Forty Stories (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)

by Donald Barthelme

  In the car on the way back from San Antonio the ladies talked about the rump of a noted poet. “Too big,” they said, “too big too big too big.” “Can you imagine going to bed with him?” they said, and then all said, “No no no no no,” and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed.

  I offered to get out and run alongside the car, if that would allow them to, converse more freely.

  In Copenhagen I went shopping with two Hungarians. I had thought they merely wanted to buy presents for their wives. They bought learner gloves, chess sets, frozen fish, baby food, lawnmowers, air conditioners, kayaks We were six hours in the department store.

  “This will teach you,” they said, “never to go shopping with Hungarians.”

  Again in Paris, the hotel was the Montalembert…. Anna jumped on the bed and sliced her hand open on an open watercolor tin, blood everywhere, the concierge assuring us that “In the war, I saw much worse things.”

  Well, yes.

  But we couldn’t stop the bleeding, in the cab to the American Hospital the driver kept looking over his shoulder to make sure that we weren’t bleeding on his seat covers, handfuls of bloody paper towels in my right and left hands..,.

  On another evening, as we were on our way to dinner, I kicked the kid with carefully calibrated force as we were crossing the Pont Mirabeau, she had been pissy all day, driving us crazy, her character improved instantly, wonderfully, this is a tactic that can be used exactly once.

  In Mexico City we lay with the gorgeous daughter of the American ambassador by a clear, cold mountain stream. Well, that was the plan, it didn’t work out that way. We were around sixteen and had run away from home, in the great tradition, hitched various long rides with various sinister folk, and there we were in the great city with about two t-shirts to Our names. My friend Herman found us jobs in a jukebox factory. Our assignment was to file the slots in American jukeboxes so that they would accept the big, thick Mexican coins. All day long. No gloves.

  After about a week of this we were walking one day on the street on which the Hotel Reforma is to be found and there were my father and grandfather, smiling. “The boys have run away,” my father had told my grandfather, and my grandfather had said, “Hot damn, let’s go get ‘em.” I have rarely seen two grown men enjoying themselves so much.

  Ninety-two this afternoon, the stock market up in heavy trading.

  In Berlin everyone stared, and I could not blame them. You were spectacular, your long skirts, your long dark hair. I was upset by the staring, people gazing at happiness and wondering whether to credit it or not, wondering whether it was to be trusted and for how long, and what it meant to them, whether they were in some way hurt by it, in some way diminished by it, in some way criticized by it, good God get it out of my sight—

  I correctly identified a Matisse as a Matisse even though it was an uncharacteristic Matisse, you thought I was knowledgeable whereas I was only lucky, we stared at the Schwitters show for one hour and twenty minutes, and then lunched. Vitello tonnato, as I recall.

  When Herman was divorced in Boston … Carol got the good barbecue pit. I put it in the Blazer for her. In the back of the Blazer were cartons of books, tableware, sheets and towels, plants, and oddly, two dozen white carnations fresh in their box. I pointed to the flowers. “Herman,” she said, “he never gives up.”

  In Barcelona the lights went out. At dinner. Candles were produced and the shiny langoustines placed before us. Why do I love Barcelona above most other cities? Because Barcelona and I share a passion for walking? I was happy there? You were with me? We were celebrating my hundredth marriage? I’ll stand on that. Show me a man who has not married a hundred times and I’ll show you a wretch who does not deserve God’s good world.

  Lunching with the Holy Ghost I praised the world, and the Holy Ghost was pleased. “We have that little problem in Barcelona,” He said, “the lights go out in the middle of dinner.” “I’ve noticed,” I said. “We’re working on it,” He said, “what a wonderful city, one of our best.” “A great town,” I agreed. In an ecstasy of admiration for what is we ate our simple soup.

