Flying to America

by Donald Barthelme

  Edward watched the brass slot on the door. Pia read to Edward from the newspaper. She read a story about four Swedes sent to prison for rapture. Edward asked Pia if she wanted to make love. “No,” she said. Edward said something funny. Pia tried to laugh. She was holding a piece of cake with a red-and-white flag on top. Edward bought a flashlight. Pia laughed. Pia still didn’t want to go to bed with Edward. It was becoming annoying. He owed the government back home a thousand dollars. Edward laughed and laughed. “I owe the government a thousand dollars,” Edward said to Pia, “did you know that?” Edward laughed. Pia laughed. They had another glass of wine. Pia was pregnant. They laughed and laughed. Edward turned off the radio. “The lights went out,” he said in Danish. Pia and Edward laughed. “What are you thinking about?” Edward asked Pia and she said she couldn’t tell him just then because she was laughing.

  The Piano Player

  Outside his window five–year–old Priscilla Hess, square and squat as a mailbox (red sweater, blue lumpy corduroy pants), looked around poignantly for someone to wipe her overflowing nose. There was a butterfly locked inside that mailbox, surely; would it ever escape? Or was the quality of mailboxness stuck to her forever, like her parents, like her name? The sky was sunny and blue. A filet of green Silly Putty disappeared into fat Priscilla Hess and he turned to greet his wife who was crawling through the door on her hands and knees.

  “Yes?” he said. “What now?”

  “I’m ugly,” she said, sitting back on her haunches. “Our children are ugly.”

  “Nonsense,” Brian said sharply. “They’re wonderful children. Wonderful and beautiful. Other people’s children are ugly, not our children. Now get up and go back to the smokeroom. You’re supposed to be curing a ham.”

  “The ham died,” she said. “I couldn’t cure it. I tried everything. You don’t love me anymore. The penicillin was stale. I’m ugly and so are the children. It said to tell you goodbye.”

  “It?”

  “The ham,” she said. “Is one of our children named Ambrose? Somebody named Ambrose has been sending us telegrams. How many do we have now? Four? Five? Do you think they’re hetero-sexual?” She made a moue and ran a hand through her artichoke hair. “The house is rusting away. Why did you want a steel house? Why did I think I wanted to live in Connecticut? I don’t know.”

  “Get up,” he said softly, “get up, dearly beloved. Stand up and sing. Sing Parsifal.”

  “I want a Triumph,” she said from the floor. “A TR–4. Everyone in Stamford, every single person, has one but me. If you gave me a TR–4 I’d put our ugly children in it and drive away. To Wellfleet. I’d take all the ugliness out of your life.”

  “A green one?”

  “A red one,” she said menacingly. “Red with leather seats.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be chipping paint?” he asked. “I bought us an electronic data processing system. An IBM.”

  “I want to go to Wellfleet,” she said. “I want to talk to Edmund Wilson and take him for a ride in my red TR–4. The children can dig clams. We have a lot to talk about, Bunny and me.”

  “Why don’t you remove those shoulder pads?” Brian said kindly. “It’s too bad about the ham.”

  “I loved that ham,” she said viciously. “When you galloped into the University of Texas on your roan Volvo, I thought you were going to be somebody. I gave you my hand. You put rings on it. Rings that my mother gave me. I thought you were going to be distinguished, like Bunny.”

  He showed her his broad-shouldered back. “Everything is in flitters,” he said. “Play the piano, won’t you?”

  “You always were afraid of my piano,” she said. “My four or five children are afraid of the piano. You taught them to be afraid of it. The giraffe is on fire, but I suppose you don’t care.”

  “What can we eat,” he asked, “with the ham gone?”

  “There’s Silly Putty in the deepfreeze,” she said tonelessly.

  “Rain is falling,” he observed. “Rain or something.”

  “When you graduated from the Wharton School of Business,” she said, “I thought at last! I thought now we can move to Stamford and have interesting neighbors. But they’re not interesting. The giraffe is interesting but he sleeps so much of the time. The mailbox is rather interesting. The man didn’t open it at 3:31 P.M. today. He was five minutes late. The government lied again.”

