Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [90]
“You leave those ingrates this,” she said, “and you’ll make them multimillionaires.”
“They’ll be that in any case,” I said. “I’m leaving them everything I own, including your pictures of the little girls in swings and the pool table, unless you want those back. After I die, they’ll have to do only one little thing to get it all.”
“What’s that?” she said.
“Merely have their names and those of my grandchildren legally changed back to ‘Karabekian,’” I said.
“You care that much?” she said.
“I’m doing it for my mother,” I said. “She wasn’t even a Karabekian by birth, but she was the one who wanted, no matter where, no matter what, the name Karabekian to live on and on.”
“How many of these are portraits of actual people?” she said.
“The bombardier clinging to my leg: that’s his face, as I remember it. These two Estonians in German uniforms are Laurel and Hardy. This French collaborator here is Charlie Chaplin. These two Polish slave laborers on the other side of the tower from me are Jackson Pollock and Terry Kitchen.”
“So there you are across the bottom: the Three Musketeers,” she said.
“There we are,” I agreed.
“The death of the other two so close together must have been a terrible blow to you,” she said.
“We’d stopped being friends long before then,” I said. “It was all the boozing we did together that made people call us that. It didn’t have anything to do with painting. We could have been plumbers. One or the other of us would stop drinking for a little while, and sometimes all three of us—and that was that for the Three Musketeers, long before the other two killed themselves. ‘Quite a blow,’ you say, Mrs. Berman? Not at all. The only thing I did after I heard about it was become a hermit for eight years or so.”
“And then Rothko killed himself after that,” she said.
“Yup,” I said. We were extricating ourselves from Happy Valley, and returning to real life. The melancholy roll-call of real-life suicides among the Abstract Expressionists again: Gorky by hanging in 1948, Pollock and then almost immediately Kitchen, by drunken driving and then pistol in 1956—and then Rothko with all possible messiness by knife in 1970.
I told her with sharpness which surprised me, and surprised her, too, that those violent deaths were like our drinking, and had nothing to do with our painting.
“I certainly won’t argue with you,” she said.
“Really!” I said. “Word of honor!” I said, my vehemence unspent. “The whole magical thing about our painting, Mrs. Berman, and this was old stuff in music, but it was brand new in painting: it was pure essence of human wonder, and wholly apart from food, from sex, from clothes, from houses, from drugs, from cars, from news, from money, from crime, from punishment, from games, from war, from peace—and surely apart from the universal human impulse among painters and plumbers alike toward inexplicable despair and self-destruction!”
“You know how old I was when you were standing on the rim of this valley?” she said. “No,” I said. “One year old,” she said. “And I don’t mean to be rude, Rabo, but this picture is so rich, I don’t think I can look at it any more tonight.”
“I understand,” I said. We had been out there for two hours. I myself was all worn out, but also twangingly proud and satisfied.
So there we were back in the doorway again, and I had my hand on the light switch. Since there were no stars that night, and no moon, a flick of that switch would plunge us into total darkness.
She asked me this: “Is there anything anywhere in the picture which says when and where this happened?”
“Nothing to say where it was,” I said. “There’s one place that says when it was, but that’s at the other end and way up high. If you really want to see it, I’ll have to get not only a stepladder but a magnifying glass.”
“Some other time,” she said.
I described it for her. “There’s this Maori, a corporal in the New Zealand Field Artillery who was captured in a battle outside Tobruk, Libya. I’m sure you know who the Maoris are,