The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  “Why, we heard that you’d sold the house, and that your poor children…”

  “I don’t recall having sold the house,” Ned said, “and the girls are at home.”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Halloran sighed. “Yes…”

  Her voice filled the air with an unseasonable melancholy, and Ned said briskly, “Thank you for the swim.”

  “Well, have a nice trip,” said Mrs. Halloran.

  Beyond the hedge, he pulled on his trunks and fastened them. They were loose, and he wondered if during the space of an afternoon he could have lost some weight. He was cold, and he was tired, and the naked Hallorans and their dark water had depressed him. The swim was too much for his strength, but how could he have guessed this, sliding down the banister that morning and sitting in the Westerhazys’ sun? His arms were lame. His legs felt rubbery and ached at the joints. The worst of it was the cold in his bones, and the feeling that he might never be warm again. Leaves were falling around him and he smelled woodsmoke on the wind. Who would be burning wood in the fireplace at this time of year?

  He needed a drink. Whiskey would warm him, pick him up, carry him through the last of his journey, refresh his feeling that it was original and valorous to swim across the county. Channel swimmers took brandy. He needed a stimulant. He crossed the lawn in front of the Hallorans’ house and went down a little path to where they had built a house for their only daughter, Helen, and her husband, Eric Sachs’ pool was small, and he found Helen and her husband there.

  “Oh, Neddy!” Helen said. “Did you lunch at Mother’s?”

  “Not really,” Ned said. “I did stop to see your parents.” This seemed to be explanation enough. “I’m terribly sorry to break in on you like this, but I’ve taken a chill, and I wonder if you’d give me a drink.”

  “Why, I’d love to,” Helen said, “but there hasn’t been anything in this house to drink since Eric’s operation. That was three years ago.”

  Was he losing his memory, had his gift for concealing painful facts let him forget that he had sold his house, that his children were in trouble, and that his friend had been ill? Ned’s eyes slipped from Eric’s face to his abdomen, where he saw three pale, sutured scars, two of them at least a foot long. Gone was his navel, and what, Neddy thought, would the roving hand, bed-checking one’s gifts at 3 A.M., make of a belly with no navel, no link to birth, this breach in the succession?

  “I’m sure you can get a drink at the Biswangers’,” Helen said. “They’re having an enormous do. You can hear it from here. Listen!”

  She raised her head, and from across the road, the lawns, the gardens, the woods, the fields he heard again the brilliant noise of voices over water. “Well, I’ll get wet,” he said, still feeling that he had no freedom of choice about his means of travel. He dove into the Sachs’ cold water, and, gasping, close to drowning, made his way from one end of the pool to the other. “Lucinda and I want terribly to see you,” he said over his shoulder, his face set toward the Biswangers’. “We’re sorry it’s been so long, and we’ll call you very soon.”

  He crossed some fields to the Biswangers’ and the sounds of revelry there. They would be honored to give him a drink, they would be happy to give him a drink, they would, in fact, be lucky to give him a drink. The Biswangers invited him and Lucinda for dinner four times a year, six weeks in advance. They were always rebuffed, and yet they continued to send out their invitations, unwilling to comprehend the rigid and undemocratic realities of their society. They were the sort of people who discussed the price of things at cocktails, exchanged market tips during dinner, and after dinner told dirty stories to mixed company. They did not belong to Neddy’s set—they were not even on Lucinda’s Christmas-card list. He went toward their pool with feelings of indifference, charity, and some unease, since it seemed to be getting dark and these were the longest days of the year. The party when he joined it was noisy and large. Grace Biswanger was the kind of hostess who asked the ophthalmologist, the veterinarian, the real-estate dealer, and the dentist. No one was swimming, and the twilight, reflected on the water of the pool, had a wintery gleam. There was a bar, and he started for it. When Grace Biswanger saw him, she came toward him, not affectionately, as he had every right to expect, but bellicosely.

  “Why, this party has everything,” she said loudly, “including a gate-crasher.”

  She could not deal him a social blow—there was no question about this—and he did not flinch. “As a gate-crasher,” he asked politely, “do I rate a drink?”

