Barthelmania!

The dilemma: Mr. Barthelme wants to get married. He thinks. He has been thinking for some time now. He wants a Mrs. Barthelme (Do I really care if she takes my name? No, that’s not the point.). He wants a partner. He wants Marjorie. He wants to share. He doesn’t ever want to let her go. Does he? (Do I? I don’t think so.) No. So the dilemma is this: How do you propose marriage to someone you actually know? In real life? Who might say no? Who (Am I going that dramatic? Yes, I believe I am.) might just be the only chance at happiness you have? Mr. Barthelme wants to get married.

The cast of characters: Mr. Barthelme — He is about 6 feet tall. He is about 167 or 168 pounds. His hair is hinting at greying. He is wearing a long, professorial jacket. He teaches English at one of the two local high schools. He is thirty-seven years old. When he grows out a moustache, he looks older. He has green eyes and a habit of staring off into the distance, like he can always see the horizon.

A streetlamp (But can a streetlamp truly be a character?)—Decidedly grey. It’s made of metal. Which kind, Mr. Barthelme doesn’t know. The metal appears cold to the touch. Assumedly the illuminating part of the lamp is some sort of electric filament or whatever they use. For a character the lamp is especially tall. It appears one of many, in looks at least, identical to how many other streetlamps in how many other towns. It should, despite its apparent coldness, be doing its best to diffuse some warmth on the scene. But this is not just another streetlamp. It is stubborn, not unlike some classic characters Mr. Barthelme might think of. This day it is damp.

Marjorie—True, she is not on the scene, but for all that Mr. Barthelme considers her the main character in the drama (That’s for sure.). She is the heroine. She is strong. She keeps her fingernails cut very short, because when she was young, she used to bite them. Badly. Her parents made her wear gardening gloves while she slept the whole year she was twelve. She can laugh about it now. She has hazel eyes, which can be frighteningly penetrating (Trust me.). She is petite. She is much more talented (not to mention good) than Mr. Barthelme, or so at least he thinks.

(If there are any other characters, Mr. Barthelme apologizes in advance for leaving them out here.)

He’s feeling very young at the moment. Young and naive. Which is almost nice for a change. He spends so much of his week feeling, well, old. Why do you feel so old, Marjorie might ask some evening, you’re not, you know – not even, she might scoff (being seven months and seven days older herself, after all). Obviously, she didn’t make a reference to how Hamlet is kind of like Theo Huxtable in her Calculus class today, he might think in return – and sigh.

It’s a foggy day. Mr. Barthelme is out walking. His gait is restrained, but impatient, vigorous, but somber. His thoughts…

He hasn’t walked across town in who knows how long. He thinks the last time was a Fun Run (walk in his case) against cancer four or five years ago, and that was down all the main thoroughfares, high profile, not wending through the side streets privately, like this. He raised over four hundred dollars that day. Today he’s saving money by not taking the bus. One dollar even for a crosstown ticket. He’s walking, because his car is in the shop. He’s walking, because despite his car being in the shop, he still needs to get to Marjorie’s.

Was I an asshole yesterday, Barthelme asks himself, extending his step over a crack in the sidewalk. Again he admits that he was. He looks down. His shoes are wet with fog but only on the surface. He doesn’t know what he’d do if it started to rain. He looks up. It might rain, he thinks. It’s definitely a possibility. He doesn’t have an umbrella. A scene flashes in his mind: him, walking across the threshold into Marjorie’s house, shaking out his drenched hair, Marjorie laughing, him, ducking his head into her, smelling her neck, Marjorie turning to whisper in his ear, wetting her cheek, him…

He approaches a crosswalk; the fog seems to thicken. He watches his shoes as the black asphalt, somehow made more black by the intense grey of the fog, moves under him. There are no cars approaching, no other pedestrians either; he would hear if there were. The walk is his alone; still at the moment he feels somehow uncomfortable, a foreboding perhaps. Then he regains the solid concrete of the sidewalk, and he looks back up. The neighborhood he’s passing through is residential. He can see wooden fences, bushes with firm green leaves, backyards, and tops of houses with brick chimneys, and street lamps flank both sides of the street, strategically spaced for their guard duty.

Perhaps he should walk more often, Mr. Barthelme finds himself thinking. Putting his right hand inside his jacket, he surreptitiously pats his stomach, and thinks it couldn’t hurt. And then, in a fit of self-pity: why does Marjorie put up with my antics, he wonders. He’s not getting any younger after all. Well, they aren’t really antics exactly. He’s not a character. Quirky, eccentric: these are not words that immediately spring to one’s mind about Barthelme. Except to the kids maybe, he thinks. And all of a sudden he wishes once more that he was there already. That’s the whole point, isn’t it? He wishes that all the time he’s there already? He really believes he does. He sighs. He shakes his head. Why? Then, not a hundred feet from another intersection, he absent-mindedly looks up:

A streetlamp, just as he approaches it, goes out.

