Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [59]
Hard times!
So I signed up for a course in creative writing instead—taught three nights a week at City College by a fairly famous short-story writer named Martin Shoup. His stories were about black people, although he himself was white. Dan Gregory had illustrated at least a couple of them—with the customary delight and sympathy he felt for people he believed to be orangutans.
Shoup said about my writing that I wasn’t going to get very far until I became more enthusiastic about describing the looks of things—and particularly people’s faces. He knew I could draw, so he found it odd that I wouldn’t want to go on and on about the looks of things.
“To anybody who can drawn,” I said, “the idea of putting the appearance of anything into words is like trying to make a Thanksgiving dinner out of ball bearings and broken glass.”
“Then perhaps you had better resign from this course,” he said. Which I did.
I have no idea what finally became of Martin Shoup, either. Maybe he got killed in the war. Circe Berman never heard of him. Now you see him, now you don’t.
Bulletin from the present: Paul Slazinger, who himself teaches creative writing from time to time, has come back into our lives in a great big way! All is forgiven, apparently. He is sound asleep here now in an upstairs bedroom. When he wakes up, we shall see what we shall see.
The Rescue Squad of the Springs Volunteer Fire Department brought him here at about midnight last night. He had awakened his neighbors in Springs by yelling for help out different windows of his house—maybe every window he owned before he was through. The Rescue Squad wanted to take him to the Veterans Administration hospital at Riverhead. It was well known that he was a veteran. It is well known that I am a veteran.
But he calmed down, and he promised the rescuers that he would be all right if they brought him over here. So they rang my doorbell, and I received them in the foyer with its pictures of little girls on swings. Supported and restrained in the midst of the compassionate volunteers was a straitjacket containing the frantic meat of Slazinger. If I gave them permission, they were going to turn him loose as an experiment.
Circe Berman had come down by then. We were both in our nightclothes. People do strange things when suddenly confronted by a person out of his or her mind. After taking one long, hard look at Slazinger, Circe turned her back on all of us and started straightening the pictures of the little girls on swings. So there was something this seemingly fearless woman was afraid of. She was petrified by insanity.
Insane people are evidently Gorgons to her. If she looks at one, she turns to stone. There must be a story there.
24
SLAZINGER WAS A LAMB when they unswad-dled him. “Just put me to bed,” he said. He named the room he wanted to be put in, the one on the second floor with Adolph Gottlieb’s “Frozen Sounds Number Seven” over the fireplace and a bay window looking across the dunes to the ocean. He wanted that room and no other, and seemed to feel entitled to sleep there. So he must have been dreaming in detail of moving in with me for hours at least, and maybe even for decades. I was his insurance plan. Sooner or later, he would simply give up, go limp, and have himself delivered to the beach house of a fabulously well-to-do Armenian.
He, incidentally, was from a very old American family. The first Slazinger on this continent was a Hessian grenadier serving as a mercenary with General John Burgoyne, the British general who was defeated by forces commanded in part by the rebel General Benedict Arnold, who would later desert to the British, at the second Battle of Freeman’s Farm, north of Albany, two hundred years ago. Slazinger’s ancestor was taken prisoner during the battle, and never went home, which was in Wiesbaden, Germany, where he had been the son of—guess what?
A cobbler.
“All God’s chilluns got shoes.”
—OLD NEGRO SPIRITUAL
I would have to say that the widow Berman