Forty Stories (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)

by Donald Barthelme

  —I’ll never achieve abandon.

  —Work hard and concentrate. Try Clown, Baby, Hell-hag, Witch, the Laughing Cavalier. The Lord helps those—

  —Purple bursts in my face as if purple staples had been stapled there every which way—

  —Hurt by malicious criticisms all very well grounded—

  —Oh that clown band. Oh its sweet strains.

  —The sky. A rectangle of glister. Behind which, a serene brown. A yellow bar, vertical, in the upper right.

  —I love you, Harmonica, quite exceptionally.

  —By gum I think you mean it. I think you do.

  —It’s Portia Wounding Her Thigh.

  —It’s Wolfram Looking at His Wife Whom He Has Imprisoned with the Corpse of Her Lover.

  —If you need a friend I’m yours till the end.

  —Your gracious and infinitely accommodating presence.

  —Julia’s is the best. Best I’ve ever seen. The finest.

  —The muscle of jealousy is not in me. Nowhere.

  —Oh it is so fine. Incomparable.

  —Some think one thing, some another.

  —The very damn best believe me.

  —Well I don’t know, I haven’t seen it.

  —Well, would you like to see it?

  —Well, I don’t know, I don’t know her very well do you?

  —Well, I know her well enough to ask her.

  —Well, why don’t you ask her if it’s not an inconvenience or this isn’t the wrong time or something.

  —Well, probably this is the wrong time come to think of it because she isn’t here and some time when she is here would probably be a better time.

  —Well, I would like to see it right now because just talking about it has got me in the mood to see it. If you know what I mean.

  —She told me that she didn’t like to be called just for that purpose, people she didn’t know and maybe wouldn’t like if she did know, I’m just warning you.

  —Oh.

  —You see.

  —I see.

  —I could have done better. But I don’t know how. Could have done better, cleaned better or cooked better or I don’t know. Better.

  —You smile. And the angels sing. La la la la la la la la la la la la.

  —Blew it. Blew it.

  —Had a clown at the wedding he officiated standing there in his voluptuous white costume his drum and trumpet at his feet. He said, “Do you, Harry …” and all that. The guests applauded, the clown band played, it was a brilliant occasion.

  —Our many moons of patience and accommodation. Tricks and stunts unknown to common cunts.

  —The guests applauded. Above us, a great tent with red and yellow stripes.

  —The unexploded pillow and the simple, blunt sheet.

  —I was fecund, savagely so.

  —Painting dead women by the hundreds in passionate imitation of Delacroix.

  —Sailing after lunch and after sailing, gin.

  —Do not go into the red barn, he said. I went into the red barn. Julia. Swinging on a rope from hayloft to tack room. Gazed at by horses with their large, accepting eyes. They somehow looked as if they knew.

  —You packed hastily reaching the station just before midnight counting the pennies in your purse.

  —Yes. Regaining the city, plunged once more into activities.

  —You’ve got to have something besides yourself. A cause, interest, or goal.

  —Made myself knowledgeable in certain areas, one, two, three, four. Studied the Value Line and dipped into cocoa.

  —The kind of thing you do so well.

  —Acquired busts of certain notables, marble, silver, bronze. The Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

  —Wailed a bit now and then into the ears of friends and caverns of the telephone.

  —But I rallied. Rallied.

  —Made an effort. Made the effort.

  —To make soft what is hard. To make hard the soft. To conceal what is black with use, under new paint. Check the tomatoes with their red times, in the manual. To enspirit the spiritless. To get me a jug and go out behind the barn sharing with whoever is out behind the barn, peasant or noble.

  —Sometimes I have luck. In plazas or taverns.

  —Right as rain. I mean okey-dokey.

  —Unless the participant affirmatively elects otherwise.

  —What does that mean?

  —Damfino. Just a bit of legal language I picked up somewhere.

  —You are the sunshine of my life.

  —Toys toys I want more toys.

