Donald Barthelme

by Donald Barthelme

  The notices are good, very good.

  LIGHTS UP THE SKY OVER

  OFF-BROADWAY AND STIMULATES

  MEN’S MINDS

  —Cue

  The actors are praised, warmly and with discrimination. People attend the play in encouraging numbers. At intermission the lobby is filled with well-dressed, enthusiastic people, discussing the play. The producer, that large, anxious man, steams with enthusiasm. The critics, he tells the playwright, are unreliable. But sometimes one has good fortune. The play, he tells the playwright, will remain forever in the history of the theatre.

  After the show closes, the director purchases the big, spiky plant that appeared, burning with presence, throughout the second act. The actors, picking up their gear, pause to watch the plant being loaded onto a truck. “Think he can teach it to go to the corner for coffee and a Danish?” “Easier said than done, boyo.”

  In his study, the playwright begins his next play, which will explore the relationship between St. Augustine and a Cartha­ginian girl named Luna and the broken bones of the heart.

  Sindbad

  THE BEACH: Sindbad, drowned animal, clutches at the sand of still another island shore.

  His right hand, marvelous upon the pianoforte, opens and closes. His hide is roasted red, his beard white with crusted salt. The broken beam to which he clung to escape his shattered vessel lies nearby.

  He hears waltzes from the trees.

  He should, of course, rouse himself, get to his feet, gather tree fruits, locate a spring, build a signal fire, or find a stream that will carry him toward the interior of this strange new place, where he will encounter a terrifying ogre of some sort, outwit him, and then take possession of the rubies and diamonds, big as baseballs, which litter the ogre’s domains, wonderfully.

  Stir your stumps, sir.

  Classroom: It’s true that the students asked me to leave. I had never taught in the daytime before, how was I to know how things were done in the daytime?

  I guess they didn’t like my looks. I was wearing shades (my eyes unused to so much light) and a jacket that was, admittedly, too big for me. I was rather prominently placed toward the front of the room, in the front of the room to be precise, sitting on the desk that faced their desks, fidgeting.

  “Would you just, please, leave?” the students said.

  The chair had asked me, “How’d you like to teach in the daytime? Just this once?” I said that I could not imagine such a thing but that I would do my very best. “Don’t get carried away, Robert,” she said, “it’s only one course, we’ve got too many people on leave and now this damnable flu . . .” I said I would prepare myself carefully and buy a new shirt. “That’s a good idea,” she said, looking closely at my shirt, which had been given to me by my younger brother, the lawyer. He was throwing out shirts.

  Sindbad’s wives look back: “I knew him, didn’t you know that I knew him?”

  “I didn’t think that a person such as you could have known him.”

  “Intimately. That’s how well I knew him. I was his ninth wife.”

  “Well of course you were more in the prime of life then. It was more reasonable to expect something.”

  “He treated me well, on the whole. In the years of our intimacy. Many gowns of great costliness.”

  “You’d never know it to look at you. I mean now.”

  “Well I have other things besides these things. I don’t wear my better things all the time. Besides gowns, he gave me frocks. Shoes of beaten lizard.”

  “Maybe jewels?”

  “Rubies and diamonds big as baseballs. I seem to remember a jeweled horsewhip. To whip my horses with. I rode, in the early mornings, on the cliffs, the cliffs overlooking the sea.”

  “You had a sea.”

  “Yes, there was a sea, adjacent to the property. He was fond of the sea.”

  “He must have been very well-off then. When I knew him he was just a merchant. A small merchant.”

  “Yes, he’d begun as a poor person, tried that for a while, didn’t like it, and then ventured forth. Upon the sea.”

  The Beaux-Arts Ball: At the Beaux-Arts Ball given by the Art and Architecture Departments I saw a young woman wearing what appeared to be men’s cotton underwear. The undershirt was sleeveless and the briefs, cut very high on the sides, had the designer’s name (“EGIZIO”) in half-inch red letters stitched around the waistband.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  She raised her hands, which were encased in red rubber gloves. “Lady Macbeth,” she said. Then she asked me to leave.

  So I went out into the parking lot carrying my costume, a brightly polished English horn. If anyone had asked me who I was I had intended saying I was one of Robin Hood’s merry men. One of the students followed me, wanted to know if I had a wife. I answered honestly that I did not, and told her that if you taught at night you weren’t allowed to have a wife. It was a sort of unwritten law, understood by all. “You’re not allowed to have a wife and you’re not allowed to have a car,” I told her honestly.

  “Then what are you doing in this parking lot?” she asked. I showed her my old blue bicycle, parked between a Camaro and a Trans Am. “Do you have a house?” she asked, and I said that I had a room somewhere, with a radio in it and one of those little refrigerators that sit upon a table.

  Sindbad’s first emporium in Baghdad: When we opened Sindbad’s we did not anticipate the good results we obtained almost immediately.

  The people leaped over the counters and wrested the goods from our hands and from the shelves behind the counters.

  Stock boys ran back and forth between the stockrooms and the counters. We had developed patterns of running back and forth so that Stock Boy A did not collide with Stock Boy B. Some warped, some woofed.

