Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [29]
He calculates that an average couple with separate places of work logs four man-woman hours each weekday, and sixteen of them on weekends. Being sound asleep with each other doesn’t count. This gives him a standard man-woman week of thirty-six man-woman hours.
He multiplies that by fifty-two. This gives him, when rounded off, a standard man-woman year of eighteen hundred man-woman hours. He advertises that any couple that has accumulated this many man-woman hours is entitled to celebrate an anniversary, and to receive flowers and appropriate presents, even if it took them only twenty weeks to do it!
If couples keep piling up man-woman hours like that, as my wives and I have done in both my marriages, they can easily celebrate their Ruby Anniversary in only twenty years, and their Golden in twenty-five!
I do not propose to discuss my love life. I will say that I still can’t get over how women are shaped, and that I will go to my grave wanting to pet their butts and boobs. I will say, too, that lovemaking, if sincere, is one of the best ideas Satan put in the apple she gave to the serpent to give to Eve. The best idea in that apple, though, is making jazz.
25
Allie’s husband Jim Adams really did go off an open drawbridge in a railroad train two days before Allie died in a hospital. Stranger than fiction!
Jim had plunged them deep in debt by manufacturing a toy of his own invention. It was a corked rubber balloon with a blob of permanently malleable clay inside. It was clay with a skin!
The face of a clown was printed on the balloon. You could make it open its mouth wide with your fingers, or make its nose protrude or its eyes sink in. Jim called it Putty Puss. Putty Puss never became popular. Moreover, Putty Puss amassed enormous debts for its manufacture and advertising.
Allie and Jim, Indianapolis people in New Jersey, had four boys and no girls. One of the boys was a mewling infant, and none of these people had asked to be born in the first place.
Boys and girls of our family often come into this world, as did Allie, with natural gifts for drawing and painting and sculpting and so on. Jane’s and my two daughters, Edith and Nanette, are middle-aged professional artists who have shows and sell pictures. So does our son the doctor Mark. So do I. Allie could have done that, too, if she had been willing to work hard and hustle some. But as I have reported elsewhere, she said, “Just because you’re talented, that doesn’t mean you have to do something with it.”
I say in my novel Bluebeard, “Beware of gods bearing gifts.” I think I had Allie in mind when I wrote that, and Allie in mind again when, in Timequake One, I had Monica Pepper spray-paint “FUCK ART!” in orange and purple across the steel front door of the Academy. Allie didn’t know there was such an institution as the Academy, I’m almost sure, but she would have been happy to see those words emblazoned anywhere.
Our father the architect was so full of ecstatic baloney about any work of art Allie made when she was growing up, as though she were the new Michelangelo, that she was shamed. She wasn’t stupid and she wasn’t tasteless. Father, without meaning to do so, rubbed her nose in how limited her gifts were, and so spoiled any modest pleasure that she, not expecting too much, might have found in using them.
Allie may have felt patronized, too, lavishly praised for very little because she was a pretty girl. Only men could become great artists.
When I was ten, and Allie was fifteen, and our big brother Bernie the born scientist was eighteen, I said at supper one night that women weren’t even the best cooks or clothing makers. Men were. And Mother dumped a pitcher of water over my head.
But Mother was as full of baloney about Allie’s prospects for marrying a rich man, and how important it was for Allie to do so, as Father was about the art she did. During the Great Depression, financial sacrifices were made to send Allie to school with Hoosier heiresses