The Teachings of Don B.

by Donald Barthelme

  KEVIN: Can you . . . tell me why?

  BILL: No.

  KEVIN: Is it a secret?

  BILL: No.

  KEVIN: Is it a mystery?

  BILL (hesitates): No. (Pause) Yes.

  KEVIN: You don’t love her anymore?

  BILL (impatient): That’s not it.

  KEVIN: You’ve lost your. . . ability to deal creatively with the many-faceted problems of existence?

  (BILL cracks up. KEVIN is taken aback.)

  BILL: I wanted to be great, once. But the moon for that was not in my sky. (Pause) I had hoped to make a powerful statement. (Pause) I had hoped to make a powerful statement, coupled with a moving plea. (Pause) I wanted to engage in a great debate, but the important thinkers I contacted were all shaken with sobs—wracked is the word for it. Why did we conceal that emotion which, had we declared it, might have liberated us? (Pause) I listened to the radio, I heard weeping. (Pause) I wanted to make suitable arrangements but those whose lives I had thought to arrange did not present themselves on the appointed day. (Pause) She laughed, in her room, pulling from under the pillow grainy gray photographs in albums, pictures of people weeping. (Pause) It was hell there, in the furnace of my ambition.

  KEVIN: But do you think we can . . .

  BILL: We can try. We can try. We can always try.

  KEVIN (relieved): That’s right! We can try like . . . hell!

  BILL (ironic): We can try like hell, (BILL smiles at KEVIN. Looks at SNOW WHITE’S hair for a moment) Heigh-ho, everybody.

  (Blackout)

  SCENE TWO

  (Six of the seven men with whom SNOW WHITE lives are onstage. They are all in their late twenties, in appearance lean young American businessmen in business suits. The set is now a living space defined by ultramodern furniture, Knoll or some such. A raised platform about five feet high runs along the back of the stage, in darkness or semidarkness, EDWARD, KEVIN, CLEM, HUBERT, HENRY, and DAN are distributed about the stage in attitudes of relaxation, as if after work.)

  EDWARD: Perhaps we should not be tending the vats and washing the buildings and carrying the money to the vault once a week, like everybody else. Perhaps we should be doing something else entirely, with our lives. God knows what. We do what we do without thinking. One tends the vats and washes the buildings and carries the money to the vault, and never stops for a moment to consider that the whole practice may be—

  CLEM: Despicable. Despicable!

  DAN (still gospel style): The future belongs . . . to those who . . . prepare for it.

  CLEM (emphatic): Oh yes!

  ALL: Oh yes!

  HENRY: Vats vats vats vats . . .

  ALL: Oh yes!

  HENRY: Real estate!

  ALL: Oh yes!

  HENRY: Baby food!

  ALL: Oh yes!

  HENRY: Chinese baby food!

  ALL: Oh oh yes!

  HENRY: Baby Dim Sum!

  ALL: Oh oh yes!

  HUBERT: Baby Sweet and Sour Pork!

  ALL: Oh yes, oh yes!

  CLEM: Twenty-three thousand cases this week alone!

  ALL: Vats vats vats vats . . .

  HUBERT: Real estate! Baby food! The profit motive!

  ALL (climax): Yeah yeah right right oh yes!

  CLEM: Before we found Snow White wandering in the forest we lived lives . . . stuffed with equanimity. There was equanimity for everybody. We washed the buildings, tended the vats, and wended our way to the country cathouse once a week—

  ALL: Heigh-ho!

  CLEM: —like everybody else. We were simple bourgeois. We knew what to do. But now—

  EDWARD: Now she’s written a gigantic poem, four pages long.

  (SNOW WHITE, wearing a red towel, is seated on a raised platform which contains a writing desk and, left, a shower curtain—the shower space.)

  HENRY: Here’s the mail.

  (SNOW WHITE is writing, does not look up.)

  HENRY: Usually she likes to paw over the mail. (A bit more insistent) Here’s the mail!

  (SNOW WHITE remains preoccupied. The men look at each other uneasily.)

  DAN (a bit angrily): What are you doing there? Writing something?

  (SNOW WHITE looks up.)

  SNOW WHITE: Yes.

  HENRY: What is it?

  SNOW WHITE: Poem.

  (The MEN look at each other in fear.)

  DAN: Poem?

  SNOW WHITE: Yes. (Pause) Poem.

  EDWARD: There it is—the red meat on the floor.

