Donald Barthelme

by Donald Barthelme

  “The written part is where I fall down,” Edgar said morosely, to everyone in the room. “The oral part is where I do best.” He looked at the back of his wife which was pointed at him. “If I don’t kick it in the head this time I don’t know what we’re going to do,” he repeated. “Barb?” But she failed to respond to this implied question. She felt it was a false hope, taking this examination which he had already failed miserably twice and which always got him very worked up, black with fear, before he took it. Now she didn’t wish to witness the spectacle any more so she gave him her back.

  “The oral part,” Edgar continued encouragingly, “is A-okay. I can for instance give you a list of answers, I know it so well. Listen, here is an answer, can you tell me the question?” Barbara, who was very sexually attractive (that was what made Edgar tap on her for a date, many years before) but also deeply mean, said nothing. She put her mind on their silent child, Rose.

  “Here is the answer,” Edgar said. “The answer is Julia Ward Howe. What is the question?”

  This answer was too provocative for Barbara to resist long, because she knew the question. “Who wrote the Battle Hymn of the Republic?” she said. “There is not a grown person in the United States who doesn’t know that.”

  “You’re right,” Edgar said unhappily, for he would have preferred that the answer had been a little more recherché, one that she would not have known the question to. But she had been a hooker for a period before their marriage and he could resort to this area if her triumph grew too great. “Do you want to try another one?”

  “Edgar I don’t believe in that examination any more,” she told him coldly.

  “I don’t believe in you Barbara,” he countered.

  This remark filled her with remorse and anger. She considered momentarily letting him have one upside the head but fear prevented her from doing it so she turned her back again and thought about the vaunted certificate. With a certificate he could write for all the important and great periodicals, and there would be some money in the house for a change instead of what they got from his brother and the Unemployment.

  “It isn’t you who has to pass this National Writers’ Examination,” he shot past her. Then, to mollify, he gave her another answer. “Brand, tuck, glave, claymore.”

  “Is that an answer?” she asked from behind her back.

  “It is indeed. What’s the question?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted, slightly pleased to be put back in a feminine position of not knowing.

  “Those are four names for a sword. They’re archaic.”

  “That’s why I didn’t know them, then.”

  “Obviously,” said Edgar with some malice, for Barbara was sometimes given to saying things that were obvious, just to fill the air. “You put a word like that in now and then to freshen your line,” he explained. “Even though it’s an old word, it’s so old it’s new. But you have to be careful, the context has to let people know what the thing is. You don’t want to be simply obscure.” He liked explaining the tricks of the trade to Barb, who made some show of interest in them.

  “Do you want me to read you what I’ve written for the written part?”

  Barb said yes, with a look of pain, for she still felt acutely what he was trying to do.

  “This is the beginning,” Edgar said, preparing his yellow manuscript paper.

  “What is the title?” Barbara asked. She had turned to face him.

  “I haven’t got a title yet,” Edgar said. “Okay, this is the beginning.” He began to read aloud. “In the town of A———, in the district of Y———, there lived a certain Madame A———, wife of that Baron A——— who was in the service of the young Friedrich II of Prussia. The Baron, a man of uncommon ability, is chiefly remembered for his notorious and inexplicable blunder at the Battle of Kolin: by withdrawing the column under his command at a crucial moment in the fighting, he earned for himself the greatest part of the blame for Friedrich’s defeat, which resulted in a loss, on the Prussian side, of 13,000 out of 33,000 men. Now as it happened, the château in which Madame A——— was sheltering lay not far from the battlefield; in fact, the removal of her husband’s corps placed the château itself in the gravest danger; and at the moment Madame A——— learned, from a Captain Orsini, of her husband’s death by his own hand, she was also told that a detachment of pandours, the brutal and much-feared Hungarian light irregular cavalry, was hammering at the château gates.”

  Edgar paused to breathe.

  Barb looked at him in some surprise. “The beginning turns me on,” she said. “More than usual, I mean.” She began to have some faint hope, and sat down on the sofabed.

  “Thank you,” Edgar said. “Do you want me to read you the development?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Edgar drank some water from a glass near to hand.

  “The man who brought this terrible news enjoyed a peculiar status in regard to the lady; he was her lover, and he was not. Giacomo Orsini, second son of a noble family of Siena, had as a young man a religious vocation. He had become a priest, not the grander sort of priest who makes a career in Rome and in great houses, but a modest village priest in the north of his country. Here befell him a singular misfortune. It was the pleasure of Friedrich Wilhelm I, father of the present ruler, to assemble, as is well known, the finest army in Europe. Tiny Prussia was unable to supply men in sufficient numbers to satisfy this ambition; his recruiters ranged over the whole of Europe, and those whom they could not persuade, with promises of liberal bounties, into the king’s service, they kidnapped. Now Friedrich was above all else fond of very tall men, and had created, for his personal guard, a regiment of giants, much mocked at the time, but nonetheless a brave and formidable sight. It was the bad luck of the priest Orsini to be a very tall man, and of impressive mien and bearing withal; he was abducted straight from the altar, as he was saying mass, the Host in his hands—”

  “This is very exciting,” Barb broke in, her eyes showing genuine pleasure and enthusiasm.

