Bluebeard

by Kurt Vonnegut

  He can't stand it that I inherited a piece of the Cincinnati Bengals, and don't give a damn. He is an avid football fan.

  14

  SO FLOYD POMERANTZ'S chauffeur delivered me to the first flagstone of my doorpath. I clambered out of our fancy casket like Count Dracula, blinded by the setting sun. I groped my way to my front door and entered.

  Let me tell you about the foyer I had every right to expect to see. Its walls should have been oyster white, like every square foot of wall space in the entire house, except for the basement and servants' quarters. Terry Kitchen's painting "Secret Window" should have loomed before me like the City of God. To my left should have been a Matisse of a woman holding a black cat in her arms and standing before a brick wall covered with yellow roses, which dear Edith had bought fair and square from a gallery as a present to me on our fifth wedding anniversary. On my right should have been a Hans Hofmann which Terry Kitchen got from Philip Guston in trade for one of his own pictures, and which he gave to me after I paid for a new transmission for his babyshit-brown convertible Buick Roadmaster.

  Those who wish to know more about the foyer need only dig out a copy of the February 1981 issue of Architect & Decorator. The foyer is on the cover, is viewed through the open front door from the flagstone walk, which was lined on both sides with hollyhocks back then. The lead article is about the whole house as a masterpiece of redecorating a Victorian house to accommodate modern art. Of the foyer itself it says, "The Karabekians' entrance hall alone contains what might serve as the core of a small museum's permanent collection of modern art, marvelous enough in itself, but in fact a mere hors d'oeuvre before the incredible feast of art treasures awaiting in the high-ceilinged, stark-white rooms beyond."

  And was I, the great Rabo Karabekian, the mastermind behind this happy marriage of the old and the new? No. Dear Edith was. It was all her idea that I bring my collection out of storage. This house, after all, was an heirloom of the Taft family, full not only of memories of Edith's happy childhood in summertimes here, but of her very good first marriage, too. When I moved in here from the potato barn, she asked me if I was comfortable in such old-fashioned surroundings. I said truthfully and from the bottom of my heart that I loved it for what it was, and that she shouldn't change a thing for me.

  So by God if it wasn't Edith who called in the contractors, and had them strip off all the wallpaper right down to bare plaster, and take down the chandeliers and put up track lights--and paint the oak baseboards and trim and doors and window sashes and walls a solid oyster-white!

  When the work was done, she looked about twenty years younger. She said she had almost gone to her grave without ever realizing what a gift she had for remodeling and decorating. And then she said, "Call Home Sweet Home Moving and Storage," in whose warehouse I had stored my collection for years and years. "Let them tell your glorious paintings as they bring them out into the daylight, 'You are going home!'"

  When I walked into my foyer after my trip to New York City, though, a scene so shocking enveloped me that, word of honor, I thought an axe murder had happened there. I am not joking! I thought I was looking at blood and gore! It may have taken me as long as a minute to realize what I was really seeing: wallpaper featuring red roses as big as cabbages against a field of black, babyshit-brown baseboards, trim and doors, and six chromos of little girls on swings, with mats of purple velvet, and with gilded frames which must have weighed as much as the limousine which had delivered me to this catastrophe.

  Did I yell? They tell me I did. What did I yell? They had to tell me afterwards what I yelled. They heard it, and I did not. When the cook and her daughter, the first to arrive, came running, I was yelling this, they say, over and over: "I am in the wrong house! I am in the wrong house!"

  Think of this: my homecoming was a surprise party they had been looking forward to all day long. Now it was all they could do, despite how generous I had always been with them, not to laugh out loud at my maximum agony!

  What a world!

  I said to the cook, and I could hear myself now: "Who did this?"

  "Mrs. Berman," she said. She behaved as though she couldn't imagine what the trouble was.

  "How could you allow this to happen?" I said.

  "I'm just the cook," she said.

  "I also hope you're my friend," I said.

  "Think what you want," she said. The truth be told, we had never been close. "I like how it looks," she said.

  "Do you!" I said.

  "Looks better than it did," she said.

