Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [7]
I mean—people who had paid fifteen-or twenty-or even thirty thousand dollars for a picture of mine found themselves gazing at a blank canvas, all ready for a new picture, and ringlets of colored tapes and what looked like moldy Rice Krispies on the floor.
It was a postwar miracle that did me in. I had better explain to my young readers, if any, that the Second World War had many of the promised characteristics of Armageddon, a final war between good and evil, so that nothing would do but that it be followed by miracles. Instant coffee was one. DDT was another. It was going to kill all the bugs, and almost did. Nuclear energy was going to make electricity so cheap that it might not even be metered. It would also make another war unthinkable. Talk about loaves and fishes! Antibiotics would defeat all diseases. Lazarus would never die: How was that for a scheme to make the Son of God obsolete?
Yes, and there were miraculous breakfast foods and would soon be helicopters for every family. There were miraculous new fibers which could be washed in cold water and need no ironing afterwards! Talk about a war well worth fighting!
During that war we had a word for extreme man-made disorder which was fubar, an acronym for “fucked up beyond all recognition.” Well—the whole planet is now fubar with postwar miracles, but, back in the early 1960s, I was one of the first persons to be totally wrecked by one—an acrylic wall-paint whose colors, according to advertisements of the day, would “… outlive the smile on the Mona Lisa.”
The name of the paint was Sateen Dura-Luxe. Mona Lisa is still smiling. And your local paint dealer, if he has been in the business any length of time, will laugh in your face if you ask for Sateen Dura-Luxe.
“Your father had the Survivor’s Syndrome,” said Circe Berman to me on my beach that day. “He was ashamed not to be dead like all his friends and relatives.”
“He was ashamed that I wasn’t dead, too,” I said.
“Think of it as a noble emotion gone wrong,” she said.
“He was a very upsetting father,” I said. “I’m sorry now that you’ve made me remember him.”
“As long as we’ve brought him back,” she said, “why don’t you forgive him now?”
“I’ve done it a hundred times already,” I said. “This time I’m going to be smart and get a receipt.” I went on to assert that Mother was more entitled to Survivor’s Syndrome than Father, since she had been right in the middle of the killing, pretending to be dead with people lying on top of her, and with screams and blood everywhere. She wasn’t all that much older then than the cook’s daughter, Celeste.
While Mother was lying there, she was looking right into the face of the corpse of an old woman who had no teeth, only inches away. The old woman’s mouth was open, and inside it and on the ground below it was a fortune in unset jewels.
“If it weren’t for those jewels,” I told Mrs. Berman, “I would not be a citizen of this great country, and would be in no position to tell you that you are now trespassing on my private property. That’s my house there, on the other side of the dunes. Would you be offended if a lonely and harmless old widower invited you thence for a drink, if you drink, and then supper with an equally harmless old friend of mine?” I meant Paul Slazinger.
She accepted. And after supper I heard myself saying, “If you’d rather stay here instead of the inn, you’re certainly welcome.” And I made her the same guarantee I made many times to Slazinger: “I promise not to bother you.”
So let’s be honest. I said a little earlier that I had no idea how she had come to share this house with me. Let’s be honest. I invited her.
3
SHE HAS TURNED me and this household upside down!
I should have known how manipulative she was from the very first words she ever said to me: “Tell me how your parents died.” I mean—those were the words of a woman who was quite used to turning people in any direction she chose, as though they were machine bolts and she were a monkey wrench.
And if I had missed the warning signals on the beach, there were plenty