Fear and Loathing in Suburbia

A FAINT UNEASINESS hangs over all Frederick Barthelme's short stories, a subtle, inescapable sense of skewed perspective Even reading snippets of his work at several-month intervals--the way most of it appeared in The New Yorker and Esquire--one detects the same imbalance over and over, a sort of ripple in the meticulous mirror-glass which the author holds up to picayune suburbia. Not that the impression dominates. Caught up in the smooth flow of Barthelme's prose, this reader has often dismissed it as a paranoid mirage. But now 17 of Barthelme's stories have been gathered into a book, and there can be no further question Frederick Barthelme has one big problem.

The difficulty may best be demonstrated by example. Of the 17 stories, no fewer than nine begin with a variation on the following scene. The narrator, always a 35-ish man with a nondescript name and nondescript job, often between marriages, is some where nondescript, actively pursuing passivity. While the T.V. chatters or the traffic light delays changing, a woman unexpectedly enters. She is physically striking, socially adept, completely confident of her welcome, and with minimal explanation she sweeps the narrator up in a sequence of events beyond his control. Sometimes there is sex, but not often, any moves in that direction the woman initiates and the narrator resists or ignores. More often than not, though, he winds up taking her out to dinner and generally going with the flow.

The opening of the title story, "Moon Deluxe," it typical.

You're stuck in traffic on the way home from work, counting blue cars, and when a blue metallic Jetta pulls along side, you count it--twenty-eight. You've seen the driver on the other evenings, she looks strikingly like a young man--big, with dark, almost red hair clipped tight around her head. Her clear fingernails move slowly, like gears, on the black steering wheel. She watches you, expressionless, for a long second, then deliberately opens her mouth and circles her lips with the wet tip of her tongue. You look away, then back Suddenly her lane moves ahead--two, three, four cars go by. You roll down the window and stick your head out, trying to see where she is, but she's gone.

Later, the narrator is enticed home by a second woman he meets at a party, who turns out to be the driver's roommate; they tease and seduce him, then hint at a lesbian menage, until he walks home alone. Virtually the same plotline follows the opening of "Pool Lights," which begins this way:

There are things that cannot be understood--things said at school, at the supermarket, or in this case by the pool of the Santa Rosa Apartments on a hazy afternoon in midsummer. A young woman wearing pleated white shorts and a thin gauze shirt open over her bikini top says, "You have a pretty face." Automatically, you smile and say, "Thank you," but, looking up at her, wonder why she selected that particular word, that adjective.

Occasionally the implied reaction to the intrusion proves less mild, less forgiving, in light of the events which unfold. "Monster Deal" ends in bitterness and anger when the female intruder all but kidnaps Karen, the teenage paper-delivery girl the narrator is attracted to; the two women go off laughingly together on Karen's Friday afternoon paper route and return dead drunk on Saturday morning, having obviated Karen's Friday night dinner date--the first--with the narrator. This story, too, begins familiarly:

Ten O' clock Friday morning I'm on the porch in the landlord's burgundy robe, smiling at a tall woman who has clear blue eyes and slightly curly light brown hair--She looks like an athlete. She might be thirty-five. Her fingernails are glistening and perfect in the morning light "I'm a friend of Elliot's Tina Graham--he didn't mention me?"

Elliot is the landlord. I tell her Elliot's out of the country till August, which is true.

"You must be Bergen, am I right?...Sorry to bust in on you like this," she says, closing the folder and stepping past me into the dark foyer. "Elliot was supposed to tell you about me. "She smiles as if we've settled something. "Maybe if we have some coffee I can explain--that a pretty robe you've got." She picks up the day-old newspaper.

IMAGES OF INTRUSION, vulnerability, forced entry, the rape theme lurking just beneath--what is all this? Frederick Barthelme is known as neither an ogre nor a psychotic, but a well-respected and well-connected fiction artist, his stories popular for their sharpness of scene and characterization, their control over accurate, endearing detail. The stories in Moon Deluxe are classic vignetes of Americana; shopping centers and brand names abound, dialogue is rendered with a perfect ear.

And yet the coincidence of openings is only the tip of a thematic iceberg. A sampling of plots from the eight stories not fitting that particular pattern reveal some of its contours:

*In "Grapette," a melancholy narrator in his late thirties is unwillingly reunited with Carmel Seaver, an ultra-precocious 17-year-old who slept with him when she was thirteen and he was thirty-three, and who drives him all over town in daddy's birthday present to her, a telephone equipped Peugeot.

*In "Safeway," the narrator pursues as far as coffee a dalliance with a beautiful married woman he meets in a Safeway supermarket, only to panic and given her a false apartment number for their intended rendezvous.

