Donald Barthelme by Paradise

Author:Paradise
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-06-05T14:20:19+00:00

“HE used a rolled-up newspaper,” Veronica says, “what you’d use on a dog. Only he put his back into it, when I was twelve and thirteen and fourteen. What can I say? Sadistic son-of-a-bitch. If he’d been a drunk I could maybe have forgiven him but he didn’t drink. He was a piano salesman, worked for this piano store downtown. He played pretty well himself. He’d wanted to be a doctor. My mother got rid of him, eventually. Not soon enough.”

Simon thinks of his own large, calm father, still active at seventy-five, playing the market and raising hell on behalf of the ADA. She’s wearing patched jeans (patches at the back of the knee, just under a buttock, on the right thigh) and a dead-black sweater. Blond hair done in cornrows this morning, a copy of Interview in her lap, somebody named Kim Basinger on the cover. He wants to hold her tight, rock her, even — a non-rational impulse, she’s almost as tall as he is.

“Well, it’s a bitch,” he says. This sounds feeble even to him.

“He looked nice in a suit. He had these pretty expensive suits, maybe a dozen suits. He had a lot of shoes, I remember the shoes with shoetrees in them. He gave me a very good camera when I was fifteen, a Mamiyaflex, a twin-lens reflex. I used to take pictures of lizards, lizard-on-branch, lizard-on-brick-wall, lizard looking at camera —”

“And your mother?”

“She was kind of a dishrag, to tell the truth. Then. She pulled her socks up after she got rid of him. She’s still back there, in Denver. She’s a school principal, elementary school. Got a boyfriend, the shop teacher. She thinks she’s doing Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”

She pauses.

“Guess what,” she says.

“What?”

“You’re not a father-figure. That surprise you?”

“No.”

“You’re more like a guy who’s stayed out in the rain too long.”

Does this translate into experienced, tried-and-true, well-tempered? Or pulpy, hanging-in-thin-strips? He pulls at an ear.

“I mean worn, but with a certain character.”

Rust never sleeps, he thinks.

“Well,” he says, “shall we take the children to school?”

“What children?”

“Right.”

“Are you going to have any more children?”

“Probably not.”

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