Bluebeard

by Kurt Vonnegut

  Old Soldier's Anecdote Number One: "While Paris was being liberated," I said, "I went to find Pablo Picasso, Dan Gregory's idea of Satan--to make sure he was O.K.," I said.

  "He opened his door a crack, with a chain across it inside, and said he was busy and did not wish to be disturbed. You could still hear guns going off only a couple of blocks away. Then he shut and locked the door again."

  Marilee laughed and said, "Maybe he knew all the terrible things our lord and master used to say about him." She said that if she had known I was still alive, she would have saved a picture in an Italian magazine which only she and I could fully appreciate. It showed a collage Picasso had made by cutting up a poster advertising American cigarettes. He had reassembled pieces of the poster, which originally showed three cowboys smoking around a campfire at night, to form a cat.

  Of all the art experts on Earth, only Marilee and I, most likely, could identify the painter of the mutilated poster as Dan Gregory.

  How is that for trivia?

  "So that is probably the only point at which Picasso paid the least bit of attention to one of the most popular American artists in history," I speculated.

  "Probably," she said.

  Old Soldier's Anecdote Number Two: "I was captured when the war had only a few more months to go," I said. "I was patched up in a hospital and then sent to a camp south of Dresden, where they were practically out of food. Everything in what was left of Germany had been eaten up. So we were all getting skinnier and skinnier except for the man we'd elected to divide what food there was into equal shares.

  "There was never a time when he had the food to himself. We saw it delivered, and then he divided it up with all of us watching. Still, he somehow remained sleek and contended-looking while the rest of us became skeletons.

  "He was feasting absentmindedly on crumbs and dribblings that fell on the tabletop and clung to his knife and ladle."

  This same innocent phenomenon, by the way, explains the great prosperity of many of my neighbors up and down the beach here. They are in charge of such wealth as remains in this generally bankrupt country, since they are so trustworthy. A little bit of it is bound to try to find its way to their mouths from their busy fingers and implements.

  Old Soldier's Anecdote Number Three: "One evening in May," I said, "we were marched out of our camp and into the countryside. We were halted at about three in the morning, and told to sleep under the stars as best we could.

  "When we awoke at sunrise, the guards were gone, and we found that we were on the rim of a valley near the ruins of an ancient stone watchtower. Below us, in that innocent farmland, were thousands upon thousands of people like us, who had been brought there by their guards, had been dumped. These weren't only prisoners of war. They were people who had been marched out of concentration camps and factories where they had been slaves, and out of regular prisons for criminals, and out of lunatic asylums. The idea was to turn us loose as far as possible from the cities, where we might raise hell.

  "And there were civilians there, too, who had run and run from the Russian front or the American and British front. The fronts had actually met to the north and south of us.

  "And there were hundreds in German uniforms, with their weapons still in working order, but docile now, waiting for whomever they were expected to surrender to."

  "The Peaceable Kingdom," said Marilee.

  I changed the subject from war to peace. I told Marilee that I had returned to the arts after a long hiatus, and had, to my own astonishment, become a creator of serious paintings which would make Dan Gregory turn over in his hero's grave in Egypt, paintings such as the world had never seen before.

  She protested in mock horror. "Oh, please--not the arts again," she said. "They're a swamp I'll never get out of as long as I live."

  But she listened thoughtfully when I told her about our little gang in New York City, whose paintings were nothing alike except for one thing: they were about nothing but themselves.

  When I was all talked out, she sighed, and she shook her head. "It was the last conceivable thing a painter could do to a canvas, so you did it," she said. "Leave it to Americans to write, 'The End.'"

  "I hope that's not what we're doing," I said.

  "I hope very much that it is what you're doing," she said. "After all that men have done to the women and children and every other defenseless thing on this planet, it is time that not just every painting, but every piece of music, every statue, every play, every poem and book a man creates, should say only this: 'We are much too horrible for this nice place. We give up. We quit. The end!'"

  She said that our unexpected reunion was a stroke of luck for her, since she thought I might have brought the solution to an interior decorating problem which had been nagging at her for years, namely: what sort of pictures, if any, should she put on the inane blanks between the columns of her rotunda? "I want to leave some sort of mark on this place while I have it," she said, "and the rotunda seems the place to do it.

  "I considered hiring women and children to paint murals of the death camps and the bombing of Hiroshima and the planting of land mines, and maybe the burning of witches and the feeding of Christians to wild animals in olden times," she said. "But I think that sort of thing, on some level, just eggs men on to be even more destructive and cruel, makes them think: 'Ha! We are as powerful as gods! There has never been anything to stop us from doing even the most frightful things, if even the most frightful things are what we choose to do.'

  "So your idea is a much better one, Rabo. Let men come into my rotunda, and wherever they look at eye level let them receive no encouragement. Let the walls cry out: 'The end! The end!'"

  Thus began the second great collection of American Abstract Expressionist art--the first being my own, the storage bills for which were making paupers of me and my wife and children. Nobody else wanted those pictures at any price!

  Marilee ordered ten of them sight unseen--to be selected by me and at one thousand dollars each!

  "You're joking!" I said.

