Donald Barthelme

by Donald Barthelme

  That’s not a criticism. We have to have cheerleaders.

  I presented myself at the Placement Office. I was on file. My percentile was the percentile of choice.

  “How come you were headman of only one student organization, George?” the Placement Officer asked. Many hats for top folk was the fashion then.

  I said I was rounded, and showed him my slash. From the Fencing Club.

  “But you served your country in an overseas post.”

  “And regard my career plan on neatly typed pages with wide margins.”

  “Exemplary,” the Placement Officer said. “You seem married, mature, malleable, how would you like to affiliate yourself with us here at the old school? We have a spot for a poppycock man, to write the admiral’s speeches. Have you ever done poppycock?”

  I said no but maybe I could fake it.

  “Excellent, excellent,” the Placement Officer said. “I see you have grasp. And you can sup at the Faculty Club. And there is a ten-per-cent discount on tickets for all home games.”

  The admiral shook my hand. “You will be a credit to us, George,” he said. I wrote poppycock, sometimes cockypap. At four o’clock the faculty hoisted the cocktail flag. We drank Daiquiris on each other’s sterns. I had equipped myself—a fibre-glass runabout, someplace to think. In the stadia of friendly shy new universities we went down the field on Gulf Coast afternoons with gulls, or exciting nights under the tall toothpick lights. The crowd roared. Sylvia roared. Gregory grew.

  There was no particular point at which I stopped being promising.

  Moonstruck I was, after a fashion. Sitting on a bench by the practice field, where the jocks chanted secret signals in their underwear behind tall canvas blinds. Layabout babies loafing on blankets, some staked out on twelve-foot dog chains. Brown mothers squatting knee to knee in shifts of scarlet and green. I stared at the moon’s pale daytime presence. It seemed . . . inimical.

  Moonstruck.

  We’re playing Flinch. You flinched.

  The simplest things are the most difficult to explain, all authorities agree. Say I was tired of p***yc**k, if that pleases you. It’s true enough.

  Sylvia went up in a puff of smoke. She didn’t like unsalaried life. And couldn’t bear a male acquaintance moon-staring in the light of day. Decent people look at night.

  We had trouble with Gregory: who would get which part. She settled for three-fifths, and got I think the worst of it, the dreaming raffish Romany part that thinks science will save us. I get matter-of-fact midnight telephone calls: My E.E. instructor shot me down. What happened? I don’t know, he’s an ass anyhow. Well that may be but still— When’s the baby due? January, I told you. Yeah, can I go to Mexico City for the holidays? Ask your mother, you know she— There’s this guy, his old man has a villa. . . . Well, we can talk about it. Yeah, was grandmother a Communist? Nothing so distinguished, she— You said she was kicked out of Germany. Her family was anti-Nazi. Adler means eagle in German. That’s true. There was something called the Weimar Republic, her father—I read about it.

  We had trouble with Gregory, we wanted to be scientific. Toys from Procreative Playthings of Princeton. O Gregory, that Princeton crowd got you coming and going. Procreative Playthings at one end and the Educational Testing Service at the other. And that serious-minded co-op nursery, that was a mistake. “A growing understanding between parent and child through shared group experience.” I still remember poor Henry Harding III. Under “Sibs” on the membership roll they listed his, by age:

  26

  25

  23

  20

  19

  15

  10

  9

  8

  6

  O Mrs. Harding, haven’t you heard? They have these little Christmas-tree ornaments for the womb now, they work wonders.

  Did we do “badly” by Gregory? Will we do “better” with Gog? Such questions curl the hair. It’s wiser not to ask.

  I mentioned Cardinal Y (the red hat). He’s a friend, in a way. Or rather, the subject of one of my little projects.

  I set out to study cardinals, about whom science knows nothing. It seemed to me that cardinals could be known in the same way we know fishes or roses, by classification and enumeration. A perverse project, perhaps, but who else has embraced this point of view? Difficult nowadays to find a point of view kinky enough to call one’s own, with Sade himself being carried through the streets on the shoulders of sociologists, cheers and shouting, ticker tape unwinding from high windows . . .