  (Whispered consultation among the MEN)

  KEVIN (boldly): Well, can we have a peek?

  SNOW WHITE: No.

  EDWARD (tentative): How long is it?

  SNOW WHITE: Four pages. At present.

  EDWARD (thunderstruck): Four pages!

  HENRY (to himself): Four pages! (To SNOW WHITE) Is it rhymed or free?

  SNOW WHITE: Free. Free, free, free.

  DAN: And the theme?

  SNOW WHITE: One of the great themes. That is all I can reveal at this time.

  DAN: Could you tell us the first word?

  SNOW WHITE: The first word is bandagedandwounded. Run together.

  DAN (thinking): How is that bandage precedes woundl

  SNOW WHITE: A metaphor for the self armoring itself against the gaze of The Other.

  DAN: The theme is Loss, then.

  SNOW WHITE: What. . . else?

  HENRY: Are you specific as to what is lost?

  SNOW WHITE: Brutally.

  (The MEN nervously talking among themselves CLEM steps into the breach, talking to paper things over.)

  CLEM (to audience): Sometimes I see signs written on the walls which say “Kill the Rich.” And sometimes “Kill the Rich” has been rubbed out and “Harm the Rich” written underneath. A clear gain for civilization, I’d say. And then the one that says “fean-Paul Sartre Is a Fartre.” Something going on there, you must admit. Dim flicker of something. (Pause) I see a great many couples, men and women, walking along. When I see a couple fighting, I give them a dollar, because fighting is interesting. Thank God for fighting. But if we can’t fight, we can at least fornicate. (Pause) Hard to tell which is preferable.

  (CLEM joins SNOW WHITE in the shower space.)

  SNOW WHITE: This water is marvelous. When it falls on my tender back. The white meat there. Give me the needle spray. First the hot, then the cold. A thousand tiny points of perturbation. More perturbation! And who is it with me, here in the shower? It is Clem. The approach is Clem’s, and the technique, or lack of it, is Clem, Clem, Clem. And Hubert waits outside, on the other side of the shower curtain, and Dan in the hall, before the closed door, and Edward is sitting downstairs, waiting. But what of Bill? Why is it that Bill, the leader, has not tapped on my shower stall door, in recent weeks? Clem, you are downright antierotic, in those blue jeans and chaps! Everything in life is interesting except Clem’s idea of sexual congress—his Western confusion between the concept “pleasure” and the concept “increasing the size of the herd.”

  MEN (in chorus): Skidmore College is where she got her education. She studied “Modern Woman, Her Privileges and Responsibilities”! the nature and nurture of women and what they stand for, in evolution and in history, including householding, upbringing, peacekeeping, healing, and devotion.

  SNOW WHITE (complaining): I am tired of being just a horsewife!

  MEN (in chorus): Then she studied “Classical Guitar One,” the methods and techniques of Sor, Tàrrega, Segovia. Then she studied “English Romantic Poets Two”: Shelley, Byron, Keats.

  SNOW WHITE: I am tired of being a horse wife!

  MEN (in chorus): Skidmore College is where she got her education. She studied “Theoretical Foundations of Psychology”: mind, consciousness, unconscious mind, personality, the self, interpersonal relations, psychosexual norms, social games, groups, adjustment, conflict, authority, mental health.

  SNOW WHITE: Oh I wish there were some words in the world that were not the words I always hear!

&nbs
p; MEN (in chorus): Then she studied “Realism and Idealism in the Contemporary Italian Novel”: Berto, Cassola, Ginzburg, Malaparte, Calvino, Gadda, Bassani, Landolfi. Then she studied . . .

  (BILL enters on the platform, right, and crosses to the edge of SNOW WHITE’s space, making it clear that he stands outside the shower area.)

  SNOW WHITE: But the water on my back is interesting. It is more than interesting. Marvelous is the word for it.

  BILL (to audience): Well it is a pleasure to please her, when human ingenuity can manage it, but the whole thing is just trembling on the edge of monotony, after several years. And yet . . . I am fond of her. Yes, I am. For when sexual pleasure is had, it makes you fond, in a strange way, of the other one, the one with whom you are having it.

  SNOW WHITE (to audience): But who am I to love? I love them, in a way, but it isn’t enough.

  BILL: And the psychiatrist?

  SNOW WHITE: He was unforgivable.

  BILL: Unforgivable?

  SNOW WHITE: He said I was uninteresting.

  BILL: Uninteresting?

  SNOW WHITE: He said I was a screaming bore.

