*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.