Paradise

Boy Produces 100 Yards Of Thread From His Right Eye And Said, “What Can You Do, Simon?”

Some days they were angry with him, some days they were angry with each other. Four people, many possibilities. Each person could be angry at any given point with one, two, or three others, or angry at the self. Two people could be angry at a third, three people at a fourth. He reached forty-nine possibilities before his math expired.

Their movement through the world required young men, a class to which he did not belong. Simon liked young men, within reasonable limits, and approved, in general, of the idea of young men and young women sleeping together in joyous disregard of history, economics, building codes. Let them have their four hundred square feet. Veronica liked garage apartments. Perhaps the young men would do well in the world, attend the new branch of Harvard Business in Gainesville, market a black bean soup that would rage through Miami like rabies or a voice attenuator capable of turning crackers into lisping Brits, and end up with seven thousand square feet in Paris on the Ile de la Cité. Young men had stiff pricks and smelled good, by and large, almost as good as babies. Young women bounced up and down on your chest and dazzled you with a thousand unexpected attacks. Simon counted the ways in which he was God-visited.

Sarah calls. “Do you know what she’s done?” she asks. She’s referring to her mother.

“What?”

“Fallen in love.”

Simon is astonished. “With whom?”

“The mayor. And he’s married.”

“Good God that’s terrible.”

“She was crying on my shoulder all last night.”

“Oh Lord. Can I do anything?”

“Talk to her?”

“Would she want to talk to me about this?”

“I guess not. She said you were what she was trying to get away from.”

“I understand that. I understood that a long time ago.”

“Don’t be bitter.”

“Simple statement of fact. People get too much of each other. Civility goes away, finally.”

“Yeah I think you’d better butt out. Not that you’ve had so much to do with the affairs of your Philadelphia group lately.”

“Well. Do you have enough money?”

“Daddy you’ve been asking me that since I was thirteen.”

“It’s a reflex. Listen, Sarah, is there anything I can do for her, do you think? Or would it be better if I didn’t know about it?”

“I think she wants you to know about it. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

“Is he in love with her?”

“He’s a mayor. He needs a lot of love. More than other people. Oceans.”

How does she know so much? “Keep me posted,” he says.

“I dropped Ways of Being, the East.”

“Why?”

“It was boring and the guy lectured into his tie, mostly.”

Veronica’s trampoline is leaning against the wall and Veronica is throwing books at it to see how far they will bounce. Buddenbrooks in a paper edition bounces a good twelve feet. Dore is painting her legs red, with a two-inch brush and a big jar into which she has crumbled bright red Easter-egg glazes. Anne is threatening to cut off her long hair. She stands poised, a hank in one hand, scissors in the other, daring anyone to interfere. “Anybody messes with me gets the scissors in the medulla.” Simon senses unrest.

A terrible night. Simon is in bed by ten, taking a Scotch for company. Anne and Dore are now watching television. Veronica is out somewhere. About ten-thirty Anne comes into the room, strips, and gets into bed with him.

“I’m chilly,” she says.

He turns her on her stomach and begins to stroke her back, gently. A very sculptural waist, narrowing suddenly under the rib cage and then the hipbones flaring.

When Anne leaves to go back to her own bed, at two, Dore appears in the doorway.

“Are you all tired?” she asks.

“Probably.” Dore climbs into the bed, clumsily, peels off her jeans and bikini pants, retaining the tank top which she’s cut raggedly around the neck in the style of the moment. She takes his cock in hand and regards it thoughtfully.

“I’m sad and depressed,” she says. “I feel useless. All I do is sit around and watch MTV.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Something. But I don’t know what.”

“Lot of people in the same position,” Simon says.

“I don’t want to be a lawyer and I don’t want to be a wife. I don’t want to be a musician. What does that leave?”

“Be bad. Imagine something bad.”

“Like what?”

“I have to tell you what to imagine?”

