The torero opens a bottle of Chivas Regal. He offers a shot to the Bishop, who graciously accepts, and then pours one for himself. The torero’s mother edges toward the bottle of Chivas Regal. The torero’s mistress films his mother’s surreptitious approach. The Bishop and the torero discuss whiskey and psychoanalysis. The torero’s mother has a hand on the neck of the bottle. The torero makes a sudden wild grab for her hair. The hair of his mother! He misses and she scuttles off into a corner of the room, clutching the bottle. The torero picks a killing sword, an estoque, from the half dozen still on the bed. The Queen of the Gypsies enters.
The Queen hurries to the torero, little tufts of dried grass falling from her robes as she crosses the room. “Unwrap the wound!” she cries. “The wound, the wound, the wound!” The torero recoils. The Bishop sits severely. His attendants stir and whisper. The torero’s mother takes a swig from the Chivas Regal bottle. The famous aficionado crosses himself. The torero’s mistress looks down through her half-open blouse at her breasts. The torero quickly reaches into the drawer of the bedside table and removes the cigar box. He takes from the cigar box the ears and tail of a bull he killed, with excellence and emotion, long ago. He spreads them out on the bedcovers, offering them to the Queen. The ears resemble bloody wallets, the tail the hair of some long-dead saint, robbed from a reliquary. “No,” the Queen says. She grasps the torero’s foot and begins to unwrap the bandages. The torero grimaces but submits. The Queen withdraws from her belt a sharp knife. The torero’s mistress picks up a violin and begins to play an air by Valdéz. The Queen whacks off a huge portion of roast beef, which she stuffs into her mouth while bent over the wound—gazing deeply into it, savoring it. Everyone shrinks—the torero, his mother, his mistress, the Bishop, the aficionado, the imbéciles, idiotas, and bobos. An ecstasy of shrinking. The Queen says, “I want this wound. This one. It is mine. Come, pick him up.” Everyone present takes a handful of the torero and lifts him high above their heads (he is screaming). But the doorway is suddenly blocked by the figure of an immense black bull. The bull begins to ring, like a telephone.
110 West Sixty-First Street
PAUL GAVE Eugenie a very large swordfish steak for her birthday. It was wrapped in red-and-white paper. The paper was soaked with swordfish juices in places but Eugenie was grateful nevertheless. He had tried. Paul and Eugenie went to a film. Their baby had just died and they were trying not to think about it. The film left them slightly depressed. The child’s body had been given to the hospital for medical experimentation. “But what about life after death?” Eugenie’s mother had asked. “There isn’t any,” Eugenie said. “Are you positive?” her mother asked. “No,” Eugenie said. “How can I be positive? But that’s my opinion.”
Eugenie said to Paul: “This is the best birthday I’ve ever had.” “The hell it is,” Paul said. Eugenie cooked the swordfish steak wondering what the hospital had done to Claude. Claude had been two years old when he died. That goddamn kid! she thought. Looking around her, she could see the places where he had been—the floor, mostly. Paul thought: My swordfish-steak joke was not successful. He looked at the rather tasteless swordfish on his plate. Eugenie touched him on the shoulder.
Paul and Eugenie went to many erotic films. But the films were not erotic. Nothing was erotic. They began looking at each other and thinking about other people. The back wall of the apartment was falling off. Contractors came to make estimates. A steel I beam would have to be set into the wall to support the floor of the apartment above, which was sagging. The landlord did not wish to pay the four thousand dollars the work would cost. One could see daylight between the back wall and the party wall. Paul and Eugenie went to his father’s place in Connecticut for a day. Paul’s father was a will lawyer—a lawyer specializing in wills. He showed them a flyer advertising do-it-yourself wills, DO YOU HAVE A WILL? Everyone should. Save on legal fees—make your own will with Will Forms Kit. Kit has 5 will forms, a 64-page book on wills, a guide to the duties of the executor, and forms for recording family assets. $1.98. Eugenie studied the third-class mail. “What are our family assets?” she asked Paul. Paul thought about the question. Paul’s sister Debbie had had a baby at fifteen, which had been put up for adoption. Then she had become a nun. Paul’s brother Steve was in the Secret Service and spent all of his time guarding the widow of a former President. “Does Debbie still believe in a life after death?” Eugenie asked suddenly. “She believes, so far as I can determine, in life now,” Paul’s father said. Eugenie remembered that Paul had told her that his father had been fond, when Debbie was a child, of beating her on her bare buttocks with a dog leash. “She believes in social action,” Paul’s bent father continued. “Probably she is right. That seems to be the trend among nuns.”