  We had always wanted a store and had as children played “store” with tiny cedar boxes replicating real goods. Now we had an actual store, pearl-colored with accents of saturated jade.

  Every day, people leaped over the counters and wrested goods from the hands of our brave, durable clerks. Our store was glorious, glorious. The simple finest of everything, that was what we purveyed. Often people had been wandering around for years trying to find the finest, lost, uncertain. Then they walked through our great bronze doors resonant with humming filigree. There it was, the finest.

  Even humble items were the finest of their kind. Our straight pin was straighter than any other straight pin ever offered, and pinned better, too.

  Once, a little girl came into the store, alone. She had only a few gold coins, and we took them from her, and made her happy. We had never, in our entire careers as merchants, seen a happier little girl as she left the store, carrying in her arms the particular goods she had purchased with her few, but real, gold coins.

  Once, a tall man came into the store, tall but bent, arthritis, he was bent half-double, but you could tell that he was tall, or had been tall before he became bent, three or four lines of physical suffering on his forehead. He asked for food. We furnished him with foodstuffs from Taillevent in Paris, the finest, and not a centime did we charge him. Because he was bent.

  In our pearl-colored store we had a pearl beyond price, a tulip bulb beyond price, and a beautiful slave girl beyond price. These were displayed behind heavy glass set in the walls. No offer for these items was ever accepted. They were beyond price. Idealism ruled us in these matters.

  The students: “Would you please leave now?” they asked. “Would you please just leave?”

  Then they all started talking to each other, they turned in their seats and began talking to each other, the air grew loud, it was rather like a cocktail party except that everybody was sitting down, the door opened and a waiter came in with drinks on a tray followed by another waiter with water chestnuts wrapped in bacon on a tray and another waiter with
more drinks. It was exactly like a cocktail party except that everybody was sitting down. So I took a drink from a tray and joined one of the groups and tried to understand what they were saying.

  Tennis: Yes, he could do this sort of thing all day. Something he can go home and talk about (assuming that he gets back to Baghdad alive), how he played tennis with two ogres tall as houses and brought them to their knees. Each ogre has a single red eye in the middle of his forehead and a single wire-rimmed lens framing the eye. He can sucker the one on the left out of position merely by glancing at the one on the right before he serves, and anything placed to the left of the one on the right is invariably missed, the one on the right has no backhand whatsoever. So how-he-played-tennis-with-two-ogres will be added to the repertoire, two female ogres following the game intently, their two staring eyes with the single tinted lenses turning right, left, right, left, the sun bursting off the lenses like the beams of two lighthouses. . . .

  At night: At night, the Department’s offices are empty. The cleaning women make their telephone calls, in Spanish, from Professor This’s office, from Professor That’s office, taking care of business. The parking lots are infernos of yellow light.

  Sitting one night on the steps of the power plant I saw a man carrying a typewriter, an IBM Selectric III. I judged him to be one of those people who stole typewriters from the university at night. “Can you type?” I asked him. He said, “Shit, man, don’t be a fool.” I asked him why he stole typewriters and he said, “Them mothers ain’t got nothin’ else worth stealin’.” I was going to suggest that he return the typewriter, when another man came out of the darkness carrying another typewriter. “This mother’s heavy,” he said to the first, and they went off together, cursing. An IBM Selectric III weighs approximately forty pounds.

  The students, no doubt, whispered about me:

  “I heard this is the first time he’s taught in the daytime.”

  “They wouldn’t let that sucker teach in sunlight ’cept that all the real teachers are dead.”

  “Did you get a shot of that coat? Tack-eeee.”

  I stood in the corridor gazing at them from behind my shades. What a good-looking group! I thought. In the presto of the morning, as Stevens puts it.

  Experience: Sindbad learns nothing from experience.

  A prudent man, after the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh voyages, would never again set foot on a ship’s deck. Every vessel upon which he has ever embarked has either headed for the bottom not two days out of port or marooned him, has been stove in by a gigantic whale (first voyage), seduced into distraction by jubilant creatures of the air (second voyage), stolen by apelike savages no more than three feet high (third voyage), crushed by a furious squall (fourth voyage), bombed from the air by huge birds carrying huge rocks (fifth voyage), or dashed against a craggy shore (sixth voyage) by the never-sleeping winds.

  But there is always a sturdy (wooden trough, floating beam, stray piece of wreckage from the doomed vessel) to cling to, and an island (garnished with rubies and diamonds, large quantities of priceless pearls, bales of the choicest ambergris) to pillage. Sindbad never fails to return to Baghdad richer than before, with many sumptuous presents for the friends and relatives who gather at his house to hear the news of his latest heroic impertinence.

  Sindbad is not a prudent but a daring man. In Who’s Who at Sea he is listed, disapprovingly, as an “adventurer.”

