Donald Barthelme

by Donald Barthelme

  I was preparing a meal for Celeste—a meal of a certain elegance, as when arrivals or other rites of passage are to be celebrated.

  First off there were Saltines of the very best quality and of a special crispness, squareness, and flatness, obtained at great personal sacrifice by making representations to the National Biscuit Company through its authorized nuncios in my vicinity. Upon these was spread with a hand lavish and not stinting Todd’s Liver Pâté, the same having been robbed from geese and other famous animals and properly adulterated with cereals and other well-chosen extenders and the whole delicately spiced with calcium propionate to retard spoilage. Next there were rare cheese products from Wisconsin wrapped in gold foil in exquisite tints with interesting printings thereon, including some very artful representations of cows, the same being clearly in the best of health and good humor. Next there were dips of all kinds including clam, bacon with horseradish, onion soup with sour cream, and the like, which only my long acquaintance with some very high-up members of the Borden company allowed to grace my table. Next there were Fritos curved and golden to the number of 224 (approx.), or the full contents of the bursting 53¢ bag. Next there were Frozen Assorted Hors d’Oeuvres of a richness beyond description, these wrested away from an establishment catering only to the nobility, the higher clergy, and certain selected commoners generally agreed to be comers in their particular areas of commonality, calcium propionate added to retard spoilage. In addition there were Mixed Nuts assembled at great expense by the Planters concern from divers strange climes and hanging gardens, each nut delicately dusted with a salt that has no peer. Furthermore there were cough drops of the manufacture of the firm of Smith Fils, brown and savory and served in a bowl once the property of Brann the Iconoclast. Next there were young tender green olives into which ripe red pimentos had been cunningly thrust by underpaid Portuguese, real and true handwork every step of the way. In addition there were pearl onions meticulously separated from their nonstandard fellows by a machine that had caused the Board of Directors of the S. & W. concern endless sleepless nights and had passed its field trials just in time to contribute to the repast I am describing. Additionally there were gherkins whose just fame needs no further words from me. Following these appeared certain cream cheeses of Philadelphia origin wrapped in costly silver foil, the like of which a pasha could not have afforded in the dear dead days. Following were Mock Ortolans Manqués made of the very best soybean aggregate, the like of which could not be found on the most sophisticated tables of Paris, London, and Rome. The whole washed down with generous amounts of Tab, a fiery liquor brewed under license by the Coca-Cola Company which will not divulge the age-old secret recipe no matter how one begs and pleads with them but yearly allows a small quantity to circulate to certain connoisseurs and bibbers whose credentials meet the very rigid requirements of the Cellar-master. All of this stupendous feed being a mere scherzo before the announcement of the main theme, chilidogs.

  “What is all this?” asked sweet Celeste, waving her hands in the air. “Where is the food?”

  “You do not recognize a meal spiritually prepared,” I said, hurt in the self-love.

  “We will be very happy together,” she said. “I cook.”

  CONCLUSION

  I folded Mr. Hawkins and Mr. Bellows and wrapped them in tissue paper and put them carefully away in a drawer along with the king, the queen, and the cardinal. I was temporarily happy and content but knew that there would be a time when I would not be happy and content; at that time I could unwrap them and continue their pilgrimages. The two surrogates, the third-person Daumier and the second-person Daumier, were wrapped in tissue paper and placed in the drawer; the second-person Daumier especially will bear watching and someday when my soul is again sickly and full of sores I will take him out of the drawer and watch him. Now Celeste is making a daube and I will go into the kitchen and watch Celeste making the daube. She is placing strips of optional pork in the bottom of a pot. Amelia also places strips of optional pork in the bottom of a pot, when she makes a daube, but somehow— The self cannot be escaped, but it can be, with ingenuity and hard work, distracted. There are always openings, if you can find them, there is always something to do.

  AMATEURS

  To Grace Paley

  Our Work and Why We Do It

  AS ADMIRABLE volume after admirable volume tumbled from the sweating presses . . .

  The pressmen wiped their black hands on their pants and adjusted the web, giving it just a little more impression on the right side, where little specks of white had started to appear in the crisp, carefully justified black prose.