Paul thought: Barbados. There we might recover what we have lost. I wonder if there is a charter flight through the Bar Association?
Paul and Eugenie drove back to the city.
“This is a lot of depressing crud that we’re going through right now,” Paul said as they reached Port Chester, N.Y. “But later it will be better.” No it won’t, Eugenie thought. “Yes it will,” Paul said.
“You are extremely self-righteous,” Eugenie said to Paul. “That is the one thing I can’t stand in a man. Sometimes I want to scream.” “You are a slut without the courage to go out and be one,” Paul replied. “Why don’t you go to one of those bars and pick up somebody, for God’s sake?” “It wouldn’t do any good,” Eugenie said. “I know that,” Paul said. Eugenie remembered the last scene of the erotic film they had seen on her birthday, in which the girl had taken a revolver from a drawer and killed her lover with it. At the time she had thought this a poor way to end the film. Now she wished she had a revolver in a drawer. Paul was afraid of having weapons in the house. “They fire themselves,” he always said. “You don’t have anything to do with it.”
Mason came over and talked. Paul and Mason had been in the army together. Mason, who had wanted to be an actor, now taught speech at a junior college on Long Island. “How are you bearing up?” Mason asked, referring to the death of Claude. “Very well,” Paul said. “I am bearing up very well but she is not.” Mason looked at Eugenie. “Well, I don’t blame her,” he said. “She should be an alcoholic by now.” Eugenie, who drank very little, smiled at Mason. Paul’s jokes were as a rule better than Mason’s jokes. But Mason had compassion. His compassion is real, she thought. Only he doesn’t know how to express it.
Mason told a long story about trivial departmental matters. Paul and Eugenie tried to look interested. Eugenie had tried to give Claude’s clothes to her friend Julia, who also had a two-year-old. But Julia had said no. “You would always be seeing them,” she said. “You should give them to a more distant friend. Don’t you have any distant friends?” Paul was promoted. He became a full partner in his law firm. “This is a big day,” he said when he came home. He was slightly drunk. “There is no such thing as a big day,” Eugenie said. “Once, I thought there was. Now I know better. I sincerely congratulate you on your promotion, which I really believe was well deserved. You are talented and you have worked very hard. Forgive me for that remark I made last month about your self-righteousness. What I said was true—I don’t retreat from that position—but a better wife would have had the tact not to mention it.” “No,” Paul said. “You were right to mention it. It is true. You should tell the truth when you know it. And you should go out and get laid if you feel like it. The veneer of politesse we cover ourselves with is not in general good for us.” “No,” Eugenie said. “Listen. I want to get pregnant again. You could do that for me. It’s probably a bad idea but I want to do it. In spite of everything.” Paul closed his eyes. “No no no no no,” he said.
Eugenie imagined the new child. This time, a girl. A young woman, she thought, eventually. Someone I could talk to. With Claude, we made a terrible mistake. We should have had a small coffin, a grave. We were sensible. We were unnatural.
Paul emerged from the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist. There was some water on him still. Eugenie touched him on the shoulder. Paul and Eugenie had once taken a sauna together, in Norway. Paul had carried a glass of brandy into the sauna and the glass had become so hot that he could not pick it up. The telephone rang. It was Eugenie’s sister in California. “We are going to have another child,” Eugenie said to her sister. “Are you pregnant?” her sister asked. “Not yet,” Eugenie said. “Do you think about him?” her sister asked. “I still see him crawling around on the floor,” Eugenie said. “Under the piano. He liked to screw around under the piano.”