She looks at him. “There was this guy once. He asked me, are you a swallower or a spitter?”

“What’d you say?”

“He was a doctor. They tend to be crude.”

He struggles around the bed and begins to kiss the insides of her thighs. “This is a terrible night.”

“Why?”

“You guys aren’t solving your problems. I can’t help you very much.” His hands are splayed out over her back, moving up and down, over the shoulders and down to the splendid buttocks. Thinking of buttercups and butterflies and flying buttresses and butts of malmsey.

“Veronica has a rash,” she says, coming up for air.

“What kind of a rash?”

“Dark red. Looks like a wine stain.”

“Where is it?”

“You’ll see.”

Saliva is running down his cock, token of enthusiasm.

Veronica walks in. “What is taking place here?” she asks, in a voice like thunder.

After the women had departed Simon set up a small office in a barely renovated building on West Broadway. He was on the fourth floor, there was no air conditioning, and the big open windows brought in the clamor of the street, sirens, rape, outrage. His partners in Philadelphia sent him small jobs, much as one might UPS a fruitcake or a brace of pheasant to one recovering from an illness, with the implication that they were to be enjoyed not now but later, when he was stronger. He sat at his draughting table, a hollow-core door resting on carpenters’ sawhorses, sketching on tracing paper with a felt pen. The problem was an office for a small foundation which had leased space in a very good block in the East Seventies. The difficulty was that although there were floor-to-ceiling windows facing the street in the existing building, very little light reached the nether regions. He had designed a light scoop to be affixed to the rear of the building, but figured that the cost would be prohibitive. The fire escape was placed precisely where the tubing for the light scoop would have to go, and light scoops don’t work very well anyhow, as both the tygers of wrath and the horses of instruction had taught him. Blake also had something to say about foundations:

Pity is become a trade, and generosity a science, That men get rich by …

But that’s a little hard, he thought, these people are doing the best they can, piloting worthy projects through the swamps of Inanition. To be working again felt very good.

Simon thinks about Paradise. On the great throne, a naked young woman, her back to the viewer. Simon looks around for Onan, doesn’t see him. Onan didn’t make it to Paradise? Seems unfair. Great deal of marble about, he notices, shades of rose and terra-cotta; Paradise seems to have been designed by Edward Durell Stone. Science had worked out a way to cremate human remains, reduce the ashes to the size of a bouillon cube, and fire the product into space in a rocket, solving the Forest Lawn dilemma. Simon had once done a sketch problem on tomb sculpture, for his sophomore Visual Awareness course. No more tomb sculpture.

Paradise unearned. It was, rather, a gift, in this way theologically unsound. It was a state or condition visited upon him, like being in the Army. Simon had walked around in green fatigues for most of two years, doing the best he could from day to day, sometimes carrying drunken comrades back to the barracks at night, outside Stuttgart, in a fireman’s lift. His days were spent in meaningless maneuvers with giant weapons which the Army was afraid to fire for fear they wouldn’t work. Mostly, when tested, they didn’t. Simon read Stars & Stripes and very good mystery novels by John D. Macdonald. On leave in Berlin he tried to find buildings by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, whose work had not been lost on Mies. The women would soon be gone. The best thing he could do was to listen to them.

“I’ve had twenty-six years’ practice in standing up. I can do it,” Anne says.

She’s wearing sweat pants with a dark gray crewneck sweater and medium-gray Reeboks. She’s been drinking tequila and she’s terribly drunk.

“I want to tell you something.”

“What?”

“You think we’re dumb bunnies.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Your attitude.”

Simon’s been reading Audubon Action, “Arizona Dam Project Faces New Challenge.”

“What’s my attitude?”

“I see fatigue and disgust.”

“Sweetie, that’s not true.”

“Don’t call me sweetie.”

“Anne,” he says, “you want to sit down?”

“You think we’re not bright enough for you.”

“You’re as bright as anybody. I mean it.”

“You have an attitude of disdain. Sticks out all over you.”

