The Teachings of Don B.

by Donald Barthelme

  THAT COSMOPOLITAN GIRL

  Must a girl always be protected by a man? Not this girl! When I lived in California I sometimes picked a man up in my car for a date if his was in the garage, loaned to a friend or—my car was in better shape! (No, he wasn’t emasculated and we stayed friends.) Last week at J.F.K. I carried one of Stephen’s bags. He was loaded with golf clubs and I only had a garment bag and a Vuitton. (No, I didn’t throw my back out and Stephen and I are still together!) Isn’t it silly to try to preserve old clichés when naturalness and freedom are so much better?

  —Adv. for Cosmopolitan in The New York Times.

  Of course the next day when Stephen picked me up for dinner at Vuitton, looking hysterically handsome in his Vuitton coveralls, I was a shade taken aback when he literally demanded that I pay for the cab. (He always used to do little things like that as a matter of course!) Well, I paid cheerfully, because I have this magazine I read that teaches me how to be natural and healthy and resilient, but then when we got out of the cab he loaded this immense steamer trunk on my back. I said, “Stephen, what are you doing?” He said, “Just get it inside, dollbaby.” Well, I don’t know if you’ve ever marched into Vuitton with a Vuitton steamer trunk on your back, huffing and puffing and bent half double, but I can tell you this, it makes you feel kind of weird. But I coped--I just pretended I was some kind of super-soigné woman mover! (It’s silly to preserve the old clichés about roles and such when naturalness and freedom and health are so much better but this time I did throw my back out!) We got a good table in spite of the steamer trunk because Stephen has this absolutely wizardly way with the V. headwaiters, and we ordered our own very special-together drink, nitroglycerin and soda (because of Stephen’s really absolutely unique heart condition--he’s the only person in the whole world who has it!), and I was beginning to feel all glow-y and comfortable, except that my back was positively ruined, because of carrying the steamer trunk. “Why are you twitching like that?” Stephen asked (a tiny bit crossly, I thought) and I explained to him that my back hurt. Usually he is the living soul of compassion--really sweet--but this time all he said was “If you didn’t spend all your time reading that damned magazine, and italicizing every third word in your sentences, you’d have a strong, healthy back, just like your mother did. I’m going to get you a washtub and a washboard for your birthday. I bet you don’t even know what a washboard looks like. I bet you never even saw one outside of a jug band.” (I thought that bit about my italicizing words was a bit cruel, because he does it too--all the time!) But I just gave him a quick grin and an impish, sort of California look, and asked if I could have another N & S. “You picking up the bloody tab?” he asked, a teeny bit viciously, I thought. But then I remembered that men have their little moods, just like women, and that Stephen is in very heavy trouble at the office right now, due to that nasty SEC investigation, just because he tipped off a couple of hundred clients about the receivership ahead of time, but for heaven’s sake, he was just trying to be loyal to his friends. So I just said offhandedly, “Sure.” But then he reached over and began to unlatch the steamer trunk, which was still standing by the table, and I noticed that all the waiters and captains and busboys had begun to gather around, to see what was inside! (I guess their curiosity was normal and healthy and lovable, but it made me feel just the least most microcosmic bit itchy!) And what was inside you would never fathom in a thousand years! It was another woman! “Get up,” Stephen said to me. “This is Elberta and I want to sit next to her.” Well, I almost crumbled into matchsticks, as you can imagine, but I just acted natural as hard as I could, and that was easier because she was wearing the most peculiar creation you could possibly conjure up in your wildest dreams--I think it’s called a housedress. I nearly died laughing, inside of course (outside I was still being natural and healthy, even though my back was giving me pure un-shieted hell), and even smiled at the thought that my carrying the steamer trunk into the restaurant on my back hadn’t emasculated Stephen one little bit--as a matter of fact he was sort of feeling Elberta’s handbag, which looked like it was made of an old armadillo shell or something, in a manner that was downright lascivious. Well, I must admit that I was in the most infinitesimal bit of a twit, so I dipped into my Vuitton and brought out my copy of the current issue of the magazine to see if the advice columns had anything à propos, if there was any strong, natural, lovable way to deal with this rather hideous situation, but all of the writers seemed to be preoccupied with the problems of unmarried mothers this month, and that wasn’t my problem, and Stephen was talking with Elberta in low tones that I couldn’t hear, although I tried, so I reached over and patted Elberta on the hand, the hand that was curled around one of our drinks, and asked her in the nicest possible way what magazine she read, what magazine she identified with, what magazine defined her, because of course I was insanely curious about how she achieved that really phony wholesomeness that she exuded all over Stephen like a web or something. She just looked at me and said, “Scientific American, dearie.”