  Tomorrow, fair and warmer, warmer and fair, most fair …

  Construction

  I went to Los Angeles and, in due course, returned, having finished the relatively important matter of business which had taken me to Los Angeles, something to do with a contract, a noxious contract, which I signed, after the new paragraphs were inserted and initialed by all parties, tiresome business of initialing numberless copies of documents reproduced on onionskin, which does not feel happy in the hand. One of the lawyers wore a woven straw Western hat with a snake hatband. He had an excessive suntan. The hatband displayed as its centerpiece the head of a rattlesnake with its mouth stretched and the fangs touchable. Helen made a joke about it, she does something in the West Coast office, I’m not sure what it is but she is treated with considerable deference, they all seem to defer to her, an attractive woman, of course, but also one who manifests a certain authority, a quiet authority, had I had the time I would have asked someone what she was “all about,” as we say, but I had to get back, one cannot spend all one’s time in lawyers’ offices in Los Angeles. Although it was January and there was snow, blizzarding even, elsewhere, the temperature was in the fifties and the foliage, the collection of strange-looking trees, not trees but something between a tree and a giant shrub, that distinguishes the city, that hides what is less prepossessing than the trees—I refer to the local construction—which serves as a screen or scrim between the eye and the local construction, much of it admirable no doubt, the foliage was successfully carrying out its function, making Los Angeles a pleasant, reticent, green place, which fact I noticed before my return from Los Angeles.

  The flight back from Los Angeles was without event, very calm and smooth in the night. I had a cup of hot chicken noodle soup which the flight attendant was kind enough to prepare for me; I handed her the can of chicken noodle soup and she (I suppose, I don’t know the details) heated it in her microwave oven and then brought me the cup of hot chicken noodle soup which I had handed her in canned form, also a number of drinks which helped make the calm, smooth flight more so. The plane was half empty, there had been a half-hour delay in getting off the ground which I spent marveling at a sentence in a magazine, the sentence reading as follows: “[Name of film] explores the issues of love and sex without ever being chaste.” I marveled over this for the full half-hour we sat on the ground waiting for clearance on my return from Los Angeles, thinking of adequate responses, such as “Well we avoided that at least,” but no response I could conjure up was equal to or could be equal to the original text which I tore out of the magazine and folded and placed, folded, in my jacket pocket for further consideration at some time in the future when I might need a giggle. Then deplaning and carrying my bag through the mostly deserted tunnels of the airport to the cab rank, I obtained a cab driven by a black man who was, he said, leaving the cab business to begin a messenger service and had that very morning taken delivery on a truck, a 1987 Toyota, for the purpose and was, as soon as his shift ended, going to not only show the 1987 Toyota to his mother but also pick up his car insurance. He asked me what I thought about the economy and I said that I thought it would continue to do well, nationally, for a time but that the local economy, by which I meant that of the whole region, would I thought not do as well, because of structural problems. He then told me a story about being in the jungle in Vietnam with a fellow who had been there for seventeen months and got a letter from his wife in which she announced that she was pregnant but (and I quote) “hadn’t been doing anything,” and that his colleague, in the jungle, had then gone crazy, and I said, “Seventeen months, what was he doing there for seventeen months?” the normal tour being one year, and he said, “He extended,” and I said, “He extended?” and he said, “Yeah, extended,” and I said, “Then he was crazy before he got the letter,” and he said, “Bingo!” and we both said, “Hoo hoo,” in healthy f
ashion. He dropped me off in front of my building and I went upstairs and made a thickish cup of Hot Spiced Cider from an envelope of Hot Spiced Cider Mix that I had acquired free when I bought the bottle of Tree Top Apple Cider that was in my refrigerator, and took off my tie, and sat there, in my house, on my return from Los Angeles.

