Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [44]
How was that for delusions of moral grandeur!
Yes, and now that I think about it: maybe the most admirable thing about the Abstract Expressionist painters, since so much senseless bloodshed had been caused by cockeyed history lessons, was their refusal to serve on such a court.
Dan Gregory kept me around as long as he did, about three years, because I was servile and because he needed company, since he had alienated most of his famous friends with his humorlessness and rage during political arguments. When I said to Gregory that first night that I had heard the famous voice of W. C. Fields from the top of the spiral staircase, he replied that Fields would never be welcome in his house again, and neither would Al Jolson or any of the others who had drunk his liquor and eaten his food that night.
“They simply do not, will not understand!” he said.
“No, sir,” I said.
And he changed the subject to Marilee Kemp. He said she was clumsy to begin with, but had gotten drunk on top of that, and had fallen downstairs. I think he honestly believed that by then. He could easily have indicated which stairs she had fallen down, since I was standing right at the top of them. But he didn’t. He felt it sufficed to let me know that she had fallen downstairs somewhere. What did it matter where?
While he went on talking about Marilee, he never mentioned her name again. She simply became “women.” “Women will never take the blame for anything,” he said. “No matter what troubles they bring on themselves, they won’t rest until they’ve found some man to blame for it. Right?”
“Right,” I said.
“There’s only one way they can take anything, and that’s personally,” he said. “You’re not even talking about them, don’t even know they’re in the room, but they will still take anything you say as though it were aimed right at them. Ever notice that?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. It seemed that I had noticed that, now that he mentioned it.
“Every so often they will get it into their heads that they understand what you’re doing better than you do yourself,” he said. “You’ve just got to throw them out, or they will screw up everything! They’ve got their jobs and we’ve got ours. We never try to horn in on them, but they’ll horn in on us every chance they get. You want some good advice?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Never have anything to do with a woman who would rather be a man,” he said. “That means she’s never going to do what a woman is supposed to do—which leaves you stuck with both what a man’s supposed to do and what a woman’s supposed to do. You understand what I am saying?”
“Yes, sir, I do,” I said.
He said that no woman could succeed in the arts or sciences or politics or industry, since her basic job was to have children and encourage men and take care of the housework. He invited me to test this statement by naming, if I could, ten women who had amounted to anything in any field but domesticity.
I think I could name ten now, but back then all I could come up with was Saint Joan of Arc.
“Jeanne d’Arc,” he said, “was a hermaphrodite!”
18
I DON’T KNOW where this fits into my story, and probably it doesn’t fit in at all. It is certainly the most trivial footnote imaginable in a history of Abstract Expressionism, but here it is:
The cook who had begrudgingly fed me my first supper in New York City, and who kept asking, “What next, what next?” died two weeks after I got there. That finally became what was going to happen next: she would drop dead in Turtle Bay Chemists, a drugstore two blocks away.
But here was the thing: the undertaker discovered that she wasn’t just a woman, and she wasn’t just a man, either. She was somewhat both. She was a hermaphrodite.
An even more trivial footnote: she would be promptly replaced as Dan Gregory’s cook by Sam Wu, the laundry man.
Marilee arrived home from the hospital in a wheelchair two days