  L’LAPSE

  A SCENARIO FOR MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI

  The scene is the plaza in front of the Plaza. Seated near the fountain are MARCELLO, a wealthy film critic who has enriched himself by writing attacks on Akira Kurosawa for the American Legion Magazine, and ANNA, a lengthy, elegant beauty, blond, whose extreme nervousness is exteriorized in thumb sucking. Shabby-looking pigeons wheel about meaningfully but in slow motion. The fountain supplies the sound of falling water; the water sounds viscid, hopeless. ANNA is a wealthy, bored young animal, rather chunky in the hindquarters—more eland than gazelle. MARCELLO is a failed poet. If the budget permits, there may be a scene, late in the film, in which MARCELLO pours lysergic acid all over a rival poet’s verses—a nasty business. The pace of the opening is slow; in fact, the entire film will proceed as if the players were wearing lead suits. The camera begins by thoughtfully considering a nearby construction project (played by the Tishman Brothers), fondling with love each girder and bag of cement; then, reluctantly, it tears itself away to focus on ANNA. ANNA, looking as if her gums are getting sore, examines her thumbs; the right thumb is distinctly larger than the left. She lifts her eyes to regard MARCELLO—a slow, somnolent, yet intensely meaningful regard, which is held for seven minutes. Finally, she speaks.

  ANNA (slowly, sadly): A superb drama. An engrossing film . . . penetratingly different . . . makes cinema history.

  MARCELLO (wealthy, bored): If I’m going to teach you the business, cara, you gotta learn not to make adverbs out of words like “penetrating.” Now go on. It’s one of the year’s ten best, I suppose?

  ANNA: One of the year’s ten best. Urgent. Sheer cinematic excitement.

  MARCELLO: A magnificent, ironic parable?

  ANNA: A magnificent ironic parable. Eerily symbolic in intent and effect. Beautiful to watch. (Inserts thumb)

  MARCELLO: Say something about style.

  ANNA: A deft and skillful style full of pictorial chic?

  MARCELLO (moodily): Not bad.

  ANNA (without hope): An outstanding film for discriminating moviegoers. Does not merely survive repeated visits, it repays them. Original and remarkable. Intellectual suspense, mystery, and excitement. A film to see. A film worth seeing. A film of disturbing beauty. Marvelously realized. (Turns face away) Oh, Marcello, it’s no good. I can’t do it. Last night . . .

  MARCELLO (sharply, annoyed): I don’t want to talk about last night. Now, what about the director?

  ANNA: A sensualist with a camera.

  MARCELLO: That’s very good. Go on. This is a review in depth.

  ANNA: A poet with a camera. A philosopher with a camera. Another damn Italian with a camera.

  MARCELLO: Anna!

  ANNA (removes thumb): But, Marcello, I didn’t like the picture. I was bored.

  MARCELLO: Look, sweets, it doesn’t matter you were bored. The point is, you were bored in a certain way. Like brilliantly.

  ANNA: You didn’t th
ink it was a little . . . slow?

  MARCELLO: Of course it was slow. I mean it had a certain slow beauty. A sort of visual rubato. On the other hand, it was obscure and baffling.

  ANNA: Visual rubato?

  MARCELLO: I mean you can’t just say you were bored, for God’s sake.

  ANNA (trailing thumb in fountain): Marcello. . .

  MARCELLO (evasively): Yes?

  ANNA: You know what’s wrong . . . between us?

  MARCELLO (more evasively): What?

  ANNA: We have to face it, Marcello. We communicate. You and me.

  MARCELLO (shamed, looks away): I know . . .

  ANNA: We communicate like crazy.

  MARCELLO: Anna . . .

  ANNA: It’s so déclassé. I can’t bear it. (Reinserts thumb)

  MARCELLO: It’s my fault. I have a tendency to make myself clear. I mean . . .

  ANNA (bitterly): I know what you mean.

