be usefully engraved upon one blade; and Care perineo (take care of the perineum) on the other. His companion replied: The test of a doctor’s prognostic acumen is to determine the time to give up medicinal and dietetic measures and empty the uterus, and overhesitancy to do this is condemnable, even though honorable . . . I do not mean that we should perform therapeutic abortion with a light spirit. On the contrary, I am slow to adopt it and always have proper consultation. If on the other hand a bear kills a man, someone said, the Croches immediately organize a hunt, capture a bear, kill it, eat its heart, and throw out the rest of the meat; they save the skin, which with the head of the beast serves as a shroud for the dead man. Among the Voguls the nearest relative was required to seek revenge. The Goldi have the same custom in regard to the tiger; they kill him and bury him with this little speech: Now we are even, you have killed one of ours, we have killed one of yours. Now let us live in peace. Don’t disturb us again, or we will kill you. Carola Mitt, brown-haired, brown-eyed and just nineteen, was born in Berlin (real name: Mittenstein), left Germany five years ago. In her senior year at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Greenwich, Conn., Carola went to the Viennese Opera Ball at the Waldorf-Astoria, was spotted by a Glamour editor.

  I mean, the doctor resumed, we should study each patient thoroughly and empty the uterus b
efore she has retinitis; before jaundice has shown that there is marked liver damage; before she has polyneuritis; before she has toxic myocarditis; before her brain is degenerated, et al.—and it can be done. Meyer Davis played for the Viennese Opera Ball. Copperplate printers, said a man, deliver Society Printing in neat, stylish boxes. They are compelled to slipsheet the work with tissue paper, an expense the letterpress printer may avoid, if careful. Boxes, covered with enameled paper for cards and all kinds of Society Printing, are on sale to carry the correct sizes. No matter how excellent your work and quality may be, women who know the correct practice will not be satisfied unless the packages are as neat as those sent out by the copperplate printers. The devil is not as wicked as people believe, and neither is an Albanian. (Carola Mitt soon dropped her plans to be a painter, made $60 an hour under the lights, appeared on the covers of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Mademoiselle and Glamour, shared a Greenwich Village apartment with another girl, yearned to get married and live in California. But that was later.)

  The Glamour editor said: Take Dolores Wettach. Dolores Wettach is lush, Lorenesque, and doubly foreign (her father is Swiss, her mother Swedish); she moved at the age of five from Switzerland to Flushing, N.Y., where her father set up a mink ranch. Now about twenty-four (“You learn not to be too accurate”), Dolores was elected Miss Vermont in the 1956 Miss Universe contest, graduated in 1957 from the University of Vermont with a B.S. in nursing. Now makes $60 an hour. While Dolores Wettach was working as a nurse at Manhattan’s Doctors Hospital, a sharp-eyed photographer saw beyond her heavy Oxfords, asked her to pose. Dying remarks: Oliver Goldsmith, 1728–74, British poet, playwright and novelist, was asked: Is your mind at ease? He replied: No, it is not, and died. Hegel: Only one man ever understood me. And he didn’t understand me. Hart Crane, 1899–1932, poet, as he jumped into the sea: Goodbye, everybody! Tons of people came to the Viennese Opera Ball. At noon, the first doctor said, on January 31, 1943, while walking, the patient was seized with sudden severe abdominal pain and profuse vaginal bleeding. She was admitted to the hospital at 1 P.M. in a state of exsanguination. She presented a tender, rigid abdomen and uterus. Blood pressure 110/60. Pulse rate 110—thready. Fetal heart not heard. Patient was given intravenous blood at once. The membranes were ruptured artificially and a Spanish windlass was applied. Labor progressed rapidly. At 6 P.M., a 5-pound stillborn infant was delivered by low forceps. Hemorrhage persisted following delivery in spite of hypodermic Pituitrin, intravenous ergotrate, and firm uterine packing. Blood transfusion had been maintained continuously. At 9 P.M. a laparotomy was done, and a Couvelaire uterus with tubes and ovaries was removed by supracervical hysterectomy. The close adherence of the tubes and ovaries to the fundus necessitated their removal. Patient stood surgery well. A total of 2000 C.C. of whole blood and 1500 C.C. of whole plasma had been administered. Convalescence was satisfactory, and the patient was dismissed on the fourteenth postoperative day. Waiters with drinks circulated among the ball-goers.