  The why of Cardinal Y. You’re entitled to an explanation.

  The Cardinal rushed from the Residence waving in the air his hands, gloved in yellow pigskin it appeared, I grasped a hand, “Yes, yellow pigskin!” the Cardinal cried. I wrote in my book, yellow pigskin.

  Significant detail. The pectoral cross contains nine diamonds, the scarlet soutane is laundered right on the premises.

  I asked the Cardinal questions, we had a conversation.

  “I am thinking of a happy island more beautiful than can be imagined,” I said.

  “I am thinking of a golden mountain which does not exist,” he said.

  “Upon what does the world rest?” I asked.

  “Upon an elephant,” he said.

  “Upon what does the elephant rest?”

  “Upon a tortoise.”

  “Upon what does the tortoise rest?”

  “Upon a red lawnmower.”

  I wrote in my book, playful.

  “Is there any value that has value?” I asked.

  “If there is any value that has value, then it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case, for all that happens and is the case is accidental,” he said. He was not serious. I wrote in my book, knows the drill.

  (Oh I had heard reports, how he slunk about in the snow telling children he was Santa Claus, how he disbursed funds in unauthorized disbursements to unshaven men who came to the kitchen door, how his housekeeper pointedly rolled his red socks together and black socks together hinting red with red and black with black, the Cardinal patiently unrolling a red ball to get a red sock and a black ball to get a black sock, which he then wore together. . . .)

  Cardinal Y. He’s sly.

  I was thorough. I popped the Cardinal on the patella with a little hammer, and looked into his eyes with a little light. I tested the Cardinal’s stomach acidity using Universal Indicator Paper, a scale of one to ten, a spectrum of red to blue. The pH value was 1 indicating high acidity. I measured the Cardinal’s ego strength using the Minnesota Multiphastic Muzzle Map, he had an M.M.M.M. of four over three. I sang to the Cardinal, the song was “Stella by Starlight,” he did not react in any way. I calculated the number of gallons needed to fill the Cardinal’s bath to a depth of ten inches (beyond which depth, the Cardinal said, he never ventured). I took the Cardinal to the ballet, the ballet was “The Conservatory.” The Cardinal applauded at fifty-seven points. Afterward, backstage, the Cardinal danced with Plenosova, holding her at arm’s length with a good will and an ill grace. The skirts of the scarlet soutane stood out to reveal high-button shoes, and the stagehands clapped.

  I asked the Cardinal his views on the moon, he said they were the conventional ones, and that is how I know all I know about cardinals. Not enough perhaps to rear a science of cardinalogy upon, but enough perhaps to form a basis for the investigations of other investigators. My report is over there, in the blue binding, next to my copy of La Géomancie et la Néomancie des Anciens by the Seigneur of Salerno.

  Cardinal Y. One can measure and measure and miss the most essential thing. I liked him. I still get the odd blessing in the mail now and then.

  Too, maybe I was trying on the role. Not for myself. When a child is born, the locus of one’s hopes . . . shifts, slightly. Not al
together, not all at once. But you feel it, this displacement. You speak up, strike attitudes, like the mother of a tiny Lollobrigida. Drunk with possibility once more.

  I am still wearing my yellow flower which has lasted wonderfully.

  “What is Gog doing?”

  “Sleeping.”

  You see, Gog of mine, Gog o’ my heart, I’m just trying to give you a little briefing here. I don’t want you unpleasantly surprised. I can’t stand a startled look. Regard me as a sort of Distant Early Warning System. Here is the world and here are the knowledgeable knowers knowing. What can I tell you? What has been pieced together from the reports of travellers.

  Fragments are the only forms I trust.

  Look at my wall, it’s all there. That’s a leaf, Gog, stuck up with Scotch Tape. No no, the Scotch Tape is the shiny transparent stuff, the leaf the veined irregularly shaped . . .

  There are several sides to this axe, Gog, consider the photostat, “Mr. W. B. Yeats Presenting Mr. George Moore to the Queen of the Fairies.” That’s a civilized gesture, I mean Beerbohm’s. And when the sculptor Aristide Maillol went into the printing business he made the paper by chewing the fibers himself. That’s dedication. And here is a Polaroid photo, shows your Aunt Sylvia and me putting an Ant Farm together. That’s how close we were in those days. Just an Ant Farm apart.