  Water cannon: The graduates don’t wish to leave the campus. We’ll have to blast them out. I say “we” because I identify with the administration although no member of the administration has asked my opinion on the matter. I think water cannon are the means of choice. I have never seen a water cannon except in TV news reports from East Germany but it seems to be an effective and relatively humane means of blasting people out of there. I wouldn’t mind having a water cannon of my own. There are certain people I wouldn’t mind blasting.

  The grounds crew was standing at the edge of the field, waiting to fold the folding chairs. The band was putting away its instruments. The graduates must have had some boards stashed away among the trees. They began building lean-tos, many of them leaned against the Science Building, some against the Student Center. Cooking fires were lit, the graduates squatted around the cooking fires, roasting corn on spits. Totem poles were erected before the lean-tos. The provost went to the microphone. “Time to go, time to go,” he said. The graduates refused to leave.

  Waltzes: Sindbad gets to his feet, shakes himself, and heads toward the tree line. Waltzes? The music is exotic to him, he has never heard such music before. He congratulates himself that on his eighth voyage the world can still reward him with new enchantments.

  Teaching: I reentered the classroom and fixed them with my fiercest glare. I began to teach. They had to put down their drinks and shrimp on toothpicks and listen.

  It was true, I said, that I had never taught in the daytime before, and that my refrigerator was small and my jacket far, far too baggy.

  Nonetheless, I said, I have something to teach. Be like Sindbad! Venture forth! Embosom the waves, let your shoes be sucked from your feet and your very trousers enticed by the frothing deep. The ambiguous sea awaits, I told them, marry it!

  There’s nothing out there, they said.

  Wrong, I said, absolutely wrong. There are waltzes, sword canes, and sea wrack dazzling to the eyes.

  What’s a sword cane? they asked, and with relief I plunged into the Romantics.

  Rif

  LET ME tell you something. New people have moved into the apartment below me and their furniture is, shockingly, identical to mine, the camelback sofa in camel-colored tweed is there as are the two wrong-side-of-the-blanket sons of the Wassily chair and the black enamel near-Mackintosh chairs, they have the pink-and-purple dhurries and the brass quasi-Eames torchères as well as the fake Ettore Sottsass faux-marble coffee table with cannonball legs. I’m shocked, in a state of shock—

  —I taught you that. Overstatement. You’re shocked. You reel, you fall, you collapse in Rodrigo’s arms, complaining of stress. He slowly begins loosening your stays, stay by stay, singing the great Ah, je vois le jour, ah, Dieu, and the second act is over.

  —You taught me that, Rhoda. You, my mentor in all things.

  —You were apt Hettie very apt.

  —I was apt.

  —The most apt.

  —Cold here in the garden.

  —You were complaining about the sun.

  —But when it goes behind a cloud—

  —Well, you can’t have everything.

  —The flowers are beautiful.

  —Indeed.

  —Consoling to have the flowers.

  —Half-consoled already.

  —And these Japanese rocks.

  —Artfully placed, most artfully.

  —You must admit, a great consolation.

  —And our work.

  —A great consolation.

  —God, aren’t these flowers beautiful.

  —Only three of them. But each remarkable, of its kind.

  —What are they?

  —Some kind of Japanese dealies, I don’t know.

  —Lazing here in the garden. This is really most luxurious.

  —I think that they provide, the company provides, a space like this, in the middle of this vast building, it’s—

  —Most enlightened.

  —It drains away. The tensions.

  —We still haven’t decided what color to paint the trucks.

  —I said blue.

  —Surely not your last word on the subject.

  —I have some swatches. If you’d care to take a gander.

  —Not now. This sun is blistering.

  —New skin. You’re going to complain?

  —Those new people. Upstairs. They make me feel bad. Woul
dn’t you feel bad?

  —It’s not my furniture that’s being replicated in every detail. Every last trite detail. So I don’t feel bad. The implications don’t—

  —I have something to tell you, Rhoda.

  —What, Hettie?

  —We’re having a thirteen-percent reduction-in-force. A rif. You’re in line to be riffed, Rhoda.

  —I am?

  —If you take early retirement voluntarily you get a better package. If I have to release you, you get less.

  —How much less?

  —Rounds out at about forty-two percent. Less.

  —Well.

  —Yes.

  —I’ll need something to do with myself. I am young yet Hettie. Relatively speaking.

  —Very relatively very.

  —What about the windows?

  —What about them?

  —They need washing. Badly in want of washing.

  —You? Washing windows?

  —Maybe work my way up through the ranks. Again.

  —Your delicate hands in the ammonia-bright bucket—I can’t see it.

  —Is cheese alive when it’s killed? My daughter asked me that she’s beginning to get the hang of things.

  —Perhaps too early?

  —On schedule I would say. The windows radiate filth, building-wide. I can do it.

  —I will plunge the dagger into my breast before I send you to Support Services.

  —All part of the program, Hettie.

  —Will I be okay without you, Rhoda?

  —Fine, Hettie, fine. My parting advice is, cut the dagger.

  —The only person I ever stuck with it was Bruce.

  —He smiled slightly as he slid to the floor, a vivid pinkness obscuring the Polo emblem on his chest.

  —He was most gracious about it, called it a learning experience.