Donald Barthelme

by Donald Barthelme

  Bloomsbury’s radio talks were of two kinds, called the first kind and the second kind. The first consisted of singling out, for special notice, from among all the others, some particular word in the English language, and repeating it in a monotonous voice for as much as fifteen minutes, or a quarter-hour. The word thus singled out might be any word, the word nevertheless for example. “Nevertheless,” Bloomsbury said into the microphone, “nevertheless, nevertheless, nevertheless, nevertheless, nevertheless, nevertheless, nevertheless.” After this exposure to the glare of public inspection the word would frequently disclose new properties, unsuspected qualities, although that was far from Bloomsbury’s intention. His intention, insofar as he may be said to have had one, was simply to put something “on the air.”

  The second kind of radio talk which Bloomsbury provided was the commercial announcement.

  The Bloomsbury announcements were perhaps not too similar to other announcements broadcast during this period by other broadcasters. They were dissimilar chiefly in that they were addressed not to the mass of men but of course to her, she with whom he had lived in the house that was gone (traded for the radio). Frequently he would begin somewhat in this vein:

  “Well, old girl” (he began), “here we are, me speaking into the tube, you lying on your back most likely, giving an ear, I don’t doubt. Swell of you to tune me in. I remember the time you went walking without your shoes, what an evening! You were wearing, I recall, your dove-gray silk, with a flower hat, and you picked your way down the boulevard as daintily as a real lady. There were chestnuts on the ground, I believe; you complained that they felt like rocks under your feet. I got down on my hands and knees and crawled in front of you, sweeping the chestnuts into the gutter with my hand. What an evening! You said I looked absurd, and a gentleman who was passing in the other direction, I remember he wore yellow spats with yellow shoes, smiled. The lady accompanying him reached out to pat me on my head, but he grasped her arm and prevented her, and the knees of my trousers tore on a broken place in the pavement.

  “Afterwards you treated me to a raspberry ice, calling for a saucer, which you placed, daintily, at your feet. I still recall the coolness, after the hot work on the boulevard, and the way the raspberry stained my muzzle. I put my face in your hand, and your little glove came away pink and sticky, sticky and pink. We were comfortable there, in the ice cream parlor, we were pretty as a picture! Man and wife!

  “When we got home, that evening, the street lights were just coming on, the insects were just coming out. And you said that next time, if there were a next time, you would wear your shoes. Even if it killed you, you said. And I said I would always be there to sweep away the chestnuts, whatever happened, even if nothing happened. And you said most likely that was right. I always had been there, you said. Swell of you to notice that. I thought at the time that there was probably no one more swell than you in the whole world, anywhere. And I wanted to tell you, but did not.

  “And then, when it was dark, we had our evening quarrel. A very ordinary one, I believe. The subject, which had been announced by you at breakfast and posted on the notice board, was Smallness in the Human Male. You argued that it was willfulness on my part, whereas I argued that it was lack of proper nourishment during my young years. I lost, as was right of course, and you said I couldn’t have any supper. I had, you said, already gorged myself on raspberry ice. I had, you said, ruined a good glove with my ardor, and a decent pair of trousers too. And I said, but it was for the love of you! and you said, hush! or there’ll be no breakfast either. And I said, but love makes the world go! and you said, or lunch tomorrow either. And I said, but we were everything to each other once! and you said, or supper tomorrow night.

  “But perhaps, I said, a little toffee? Ruin your teeth then for all I care, you said, and put some pieces of toffee in my bed. And thus we went happily to sleep. Man and wife! Was there ever anything, old skin, like the old days?”

  Immediately following this commercial announcement, or an announcement much like this, Bloomsbury would play “The Star-Spangled Banner” 80 or 100 times, for the finality of it.

  When he interrogated himself about the matter, about how it felt to operate a radio of his own, Bloomsbury told himself the absolute truth, that it felt fine. He broadcast during this period not only some of his favorite words, such as the words assimilate, alleviate, authenticate, ameliorate, and quantities of his favorite music (he was particularly fond of that part, toward the end, that went: da-da, da da da da da da da-a), but also a series of commercial announcements of great power and poignancy, and persuasiveness. Nevertheless he felt, although he managed to conceal it from himself for a space, somewhat futile. For there had been no response from her (she who figured, as both subject and object, in the commercial announcements, and had once, before it had been traded for the radio, lived in the house).

  A commercial announcement of the period of this feeling was:

  “On that remarkable day, that day unlike any other, that day, if you will pardon me, of days, on that old day from the old days when we were, as they say, young, we walked if you will forgive the extravagance hand in hand into a theater where there was a film playing. Do you remember? We sat in the upper balcony and smoke from below, where there were people smoking, rose and we, if you will excuse the digression, smelled of it. It smelled, and I or we thought it remarkable at the time, like the twentieth century. Which was after all our century, none other.

  “We were there you and I because we hadn’t rooms and there were no parks and we hadn’t automobiles and there were no beaches, for making love or anything else. Ergo, if you will condone the anachronism, we were forced into the balcony, to the topmost row, from which we had a tilty view of the silver screen. Or would have had had we not you and I been engaged in pawing and pushing, pushing and pawing. On my part at least, if not on yours.