The streetlamp might simultaneously notice, just as he approaches it, Mr. Barthelme stopping dead in his tracks.

Why would that happen, he, the man Barthelme not the nameless lamp, wonders. He looks around, as if for an explanation. There are no answers. He squints his eyes imperceptibly and looks back up at the streetlamp. That’s a weird thing to happen, he thinks.

The symbolic bent in him is drawn to the idea of death. His own eternal flame snuffed out. But that can’t be it. There’s no history of heart attacks in his family, and despite his frequent avowals that he should lose ten pounds, he considers himself soundly healthy for his age, and he can’t think of any other way he’d suddenly die on a walk. No, perhaps it’s even more sinister than that, he realizes. It’s not his heart, but his hopes that have just been extinguished. Perhaps in a Dimmesdalian cosmic message, God, through the streetlamp, is telling Mr. Barthelme the answer to the question he is continually mulling over, instructing him that he shouldn’t ask it.

So that’s it then. A no.

Mr. Barthelme isn’t moving.

He knows he always secretly doubted whether it could last. He just needed a streetlamp, a streetlamp he stands here stubbornly looking up at, to tell him. He could turn around and go back home, his walk abandoned as hopeless.

Instead, the fog swirls slowly around him, scattering microscopically across his face as he continues looking up. I have no idea what I’m doing, he thinks. She’s angry at me anyway, he thinks. What was I thinking anyway, he thinks. The whole world is grey.

Three minutes later he is still standing there, looking up, waiting, because acceptance is difficult. This is years and years he doesn’t want to lose. So recently, he had been walking across town, to Marjorie’s, with a purpose, but now he’s just standing, Barthelme, with nothing else to lose. So, he’s determined to fight it.

So he’s going to keep on standing, because, well… That maybe the light isn’t burnt out. Because maybe it’s off for some altogether different reason. Because maybe it’s a cycle. Because maybe it’s going to come back on. Because that would make everything different, wouldn’t it? If it comes back on and he waits to see it, then who knows what it would mean, but not necessarily no. Then he could still go on.

Though does she even want to see me, he wonders, after yesterday. Of course he has a key to her house for emergencies, so I could just let myself in, he thinks, but he wouldn’t. He’s polite and always knocks. The key rests against the small box in his coat pocket, both unused.

He straightens up and draws in a breath. He feels his cheeks are red.

What would Marjorie say if she could see me right now, he wonders. Maybe she can, he thinks. Perhaps, she’s a witch. Perhaps she cast a breaking spell on his car, a slowness spell on the mechanic, conjured the fog, extinguished the streetlamp, all to test him like in the tales of old. How weird it would be if that were true, Mr. Barthelme thinks, if Marjorie were a witch. She is awfully wise, he adds.

Mr. Barthelme is beginning to get impatient. The watched pot will not boil. He lets out a breath and looks down, scanning the neighborhood he’s in, superficially at first, then, disturbed, a little more closely.

The corner up ahead is familiar.

It’s been a while, quite a few years now, but he knows this neighborhood well, would never have wandered this way on a sunny day. He tries to read the street signs through the fog, but it’s hopeless and unnecessary. And this is what you get for not paying better attention, he thinks. That personal little ghost of Christmas past leads you right here. Not much more than a hundred yards or so in front of him is the house of death.

About ten years ago if you had turned left at the corner then knocked on the third door on your right, it would have been one of his feeble parents who came to answer; then eight or nine years ago it would have been their live-in nurse, Harmon, or not infrequently, it might have been Mr. Barthelme himself. Though both the door knocker and bell back then were probably stiff from lack of use. He had been by far the most common visitor, and he had his own key. It’s weird to be here now, he thinks. He usually tries not to think at all about his parents in this house where they spent the last twelve years of their lives. I might have just passed right by this spot in the fog without a moment’s recognition, he thinks.

He looks back up at the streetlamp, hoping it will have changed, hoping for permission to go, but it’s still unlit. A chill runs down his spine, and he hugs his coat close to himself.

The last couple of years of his parents’ lives (he might say life) were difficult ones for all of them. He left graduate school with half a dissertation on the Nomad Archetype in Victorian Literature in his suitcase and not quite enough credits and came back to his hometown to be with them. They offered him a room in their new, as he always thought of it, house. They’d be glad to save him the money, they said, but he couldn’t do it. If they had still been in his childhood home, maybe, but not in that sickness-infested building. He spent many long hours there, but even looking back now he knows he couldn’t have lived there.

