Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [37]
So by God if it wasn’t Edith who called in the contractors, and had them strip off all the wallpaper right down to bare plaster, and take down the chandeliers and put up track lights—and paint the oak baseboards and trim and doors and window sashes and walls a solid oyster-white!
When the work was done, she looked about twenty years younger. She said she had almost gone to her grave without ever realizing what a gift she had for remodeling and decorating. And then she said, “Call Home Sweet Home Moving and Storage,” in whose warehouse I had stored my collection for years and years. “Let them tell your glorious paintings as they bring them out into the daylight, ‘You are going home!’”
When I walked into my foyer after my trip to New York City, though, a scene so shocking enveloped me that, word of honor, I thought an axe murder had happened there. I am not joking! I thought I was looking at blood and gore! It may have taken me as long as a minute to realize what I was really seeing: wallpaper featuring red roses as big as cabbages against a field of black, babyshit-brown baseboards, trim and doors, and six chromos of little girls on swings, with mats of purple velvet, and with gilded frames which must have weighed as much as the limousine which had delivered me to this catastrophe.
Did I yell? They tell me I did. What did I yell? They had to tell me afterwards what I yelled. They heard it, and I did not. When the cook and her daughter, the first to arrive, came running, I was yelling this, they say, over and over: “I am in the wrong house! I am in the wrong house!”
Think of this: my homecoming was a surprise party they had been looking forward to all day long. Now it was all they could do, despite how generous I had always been with them, not to laugh out loud at my maximum agony!
What a world!
I said to the cook, and I could hear myself now: “Who did this?”
“Mrs. Berman,” she said. She behaved as though she couldn’t imagine what the trouble was.
“How could you allow this to happen?” I said.
“I’m just the cook,” she said.
“I also hope you’re my friend,” I said.
“Think what you want,” she said. The truth be told, we had never been close. “I like how it looks,” she said.
“Do you!” I said.
“Looks better than it did,” she said.
So I turned to her daughter. “You think it looks better than it did?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Well—” I said, “isn’t this just wonderful! The minute I was out of the house, Mrs. Berman called in the painters and paperhangers, did she?”
They shook their heads. They said that Mrs. Berman had done the whole job herself, and that she had met her husband the doctor while papering his office. She used to be a professional paperhanger! Can you beat it?
“After his office,” said Celeste, “he had her paper his home.”
“He was lucky she didn’t paper him!” I said.
And Celeste said, “You know you dropped your patch?”
“My what?” I said.
“Your eye patch,” she said. “It’s on the floor and you’re stepping on it.”
It was true! I was so upset that at some point, maybe while tearing my hair, I had stripped the patch from my head. So now they were seeing the scar tissue which I had never even shown Edith. My first wife had certainly seen a lot of it, but she was my nurse in the Army hospital at Fort Benjamin Harrison, where a plastic surgeon tried to clean up the mess a little bit after the war. He would have had to do a lot more surgery to get it to the point where it would hold a glass eye, so I chose an eye patch instead.
The patch was on the floor!
My most secret disfigurement was in plain view of the cook and her daughter! And now Paul Slazinger came into the foyer in time to see it, too.
They were all very cool about what they saw. They didn’t recoil in horror or cry out in disgust. It was almost as though I looked just about the same, with or without the eye patch on.
After I got the eye patch back in place, I said to Slazinger: “Were you here while this was going on?”
“Sure,” he said. “I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.”
“Didn’t you know how it would make me feel?” I said.
“That