  “The first thing I knew I was inside your shirt with my hand and I found there something very lovely and, as they say, desirable. It belonged to you. I did not know, then, what to do with it, therefore I simply (simply!) held it in my hand, it was, as the saying goes, soft and warm. If you can believe it. Meanwhile down below in the pit events were taking place, whether these were such as the people in the pit had paid for, I did not and do not know. Nor did or do, wherever you are, you. After a time I was in fact distracted, I still held it in my hand but I was looking elsewhere.

  “You then said into my ear, get on with it, can’t you?

  “I then said into your ear, I’m watching the picture.

  “At this speech of mine you were moved to withdraw it from my hand, I understood, it was a punishment. Having withdrawn it you began, for lack of anything better, to watch the picture also. We watched the picture together, and although this was a kind of intimacy, the other kind had been lost. Nevertheless it had been there once, I consoled myself with that. But I felt, I felt, I felt (I think) that you were, as they say, angry. And to that row of the balcony we, you and I, never returned.”

  After this announcement was broadcast Bloomsbury himself felt called upon to weep a little, and did, but not “on the air.”

  He was in fact weeping quietly in the control room, where were kept the microphone, the console, the turntables and the hotplate, with “The Star-Spangled Banner” playing bravely and a piece of buttered toast in his hand, when he saw in the glass that connected the control room with the other room, which had been a reception room or foyer, a girl or woman of indeterminate age dressed in a long bright red linen duster.

  The girl or woman removed her duster, underneath she was wearing black toreador pants, an orange sweater, and harlequin glasses. Bloomsbury immediately stepped out into the reception room or foyer in order to view her more closely, he regarded her, she regarded him, after a time there was a conversation.

  “You’re looking at me!” she said.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “Right. I certainly am
.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s something I do,” he said. “It’s my you might say métier.”

  “Milieu,” she said.

  “Métier,” Bloomsbury said. “If you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t often get looked at as a matter of fact.”

  “Because you’re not very good-looking,” Bloomsbury said.

  “Oh I say.”

  “Glasses are discouraging,” he said.

  “Even harlequin glasses?”

  “Especially harlequin glasses.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “But you have a grand behind,” he said.

  “Also a lively sense of humor,” she said.

  “Lively,” he said. “Whatever possessed you to use that word?”

  “I thought you might like it,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “Definitely not.”

  “Do you think you ought to stand around and look at girls?” she asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Bloomsbury said. “I think it’s indicated.”

  “Indicated,” she cried. “What do you mean, indicated?”

  “Tell me about your early life,” Bloomsbury said.

  “To begin with I was president of the Conrad Veidt fan club,” she began. “That was in, oh, I don’t remember the year. His magnetism and personality got me. His voice and gestures fascinated me. I hated him, feared him, loved him. When he died it seemed to me a vital part of my imagination died too.”

  “I didn’t mean necessarily in such detail,” he said.

  “My world of dreams was bare!”

  “Fan club prexies are invariably homely,” Bloomsbury said.

  “Plain,” she suggested. “I prefer the word plain. Do you want to see a picture of Conrad Veidt?”

  “I would be greatly interested,” Bloomsbury said (although this was not the truth).

  The girl or woman then retrieved from her purse, where it had apparently remained for some time, perhaps even years, a page from a magazine. It bore a photograph of Conrad Veidt who looked at one and the same instant handsome and sinister. There was moreover printing on the photograph which said: If CONRAD VEIDT offered you a cigarette, it would be a DE REZKE—of course!

  “Very affecting,” Bloomsbury said.

  “I never actually met Mr. Veidt,” the girl (or woman) said. “It wasn’t that sort of club. I mean we weren’t in actual communication with the star. There was a Joan Crawford fan club, and those people now, they were in actual communication. When they wanted a remembrance . . .”

  “A remembrance?”

  “Such as Kleenex that had been used by the star, for instance, with lipstick on it, or fingernail clippings, or a stocking, or a hair from the star’s horse’s tail or mane . . .”

  “Tail or mane?”

  “The star naturally, noblesse oblige, forwarded that object to them.”

  “I see,” Bloomsbury said.

  “Do you look at a lot of girls?”

  “Not a lot,” he said, “but quite a number.”

  “Is it fun?”

  “Not fun,” he said, “but better than nothing.”

  “Do you have affairs?”

  “Not affairs,” he said, “but sometimes a little flutter.”

  “Well,” she said, “I have feelings too.”

  “I think it’s very possible,” he said. “A great big girl like you.”

  This remark however seemed to offend her, she turned on her heel and left the room. Bloomsbury himself felt moved by this meeting, which was in fact the first contact he had enjoyed with a human being, of any description, since the beginning of the period of his proprietorship of the radio, and even before. He immediately returned to the control room and introduced a new commercial announcement.