  I picked up the hammer and said into the telephone, “Well, if he comes around here he’s going to get a face full of hammer

  “A four-pound hammer can mess up a boy’s face pretty bad

  “A four-pound hammer can make a bloody rubbish of a boy’s face.”

  I hung up and went into the ink room to see if we had enough ink for the rest of the night’s runs.

  “Yes, those were weary days,” the old printer said with a sigh. “Follow copy even if it flies out the window, we used to say, and oft—”

  Just then the Wells Fargo man came in, holding a .38 loosely in his left hand as the manual instructs

  It was pointed at the floor, as if he wished to

  But then our treasurer, old Claiborne McManus

  The knobs of the safe

  Sweet were the visions inside.

  He handed over the bundle of Alice Cooper T-shirts we had just printed up, and the Wells Fargo man grabbed them with his free hand, gray with experience, and saluted loosely with his elbow, and hurried the precious product out to the glittering fans.

  And coming to work today I saw a brown Mercedes with a weeping woman inside, her head was in her hands, a pretty blond back-of-the-neck, the man driving the Mercedes was paying no attention, and

  But today we are running the Moxxon Travel Guide in six colors

  The problems of makeready, registration, show-through, and feed

  Will the grippers grip the sheet correctly?

  And I saw the figure 5 writ in gold

  “Down time” was a big factor in the recent negotiations, just as “wash-up time” is expected to complicate the negotiations to come. Percy handed the two-pound can of yellow ink to William.

  William was sitting naked in the bed wearing the black hat. Rowena was in the bed too, wearing the red blanket. We have to let them do everything they want to do, because they own the business. Often they scandalize the proofreaders, and then errors don’t get corrected and things have to be reset, or additional errors are inserted by a proofreader with his mind on the shining thing he has just seen. Atlases are William’s special field of interest. There are many places he has never been.

  “Yesterday,” William began

  You have your way of life and we ours

  A rush order for matchbook covers for Le Foie de Veau restaurant

  The tiny matchbook-cover press is readied, the packing applied, the “Le Foie de Veau” form locked into place. We all stand around a small table watching the matchbook press at work. It is exactly like a toy steam engine. Everyone is very fond of it, although we also have a press big as a destroyer escort—that one has a crew of thirty-five, its own galley, its own sick bay, its own band. We print the currency of Colombia, and the Acts of the Apostles, and the laws of the land, and the fingerprints

  “My dancing shoes have rusted,” said Rowena, “because I have remained for so long in this bed.”

  of criminals, and Grand Canyon calendars, and gummed labels, some things that don’t make any sense, but that isn’t our job, to make sense of things—our job is to kiss the paper with the form or plate, as the case may be, and make sure it’s not getting too much ink, and worry about the dot structure of the engravings, or whether a tiny shim is going to work up during the run and split a f
ountain.

  William began slambanging Rowena’s dancing shoes with steel wool. “Yesterday,” he said

  Salesmen were bursting into the room with new orders, each salesman’s person bulging with new orders

  And old Lucien Frank was pushing great rolls of Luxus Semi-Fine No. 2 through the room with a donkey engine

  “Yesterday,” William said, “I saw six Sabrett hot-dog stands on wheels marching in single file down the middle of Jane Street followed at a slow trot by a police cruiser. They had yellow-and-blue umbrellas and each hot-dog stand was powered by an elderly man who looked ill. The elderly men not only looked ill but were physically small—not more than five-six, any of them. They were heading I judged for the Sixth Precinct. Had I had the black hat with me, and sufficient men and horses and lariats and .30-.30s, and popular support from the masses and a workable revolutionary ideology and/or a viable myth pattern, I would have rescued them. Removed them to the hills where we would have feasted all night around the fires on tasty Sabrett hot dogs and maybe steaming butts of Ballantine ale, and had bun-splitting contests, sauerkraut-hurling”

  He opened the two-pound can of yellow ink with his teeth.

