Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [75]
“No,” I said.
“But you’re going to look for one,” she said. “You’re going to take your degree in business administration that we all sacrificed so much for, and knock on doors out there till somebody in some decent business hires you, so we’ll have steady money coming in.”
“Honeybunch, listen to me,” I said. “When I was in Florence I sold ten thousand dollars’ worth of paintings.”
Our basement apartment resembled a storage room for scenery in a theater, there were so many huge canvases in there—which I had accepted in lieu of repayments of debts. So she got off this joke: “Then you’re going to end up in prison,” she said, “because we don’t even have three dollars’ worth of paintings here.”
I had made her so unhappy that she had developed a sense of humor, which she certainly didn’t have when I married her.
“You’re supposed to be thirty-four years old,” she said. She herself was twenty-three!
“I am thirty-four,” I said.
“Then act thirty-four,” she said. “Act like a man with a wife and family who’ll be forty before he knows it, and nobody will give him a job doing anything but sacking groceries or pumping gas.”
“That’s really laying it on the line, isn’t it?” I said.
“I don’t lay it on the line like that,” she said. “Life lays it on the line like that. Rabo! What’s happened to the man I married? We had such sensible plans for such a sensible life. And then you met these people—these bums.”
“I always wanted to be an artist,” I said.
“You never told me that,” she said.
“I didn’t think it was possible,” I said. “Now I do.”
“Too late—and much too risky for a family man. Wake up!” she said. “Why can’t you just be happy with a nice family? Everybody else is.”
“I’ll tell you again: I sold ten thousand dollars’ worth of paintings in Florence,” I said.
“That’ll fall through like everything else,” she said.
“If you love me, you’d have more faith in me as a painter,” I said.
“I love you, but I hate your friends and your paintings,” she said, “and I’m scared for me and my babies, the way things are going. The war is over, Rabo!”
“What is that supposed to mean?” I said.
“You don’t have to do wild things, great big things, dangerous things that don’t have a chance,” she said. “You’ve already got all the medals anybody could want. You don’t have to conquer France.” This last was a reference to our grandiose talk about making New York City rather than Paris the Art Capital of the World.
“They were on our side anyway, weren’t they?” she said. “Why do you have to go conquer them? What did they ever do to you?”
I was already outside the apartment when she asked me that, so all she had to do to end the conversation was what Picasso had done to me, which was to close the door and lock it.
I could hear her crying inside. Poor soul! Poor soul!
It was late afternoon. I took my suitcase over to Kitchen’s and my studio. Kitchen was asleep on his cot. Before I woke him up, I had a look at what he had been doing in my absence. He had slashed all his paintings with an ivory-handled straight razor inherited from his paternal grandfather, who had been president of the New York Central Railroad. The Art World certainly wasn’t any the poorer for what he had done. I had the obvious thought: “It’s a miracle he didn’t slash his wrists as well.”
This was a great big beautiful Anglo-Saxon sleeping there, like Fred Jones a model for a Dan Gregory illustration of a story about an ideal American hero. And when he and I went places together, we really did look like Jones and Gregory. Not only that, but Kitchen treated me as respectfully as Fred had treated Gregory, which was preposterous! Fred had been a genuine, dumb, sweet lunk, whereas my own buddy, sleeping there, was a graduate of Yale Law School, could have been a professional pianist or tennis player or golfer.
He had inherited a world of talent along with that straight razor. His father was a first-rate cellist and chess player and horticulturalist, as well as a corporation lawyer and a pioneer in winning civil rights for the black people.
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