Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [13]
There used to be lots of bears on Long Island, but there certainly aren’t bears anymore. He said his knowledge of bears came from his father, who, at the age of sixty, was treed by a grizzly in Yellowstone Park. After that, John’s father read every book about bears he could get his hands on.
“I’ll say this for that bear—” said John, “it got the old man reading books again.”
Mrs. Berman is so God damn nosy! I mean—she comes in here and reads what is in my typewriter without feeling the need to ask permission first.
“How come you never use semicolons?” she’ll say. Or: “How come you chop it all up into little sections instead of letting it flow and flow?” That sort of thing.
And when I listen to her moving about this house, I not only hear her footsteps: I hear the opening and closing of drawers and cupboards, too. She has investigated every nook and cranny, including the basement. She came up from the basement one day and said, “Do you know you’ve got sixty-three gallons of Sateen Dura-Luxe down there?” She had counted them!
It is against the law to dispose of Sateen Dura-Luxe in an ordinary dump because it has been found to degrade over time into a very deadly poison. To get rid of the stuff legally, I would have to ship it to a special disposal area near Pitchfork, Wyoming, and I have never got around to doing that. So there it sits in the basement after all these years.
The one place on the property she hasn’t explored is my studio, the potato barn. It is a very long and narrow structure without windows, with sliding doors and a potbellied stove at either end, built for the storage of potatoes and nothing else. The idea was this: a farmer might maintain an even temperature in there, no matter what the weather, with the stoves and the doors, so that his potatoes would neither freeze nor sprout until he was ready to market them.
It was structures with such unusual dimensions, in fact, along with what used to be very cheap property, which caused many painters to move out here when I was young, and especially painters who were working on exceptionally large canvases. I would never have been able to work on the eight panels comprising “Windsor Blue Number Seventeen” as a single piece, if I hadn’t rented that potato barn.
The nosy widow Berman, a.k.a. “Polly Madison,” can’t get into the studio or even take a peek inside because it has no windows and because two years ago, right after my wife died, I personally nailed the doors at one end shut from the inside with six-inch spikes, and immobilized the doors at the other end on the outside, from top to bottom, with six big padlocks and massive hasps.
I myself haven’t been in there since. And, yes, there is something in there. This is no shaggy dog story. After I die and am buried next to my darling Edith, and the executors of my estate open those doors at last, they will find more than just thin air in there. And it won’t be some pathetic symbol, such as a paintbrush broken in two or my Purple Heart on an otherwise vacant and clean-swept floor.
And there is no lame joke in there, like a painting of potatoes, as though I were returning the barn to potatoes, or a painting of the Virgin Mary wearing a derby and holding a watermelon, or some such thing.
And no self-portrait.
And nothing with a religious message.
Tantalizing? Here’s a hint: it’s bigger than a bread box and smaller than the planet Jupiter.
Not even Paul Slazinger has come close to guessing what is in there, and he has said more than once that he doesn’t see how our friendship can continue, if I feel my secret would not be safe with him.
The barn has become quite famous in the art world. After I show visitors the collection in the house, most of them ask if they can see what is in the barn as well. I tell them that they can see the outside of the barn, if they like, and that the outside is in fact a significant landmark in art history. The first time Terry Kitchen used