Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [80]
Prophetically, she was carrying a tamed raccoon in her arms. She was a magical tamer of almost any sort of animal, an overwhelmingly loving and uncritical nurturer of anything and everything that looked half alive. That’s what she would do to me when I was living as a hermit in the barn and she needed a new husband: she tamed me with nature poems and good things to eat which she left outside my sliding doors. I’m sure she tamed her first husband, too, and thought of him lovingly and patronizingly as some kind of dumb animal.
She never said what kind of animal she thought he was. I know what kind of animal she thought I was, because she came right out and said it to a female relative from Cincinnati at our wedding reception, when I was all dressed up in my Izzy Finkelstein suit: “I want you to meet my tamed raccoon.”
I will be buried in that suit, too. It says so in my will: “I am to be buried next to my wife Edith in Green River Cemetery in the dark blue suit whose label says: ‘Made to order for Rabo Karabekian by Isadore Finkelstein.’” It wears and wears.
Well—the execution of that will still lies in the future, but just about everything else has vanished into the past, including Circe Berman. She finished up her book and returned to Baltimore two weeks ago.
On her last night here, she wanted me to take her dancing, and I again refused. I took her to supper at the American Hotel in Sag Harbor instead. Just another tourist trap nowadays, Sag Harbor used to be a whaling port. You can still see the mansions of the brave captains who sailed from there to the Pacific Ocean, around the tip of South America, and then came home millionaires.
In the lobby of the hotel is a guest register opened to a date at the peak of the whale-killing industry, so disreputable nowadays: March 1, 1849. Back then, Circe’s ancestors were in the Russian Empire and mine in the Turkish Empire, which would have made them enemies.
We feasted on lobsters, and drank in moderation in order to become voluble. It is a bad thing to need a drink, everybody is saying now, and I in fact went without alcohol the whole time I was a hermit. But my feelings about Mrs. Berman on the eve of her departure were so contradictory that, without a drink, I might have eaten in wooden silence. But I certainly wasn’t going to drive with a couple of drinks in me, and neither was she. It used to be almost fashionable to drive when drunk, but no more, no more.
So I hired a boyfriend of Celeste’s to drive us over there in his father’s car, and then pick us up again.
In the simplest terms: I was sorry that she was leaving, because she was exciting to have around. But she could also be too exciting, telling everybody exactly what to do. So I was also glad that she was going, since what I wanted most, with my own book so nearly finished, was peace and quiet for a change. To put it another way: we were acquaintances, despite our months together. We had not become great friends.
That would change, however, once I had shown her what was in the potato barn.
Yes, that’s right: this determined widow from Baltimore, before she left, persuaded this old Armenian geezer to unlock the locks and turn on the floodlights in the potato barn.
What did I get in exchange? I think we’re really friends now.
33
WHEN WE GOT HOME from the American Hotel, the first thing she said was: “One thing you don’t have to worry about: I’m not going to badger you about the keys to the potato barn.”
“Thank God!” I said.
I think she was certain right then that, before the night was over, one way or another, she was damn well going to see what was in the potato barn.
“I only want you to draw me a picture,” she said.
“Do what?” I said.
“You’re a very modest man—” she said, “to the point where anybody who believed you would think you were no good at anything.”
“Except camouflage,” I said. “You’re forgetting camouflage. I was awarded a Presidential Unit Citation, my platoon was so good