  —Yes, I should think you would.

  —That wallow in certainty called the love affair.

  —The fading gray velvet of the sofa. He clowned with my panties in his teeth. Walked around that way for half an hour.

  —What’s this gunk here in this bucket?

  —Bread in milk, have some.

  —I think I could eat a little something.

  —A mistletoe salad we whipped up together.

  —Stick to it, keep after it. Only way to go is all the way.

  —Want to buy a garter belt? Have one, thanks. Cut your losses, try another town, split for the tall timber.

  —Well it’s a clean afternoon, heavy on the azaleas.

  —Yes they pride themselves on their azaleas. Have competitions, cups.

  —I dashed a hope and dimmed an ardor. Promises shimmering like shrimp in light just under the surface of the water.

  —Peered into his dental arcade noting the health of his pink tissue.

  —Backed into a small table which overturned with a scattering of ashtrays and back copies of important journals.

  —What ought I to do? What do you advise me? Should I try to see him? What will happen? Can you tell me?

  —Yes it’s caring and being kind. We have corn dodgers too and blood sausage.

  —Lasciviously offered a something pure and white.

  —But he hastily with an embarrassed schottische of the hands covered you up again.

  —Much like that. Every day. I don’t mind doing the work if I get the results.

  —We had a dog because we thought it would keep us together. A plain dog.

  —Did it?

  —Naw it was just another of those dumb ideas we had we thought would keep us together.

  —Bone ignorance.

  —Saw him once more, he was at a meeting I was at, had developed an annoying habit of coughing into his coat collar whenever he—

  —Coughed.

  —Yes he’d lift his coat collar and cough into it odd mannerism very annoying.

  —Then the candles going out one by one—

  —The last candle hidden behind the altar—

  —The tabernacle door ajar—

  —The clapping shut of the book.

  —I got ready for the great day. The great day came, several times in fact.

  —Each time with memories of the last time.

  —No. These do not in fact intrude. Maybe as a slight patina of the over-and-done-with. Each great day is itself, with its own war machines, rattles, and green lords. There is the hesitation that the particular day won’t be what it is meant to be. Mostly it is. That’s peculiar.

  —He told me terrible things in the evening of that day as we sat side by side waiting for the rain to wash his watercolor paper clean. Waiting for the rain to wash the watercolors from his watercolor paper.

  —What do the children say?

  —There’s a thing the children say.

  —What do the children say?

  —They say: Will you always love me?

  —Always.

  —Will you always remember me?

  —Always.

  —Will you remember me a year from now?

  —Yes, I will.

  —Will you remember me two years from now?

  —Yes, I will.

  —Will you remember me five years from now?

  —Yes, I will.

 
—Knock knock.

  —Who’s there?

  —You see?

  The Baby

  THE first thing the baby did wrong was to tear pages out of her books. So we made a rule that each time she tore a page out of a book she had to stay alone in her room for four hours, behind the closed door. She was tearing out about a page a day, in the beginning, and the rule worked fairly well, although the crying and screaming from behind the closed door were unnerving. We reasoned that that was the price you had to pay, or part of the price you had to pay. But then as her grip improved she got to tearing out two pages at a time, which meant eight hours alone in her room, behind the closed door, which just doubled the annoyance for everybody. But she wouldn’t quit doing it. And then as time went on we began getting days when she tore out three or four pages, which put her alone in her room for as much as sixteen hours at a stretch, interfering with normal feeding and worrying my wife. But I felt that if you made a rule you had to stick to it, had to be consistent, otherwise they get the wrong idea. She was about fourteen months old or fifteen months old at that point. Often, of course, she’d go to sleep, after an hour or so of yelling, that was a mercy. Her room was very nice, with a nice wooden rocking horse and practically a hundred dolls and stuffed animals. Lots of things to do in that room if you used your time wisely, puzzles and things. Unfortunately sometimes when we opened the door we’d find that she’d torn more pages out of more books while she was inside, and these pages had to be added to the total, in fairness.

