Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [36]
“Yes,” I said. “I guess it does.”
“Do you think there is still time for me to be a painter?” he said.
“Never too late,” I said.
Earlier, I knew, he had asked Paul Slazinger if there was still time for him to become a writer. He thought people might be interested in his side of the story about what happened to him at the network.
Slazinger said afterwards that there ought to be some way to persuade people like Pomerantz, and the Hamptons teem with people like Pomerantz, that they had already extorted more than enough from the economy. He suggested that we build a Money Hall of Fame out here, with busts of the arbitrageurs and hostile-takeover specialists and venture capitalists and investment bankers and golden handshakers and platinum parachutists in niches, with their statistics cut into stone—how many millions they had stolen legally in how short a time.
I asked Slazinger if I deserved to be in the Money Hall of Fame. He thought that over, and concluded that I belonged in some sort of Hall of Fame, but that all my money had come as a result of accidents rather than greed.
“You belong in the Dumb Luck Hall of Fame,” he said. He thought it should be built in Las Vegas or Atlantic City, maybe, but then changed his mind. “The Klondike, I think,” he said. “People should have to come by dogsled or on snowshoes if they want to see Rabo Karabekian’s bust in the Dumb Luck Hall of Fame.”
He can’t stand it that I inherited a piece of the Cincinnati Bengals, and don’t give a damn. He is an avid football fan.
14
SO FLOYD POMERANTZ’S chauffeur delivered me to the first flagstone of my doorpath. I clambered out of our fancy casket like Count Dracula, blinded by the setting sun. I groped my way to my front door and entered.
Let me tell you about the foyer I had every right to expect to see. Its walls should have been oyster white, like every square foot of wall space in the entire house, except for the basement and servants’ quarters. Terry Kitchen’s painting “Secret Window” should have loomed before me like the City of God. To my left should have been a Matisse of a woman holding a black cat in her arms and standing before a brick wall covered with yellow roses, which dear Edith had bought fair and square from a gallery as a present to me on our fifth wedding anniversary. On my right should have been a Hans Hofmann which Terry Kitchen got from Philip Guston in trade for one of his own pictures, and which he gave to me after I paid for a new transmission for his babyshit-brown convertible Buick Roadmaster.
Those who wish to know more about the foyer need only dig out a copy of the February 1981 issue of Architect & Decorator. The foyer is on the cover, is viewed through the open front door from the flagstone walk, which was lined on both sides with hollyhocks back then. The lead article is about the whole house as a masterpiece of redecorating a Victorian house to accommodate modern art. Of the foyer itself it says, “The Karabekians’ entrance hall alone contains what might serve as the core of a small museum’s permanent collection of modern art, marvelous enough in itself, but in fact a mere hors d’oeuvre before the incredible feast of art treasures awaiting in the high-ceilinged, stark-white rooms beyond.”
And was I, the great Rabo Karabekian, the mastermind behind this happy marriage of the old and the new? No. Dear Edith was. It was all her idea that I bring my collection out of storage. This house, after all, was an heirloom of the Taft family, full not only of memories of Edith’s happy childhood in summertimes here, but of her very good first marriage, too. When I moved in here from the potato barn, she asked me if I was comfortable in such old-fashioned surroundings. I said truthfully and from the bottom of my heart that I loved it for what it was, and that she shouldn’t change a thing for