“Just not so.”

“Veronica thinks you want us out.”

“No. Untrue.”

“She thinks your mind is wandering.”

“That’s what my mind does. Wander. Right now I’m thinking about the furniture of Paradise.”

“What is it?”

“Knoll, basically.” He pushes a sketch pad toward her. “But you see they haven’t allowed for the angels who have only one wing, so I’m trying to —”

“The angels have only one wing?” she says in astonishment.

“Some angels have only one wing.” He shows her an old engraving in which a single-winged angel is pictured.

“How can they fly with only one wing?”

“What makes you think they fly? In the literal sense?”

“I’ve always seen them with two wings.”

“Artists like symmetry.”

“He looks imperfect.”

“You can get a lot accomplished with one wing. Fan the flames and lead the orchestra. I saw Buddy Rich, the drummer, play with a broken arm one night. Did more with one hand and his two feet than —”

“But it’d be like having only one breast.” He slips a hand inside her shirt. Her breasts are bare. “If I’d spent the same amount of time worrying about my mind as I have worrying about my chest, I’d be Hegel by now,” she says. “I mean since thirteen.”

“Old Hegel.”

“Don’t be so snotty. We have Hegel in Denver.”

“Hegel is quite sexy. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis.”

“You think that’s where he got the idea?”

“Could be.”

Simon positions the white plaster egg eight feet tall in the sitting room. The women are watching. He smashes it with an iron-headed maul. Inside are three naked young men. Their names are Harry.

Q: I sometimes imagine that I am in Pest Control. I have a small white truck with a red diamond-shaped emblem on the door and a white jump suit with the same emblem on the breast pocket. I park the truck in front of a subscriber’s neat three-hundred-thousand-dollar home, extract the silver canister of deadly pest-killer from the back of the truck, and walk up the brick sidewalk to the house’s front door. Chimes ring, the door swings open, a young wife in jeans and a pink flannel shirt worn outside the jeans is standing there. “Pest Control,” I say. She smiles at me, I smile back and move past her into the house, into the handsomely appointed kitchen. The canister is suspended by a sling from my right shoulder, and, pumping the mechanism occasionally with my right hand, I point the nozzle of the hose at the baseboards and begin to spray. I spray alongside the refrigerator, alongside the gas range, under the sink, and behind the kitchen table. Next, I move to the bathrooms, pumping and spraying. The young wife is in another room, waiting for me to finish. I walk into the main sitting room and spray discreetly behind the largest pieces of furniture, an oak sideboard, a red plush Victorian couch, and along the inside of the fireplace. I do the study, spraying behind the master’s heavy desk on which there is an open copy of the Columbia Encyclopedia, he’s been looking up the Seven Years War, 1756-63, yellow highlighting there, and behind the forty-five-inch RCA television. The master bedroom requires just touches, like perfume behind the ear, short bursts in her closet which must avoid the two dozen pairs of shoes there and in his closet which contains six to eight long guns in canvas cases. Finally I spray the laundry room with its big white washer and dryer, and behind the folding table stacked with sheets and towels already folded. Who folds? I surmise that she folds. Unless one of the older children, pressed into service, folds. In my experience they are unlikely to fold. Maybe the au pair. Finished, I tear a properly-made-out receipt from my receipt book and present it to the young wife. She scribbles her name in the appropriate space and hands it back to me. The house now stinks quite palpably but I know and she knows that the stench will dissipate in two to four hours. The young wife escorts me to the door, and, in parting, pins a silver medal on my chest and kisses me on both cheeks. Pest Control!

Four o’clock in the morning. Simon listening to one of his radios, sipping white wine. Two horn players are talking about Coltrane.

“The thing is,” one says, and the other bursts in to say, “Yeah, but wait a minute.”

