Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [48]
If I, on the other hand, were to die, God forbid, and if some magician were to recover every painting of mine, from the one Gregory incinerated to the last one I will ever do, and if these were to be hung in a great domed rotunda so as to concentrate the soul in each one at the same focal point, and if my own mother and the women who swore they loved me, which would be Marilee and Dorothy and Edith, were to stand for hours at that focal point, along with the best friend I ever had, who was Terry Kitchen, not one of them would find any reason to think about me except randomly. There would not be a trace of their dear departed Rabo Karabekian, or of spiritual energy of any sort, at the focal point!
What an experiment!
Oh, I know: I bad-mouthed Gregory’s works a while back, saying he was a taxidermist, and that his pictures were always about a single moment rather than the flow of life, and so on. But he was sure a better painter than I could ever hope to be. Nobody could put more of the excitement of a single moment into the eyes of stuffed animals, so to speak, than Dan Gregory.
Circe Berman has just asked me how to tell a good picture from a bad one.
I said that the best answer I had ever heard to that question, although imperfect, came from a painter named Syd Solomon, a man about my age who summers not far from here. I overheard him say it to a very pretty girl at a cocktail party maybe fifteen years ago. She was so wide-eyed and on tippy-toe! She sure wanted to learn all about art from him.
“How can you tell a good painting from a bad one?” he said. This is the son of a Hungarian horse trainer. He has a magnificent handlebar mustache.
“All you have to do, my dear,” he said, “is look at a million paintings, and then you can never be mistaken.”
It’s true! It’s true!
The present again:
I must tell what happened here yesterday afternoon, when I received the first visitors to my collection since the foyer was, to use the decorator’s term, “redone.” A young man from the State Department escorted three writers from the Soviet Union, one from Tallin, Estonia, where Mrs. Berman’s ancestors came from, after the Garden of Eden, of course, and two from Moscow, Dan Gregory’s old hometown. Small world. They spoke no English, but their guide was an able interpreter.
They made no comment on the foyer when they came in, and proved to be sophisticated and appreciative with respect to Abstract Expressionism, quite a contrast with many other guests from the USSR. As they were leaving, though, they had to ask me why I had such trashy pictures in the foyer.
So I gave them Mrs. Berman’s lecture on the horrors which awaited these children, bringing them close to tears. They were terribly embarrassed. They apologized effusively for not understanding the true import of the chromos, and said that, now that I had explained them, they were unanimous in agreeing that these were the most important pictures in the house. And then they went from picture to picture, bewailing all the pain each girl would go through. Most of this wasn’t translated, but I gathered that they were predicting cancer and war and so on.
I was quite a hit, and was hugged and hugged.
Never before had visitors bid me farewell so ardently! Usually they can hardly think of anything to say.
And they called something to me from the driveway, grinning affectionately and shaking their heads. So I asked the man from the State Department what they had said, and he translated: “No more war, no more war.
20
BACK TO THE PAST:
When Dan Gregory burned up my painting, why didn’t I do to him what he had done to Beskudnikov? Why didn’t I mock him and walk out and find a better job? For one thing, I had learned a lot about the commercial art world by then, and knew that artists like me were a dime a dozen and all starving to death.
Consider all I had to lose: a room of my own, three square meals a day, entertaining errands to