  See the moon? It hates us.

  And now comes J. J. Sullivan’s orange-and-blue Gulf Oil truck to throw kerosene into the space heater. Driver in green siren suit, red face, blond shaved head, the following rich verbal transaction:

  “Beautiful day.”

  “Certainly is.”

  And now settling back in this green glider with a copy of Man. Dear Ann when I look at Man I don’t want you. Unfolded Ursala Thigpen seems eversomuchmore desirable. A clean girl too and with interests, cooking, botany, pornographic novels. Someone new to show my slash to.

  In another month Gog leaps fully armed from the womb. What can I do for him? I can get him into A.A., I have influence. And make sure no harsh moonlight falls on his new soft head.

  Hello there Gog. We hope you’ll be very happy here.

  CITY LIFE

  To Roger Angell

  Views of My Father Weeping

  AN ARISTOCRAT was riding down the street in his carriage. He ran over my father.

  •

  After the ceremony I walked back to the city. I was trying to think of the reason my father had died. Then I remembered: he was run over by a carriage.

  •

  I telephoned my mother and told her of my father’s death. She said she supposed it was the best thing. I too supposed it was the best thing. His enjoyment was diminishing. I wondered if I should attempt to trace the aristocrat whose carriage had run him down. There were said to have been one or two witnesses.

  •

  Yes it is possible that it is not my father who sits there in the center of the bed weeping. It may be someone else, the mailman, the man who delivers the groceries, an insurance salesman or tax collector, who knows. However, I must say, it resembles my father. The resemblance is very strong. He is not smiling through his tears but frowning through them. I remember once we were out on the ranch shooting peccadillos (result of a meeting, on the plains of the West, of the collared peccary and the nine-banded armadillo). My father shot and missed. He wept. This weeping resembles that weeping.

  •

  “Did you see it?” “Yes but only part of it. Part of the time I had my back turned.” The witness was a little girl, eleven or twelve. She lived in a very poor quarter and I could not imagine that, were she to testify, anyone would credit her. “Can you recall what the man in the carriage looked like?” “Like an aristocrat,” she said.

  •

  The first witness declares that the man in the carriage looked “like an aristocrat.” But that might be simply the carriage itself. Any man sitting in a handsome carriage with a driver on the box and perhaps one or two footmen up behind tends to look like an aristocrat. I wrote down her name and asked her to call me if she remembered anything else. I gave her some candy.

  •

  I stood in the square where my father was killed and asked people passing by if they had seen, or knew of anyone who had seen, the incident. At the same time I felt the effort was wasted. Even if I found the man whose carriage had done the job, what would I say to him? “You killed my father.” “Yes,” the aristocrat would say, “but he ran right in under the legs of the horses. My man tried to stop but it happened too quickly. There was nothing anyone could do.” Then perhaps he would offer me a purse full of money.

  •

  The man sitting in the center of the bed looks very much like my father. He is weeping, tears coursing down his cheeks. One can see that he is upset about something. Looking at him I see that something is wrong. He is spewing like a fire hydrant with its lock knocked off. His yammer darts in and out of all the rooms. In a melting mood I lay my paw on my breast and say, “Father.” This does not distract him from his plaint, which rises to a shriek, sinks to a pule. His range is great, his ambition commensurate. I say again, “Father,” but he ignores me. I don’t know whether it is time to flee or will not be time to flee until later. He may suddenly stop, assume a sternness. I have kept the door open and nothing between me and the door, and moreover the screen unlatched, and on top of that the motor running, in the Mustang. But perhaps it is not my father weeping there, but another father: Tom’s father, Phil’s father, Pat’s father, Pete’s father, Paul’s father. Apply some sort of test, voiceprint reading or

  •

  My father throws his ball of knitting up in the air. The orange wool hangs there.

  •

  My father regards the tray of pink cupcakes. Then he jams his thumb into each cupcake, into the top. Cupcake by cupcake. A thick smile spreads over the face of each cupcake.

