Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [39]
And here is what Kitchen, arguably the most important artist ever to paint in the Hamptons, with the possible exception of Winslow Homer, is called in the local bars by the few who still remember him: “The guy in the babyshit-brown convertible.”
15
“WHERE IS MRS. BERMAN at this moment?” I wished to know.
“Upstairs—getting dressed for a big date,” said Celeste. “She looks terrific. Wait till you see.”
“Date?” I said. She had never gone on a date as long as she had been living here. “Who would she have a date with?”
“She met a psychiatrist on the beach,” said the cook.
“He drives a Ferrari,” said her daughter. “He held the ladder for her while she hung the paper. He’s taking her to a big dinner party for Jackie Kennedy over in Southampton, and then they’re going dancing in Sag Harbor afterwards.”
At that moment, Mrs. Berman arrived in the foyer, as serene and majestic as the most beautiful motor ship ever built, the French liner Normandie.
When I was a hack artist in an advertising agency before the war, I had painted a picture of the Normandie for a travel poster. And when I was about to sail as a soldier for North Africa on February 9, 1942, and was giving Sam Wu the address where he could write to me, the sky over New York Harbor was thick with smoke.
Why?
Workmen converting an ocean liner into a troopship had started an uncontrollable fire in the belly of the most beautiful motor ship ever built. Her name again, and may her soul rest in peace: the Normandie.
“This is an absolute outrage,” I said to Mrs. Berman.
She smiled. “How do I look?” she said. She was overwhelmingly erotic—her voluptuous figure exaggerated and cocked this way and that way as she teetered on high-heeled, golden dancing shoes. Her skintight cocktail dress was cut low in front, shamelessly displaying her luscious orbs. What a sexual bully she could be!
“Who gives a damn what you look like?” I said.
“Somebody will,” she said.
“What have you done to this foyer?” I said. “That’s what I’d like to discuss with you, and the hell with your clothes!”
“Make it fast,” she said. “My date will be here at any time.”
“O.K.,” I said. “What you have done here is not only an unforgivable insult to the history of art, but you have spit on the grave of my wife! You knew perfectly well that she created this foyer, not I. I could go on to speak of sanity as compared with insanity, decency as compared with vandalism, friendship as compared with rabies. But since you, Mrs. Berman, have called for speed and clarity in my mode of self-expression, because your concupiscent shrink will be arriving in his Ferrari at any moment, try this: Get the hell out of here, and never come back again!”
“Bushwa,” she said.
“‘Bushwa’?” I echoed scornfully. “I suppose that’s the high level of intellectual discourse one might expect from the author of the Polly Madison books.”
“It wouldn’t hurt you to read one,” she said. “They’re about life right now.” She indicated Slazinger. “You and your ex-pal here never got past the Great Depression and World War Two.”
She was wearing a gold wristwatch encrusted with diamonds and rubies which I had never seen before, and it fell to the floor.
The cook’s daughter laughed, and I asked her loftily what she thought was funny.
She said, “Everybody’s got the dropsies today.”
So Circe, picking up the watch, asked who else had dropped something, and Celeste told her about my eye patch.
Slazinger took the opportunity to mock what was under the eye patch. “Oh, you should see that scar,” he said. “It is the most horrible scar! I have never seen such disgusting disfigurement.”
I wouldn’t have taken that from anybody else, but I had to take it from him. He had a wide scar that looked like a map of the Mississippi Valley running from his sternum to his crotch, where he had been laid open by the hand grenade.
He has only one nipple left, and he asked me a