  “Thank you,” Edgar said, and continued his reading.

  “—and served ten years in the regiment of giants. On the death of Friedrich Wilhelm, the regiment was disbanded, among other economies; but the former priest, by now habituated to military life, and even zestful for it, enlisted under the new young king, with the rank of captain.”

  “Is this historically accurate?” Barbara asked.

  “It does not contradict what is known,” Edgar assured her.

  “Assigned to the staff of Baron A———, and much in the latter’s house in consequence, he was thrown in with the lovely Inge, Madame A———, a woman much younger than her husband, and possessed of many excellent qualities. A deep sympathy established itself between them, with this idiosyncrasy, that it was never pressed to a conclusion, on his part, or acknowledged in any way, on hers. But both were aware that it existed, and drew secret nourishment from it, and took much delight in the nearness, one to the other. But this pleasant state of affairs also had a melancholy aspect, for Orsini, although exercising the greatest restraint in the matter, nevertheless considered that he had, in even admitting to himself that he was in love with Madame A———, damaged his patron the Baron, whom he knew to be a just and honorable man, and one who had, moreover, done him many kindnesses. In this humor Orsini saw himself as a sort of jackal skulking about the periphery of his benefactor’s domestic life, which had been harmonious and whole, but was now, in whatsoever slight degree, compromised.”

  Rose, the child, stood in her white bathrobe looking at her father who was talking for such a long time, and in such a dramatic shaking voice.

  “The Baron, on his side, was not at all insensible of the passion that was present, as it were in a condition of latency, between his young wife and the handsome Sienese. In truth, his knowledge of their intercourse, which he imagined had ripened far bey
ond the point it had actually reached, had flung him headlong into a horrible crime: for his withholding of the decisive troops at Kolin, for which history has judged him so harshly, was neither an error of strategy nor a display of pusillanimity, but a willful act, having as its purpose the exposure of the château, and thus the lovers, whom he had caused to be together there, to the blood-lust of the pandours. And as for his alleged suicide, that too was a cruel farce; he lived, in a hidden place.”

  Edgar stopped.

  “It’s swift-moving,” Barbara complimented.

  “Well, do you want me to read you the end?” Edgar asked.

  “The end? Is it the end already?”

  “Do you want me to read you the end?” he repeated.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve got the end but I don’t have the middle,” Edgar said, a little ashamed.

  “You don’t have the middle?”

  “Do you want me to read you the end or don’t you?”

  “Yes, read me the end.” The possibility of a semi-professional apartment, which she had entertained briefly, was falling out of her head with this news, that there was no middle.

  “The last paragraph is this:

  “During these events Friedrich, to console himself for the debacle at Kolin, composed in his castle at Berlin a flute sonata, of which the critic Guilda has said, that it is not less lovely than the sonatas of Georg Philip Telemann.”

  “That’s ironic,” she said knowingly.

  “Yes,” Edgar agreed, impatient. He was as volatile as popcorn.

  “But what about the middle?”

  “I don’t have the middle!” he thundered.

  “Something has to happen between them, Inge and what’s his name,” she went on. “Otherwise there’s no story.” Looking at her he thought: she is still streety although wearing her housewife gear. The child was a perfect love, however, and couldn’t be told from the children of success.

  Barb then began telling a story she knew that had happened to a friend of hers. This girl had had an affair with a man and had become pregnant. The man had gone off to Seville, to see if hell was a city much like it, and she had spontaneously aborted, in Chicago. Then she had flown over to parley, and they had walked in the streets and visited elderly churches and like that. And the first church they went into, there was this tiny little white coffin covered with flowers, right in the sanctuary.

  “Banal,” Edgar pronounced.

  She tried to think of another anecdote to deliver to him.

  “I’ve got to get that certificate!” he suddenly called out desperately.

  “I don’t think you can pass the National Writers’ Examination with what you have on that paper,” Barb said then, with great regret, because even though he was her husband she didn’t want to hurt him unnecessarily. But she had to tell the truth. “Without a middle.”

  “I wouldn’t have been great, even with the certificate,” he said.

  “Your views would have become known. You would have been something.”

  At that moment the son manqué entered the room. The son manqué was eight feet tall and wore a serape woven out of two hundred transistor radios, all turned on and tuned to different stations. Just by looking at him you could hear Portland and Nogales, Mexico.

  “No grass in the house?”

  Barbara got the grass which was kept in one of those little yellow and red metal canisters made for sending film back to Eastman Kodak.

  Edgar tried to think of a way to badmouth this immense son leaning over him like a large blaring building. But he couldn’t think of anything. Thinking of anything was beyond him. I sympathize. I myself have these problems. Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin.

  The Police Band

  IT WAS kind of the department to think up the Police Band. The original impulse, I believe, was creative and humanitarian. A better way of doing things. Unpleasant, bloody things required by the line of duty. Even if it didn’t work out.

