Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [81]
“O.K.—camouflage,” she said.
“We were so good at camouflage,” I said, “that half the things we hid from the enemy have to this very day never been seen again!”
“And that’s not true,” she said.
“We’re having a celebration, so all sorts of things have been said which are not true,” I said. “That’s how to act at a party.”
“You want me to go home to Baltimore knowing a whole lot of things about you which are not true?” she said.
“Everything that’s true about me you should have learned before now, given your profound powers of investigation,” I said. “This is just a party.”
“I still don’t know whether you can really draw or not,” she said.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
“That’s the bedrock of your life, to hear you tell it,” she said. “That and camouflage. You were no good as a commercial artist, and you were no good as a serious artist, and you were no good as a husband or a father, and your great collection of paintings is an accident. But you keep coming back to one thing you’re proud of: you could really draw.”
“It’s true,” I said. “I didn’t realize that, but now that you mention it, it’s true.”
“So prove it,” she said.
“It’s a very small boast,” I said. “I wasn’t an Albrecht Dürer. I could draw better than you or Slazinger or the cook—or Pollock or Terry Kitchen. I was born with this gift which certainly doesn’t look like much when you compare me with all the far superior draughtsmen who’ve lived and died. I wowed the grade school and then the high school in San Ignacio, California. If I’d lived ten thousand years ago, I might have wowed the cave dwellers of Lascaux, France—whose standards for draughtsmanship must have been on about the same level as those of San Ignacio.”
“If your book is actually published,” she said, “you’re going to have to include at least one picture that proves you can draw. Readers will insist on that.”
“Poor souls,” I said. “And the worst thing about getting as old as I am—”
“You’re not that old,” she said.
“Old enough!” I said. “And the worst thing is that you keep finding yourself in the middle of the same old conversations, no matter who you’re talking to. Slazinger didn’t think I could draw. My first wife didn’t think I could draw. My second wife didn’t care whether I could or not. I was just an old raccoon she brought in from the barn and turned into a house pet. She loved animals whether they could draw or not.”
“What did you say to your first wife when she bet you couldn’t draw?” she said.
“We had just moved out in the country where she didn’t know a soul,” I said. “There still wasn’t heat in the house, and I was trying to keep us warm with fires in the three fireplaces—like my pioneer ancestors. And Dorothy was finally trying to catch up on art, reading up on it, since she had resigned herself to being stuck with an artist. She had never seen me draw—because not drawing and forgetting everything I knew about art, I thought, was the magic key to my becoming a serious painter.
“So, sitting in front of a fire in the kitchen fireplace, with all the heat going up the flue instead of coming out in the room,” I said, “Dorothy read in an art magazine what an Italian sculptor had said about the first Abstract Expressionist paintings ever to be shown in a major show in Europe—at the Venice Biennale in 1950, the same year I had my reunion with Marilee.”
“You had a painting there?” said Circe.
“No,” I said. “It was just Gorky and Pollock and de Kooning. And this Italian sculptor, who was supposedly very important back then, but who is all but forgotten now, said this about what we thought we were up to: ‘These Americans are very interesting. They dive into the water before they learn to swim.’ He meant we couldn’t draw.
“Dorothy picked up on that right away. She wanted to hurt me as much as I had hurt her, so she said, ‘So that’s it! You guys all paint the way you do because you couldn’t paint something real if you had to.’
“I didn’t rebut her with words. I snatched a green crayon Dorothy had been using to make a list of all the things inside and outside