  With a gesture of impatience, Brian turned on the light. The great burst of electricity illuminated her upturned tiny face. Eyes like snow peas, he thought. Tamar dancing. My name is in the dictionary, in the back. The Law of Bilateral Good Fortune. Piano bread perhaps. A nibble of pain running through the Western World. Coriolanus.

  “Oh God,” she said, from the floor. “Look at my knees.”

  Brian looked. Her knees were blushing.

  “It’s senseless, senseless, senseless,” she said, “I’ve been caulking the medicine chest. What for? I don’t know. You’ve got to give me more money. Ben is bleeding. Bessie wants to be an S.S. man. She’s reading The Rise and Fall. She’s identified with Himmler. Is that her name? Bessie?”

  “Yes. Bessie.”

  “What’s the other one’s name? The blond one?”

  “Billy. Named after your father. Your Dad.”

  “You’ve got to get me an air hammer. To clean the children’s teeth. What’s the name of that disease? They’ll all have it, every single one, if you don’t get me an air hammer.”

  “And a compressor,” Brian said. “And a Pinetop Smith record. I remember.”

  She lay on her back. The shoulder pads clattered against the terrazzo. Her number, 17, was written large on her chest. Her eyes were screwed tight shut. “Altman’s is having a sale,” she said. “Maybe I should go in.”

  “Listen,” he said. “Get up. Go into the grape arbor. I’ll trundle the piano out there. You’ve been chipping too much paint.”

  “You wouldn’t touch that piano,” she said. “Not in a million years.”

  “You really think I’m afraid of it?”

  “Not in a million years,” she said, “you phony.”

  “All right,” Brian said quietly. “All right.” He strode over to the piano. He took a good grip on its black varnishedness. He began to trundle it across the room, and, after slight hesitation, it struck him dead.

  Henrietta and Alexandra

  Alexandra was reading Henrietta’s manuscript.

  “This,” she said, pointing with her finger, “is inane.”

  Henrietta got up and looked over Alexandra’s shoulder at the sentence.

  “Yes,” she said. “I prefer the inane, sometimes. The ane is often inutile to the artist.”

  There was a moment of contemplation.

  “I have been offered a thousand florins for it,” Henrietta said. “The Dutch rights.”

  “How much is that in our money?”

  “Two hundred sixty-six dollars.”

  “Bless Babel,” Alexandra said, and took her friend in her arms.

  Henrietta said: “Once I was a young girl, very much like any other young girl, interested in the same things, I was exemplary. I was told what I was, that is to say a young girl, and I knew what I was because I had been told and because there were other young girls all around me who had been told the same things and knew the same things, and looking at them and hearing again in my head the things I had been told I knew what a young girl was. We had all been told the same things. I had not been told, for example, that some wine was piss and some not and I had not been told . . . other things. Still I had not been told a great many things all very useful but I had not been told that I was going to die in any way that would allow me to realize that I really was going to die and that it would all be over, then, and that this was all there was and that I had damned well better make the most of it. That I discovered for myself and covered with shame and shit as I was I made the most of it. I had not been told how to make the most of it but I figured it out. Then I moved thro
ugh a period of depression, the depression engendered by the realization that I had placed myself beyond the pale, there I was, beyond the pale. Then I discovered that there were other people beyond the pale with me, that there were quite as many people on the wrong side of the pale as there were on the right side of the pale and that the people on the wrong side of the pale were as complex as the people on the right side of the pale, as unhappy, as subject to time, as subject to death. So what the fuck? I said to myself in the colorful language I had learned on the wrong side of the pale. By this time I was no longer a young girl. I was mature.”

  Alexandra had a special devotion to the Sacred Heart.