  “Suit yourself,” she said.

  She turned her back on him and joined some guests, and he went to the bar and ordered a whiskey. The bartender served him, but rudely. His was a world in which the caterer’s men kept the social score, and to be rebuffed by a part-time barkeep meant that he had suffered some loss of social esteem. Or perhaps the man was new and uninformed. Then at his back he heard Grace say, “They went broke overnight—nothing but income—and he showed up drunk one Sunday and asked us to loan him five thousand dollars….” She was always talking about money. It was worse than eating your peas off a knife. He dove into the pool, swam its length, and went away.

  · · ·

  The next pool on his list, the last but two, belonged to his old mistress, Shirley Abbott. If he had suffered any injuries at the Biswangers’, they would be cured here. Love—sexual roughhouse, in fact—was the supreme elixir, the painkiller, the brightly colored pill that would put the spring back into his step, the joy of life in his heart. They had had an affair last week, last month, last year. He couldn’t remember. It was he who had broken it off, his was the upper hand, and as he stepped through the gate of the wall that surrounded her pool it seemed to be his pool, since the lover, particularly the illicit lover, enjoys the possessions of his mistress with an authority unknown to holy matrimony. She was there, her hair the color of brass, but her figure, at the edge of the lighted, cerulean water, excited in him no profound memories. It had been, he thought, a lighthearted affair, although she wept when he broke it off. She seemed confused to see him. If she was still wounded, would she, God forbid, weep again?

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “I’m swimming across the county.”

  “Good Christ. Will you ever grow up?”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “If you’ve come here for money,” she said, “I won’t give you another cent.”

  “You could give me a drink.”

  “I could, but I won’t. I’m not alone.”

  “Well, I’m on my way.”

  He dove in and swam the pool, but when he tried to haul himself up onto the curb, he found that the strength in his arms and his shoulders had gone, and he paddled to the ladder and climbed out. Looking over his shoulder, he saw, in the lighted bathhouse, a young man. Going out onto the dark lawn, he smelled chrysanthemums or marigolds—some stubborn autumnal fragrance on the night air, strong as gas. Looking overhead, he saw that the stars had come out, but why should he seem to see Andromeda, Cepheus, and Cassiopeia? What had become of the constellations of midsummer? He began to cry.

  It was probably the first time in his adult life that he had ever cried—certainly the first time in his life that he had ever felt so miserable, cold, tired, and bewildered. He could not understand the rudeness of the caterer’s barkeep, or the rudeness of a mistress who had once come to him on her knees and showered his trousers with tears. He had swum too long, he had been immersed too long, and his nose and his throat were sore from the water. What he needed then was a drink, some company, and some clean dry clothes, and while he could have cut directly across the road to his home, he went on, instead, to the Gilmartins’ pool. Here, for the first time in his life, he did not dive but went down the steps into the icy water and swam a hobbled sidestroke that he might have learned as a child. He staggered with fatigue on his way to the Clydes’, and paddled the length of their pool, stopping again and again, with his hand on the curb, to rest. He climbe
d up the ladder and wondered if he had the strength to get home. He had done what he wanted—he had swum the county—but he was so stupefied with exhaustion that his triumph seemed vague. Stooped, holding onto the gateposts for support, he turned up the driveway of his own house.

  The place was dark. Had Lucinda stayed at the Westerhazys’ for supper? Had the girls joined her there, or gone someplace else? Hadn’t they agreed, as they usually did on Sunday, to regret all their invitations and stay at home?

  He tried the garage doors, to see what cars were in, but the doors were locked and rust came off the handles. Going toward the house, he saw that the force of the thunderstorm had knocked one of the rain gutters loose. It hung down over the front door like an umbrella rib, but it could be fixed in the morning. The house was locked, and he thought that the stupid cook or the stupid maid must have locked the place up, until he remembered that it had been some time since they had employed a maid or a cook. He shouted, pounded on the door, tried to force it with his shoulder, and then, looking in at the windows, saw that the place was empty.