  I thought about the food that I had had in Los Angeles and about what I had to do next, the next day, the next several days, and of course about the long-range plan. I sat there in the darkened room without a shirt (I had taken off my shirt) thinking about the food I had had in Los Angeles, the rather ordinary Tournedos Rossini, the rather too down-to-earth Huevos Rancheros in a very expensive place that nevertheless presented its Huevos Rancheros on a tin plate, and its coffee in cracked blue enamel mugs, the Chuck Wagon was its name. Breakfast there with Helen, who had an air of authority, one could not immediately fathom its source and I was too tired, after a long night in Los Angeles, too tired or insufficiently interested, to ask the questions, either of her associates or my associates or of Helen directly, that would have allowed me to fathom the sources of her authority in Los Angeles, Los Angeles being to me a place where one went, of necessity, at rare intervals, to sign and/or initial or renegotiate whatever needed such attention. I noticed very little about the place, the shrubs or trees, saw a bit of the ocean from my hotel* room window, saw an old woman in a green bathrobe on the balcony of the building opposite, at the same level, the eleventh floor, and wondered if she was a guest or if she was one of those persons who clean the place; if she was one of those persons who clean the place it seemed unlikely that she would come to work in a green bathrobe and I am sure that she wore a green bathrobe, but she did not resemble a guest or tenant, she had a bent broken stooped losing-the-game look of the kind that defines the person who is not winning the game. Seldom am I in error about such things, the eidetic memory as we say, saw a figure of some kind possibly female atop the Mormon temple, the figure seemed to be leading the people somewhere, onward, presumably, saw several unpainted pictures on the street, from the windows of the limousine in which I was moved from place to place, Pietas mostly, one creature holding another creature in its arms, at bus stops, mostly. Los Angeles.

  I thought about sand although I saw no sand in Los Angeles, they told me that there were beaches in the vicinity; the bit of ocean I had seen from the window of my hotel room on Wilshire implied sand but I saw no sand during my not extensive stay in Los Angeles, where I signed various documents having to do with the long-range plan, which I sat thinking about in the dank without my shirt upon my return from Los Angeles. I mentally compared our city to Los Angeles, a competition in which our city was not found inferior, you may be sure, a weighing of values in which our city was not given short weight, you may be sure. In the matter of madhouses alone we surpass Los Angeles. To say nothing of our grand boulevards and taverns (where never, never would one be served Hucvos Rancheros on a tin plate) and our excellent mayor who habitually meets the City Council with a Holy Bible clenched between his teeth. But I had no desire to get into a slanging match with the city of Los Angeles, in my mind, and so turned my mind to the problem at hand, the long-range plan.

  I was considering the long-range plan, pressing upon me in all its immensity, the eight-hundred-and-seventy-six-million-dollar long-range plan for which I have been repeatedly criticized by my associates and by their associates and, who knows, by associates of the associates of my associates, with particular reference to the vast underground parking facility, when my mother telephoned to ask what the left-hand page of a book is called. My mother often calls me at two o’clock in the morning because she has trouble sleeping. “Recto,” I said, “it’s either recto or verso, I don’t remember which is which, look it up, how, are you?” My mother said that she was fine except for horrible nightmares when she did manage to get to sleep, horrible nightmares involving the long-range plan. I had taken the eight-hundred-and-seventy-six-million-dollar long-range plan home to show my mother some months previously, she studied the many-hundred-page printout and then announced that, very probably, it would give her nightmares. My mother is a disciple of Schumacher, the “small” man, a disciple of Mumford, a disciple (moving backward in time) of Fourier, and a disciple most recently of Francois Mitterrand, she wonders why we can’t have a President like that, a real Socialist who also speaks excellent French. My mother is somewhat out of touch with present realities and feels that property is theft and feels that my father taught me the wrong things (although I feel that much of what my father taught me, in his quite bold and dramatic way, his quite bold and dramatic and let it be acknowledged self-dramatizing way, was of great use to me later—the épée, the leveraged buyout, Chapter II—although had he really loved me he would have placed more stress, perhaps, on air conditioning, the manufacture, sale, installation, and maintenance of air conditioning). My problem with the long-range plan was not ethical, like my mother’s, but practical: Why am I doing this?