  (Shot of sky—overbright, glaring. Overexposed? Shot of cement bag—fat, opulent even, manufacturer’s name clearly visible. Shot of boy on bicycle looking over shoulder, away from camera. Shot of puddle of water, Juicy Fruit wrapper floating on surface.)

  MARCELLO: Anna?

  ANNA: Last night . . .

  MARCELLO: I could change. My approach, I mean. (Speaks in italics) These rooms, these corridors, empty, endless, oppressive; the mirrors on the walls, dark, ancient, oppressive; the carved frames, elaborate ceilings. These rooms, these corridors . . . Where did you put my pills?

  ANNA (searches in handbag): I have them here—here. I wish you wouldn’t.

  MARCELLO (chews pills): I can’t help it. I’m nervous. It’s that new picture I have to see tomorrow—the one I’ve been putting off. Lawrence or Arabia? Lawrence over Arabia? I don’t know. All I know is, I’m afraid of it.

  ANNA: What’s to be afraid?

  MARCELLO (dismally): I hear it’s a picture, you know, in the old tradition. Swift-moving, panoramic. With action. I’m not sure I’ll be able to cope.

  ANNA (brutally): You’re as good as you ever were, Marcello.

  (MARCELLO winces. They regard each other for a long moment. Shot of nail kegs at construction site. Camera peers into keg, counts nails. Shot of bus disappearing around corner. Shot of IRT breaking down. Shot of man in undershirt high on apartment balcony. Shot of little girl with balloon.)

  ANNA: Last night . . .

  MARCELLO (pulls himself together): Forget about last night. Think about tonight. What’s for supper?

  ANNA: Steak. The way you like it.

  MARCELLO: With peanut butter?

  ANNA: Yes.

  MARCELLO: God, that’s decadent.

  ANNA (pleased, smiles): Yes.

  MARCELLO: Don’t you think that’s just a little . . . Fellini?

  ANNA (enigmatically): Yes.

  (Shot of passenger pigeons against bleak sky. Shot of man waiting for bus; bus fails to appear—he is waiting on Park Avenue. Long shot of traffic light changing on Fordham Road. Close shot of unsmoked filter-tip cigarette; it looks virginal, possibly inhibited.)

  ANNA (removes thumb): Last night . . .

  MARCELLO (ignores her, reads from magazine): “A prolonged detailed illustration of the moody surrender of a woman to a rare and elusive love.” Crowther, Times. How do you like that?

  ANNA (thumb): I like it. “Moody surrender.” It’s beautiful.

  MARCELLO: It’s pure pasta, that’s what it is. Listen to this: “Antonioni is so selective and sensitive with his use of camera, so deft in catching intonations of emotional flux and flow in the graphic relations of individuals to the vividly passing scene—” I can’t go on.

  ANNA (rare, elusive): Finish it.

  MARCELLO: “—that what might be slow and tedious as a cinematic style actually turns out quite fascinating in his skillful command of it.” That’s what I call a really ugly sentence.

  ANNA (thumb out): You critics with your jealousies. You disgust me, all of you. Critic!

  MARCELLO: Anna, I think it’s time for your walk.

  ANNA: My long, long, aimless walk? Marcello, I don’t want to go today.

  MARCELLO (slowly, con amore): Anna, you must. It’s a convention.

  ANNA (thumb): Will there be meaningless incidents?

  MARCELLO (bored again): One assumes.

  ANNA: A little girl playing with a balloon?

  MARCELLO: Undoubtedly.

  ANNA: An old man with a terrible lined face reading an Armenian newspaper?

  MARCELLO: Wasn’t he there yesterday?

  ANNA (despair): Of course. Of course.

  (Shot of empty street with man lurking in doorway. Is it Orson Welles? No, unfortunately, it is not Orson Welles. Shot of electricity lurking in wall outlet. Shot of hoarding advertising Sodom and Gomorrah. Shot of I beams stacked randomly in field. Shot of empty benches in park. Medium shot of tree branches afflicted with Memling’s Rot.)

  MARCELLO (reading picture magazine): What is this . . . “surfboard”?

  ANNA (dreamily): One takes a board—

  MARCELLO: Yes?

  ANNA: And runs out into the water with it—

  MARCELLO: Go on.

  ANNA: And sinks.