  So I turned to her daughter. "You think it looks better than it did?"

  "Yes," she said.

  "Well--" I said, "isn't this just wonderful! The minute I was out of the house, Mrs. Berman called in the painters and paperhangers, did she?"

  They shook their heads. They said that Mrs. Berman had done the whole job herself, and that she had met her husband the doctor while papering his office. She used to be a professional paperhanger! Can you beat it?

  "After his office," said Celeste, "he had her paper his home."

  "He was lucky she didn't paper him!" I said.

  And Celeste said, "You know you dropped your patch?"

  "My what?" I said.

  "Your eye patch," she said. "It's on the floor and you're stepping on it."

  It was true! I was so upset that at some point, maybe while tearing my hair, I had stripped the patch from my head. So now they were seeing the scar tissue which I had never even shown Edith. My first wife had certainly seen a lot of it, but she was my nurse in the Army hospital at Fort Benjamin Harrison, where a plastic surgeon tried to clean up the mess a little bit after the war. He would have had to do a lot more surgery to get it to the point where it would hold a glass eye, so I chose an eye patch instead.

  The patch was on the floor!

  My most secret disfigurement was in plain view of the cook and her daughter! And now Paul Slazinger came into the foyer in time to see it, too.

  They were all very cool about what they saw. They didn't recoil in horror or cry out in disgust. It was almost as though I looked just about the same, with or without the eye patch on.

  After I got the eye patch back in place, I said to Slazinger: "Were you here while this was going on?"

  "Sure," he said. "I wouldn't have missed it for anything."

  "Didn't you know how it would make me feel?" I said.

  "That's why I wouldn't have missed it for anything," he said.

  "I just don't understand this," I said. "Suddenly it sounds as though you're all my enemies."

  "I don't know about these two," said Slazinger, "but I'm sure as hell your enemy. Why didn't you tell me she was Polly Madison?"

  "How did you find out?" I said.

  "She told me," he said. "I saw what she was doing here, and I begged her not to--because I thought it might kill you. She said it would make you ten years younger.

  "I thought it might really be a life-and-death situation," he went on, "and that I had better take some direct physical action." This was a man, incidentally, who had won a Silver Star for protecting his comrades on Okinawa by lying down on a fizzing Japanese hand grenade.

  "So I gathered up as many rolls of wallpaper as I could," he said, "and ran out into the kitchen and hid them in the deep freeze. How's that for friendship?"

  "God bless you!" I exclaimed.

  "Yes, and God fuck you," he said. "She came right after me, and wanted to know what I'd done with the wallpaper. I called her a crazy witch, and she called me a freeloader and 'the spit-filled penny whistle of American literature.' 'Who are you to talk about literature?' I asked her. So she told me."

  What she said to him was this: "My novels sold seven million copies in the United States alone last year. Two are being made into major motion pictures as we stand here, and one of them made into a movie last year won Academy Awards for Best Cinematography, Best Supporting Actress and Best Score. Shake hands, Buster, with Polly Madison, Literary Middleweight Champion of
the World! And then give me back my wallpaper, or I'll break your arms!"

  "How could you have let me make such a fool of myself for so long, Rabo--" he said, "giving her tips on the ins and outs of the writing game?"

  "I was waiting for the opportune time," I said.

  "You missed it by a mile, you son of a bitch," he said.

  "She's in a different league from you anyway," I said.

  "That's right," he said. "She's richer and she's better."

  "Not better, surely," I said.

  "This woman is a monster," he said, "but her books are marvelous! She's the new Richard Wagner, one of the most awful people who ever lived."

  "How would you know about her books?" I said.

  "Celeste has them all, so I read them," he said. "How's that for an irony? There I was all summer, reading her books and admiring the hell out of them, and meanwhile treating her like a half-wit, not knowing who she was."

  So that's what he did with this summer, anyway: he read all the Polly Madison books!

  "After I found out who she was," he said, "and the way you'd kept it from me, I became more enthusiastic than she was about redoing the foyer. I said that if she really wanted to make you happy, she would paint the woodwork babyshit brown."