  “I remember” (he enunciated), “the quarrel about the ice cubes, that was a beauty! That was one worth . . . remembering. You had posted on the notice board the subject Refrigeration, and I worried about it all day long, and wondered. Clever minx! I recalled at length that I had complained, once, because the ice cubes were not frozen. But were in fact unfrozen! watery! useless! I had said that there weren’t enough ice cubes, whereas you had said there were more than enough.

  “You said that I was a fool, an idiot, an imbecile, a stupid!, that the machine in your kitchen which you had procured and caused to be placed there was without doubt and on immaculate authority the most accomplished machine of its kind known to those who knew about machines of its kind, that among its attributes was the attribute of conceiving containing and at the moment of need whelping a fine number of ice cubes so that no matter how grave the demand, how vast the occasion, how indifferent or even hostile the climate, how inept or even treacherous the operator, how brief or even nonexistent the lapse between genesis and parturition, between the wish and the fact, ice cubes in multiples of sufficient would present themselves. Well, I said, perhaps.

  “Oh! how you boggled at that word perhaps. How you sweated, old girl, and cursed. Your chest heaved, if I may say so, and your eyes (your eyes!) flashed. You said we would, by damn, count the by damn ice cubes. As we, subsequently, did.

  “How I enjoyed, although I concealed it from you, the counting! You were, as they say, magisterial. There were I observed twelve rows of three, or three of twelve, in each of four trays. But this way of counting was not your way of counting. You chose, and I admired your choice, the explicitness and implicitness of it, to run water over the trays so that the cubes, loosened, fell into the salad bowl, having previously turned the trays, and thus the cubes, bottoms up, so that the latter would fall, when water was run upon the former, in the proper direction. That these matters were so commendably arranged I took to be, and even now take to be, a demonstration of your fundamental decency, and good sense.

  “But you reckoned wrong, when it came to that. You were never a reckoner. You reckoned that there were in the bowl one hundred forty-four cubes, taking each cube, individually, from the bowl and placing it, individually, in the sink, bearing in mind meanwhile the total that could be obtained by simple multiplication of the spaces in the trays. Thus having it, in this as in other matters, both ways! However you failed on this as on other occasions to consider the imponderables, in this instance the fact that I, unobserved by you, had put three of the cubes into my drink! Which I then drank! And that one had missed the bowl entirely and fallen into the sink! And melted once and for all! These events precluded sadly enough the number of cubes in the bowl adding up to a number corresponding to the number of spaces in the trays, proving also that there is no justice!

  “What a defeat for you! What a victory for me! It was my first victory, I fear I went quite out of my head. I dragged you to the floor, among the ice cubes, which you had flung there in pique and chagrin, and forced you, with results that I considered then, and consider now, to have been ‘first rate.’ I thought I detected in you . . .”

  But he could not continue this announcement, from a surfeit of emotion.

  The girl or woman, who had become a sort of camp follower of the radio, made a practice during this period of sleeping in the former reception room underneath the piano, which being a grand provided ample shelter. When she wished to traffic with Bloomsbury she would tap on the glass separating them with one finger, at other times she would, with her hands, make motions.

  A typical conversation of the period when the girl (or woman) was sleeping in the foyer was this:

  “Tell me about your early life,” she said.

  “I was, in a sense, an All-American boy,” Bloomsbury replied.

  “In what sense?”

  “In the sense that I married,” he said.

  “Was it love?”

  “It was love but it was only temporary.”

  “It didn’t go on forever?”

  “For less than a
decade. As a matter of fact.”

  “But while it did go on . . .”

  “It filled me with a somber and paradoxical joy.”

  “Coo!” she said. “It doesn’t sound very American to me.”

  “Coo,” he said. “What kind of an expression is that?”

  “I heard it in a movie,” she said. “A Conrad Veidt movie.”

  “Well,” he said, “it’s distracting.”

  This conversation was felt by Bloomsbury to be not very satisfactory, however he bided his time, having if the truth were known no alternative. The word matriculate had engaged his attention, he pronounced it into the microphone for what seemed to him a period longer than normal, that is to say, in excess of a quarter-hour. He wondered whether or not to regard this as significant.

  It was a fact that Bloomsbury, who had thought himself dispassionate (thus the words, the music, the slow turning over in his brain of events in the lives of him and her), was beginning to feel, at this time, disturbed. This was attributable perhaps to the effect, on him, of his radio talks, and also perhaps to the presence of the “fan,” or listener, in the reception room. Or possibly it was something else entirely. In any case this disturbance was reflected, beyond a doubt, in the announcements made by him in the days that, inevitably, followed.

  One of these was:

  “The details of our housekeeping, yours and mine. The scuff under the bed, the fug in the corners. I would, if I could, sigh to remember them. You planted prickly pear in the parlor floor, and when guests came . . . Oh, you were a one! You veiled yourself from me, there were parts I could have and parts I couldn’t have. And the rules would change, I remember, in the middle of the game, I could never be sure which parts were allowed and which not. Some days I couldn’t have anything at all. Is it remarkable, then, that there has never been another? Except for a few? Who don’t count?