  The baby’s name was Born Dancin’. We gave the baby some of our wine, red, white, and blue, and spoke seriously to her. But it didn’t do any good.

  I must say she got real clever. You’d come up to her where she was playing on the floor, in those rare times when she was out of her room, and there’d be a book there, open beside her, and you’d inspect it and it would look perfectly all right. And then you’d look closely and you’d find a page that had one little corner torn, could easily pass for ordinary wear-and-tear, but I knew what she’d done, she’d torn off this little corner and swallowed it. So that had to count and it did. They will go to any lengths to thwart you. My wife said that maybe we were being too rigid and that the baby was losing weight. But I pointed out to her that the baby had a long life to live and had to live in the world with others, had to live in a world where there were many, many rules, and if you couldn’t learn to play by the rules you were going to be left out in the cold with no character, shunned and ostracized by everyone. The longest we ever kept her in her room consecutively was eighty-eight hours, and that ended when my wife took the door off its hinges with a crowbar even though the baby still owed us twelve hours because she was working off twenty-five pages. I put the door back on its hinges and added a big lock, one that opened only if you put a magnetic card in a slot, and I kept the card.

  But things didn’t improve. The baby would come out of her room like a bat out of hell and rush to the nearest book, Goodnight Moon or whatever, and begin tearing pages out of it hand over fist. I mean there’d be thirty-four pages of Goodnight Moon on the floor in ten seconds. Plus the covers. I began to get a little worried. When I added up her indebtedness, in terms of hours, I could see that she wasn’t going to get out of her room until 1992, if then. Also, she was looking pretty wan. She hadn’t been to the park in weeks. We had more or less of an ethical crisis on our hands.

  I solved it by declaring that it was all right to tear pages out of books, and moreover, that it was all right to have turn pages out of books in the past. That is one of the satisfying things about being a parent—you’ve got a lot of moves, each one good as gold. The baby and I sit happily on the floor, side by side, tearing pages out of books, and sometimes, just for fun, we go out on the street and smash a windshield together.

  January

  THE interview took place, appropriately enough, on St. Thomas in the US. Virgin Islands. Thomas Brecker was renting a small villa, before which a bougainvillaea bloomed, on the outskirts of Charlotte Amalie. Brecker was wearing an orange-red tie with a light blue cotton shirt and seemed very much at ease. He has a leg brace because of an early bout with polio but it does not seem to inhibit his movement, which is vigorous, athletic. At sixty-five, he has published seven books, from Christianity and Culture (1964) to, most recently, The Possibility of Belief, for which he won the Van Baaren Prize awarded annually by Holland’s Groningen Foundation. While we talked, on a sultry day in June 1986, a houseboy attended us, bringing cool drinks on a brown plastic tray of the sort found in cafeterias. From time to time we were interrupted by Brecker’s son Patrick, six, who seemed uncomfortable when out of sight of his father.

  INTERVIEWER

  You were a journalist when you began, I believe. Can you tell us something about those years?

  BRECKER

  I wasn’t much of a journalist, or I wasn’t a journalist for very long, two or three years. This was on a small paper in California, a middle-sized daily, a Knight-Ridder paper in San Jose. I started out doing all the routine things, courts, police, city hall, then they made me the religion writer. I did that for two years. It was not a choice assignment, it was very much looked down upon, one step above being an obituary writer, what we called the mort man. Also, in those days it was very difficult to print anything that might be construed as critical of any given religion, even when you were dealing with the problems a particular church might be having. So many things couldn’t be talked about: abortion, mental illness among the clergy, fratricidal behavior among churches of the same denomination. Now that’s all changed.

  INTERVIEWER

  And that got you interested in religion.