  Carola Mitt met Isabella Albonico at the Viennese Opera Ball. Isabella Albonico, Italian by temperament as well as by birth (twenty-four years ago, in Florence), began modeling in Europe when she was fifteen, arrived in New York four years ago. Brown-haired and brown-eyed, she has had covers on Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Life, makes $60 an hour, and has won, she says, “a reputation for being allergic to being pummeled around under the lights. Nobody touches me.” I entirely endorse these opinions, said a man standing nearby, and would only add that the wife can do much to avert that fatal marital ennui by independent interests which she persuades him to share. For instance, an interesting book, or journey, or lecture or concert, experienced, enjoyed and described by her, with sympathy and humor, may often be a talisman to divert his mind from work and worry, and all the irritations arising therefrom. But, of course, he, on his side, must be able to appreciate her appreciation and her conversation. The stimuli to the penile nerves may differ in degrees of intensity and shades of quality; and there are corresponding diversities in the sensations of pleasure they bestow. It is of much importance in determining these sensations whether the stimuli are localized mainly in the frenulum preputti or the posterior rim of the glans. Art rather than sheer force should prevail. (There is an authentic case on record in which the attendant braced himself and pulled so hard that, when the forceps slipped off, he fell out of an open window onto the street below and sustained a skull fracture, while the patient remained undelivered.) The Jumbo Tree, 254 feet high, is named from the odd-shaped growths at the base resembling the heads of an elephant, a monkey and a bison. Isabella told Carola that she “would like most of all to be a movie star,” had just returned from Hollywood, where she played a small part (“but opposite Cary Grant”) in That Touch of Mink and a larger one in an all-Italian film, Smog. Besides English and Italian, Isabella speaks French and Spanish, hates big groups. What kind of big groups? Carola asked. This kind, Isabella said, waving her hand to indicate the Viennese Opera Ball.

  Smog is an interesting name Carola said. In the empty expanses of Islamabad, the new capital that Pakistan plans to erect in the cool foothills of the Himalayas, the first buildings scheduled to go up are a cluster of airy structures designed by famed U.S. architect Edward Stone. Set in a cloistered water garden, the biggest of Stone’s buildings will house Pakistan’s first nuclear reactor—one of the largest sales made by New York’s American Machine & Foundry Co. Fifteen years ago, AMF was a company with only a handful of products (cigarette, baking and stitching machines) and annual sales of about $12,000,000. Today, with 42 plants and 19 research facilities scattered across 17 countries, AMF turns out products ranging from remote-controlled toy airplanes to ICBM launching systems. Thanks to AMF’s determined pursuit of diversification and growth products, its 1960 sales were $361 million, its earnings $24 million. And in the glum opening months of 1961, the company’s sales and earnings hit new first-quarter highs. AMF’s expansion is the work of slow-spoken, low-pressured Chairman Morehead Patterson, 64, who took over the company in 1943 from his father, Rufus L. Patterson, inventor of the first automated tobacco machine. After World War II, Morehead Patterson decided that the company had to grow or die. Searching for new products, he turned up a crude prototype of an automatic bowling-pin setter. To get the necessary cash to develop the intricate gadget, Patterson swapped off AMF stock to acquire eight small companies with fast-selling products. The Pinspotter, perfected and put on the market in 1951, helped to turn bowling into the most popular U.S. competitive sport. Despite keen competition from the Brunswick Corp., AMF has remained the world’s largest maker of automatic pin setters. With 68,000 machines already on lease in the U.S. (for an average annual gross of $68 million), AMF last week got a $3,000,000 contract to equip a new chain of bowling centers in the East. Is there another Pinspotter in AMF’s future? Chairman Patterson cautiously admits to the hope that perhaps the firm’s intensive research into purifying brackish and fouled water might produce another product breakthrough. “Companies, like people,” says Patterson, “get arteriosclerosis. My job is to see that AMF doesn’t.” Morehead Patterson did not attend the Viennese Opera Ball.

