Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [60]
So I put Slazinger to bed unassisted. I didn’t undress him. He didn’t have that many clothes on anyway—just Jockey shorts and a T-shirt that said, STOP SHOREHAM. Shoreham is a nuclear generating plant not far away. If it didn’t work the way it was supposed to, it might kill hundreds of thousands of people and render Long Island uninhabitable for centuries. A lot of people were opposed to it. A lot of people were for it. I myself think about it as little as possible.
I will say this about it, although I have only seen it in photographs. Never have I contemplated architecture which said more pointedly to one and all: “I am from another planet. I have no way of caring what you are or what you want or what you do. Buster, you have been colonized.”
A good subtitle for this book might be this: Confessions of an Armenian Late Bloomer or Always the Last to Learn. Listen to this: I never even suspected that the widow Berman was a pill freak until the night Slazinger moved in.
After I had put him to bed, with the Belgian linen sheets pulled right up to the nostrils of his big Hessian nose, I thought it might be a good idea to give him a sleeping pill. I didn’t have any, but I hoped Mrs. Berman might have some. I had heard her come up the stairs very slowly and go into her bedroom.
Her door was wide open, so I paid her a call. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, staring straight ahead. I asked her for a sleeping pill, and she told me to help myself in the bathroom. I hadn’t entered that bathroom since she took up residence. In fact, I don’t think I had been in it for years and years. There is a good chance that I had never been in that bathroom before.
And, my God—I wish you could see the pills she had! They were apparently samples from drug salesmen which her late doctor husband had accumulated over decades! The medicine cabinet couldn’t begin to hold them all! The marble counter-top around the washbasin was about five feet long and two feet wide, I would estimate, and an entire regiment of little bottles was deployed there. The scales dropped from my eyes! So much was suddenly explicable—the strange salutation when we first met on the beach, the impulsive redecoration of the foyer, the unbeatable pool game, the dancing madness, and on and on.
And which patient needed me most now in the dead of night?
Well—what could I do for a pill freak that she couldn’t do better or worse for herself? So I went back to Slazinger empty handed, and we talked about his trip to Poland for a while. Why not? Any port in a storm.
Here is the solution to the American drug problem suggested a couple of years back by the wife of our President: “Just say no.”
Maybe Mrs. Berman could say no to her pills, but poor Paul Slazinger had no control over the dangerous substances his own body was manufacturing and dumping in his bloodstream. He had no choice but to think all kinds of crazy things. And I listened to him rave on awhile about how well he could write, if only he were in hiding or in prison in Poland, and how the Polly Madison Books were the greatest works of literature since Don Quixote.
He did get off one pretty good crack about her, but I don’t think it was meant to be a crack, since he was so rapt when he said it. He called her “the Homer of the bubblegum crowd.”
And let’s just get it out of the way right here and now about the merits of the Polly Madison books. To settle this question in my own mind, without having to actually read them, I have just solicited by telephone the opinions of a bookseller and a librarian in East Hampton, and also the widows of a couple of the old Abstract Expressionist gang who have teenage grandchildren now.
They all said about the same thing, boiling down to this: “Useful, frank, and intelligent, but as literature hardly more than workmanlike.”
So there it