Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [52]
And he would eventually arrange to have himself and his only friend killed while wearing Italian uniforms!
Everything about Dan Gregory, except for his paintings, had fewer connections with reality and common sense than the most radical modern art!
Bulletin from the present: Circe Berman has just discovered, after questioning me closely, that I have never actually read a whole book by Paul Slazinger, my former best friend.
She, it turns out, has read them all since moving in. I own them all. They have a little shelf of honor in the library, and are autographed beneath testimonials as to how close Paul and I have been for so many years. I have read reviews of most of them, and have a pretty good idea of how they go.
I think Paul knew this about me, although we have certainly never discussed it openly. It is impossible for me to take his writings seriously, knowing how reckless he has been in real life. How can I study his published opinions on love and hate and God and man and whether the ends ever justify the means and all that with solemnity? As for a quid pro quo: I don’t owe him one. He has never honored me as a painter or collector, nor should he have.
So what was our bond?
Loneliness and wounds from World War Two which were quite grave.
Circe Berman has broken her silence about the mystery of the locked potato barn. She found a big picture book in the library whose spine is split and whose pages are not only dog eared but splotched with painty finger-prints, although it was published only three years ago. It depicts virtually all the uniforms worn by every sort of regular soldier or sailor or airman during World War Two. She asked me point blank if it had anything to do with what was in the barn.
“Maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t,” I said.
But I will tell you a secret: it does, it does.
So Marilee and I slouched home from the Museum of Modern Art like whipped children. We laughed sometimes, too, just fell into each other’s arms and laughed and laughed. So we were feeling each other up and liking each other terrifically all the way home.
We stopped to watch a fight between two white men in front of a bar on Third Avenue. Neither one was wearing green. They snarled in some language we did not understand. They may have been Macedonians or Basques or Frisian Islanders, or something like that.
Marilee had a slight limp and a list to the left, as permanent consequences of her having been pushed down the stairs by an Armenian. But another Armenian was groping her and nuzzling her hair and so on, and had an erection with which you might have smashed coconuts. I like to think we were man and wife. Life itself can be sacramental. The supposition was that we would be leaving the Garden of Eden together, and would cleave to one another in the wilderness through thick and thin.
I don’t know why we laughed so much.
Our ages again: I was almost twenty, and she was twenty-nine. The man we were about to cuckold or whatever was fifty-three, with only seven more years to go, a mere stripling in retrospect. Imagine having all of seven more years to go!
Maybe Marilee and I laughed so much because we were about to do the one thing other than eat and drink and sleep which our bodies said we were on Earth to do. There was no vengeance or defiance or defilement in it. We did not do it in the bed she and Gregory shared, or in Fred Jones’s bed next door, or in the immaculate French Empire guest-room, or in the studio—and not even on my own bed, although we could have done it almost anywhere except in the basement, since Fu Manchu was the only other person in the house just then. Our brainless lovemaking anticipated Abstract Expressionism in a way, since it was about absolutely nothing but itself.
Yes, and I am reminded now of what the painter Jim Brooks said to me about how he operated, about how all the Abstract Expressionists operated: “I lay on the first stroke of color. After that, the canvas has to do at least half the work.” The canvas, if