Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [15]
I concluded that my mind was so ordinary, which is to say empty, that I could never be anything but a reasonably good camera. So I would content myself with a more common and general sort of achievement than serious art, which was money. I was not saddened about this. I was in fact much relieved!
But I still enjoyed engaging in the blather of art, since I could talk if not paint pictures as well as anyone. So I would go to bars around NYU at night, and easily made friends with several painters who thought they were right about almost everything, but who never expected to receive much recognition. I could talk as well as the best of them, and drink as much as they could. Best of all, I could pick up the check at the end of the evening, thanks to the money I was making in the stock market, subsistence payments I was receiving from the government while going to the university, and a lifetime pension from a grateful nation for my having given one eye in defense of Liberty.
To the real painters I seemed a bottomless pit of money. I was good not only for the cost of drinks, but for rent, for a down payment on a car, for a girlfriend’s abortion, for a wife’s abortion. You name it. However much money they needed for no matter what, they could get it from Diamond Rabo Karabekian.
So I bought those friends. My pit of money wasn’t really bottomless. By the end of every month they had taken me for everything I had. But then the pit, a small one, would fill up again.
Fair was fair. I certainly enjoyed their company, especially since they treated me as though I were a painter, too. I was one of them. Here was another big family to replace my lost platoon.
And they paid me back with more than companionship. They settled their debts as best they could with pictures nobody wanted, too.
I almost forgot to say: I was married and my wife was pregnant at the time. She would be twice impregnated by that incomparable lover, Rabo Karabekian.
I have now returned to this typewriter from the vicinity of the swimming pool, where I asked Celeste and her friends in and around that public teenage athletic facility, if they knew who Bluebeard was. I meant to mention Bluebeard in this book. I wanted to know if I had to explain, for the sake of young readers, who Bluebeard was.
Nobody knew. While I was at it, I asked them if they recognized the names of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, or Terry Kitchen, or Truman Capote, or Nelson Algren, or Irwin Shaw, or James Jones, all of whom had figured not only in the history of arts and letters but in the history of the Hamptons. They did not. So much for achieving immortality via the arts and letters.
So: Bluebeard is a fictitious character in a very old children’s tale, possibly based loosely on a murderous nobleman of long ago. In the story, he has married many times. He marries for the umpteenth time, and brings his latest child bride back to his castle. He tells her that she can go into any room but one, whose door he shows her.
Bluebeard is either a poor psychologist or a great one, since all his new wife can think about is what might be behind the door. So she takes a look when she thinks he isn’t home, but he really is home.
He catches her just at the point she is gazing aghast at the bodies of all his former wives in there, all of whom he has murdered, save for the first one, for looking behind the door. The first one got murdered for something else.
So—of all the people who know about my locked potato barn, the one who finds the mystery most intolerable is surely Circe Berman. She is after me all the time to tell her where the six keys are, and I tell her again that they are buried in a golden