  BILL: That’s less than kind.

  SNOW WHITE: He said, “Let’s go to a movie,” for God’s sake.

  BILL: And?

  SNOW WHITE: We went to a movie.

  BILL: Which?

  SNOW WHITE: A Charlton Heston.

  BILL: How was it?

  SNOW WHITE: Excellent.

  BILL: Was there popcorn?

  SNOW WHITE: Mars Bars.

  BILL: Did you hold hands?

  SNOW WHITE: Naturellement.

  BILL: And after?

  SNOW WHITE: Drinks.

  BILL: And after that?

  SNOW WHITE: Don’t pry.

  BILL: But . . . three days at the psychiatrist’s . . .

  MEN (in chorus): What is Snow White thinking? No one knows.

  (HENRY moves downstage, right, adjusting his tie, looking in a mirror, etc.)

  HENRY: Now it is necessary to court her, and win her, and put on this clean dressing gown, and cut my various nails, and drink something that will kill the millions of germs in my mouth, and say something flattering, and be witty and bonny, and hale and kinky, all just to ease this wrinkle in the groin. It seems a high price.

  DAN: You live in a world of your own, Henry.

  HENRY: I can certainly improve on what was given.

  (HENRY turns and climbs up on the platform to SNOW WHITE’S shower space. He stands behind her and puts his arms around her.)

  BILL (to audience): Snow White knows a singing bone. The singing bone has told her stories which have left her troubled and confused: of a bear transformed into a king’s son, of an immense treasure at the bottom of a brook, of a crystal casket in which there is a cap that makes the wearer invisible. This must not continue. The behavior of the bone is unacceptable. The bone must be persuaded to confine itself to events and effects confirmable by the instrumentarium of the physical sciences. Someone must reason with the bone!

  MEN (in chorus): What is Snow White thinking? No one knows.

  SNOW WHITE: Those men . . . hulking . . . hulk in closets . . . and outside . . . gestures eventuating against a white screen . . . difficulties . . . intelligence. . . . I only wanted one plain hero of incredible size . . . soft, flexible manners . . . parts . . . thought . . . dissembling . . . add up the thumbprints on my shoulders . . . seven is . . . different levels of emotional . . . mirror . . . daytime . . . Bill . . . thank you.

  (PAUL enters carrying a very large painting, painfully abstract.)

  PAUL: Is there someplace I can put this? It’s a new thing I just finished today, still a little wet I’m afraid.

  (PAUL leans canvas against chair, SNOW WHITE inspects it.)

  SNOW WHITE: It’s poor. Poor, poor.

  PAUL (complacently): Yes. One of my poorer things, I think.

  SNOW WHITE: Wonderfully poor.

  PAUL: Yes, it has some of the qualities of poorness. I just took up painting yesterday. This is only my fourth canvas.

  SNOW WHITE: Especially poor in the lower-left-hand corner.

  PAUL: I would go so far as to hurl it into the marketplace.

  SNOW WHITE: What is your name, handsome stranger? You have a certain . . . princeliness.

  PAUL: Paul. I am princely. There is that. At times, when I am down, I am able to pump myself up again by thinking about my blood. It is blue, the bluest this fading world has known, probably. At times I startle myself with a gesture so royal, so full of light, that I wonder where it comes from. (Pause) It comes from my father, Paul the Seventeenth, a most kingly man and personage. Even though his sole accomplishment during his long lack of reign was the de-deification of his own person. The one thing they could not take away from him, there in that hall bedroom in Montreux, was his blood. And the other thing they could not take away from him was his airs and graces, which I have inherited, to a sickening degree. Even at fifty-five he was still putting cologne in his shoes. The height of his ambition was to tumble the odd chambermaid now and then, whereas I have loftier ambitions, only I don’t know what they are, exactly. Probably I should go out and effect a liaison with some beauty who needs me, and save her, and ride away with her flung over the pommel of my palfrey. But on the other hand . . . that’s an awful lot of trouble. (Pause) He was peculiar, my father. He knew some things other men do not know. He heard the swans singing just before death, and the bees barking in the night. That is what he said, but I didn’t believe him then. Now I don’t know.

  SNOW WHITE (looking at the picture): Sublimely poor!

  PAUL: Wallpaper!

  (SNOW WHITE jumps down from the platform. She walks slowly up to PAUL and looks at him very carefully, then goes off opposite side.)