*In "Exotic Nile," the narrator is hoodwinked by his landlord into taking his wife's younger sister out to dinner because "She's young, but she's not that young, and she likes you." "[Did] You get him?" the girl asks her brother on reappearing and they all pile into her convertible, where she proceeds to climb all over the narrator.

*Barthelme gets the most explicitly hostile in "Shopgirls," which traces the exploits of a sort of Peeping Tom manque who, caught by one salesgirl after weeks of trailing two others, is dragged along by all three of them to a teasing and titillating group lunch. While he stares dumbly at his roast beef, the girls chatter about the school they attended to learn to look pretty: "We're professionals, like models. We make the women envious and we make the men feel cheated, and that's not as easy as it sound." Just before the least attractive of the three bears him off to her apartment (he sleeps on the couch), the author provides this little vignette:

"Well," Sally says, suddenly pushing back her chair and standing up, "I think it's me he really wants to look at. Isn't that right, Robert?" She comes around to you side of the table and leans over you and wraps her bare arm around your head, then pulls back and with her other hand opens her blouse slightly "See, Robert? Isn't it pretty? Tell the girls I'm the one you really like."

WHAT'S ALL the fuss? you ask. Can't a writer paint pictures of the society he sees, even the hypersensitive sex-and-social-life carnival, without failing prey to political ire? If everywhere Frederick Barthelme looks, he sees women who terrify him--women taking the sexual initiative, women not concerned whether or not they are at a particular moment wanted, something very much like that must be happening around him.

Besides, Barthelme's vision is a convincing one, at many points delicately rendered. Though his characters, male and female, blur together, their situations remain in the mind--the neighbors reduced to enmity by their dogs' recurrent fights; the man whose divorced wife throws herself into a swimming pool, fully clothed, when he arrives at a party. And the ways in which his women demonstrate their sureness, so different from the men's limpness, are as varied as they are inescapable. Perhaps the most startling is the moment when Carmel Seaver, the 17-year-old in "Grapette," absent-mindedly begins to rinse a dish in the narrator's sink and is brought up short by his polite protest:

She stops what she's doing and looks at the sponge in her hand as if it had suddenly turned into a fish. "Jesus," she says. "I didn't even think--this is your apartment." She drops the sponge on the lip of the sink, rubs her hands together, and reaches for her purse. She removes a small bottle and taps a curl of hand cream into her palm, then screws on the bottle top before rubbing the cream into her skin.

How better to lament the tyranny of appearance than through such understated anecdotes, rendered in prose that, despite occasional embarrassments ("Everything in the room seems to have pitted tubular chrome legs"), is reminiscent of Updike?

BUT BARTHELME isn't lamenting anything. "Grapette," in fact, finds him unusually at case. So does "Trip," which chronicles a couple's readezvous after six months of flirting over their company's WATS line. After the first night the woman muses that she has been too forward: "I probably should've waited for you in town," she notes in the morning. "You don't seem to be working at this."

Barthelme doesn't want to chronicle the sexual revolution; he hasn't gotten that far. But he sees it rising around him and, like a man in a nightmare, hallucinates gigantic proportions on what is merely a small change in stature. Feminism for him doesn't mean that women have broken a little loose of the social straitjacket that once forbade them to call a man on the phone; initiate a choice of sexual partners rather than accept what circumstance deals them; or deviate from the admen's norm in clothing, speech and thought. No, the world since women's lib has become a terrifying jungle for nice guys who never did anyone any harm; nowadays they can't even watch television without fearing that the Amazons will burst in, hunting hapless creatures to bend to their incomprehensible whim and will.

Margaret Atwood puts the matter directly, if a bit move crudely, in her recent novel Bodily Harm. As one oft-jilted character muses to another.

My theory is that when sex was such a big deal, above the waist, below the waist, with stages of achievement marked on it like the United Appeal thermometer, they wanted it that way because you could win, scoring, you know? Our team against their team. One in the tooth for Mummy. So we said, you want it, fine, we want it too, and all of a sudden millions of pricks went limp. Nation wide! That's my theory.

Women who take an aggressive role in the sexual game aren't just getting a turn as the wheel of fortune rotates their way; they're monsters, powerful beyond comprehension, willful beyond any defense. Women who aren't beautiful enough to get you coming after them of your own accord--assuming you're a regular guy--are nevertheless unstoppable freaks; if nothing else, they'll bilk you for the price of dinner. Women who are beautiful and know how to use it--like the shopgirls in Robert's lunch date--are whores. You can see it just by looking around you. And if a smart man like Frederick Barthelme, who knows so well how to express himself, sees it too--well, then, it must be so. How inexorably plausible. How damnably unfair.