Donald Barthelme

by Donald Barthelme

  The darkness, strangeness, and complexity of the new President have touched everyone. There has been a great deal of fainting lately. Is the President at fault? I was sitting, I remember, in Row EE at City Center; the opera was “The Gypsy Baron.” Sylvia was singing in her green-and-blue gypsy costume in the gypsy encampment. I was thinking about the President. Is he, I wondered, right for this period? He is a strange fellow, I thought—not like the other Presidents we’ve had. Not like Garfield. Not like Taft. Not like Harding, Hoover, either of the Roosevelts, or Woodrow Wilson. Then I noticed a lady sitting in front of me, holding a baby. I tapped her on the shoulder. “Madam,” I said, “your child has I believe fainted.” “Charles!” she cried, rotating the baby’s head like a doll’s. “Charles, what has happened to you?” The President was smiling in his box.

  “The President!” I said to Sylvia in the Italian restaurant. She raised her glass of warm red wine. “Do you think he liked me? My singing?” “He looked pleased,” I said. “He was smiling.” “A brilliant whirlwind campaign, I thought,” Sylvia stated. “Winning was brilliant,” I said. “He is the first President we’ve had from City College,” Sylvia said. A waiter fainted behind us. “But is he right for the period?” I asked. “Our period is perhaps not so choice as the previous period, still—”

  “He thinks a great deal about death, like all people from City,” Sylvia said. “The death theme looms large in his consciousness. I’ve known a great many people from City, and these people, with no significant exceptions, are hung up on the death theme. It’s an obsession, as it were.” Other waiters carried the waiter who had fainted out into the kitchen.

  “Our period will be characterized in future histories as a period of tentativeness and uncertainty, I feel,” I said. “A kind of parenthesis. When he rides in his black limousine with the plastic top I see a little boy who has blown an enormous soap bubble which has trapped him. The look on his face—” “The other candidate was dazzled by his strangeness, newness, smallness, and philosophical grasp of the death theme,” Sylvia said. “The other candidate didn’t have a prayer,” I said. Sylvia adjusted her green-and-blue veils in the Italian restaurant. “Not having gone to City College and sat around the cafeterias there discussing death,” she said.

  I am, as I say, not entirely sympathetic. Certain things about the new President are not clear. I can’t make out what he is thinking. When he has finished speaking I can never remember what he has said. There remains only an impression of strangeness, darkness . . . On television, his face clouds when his name is mentioned. It is as if hearing his name frightens him. Then he stares directly into the camera (an actor’s preempting gaze) and begins to speak. One hears only cadences. Newspaper accounts of his speeches always say only that he “touched on a number of matters in the realm of . . .” When he has finished speaking he appears nervous and unhappy. The camera credits fade in over an image of the President standing stiffly, with his arms rigid at his sides, looking to the right and to the left, as if awaiting instructions. On the other hand, the handsome meliorist who ran against him, all zest and programs, was defeated by a fantastic margin.

  People are fainting. On Fifty-seventh Street, a young girl dropped in her tracks in front of Henri Bendel. I was shocked to discover that she wore only a garter belt under her dress. I picked her up and carried her into the store with the help of a Salvation Army major—a very tall man with an orange hairpiece. “She fainted,” I said to the floorwalker. We talked about the new President, the Salvation Army major and I. “I’ll tell you what I think,” he said. “I think he’s got something up his sleeve nobody knows about. I think he’s keeping it under wraps. One of these days . . .” The Salvation Army major shook my hand. “I’m not saying that the problems he faces aren’t tremendous, staggering. The awesome burden of the Presidency. But if anybody—any one man . . .”

  What is going to happen? What is the President planning? No one knows. But everyone is convinced that he will bring it off. Our exhausted age wishes above everything to plunge into the heart of the problem, to be able to say, “Here is the difficulty.” And the new President, that tiny, strange, and brilliant man, seems cankered and difficult enough to take us there. In the meantime, people are fainting. My secretary fell in the middle of a sentence. “Miss Kagle,” I said. “Are you all right?” She was wearing an anklet of tiny silver circles. Each tiny silver circle held an initial: @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@. Who is this person “A”? What is he in your life, Miss Kagle?