In the days that followed, Paul discovered a pair of gold cuff links, oval in shape, at the bottom of a drawer. Cuff links, he thought. Could I ever have worn cuff links? In the days that followed, Eugenie met Tiger. Tiger was a black artist who hated white people so much he made love only to white women. “I am color-blind, Tiger,” Eugenie said to Tiger, in bed. “I really am.” “The hell you are,” Tiger said. “You want to run a number on somebody, go ahead. But don’t jive me.” Eugenie admired Tiger’s many fine qualities. Tiger “turned her head around,” she explained to Paul. Paul tried to remain calm. His increased responsibilities were wearing out his nerve ends. He was guiding a bus line through bankruptcy. Paul asked Eugenie if she was using contraceptives. “Of course,” she said.
“How’d it happen?” Tiger asked Eugenie, referring to the death of Claude. Eugenie told him. “That don’t make one happy,” Tiger said. “Tiger, you are an egocentric mushbrain monster,” she said. “You mean I’m a mean nigger,” Tiger said. He loved to say “nigger” because it shook the white folks so. “I mean you’re an imitation wild man. You’re about as wild as a can of Campbell’s Chicken with Rice soup.” Tiger then hit her around the head a few times to persuade her of his authenticity. But she was relentless. “When you get right down to it,” she said, holding on to him and employing the dialect, “you ain’t no better than a husband.”
Tiger fell away into the bottomless abyss of the formerly known.
Paul smiled. He had not known it would come to this, but now that it had come to this, he was pleased. The bus line was safely parked in the great garage of Section 112 of the Bankruptcy Act. Time passed. Eugenie’s friend Julia came over for coffee and brought her three-year-old son, Peter. Peter walked around looking for his old friend Claude. Eugenie told Julia about the departure of Tiger. “He snorted coke but he would never give me any,” she complained. “He said he didn’t want to get me started.” “You should be grateful,” Julia said. “You can’t afford it.” There was a lot of noise from the back room where workmen were putting in the steel I beam, finally. Paul was promoted from bus-line bankruptcies to railroad bankruptcies. “Today is a big day,” he told Eugenie when he got home. “Yes, it is,” she said. “They gave me the Cincinnati & West Virginia. The whole thing. It’s all mine.” “That’s wonderful,” Eugenie said. “I’ll make you a drink.” Then they went to bed, he masturbating with long slow strokes, she masturbating with quick light touches, kissing each other passionately all the while.
Paul made more and more money. He bought a boat, a thirty-two-foot Bristol. The sea taught him many things. Bravery descended upon him like sudden rain. Alicia, the new child, stands on the bow wearing a fat orange life jacket. From the shore, lounging waiters at The Captain’s Table watch her, wishing her well.
Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby
SOME OF us had been threatening our friend Colby for a long time, because of the way he had been behaving. And now he’d gone too far, so we decided to hang him. Colby argued that just because he had gone too far (he did not deny that he had gone too far) did not mean that he should be subjected to hanging. Going too far, he said, was something everybody did sometimes. We didn’t pay much attention to this argument. We asked him what sort of music he would like played at the hanging. He said he’d think about it but it would take him a while to decide. I pointed out that we’d have to know soon, because Howard, who is a conductor, would have to hire and rehearse the musicians and he couldn’t begin until he knew what the music was going to be. Colby said he’d always been fond of Ives’s Fourth Symphony. Howard said that this was a “delaying tactic” and that everybody knew that the Ives was almost impossible to perform and would involve weeks of rehearsal, and that the size of the orchestra and chorus would put us way over the music budget. “Be reasonable,” he said to Colby. Colby said he’d try to think of something a little less exacting.
Hugh was worried about the wording of the invitations. What if one of them fell into the hands of the authorities? Hanging Colby was doubtless against the law, and if the authorities learned in advance what the plan was they would very likely come in and try to mess everything up. I said that although hanging Colby was almost certainly against the law, we had a perfect moral right to do so because he was our friend, belonged to us in various important senses, and he had after all gone too far. We agreed that the invitations would be worded in such a way that the person invited could not know for sure what he was being invited to. We decided to refer to the event as “An Event Involving Mr. Colby Williams.” A handsome script was selected from a catalogue and we picked a cream-colored paper. Magnus said he’d see to having the invitations printed, and wondered whether we should serve drinks. Colby said he thought drinks would be nice but was worried about the expense. We told him kindly that the expense didn’t matter, that we were after all his dear friends and if a group of his dear friends couldn’t get together and do the thing with a little bit of éclat, why, what was the world coming to? Colby asked if he would be able to have drinks, too, before the event. We said, “Certainly.”
