Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [53]
Talk about paint!
Marilee’s and my canvas, so to speak, called for more and wetter kisses, and then a groping, goosey, swooning tango up the spiral staircase and through the grand dining room. We knocked over a chair, which we set up-right again. The canvas, doing all the work and not just half of it, sent us through the butler’s pantry and into an unused storage room about eight feet square. The only thing in there was a broken-down sofa which must have been left by the previous owners. There was one tiny window, looking northward, into the leafless treetops of the back garden.
We needed no further instructions from the canvas as to what to do, should we wish to complete a masterpiece. This we did.
Nor did I need instructions from the experienced older woman as to what to do.
Bull’s-eye and bull’s-eye and bull’s-eye again!
And it was so retroactive! This was something I had been doing all my life! It was so prospective, too! I would be doing one hell of a lot of this for the rest of my life.
And so I did. Except that it would never be that good again.
Never again would the canvas of life, so to speak, help me and a partner create a sexual masterpiece.
Rabo Karabekian, then, created at least one masterpiece as a lover, which was necessarily created in private and vanished from the Earth even more quickly than the paintings which made me a footnote in Art History. Is there nothing I have done which will outlive me, other than the opprobrium of my first wife and sons and grandchildren?
Do I care?
Doesn’t everybody?
Poor me. Poor practically everybody, with so little durable good to leave behind!
After the war, when I told Terry Kitchen something about my three hours of ideal lovemaking with Marilee, and how contentedly adrift in the cosmos they made me feel, he said this: “You were experiencing a non-epiphany.”
“A what?” I said.
“A concept of my own invention,” he said. This was back when he was still a talker instead of a painter, long before I bought him the spray rig. As far as that goes, I was nothing but a talker and a painters’ groupie. I was still going to become a businessman.
“The trouble with God isn’t that He so seldom makes Himself known to us,” he went on. “The trouble with God is exactly the opposite: He’s holding you and me and everybody else by the scruff of the neck practically constantly.”
He said he had just come from an afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where so many of the paintings were about God’s giving instructions, to Adam and Eve and the Virgin Mary, and various saints in agony and so on. “These moments are very rare, if you can believe the painters—but who was ever nitwit enough to believe a painter?” he said, and he ordered another double Scotch, I’m sure, for which I would pay. “Such moments are often called ‘epiphanies’ and I’m here to tell you they are as common as houseflies,” he said.
“I see,” I said. I think Pollock was there listening to all this, although he and Kitchen and I were not yet known as the “Three Musketeers.” He was a real painter, so he hardly talked at all. After Terry Kitchen became a real painter, he, too, hardly talked at all.
“‘Contentedly adrift in the cosmos,’ were you?” Kitchen said to me. “That is a perfect description of a non-epiphany, that rarest of moments, when God Almighty lets go of the scruff of your neck and lets you be human for a little while. How long did the feeling last?”
“Oh—maybe half an hour,” I said.
And he leaned back in his chair and he said with deep satisfaction: “And there you are.”
That could have been the same afternoon I rented studio space for the two of us in a loft owned by a photographer at the top of a building on Union Square. Studio space in Manhattan was dirt cheap back then. An artist could actually afford to live in New York City! Can you imagine that?