Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [50]
Circe Berman asked me about being one eyed after we had known each other less than an hour. She will ask anybody anything at any time.
“It’s a piece of cake,” I said.
I remember Dan Gregory now, and he really did resemble, as W. C. Fields had said, “a sawed-off Arapahoe,” and of Marilee and Fred Jones at his beck and call. I think what great models they would make for a Gregory illustration of a story about a Roman emperor with a couple of blond, blue-eyed Germanic captives in tow.
It is curious that Fred and not Marilee was the captive Gregory liked to parade in public all the time. It was Fred he took to parties and on fox hunts in Virginia and cruises on his yacht, the Ararat.
I do not propose to explain this, beyond declaring for a certainty that Gregory and Fred were men’s men. They were not homosexuals.
Whatever the explanation, Gregory did not mind at all that Marilee and I took long walks all over Manhattan, with heads snapping around to take second, third, and fourth looks at her. People must have wondered, too, how somebody like me, obviously not a relative, could have won the companionship of a woman that beautiful.
“People think we’re in love,” I said to her on a walk one day.
And she said, “They’re right.”
“You know what I mean,” I said.
“What do you think love is anyway?” she said.
“I guess I don’t know,” I said.
“You know the best part—” she said, “walking around like this and feeling good about everything. If you missed the rest of it, I certainly wouldn’t cry for you.”
So we went to the Museum of Modern Art for maybe the fiftieth time. I had been with Gregory for almost three years then, and was just a shade under twenty years old. I wasn’t a budding artist anymore. I was an employee of an artist, and lucky to have a job of any kind. An awful lot of people were putting up with any sort of job, and waiting for the Great Depression to end, so that real life could get going again. But we would also have to get through another World War before real life could get going again.
Don’t you love it? This is real life we are now experiencing.
But let me tell you that life seemed as real as Hell back in 1936, when Dan Gregory caught Marilee and me coming out of the Museum of Modern Art.
21
DAN GREGORY caught Marilee and me coming out of the Museum of Modern Art while a Saint Patrick’s Day parade was blatting and booming northward on Fifth Avenue, a half a block away. The parade caused Gregory’s automobile, a convertible Cord, the most beautiful American means of transportation ever manufactured, to be stuck in traffic right in front of the Museum of Modern Art. This was a two-seater with the top down, and with Fred Jones, the old World War One aviator, at the wheel.
What Fred may have been doing with his sperm I never found out. If I had to guess, I would say that he was saving it up like me. He had that look as he sat at the wheel of that sublime motorcar, but the hell with Fred. He was going to be O.K. for quite a while longer, until he was shot dead in Egypt—whereas I was about to go into the real world, ready or not, and try to stand on my own two feet!
Everybody was wearing something green! Then as now, even black people and Orientals and Hasidic Jews were wearing something green in order not to provoke arguments with Roman Catholic Irishmen. Marilee and Dan Gregory and I and Fred Jones were all wearing green. Back in Gregory’s kitchen, Sam Wu was wearing green.
Gregory pointed a finger at us. He was trembling with rage. “Caught you!” he shouted. “Stay right there! I want to talk to you!”
He clambered over the car door, pushed his way through the crowd and planted himself in front of us, his feet far apart, his hands balled into fists. He had often hit Marilee, but he had certainly never hit me. Oddly enough, nobody had ever hit me. Nobody has ever hit me.
Sex was the cause of our excitement: youth versus age, wealth and power versus physical attractiveness, stolen moments of forbidden fun and so on—but Gregory spoke only of gratitude, loyalty and modern art.
As for the pictures