The next item of business was the gibbet. None of us knew too much about gibbet design, but Tomás, who is an architect, said he’d look it up in old books and draw the plans. The important thing, as far as he recollected, was that the trapdoor function perfectly. He said that just roughly, counting labor and materials, it shouldn’t run us more than four hundred dollars. “Good God!” Howard said. He said what was Tomás figuring on, rosewood? No, just a good grade of pine, Tomás said. Victor asked if unpainted pine wouldn’t look kind of “raw,” and Tomás replied that he thought it could be stained a dark walnut without too much trouble.
I said that although I thought the whole thing ought to be done really well and all, I also thought four hundred dollars for a gibbet, on top of the expense for the drinks, invitations, musicians, and everything, was a bit steep, and why didn’t we just use a tree—a nice-looking oak, or something? I pointed out that since it was going to be a June hanging the trees would be in glorious leaf and that not only would a tree add a kind of “natural” feeling but it was also strictly traditional, especially in the West. Tomás, who had been sketching gibbets on the backs of envelopes, reminded us that an outdoor hanging always had to contend with the threat of rain. Victor said he liked the idea of doing it outdoors, possibly on the bank of a river, but noted that we would have to hold it some distance from the city, which presented the problem of getting the guests, musicians, etc., to the site and then back to town.
At this point everybody looked at Harry, who runs a car-and-truck-rental business. Harry said he thought he could round up enough limousines to take care of that end but that the drivers would have to be paid. The drivers, he pointed out, wouldn’t be friends of Colby’s and couldn’t be expected to donate their services, any more than the bartender or the musicians. He said that he had about ten limousines, which he used mostly for funerals, and that he could probably obtain another dozen by calling around to friends of his in the trade. He said also that if we did it outside, in the open air, we’d better figure on a tent or awning of some kind to cover at least the principals and the orchestra, because if the hanging was being rained on he thought it would look kind of dismal. As between gibbet and tree, he said, he had no particular preferences and he really thought that
the choice ought to be left up to Colby, since it was his hanging. Colby said that everybody went too far, sometimes, and weren’t we being a little Draconian? Howard said rather sharply that all that had already been discussed, and which did he want, gibbet or tree? Colby asked if he could have a firing squad. No, Howard said, he could not. Howard said a firing squad would just be an ego trip for Colby, the blindfold and last-cigarette bit, and that Colby was in enough hot water already without trying to “upstage” everyone with unnecessary theatrics. Colby said he was sorry, he hadn’t meant it that way, he’d take the tree. Tomás crumpled up the gibbet sketches he’d been making, in disgust.
Then the question of the hangman came up. Pete said did we really need a hangman? Because if we used a tree, the noose could be adjusted to the appropriate level and Colby could just jump off something—a chair or stool or something. Besides, Pete said, he very much doubted if there were any free-lance hangmen wandering around the country, now that capital punishment has been done away with absolutely, temporarily, and that we’d probably have to fly one in from England or Spain or one of the South American countries, and even if we did that how could we know in advance that the man was a professional, a real hangman, and not just some money-hungry amateur who might bungle the job and shame us all, in front of everybody? We all agreed then that Colby should just jump off something and that a chair was not what he should jump off of, because that would look, we felt, extremely tacky—some old kitchen chair sitting out there under our beautiful tree. Tomás, who is quite modern in outlook and not afraid of innovation, proposed that Colby be standing on a large round rubber ball ten feet in diameter. This, he said, would afford a sufficient “drop” and would also roll out of the way if Colby suddenly changed his mind after jumping off. He reminded us that by not using a regular hangman we were placing an awful lot of the responsibility for the success of the affair on Colby himself, and that although he was sure Colby would perform creditably and not disgrace his friends at the last minute, still, men have been known to get a little irresolute at times like that, and the ten-foot-round rubber ball, which could probably be fabricated rather cheaply, would insure a “bang-up” production right down to the wire.
Donald Barthelme Page 47
