Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [54]
After we had rented the studio space, I said to him: “My wife will kill me, if she hears about this.”
“Just give her seven epiphanies a week,” he said, “and she’ll be so grateful that she’ll let you get away with anything.”
“Easier said than done,” I said.
The same people who believe that Circe Berman’s Polly Madison books are destroying the fabric of American society, telling teenage girls that they can get pregnant if they’re not careful and so on, would surely consider Terry Kitchen’s concept of non-epiphanies blasphemous. But I can’t think of anybody who tried harder than he did to find worthwhile errands to run for God. He could have had brilliant careers in law or business or finance or politics. He was a magnificent pianist, and a great athlete, too. He might have stayed in the Army and soon become a general and maybe Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
When I met him, though, he had given all that up in order to be a painter, even though he couldn’t draw for sour apples, and had never had an art lesson in his life! “Something’s just got to be worth doing!” he said. “And painting is one of the few things I haven’t tried.”
A lot of people, I know, think that Terry could draw realistically, if he wanted to do so. But their only proof of that is a small patch in a painting that used to hang in my foyer here. He never gave the picture a title, but it is now generally known as Magic Window.
Except for one little patch, that picture is a typical Kitchen airbrush view of a brightly colored storm system as viewed from an orbiting satellite, or whatever you want to call it. But the little patch, if examined carefully, turns out to be an upside-down copy of John Singer Sargent’s full-length “Portrait of Madame X,” with her famous milk-white shoulders and ski-jump nose and so on.
I’m sorry, folks: that whimsical insert, that magic window, wasn’t Terry’s work, and couldn’t have been Terry’s work. It was done at Terry’s insistence by a hack illustrator with the unlikely name of Rabo Karabekian.
Terry Kitchen said that the only moments he ever experienced as non-epiphanies, when God left him alone, were those following sex and the two times he took heroin.
22
BULLETIN FROM THE PRESENT: Paul Slazinger has gone to Poland, of all places. According to The New York Times this morning, he was sent there for a week by the international writers’ organization called “PEN”—as a part of a delegation to investigate the plight of his suffocated colleagues there.
Perhaps the Poles will reciprocate, and investigate his plight in turn. Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
Bulletin from the present: the widow Berman has installed an old-fashioned pool table dead center in my living room, having sent the furniture it displaced to Home Sweet Home Moving and Storage. This is a real elephant, so heavy that jack posts had to be put in the basement to keep it from winding up down there amid the cans of Sateen Dura-Luxe.
I haven’t played this game since my Army days, and never played it very well. But you should see Mrs. Berman clear the table of balls no matter where they are!
“Where did you ever learn to shoot pool like that?” I asked her.
She said that after her father committed suicide she dropped out of high school and, rather than be sexually promiscuous or become an alcoholic in Lackawanna, she spent ten hours a day shooting pool instead.
I don’t have to play with her. Nobody has to play with her, and I don’t suppose anybody had to play with her in Lackawanna. But a funny thing will happen. She will suddenly lose her deadly accuracy, and have a fit of yawns and will scratch herself as though she had a fit of itching, too. Then she will go up to bed, and sometimes sleep until noon the next day.
She is the moodiest woman I ever knew.
And what of the broad hints I have given as to the secret of the potato barn? Won’t she read them in this manuscript, and easily guess the rest? No.
She keeps her promises, and she promised