  Donald Barthelme

  MARCH 6, 1965

  WE DEFENDED THE city as best we could. The arrows of the Comanches came in clouds. The war clubs of the Comanches clattered on the soft, yellow pavements. There were earthworks along the Boulevard Mark Clark and the hedges had been laced with sparkling wire. People were trying to understand. I spoke to Sylvia. “Do you think this is a good life?” The table held apples, books, long-playing records. She looked up. “No.”

  Patrols of paras and volunteers with armbands guarded the tall, flat buildings. We interrogated the captured Comanche. Two of us forced his head back while another poured water into his nostrils. His body jerked, he choked and wept. Not believing a hurried, careless, and exaggerated report of the number of casualties in the outer districts where trees, lamps, swans had been reduced to clear fields of fire we issued entrenching tools to those who seemed trustworthy and turned the heavy-weapons companies so that we could not be surprised from that direction. And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love. We talked.

  “Do you know Fauré’s ‘Dolly’?”

  “Would that be Gabriel Fauré?”

  “It would.”

  “Then I know it,” she said. “May I say that I play it myself at certain times, when I am sad, or happy, although it requires four hands.”

  “How is that managed?”

  “I accelerate,” she said, “ignoring the time signature.”

  And when they shot the scene in the bed I wondered how you felt under the eyes of the cameramen, grips, juicers, men in the mixing booth: excited? stimulated? And when they shot the scene in the shower I sanded a hollow-core door working carefully against the illustrations in texts and whispered instructions from one who had already solved the problem. I had made after all other tables, one while living with Nancy, one while living with Alice, one while living with Eunice, one while living with Marianne.

  Red men in waves like people scattering in a square startled by something tragic or a sudden, loud noise accumulated against the barricades we had made of window dummies, silk, thoughtfully planned job descriptions (including scales for the orderly progress of other colors), wine in demi-johns, and robes. I analyzed the composition of the barricade nearest me and found two ashtrays, ceramic, one dark brown and one dark brown with an orange blur at the lip; a tin frying pan; two-litre bottles of red wine; three-quarter-litre bottles of Black & White, aquavit, cognac, vodka, gin, Fad #6 sherry; a hollow-core door in birch veneer on black wrought-iron legs; a blanket, red-orange with faint blue stripes; a red pillow and a blue pillow; a woven straw wastebasket; two glass jars for flowers; corkscrews and can openers; two plates and two cups, ceramic, dark brown; a yellow-and-purple poster; a Yugoslavian carved flute, wood, dark brown; and other items. I decided I knew nothing.

  The hospitals dusted wounds with powders the worth of which was not quite established, other supplies having been exhausted early in the first day. I decided I knew nothing. Friends put me in touch with a Miss R., a teacher, unorthodox they said, excellent they said, successful with difficult cases, steel shutters on the windows made her house safe. I had just learned via an International Distress Coupon that Jane had been beaten up by a dwarf in a bar in Tenerife but Miss R. did not allow me to speak of it. “You know nothing,” she said, “you feel nothing, you are locked in a most savage and terrible ignorance, I despise you, my boy, mon cher, my heart. You may attend but you must not attend now, you must attend later, a day or a week or an hour, you are making me ill….” I nonevaluated these remarks as Korzybski instructed. But it was difficult. Then they pulled back in a feint near the river and we rushed into that sector with a reinforced battalion hastily formed among the Zouaves and cabdrivers. This unit was crushed in the afternoon of a day that began with spoons and letters in hallways and under windows where men tasted the history of the heart, cone-shaped muscular organ that maintains circulation of the blood.

  But it is you I want now, here in the middle of this Uprising, with the streets yellow and threatening, short, ugly lances with fur at the throat and inexplicable shell money lying in the grass. It is when I am with you that I am happiest, and it is for you that I am making this hollow-core door table with black wrought-iron legs. I held Sylvia by her bear-claw necklace. “Call off your braves,” I said. “We have many years left to live.” There was a sort of muck running in the gutters, yellowish, filthy stream suggesting excrement, or nervousness, a city that does not know what it has done to deserve baldness, errors, infidelity. “With luck you will survive until matins,” Sylvia said. She ran off down the Rue Chester Nimitz, uttering shrill cries.

