Donald Barthelme

by Donald Barthelme

—Most gracious. Above and beyond.

  —I remember the year we got the two-percent increase.

  —Then the four-percent increase.

  —Then the eight-percent across-the-board cut.

  —The year the Easter bonus came through.

  —Our ups and downs.

  —Wonderful memories, wonderful.

  —Bruce. Mentor-at-large. First he was your Bruce. Then he was my Bruce.

  —Taught me much, Bruce.

  —That’s what they’re for. To teach. That’s how I regarded him. That’s why I took him.

  —A good poke too, not a bad poke, fair poke not too bad a poke.

  —Mentoring away. Through dark and dank.

  —Yes.

  —He always said you cast him off like an old spreadsheet.

  —I remember a night in California. I’ve always hated California. But on this night, in California, he by God taught me lost-horse theory. Where you have a lost horse and have to find it. Has to do with the random movement of markets and the taming of probability. I was by God entranced.

  —Well we’ve moved beyond that now haven’t we?

  —If you say so Hettie.

  —I mean we don’t want to get hung up on the Bruce question at this late date.

  —What good would it do? He’s gone.

  —He thought he could cook.

  —He prided himself upon his cooking.

  —He couldn’t cook.

  —He could do gizzards. Something about gizzards that engaged his attention.

  —Nothing he could do I couldn’t do better. In addition, I could luxuriously stretch out my naked, golden leg. He couldn’t do that.

  —His, a rather oaklike leg covered with lichen.

  —Oh he was a sturdy boy. Head like a chopping block. Many’s the time I tried to bash the new into it.

  —Your subtle concept shattered upon the raw butchered surface.

  —And when it was necessary to put him out to pasture—

  —Did we flinch? We did not flinch.

  —Grazing now with all the other former vice-presidents in Kentucky.

  —Muzzle-deep in the sweetest clover.

  —I have the greatest of expectations, still.

  —Of course you do. Part of the program.

  —My expectations are part of the program?

  —The soul of the program.

  —No no no no. My expectations come from within.

  —I think not. Blown into being, as it were, by the program.

  —My expectations are a function of my thinking. My own highly individuated thinking which includes elements of the thought of Immanuel Kant and Harry S. Truman.

  —Absolutely. Unique to you.

  —Furthermore I’m going to bust out of this constraining smothering retrograde environment at the first opportunity. I give you fair warning.

  —Why tell me? I’m the mere window person.

  —To me, Rhoda, you will always be the rock upon which my church is founded.

  —Why you ragged kid, you ain’t got no church.

  —I ain’t?

  —At most, a collection plate.

  —I circulate among the worshipers, taking tithes.

  —It’s a living. Put a bunch of tithes one on top of another, you have a not inconsiderable sum.

  —The priestly function, mine. The one who understands the arcanum, me.

  —Also you get to herd the flock. Tell the flock to flock here, to flock there.

  —Divine inspiration. That’s all it is. Nothing to it.

  —You yourself awash in humility all the while.

  —I can do humility.

  —Don’t wave the dagger. The argument of the third act, as it spreads itself before us, is perfectly plain: If we recognize ourselves to be part of a larger whole with which we are in relations, those relations and that whole cannot be created by the finite self but must be produced by an absolute all-inclusive mind of which our minds are parts and of which the world-process in its totality is the experience. Don’t wave the dagger.

  —I’ll bare my breast, place the point of the knife upon its plump surface. Then explain the issues.

  —I tell you people lust for consummation. They see a shining dagger poised above a naked breast, they want it shoved in.

  —I wonder what it would have been like. If I’d had another mentor. One less sour, perhaps.

  —You’d be a different person, Hettie.

  —I would, wouldn’t I. Strange to think.

  —Are you satisfied? You needn’t answer.

  —No, I’m not. You taught me that. Not to be satisfied.

  —The given can always be improved upon. Screwed around with.

  —You were a master. Are a master. Wangling and diddling, fire and maneuver.

  —I can sit and watch my daughter. Scrape the city off her knees and tell her to look both ways when she crosses the street.