  BRECKER

  Yes. It was very good experience and I’m grateful for it. I began to think of religion in a much more practical sense than I’d ever thought about it before, what the church offered or could offer to people, what people got from the church in a day-to-day sense, and especially what it did to the clergy. I saw people wrestling with terrible dilemmas, gay priests, ministers who had to counsel people against abortion when abortion was obviously the only sane solution to, say, the problem of a pregnant thirteen-year-old, women who could only be nurses or teachers when they felt they had a very powerful vocation for the priesthood itself— I came to theoretical concerns by way of very practical ones.

  INTERVIEWER

  You did your undergraduate work at UCLA, I remember.

  BRECKER

  Yes. In chemistry, of all things. My undergraduate degree was in chemical engineering, but when I got out there were no jobs so I took the first thing that was offered, which was this fifty-dollar a-week newspaper thing in San Jose. So after working on the paper, I went back to the university and studied first philosophical anthropology and then religion. I ended up at the Harvard Divinity School. That would be the late forties.

  INTERVIEWER

  You did your dissertation with Tillich.

  BRECKER

  No. I knew him and of course he was of enormous importance to all of us. He was at Harvard until ‘62, I believe. He had an apartment on Chauncy Street in Cambridge, on the second floor, he used to have informal seminars at home, some of which I attended. But he wasn’t my dissertation director, a man named Howard Cadmus was.

  INTERVIEWER

  Your dissertation dealt with acedia.

  BRECKER

  In the forties that sort of topic was more or less in the air. And of course it’s interesting, that sort of sickness, torpor, one wonders how it arises and how it’s dealt with, and it’s real and it has a relation, albeit a negative one, to religion. The topic was maybe too fashionable but I still think the dissertation was respectable, a respectable piece of work if not brilliant.

  INTERVIEWER

  What was the burden of the argument?

  BRECKER

  The thesis was that acedia is a turning toward something rather than, as it’s commonly conceived of, a turning away from something. I argued that acedia is a positiv
e reaction to extraordinary demand, for example, the demand that one embrace the good news and become one with the mystical body of Christ. The demand is extraordinary because it’s so staggering in terms of changing your life—out of the ordinary, out of the common run. Acedia is often conceived of as a kind of sullenness in the face of existence; I tried to locate its positive features. For example, it precludes certain kinds of madness, crowd mania, it precludes a certain kind of error. You’re not an enthusiast and therefore you don’t go out and join a lynch mob—rather you languish on a couch with your head in your hands. I was trying to stake out a position for the uncommitted which still, at the same time, had something to do with religion. I may have been right or wrong, it doesn’t much matter now, but that’s what I was trying to do.

  Acedia refuses certain kinds of relations with others. Of course there’s a concomitant loss—of being with others, intersubjectivity. In literature, someone like Huysmans exemplifies the type. You could argue that he was just a 19th Century dandy of a certain kind but that misses the point, which is that something brought him to this position. As ever, fear comes into it. I argued that acedia was a manifestation of fear and I think that’s true. Here it would be a fear of the need to submit, of joining the culture, of losing that much of the self to the culture.

  INTERVIEWER

  The phrase “the need to submit”—you’re consistently critical of that.

  BRECKER

  It has parts, just like anything else. There’s a relief in submission to authority and that’s a psychological good. At the same time, we consider submission a diminishment of the individual, a ceding of individual being, which we criticize. It’s a paradox which has to do with competing goods. For example, how much of your own autonomy do you cede to duly constituted authority, whether civil or churchly? And this is saying you’re not coerced. We pay taxes because there’s a fairly efficient system of coercion involved, but how much fealty do you give a government which is very often pursuing schemes which you, as an individual, using your best judgment, consider quite mad? And how much submission to a church, quite possibly the very wrongheaded temporary management of a church, whether it’s a local vestry with ten deacons of suspect intelligence or Rome itself? Christ tells us not to throw the first stone, and that’s beautiful, but at some point somebody has to stand up and say that such-and-such is nonsense—which is equivalent to throwing stones.