Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [91]
“They’re Polynesians,” she said. “They’re the aborigines of New Zealand.”
“Exactly!” I said. “They were cannibals and were divided into many warring tribes until the white man came. So this Polynesian is sitting on a discarded German ammunition box. There are three bullets still in the bottom of it, in case anybody needs one. He is trying to read what is an inside page from a newspaper. He has grabbed it as it scuttled across the valley in the breeze that came with sunrise.”
I went on, my fingertips touching the light switch: “The page is from an anti-Semitic weekly published in Riga, Latvia, during the German occupation of that little country. It is six months old, and offers tips on gardening and home canning. The Maori is studying it very earnestly, in the hopes of learning what we would all like to know about ourselves: where he is, what is going on, and what is likely to happen next.
“If we had a stepladder and a magnifying glass, Mrs. Berman, you could see for yourself that written in tiny characters on the ammunition box is this date, when you were only one year old: ‘May 8, 1945.’”
I took one last look at “Now It’s the Women’s Turn,” which was foreshortened again into a seeming triangle of close-packed jewels. I did not have to wait for the neighbors and Celeste’s schoolmates to arrive before knowing that it was going to be the most popular painting in my collection.
“Jesus, Circe!” I said. “It looks like a million bucks!”
“It really does,” she said.
Out went the lights.
37
WHEN WE SAUNTERED back to this house through the darkness, she held my hand, and she said I had taken her dancing after all.
“When was that?” I said.
“We’re dancing now,” she said.
“Oh,” I said.
She said again that she couldn’t imagine how I or anybody could have made such a big, beautiful painting about something so important.
“I can’t believe I did it myself,” I said. “Maybe I didn’t. Maybe it was done by potato bugs.”
She said that she looked at all the Polly Madison books in Celeste’s room one time, and couldn’t believe she’d written them.
“Maybe you’re a plagiarist,” I said.
“That’s what I feel like sometimes,” she said.
When we reached this house, and although we had not and never would make love, our moods were postcoital. May I say, without seeming boastful, that I had never seen her so languorous?
She surrendered her body, ordinarily so restless, so twitchy and itchy, to a voluptuously cushioned easy chair in the library. Marilee Kemp was in the room, too, in a ghostly way. The bound volume of letters she had written to an Armenian child in California was on the coffee table between me and Mrs. Berman.
I asked Mrs. Berman what she would have thought if the barn had been empty, or if the eight panels had been blanks, or if I had reconstructed “Windsor Blue Number Seventeen.”
“If you had really been that empty, which I thought you were,” she said, “I guess I would have had to give you an A-plus for sincerity.”
I asked her if she would write. I meant letters to me, but she thought I meant books. “That’s all I do—that and dancing,” she said. “As long as I keep that up, I keep grief away.” All summer long, she had made it easy to forget that she had recently lost a husband who was evidently brilliant and funny and adorable.
“One other thing helps a little bit,” she said. “It works for me. It probably wouldn’t work for you. That’s talking loud and brassy, telling everybody when they’re right and wrong, giving orders to everybody: ‘Wake up! Cheer up! Get to work!’”
“Twice now I’ve been a Lazarus,” I said. “I died with Terry Kitchen, and Edith brought me back to life again. I died with dear Edith, and Circe Berman brought me back to life again.”
“Whoever that is,” she said.
We talked some about Gerald Hildreth, the man who would come at eight in the morning to take her and her luggage to the airport in his taxicab. He was a local character about sixty years old. Everybody out this way knows Gerald Hildreth and his taxicab.
“He used to be on the Rescue Squad,” I said, “and I think he and my first