  "The Countess Portomaggiore never jokes," she said. "And I'm as noble and rich as anybody who ever lived here, so you do what I say."

  So I did.

  She asked if our gang had come up with a name for ourselves, and we hadn't. It was critics who would finally name us. She said that we should call ourselves the "Genesis Gang," since we were going right back to the beginning, when subject matter had yet to be created.

  I found that a good idea, and would try to sell it to the others when I got home. But it never caught on somehow.

  Marilee and I talked for hours, until it was dark outside. She said at last, "I think you had better go now."

  "Sounds like what you said to me on Saint Patrick's Day fourteen years ago," I said.

  "I hope you won't be so quick to forget me this time," she said.

  "I never did that," I said.

  "You forgot to worry about me," she said.

  "I give you my word of honor, Contessa," I said, standing. "I can never do that again."

  That was the last time we met. We exchanged several letters, though. I have dug one of hers from the archives here. It is dated three years after our reunion, June 7, 1953, and says that we have failed to paint pictures of nothing after all, that she easily identifies chaos in every canvas. This is a pleasant joke, of course. "Tell that to the rest of the Genesis Gang," she says.

  I answered that letter with a cable, of which I have a copy. "NOT EVEN CHAOS IS SUPPOSED TO BE THERE," it reads. "WE'LL COME OVER AND PAINT IT OUT. ARE OUR FACES RED. SAINT PATRICK."

  Bulletin from the present: Paul Slazinger has voluntarily committed himself to the psychiatric ward at the Veterans Administration hospital over at Riverhead. I certainly didn't know what to do about the bad chemicals his body was dumping into his bloodstream, and he was becoming a maniac even to himself. Mrs. Berman was glad to see him out of here.

  Better he should be looked after by his Uncle Sam.

  31 />
  OF ALL THE THINGS I have to be ashamed of, the most troublesome of this old heart of mine is my failure as a husband of the good and brave Dorothy, and the consequent alienation of my own flesh and blood, Henri and Terry, from me, their Dad.

  What will be found written after the name of Rabo Karabekian in the Big Book on Judgment Day?

  "Soldier: Excellent.

  "Husband and Father: Floparroo.

  "Serious artist: Floparroo."

  There was Hell to pay when I got home from Florence. The good and brave Dorothy and both boys had a brand new kind of influenza, yet another postwar miracle. A doctor had been to see them and would come again, and a woman upstairs was feeding them. It was agreed that I could only be in the way until Dorothy got back to her feet, and that I should spend the next few nights at the studio Terry Kitchen and I had rented above Union Square.

  How smart we would have been to have me stay away for a hundred years instead!

  "Before I go, I want to tell you I've got some really good news," I said.

  "We're not going to move out to that godforsaken house in the middle of nowhere?" she said.

  "That isn't it," I said. "You and the kids will get to love it out there, with the ocean and lots of fresh air."

  "Somebody's offered you a steady job out there?" she said.

  "No," I said.

  "But you're going to look for one," she said. "You're going to take your degree in business administration that we all sacrificed so much for, and knock on doors out there till somebody in some decent business hires you, so we'll have steady money coming in."

  "Honeybunch, listen to me," I said. "When I was in Florence I sold ten thousand dollars' worth of paintings."

  Our basement apartment resembled a storage room for scenery in a theater, there were so many huge canvases in there--which I had accepted in lieu of repayments of debts. So she got off this joke: "Then you're going to end up in prison," she said, "because we don't even have three dollars' worth of paintings here."

  I had made her so unhappy that she had developed a sense of humor, which she certainly didn't have when I married her.

  "You're supposed to be thirty-four years old," she said. She herself was twenty-three!

  "I am thirty-four," I said.

  "Then act thirty-four," she said. "Act like a man with a wife and family who'll be forty before he knows it, and nobody will give him a job doing anything but sacking groceries or pumping gas."

  "That's really laying it on the line, isn't it?" I said.

  "I don't lay it on the line like that," she said. "Life lays it on the line like that. Rabo! What's happened to the man I married? We had such sensible plans for such a sensible life. And then you met these people--these bums."

  "I always wanted to be an artist," I said.

  "You never told me that," she said.

  "I didn't think it was possible," I said. "Now I do."

  "Too late--and much too risky for a family man. Wake up!" she said. "Why can't you just be happy with a nice family? Everybody else is."

  "I'll tell you again: I sold ten thousand dollars' worth of paintings in Florence," I said.

  "That'll fall through like everything else," she said.

  "If you love me, you'd have more faith in me as a painter," I said.

  "I love you, but I hate your friends and your paintings," she said, "and I'm scared for me and my babies, the way things are going. The war is over, Rabo!"

  "What is that supposed to mean?" I said.

  "You don't have to do wild things, great big things, dangerous things that don't have a chance," she said. "You've already got all the medals anybody could want. You don't have to conquer France." This last was a reference to our grandiose talk about making New York City rather than Paris the Art Capital of the World.

  "They were on our side anyway, weren't they?" she said. "Why do you have to go conquer them? What did they ever do to you?"

  I was already outside the apartment when she asked me that, so all she had to do to end the conversation was what Picasso had done to me, which was to close the door and lock it.

