Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut [85]
(1951)
GO BACK TO YOUR PRECIOUS WIFE AND SON
GLORI HILTON and her fifth husband didn’t live in New Hampshire very long. But they lived there long enough for me to sell them a bathtub enclosure. My main line is aluminum combination storm windows and screens—but anybody in storm windows is practically automatically in bathtub enclosures, too.
The enclosure they ordered was for Gloria Hilton’s personal bathtub. I guess that was the zenith of my career. Some men are asked to build mighty dams or noble sky-scrapers, or conquer terrible plagues, or lead great armies into battle.
Me?
I was asked to keep drafts off the most famous body in the world.
People ask me how well did I know Gloria Hilton. I generally say, "The only time I ever saw that woman in the flesh was through a hot-air register." That was how the bathroom where they wanted the enclosure was heated—with a hot-air register in the floor. It wasn’t connected to the furnace. It just bled heat from the ceiling of the room down below. I don’t wonder Gloria Hilton found her bathroom cold.
I was installing the enclosure when loud talk started coming out of the register. I was at a very tricky point, gluing the waterproof gasket around the rim of the tub with contact cement, so I couldn’t close the register. I had to listen to what wasn’t any of my business, whether I wanted to or not.
"Don’t talk to me about love," Gloria Hilton said to her fifth husband. "You don’t know anything about love. You don’t know the meaning of love."
I hadn’t looked down through the register yet, so the only face I had to put with her voice was her face in the movies.
"Maybe you’re right, Gloria," said her fifth husband.
"I give you my word of honor I’m right," she said.
"Well — he said, "that certainly brings the whole discussion to a dead stop right there. How could I possibly argue with the sacred word of honor of Gloria Hilton?"
I knew what he looked like. He was the one who’d done all the negotiating for the bathtub enclosure. I had also sold him two Fleetwood Trip-L-Trak storm windows for the two bathroom windows. Those have the self-storing screen feature. The whole time we were negotiating, he called his wife "Miss Hilton." Miss Hilton wanted this, and Miss Hilton wanted that. He was only thirty-five, but the circles under his eyes made him look sixty.
"I pity you," Gloria Hilton said to him. "I pity anybody who can’t love. They are the most pitiful people there are."
"The more you talk," he said, "the more I’m convinced I’m one of them."
He was the writer, of course. My wife keeps a lot of Hollywood stuff in her head, and she tells me Gloria Hilton was married to a motorcycle policeman, then a sugar millionaire, then somebody who played Tarzan, then her agent—and then the writer. George Murra, the writer, was the one I knew.
"People keep wondering what the matter with the world is," said Gloria. "I know what the matter is. It’s simple: most men don’t know the meaning of the word love."
"At least give me credit for trying to find out what it means," said Murra. "For one solid year now, I haven’t done a single, solitary thing but order a bathtub enclosure and try to find out what love means."
"I suppose you’re going to blame me for that, too," she said.
"For what?" he said.
"The fact that you haven’t written a word since we’ve been married," she said. "I suppose that’s somehow my fault, too."
"I hope I’m not that shallow," he said. "I know a plain, ordinary coincidence when I see one. The fights we have all night, the photographers and reporters and so-called friends we have all day—they have nothing to do with the fact I’ve dried up."
"You’re one of those people who enjoys suffering," she said.
"That’s a smart way to be," he said.
"I’ll tell you frankly," she said, "I’m disappointed in you."
"I knew," he said, "that sooner or later you would come right out and say it."
"I might as well tell