  •

  Then a man volunteered that he had heard two other men talking about the accident in a shop. “What shop?” The man pointed it out to me, a draper’s shop on the south side of the square. I entered the shop and made inquiries. “It was your father, eh? He was bloody clumsy if you ask me.” This was the clerk behind the counter. But another man standing nearby, well-dressed, even elegant, a gold watchchain stretched across his vest, disagreed. “It was the fault of the driver,” the second man said. “He could have stopped them if he had cared to.” “Nonsense,” the clerk said, “not a chance in the world. If your father hadn’t been drunk—” “He wasn’t drunk,” I said. “I arrived on the scene soon after it happened and I smelled no liquor.”

  •

  This was true. I had been notified by the police, who came to my room and fetched me to the scene of the accident. I bent over my father, whose chest was crushed, and laid my cheek against his. His cheek was cold. I smelled no liquor but blood from his mouth stained the collar of my coat. I asked the people standing there how it had happened. “Run down by a carriage,” they said. “Did the driver stop?” “No, he whipped up the horses and went off down the street and then around the corner at the end of the street, toward King’s New Square.” “You have no idea as to whose carriage . . .” “None.” Then I made the arrangements for the burial. It was not until several days later that the idea of seeking the aristocrat in the carriage came to me.

  •

  I had had in my life nothing to do with aristocrats, did not even know in what part of the city they lived, in their great houses. So that even if I located someone who had seen the incident and could identify the particular aristocrat involved, I would be faced with the further task of finding his house and gaining admittance (and even then, might he not be abroad?). “No, the driver was at fault,” the man with the gold watchchain said. “Even if your father was drunk—and I can’t say about that, one way or another, I have no opinion—even if your father was drunk, the driver could hav
e done more to avoid the accident. He was dragged, you know. The carriage dragged him about forty feet.” I had noticed that my father’s clothes were torn in a peculiar way. “There was one thing,” the clerk said, “don’t tell anyone I told you, but I can give you one hint. The driver’s livery was blue and green.”

  •

  It is someone’s father. That much is clear. He is fatherly. The gray in the head. The puff in the face. The droop in the shoulders. The flab on the gut. Tears falling. Tears falling. Tears falling. Tears falling. More tears. It seems that he intends to go further along this salty path. The facts suggest that this is his program, weeping. He has something in mind, more weeping. O lud lud! But why remain? Why watch it? Why tarry? Why not fly? Why subject myself? I could be somewhere else, reading a book, watching the telly, stuffing a big ship into a little bottle, dancing the Pig. I could be out in the streets feeling up eleven-year-old girls in their soldier drag, there are thousands, as alike as pennies, and I could be— Why doesn’t he stand up, arrange his clothes, dry his face? He’s trying to embarrass us. He wants attention. He’s trying to make himself interesting. He wants his brow wrapped in cold cloths perhaps, his hands held perhaps, his back rubbed, his neck kneaded, his wrists patted, his elbows anointed with rare oils, his toenails painted with tiny scenes representing God blessing America. I won’t do it.

  •

  My father has a red bandana tied around his face covering the nose and mouth. He extends his right hand in which there is a water pistol. “Stick ’em up!” he says.

  •

  But blue and green livery is not unusual. A blue coat with green trousers, or the reverse, if I saw a coachman wearing such livery I would take no particular notice. It is true that most livery tends to be blue and buff, or blue and white, or blue and a sort of darker blue (for the trousers). But in these days one often finds a servant aping the more exquisite color combinations affected by his masters. I have even seen them in red trousers although red trousers used to be reserved, by unspoken agreement, for the aristocracy. So that the colors of the driver’s livery were not of much consequence. Still it was something. I could now go about in the city, especially in stables and gin shops and such places, keeping a weather eye for the livery of the lackeys who gathered there. It was possible that more than one of the gentry dressed his servants in this blue and green livery, but on the other hand, unlikely that there were as many as half a dozen. So that in fact the draper’s clerk had offered a very good clue indeed, had one the energy to pursue it vigorously.