Ghosts, ghosts, and more ghosts, that’s what comes out in the fog apparently, Mr. Barthelme thinks. He certainly no longer feels young. That passed long ago. He feels as though…

A car speeds by. Why hadn’t he heard it coming up? Was it because of the fog? That seems weird somehow, he thinks, watching the red taillights drifting away in front of him, the left turn blinker seemingly on for no reason. He hears its ticking in his head. The car looked full, he noticed.

Now that he’s really looking around, the good thing is no time seems to have passed since he first stopped. The world is still the same hues of grey, misty, not yet dark; Mr. Barthelme knows the sun must be nearing the horizon all the same.

He tries to imagine what Marjorie’s doing at that very moment. Is she worried? They hadn’t set an exact time of course. For so long they had been so comfortable together, they rarely did, so he has trouble picturing concerned. What he almost involuntarily see is her reading. She’s turned toward the lamp, feet bare and up on the armrest of her enormous couch. She reads like an eclipse with the book directly blocking the light from her face. The one time they had gone to the beach together, she had ended up lying flat on her blanket, book directly above her head, protecting her eyes, totally obscuring the high noon sun. He had spent the next week rubbing aloe on her horribly burned elbows.

What he wants more than anything at the moment is to be laying next to Marjorie on her couch, held. He’s really feeling tempted to just go, but something holds him back, some nagging suspicion that for some totally unknown reason this really is exactly where he’s supposed to be right now. Of course that could be a load of crap, he knows.

So he doesn’t go. Not yet. He looks back up at his friend, the streetlamp. He thinks about the way his father used to read him poetry, and then of the times, at the end, when he would read his father’s favorite poem to him. This might be my last day, his dad would say, I want to hear it. You can read perfectly well, Mr. Barthelme might have replied. No, I need to hear it. You’ve got to hear poetry. And then Mr. Barthelme would begin again, always the same lines, “We are the keepers of the Marigolds in winter…” He remembers his mother’s smile as she looked up at him from her own book. He remembers how much she liked Marjorie when they met. It had disquieted him at the time. Now—Now, those thoughts are fruitless.

Yesterday, Mr. Barthelme had been a jerk and laughed at her on purpose. They had been talking about their weeks while she was driving him home. It was something they almost always did late on Friday nights. It should have been safe territory, but the week had been a rough, testing one for both of them. It was when she was saying that to cap it all off during fourth period that day she had bumped into her desk, really stumbled, as she went to help someone at the back of the class, that he started to laugh.

“What’s so funny?”

“It’s just stupid; that’s all.”

“It’s stupid that I bumped into the desk? I’m going to have a bruise.”

“I was just picturing it. I like to imagine you in your classroom.”

“You could just visit me in there more often you know.”

“Yeah, I guess so. Sorry.”

And the worst part was he realized later that he hadn’t been laughing at her at all.

He was eating leftovers and pulling at a string on his placemat when it dawned on him: he had been laughing at himself. It was his first year teaching. He was attempting to grade his students’ poems inspired by the myth of Atalanta while they read silently, when he thought he heard a student call his name. He got up too quickly from his chair, propelling himself into the corner of his own desk, charley-horsing himself so hard, he fell and curled up on the ground. At the time the kids had been so surprised they hadn’t laughed. This was what had bubbled into his subconscious yesterday afternoon and prompted him to laugh. He had responded to it without even thinking. God, I can really be an idiot is exactly what he had been trying to tell himself, while simultaneously proving it once again by acting like an idiot.

Mr. Barthelme smiles ruefully into the fog. Then he shuts his eyes and transforms the streetlamp, his coat, and the whole scene around him into antiquated fits and forms. Now I am a character out of Gaskell, he thinks. He sighs.

The thing about Marjorie is this: she really likes meringue. There’s a French restaurant they go to that has a particular chocolate meringue dessert. He’s been planning on taking her there tonight. He will, he decides. She can enjoy dinner regardless of the rest of it, he thinks. And if it’s the last they ever have together as lovers, then so be it. She’ll enjoy it, and he’ll always remember the way her face looks as she enjoys it.

Mr. Barthelme shrugs and shivers. He believes he feels a drop hit his cheek, but who can be sure in this unilluminated fog. Perhaps there will be more. It might rain after all, he thinks. Then he’ll be wet. His parents got engaged on a boat, fishing. Laughing, he imagines for some reason, though a sense of humor was never known to be either of the elder Barthelmes’ strong suits. Of course, neither had fishing. If he starts walking right now, he’ll do it. He looks up at the streetlamp. Marjorie has a great laugh, he thinks. He wipes his face off, and then one last time pulls his jacket closer around him and squints up above.

Grey grey grey was the day, he muses, as Mr. Barthelme walked along his way…