  —They have to learn. Like everybody else.

  —Maybe I’ll teach her to look only to the left. Not both ways.

  —That’s wrong. That’s not right. It’s unsafe.

  —The essence of my method.

  —You were a wild old girl, Rhoda. I’ll remember.

  —I was, wasn’t I.

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

  —Blue?

  Jaws

  HOW IS William to prove to Natasha that he still loves her? That’s the problem I’m working on, mentally, as I check the invoices and get the big double-parked trucks from the warehouses unloaded and deal with all the people bringing in aluminum cans for redemption. Benny, this black Transit cop who had ordered a hot pastrami on rye with mustard from our deli and then had to rush out on a call, is now eating his hot pastrami and telling me about this woman who was hanging out of a sixth-floor window over on Second Avenue where he and his partner couldn’t get at her. “She wouldn’t come in,” Benny says. “I said, go ahead and fly, Loony-tunes. I shouldn’t have said that. I made an error.”

  I understand how that could be. This woman wanted to blend her head with Second Avenue and mess up the honor of the Transit Police, probably because somebody didn’t love her anymore. Mutilation, actual or verbal, is usually taken as an earnest of sincere interest in another person. Verbal presentations, with William and Natasha, are no good. So many terrible sentences drift in the poisoned air between them, sentences about who is right and sentences about who works hardest and sentences about money and even sentences about physical appearance—the most ghastly of known sentences. That’s why Natasha bites, I’m convinced of it. She’s trying to say something. She opens her mouth, then closes it (futility) on William’s arm (sudden eloquence).

  I like them both, so they both tell me about these incidents and I rationalize and say, well, that’s not so terrible, maybe she’s under stress, or maybe he’s under stress. I neglect to mention that most people in New York are under some degree of stress and few of them, to my knowledge, bite each other. People always like to hear that they’re under stress, makes them feel better. You can imagine what they’d feel if they were told they weren’t under stress.

  Natasha is a small woman with dark hair and a serious, concerned face. Good teeth. She wears trusty Canal Street–West Broadway pants and shirts and is maybe twenty-six. I met her three years ago when she came over to my little cubicle at the A&P at Twelfth Street and Seventh to cash a check, one that William had signed. Of course she didn’t have the proper ID, since she wasn’t William. But she was so embarrassed that I decided she was okay. “He’s a little peculiar about money,” she told me, and I was embarrassed. I thought, what’s with this guy? I thought he was probably some kind of monster, in a minor way. Then one day he came in to cash a check himself. “Why don’t you put your w
ife on your account?” I asked him. “I cash her checks because I know her, but sometimes I’m not here. Also, she must have trouble other places. I mean, I’m not telling you how to run your life.”

  William blushed. You don’t see that much blushing at A&P Twelfth Street. He was wearing a suit, a gray Barney’s pin-striped number, and had obviously just come from work. “She has a tendency to overspend,” he said. “It’s not her fault. She was born to wealth and her habits never left her, even when she married me. When we had a joint account she never entered the checks in her checkbook. So we were always overdrawn and I finally closed the account and now we do it this way.”

  When Natasha found out about William’s affair with the girl at the office, I should say woman at the office, she came straight to me and told me everything. “It was at the office picnic in Central Park,” she said. “Everybody was playing badminton, okay? In bare feet. William was playing and I noticed that he had a piece of silver duct tape around his big toe. He had a cut, he said. William uses duct tape for everything. Our place is practically held together with duct tape. And then later on I noticed that this rather pretty girl was playing with a piece of duct tape on her ankle. She’d scraped her ankle. And that told me the story, right there. I confronted him with it and he admitted it. It was as simple as that.”

  Well, romance is not unknown at the A&P. We are an old and wise organization and have seen much. We are not called The Great Atlantic and Pacific for nothing, we contain multitudes and sometimes people lock gazes across the frozen rabbit parts and the balloon goes up, figuratively speaking. I counseled forbearance. “Don’t come down too hard on him,” I said. “William is clearly in the wrong in this matter, that gives you a certain edge. Don’t harangue or threaten or cry and weep. Calm, rational understanding is your mode. Politically, you’re way out in front. Act accordingly.”