  He knew that I had had at least two unhappy experiences with the color practically everybody calls "babyshit brown." Even in San Ignacio when I was a boy, people called it "babyshit brown."

  One experience took place outside Brooks Brothers years ago, where I had bought a summer suit which I thought looked pretty nice, which had been altered for me, and which I decided to wear home. I was then married to Dorothy, and we were still living in the city, and both still planning on my being a businessman. The minute I stepped outside, two policemen grabbed me for hard questioning. Then they let me go with an apology, explaining that a man had just robbed a bank down the street, with a lady's nylon stocking over his head. "All that anybody could tell us about him," one of them said to me, "was that his suit was babyshit brown."

  My other unhappy association with that color had to do with Terry Kitchen. After Terry and I and several others in our gang moved out here for the cheap real estate and potato barns, Terry did his afternoon drinking at bars which were, in effect, private clubs for native working men. This was a man, incidentally, who was a graduate of Yale Law School, who had been a clerk to Supreme Court Justice John Harlan, and a major in the Eighty-second Airborne. I was not only supporting him in large measure: I was the one he called or had somebody else call from some bar when he was too drunk to drive home.

  And here is what Kitchen, arguably the most important artist ever to paint in the Hamptons, with the possible exception of Winslow Homer, is called in the local bars by the few who still remember him: "The guy in the babyshit-brown convertible."

  15

  "WHERE IS MRS. BERMAN at this moment?" I wished to know.

  "Upstairs--getting dressed for a big date," said Celeste. "She looks terrific. Wait till you see."

  "Date?" I said. She had never gone on a date as long as she had been living here. "Who would she have a date with?"

  "She met a psychiatrist on the beach," said the cook.

  "He drives a Ferrari," said her daughter. "He held the ladder for her while she hung the paper. He's taking her to a big dinner party for Jackie Kennedy over in Southampton, and then they're going dancing in Sag Harbor afterwards."

  At that moment, Mrs. Berman arrived in the foyer, as serene and majestic as the most beautiful motor ship ever built, the French liner Normandie.

  When I was a hack artist in an advertising agency before the war, I had painted a picture of the Normandie for a travel poster. And when I was about to sail as a soldier for North Africa on February 9, 1942, and was giving Sam Wu the address where he could write to me, the sky over New York Harbor was thick with smoke.

  Why?

  Workmen converting an ocean liner into a troopship had started an uncontrollable fire in the belly of the most beautiful motor ship ever built. Her name again, and may her soul rest in peace: the Normandie.

  "This is an absolute outrage," I said to Mrs. Berman.

  She smiled. "How do I look?" she said. She was overwhelmingly erotic--her voluptuous figure exaggerated and cocked this way and that way as she teetered on high-heeled, golden dancing shoes. Her skintight cocktail dress was cut low in front, shamelessly displaying her luscious orbs. What a sexual bully she could be!

  "Who gives a damn what you look like?" I said.

  "Somebody will," she said.

  "What have you done to this foyer?" I said. "That's what I'd like to discuss with you, and the hell with your clothes!"

  "Make it fast," she said. "My date will be here at any time."

  "O.K.," I said. "What you have done here is not only an unforgivable insult to the history of art, but you have spit on the grave of my wife! You knew perfectly well that she created this foyer, not I. I could go on to speak of sanity as compared with insanity, decency as compared with vandalism, friendship as compared with rabies. But since you, Mrs. Berman, have called for speed and clarity in my mode of self-expression, because your concupiscent shrink will be arriving in his Ferrari at any moment, try this: Get the hell out of here, and never come back again!"

  "Bushwa," she said.

  "'Bushwa'?" I echoed scornfully. "I suppose that's the high level of intellectual discourse one might expect from the author of the Polly Madison books."

  "It wouldn't hurt you to read one," she said. "They're about life right now." She indicated Slazinger. "You and your ex-pal here never got past the Great Depression and World War Two."

  She was wearing a gold wristwatch encrusted with diamonds and rubies which I had never seen before, and it fell to the floor.

  The cook's daughter laughed, and I asked her loftily what she thought was funny.