A Woody Shaw record is played. Simon’s using earphones so he can play the music as loud as he pleases without disturbing the women. At low volume you lose half of it, a thing his wife had never understood. Now one of the guests is praising D flat. “This is on ITC,” the host says. “ITC is a new label that’s just getting started in LA. They’re getting new guys and doing new things.” The drummer on the Woody Shaw record is wonderfully skillful if a bit orotund.

“Great one,” says one of the guys on the radio, when the Wynton Marsalis track is over.

“A lot of humility,” says the other. “I mean he can do it all.”

Simon suddenly remembers putting on his daughter’s shoes, in the morning, before his wife took her to nursery school. His wife brought in the child and the shoes, and Sarah would sit on his lap as sneaker was fitted to foot. “Make your toes little,” he’d say, and she’d perversely spread them.

“New York is a bitch,” the radio says, “but there’s more community.”

Wheat-germ bubble gum was served

At the Maniacs’ Ball

He lays himself down in bed, sleeps fitfully for an hour and a half. At six he’s up again, in a t-shirt and jeans, moving around the apartment. The women are all still sleeping. He looks out of the windows. On the street a man in violet running shorts is carrying a woman on his shoulders, she’s in fact riding him, her legs around his neck. The man is heavy, muscular, carries his rider with spectacular ease. The woman is in her early forties, the man the same age or a little younger. The man runs in circles, the woman waves like a circus performer. It’s six-thirty.

When he goes out to get the Times there is a semi-corpse in the vestibule, a barely breathing Hispanic male. He’s vomited blood and blood is all over the red tile. Simon shakes the man’s shoulder. Whiskey smell and no visible wounds. He shakes the man again. No response.

There’s a hospital at the end of the block. Simon, on the sidewalk, stops a resident on the way to work. He’s Oriental, Korean or Japanese, white-clothed, a stethoscope stuck in his right-hand jacket pocket.

“There’s a man in here. Not in good shape.”

The doctor looks annoyed.

“Call nine one one.”

“I think you’d better look at him. He looks pretty far gone.”

With clear reluctance the doctor, a small man with a mustache, follows Simon into the vestibule. He bends over the fallen man, taking care not to touch him.

“Call the hospital. Something in the —”

He moves one hand up and down his chest.

“Drunk, too.”

Simon trudges back upstairs and telephones the hospital.

And what if we grow old together, just the four of us? The loving quartet? What if we raddle together? They of course raddling at a rate less precipitant than my own. I have a quarter-century advantage, in terms of raddling. He’s WAD, as the medical students say, Whirling Around the Drain. What kind of old ladies will these old ladies be? Veronica will be, as ever, moody. She’ll do something immensely foolish, like writing a book. The book will be an extended meditation on the word “or,” or the road not taken, or the road taken but not enjoyed, or the road taken and enjoyed to the fullest, a celebration of “or” not less fun-some than Kierkegaard’s. Twelve people will read the book. Four will write her letters. I will read the book but not write her a letter. “Good work,” I will say to Veronica, clapping her on the shoulder several times to signal hearty congratulation. “That type…” The book will have been set in Bulmer, a typeface most eloquent, anorexic Bodoni but speaking nevertheless. Veronica will bring me my toddy as I sit by the fire, two pints of tequila laced with capers and a little gunpowder. She’ll kiss my knee, which will probably, by this time, resemble a drill bit. I’ll place my claw in her hair, now red and a very convincing red thanks to improved Dupont manipulation of the Periodic Table. The old folks at home.

Dore will come in and demand to know where my penis has got to. I don’t know, I’ll say, it was there yesterday, more or less. You call that there, she’ll say, scornfully, and I’ll say, I am a poor relic, a poor husk, a leftover, a single yellow bean covered with Cling Wrap sailing on a flawed plate through the refrigerator of life. Yes, she’ll say, excuses, you promised us Eden, you did, I remember, not anything you said in so many words but by implication, you implied that we would be happy forever together… I didn’t! I’ll say, or scream, I always said that things would turn out badly, consult the records, look at the transcript, you have no right to —