Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [56]
“Did I do something wrong?” I said.
“You didn’t do anything right or wrong,” she said, “and neither did I.” She stopped dressing to look me straight in the eyes. I still had two. “This never happened.” She resumed the making of her toilette.
“Feel better?” she said.
I told her that I certainly did.
“So do I,” she said, “but it won’t last long.”
Talk about realism]
I thought we had made a contract to pair off permanently. Many people used to think that about sexual intercourse. I thought, too, that Marilee might now bear my child. I did not know that she had been rendered sterile by an infection she picked up during an abortion in supposedly germ-free Switzerland. There was so much I didn’t know about her, and which I wouldn’t find out for fourteen years!
“Where do you think we should go next?” I said.
“Where do I think who should go next?” she said.
“Us,” I said.
“You mean after we go leave this warm house forever, smiling bravely and holding hands?” she said. “There’s an opera for you that’ll break your heart.”
“Opera?” I said.
“The beautiful, worldly mistress of a great painter twice her age seduces his apprentice, almost young enough to be her son,” she said. “They are discovered. They are cast out into the world. She believes that her love and advice will make the boy a great painter, too, and they freeze to death.”
That is just about what would have happened, too.
“You have to go, but I have to stay,” she said. “I’ve got a little money saved up—enough to take care of you for a week or two. It’s time you got out of here anyway. You were getting much too comfortable.”
“How could we ever part after what we just did?” I said.
“The clocks stopped while we did it,” she said, “and now they’ve started up again. It didn’t count, so forget it.”
“How could I?” I said.
“J already have,” she said. “You’re still a little boy, and I need a man to take care of me. Dan is a man.”
So I slunk to my room, confused and humiliated. I packed up my belongings. She did not see me out. I had no idea what room she had gone to, or what she might be doing there. Nobody saw me out.
And I left that house forever as the sun went down on Saint Patrick’s Day, 1936, without a backward glance at the Gorgon on the front door of Dan Gregory.
I spent my first night on my own only a block away, at the Vanderbilt YMCA, but would not see or hear from her again for fourteen years. It seemed to me that she had dared me to become a great financial success, and then to come back and take her away from Dan Gregory. I fantasized about that as a real possibility for perhaps a month or two. Such things happened all the time in stories Dan Gregory was given to illustrate.
She would not see me again until I was worthy of her. Dan Gregory was working on a new edition of Tales of King Arthur and His Knights when he got rid of me. Marilee had posed as Guinevere. I would bring her the Holy Grail.
But the Great Depression soon made clear to me that I would never amount to anything. I couldn’t even provide decent food and a bed for my worthless self, and was frequently a bum among bums in soup kitchens and shelters for the homeless. I improved myself in libraries while keeping warm, reading histories and novels and poems said to be great—and encyclopedias and dictionaries, and the latest self-help books about how to get ahead in the United States of America, how to learn from failures, how to make strangers like and trust you immediately, how to start your own business, how to sell anybody anything, how to put yourself into the hands of God and stop wasting so much time and precious energy worrying. How to eat right.
I was certainly a child of Dan Gregory, and of the times, too, when I tried to make my vocabulary and familiarity with great issues and events and personalities throughout recorded time equal to those of graduates of great universities. My accent, moreover, was as synthetic as Gregory’s, and so, by the way, was Marilee’s. Marilee and I, a coal miner’s daughter and an Armenian