  (Blackout)

  SCENE THREE

  (The platform has been hoisted about halfway up the back of the stage. A grid suggesting windows is seen behind it. On the platform are EDWARD, KEVIN, DAN, and BILL, with buckets, squeegees, etc. HUBERT, HENRY, and CLEM are onstage, backs to the audience, miming building-washing. At right are JANE and HER MOTHER, with an ironing board (for instance), JANE addresses the audience)

  JANE: I was fair once. I was the fairest of them all. Men came from miles around simply to be in my power. But those days are gone. Those better days. Now I cultivate my malice. It is a cultivated malice, not the pale natural malice we knew, when the world was young. I grow more and more witchlike as the hazy days imperceptibly slip into one another, and the musky months sink into memory as into a sough, sump, or slime. But I have my malice. I have that. I have even invented new varieties of malice, that men have not seen before now. Were it not for the fact that I am the sleepie of Hogo de Bergerac, I would be total malice. But I am redeemed by this hopeless love, which places us along the human continuum, still. (Pause) Mother, can I go over to Hogo’s and play?

  MOTHER: No, Jane, Hogo is not the right type of young man for you to play with. He is forty now and that is too old for innocent play. I am afraid he knows some kind of play that is not innocent, and will want you to play it with him, and you will agree in your ignorance, and then the fat will be in the fire. That is the way I have the situation figured out. That is my reading of it. That is the way it looks from where I stand. (Pause) What is that apelike hand I see reaching into my mailbox?

  JANE: Mother, all this false humility does not become you. Neither does that mucky old poor-little-match-girl dress.

  MOTHER: This dress Til have you know cost two hundred and forty dollars when it was new.

  JANE: When it was new?

  MOTHER (elegiac): It was new in 1918, the year your father and I were in the trenches together, in the Great War. That was a war, all right. Oh I know there have been other wars since, better-publicized ones, more expensive ones, but our war is the one I’ll always remember. Our war is the one that means war to me.

  JANE: Mother, I know Hogo is forty and thoroughly vile through and through, but there
is something drawing me to him. To his house. To the uninnocence which awaits me there.

  MOTHER: Simmer down, child. I know how you feel. I was a person myself, once. (Pause) What is that apelike hand I see reaching into my mailbox?

  JANE: That’s nothing. Think nothing of it. It’s nothing. It’s just one of my familiars, Mother. It’s just an ape, that’s all. Just an ordinary ape. Don’t give it another thought.

  MOTHER: I think you dismiss these things too easily, Jane. It’s unusual. It means something.

  JANE: No, Mother. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just what I said it was.

  MOTHER: I’m sure it means more than that, Jane.

  JANE: NO, Mother, it does not mean more than that. Don’t go reading things into things, Mother.

  MOTHER: I wish you wouldn’t surround yourself with such strange creatures, Jane. The ape . . . Hogo . . .

  JANE: Shhh, Mother. I have work to do. (MOTHER exits, JANE picks up telephone book. Closes her eyes. Stabs telephone book with her forefinger. Opens her eyes. Memorizes number. Puts book down. Picks telephone up, dials.) Mr. Quistgaard? (Pause) Hello, Mr. Quistgaard. (Pause) Although you do not know me, my name is Jane. (Pause) fane. (Pause) I am a witch. (Pause) A witch. I am a very good witch. (Pause) I have seized your name, Mr. Quistgaard, from the telephone book. (Pause) From the telephone book. It was right there, in the telephone book. (Pause) You are correct, Mr. Quistgaard, in seeing this as a threatening situation. Who knows what I might say? Who knows what I might ask? Who knows what I might tell? Who knows what I might be told? (Settling down; cozy) Now, Mr. Quistgaard, let’s chat for a bit.

  (HOGO enters, JANE continues to whisper threats during HOGO’S speech but hangs up before he is finished.)

  HOGO: God, what filthy beasts we were, then! And what a thing it must have been to be a Hun! A filthy Boche! And then to turn around and be a Nazi! A gray vermin! And today? (Pause) Filthy deutschmarks! That so eclipse the very mark and texture of a man . . . That so eclipse the very mark and bosom of a man, that vileness . . . that vileness itself is vilely overthrown. That so enfold . . . that so enwash . . . Bloody deutschmarks! That so enwrap the very warp and fiber of a man, that what we cherished in him, vileness, is—Dies, his ginger o’erthrown. Bald pelf! That so encapsulates the very wrack and mixture of a man, that in him the sweet stings of vileness are . . . all ginger fled, he . . .