  I could hear her crying inside. Poor soul! Poor soul!

  It was late afternoon. I took my suitcase over to Kitchen's and my studio. Kitchen was asleep on his cot. Before I woke him up, I had a look at what he had been doing in my absence. He had slashed all his paintings with an ivory-handled straight razor inherited from his paternal grandfather, who had been president of the New York Central Railroad. The Art World certainly wasn't any the poorer for what he had done. I had the obvious thought: "It's a miracle he didn't slash his wrists as well."

  This was a great big beautiful Anglo-Saxon sleeping there, like Fred Jones a model for a Dan Gregory illustration of a story about an ideal American hero. And when he and I went places together, we really did look like Jones and Gregory. Not only that, but Kitchen treated me as respectfully as Fred had treated Gregory, which was preposterous! Fred had been a genuine, dumb, sweet lunk, whereas my own buddy, sleeping there, was a graduate of Yale Law School, could have been a professional pianist or tennis player or golfer.

  He had inherited a world of talent along with that straight razor. His father was a first-rate cellist and chess player and horticulturalist, as well as a corporation lawyer and a pioneer in winning civil rights for the black people.

  My sleeping buddy had also outranked me in the Army, as a lieutenant colonel in the Paratroops, and in deeds of derring-do! But he chose to stand in awe of me because I could do one thing he could never do, which was to draw or paint a likeness of anything my eye could see.

  As for my own work there in the studio, the big fields of color before which I could stand intoxicated for hour after hour: they were meant to be beginnings. I expected them to become more and more complicated as I slowly but surely closed in on what had so long eluded me: soul, soul, soul.

  I woke him up, and said I would buy him an early supper at the Cedar Tavern. I didn't tell him about the big deal I had pulled off in Florence, since he couldn't be a part of it. He wouldn't get his hands on the spray rig for two more days.

  When the Contessa Portomaggiore died, incidentally, her collection would include sixteen Terry Kitchens.

  "Early supper" meant early drinking too. There were already three painters at what had become our regular table in the back. I will call them "Painters X, Y and Z." And, lest I give aid and comfort to Philistines eager to hear that the first Abstract Expressionists were a bunch of drunks and wild men, let me say who these three weren't.

  They were not, repeat, were not: William Baziotes, James Brooks, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, who was already dead by then anyway, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Hans Hofmann, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Syd Solomon or Bradley Walker Tomlin.

  Pollock would show up that evening, all right, but he was on the wagon. He would not say a word, and would soon go home again. And one person there wasn't a painter at all, as far as we knew. He was a tailor. His name was Isadore Finkelstein, and his shop was right above the tavern. After a couple of drinks, he could talk painting as well as anyone. His grandfather, he said, had been a tailor in Vienna, and had made several suits for the painter Gustav Klimt before the First World War.

  And we got on the subject of why, even though we had been given shows which had excited some critics, and which had inspired a big story in Life magazine about Pollock, we still weren't making anywhere near enough to live on.

  We concluded that it was our clothing and grooming which were holding us back. This was a kind of joke. Everything we said was a kind of joke. I still don't understand how things got so gruesomely serious for Pollock and Kitchen after only six more years went by.

  Slazinger was there, too. That was where I met him. He was gathering material for a novel about painters--one of dozens of novels he never wrote.

  At the end of that evening, I remember, he said to me: "I can't get over how passionate you guys are, and ye
t so absolutely unserious."

  "Everything about life is a joke," I said. "Don't you know that?"

  "No," he said.

  Finkelstein declared himself eager to solve the clothing problem of anybody who thought he had one. He would do it for a small down payment and a manageable installment plan. So the next thing I knew, Painters X, Y and Z and I and Kitchen were all upstairs in Finkelstein's shop, getting measured for suits. Pollock and Slazinger came along, but only as spectators. Nobody else had any money, so, in character, I made everybody's down payment with the traveler's checks I had left over from my trip to Florence.

  Painters X, Y and Z, incidentally, would pay me back with pictures the very next afternoon. Painter X had a key to our apartment, which I had given him after he was thrown out of his fleabag hotel for setting his bed on fire. So he and the other two delivered their paintings and got out again before poor Dorothy could defend herself.

  Finkelstein the tailor had been a real killer in the war, and so had Kitchen been. I never was.

  Finkelstein was a tank gunner in Patton's Third Army. When he measured me for my suit, a suit I still own, he told me, his mouth full of pins, about how a track was blown off his tank by a boy with a rocket launcher two days before the war in Europe ended.

  So they shot him before they realized that he was just a boy.

  And here is a surprise: when Finkelstein died of a stroke three years later, when we were all starting to do quite well financially, it turned out that he had been a secret painter all along!

  His young widow Rachel, who looked a lot like Circe Berman, now that I think about it, gave him a one-man show in his shop before she closed it up forever. His stuff was unambitious but strong: as representational as he could make it, much like what his fellow war heroes Winston Churchill and Dwight David Eisenhower used to do.

  Like them, he enjoyed paint. Like them, he appreciated reality. That was the late painter Isadore Finkelstein.