  THEORIES OF THE SACRED HEART

  LOSS AND RECOVERY OF THE SACRED HEART

  CONFLICTING CLAIMS OF THE GREAT CATHEDRALS

  THE SACRED HEART IN CONTEMPORARY ICONOGRAPHY

  APPEARANCE OF SPURIOUS SACRED HEARTS AND HOW THEY MAY BE

  DISTINGUISHED FROM THE TRUE ONE

  LOCATION OF THE TRUE SACRED HEART REVEALED

  HOW THE ABBÉ ST. GERMAIN PRESERVED THE TRUE SACRED HEART

  FROM THE HANDS OF THE BARBARIANS

  WHY THE SACRED HEART Is FREQUENTLY REPRESENTED SURMOUNTED

  BY A CROWN OF THORNS

  MEANING OF THE TINY TONGUE OF FLAME

  ORDERS AND CEREMONIES IN THE VENERATION OF THE SACRED HEART

  ROLE OF THE SACRED HEART SOCIETY IN THE VENERATION OF THE SACRED HEART

  Alexandra was also a member of the Knights of St. Dympna, patroness of the insane.

  Alexandra and Henrietta were walking down the street in their long gowns. A man looked at them and laughed. Alexandra and Henrietta rushed at him and scratched his eyes out.

  As a designer of artificial ruins, Alexandra was well-known. She designed ruins in the manners of Langley, Effner, Robert Adam, and Carlo Marchionni, as well as her own manner. She was working on a ruin for a park in Tempe, Arizona, consisting of a ruined wall nicely disintegrated at the top and one end, two classical columns upright and one fallen, vines, and a number of broken urns. The urns were difficult because it was necessary to produce them from intact urns and the workmen at the site were often reluctant to do violence to the urns. Sometimes she pretended to lose her temper. “Hurl the bloody urn, Umberto!”

  Alexandra looked at herself in the mirror. She admired her breasts, her belly, and her legs, which were, she felt, her best feature.

  “Now I will go into the other room and astonish Henrietta, who is also beautiful.”

  Henrietta stood up and, with a heaving motion, threw the manuscript of her novel into the fire. The manuscript of the novel she had been working on ceaselessly, night and day, for the last ten years.

  “Alexandra! Aren’t you going to rush to the fire and pull the manuscript of my novel out of it?”

  “No.”

  Henrietta rushed to the fire and pulled the manuscript out of it. Only the first and last pages were fully burned, and luckily, she remembered what was written there.

  Henrietta decided that Alexandra did not love her enough. And how could nuances of despair be expressed if you couldn’t throw your novel into the fire safely?

  Alexandra was sending a petition to Rome. She wanted her old marriage, a dim marriage ten years old to a man named Black Dog, annulled. Alexandra read the rules about sending petitions to Rome to Henrietta.

  “All applications to be sent to Rome should be written on good paper, and a double sheet, 8⅛ inches x 10¾ inches, should be employed. The writing of petitions should be done with ink of a good quality, that will remain legible for a long time. Petitions are generally composed in the Latin language, but the use of the French and Italian languages is also permissible.

  “The fundamental rule to be observed is that all petitions must be addressed to the Pope, who, directly or indirectly, grants the requested favors. Hence the regulation form of address in all petitions reads Beatissime Pater. Following this the petition opens with the customary deferential phrase ad pedes Sanctitatis Vestrae humillime provolutus. The concluding formula is indicated by its opening words: Et Deus . . . expressing the prayer of blessing which the grateful petitioner addresses in advance to God for the expected favor.

  “After introduction, body, and conclusion of the petition have been duly drawn, the sheet is evenly folded length-wise, and on its back, to the right of the fold line, are indited the date of the presentation and the petitioner’s name.

  “The presentation of petitions is generally made through an agent, whose name is inscribed in the right-hand corner on the back of the petition. This signature is necessary because the agent will call for the grant, and the Congregations deliver rescripts to no one but the agent whose name is thus recorded. The agents, furthermore, pay the fee and taxes for the requested rescripts of favor, give any necessary explanations and comments that may be required, and are at all times in touch with the authorities in order to correct any mistakes or defects in the petitions. Between the hours of nine and one o’clock the agents gather in the offices of the Curial administration to hand in new petitions and to inquire about the fate of those not yet decided. Many of them also go to the anterooms of secretaries in order to discuss important matters personally with the leading officials.