  MARCELLO: Are you sure?

  ANNA (thumb out, gaze fixed on thumb): Sometimes two people take the board and run out into the water with it and sink. Last night—

  MARCELLO (admiringly): You got a future in the industry, baby. What a gift for empty anecdote!

  ANNA: Marcello, why do we communicate? Why you and me? Last night, when we talked to each other . . . I couldn’t bear it. Why can’t we be like other people? Why can’t we spend our time in mindless eroticism, like everybody else?

  MARCELLO (hangs head): I don’t know.

  ANNA: Last night when we were talking about pure cinema, and I called for a transvaluation of all values, and you said that light was the absence of light—we weren’t communicating then, were we? It was just jargon, wasn’t it? Just noise?

  MARCELLO (facing the truth): No, Anna, I’m afraid we were communicating. On a rather low level.

  ANNA (frenzied, all thumbs): I want my life to be really meaningless. Like in that film. Such boredom! Such emptiness! Such febrile elegance! It was penetratingly different, a magnificent ironic parable, one of the year’s ten best. Marcello!

  MARCELLO: Meaninglessness like that is not for everybody. Not for you and me, cara.

  (ANNA turns away. It is clear that if we could see it her face would reveal an emotion of some kind. MARCELLO knows what she is feeling, or appears to. He stretches out his right hand. But he cannot quite reach ANNA; she is running off down the street after a disappearing bus.)

  MARCELLO: Anna! (Slow pause) Anna?

  (Shot of man on bench looking at camera inquiringly. Shot of cement bags. Shot of leaf floating in gutter; leaf floats down drain. Camera waits four minutes to see if leaf will reappear. It does not reappear. Shot of traffic light; it is stuck. Medium shot of old lady pouring mineral water on head. Close shot of same man on bench; his eyes close.)

  FIN

  MORE ZERO

  A NOVEL OF LOS ANOMIES

  Ashley picks me up in one of the two red BMWs her mother gave her for her birthday. She’s wearing sunglasses and a Wheat Chex T-shirt and tight jeans and says that DataLife will be at Pablo’s tonight and do I want to go. I’m doing a line of coke off the rearview mirror as she drives and it’s sort of tricky and I don’t answer her.

  “Or we could go to Brick’s party,” she says. “Centipede is suppose to be there. The ’rents are in Gstaad or somewhere.”

  I’m feeling just sort of totally ill because I’m only eighteen and I spent the night before playing Old Maid with Kimberly and Griff and it was totally exhausting. We stop at Fanfare and the valet guy takes the car and nods at Ashley and he looks like some guy I’d seen at Oliver’s house in Bel Air the night Oliver OD’d, tan with short blond hair, but Ashley apparently doesn’t know him and we go in and sit down and they g
ive us these big leather menus. The menu is too heavy to lift and I decide that I’m not all that hungry and Ashley sticks her thumb in her mouth and orders the crab salad.

  “Tiffany’s back in Cedars-Sinai,” Ashley says, “and so are Wingate and Pembroke and Pierce. I’ll probably go see them, maybe next week or something. Want to come?”

  I’m thinking about doing my laps which I haven’t done for two days and also about my dealer, Ti-Ti, who was supposed to meet me at Sunflower for breakfast but didn’t show, and also how I have to get some tanning oil, and this line from Stax, “Can’t we have more debris?,” is going through my head and I’m very tense because I have to have dinner with my father tonight and I’m afraid he’ll bring this really large amount of money and give it to me in one of those pretty expensive kangaroo-hide Dopp kits that he uses to carry money in, right in front of everybody at Chasen’s where there’ll probably be all these old guys talking about deals and coming to our table to say hello to my father.

  I get really tense and go into the men’s room and there’s this guy there, too tan with short blond hair, who looks like a guy who was at Spago with Kimberly the night Kimberly totaled her new black Porsche with all the new shirts from Fred Segal that she’d bought for Brent to celebrate his getting out of Cedars-Sinai. I nod to him and say “Hey dude,” he doesn’t respond, just looks at me. He’s holding a big can of Ajax and rubbing Ajax into his gums but I know it isn’t Ajax, it’s probably Comet or Ajax cut with Comet; the guy slides to the floor and I step over him and wash my hands and put some water on my face and go back to Ashley.