Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [16]
I said to her the last time she asked, which was about five minutes ago: “Look: think about something else, anything else. I am Bluebeard, and my studio is my forbidden chamber as far as you’re concerned.”
6
THE BLUEBEARD STORY notwithstanding, there are no bodies in my barn. The first of my two wives, who was and is Dorothy, remarried soon after our divorce, remarried happily, from all accounts. Dorothy is now a widow in a beachfront condominium in Sarasota, Florida. Her second husband was what we both thought I might become right after the war: a capable and personable insurance man. We each have a beach.
My second wife, dear Edith, is buried in Green River Cemetery out here, where I expect to be buried, too—only a few yards, in fact, from the graves of Jackson Pollock and Terry Kitchen.
If I killed anybody in the war, and I just might have, it would have been during the few seconds before a shell from somewhere knocked me unconscious and took out one eye.
When I was a two-eyed boy, I was the best draughtsman they had ever seen in the rinky-dink public school system of San Ignacio, which wasn’t saying much. Several of my teachers were so impressed that they suggested to my parents that perhaps I should pursue a career as an artist.
But this advice seemed so impractical to my parents that they asked the teachers to stop putting such ideas in my head. They thought that artists lived in poverty, and that they had to die before their works were appreciated. They were generally right about that, of course. The paintings by dead men who were poor most of their lives are the most valuable pieces in my collection.
And if an artist wants to really jack up the prices of his creations, may I suggest this: suicide.
But in 1927, when I was eleven years old, and was incidentally well on my way to becoming as good a cobbler as my father, my mother read about an American artist who made as much money as many movie stars and tycoons, and was in fact the friend and equal of movie stars and tycoons, and had a yacht—and a horse farm in Virginia, and a beach house in Montauk, not far from here.
Mother would say later, and not all that much later, since she had only one more year to live, that she never would have read the article if it hadn’t been for a photograph of this rich artist on his yacht. The name of the yacht was the name of the mountain as sacred to Armenians as Fujiyama is to the Japanese: Ararat.
This man had to be an Armenian, she thought, and so he was. The magazine said he had been born Dan Gregorian in Moscow, where his father was a horse trainer, and that he had been apprenticed to the chief engraver of the Russian Imperial Mint.
He had come to this country in 1907 as an ordinary immigrant, not a refugee from any massacre, and had changed his name to Dan Gregory, and had become an illustrator of magazine stories and advertisements, and of books for young people. The author of the article said he was probably the highest paid artist in American history.
That could still be true of Dan Gregory, or “Gregorian,” as my parents always called him, if his income in the 1920s, or especially during the Great Depression, were translated into the depreciated dollars of today. He could still be the champ, living or dead.
My mother was shrewd about the United States, as my father was not. She had figured out that the most pervasive American disease was loneliness, and that even people at the top often suffered from it, and that they could be surprisingly responsive to attractive strangers who were friendly.
So my mother said to me, and I hardly recognized her, so sly and witchlike had her face become: “You must write to this Gregorian. You must tell him that you are also Armenian. You must tell him that you want to be an artist half as good as he is, and that you think he is the greatest artist who ever lived.”
So I wrote such a letter, or about twenty such letters, in my childish longhand, until Mother was satisfied that the bait was irresistible. I did this hard work in