Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [45]
And I would be like that, too, after the war, and it would wreck my first marriage and my determination to be a good father. I had a very hard time getting the hang of civilian life after the war, and then I discovered something as powerful and irresponsible as shooting up with heroin: if I started laying on just one color of paint to a huge canvas, I could make the whole world drop away.
And Gregory’s total concentration on his work for twelve or more hours a day meant that I, as his apprentice, had a very easy job indeed. He had nothing for me to do, and did not want to waste time inventing tasks. He had told me to make a painting of his studio, but once he himself got back to work, I think he forgot all about it.
Did I make a painting of his studio which was virtually indistinguishable from a photograph? Yes, I did, yes I did.
But I was the only person who gave a damn if I even tried to work such a miracle, or not. I was so unworthy of his attention, so far from being a genius, a Gregorian to his Beskudnikov, a threat or a son or whatever, that I might as well have been his cook, who had to be told what to prepare for dinner.
Anything! Anything! Roast beef! Paint a picture of this studio! Who cares? Broccoli!
O.K. I would show him.
And I did.
It was up to his real assistant, Fred Jones, the World War One aviator, to think up work for me to do. Fred made me a messenger, which must have been a terrible blow for the messenger service he had been using. Somebody who desperately needed a job, any kind of job, must have been thrown out of work when Fred gave me a handful of subway tokens and a map of New York City.
He also set me the task of cataloguing all the valuable objects in Gregory’s studio.
“Won’t that bother Mr. Gregory while he’s working?” I said.
And he said: “You could saw him off at the waist while singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ and he wouldn’t notice. Just keep away from his eyes and hands.”
So I was up in the studio, just a few feet from Dan Gregory, itemizing in a ledger his extensive collection of bayonets, when Marilee came home. I remember still how full of bad magic all those spearpoints to be put on the ends of rifles seemed to be. One was like a sharpened curtain rod. Another was triangular in cross-section, so that the wound it made wouldn’t close up again and keep the blood and guts from falling out. Another one had sawteeth—so it could work its way through bone, I guess. I can remember thinking that war was so horrible that, at last, thank goodness, nobody could ever be fooled by romantic pictures and fiction and history into marching to war again.
Nowadays, of course, you can buy a machine gun with a plastic bayonet for your little kid at the nearest toy boutique.
The sounds of Marilee’s homecoming floated up from down below. I myself, so much in her debt, didn’t hurry down to greet her. I think the cook and my first wife were right: I have always been leery of women—possibly because, as Circe Berman suggested at breakfast this morning, I considered my mother faithless, since she had up and died on me.
Maybe so.
Anyway: she had to send for me, and I behaved with formality. I did not know that Gregory had almost killed her because of the art materials she had sent to me. If I had known that, I might still have been very formal. One thing, surely, which prevented my being effusive, was my sense of my own homeliness and powerlessness and virginity. I was unworthy of her, since she was as beautiful as Madeleine Carroll, the most beautiful of all movie stars.
She was cool and stiff with me, too, I have to say, possibly answering formality with formality. There was probably this factor, too: she wanted to make it clear to me, to Fred, to Gregory,