Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [38]
“I just don’t understand this,” I said. “Suddenly it sounds as though you’re all my enemies.”
“I don’t know about these two,” said Slazinger, “but I’m sure as hell your enemy. Why didn’t you tell me she was Polly Madison?”
“How did you find out?” I said.
“She told me,” he said. “I saw what she was doing here, and I begged her not to—because I thought it might kill you. She said it would make you ten years younger.
“I thought it might really be a life-and-death situation,” he went on, “and that I had better take some direct physical action.” This was a man, incidentally, who had won a Silver Star for protecting his comrades on Okinawa by lying down on a fizzing Japanese hand grenade.
“So I gathered up as many rolls of wallpaper as I could,” he said, “and ran out into the kitchen and hid them in the deep freeze. How’s that for friendship?”
“God bless you!” I exclaimed.
“Yes, and God fuck you,” he said. “She came right after me, and wanted to know what I’d done with the wallpaper. I called her a crazy witch, and she called me a freeloader and ‘the spit-filled penny whistle of American literature.’ ‘Who are you to talk about literature?’ I asked her. So she told me.”
What she said to him was this: “My novels sold seven million copies in the United States alone last year. Two are being made into major motion pictures as we stand here, and one of them made into a movie last year won Academy Awards for Best Cinematography, Best Supporting Actress and Best Score. Shake hands, Buster, with Polly Madison, Literary Middleweight Champion of the World! And then give me back my wallpaper, or I’ll break your arms!”
“How could you have let me make such a fool of myself for so long, Rabo—” he said, “giving her tips on the ins and outs of the writing game?”
“I was waiting for the opportune time,” I said.
“You missed it by a mile, you son of a bitch,” he said.
“She’s in a different league from you anyway,” I said.
“That’s right,” he said. “She’s richer and she’s better.”
“Not better, surely,” I said.
“This woman is a monster,” he said, “but her books are marvelous! She’s the new Richard Wagner, one of the most awful people who ever lived.”
“How would you know about her books?” I said.
“Celeste has them all, so I read them,” he said. “How’s that for an irony? There I was all summer, reading her books and admiring the hell out of them, and meanwhile treating her like a half-wit, not knowing who she was.”
So that’s what he did with this summer, anyway: he read all the Polly Madison books!
“After I found out who she was,” he said, “and the way you’d kept it from me, I became more enthusiastic than she was about redoing the foyer. I said that if she really wanted to make you happy, she would paint the woodwork babyshit brown.”
He knew that I had had at least two unhappy experiences with the color practically everybody calls “babyshit brown.” Even in San Ignacio when I was a boy, people called it “babyshit brown.”
One experience took place outside Brooks Brothers years ago, where I had bought a summer suit which I thought looked pretty nice, which had been altered for me, and which I decided to wear home. I was then married to Dorothy, and we were still living in the city, and both still planning on my being a businessman. The minute I stepped outside, two policemen grabbed me for hard questioning. Then they let me go with an apology, explaining that a man had just robbed a bank down the street, with a lady’s nylon stocking over his head. “All that anybody could tell us about him,” one of them said to me, “was that his suit was babyshit brown.”
My other unhappy association with that color had to do with Terry Kitchen. After Terry and I and several others in our gang moved out here for the cheap real estate and potato barns, Terry did his afternoon drinking at bars which were, in effect, private clubs for native working men. This was a man, incidentally, who was a graduate of Yale Law School, who had been a clerk to Supreme Court Justice John Harlan, and a major in