  I think this was psychologically acute advice. It was the best I had to offer. What she did was, she bit him again. On the shoulder, in the shower. He was in the shower, he told me, and suddenly there was this horrible pain in his left shoulder and this time she did break the skin. He had to slug her in the hipbone to make her let go. “It’s the only time I’ve ever hit her,” he said. He poured Johnnie Walker Black over the wound and slapped a piece of duct tape on it and took a room at the Mohawk Motor Inn, on Tenth Avenue.

  William has not only not proved to Natasha that he still loves her but alienated her still further, because of the thing with Patricia, who he’s not seeing anymore, in that way. Furthermore he’s been in the Mohawk Motor Inn for a week, and that can get to you. Nothing breaks down a man accustomed to at least some degree of domestic felicity more than a week at a Motor Inn, however welcoming. He walks over in the mornings from the Mohawk for a bagel with dilled cream cheese and to find out if Natasha’s been around. I have to be, and have been, strictly impartial. “She was in,” I say. “She’s butterflying a leg of lamb tonight. Marinating it for six hours in soy sauce and champagne. I don’t myself think the champagne is a good idea but she got some recipe from somewhere—”

  “From her sister,” William says. “Danni spreads champagne on hot dog buns. Rex, what do you think?”

  “Go home,” I say. “Praise the lamb.”

  “How do I know it won’t be the spinal cord next?”

  “Hard to get to. Probably couldn’t even dent it.”

  “I feel like I’m married to some kind of animal.”

  “Our animal nature is part of us and we are part of it.”

  So he goes back to their apartment on Charles Street and they have a festive evening with the lamb and candles. They go to bed together and in the middle of the night she bites him on the back of the leg, severing a tendon just above the knee. A real gorilla bite. I can’t understand it. She’s a really nice woman, and pretty, too.

  “You can’t bite your way through life,” I say to her. She’s just seen William in his semi-private room at St. Vincent’s.

  “The physical therapist says there’ll be a slight limp,” she says, “forever. How could I have done that?”

  “Passion, I guess. Feeling run rampant.”

  “Will he ever speak to me again?”

  “What’d he say at the hospital?”

  “Said the food was lousy.”

  “That’s a beginning.”

  “He doesn’t feel for me anymore. I know it.”

  “He keeps coming back. However chewed upon. That’s got to prove something.”

  “I guess.”

  I don’t believe that we are what we do although many thinkers argue otherwise. I believe that what we do is, very often, a poor approximation of what we are—an imperfect manifestation of a much better totality. Even the best of us sometimes bite off, as it were, less than we can chew. When Natasha bites William she’s saying only part of what she wants to say to him. She’s saying, William! Wake up! Remember! But that gets lost in a haze of pain, his. I’m trying to help. I give her a paper bag of bagels and a plastic container of cream cheese with shallots to take to him, and for herself, an A&P check-cashing application with my approval already initialed in the upper right-hand corner. I pray that they will be successful together, eventually. Our organization stands behind them.

  Bluebeard

  “NEVER OPEN that door,” Bluebeard told me, and I, who knew his history, nodded. In truth I had a very good idea of what lay on the other side of the door and no interest at all in opening it. Bluebeard was then in his forty-fifth year, quite vigorous, the malaise that later claimed him—indeed enfeebled him—not yet in evidence. When he had first attempted to put forward his suit, my father, who knew him slightly (they were both clients of Dreyer, the American art dealer), refused him admittance, saying only, “Not, I think, a good idea.” Bluebeard sent my father a small Poussin watercolor, a study for The Death of Phocion; me he sent, with astonishing boldness, a black satin remarque nightgown.