  “For lay persons it is as a rule useless to forward petitions through the mails to the Roman Congregations, because as a matter of principle they will not be considered. Equally useless, of course, would be the enclosing of postage stamps with such petitions. Applications by telegraph are not permitted because of their publicity. Nor are decisions ever given by telegraph.”

  Alexandra stopped reading.

  “Jesus Christ!” Henrietta said.

  “This wine is piss,” Alexandra said.

  “You needn’t drink it then.”

  “I’ll have another glass.”

  “You wanted me to buy California wine,” Henrietta said.

  “But there’s no reason to buy absolute vinegar, is there? I mean couldn’t you have asked the man at the store?”

  “They don’t always tell the truth.”

  “I remember that time in Chicago,” Alexandra said. “That was a good bottle. And afterwards . . .”

  “How much did we pay for that bottle?” Henrietta asked, incuriously.

  “Twelve dollars. Or ten dollars. Ten or twelve.”

  “The hotel,” Henrietta said. “Snapdragons on the night table.”

  “You were . . . exquisite.”

  “I was mature,” Henrietta said.

  “If you were mature then, what are you now?”

  “More mature,” Henrietta said. “Maturation is a process that is ongoing.”

  “When are you old?” Alexandra asked.

  “Not while love is here,” Henrietta said.

  Henrietta said: “Now I am mature. In maturity I found a rich world beyond the pale and found it possible to live in that world with a degree of enthusiasm. My mother says I am deluded but I have stopped talking to my mother. My father is dead and thus has no opinion. Alexandra continues to heap up indulgences by exclaiming ‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!’ which is worth an indulgence of fifty days each time it is exclaimed. Some of the choicer ejaculations are worth seven years and seven quarantines and these she pursues with the innocent cupidity of the small investor. She keeps her totals in a little book. I love her. She has to date worked off eighteen thousand years in the flames of Purgatory. I tell her that the whole thing is a shuck but she refuses to consider my views on this point. Alexandra is immature in that she thinks she will live forever, live after she is dead at the right hand of God in His glory with His power and His angels and His whatnot and I cannot persuade her otherwise. Joseph Conrad will live forever but Alexandra will not. I love her. Now we are going out.”

  Henrietta and Alexandra went walking. They were holding each other’s arms. Alexandra moved a hand sensuously with a circular motion around one of Henrietta’s breasts. Henrietta did the same thing to Alexandra. People were lookin
g at them with strange expressions on their faces. They continued walking, under the shaped trees of the boulevard. They were swooning with pleasure, more or less. Someone called the police.

  Presents

  In the middle of a forest. Parked there is a handsome 1932 Ford, its left rear door open. Two young women are pausing, about to step into the car. Each has one foot on the running board. Both are naked. They have their arms around each other’s waist in sisterly embrace. The woman on the left is dark, the one on the right fair. Their white, graceful backs are in sharp contrast to the shiny black of the Ford. The woman on the right has turned her head to hear something her companion is saying.

  ***

  At a dinner party. The eight guests are seated, in shining white plastic shells mounted on steel pedestals, in a luxurious kitchen. They sit around a long table of polished rosewood, at one end of which there is a wicker basket filled with fruit, pineapples, bananas, pears, and at the other a wicker basket containing loaves of burnt-orange bread. The kitchen floor is polished black tile; electric ovens with bronze fronts are set into the polished off-white walls. On thick glass shelves above the diners, handsome pots with herbs, jams, jellies, and tall glass jars with half-a-dozen varieties of raw pasta. Six of the guests, men and women, are conventionally clothed. The two young women (one dark, one fair) are naked, smoking cigarillos. One of them unfolds a large white linen napkin and smoothes it over her companion’s lap.