  Carola Mitt said: Among other things, I means the ego; it is also the symbol, in astronomy, for the inclination of an orbit to the ecliptic; in chemistry, for iodine; in physics, for the density of current, the intensity of magnetization, or the moment of inertia; in logic, for a particular affirmative proposition. Lester Lannin also played for the Viennese Opera Ball. Nonsense! said a huge man wearing the Double Eagle of St. Puce, what about sailing, salesmen, salt, sanitation, Santa Claus, saws, scales, schools, screws, sealing wax, secretaries, sects, selling, the Seven Wonders, sewerage, sewing machines, sheep, sheet metal, shells, shipbuilding, shipwrecks, shoemaking, shopping, shower baths, sieges, signboards, silverware, sinning, skating, skeletons, skeleton keys, sketching, skiing, skulls, skyscrapers, sleep, smoking, smugglers, Socialism, soft drinks, soothsaying, sorcery, space travel, spectacles, s
pelling, sports, squirrels, steamboats, steel, stereopticans, the Stock Exchange, stomachs, stores, storms, stoves, streetcars, strikes, submarines, subways, suicide, sundials, sunstroke, superstition, surgery, surveying, sweat and syphilis! It is one of McCormack’s proudest boasts, Carola heard over her lovely white shoulder, that he has never once missed having dinner with his wife in their forty-one years of married life. She remembered Knocko at the Evacuation Day parade, and Baudelaire’s famous remark. Mortality is the final evaluator of methods. An important goal is an intact sphincter. The greater the prematurity, the more generous should be the episiotomy. Yes said Leon Jaroff, Detroit Bureau Chief for Time, at the Thomas Elementary School on warm spring afternoons I could look from my classroom into the open doors of the Packard plant. Ideal foster parents are mature people who are not necessarily well off, but who have a good marriage and who love and understand children. The ninth day of the ninth month is the festival of the chrysanthemum (Kiku No Sekku), when sake made from the chrysanthemum is drunk. Kiku Jido, a court youth, having inadvertently touched with his foot the pillow of the emperor, was banished to a distant isle, where, it is said, he was nourished by the dew of the chrysanthemums which abounded there. Becoming a hermit, he lived for a thousand years. Husbands have been known to look at their wives with new eyes, Laura La Plante thought to herself. Within the plane of each individual work—experienced apart from a series—he presents one with a similar set of one-at-a-time experiences each contained within its own compartment, and read in a certain order, up or down or across. Far off at Barlow Ranger Station, as the dawn was breaking, Bart slept dreamlessly at last. Peridermium coloradense on spruce (Picea) has long been considered conspecific with Melampsorella caryophyllacearum Schroet., which alternates between fir (Abies) and Caryophyllaceæ. Evidence that these rusts are identical consists largely of inoculation results of Weit and Hubert (1,2), but these have never been fully confirmed. Take Dorothea McGowan the Glamour editor said. Dorothea McGowan is the exception in the new crop: she speaks only English and was born in Brooklyn. Her premodeling life took her as far from home as Staten Island, where she finished her freshman year at Notre Dame College before taking a summer job modeling $2.98 house dresses. A few months later, her first photographic try at a cover made Vogue; this year she set some kind of a record by appearing on four Vogue covers in a row (nobody but her mother or agent could have told that it was the same girl). Twenty-year-old Dorothea (“My middle initial is E, and Dorothy sounded so ordinary”) makes $60 an hour, has her own apartment in New York, studies French at Manhattan’s French Institute twice a week (“so that when my dream of living in Paris comes true, I’ll be ready for it”). Dorothea has been sent, all expenses paid, to be photographed in front of the great architectural monuments of Europe, among Middle East bazaars and under Caribbean palms. She is absolutely infatuated with the idea of being paid to travel. I never saw so many autumn flowers as grow in the woods and sheep-walks of Maryland. But I confess, I scarcely knew a single name. Let no one visit America without first having studied botany.