Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [47]
Marilee said this about Nora in A Doll’s House: “She should have stayed home and made the best of things.”
19
BELIEF IS NEARLY the whole of the Universe, whether based on truth or not, and I believed back then that sperm, if not ejaculated, was reprocessed by healthy males into substances which made them athletic, merry, brave and creative. Dan Gregory believed this, too, and so did my father, and so did the United States Army and the Boy Scouts of America and Ernest Hemingway. So I cultivated erotic fantasies about making love to Marilee, and behaved as though we were courting sometimes, but only in order to generate more sperm which could be converted into the beneficial chemicals.
I used to shuffle my feet for a long time on a carpet, and then give Marilee an electric shock with my fingertips when she wasn’t expecting it—on the back of her neck or her cheek or a hand. How is that for pornography?
I also got her to sneak off with me and do something which would have made Gregory furious, if he had found out about it, which was to go to the Museum of Modern Art.
But she certainly wasn’t about to promote me erotically above the rank of pest and playmate. Not only did she love Gregory, but he was also making it very easy for both of us to get through the Great Depression. First things first.
Meanwhile, though, we were innocently exposing ourselves to a master seducer against whose blandishments we were defenseless. It was too late for either of us to turn back by the time we realized how deeply embroiled we had let ourselves become.
Want to guess who or what it was?
It was the Museum of Modern Art.
The theory that sperm, if unspent, was converted into cosmic vitamins seemed validated by my own performances. Running errands for Gregory, I became as cunning as a sewer rat about the fastest ways to get from anywhere to anywhere on the island of Manhattan. I quintupled my vocabulary, learning the names and functions of every important part of every sort of organism and artifact. My most thrilling accomplishment, however, was this: I finished a meticulously accurate painting of Gregory’s studio in only six months! The bone was bone, the fur was fur, the hair was hair, the dust was dust, the soot was soot, the wool was wool, the cotton was cotton, the walnut was walnut, the oak was oak, the horsehide was horsehide, the cowhide was cowhide, the iron was iron, the steel was steel, the old was old and the new was new.
Yes, and the water dripping from the skylight in my painting was not only the wettest water you ever saw: in each droplet, if you looked at it through a magnifying glass, there was the whole damned studio! Not bad! Not bad!
An idea has just come to me from nowhere, to wit: Might not the ancient and nearly universal belief that sperm could be metabolized into noble actions have been the inspiration for Einstein’s very similar formula: “E equals MC squared”?
“Not bad, not bad,” said Dan Gregory of my painting, and I imagined his feeling like Robinson Crusoe on the occasion of Crusoe’s understanding that he no longer had his little island all to himself. There was now me to reckon with.
But then he said, “However, not bad is another term for disappointing or worse, wouldn’t you say?”
Before I could frame a reply, he had put the picture atop the glowing coals in the fireplace with the skulls on its mantelpiece. Six months’ painstaking work went up the flue in a moment.
I managed to ask chokingly, perfectly aghast, “What was the matter with it?”
“No soul,” he said complacently.
So there I was in the thrall of the new Imperial engraver Beskudnikov!
I knew what he was complaining about, and the complaint wasn’t laughable, coming from him. His own pictures were vibrant with the full spectrum of his own loves, hates and neutralities, as dated as that spectrum might seem today. If I were to visit that private museum in Lubbock, Texas, where so many of his works are on permanent display, the pictures would create for