  I gave her water with a little brandy in it. I speculated about the President’s mother. Little is known about her. She presented herself in various guises:

  A little lady, 5′ 2″, with a cane.

  A big lady, 7′ 1″, with a dog.

  A wonderful old lady, 4′ 3″, with an indomitable spirit.

  A noxious old sack, 6′ 8″, excaudate, because of an operation.

  Little is known about her. We are assured, however, that the same damnable involvements that obsess us obsess her too. Copulation. Strangeness. Applause. She must be pleased that her son is what he is—loved and looked up to, a mode of hope for millions. “Miss Kagle. Drink it down. It will put you on your feet again, Miss Kagle.” I regarded her with my warm kind eyes.

  At Town Hall, I sat reading the program notes to “The Gypsy Baron.” Outside the building, eight mounted policemen collapsed en bloc. The well-trained horses planted their feet delicately among the bodies. Sylvia was singing. They said a small man could never be President (only forty-eight inches high at the shoulder). Our period is not the one I would have chosen, but it has chosen me. The new President must have certain intuitions. I am convinced that he has these intuitions (although I am certain of very little else about him; I have reservations, I am not sure). I could tell you about his mother’s summer journey, in 1919, to western Tibet—about the dandymen and the red bear, and how she told off the Pathan headman, instructing him furiously to rub up his English or get out of her service—but what order of knowledge is this? Let me instead simply note his smallness, his strangeness, his brilliance, and say that we expect great things of him. “I love you,” Sylvia said. The President stepped through the roaring curtain. We applauded until our arms hurt. We shouted until the ushers set off flares enforcing silence. The orchestra tuned itself. Sylvia sang the second lead. The President was smiling in his box. At the finale, the entire cast slipped into the orchestra pit in a great, swooning mass. We cheered until the ushers tore up our tickets.

  See the Moon?

  I KNOW you think I’m wasting my time. You’ve made that perfectly clear. But I’m conducting these very important lunar hostility studies. And it’s not you who’ll have to leave the warm safe capsule. And dip a toe into the threatening lunar surround.

  I am still wearing my yellow flower which has lasted wonderfully.

  My methods may seem a touch irregular. Have to do chiefly with folded paper airplanes at present. But the paper must be folded in the right way. Lots of calculations and worrying about edges.

  Show me a man who worries about edges and I’ll show you a natural-born winner. Cardinal Y agrees. Columbus himself worried, the Admiral of the Ocean Sea. But he kept it quiet.

  The sun so warm on this screened porch, it reminds me of my grandmother’s place in Tampa. The same rusty creaky green glider and the same faded colored canvas cushions. And at night the moon graphed by the screen wire, if you squint. The Sea of Tranquillity occupying squares 47 through 108.

  See the moon? It hates us.

  My methods are homely but remember Newton and the apple. And when Rutherford started out he didn’t even have a decently heated laboratory. And then there’s the matter of my security check—I’m waiting for the government. Somebody told it I’m insecure. That’s true.

  I suffer from a frightful illness of the mind, light-mindedness. It’s not catching. You needn’t shrink.

  You’ve noticed the wall?
I pin things on it, souvenirs. There is the red hat, there the book of instructions for the Ant Farm. And this is a traffic ticket written on a saint’s day (which saint? I don’t remember) in 1954 just outside a fat little town (which town? I don’t remember) in Ohio by a cop who asked me what I did. I said I wrote poppycock for the president of a university, true then.

  You can see how far I’ve come. Lunar hostility studies aren’t for everyone.

  It’s my hope that these . . . souvenirs . . . will someday merge, blur—cohere is the word, maybe—into something meaningful. A grand word, meaningful. What do I look for? A work of art, I’ll not accept anything less. Yes I know it’s shatteringly ingenuous but I wanted to be a painter. They get away with murder in my view; Mr. X. on the Times agrees with me. You don’t know how I envy them. They can pick up a Baby Ruth wrapper on the street, glue it to the canvas (in the right place, of course, there’s that), and lo! people crowd about and cry, “A real Baby Ruth wrapper, by God, what could be realer than that!” Fantastic metaphysical advantage. You hate them, if you’re ambitious.

