Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [82]
“Dorothy was flabbergasted,” I said to Circe. “She said to me: ‘Why don’t you do that all the time?’ And I said to her, and this was the first time I ever said ‘fuck’ to her, no matter how angry we might have been with each other: ‘It’s just too fucking easy.’”
“You never did fill in the joints between the Sheet-rock?” said Mrs. Berman.
“That is certainly a woman’s question,” I said. “And my manly answer is this one: ‘No, I did not.’”
“So what happened to the portraits?” she said. “Were they painted over?”
“No,” I said. “They stayed there on the Sheetrock for six years. But then I came home half drunk one afternoon, and found my wife and children and the pictures gone, and a note from Dorothy saying they were gone forever. She had cut the pictures out of the Sheetrock and taken them with her. There were two big square holes where the pictures used to be.”
“You must have felt awful,” said Mrs. Berman.
“Yes,” I said. “Pollock and Kitchen had killed themselves only a few weeks before that, and my own paintings were falling apart. So when I saw those two squares cut out of the Sheetrock in that empty house—” I stopped. “Never mind,” I said.
“Finish the sentence, Rabo,” she begged.
“That was as close as I’ll ever be,” I said, “to feeling what my father must have felt when he was a young teacher—and found himself all alone in his village after the massacre.”
Slazinger was another one who had never seen me draw, who wondered if I could really draw. I had been living out here for a couple of years by then, and he came by to watch me paint in the potato barn. I had set up a stretched and primed canvas eight by eight feet, and was about to lay on a coat of Sateen Dura-Luxe with a roller. It was a shade of greenish burnt orange called “Hungarian Rhapsody.” Little did I know that Dorothy, back at the house, was slathering our whole bedroom with “Hungarian Rhapsody.” But that is another story.
“Tell me, Rabo—” said Slazinger, “if I put on that same paint with that same roller, would the picture still be a Karabekian?”
“Absolutely,” I said, “provided you have in reserve what Karabekian has in reserve.”
“Like what?” he said.
“Like this,” I said. There was dust in a pothole in the floor, and I picked up some of it on the balls of both my thumbs. Working both thumbs simultaneously, I sketched a caricature of Slazinger’s face on the canvas in thirty seconds.
“Jesus!” he said. “I had no idea you could draw like that!”
“You’re looking at a man who has options,” I said.
And he said: “I guess you do, I guess you do.”
I covered up that caricature with a couple of coats of “Hungarian Rhapsody,” and laid on tapes which were supposed to be pure abstraction, but which to me were secretly six deer in a forest glade. The deer were near the left edge. On the right was a red vertical band, which to me, again secretly, was the soul of a hunter drawing a bead on one of them. I called it “Hungarian Rhapsody Number Six,” which was bought by the Guggenheim Museum.
That picture was in storage when it started to fall apart like all the rest of them. A woman curator just happened to walk by and see all this tape and flakes of Sateen Dura-Luxe on the floor, so she called me up to ask what could be done to restore the picture, and whether they might be at fault someway. I didn’t know where she had been the past year, when my pictures had become notorious for falling apart everywhere. She honestly thought maybe the Guggenheim hadn’t provided proper humidity controls or whatever. I was at that time living like an animal in the potato barn, friendless and unloved. But I did have a telephone.
“One very strange