  “You are totally wired,” Rowena said tenderly

  “A boy likes to be”

  We turned away from this scene, because of what they were about to do, and had some more vodka. Because although we, too, are wired most of the time, it is not the vodka. It is, rather . . . What I mean is, if you have ink in your blood it’s hard to get it out of your hands, or to keep your hands off the beautiful typefaces carefully distributed in the huge typecases

  Annonce Grotesque

  Compacta

  Cooper Black

  Helvetica Light

  Melior

  Microgramma Bold

  Profil

  Ringlet

  And one of our volumes has just received a scathing notice in Le Figaro, which we also print . . . Should we smash the form? But it’s our form . . .

  Old Kermit Dash has just hurt his finger in the papercutter. “It’s not so bad, Kermit,” I said, binding up the wound. “I’m scared of the papercutter myself. Always have been. Don’t worry about it. Think instead of the extra pay you will be drawing for that first joint, for the rest of your life. Now get back in there and cut paper.” I whacked him on the rump, although he is eighty, almost rumpless

  We do the Oxford Book of American Grub

  Rowena handed Bill another joint—I myself could be interested in her, if she were not part of Management and thus “off limits” to us fiercely loyal artisans. And now, the problem of where to hide the damning statistics in the Doe Airframe Annual Report. Hank Witteborn, our chief designer, suggests that they just be “accidentally left out.” The idea has merit, but

  Crash! Someone has just thrown something through our biggest window. It is a note with a brick wrapped around it:

  Sirs:

  If you continue to live and breathe

  If you persist in walking the path of

  Coating the façade of exploitation with

  the stucco of good printing

  Faithfully

  What are they talking about? Was it not we who had the contract for the entire Tanberian Revolution, from the original manifestos hand-set in specially nicked and scarred Blood Gothic to the letterheads of the Office of Permanent Change & Price Control (18 pt. Ultima on a 20-lb. laid stock)? But William held up a hand, and because he was the boss, we let him speak.

  “It is good to be a member of the bourgeoisie,” he said. “A boy likes being a member of the bourgeoisie. Being a member of the bourgeoisie is good for a boy. It makes him feel warm and happy. He can worry about his plants. His green plants. His plants and his quiches. His property taxes. The productivity of his workers. His plants/quiches/property taxes/workers/Land Rover. His sword hilt. His”

  William is sometimes filled with self-hatred, but we are not. We have our exhilarating work, and our motto, “Grow or Die,” and our fringe benefits, and our love for William (if only he would take his hands off Rowena’s hip bones during business hours, if only he would take off the black hat and put on a pair of pants, a vest, a shirt, socks, and)

  I was watching over the imposition of the Detroit telephone book. Someone had just dropped all the H’s—a thing that happens sometimes.

  “Don’t anybody move! Now, everybody bend over and pick up the five slugs nearest him. Now, the next five. Easy does it. Somebody call Damage Control and have them send up extra vodka, lean meat, and bandages. Now, the next five. Anybody that steps on a slug gets the hammer in the mouth. Now, the next”

  If only we could confine ourselves to matchbook covers!

  But matchbook covers are not our destiny. Our destiny is to accomplish 1.5 million impressions per day. In the next quarter, that figure will be upped by 12 percent, unless

  “Leather,” William says.

  “Leather?”

  “Leather,” he says with added emphasis. “Like they cover cows with.”

  William’s next great idea will be in the area of leather. I am glad to know this. His other great ideas have made the company great.

  The new machine for printing underground telephone poles

  The new machine for printing smoke on smoked hams

  The new machine for writing the figure 5 in gold

  All of this weakens the heart. I have the hammer, I will smash anybody who threatens, however remotely, the company way of life. We know what we’re doing. The vodka ration is generous. Our reputation for excellence is unexcelled, in every part of the world. And will be maintained until the destruction of our art by some other art which is just as good but which, I am happy to say, has not yet been invented.

  The Wound

  HE SITS up again. He makes a wild grab for his mother’s hair. The hair of his mother! But she neatly avoids him. The cook enters with the roast beef. The mother of the torero tastes the sauce, which is presented separately, in a silver dish. She makes a face. The torero, ignoring the roast beef, takes the silver dish from his mother and sips from it, meanwhile maintaining intense eye contact with his mistress. The torero’s mistress hands the camera to the torero’s mother and reaches for the silver dish. “What is all this nonsense with the dish?” asks the famous aficionado who is sitting by the bedside. The torero offers the aficionado a slice of beef, carved from the roast with a sword, of which there are perhaps a dozen on the bed. “These fellows with their swords, they think they’re so fine,” says one of the imbéciles to another, quietly. The second imbécil says, “We would all think ourselves fine if we could. But we can’t. Something prevents us.”

