Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [49]
What a fool I would have been to let self-respect interfere with my happiness!
After the hermaphroditic cook died, incidentally, Sam Wu, the laundryman, asked for the job and got it. He was a wonderful cook of good, honest American food as well as Chinese delicacies, and Gregory continued to use him as a model for the sinister master criminal Fu Manchu.
Back to the present:
Circe Berman said to me at lunch today that I ought to try painting again, since it used to give me such pleasure.
My dear wife Edith made the same suggestion one time, and I told Mrs. Berman what I told her: “I have had all I can stand of not taking myself seriously.”
She asked me what had been the most pleasing thing about my professional life when I was a full-time painter—having my first one-man show, getting a lot of money for a picture, the comradeship with fellow painters, being praised by a critic, or what?
“We used to talk a lot about that in the old days,” I said. “There was general agreement that if we were put into individual capsules with our art materials, and fired out into different parts of outer space, we would still have everything we loved about painting, which was the opportunity to lay on paint.”
I asked her in turn what the high point was for writers—getting great reviews, or a terrific advance, or selling a book to the movies, or seeing somebody reading your book, or what?
She said that she, too, could find happiness in a capsule in outer space, provided that she had a finished, proofread manuscript by her in there, along with somebody from her publishing house.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“The orgastic moment for me is when I hand a manuscript to my publisher and say, ‘Here! I’m all through with it. I never want to see it again,’” she said.
Back to the past again:
Marilee Kemp wasn’t the only one who was trapped like Nora in A Doll’s House before Nora blew her cork. I was another one. And then I caught on: Fred Jones was still another one. He was so handsome and dignified and honored, seemingly, to be of assistance to the great artist Dan Gregory in any way possible—but he was a Nora, too.
His life had been all downhill since World War One, when he had discovered a gift for flying rattletrap kites which were machine-gun platforms. The first time he got his hands on the joystick of an airplane, he must have felt what Terry Kitchen felt when he gripped a spray gun. He must have felt like Kitchen again when he fired his machine guns up in the wild blue yonder, and saw a plane in front of him draw a helix of smoke and flame—ending in a sunburst far below.
What beauty! So unexpected and pure! So easy to achieve!
Fred Jones told me one time that the smoke trails of falling airplanes and observation balloons were the most beautiful things he ever expected to see. And I now compare his elation over arcs and spirals and splotches in the atmosphere with what Jackson Pollock used to feel as he watched what dribbled paint chose to do when it struck a canvas on his studio floor.
Same sort of happiness!
Except that what Pollock did lacked that greatest of all crowd pleasers, which was human sacrifice.
But my point about Fred Jones is this: he had found a home in the Air Corps, just as I would find a home in the Corps of Engineers.
And then he was kicked out for the same reason that I was: he had lost an eye somewhere.
So there is something startling I might tell myself as a youth, if I could get back to the Great Depression in a time machine: “Pst—you, the cocky little Armenian kid. Yes, you. You think Fred Jones is funny and sad at the same time? That’s what you’ll be someday, too: a one-eyed old soldier, afraid of women and with no talent for civilian life.”
I used to wonder back then what it was like to have one eye instead of two, and experiment by covering one eye with a hand. The world didn’t seem all that diminished when I looked at it with only one eye. Nor do I feel today that having only one eye is a particularly serious handicap.