Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [74]
“So your idea is a much better one, Rabo. Let men come into my rotunda, and wherever they look at eye level let them receive no encouragement. Let the walls cry out: ‘The end! The end!’”
Thus began the second great collection of American Abstract Expressionist art—the first being my own, the storage bills for which were making paupers of me and my wife and children. Nobody else wanted those pictures at any price!
Marilee ordered ten of them sight unseen—to be selected by me and at one thousand dollars each!
“You’re joking!” I said.
“The Countess Portomaggiore never jokes,” she said. “And I’m as noble and rich as anybody who ever lived here, so you do what I say.”
So I did.
She asked if our gang had come up with a name for ourselves, and we hadn’t. It was critics who would finally name us. She said that we should call ourselves the “Genesis Gang,” since we were going right back to the beginning, when subject matter had yet to be created.
I found that a good idea, and would try to sell it to the others when I got home. But it never caught on somehow.
Marilee and I talked for hours, until it was dark outside. She said at last, “I think you had better go now.”
“Sounds like what you said to me on Saint Patrick’s Day fourteen years ago,” I said.
“I hope you won’t be so quick to forget me this time,” she said.
“I never did that,” I said.
“You forgot to worry about me,” she said.
“I give you my word of honor, Contessa,” I said, standing. “I can never do that again.”
That was the last time we met. We exchanged several letters, though. I have dug one of hers from the archives here. It is dated three years after our reunion, June 7, 1953, and says that we have failed to paint pictures of nothing after all, that she easily identifies chaos in every canvas. This is a pleasant joke, of course. “Tell that to the rest of the Genesis Gang,” she says.
I answered that letter with a cable, of which I have a copy. “NOT EVEN CHAOS IS SUPPOSED TO BE THERE,” it reads. “WE’LL COME OVER AND PAINT IT OUT. ARE OUR FACES RED. SAINT PATRICK.”
Bulletin from the present: Paul Slazinger has voluntarily committed himself to the psychiatric ward at the Veterans Administration hospital over at Riverhead. I certainly didn’t know what to do about the bad chemicals his body was dumping into his bloodstream, and he was becoming a maniac even to himself. Mrs. Berman was glad to see him out of here.
Better he should be looked after by his Uncle Sam.
31
OF ALL THE THINGS I have to be ashamed of, the most troublesome of this old heart of mine is my failure as a husband of the good and brave Dorothy, and the consequent alienation of my own flesh and blood, Henri and Terry, from me, their Dad.
What will be found written after the name of Rabo Karabekian in the Big Book on Judgment Day?
“Soldier: Excellent.
“Husband and Father: Floparroo.
“Serious artist: Floparroo.”
There was Hell to pay when I got home from Florence. The good and brave Dorothy and both boys had a brand new kind of influenza, yet another postwar miracle. A doctor had been to see them and would come again, and a woman upstairs was feeding them. It was agreed that I could only be in the way until Dorothy got back to her feet, and that I should spend the next few nights at the studio Terry Kitchen and I had rented above Union Square.
How smart we would have been to have me stay away for a hundred years instead!
“Before I go, I want to tell you I’ve got some really good news,” I said.
“We’re not going to move out to that godforsaken house in the middle of nowhere?” she said.
“That isn’t it,” I said. “You and the kids will get to love it out there, with the ocean and lots of fresh air.”
“Somebody’s offered you