Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [85]
The long and narrow barn, a century old, was as much a part of it as all that white, white, white.
The powerful floodlights dangling from tracks on the ceiling were part of it, pouring megawatts of energy into all that white sizing, making it far whiter than I would have believed white could ever be. I had caused those artificial suns to be installed when I received the commission to create “Windsor Blue Number Seven-teen.
“What are you going to do with it next?” dear Edith asked.
“It’s done,” I said.
“Are you going to sign it?” she said.
“That would spoil it,” I replied. “A flyspeck would spoil it.”
“Does it have a title?” she said.
“Yes,” I said, and I gave it a title on the spot, one as long as the title Paul Slazinger had given his book on successful revolutions: “I Tried and Failed and Cleaned Up Afterwards, so It’s Your Turn Now.”
I had my own death in mind—and what people would say about me afterwards. That was when I first locked up the barn, but with only a single padlock and hasp. I assumed, as my father had and as most husbands do, that I would of course be the first of our pair to die. So I had whimsically self-pitying instructions for Edith as to what she was to do immediately following my burial.
“Hold my wake in the barn, Edith,” I said, “and when people ask you about all the white, white, white, you tell them that it was your husband’s last painting, even though he didn’t paint it. And then you tell them what the title is.”
But she died first, and only two months after that. Her heart stopped, and down she fell into a flower bed.
“No pain,” the doctor said.
At her burial at noon in Green River Cemetery, in a grave only a few yards from those of the other two Musketeers, Jackson Pollock and Terry Kitchen, I had my strongest vision yet of human souls unencumbered, unembarrassed by their unruly meat. There was this rectangular hole in the ground, and standing around it were all these pure and innocent neon tubes.
Was I crazy? You bet.
Her wake was in the home of a friend of hers, not mine, a mile up the beach from here. The husband did not attend!
Nor did he reenter this house, where he had been so useless and contented and loved without reason for one third of his life and one quarter of the twentieth century.
He went out to the barn, unlocked the sliding doors and turned on the lights. He stared at all that white.
Then he got into his Mercedes and drove to a hardware store in East Hampton, which carried art supplies. I bought everything a painter could ever wish for, save for the ingredient he himself would have to supply: soul, soul, soul.
The clerk was new to the area, and so did not know who I was. He saw a nameless old man in a shirt and tie and a suit made to order by Izzy Finkelstein—and a patch over one eye. The cyclops was in a high state of agitation.
“You’re a painter, are you, sir?” said the clerk. He was perhaps twenty years old. He hadn’t even been born when I stopped painting, stopped making pictures of any kind.
I spoke one word to him before leaving. This was it: “Renaissance.”
The servants quit. I had become an untamed old raccoon again, who spent all his life in and around the potato barn. I kept the sliding doors closed, so that nobody could see what it was that I did in there. I did it for six months!
When I was done, I bought five more locks and hasps for the sliding doors, and snapped them shut. I hired new servants, and had a lawyer draw up a new will, which stipulated, as I have said, that I be buried in my Izzy Finkelstein suit, that all I owned was to go to my two sons, provided that they did a certain thing in memory of their Armenian ancestors, and that the barn was not to be unlocked until after my burial.
My sons have done quite well in the world, despite the horrors of their childhood. As I’ve said, their last name now is that of their good stepfather. Henri Steel is a civilian contract compliance officer at the Pentagon. Terry Steel is