Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [8]
She was outrageous! She sat across from a Jackson Pollock for which I had just been offered two million dollars by an anonymous collector in Switzerland, and she said, “I wouldn’t give that houseroom!”
So I asked her tartly, after a wink in Slazinger’s direction, what sort of picture might please her more.
She replied that she wasn’t on Earth to be pleased but to be instructed. “I need information the way I need vitamins and minerals,” she said. “Judging from your pictures, you hate facts like poison.”
“I suppose you would be happier looking at George Washington crossing the Delaware,” I said.
“Who wouldn’t?” she said. “But I tell you what I’d really like to see there since our talk on the beach.”
“Which is—?” I said, arching my eyebrows and then winking at Slazinger again.
“I’d like a picture with some grass and dirt at the bottom,” she said.
“Brown and green,” I suggested.
“Fine,” she said. “And sky at the top.”
“Blue,” I said.
“Maybe with clouds,” she said.
“Easily supplied,” I said.
“And in between the sky and the ground—” she said.
“A duck?” I said. “An organ-grinder with his monkey? A sailor and his girl on a park bench?”
“Not a duck and not an organ-grinder and not a sailor and his girl,” she said. “A whole lot of dead bodies lying every which way on the ground. And very close to us is the face of a beautiful girl, maybe sixteen or seventeen. She is pinned under the corpse of a man, but she is still alive, and she is staring into the open mouth of a dead old woman whose face is only inches from hers. Out of that toothless mouth are spilling diamonds and emeralds and rubies.”
There was a silence.
And then she said, “You could build a whole new religion, and a much needed one, too, on a picture like that.” She nodded in the direction of the Pollock. “All anybody could do with a picture like that is illustrate an advertisement for a hangover remedy or seasick pills.”
Slazinger asked her what had brought her to the Hamptons, since she didn’t know anybody here. She replied that she hoped to find some peace and quiet so she could devote her full attention to writing a biography of her husband, the Baltimore brain surgeon.
Slazinger preened himself as a man who had published eleven novels and he patronized her as an amateur.
“Everybody thinks he or she can be a writer,” he said with airy irony.
“Don’t tell me it’s a crime to try,” she said.
“It’s a crime to think it’s easy,” he said. “But if you’re really serious, you’ll find out quick enough that it’s the hardest thing there is.”
“Particularly so, if you have absolutely nothing to say,” she said. “Don’t you think that’s the main reason people find it so difficult? If they can write complete sentences and can use a dictionary, isn’t that the only reason they find writing hard: they don’t know or care about anything?”
Here Slazinger stole a line from the writer Truman Capote, who died five years ago, and who had a house only a few miles west of here. “I think you’re talking about typing instead of writing,” he said.
She promptly identified the source of his witticism: “Truman Capote,” she said.
Slazinger covered himself nicely. “As everyone knows,” he said.
“If you didn’t have such a kind face,” she said, “I would suspect that you were making fun of me.”
But listen to this, which she only told me at breakfast this morning. Just listen to this and then tell me who was toying with whom at that supper, which is now two weeks ago: Mrs. Berman is not an amateur writing a biography of her late husband. That was just a story to cover her true