Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [51]
“You parasites! You ingrates! You rotten-spoiled little kids!” seethed Dan Gregory. “Your loving Papa asked just one thing of you as an expression of your loyalty: ‘Never go into the Museum of Modern Art.’”
I doubt that many people who heard him even knew that we were in front of a museum. They probably thought he had caught us coming out of a hotel or an apartment house—someplace with beds for lovers. If they took him literally when he called himself a “Papa,” they would have had to conclude that he was my Papa and not hers, since we looked so much alike.
“It was symbolic!” he said. “Don’t you understand that? It was a way of proving you were on my side and not theirs. I’m not afraid to have you look at the junk in there. You were part of my gang, and proud of it.” He was all choked up now, and he shook his head. “That’s why I made that very simple, very modest, very easily complied-with request: ‘Stay out of the Museum of Modern Art.’”
Marilee and I were so startled by this confrontation, we may even have gone on holding hands. We had come skipping out and holding hands like Jack and Jill. We probably did go on holding hands—like Jack and Jill.
Only now do I realize that Dan Gregory caught us at a moment when we had somehow agreed that we were going to make love that afternoon. I now think we were out of control, and would have made love whether we had run into him or not. Every time I have told this story before, I have indicated that there would have been no lovemaking if it hadn’t been for the confrontation.
Not so.
“I don’t give a hoot what pictures you look at,” he said. “All I asked was that you not pay your respects to an institution which thinks that the smears and spatters and splotches and daubs and dribbles and vomit of lunatics and degenerates and charlatans are great treasures we should all admire.”
Reconstructing what he said to us long ago, I am touched by how careful he and almost all angry males used to be, when in mixed company, not to use words which might offend women and children, such as shit and fuck.
Circe Berman argues that the inclusion of once-taboo words into ordinary conversations is a good thing, since women and children are now free to discuss their bodies without shame, and so to take care of themselves more intelligently.
I said to her, “Maybe so. But don’t you think all this frankness has also caused a collapse of eloquence?” I reminded her of the cook’s daughter’s habit of referring to anybody she didn’t like for whatever reason as “an asshole.” I said: “Never did I hear Celeste give a thoughtful explanation of what it was that such a person might have done to earn that protological sobriquet.”
“Of all the ways to hurt me,” Gregory went on in that British accent of his, “you could not have picked a crueler one. I have treated you as a son,” he said to me, “and you like a daughter,” he said to Marilee, “and this is the thanks I get. And it’s not your going in there which is the most insulting. No, it isn’t that. It’s how happy you were when you were coming out! What could that happiness be but a mockery of me and of every person who ever tried to keep control of a paintbrush?”
He said that he was going to have Fred drive him to City Island, where his yacht the Ararat was in dry dock, and he was going to live aboard her until Fred could assure him that we were out of his house on Forty-eighth Street, and that every trace of our ever having been there had been removed.
“Out you go!” he said. “Good riddance of bad rubbish!” What a surreal thing this master realist was about to do! He was going to take up residence on an eighty-foot sailing yacht in dry dock! He would have to come and go by ladder, would have to use a boatyard toilet and telephone!
And think of what a bizarre creation his