Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [4]
Paul has no money. He eats supper with me here four or five times a week, and gobbles directly from my refrigerator and fruit bowls during the daytime, so I am surely his primary source of nutriment. I have said to him many times after supper, “Paul—why don’t you sell your house and get a little walking-around money, and move in here? Look at all the room I’ve got. And I’m never going to have a wife or a lady friend again, and neither are you. Jesus! Who would have us? We look like a couple of gutshot iguanas! So move in! I won’t bother you, and you won’t bother me. What could make more sense?”
His answer never varies much from this one: “I can only write at home.” Some home, with a busted refrigerator and nobody ever there but him.
One time he said about this house: “Who could write in a museum?”
Well—I am now finding out if that can be done or not. I am writing in this museum.
Yes, it’s true: I, old Rabo Karabekian, having disgraced myself in the visual arts, am now having a go at literature. A true child of the Great Depression, though, playing it safe, I am hanging on to my job as a museum guard.
What has inspired this amazing career change by one so old? Cherchez la femme!
Uninvited, as nearly as I can remember, an energetic and opinionated and voluptuous and relatively young woman has moved in with me!
She said she couldn’t bear seeing and hearing me do absolutely nothing all day long—so why didn’t I do something, do anything? If I couldn’t think of anything else to do, why didn’t I write my autobiography?
Why not, indeed?
She is so authoritative!
I find myself doing whatever she says I must do. During our twenty years of marriage, my dear Edith never once thought of something for me to do. In the Army, I knew several colonels and generals like this new woman in my life, but they were men, and we were a nation at war.
Is this woman a friend? I don’t know what the hell she is. All I know is that she isn’t going to leave again until she’s good and ready, and that she scares the pants off me.
Help.
Her name is Circe Berman.
She is a widow. Her husband was a brain surgeon in Baltimore, where she still has a house as big and empty as this one. Her husband Abe died of a brain hemorrhage six months ago. She is forty-three years old, and she has selected this house as a nice place to live and work while she writes her husband’s biography.
There is nothing erotic about our relationship. I am twenty-eight years Mrs. Berman’s senior, and have become too ugly for anyone but a dog to love. I really do look like a gutshot iguana, and am one-eyed besides. Enough is enough.
Here is how we met: she wandered onto my private beach alone one afternoon, not knowing it was private. She had never heard of me, since she hates modern art. She didn’t know a soul in the Hamptons, and was staying in the Maidstone Inn in the village about a mile and a half from here. She had walked from there to the public beach, and then across my border.
I went down for my afternoon dip, and there she was, fully dressed, and doing what Paul Slazinger does so much of: sitting on sand and staring out to sea. The only reason I minded her being there, or anybody’s being there, was my ludicrous physique and the fact I would have to take off my eye patch before I went in. There’s quite a mess under there, not unlike a scrambled egg. I was embarrassed to be seen up close.
Paul Slazinger says, incidentally, that the human condition can be summed up in just one word, and this is the word: Embarrassment.
So I elected not to swim, but to sunbathe some distance away from her.
I did, however, come close enough to say, “Hello.”
This was her curious reply: “Tell me how your parents died.”
What a spooky woman! She could be a witch. Who but a witch could have persuaded me to write my autobiography?
She has just stuck her head in the room to say that it was time I went to New York City, where I haven’t been since Edith died. I’ve hardly been out