Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [76]
As for my own work there in the studio, the big fields of color before which I could stand intoxicated for hour after hour: they were meant to be beginnings. I expected them to become more and more complicated as I slowly but surely closed in on what had so long eluded me: soul, soul, soul.
I woke him up, and said I would buy him an early supper at the Cedar Tavern. I didn’t tell him about the big deal I had pulled off in Florence, since he couldn’t be a part of it. He wouldn’t get his hands on the spray rig for two more days.
When the Contessa Portomaggiore died, incidentally, her collection would include sixteen Terry Kitchens.
“Early supper” meant early drinking too. There were already three painters at what had become our regular table in the back. I will call them “Painters X, Y and Z.” And, lest I give aid and comfort to Philistines eager to hear that the first Abstract Expressionists were a bunch of drunks and wild men, let me say who these three weren’t.
They were not, repeat, were not: William Baziotes, James Brooks, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, who was already dead by then anyway, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Hans Hofmann, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Syd Solomon or Bradley Walker Tomlin.
Pollock would show up that evening, all right, but he was on the wagon. He would not say a word, and would soon go home again. And one person there wasn’t a painter at all, as far as we knew. He was a tailor. His name was Isadore Finkelstein, and his shop was right above the tavern. After a couple of drinks, he could talk painting as well as anyone. His grandfather, he said, had been a tailor in Vienna, and had made several suits for the painter Gustav Klimt before the First World War.
And we got on the subject of why, even though we had been given shows which had excited some critics, and which had inspired a big story in Life magazine about Pollock, we still weren’t making anywhere near enough to live on.
We concluded that it was our clothing and grooming which were holding us back. This was a kind of joke. Everything we said was a kind of joke. I still don’t understand how things got so gruesomely serious for Pollock and Kitchen after only six more years went by.
Slazinger was there, too. That was where I met him. He was gathering material for a novel about painters—one of dozens of novels he never wrote.
At the end of that evening, I remember, he said to me: “I can’t get over how passionate you guys are, and yet so absolutely unserious.”
“Everything about life is a joke,” I said. “Don’t you know that?”
“No,” he said.
Finkelstein declared himself eager to solve the clothing problem of anybody who thought he had one. He would do it for a small down payment and a manageable installment plan. So the next thing I knew, Painters X, Y and Z and I and Kitchen were all upstairs in Finkelstein’s shop, getting measured for suits. Pollock and Slazinger came along, but only as spectators. Nobody else had any money, so, in character, I made everybody’s down payment with the traveler’s checks I had left over from my trip to Florence.
Painters X, Y and Z, incidentally, would pay me back with pictures the very next afternoon. Painter X had a key to our apartment, which I had given him after he was thrown out of his fleabag hotel for setting his bed on fire. So he and the other two delivered their paintings and got out again before poor Dorothy could defend herself.
Finkelstein the tailor had been a real killer in the war, and so had Kitchen been. I never was.
Finkelstein was a tank gunner in Patton’s Third Army. When he measured me for my suit, a suit I still own, he told me, his mouth full of pins, about how a track was blown off his tank by a boy with a rocket launcher two days before the war