  The torero looks with irritation in the direction of the imbéciles. His mistress takes the 8-mm. movie camera from his mother and begins to film something outside the window. The torero has been gored in the foot. He is, in addition, surrounded by imbéciles, idiotas, and bobos. He shifts uncomfortably in his bed. Several swords fall on the floor. A telegram is delivered. The mistress of the torero puts down the camera and removes her shirt. The mother of the torero looks angrily at the imbéciles. The famous aficionado reads the telegram aloud. The telegram suggests the torero is a clown and a cucaracha for allowing himself to be gored in the foot, thus both insulting the noble profession of which he is such a poor representative and irrevocably ruining the telegram sender’s Sunday afternoon, and that, furthermore, the telegram sender is even now on his way to the Church of Our Lady of the Several Sorrows to pray against the torero, whose future, he cordially hopes, is a thing of the past. The torero’s head flops forward into the cupped hands of an adjacent bobo.

  The mother of the torero turns on the television set, where the goring of the foot of the torero is being shown first at normal speed, then in exquisite slow motion. The torero’s head remains in the cupped hands of the bobo. “My foot!” he sho
uts. Someone turns off the television. The beautiful breasts of the torero’s mistress are appreciated by the aficionado, who is also an aficionado of breasts. The imbéciles and idiotas are afraid to look. So they do not. One idiota says to another idiota, “I would greatly like some of that roast beef.” “But it has not been offered to us,” his companion replies, “because we are so insignificant.” “But no one else is eating it,” the first says. “It simply sits there, on the plate.” They regard the attractive roast of beef.

  The torero’s mother picks up the movie camera that his mistress has relinquished and begins filming the torero’s foot, playing with the zoom lens. The torero, head still in the hands of the bobo, reaches into a drawer in the bedside table and removes from a box there a Cuban cigar of the first quality. Two bobos and an imbécil rush to light it for him, bumping into each other in the process. “Lysol,” says the mother of the torero. “I forgot the application of the Lysol.” She puts down the camera and looks around for the Lysol bottle. But the cook has taken it away. The mother of the torero leaves the room, in search of the Lysol bottle. He, the torero, lifts his head and follows her exit. More pain?

  His mother reenters the room carrying a bottle of Lysol. The torero places his bandaged foot under a pillow, and both hands, fingers spread wide, on top of the pillow. His mother unscrews the top of the bottle of Lysol. The Bishop of Valencia enters with attendants. The Bishop is a heavy man with his head cocked permanently to the left—the result of years of hearing confessions in a confessional whose right-hand box was said to be inhabited by vipers. The torero’s mistress hastily puts on her shirt. The imbéciles and idiotas retire into the walls. The Bishop extends his hand. The torero kisses the Bishop’s ring. The famous aficionado does likewise. The Bishop asks if he may inspect the wound. The torero takes his foot out from under the pillow. The torero’s mother unwraps the bandage. There is the foot, swollen almost twice normal size. In the center of the foot, the wound, surrounded by angry flesh. The Bishop shakes his head, closes his eyes, raises his head (on the diagonal), and murmurs a short prayer. Then he opens his eyes and looks about him for a chair. An idiota rushes forward with a chair. The Bishop seats himself by the bedside. The torero offers the Bishop some cold roast beef. The Bishop begins to talk about his psychoanalysis: “I am a different man now,” the Bishop says. “Gloomier, duller, more fearful. In the name of the Holy Ghost, you would not believe what I see under the bed, in the middle of the night.” The Bishop laughs heartily. The torero joins him. The torero’s mistress is filming the Bishop. “I was happier with my whiskey,” the Bishop says, laughing even harder. The laughter of the Bishop threatens the chair he is sitting in. One bobo says to another bobo, “The privileged classes can afford psychoanalysis and whiskey. Whereas all we get is sermons and sour wine. This is manifestly unfair. I protest, silently.” “It is because we are no good,” the second bobo says. “It is because we are nothings.”