  The Commissioner (the old Commissioner, not the one they have now) brought us up the river from Detroit. Where our members had been, typically, working the Sho Bar two nights a week. Sometimes the Glass Crutch. Friday and Saturday. And the rest of the time wandering the streets disguised as postal employees. Bitten by dogs and burdened with third-class mail.

  What are our duties? we asked at the interview. Your duties are to wail, the Commissioner said. That only. We admired our new dark-blue uniforms as we came up the river in canoes like Indians. We plan to use you in certain situations, certain tense situations, to alleviate tensions, the Commissioner said. I can visualize great success with this new method. And would you play “Entropy.” He was pale, with a bad liver.

  We are subtle, the Commissioner said, never forget that. Subtlety is what has previously been lacking in our line. Some of the old ones, the Commissioner said, all they know is the club. He took a little pill from a little box and swallowed it with his Scotch.

  When we got to town we looked at those Steve Canyon recruiting posters and wondered if we resembled them. Henry Wang, the bass man, looks like a Chinese Steve Canyon, right? The other cops were friendly in a suspicious way. They liked to hear us wail, however.

  The Police Band is a very sensitive highly trained and ruggedly anti-Communist unit whose efficacy will be demonstrated in due time, the Commissioner said to the Mayor (the old Mayor). The Mayor took a little pill from a little box and said, We’ll see. He could tell we were musicians because we were holding our instruments, right? Emptying spit valves, giving the horn that little shake. Or coming in at letter E with some sly emotion stolen from another life.

  The old Commissioner’s idea was essentially that if there was a disturbance on the city’s streets—some ethnic group cutting up some other ethnic group on a warm August evening—the Police Band would be sent in. The handsome dark-green band bus arriving with sirens singing, red lights whirling. Hard-pressed men on the beat in their white hats raising a grateful cheer. We stream out of the vehicle holding our instruments at high port. A skirmish line fronting the angry crowd. And play “Perdido.” The crowd washed with new and true emotion. Startled, they listen. Our emotion stronger than their emotion. A triumph of art over good sense.

  That was the idea. The old Commissioner’s musical ideas were not very interesting, because after all he was a cop, right? But his police ideas were interesting.

  We had drills. Poured out of that mother-loving bus onto vacant lots holding our instruments at high port like John Wayne. Felt we were heroes already. Playing “Perdido,” “Stumblin’,” “Gin Song,” “Feebles.” Laving the terrain with emotion stolen from old busted-up loves, broken marriages, the needle, economic deprivation. A few old ladies leaning out of high windows. Our emotion washing rusty Rheingold cans and parts of old doors.

  This city is too much! We’d be walking down the street talking about our techniques and we’d see out of our eyes a woman standing in the gutter screaming to herself about what we could not imagine. A drunk trying to strangle a dog somebody’d left leashed to a parking meter. The drunk and the dog screaming at each other. This city is too much!

  We had drills and drills. It is true that the best musicians come from Detroit but there is something here that you have to get in your playing and that is simply the scream. We got that. The Commissioner, a sixty-three-year-old hippie with no doubt many graft qualities and unpleasant qualities, nevertheless understood that. When we’d play “ugly,” he understood that. He understood the rising expectations of the world’s peoples also. That our black members didn’t feel like toting junk mail around Detroit forever until the ends of their lives. For some strange reason.

  He said one of our functions would be to be sent out to play in places where people were trembling with fear inside their houses, right? To inspirit them in difficult ti
mes. This was the plan. We set up in the street. Henry Wang grabs hold of his instrument. He has a four-bar lead-in all by himself. Then the whole group. The iron shutters raised a few inches. Shorty Alanio holding his horn at his characteristic angle (sideways). The reeds dropping lacy little fill-ins behind him. We’re cooking. The crowd roars.

  The Police Band was an idea of a very romantic kind. The Police Band was an idea that didn’t work. When they retired the old Commissioner (our Commissioner), who it turned out had a little drug problem of his own, they didn’t let us even drill anymore. We have never been used. His idea was a romantic idea, they said (right?), which was not adequate to the rage currently around in the world. Rage must be met with rage, they said. (Not in so many words.) We sit around the precinct houses, under the filthy lights, talking about our techniques. But I thought it might be good if you knew that the Department still has us. We have a good group. We still have emotion to be used. We’re still here.

  Edward and Pia

  EDWARD LOOKED at his red beard in the tableknife. Then Edward and Pia went to Sweden, to the farm. In the mailbox Pia found a check for Willie from the government of Sweden. It was for twenty-three hundred crowns and had a rained-on look. Pia put the check in the pocket of her brown coat. Pia was pregnant. In London she had been sick every day. In London Pia and Edward had seen the Marat/Sade at the Aldwych Theatre. Edward bought a bottle of white stuff for Pia in London. It was supposed to make her stop vomiting. Edward walked out to the wood barn and broke up wood for the fire. Snow in patches lay on the ground still. Pia wrapped cabbage leaves around chopped meat. She was still wearing her brown coat. Willie’s check was still in the pocket. It was still Sunday.

  “What are you thinking about?” Edward asked Pia and she said she was thinking about Willie’s hand. Willie had hurt his hand in a machine in a factory in Markaryd. The check was for compensation.