Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [41]
16
NO SOONER had the snarl and burble of the psychiatrist’s Ferrari died away in the sunset than the cook said she and her daughter would be leaving too. “This is your two weeks’ notice,” she said.
What a blow! “What made you decide so suddenly?” I asked.
“Nothing sudden about it,” she said. “Celeste and I were about to leave right before Mrs. Berman came. It was so dead here. She made things exciting, so we stayed. But we’ve always said to each other: “When she goes, we go, too.””
“I really need you,” I said. “What could I do to persuade you to stay?” I mean: my God—they already had rooms with ocean views, and Celeste’s young friends had the run of the property, and no end of free snacks and refreshments. The cook could take any of the cars anytime she wanted to, and I was paying her like a movie star.
“You could learn my name,” she said.
What was going on? “Do what?” I said.
“Whenever I hear you talk about me, all you ever call me is “the cook.” I have a name. It’s ‘Allison White,’” she said.
“Goodness!” I protested with terrified joviality, “I know that perfectly well. That’s who I make out your check to every week. Did I misspell it or something—or get your Social Security wrong?”
“That’s the only time you ever think of me,” she said, “when you make out my check—and I don’t think you think about me then. Before Mrs. Berman came, and Celeste was in school, and there were just the two of us in the house alone, and we’d slept under the same roof night after night, and you ate my food—”
Here she stopped. She hoped she’d said enough, I guess. I now realize that this was very hard for her.
“Yes—?” I said.
“This is so stupid,” she said.
“I can’t tell if it is or not,” I said.
And then she blurted: “I don’t want to marry you!
My God! “Who would?” I said.
“I just want to be a human being and not a nobody and a nothing, if I have to live under the same roof with a man—any man,” she said. She revised that instantly: “Any person,” she said.
This was dismayingly close to what my first wife Dorothy had said to me: that I often treated her as though I didn’t even care what her name was, as though she really weren’t there. The next thing the cook said I had also heard from Dorothy:
“I think you’re scared to death of women,” she said.
“Me, too,” said Celeste.
“Celeste—” I said, “you and I have been close, haven’t we?”
“That’s because you think I’m stupid,” said Celeste.
“And she’s still too young to be threatening,” her mother said.
“So everybody’s leaving now,” I said. “Where’s Paul Slazinger?”
“Out the door,” said Celeste.
What had I done to deserve this? All I had done was go to New York City for one night, giving the widow Berman time to redecorate the foyer! And now, as I stood in the midst of a life she had ruined, she was off hobnobbing in Southampton with Jackie Kennedy!
“Oh, my,” I said at last. “And I know you hate my famous art collection, too.”
They brightened some, because, I suppose, I had broached a subject which was a lot easier to discuss than the relationship between women and men.
“I don’t hate them,” said the cook—said Allison White, Allison White, Allison White! This is a perfectly presentable woman, with even features and a trim figure and nice brown hair. I’m the problem. I am not a presentable man.
“They just don’t mean anything to me,” she went on. “I’m sure that’s because I’m uneducated. Maybe if I went to college, I would finally realize how wonderful they are. The only one I really liked, you sold.”
“Which one was that?” I said. I myself perked up some, hoping to salvage something, at least, from this nightmare: a statement from these unsophisticated people as to which of my paintings, one I had sold, evidently, had had such power that even they had liked it.
“The one with the two little black boys and the two little white boys,” she said.
I ransacked my mind for any painting in the house which might have been misread in that way by an imaginative and simple person. Which one had two black blobs and two white ones? Again: it sounded a lot like a Rothko.
But then I