  She said, "Everybody's got the dropsies today."

  So Circe, picking up the watch, asked who else had dropped something, and Celeste told her about my eye patch.

  Slazinger took the opportunity to mock what was under the eye patch. "Oh, you should see that scar," he said. "It is the most horrible scar! I have never seen such disgusting disfigurement."

  I wouldn't have taken that from anybody else, but I had to take it from him. He had a wide scar that looked like a map of the Mississippi Valley running from his sternum to his crotch, where he had been laid open by the hand grenade.

  He has only one nipple left, and he asked me a riddle one time: "What has three eyes, three nipples and two assholes?"

  "I give up," I said.

  And he said, "Paul Slazinger and Rabo Karabekian."

  There in the foyer, he said to me, "Until you dropped your eye patch, I had no idea how vain you were. That's a perfectly acceptable wink under there."

  "Now that you know," I said, "I hope that both you and Polly Madison clear the hell out of here and never come back again. How you two took advantage of my hospitality!"

  "I paid my share," said Mrs. Berman. This was true. From the very first, she had insisted on paying for the cook and the food and liquor.

  "You are so deep in my debt for so many things besides money," she went on, "you could never pay me back in a million years. After I'm gone, you're going to realize what a favor I did you with this foyer alone."

  "Favor? Did you say favor?" I jeered. "You know what these pictures are to anybody with half a grain of sense about art? They are a negation of art! They aren't just neutral. They are black holes from which no intelligence or skill can ever escape. Worse than that, they suck up the dignity, the self-respect, of anybody unfortunate enough to have to look at them."

  "Seems like a lot for just a few little pictures to do," she said, meanwhile trying without any luck to clip her watch around her wrist again.

  "Is it still running?" I said.

  "It hasn't run for years," she said.

  "Then why do you wear it?" I said.

  "To look as nice as possibl
e," she said, "but now the clasp is broken." She offered the watch to me, and made an allusion to my tale of how my mother had become rich in jewels during the massacre. "Here! Take it, and buy yourself a ticket to someplace where you'll be happier--like the Great Depression or World War Two."

  I waved the gift away.

  "Why not a ticket back to what you were before I got here?" she said. "Except you don't need a ticket. You'll be back there quick enough, as soon as I move out."

  "I was quite content in June," I said, "and then you appeared."

  "Yes," she said, "and you were also fifteen pounds lighter and ten shades paler, and a thousand times more listless, and your personal hygiene was so careless that I almost didn't come to supper. I was afraid I might get leprosy."

  "You're too kind," I said.

  "I brought you back to life," she said. "You're my Lazarus. All Jesus did for Lazarus was bring him back to life. I not only brought you back to life--I got you writing your autobiography."

  "That was a big joke, too, I guess," I said.

  "Big joke like what?" she said.

  "Like this foyer," I said.

  "These pictures are twice as serious as yours, if you give them half a chance," she said.

  "You had them sent up from Baltimore?" I said.

  "No," she said. "I ran into another collector at an antique show in Bridgehampton last week, and she sold them to me. I didn't know what to do with them at first, so I hid them in the basement--behind all the Sateen Dura-Luxe."

  "I hope this babyshit brown isn't Sateen Dura-Luxe," I said.

  "No," she said. "Only an idiot would use Sateen Dura-Luxe. And you want me to tell you what's great about these pictures?"

  "No," I said.

  "I've done my best to understand and respect your pictures," she said. "Why won't you do the same for mine?"

  "Do you know the meaning of the word "kitsch"?" I said.

  "I wrote a book called Kitsch," she said.

  "I read it," said Celeste. "It's about a girl whose boyfriend tried to make her think she has bad taste, which she does--but it doesn't matter much."

  "You don't call these pictures of little girls on swings serious art?" jeered Mrs. Berman. "Try thinking what the Victorians thought when they looked at them, which was how sick or unhappy so many of these happy, innocent little girls would be in just a little while--diphtheria, pneumonia, smallpox, miscarriages, violent husbands, poverty, widowhood, prostitution--death and burial in potter's field."