  The Ant Farm instructions are a souvenir of Sylvia. The red hat came from Cardinal Y. We’re friends, in a way.

  I wanted to be one, when I was young, a painter. But I couldn’t stand stretching the canvas. Does things to the fingernails. And that’s the first place people look.

  Fragments are the only forms I trust.

  Light-minded or no, I’m . . . riotous with mental health. I measure myself against the Russians, that’s fair. I have here a clipping datelined Moscow, four young people apprehended strangling a swan. That’s boredom. The swan’s name, Borka. The sentences as follows: Tsarev, metalworker, served time previously for stealing public property, four years in a labor camp, strict regime. Roslavtsev, electrician, jailed previously for taking a car on a joyride, three years and four months in a labor camp, semi-strict regime. Tatyana Voblikova (only nineteen and a Komsomol member too), technician, one and a half years in a labor camp, degree of strictness unspecified. Anna G. Kirushina, technical worker, fine of twenty per cent of salary for one year. Anna objected to the strangulation, but softly: she helped stuff the carcass in a bag.

  The clipping is tacked up on my wall. I inspect it from time to time, drawing the moral. Strangling swans is wrong.

  My brother who is a very distinguished pianist . . . has no fingernails at all. Don’t look it’s horrible. He plays under another name. And tunes his piano peculiarly, some call it sour. And renders ragas he wrote himself. A night raga played at noon can cause darkness, did you know that? It’s extraordinary.

  He wanted to be an Untouchable, Paul did. That was his idea of a contemporary career. But then a girl walked up and touched him (slapped him, actually; it’s a complicated story). And he joined us, here in the imbroglio.

  My father on the other hand is perfectly comfortable, and that’s not a criticism. He makes flags, banners, bunting (sometimes runs me up a shirt). There was never any question of letting my father drink from the public well. He was on the Well Committee, he decided who dipped and who didn’t. That’s not a criticism. Exercises his creativity, nowadays, courtesy the emerging nations. Green for the veldt that nourishes the gracile Grant’s gazelle, white for the purity of our revolutionary aspirations. The red for blood is understood. That’s not a criticism. It’s what they all ask for.

  A call tonight from Gregory, my son by my first wife. Seventeen and at M.I.T. already. Recently he’s been asking questions. Suddenly he’s conscious of himself as a being with a history.

  The telephone rings. Then, without a greeting: Why did I have to take those little pills? What little pills? Little white pills with a “W” on them. Oh. Oh yes. You had some kind of a nervous disorder, for a while. How old was I? Eight. Eight or nine. What was it? Was it epilepsy? Good God no, nothing so fancy. We never found out what it was. It went away. What did I do? Did I fall down? No no. Your mouth trembled, that was all. You couldn’t control it. Oh, O.K. See you.

  The receiver clicks.

  Or: What did my great-grandfather do? For a living I mean? He was a ballplayer, semi-pro ballplayer, for a while. Then went into the building business. Who’d he play for? A team called the St. Augustine Rowdies, I think it was. Never heard of them. Well . . . Did he make any money? In the building business? Quite a bit. Did your father inherit it? No, it was tied up in a lawsuit. When the suit was over there wasn’t anything left. Oh. What was the lawsuit? Great-grandfather diddled a man in a land deal. So the story goes. Oh. When did he die? Let’s see, 1938 I think. What of? Heart attack. Oh. O.K. See you.

  End of conversation.

  Gregory, you didn’t listen to my advice. I said try the Vernacular Isles. Where fish are two for a penny and women two for a fish. But you wanted M.I.T. and electron-spin-­resonance spectroscopy. You didn’t even crack a smile in your six-ply heather hopsacking.

  Gregory you’re going to have a half brother now. You’ll like that, won’t you? Will you half like it?

  We talked about the size of the baby, Ann and I. What could be deduced from the outside.

  I said it doesn’t look very big to me. She said it’s big enough for us. I said we don’t need such a great roaring big one after all. She said they cost the earth, those extra-large sizes. Our holdings in Johnson’s Baby Powder to be considered too. We’d need acres and acres. I said we’ll put it in a Skinner box maybe. She said no child of hers. Displayed under glass like a rump roast. I said you haven’t wept lately. She said I keep getting bigger whether I laugh or cry.

