Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [84]
Her art appreciation teacher showed slides of famous pictures, and two of these were of “Windsor Blue Number Seventeen,” before and after it fell apart.
“How can I thank him?” I said.
“I think he was trying to lighten up the course,” she said. “The rest of it was so serious.”
“Do you want the canvases or not?” she said. There was a long silence, so she finally said, “Hello? Hello?”
“Sorry,” I said. “That may seem like a simple question to you, but it’s a biggie to me. To me it’s as though you called me up out of the blue on a day like any other day, and asked me if I was grown up yet.”
If harmless objects like those rectangles of stretched canvas were hobgoblins to me, could fill me with shame, yes, with rage at a world which had entrapped me into being a failure and a laughingstock and so on, then I wasn’t a grown-up yet, although I was then sixty-eight years old.
“So what is your answer?” she said on the telephone.
“I’m waiting myself to hear it,” I said. I had no use for the canvases—or so I thought back then. I honestly never expected to paint again. Storing them would be no problem, since there was plenty of space in the potato barn. Could I sleep well here with the worst of the embarrassments from my past right here on the property? I hoped so.
I heard myself say this at last: “Please—don’t throw them away. I will call Home Sweet Home Moving and Storage out here, and have them picked up as soon as possible. Please tell me your name again—so they can ask for you.”
And she said this: “Mona Lisa Trippingham.”
When GEFFCo hung “Windsor Blue Number Seventeen” in its lobby, with fanfare about such an old company’s keeping on top of the latest developments not only in technology but in the arts, the company’s publicity people hoped to say that “Windsor Blue Number Seventeen” was superlative in terms of size—if not the largest painting in the world, then at least the largest painting in New York City, or whatever. But there were several murals right in the city, and God knows in the world, which easily exceeded my painting’s 512 square feet.
The publicity people wondered if it might not be a record holder for a painting hung on a wall—ignoring the fact that it was in fact eight separate panels, mated in back with C-clamps. But that wouldn’t do, either, since it turned out that the Museum of the City of New York had three continuous paintings on canvas, stitched together to be sure, as high as mine and a third again as long! They were curious artifacts—an early effort at making movies, you might say, since they had rollers at either end. They could be unwound from one and rewound on the other. An audience could see only a small part of the whole at any time. These Brobdingnagian ribbons were decorated with mountains and rivers and virgin forests and limitless grasslands on which buffalo grazed, and deserts where diamonds or rubies or gold nuggets might be had for the stooping. These were the United States of America.
Lecturers traveled all over Northern Europe with such pictures in olden times. With assistants to unroll one end and roll up the other, they urged all ambitious and able persons to abandon tired old Europe and lay claim to rich and beautiful properties in the Promised Land, which were practically theirs for the asking.
Why should a real man stay home when he could be raping a virgin continent?
I had the eight panels purged of every trace of faithless Sateen Dura-Luxes, and restretched and reprimed. I had them set up in the barn, dazzling white in their restored virginity, just as they had been before I transmuted them into “Windsor Blue Number Seventeen.”
I explained to my wife that this eccentric project was an exorcism of an unhappy past, a symbolic repairing of all the damage I had done to myself and others during my brief career as a painter. That was yet another