Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [35]
But there was nobody to ask, so I never found out. So there is one storytelling fizzle for you, dear Reader. I never found out.
And here is another one. The house to the west of that one is, judging from the mailboxes and bells, evidentally a triplex at the bottom, with a duplex on top of that. It was this third of Gregory’s establishment which the live-in servants had inhabited, and where I, too, was given a small but cheerful bedroom. Fred Jones’s bedroom, by the way, was right in back of Gregory’s and Marilee’s room in the Emirate of Salibaar.
This woman came out of the brownstone with the duplex and triplex. She was old and trembly, but her posture was good, and it was easy to see that she had been very beautiful at one time. I locked my gaze to hers, and a flash of recognition went off in my skull. I knew her, but she didn’t know me. We had never met. I realized that I had seen her in motion pictures when she was much younger. A second later, I came up with her name. She was Barbira Mencken, the ex-wife of Paul Slazinger. He had lost touch with her years ago, had no idea where she lived. She hadn’t done a movie or a play for a long, long time, but there she was. Greta Garbo and Katharine Hepburn also live in that same general neighborhood.
I didn’t speak to her. Should I have spoken to her? What would I have had to say to her? “Paul is fine and sends his best”? Or how about this one: “Tell me how your parents died”?
I had supper at the Century Club, to which I have belonged for many years. There was a new maître d’, and I asked him what had happened to the old one, Roberto. He said that Roberto had been killed by a bicycle messenger going the wrong way on a one-way street right in front of the club.
I said that was too bad, and he heartily agreed with me.
I didn’t see anybody I knew, which was hardly surprising, since everybody I know is dead. But I made friends in the bar with a man considerably my junior, who was a writer of young adult novels, like Circe Berman. I asked him if he had ever heard of the Polly Madison books and he asked me if I had ever heard of the Atlantic Ocean.
So we had supper together. His wife was out of town lecturing, he said. She was a prominent sexologist.
I asked him as delicately as I could if making love to a woman so sophisticated in sexual techniques was in any way unusually burdensome. He replied, rolling his eyes at the ceiling, that I had certainly hit the nail on the head. “I have to reassure her that I really love her practically incessantly,” he said.
I spent an uneventful late evening watching pornographic TV programs in my room at the Algonquin Hotel. I watched and didn’t watch at the very same time.
I planned to catch a train back the next afternoon, but met a fellow East Hamptonite, Floyd Pomerantz, at breakfast. He, too, was headed home later in the day, and offered me a ride in his Cadillac stretch limousine. I accepted with alacrity.
What a satisfactory form of transportation that proved to be! That Cadillac was better than womblike. The Twentieth Century Limited, as I have said, really was womblike, in constant motion, with all sorts of unexplained thumps and bangs outside. But the Cadillac was coffinlike. Pomerantz and I got to be dead in there. The hell with this baby stuff. It was so cozy, two of us in a single, roomy, gangster-style casket. Everybody should be buried with somebody else, just about anybody else, whenever feasible.
Pomerantz talked some about picking up the pieces of his life and trying to put them back