  It is not easy, it is not the easiest thing, to go through life asking this sort of question, this sort of poignant and noxious question that poisons and makes poignant (I detest poignancy!) one’s every can of chicken noodle soup or cup of Hot Spiced Cider, afflicting equally morning, noon, and night (I sleep no better than my mother does), infecting calm seriousness and the will-to-win. For America, I say to myself, for America, and that works sometimes but sometimes it does not; for America is better than because I can and not as good, not as sweetly persuasive, as movement of historical forces, which is itself less convincing than either what else? or why not? Where in this, I ask myself, where in all this “construction” (and the vast underground parking facility alone will extend from here to St. Louis, or very near), where in all this is the (and we do not fail to notice, do not fail to notice, the constructive associations clustering about the word “construction,” the hugely affirmative and congratulatory overtones clinging like busy rust to the word “construction”) answer to the question, Why am I doing this? What else? Why not?

  There remained the mystery of Helen, whose moods, her aggressive moods, her fearful moods, her celebratory, resentful, and temporizing moods, remained to be plumbed, thoroughly plumbed. Thoroughness is the key to avoidance of noxious and life-ruining questions, perplexing, noxious, and life-ruining questions which threaten the delicate principle, construction. Construction is like a little boy growing up or an old man winding down or a middle-aged man floundering in the soup, where not infrequently I find that boiling lobster, myself. The spread (margarine, disease) of the physical surround can be like a spill of mixed motives or like an irruption of the divine (New Jerusalem, vast underground parking facility) or like decay in the sense of spoliation of an existing unshrubbed unbuilt swamp or Eden, these are the three categories under which construction may be subsumed, the word “subsumed” itself sounds like a soil test. But if one spends (and on the word “spend” I wish to dwell not at all) one’s time thinking about these issues one loosens one’s grasp on other issues, bond issues, for example, on leverage and the honest use of materials and density and building codes which vary fearfully from locality to locality and tax wrinkles and the golden section and 1% for art and 100% locations and cul-de-sacs and the Wiener Werkstätte and seals-and-cladding and fast skinning and cure of paints and the beveling of glass and how to clinch a nail and how to sleep well, at night, in the vast marché aux puces of my calling….

  The next day, pausing only to instruct my secretary, Rip, to throw our messenger business to Hubie the former cabdriver, who had given me his card, I flew back to Los Angeles to begin understanding the mystery of Helen.

  Letters To The Editore

  THE Editor of Shock Art has hardly to say that the amazing fecundity of the LeDuff-Galerie Z controversy during the past five numbers has enflamed both shores of the Atlantic, at intense length. We did not think anyone would care, but apparently, a harsh spot has been touched. It is a terrible trouble to publish an international art-jour
nal in two languages simultaneously, and the opportunities for dissonance have not been missed. We will accept solely one more correspondence on this matter, addressed to our editorial offices, 6, Viale Berenson, 20144 Milano (Italy), and that is the end. Following is a poor selection of the recent reverberations.

  Nicolai PONT

  Editore

  SIRS:

  This is to approximate a reply to the reply of Doug LeDuff to our publicity of 29 December which appeared in your journal and raised such possibilities of anger. The furnings of Mr. LeDuff were not unanticipated by those who know. However nothing new has been proved by these vapourings, which leave our points untouched, for the most part, and limp off into casuistry and vague threats. We are not very intimidated! The matters of substantial interest in our original publicity are scatheless. Mr. LeDuff clearly has the opinion that the readers of Shock Art are dulls, which we do not. Our contention that the works of Mr. LeDuff the American are sheer copyings of the work of our artist Gianbello Bruno can be sustained by ruthless scholarship, of the type that Mr. LeDuff cannot, for obvious reasons, bear to produce. But the recipient of today’s art-scene is qualified enough to judge for himself. We need only point to the 1978 exposition at the Galerie Berger, Paris, in which the “asterisk” series of Bruno was first inserted, to see what is afoot. The American makes the claim that he has been painting asterisks since 1975—we say, if so, where are these asterisks? In what collections? In what expositions? With what documentation? Whereas the accomplishment of the valuable Bruno is fully documented, by the facts and other printed materials, as was brought out in our original publicity. That LeDuff has infiltrated the collectors of four continents with his importunity proves nothing, so much so as to be dismissive and final.