Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [83]
“You should notify the Pope,” I said.
“The Pope?” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “You may have the next best thing to the Shroud of Turin.”
I had better explain to young readers that the Shroud of Turin is a linen sheet in which a dead person has been wrapped, which bears the imprint of an adult male who has been crucified, which the best scientists of today agree may indeed be two thousand years old. It is widely believed to have swaddled none other than Jesus Christ, and is the chief treasure of the Cathedral of San Giovanni Battista in Turin, Italy.
My joke with the lady at the Guggenheim suggested that it might be the face of Jesus emerging from the canvas—possibly just in time to prevent World War Three.
But she topped my joke. She said, “Well—I would call the Pope right away, except for one thing.”
“What’s that?” I said.
And she said: “You happen to be talking to somebody who used to date Paul Slazinger.”
I made her the same offer I had made everybody else: that I would duplicate the painting exactly in more durable materials, paints and tapes which really would outlive the smile on the “Mona Lisa.”
But the Guggenheim, like everybody else, turned me down. Nobody wanted to spoil the hilarious footnote I had become in art history. With a little luck, my last name might actually find its way into dictionaries:
kar·a·bek·i·an (), n. (from Rabo Karabekian, U.S. 20th cent painter). Fiasco in which a person causes total destruction of own work and reputation through stupidity, carelessness or both.
34
WHEN I REFUSED to draw a picture for Mrs. Berman, she said, “Oh—you are such a stubborn little boy!”
“I am a stubborn little old gentleman,” I said, “clinging to his dignity and self-respect as best he can.”
“Just tell me what kind of thing it is in the barn—” she wheedled, “animal, vegetable or mineral?”
“All three,” I said.
“How big?” she said.
I told her the truth: “Eight feet high and sixty-four feet long.”
“You’re kidding me again,” she surmised.
“Of course,” I said.
Out in the barn were eight panels of primed and stretched canvas placed side by side, each one eight feet by eight feet. They formed, as I had told her, a continuous surface sixty-four feet long. They were held upright in back by two-by-fours, and ran like a fence down the middle of the potato barn. These were the same panels which had shed the paint and tape of what had been my most famous and then most infamous creation, the picture which had graced and then disgraced the lobby of the GEFFCo headquarters on Park Avenue: “Windsor Blue Number Seventeen.”
Here is how they came back into my possession, three months before dear Edith died:
They were found entombed in a locked chamber in the bottommost of the three basement floors under the Matsumoto Building, formerly the GEFFCo Building. They were recognized for what they were, with shreds of Sateen Dura-Luxe clinging to them here and there, by an inspector from Matsumoto’s insurance company, who was looking for fire hazards deep underground. There was a locked steel door, and nobody had any idea what was on the other side.
The inspector got permission to break in. This was a woman and, as she told me on the telephone: she was the first female safety inspector for her company, and also the first black. “I am two birds with one stone,” she said, and she laughed. She had a very nice laugh. There was no malice or mockery in it. In offering to return my canvases to me after all those years, with the absent-minded approval of Matsumoto, she was simply expressing her reluctance to see anything go to waste.
“I’m the only one who cares one way or another,” she said, “so you tell me what to do. You’d have to pick them up yourself,” she said.
“How did you know what they were?” I said.
She had been a prenursing student at Skidmore College, she said, and had taken, as one of her precious few electives, a course in art appreciation. She was a registered nurse