  Events progressed. My father could not bring himself to part with the Poussin, and in very short order Bluebeard was a fixture in our sitting room, never without some lavish gift—a pair of gold cruets attributed to Cellini, a cut-pile Aubusson fire-extinguisher cover. I admit I found him very attractive despite his age and his nose, the latter a black rocklike object threaded with veins of silver, a feature I had never before seen adorning a human countenance. The sheer energy of the man carried all before it, and he was as well most thoughtful. “The history of architecture is the history of the struggle for light,” he said one day. I have latterly seen this remark attributed to the Swiss Le Corbusier, but it was first uttered, to my certain knowledge, in our sitting room, Bluebeard paging through a volume of Palladio. In fine, I was taken; I became his seventh wife.

  “Have you tried to open the door?” he asked me, in the twelfth month of our (to that point) happy marriage. I told him I had not, that I was not at all curious by nature and was furthermore obedient to the valid proscriptions my husband might choose to impose vis-à-vis the governance of the household. This seemed to irritate him. “I’ll know, you know,” he said. “If you try.” The silver threads in his black nose pulsated, light from the chandelier bouncing from them. He had at that time a project in view, a project with which I was fully in sympathy: the restoration of the south wing of the castle, bastardized in the eighteenth century by busybodies who had overlaid its Georgian pristinity with Baroque rickrack in the manner of Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor. Striding here and there in his big India-rubber boots, cursing the trembling masons on the scaffolding and the sweating carpenters on the ground, he was all in all a fine figure of a man—a thing I have never forgotten.

  I spent my days poring over motorcar catalogues (the year was 1910). Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler had produced machines capable of great speed and dash and I longed to have one, just a little one, but could not bring myself to ask my husband (my ever-generous husband) for so considerable a gift. Where did I want
to go, my husband would ask, and I would be forced to admit that going somewhere was a conception alien to our rich, full life at the castle, only forty kilometers from Paris, to which I was allowed regular visits. My husband’s views on marriage—old-fashioned if you will—were not such as to encourage promiscuous wanting. If I could have presented the Daimler phaeton as a toy, something to tootle about the grounds in, something that enabled him to laugh at my inadequacies as a pilot of the machine (decimation of the rosebushes), then he might have, with a toss of his full, rich head of hair, acceded to my wish. But I was not that intelligent.

  “Will you never attempt the door?” he asked one morning over coffee in the sunroom. He had just returned from a journey—he always returned suddenly, unexpectedly, a day or two before he had planned to do so—and had brought me a Buen Retiro white biscuit clock two meters high. I repeated what I had told him previously: that I had no interest in the door or what lay behind it, and that I would gladly return the silver key he had given me if his mind would be eased thereby. “No, no,” he said, “keep the key, you must have the key.” He thought for a moment. “You are a peculiar woman,” he said. I did not know what he meant by this remark and I fear I did not take it kindly, but I had no time to protest or plead my ordinariness, for he abruptly left the room, slamming the door behind him. I knew I had angered him in some way but I could not for the life of me understand precisely how I had erred. Did he want me to open the door? To discover, in the room behind the door, hanging on hooks, the beautifully dressed carcasses of my six predecessors? But what if, contrary to informed opinion, the beautifully dressed carcasses of my six predecessors were not behind the door? What was? At that moment I became curious, and at the same time, one part of my brain contesting another, I contrived to lose the key, in the vicinity of the gazebo.

  I had trusted my husband to harbor behind the door nothing more than rotting flesh, but now that the worm of doubt had inched its way into my consciousness I became a different person. On my hands and knees on the brilliant green lawn behind the gazebo I searched for the key; looking up I saw, in a tower window, that great black nose, with its veins of silver, watching me. My hands moved nervously over the thick grass and only the thought of the three duplicate keys I had had made by the locksmith in the village, a M. Necker, consoled me. What was behind the door? Whenever I placed my hands on it the thick carved oak gave off a slight chill (although this may have been the result of an inflamed imagination). Exhausted, I gave up the search; Bluebeard now knew that I had lost something and could readily surmise what it was—advantage to me, in a sense. At dusk, from a tower window, I saw him trolling in the grass with a horseshoe magnet dangling from a string.