  Then it was learned that they had infiltrated our ghetto and that the people of the ghetto instead of offering resistance had joined the smooth, well-coordinated attack with zipguns, telegrams, lockets, causing that portion of the line held by the I.R.A. to swell and collapse. We sent more heroin into the ghetto, and hyacinths, ordering another hundred thousand of the pale, delicate flowers. On the map we considered the situation with its strung-out inhabitants and merely personal emotions. Our parts were blue and their parts were green. I showed the blue-and-green map to Sylvia. “Your parts are green,” I said. “You gave me heroin first a year ago,” Sylvia said. She ran off down George C. Marshall Allée, uttering shrill cries. Miss R. pushed me into a large room painted white (jolting and dancing in the soft light, and I was excited! and there were people watching!) in which there were two chairs. I sat in one chair and Miss R. sat in the other. She wore a blue dress containing a red figure. There was nothing exceptional about her. I was disappointed by her plainness, by the bareness of the room, by the absence of books.

  · · ·

  The girls of my quarter wore long blue mufflers that reached to their knees. Sometimes the girls hid Comanches in their rooms, the blue mufflers together in a room creating a great blue fog. Block opened the door. He was carrying weapons, flowers, loaves of bread. And he was friendly, kind, enthusiastic, so I related a little of the history of torture, reviewing the technical literature quoting the best modern sources, French, German, and American, and pointing out the flies which had gathered in anticipation of some new, cool color.

  “What is the situation?” I asked.

  “The situation is liquid,” he said. “We hold the south quarter and they hold the north quarter. The rest is silence.”

  “And Kenneth?”

  “That girl is not in love with Kenneth,” Block said frankly. “She is in love with his coat. When she is not wearing it she is huddling under it. Once I caught it going down the stairs by itself. I looked inside. Sylvia.”

  Once I caught Kenneth’s coat going down the stairs by itself but the coat was a trap and inside a Comanche who made a thrust with his short, ugly knife at my leg which buckled and tossed me over the balustrade through a window and into another situation. Not believing that your body brilliant as it was and your
fat, liquid spirit distinguished and angry as it was were stable quantities to which one could return on wires more than once, twice, or another number of times I said: “See the table?”

  In Skinny Wainwright Square the forces of green and blue swayed and struggled. The referees ran out on the field trailing chains. And then the blue part would be enlarged, the green diminished. Miss R. began to speak. “A former king of Spain, a Bonaparte, lived for a time in Bordentown, New Jersey. But that’s no good.” She paused. “The ardor aroused in men by the beauty of women can only be satisfied by God. That is very good (it is Valéry) but it is not what I have to teach you, goat, muck, filth, heart of my heart.” I showed the table to Nancy. “See the table?” She stuck out her tongue red as a cardinal’s hat. “I made such a table once,” Block said frankly. “People all over America have made such tables. I doubt very much whether one can enter an American home without finding at least one such table, or traces of its having been there, such as faded places in the carpet.” And afterward in the garden the men of the 7th Cavalry played Gabrieli, Albinoni, Marcello, Vivaldi, Boccherini. I saw Sylvia. She wore a yellow ribbon, under a long blue muffler. “Which side are you on,” I cried, “after all?”

  “The only form of discourse of which I approve,” Miss R. said in her dry, sack voice, “is the litany. I believe our masters and teachers as well as plain citizens should confine themselves to what can safely be said. Thus when I hear the words pewter, snake, tea, Fad #6 sherry, serviette, fenestration, crown, blue coming from the mouth of some public official, or some raw youth, I am not disappointed. Vertical organization is also possible,” Miss R. said, “as in

  pewter

  snake

  tea

  Fad #6 sherry

  serviette

  fenestration

  crown

  blue.

  I run to liquids and colors,” she said, “but you, you may run to something else, my virgin, my darling, my thistle, my poppet, my own. Young people,” Miss R. said, “run to more and more unpleasant combinations as they sense the nature of our society. Some people,” Miss R. said, “run to conceits or wisdom but I hold to the hard, brown, nut-like word. I might point out that there is enough aesthetic excitement here to satisfy anyone but a damned fool.” I sat in solemn silence.