  Dear Ann. I don’t think you’ve quite . . .

  What you don’t understand is, it’s like somebody walks up to you and says, I have a battleship I can’t use, would you like to have a battleship. And you say, yes yes, I’ve never had a battleship, I’ve always wanted one. And he says, it has four sixteen-inch guns forward, and a catapult for launching scout planes. And you say, I’ve always wanted to launch scout planes. And he says, it’s yours, and then you have this battleship. And then you have to paint it, because it’s rusting, and clean it, because it’s dirty, and anchor it somewhere, because the Police Department wants you to get it off the streets. And the crew is crying, and there are silverfish in the chartroom and a funny knocking noise in Fire Control, water rising in the No. 2 hold, and the chaplain can’t find the Palestrina tapes for the Sunday service. And you can’t get anybody to sit with it. And finally you discover that what you have here is this great, big, pink-and-blue rockabye battleship.

  Ann. I’m going to keep her ghostly. Just the odd bit of dialogue:

  “What is little Gog doing.”

  “Kicking.”

  I don’t want her bursting in on us with the freshness and originality of her observations. What we need here is perspective. She’s good with Gregory though. I think he half likes her.

  Don’t go. The greased-pig chase and balloon launchings come next.

  I was promising once. After the Elgar, a summa cum laude. The university was proud of me. It was a bright shy white new university on the Gulf Coast. Gulls and oleanders and quick howling hurricanes. The teachers brown burly men with power boats and beer cans. The president a retired admiral who’d done beautiful things in the Coral Sea.

  “You will be a credit to us, George,” the admiral said. That’s not my name. I’m protecting my identity, what there is of it.

  Applause from the stands filled with mothers and brothers. Then following the mace in a long line back to the field house to ungown. Ready to take my place at the top.

  But a pause at Pusan, and the toy train to the Chorwon Valley. Walking down a road wearing green clothes. Korea green and black and silent. The truce had been signed. I had a carbine to carry. My buddy Bo Tagliabue the bonus baby, for whom the Yanks had paid thirty thousand. We whitewashed rocks to enhance our area. Colonels came crowding to feel Bo’s hurling arm. Mine the whitest rocks.

  I lun
ched with Thais from Thailand, hot curry from great galvanized washtubs. Engineers banging down the road in six-by-sixes raising red dust. My friend Gib Mandell calling Elko, Nevada on his canvas-covered field telephone. “Operator I crave Elko, Nevada.”

  Then I was a sergeant with stripes, getting the troops out of the sun. Tagliabue a sergeant too. Triste in the Tennessee Tea Room in Tokyo, yakking it up in Yokohama. Then back to our little tent town on the side of a hill, boosting fifty-gallon drums of heating oil tentward in the snow.

  Ozzie the jeep driver waking me in the middle of the night. “They got Julian in the Tango Tank.” And up and alert as they taught us in Leadership School, over the hills to Tango, seventy miles away. Whizzing through Teapot, Tempest, Toreador, with the jeep’s canvas top flapping. Pfc. Julian drunk and disorderly and beaten up. The M.P. sergeant held out a receipt book. I signed for the bawdy remains.

  Back over the pearly Pacific in a great vessel decorated with oranges. A trail of orange peel on the plangent surface. Sitting in the bow fifty miles out of San Francisco, listening to the Stateside disc jockeys chattering cha cha cha. Ready to grab my spot at the top.

  My clothes looked old and wrong. The city looked new with tall buildings raised while my back was turned. I rushed here and there visiting friends. They were burning beef in their back yards, brown burly men with beer cans. The beef black on the outside, red on the inside. My friend Horace had fidelity. “Listen to that bass. That’s sixty watts worth of bass, boy.”

  I spoke to my father. “How is business?” “If Alaska makes it,” he said, “I can buy a Hasselblad. And we’re keeping an eye on Hawaii.” Then he photographed my veteran face, f.6 at 300. My father once a cheerleader at a great Eastern school. Jumping in the air and making fierce angry down-the-field gestures at the top of his leap.