Bluebeard Read online

  There was the swish of tires in the gravel driveway. "Time to go," she said. "Maybe you can't stand truly serious art. Maybe you'd better use the back door from now on."

  And she was gone!

  16

  NO SOONER had the snarl and burble of the psychiatrist's Ferrari died away in the sunset than the cook said she and her daughter would be leaving too. "This is your two weeks' notice," she said.

  What a blow! "What made you decide so suddenly?" I asked.

  "Nothing sudden about it," she said. "Celeste and I were about to leave right before Mrs. Berman came. It was so dead here. She made things exciting, so we stayed. But we've always said to each other: "When she goes, we go, too.""

  "I really need you," I said. "What could I do to persuade you to stay?" I mean: my God--they already had rooms with ocean views, and Celeste's young friends had the run of the property, and no end of free snacks and refreshments. The cook could take any of the cars anytime she wanted to, and I was paying her like a movie star.

  "You could learn my name," she said.

  What was going on? "Do what?" I said.

  "Whenever I hear you talk about me, all you ever call me is "the cook." I have a name. It's 'Allison White,'" she said.

  "Goodness!" I protested with terrified joviality, "I know that perfectly well. That's who I make out your check to every week. Did I misspell it or something--or get your Social Security wrong?"

  "That's the only time you ever think of me," she said, "when you make out my check--and I don't think you think about me then. Before Mrs. Berman came, and Celeste was in school, and there were just the two of us in the house alone, and we'd slept under the same roof night after night, and you ate my food--"

  Here she stopped. She hoped she'd said enough, I guess. I now realize that this was very hard for her.

  "Yes--?" I said.

  "This is so stupid," she said.

  "I can't tell if it is or not," I said.

  And then she blurted: "I don't want to marry you!

  My God! "Who would?" I said.

  "I just want to be a human being and not a nobody and a nothing, if I have to live under the same roof with a man--any man," she said. She revised that instantly: "Any person," she said.

  This was dismayingly close to what my first wife Dorothy had said to me: that I often treated her as though I didn't even care what her name was, as though she really weren't there. The next thing the cook said I had also heard from Dorothy:

  "I think you're scared to death of women," she said.

  "Me, too," said Celeste.

  "Celeste--" I said, "you and I have been close, haven't we?"

  "That's because you think I'm stupid," said Celeste.

  "And she's still too young to be threatening," her mother said.

  "So everybody's leaving now," I said. "Where's Paul Slazinger?"

  "Out the door," said Celeste.

  What had I done to deserve this? All I had done was go to New York City for one night, giving the widow Berman time to redecorate the foyer! And now, as I stood in the midst of a life she had ruined, she was off hobnobbing in Southampton with Jackie Kennedy!

  "Oh, my," I said at last. "And I know you hate my famous art collection, too."

  They brightened some, because, I suppose, I had broached a subject which was a lot easier to discuss than the relationship between women and men.

  "I don't hate them," said the cook--said Allison White, Allison White, Allison White! This is a perfectly presentable woman, with even features and a trim figure and nice brown hair. I'm the problem. I am not a presentable man.

  "They just don't mean anything to me," she went on. "I'm sure that's because I'm uneducated. Maybe if I went to college, I would finally realize how wonderful they are. The only one I really liked, you sold."

  "Which one was that?" I said. I myself perked up some, hoping to salvage something, at least, from this nightmare: a statement from these unsophisticated people as to which of my paintings, one I had sold, evidently, had had such power that even they had liked it.

  "The one with the two little black boys and the two little white boys," she said.

  I ransacked my mind for any painting in the house which might have been misread in that way by an imaginative and simple person. Which one had two black blobs and two white ones? Again: it sounded a lot like a Rothko.

  But then I caught on that she was talking about a painting I had never considered a part of my collection, but simply a souvenir. It was by none other than Dan Gregory! It was a magazine illustration for a Booth Tarkington story about an encounter in the back alley of a middle-western town, not in this century but in the one before, between two white boys and two black--about ten years old.

  In the picture, they were obviously wondering if they could be playmates, or whether they had better go their separate ways.

  In the story, the two black boys had very comical names: "Herman" and "Verman." I often heard it said that nobody could paint black people like Dan Gregory, but he did it entirely from photographs. One of the first things he ever said to me was that he would never have a black person in his house.

  I thought that was great. I thought everything he said was great for a little while. I was going to become what he was, and regrettably did in many ways.

  I sold that painting of the two black boys and the two white boys to a real-estate and insurance millionaire in Lubbock, Texas, who has the most complete collection of Dan Gregory paintings in the world, he told me. As far as I know, he has the only such collection, for which he has built a large private museum.

  He discovered somehow that I used to be Gregory's apprentice, and he called me up to ask if I had any of my master's works I was willing to part with. I had only that one, which I hadn't looked at for years, since it hung in the bathroom of one of the many guest rooms here which I had had no reason to enter.

  "You sold the only picture that was really about something," said Allison White. "I used to look at it and try and guess what would happen next."

  Oh: one last thing Allison White said to me before she and Celeste went upstairs to their quarters which had priceless ocean views: "We'll get out of your way now," she said, "and we don't care if we never find out what's in the potato barn."

  So there I was all alone downstairs. I was afraid to go upstairs. I didn't want to be in the house at all, and seriously considered taking up residence again as what I had been to dear Edith after her first husband died: a half-tamed old raccoon in the potato barn.

  So I went walking for hours on the beach--all the way to Sagaponack and back again, reliving my blank-brained, deep-breathing hermit days.

  There was a note on the kitchen table from the cook, from Allison White, saying my supper was in the oven. So I ate it. My appetite is always good. I had a few drinks, and listened to some music. There was one thing I learned during my eight years as a professional soldier which proved to be very useful in civilian life: how to fall asleep almost anywhere, no matter how bad the news may be.

  I was awakened at two in the morning by someone's rubbing the back of my neck so gently. It was Circe Berman.

  "Everybody's leaving," I said. "The cook gave notice. In two weeks, she and Celeste will be gone."

  "No, no," she said. "I've talked to them, and they're staying."

  "Thank God!" I said. "What did you say to them? They hate it here."

  "I promised them I wasn't leaving," she said, "so they'll stay, too. Why don't you go up to bed now? You'll be very stiff in the morning if you spend all night down here."

  "O.K.," I said groggily.

  "Mama's been out dancing, but she's home again," she said. "Go to bed, Mr. Karabekian. All's well with the world."

  "I'll never see Slazinger again," I said.

  "What do you care?" she said. "He never liked you and you never liked him. Don't you know that?"

  17

  WE MADE SOME SORT of contract that night. It was as though we had been negotiating its terms for q
uite some time: she wanted this, I wanted that.

  For reasons best known to herself, the widow Berman wants to go on living and writing here rather than return to Baltimore. For reasons all too clear to myself, I am afraid, I want someone as vivid as she is to keep me alive.

  What is the biggest concession she has made? She no longer mentions the potato barn.

  To return to the past:

  After Dan Gregory at our first meeting ordered me to make a super-realistic painting of his studio, he said that there was a very important sentence he wanted me to learn by heart. This was it: "The Emperor has no clothes."

  "Let me hear you say it," he said. "Say it several times."

  So I did. "The Emperor has no clothes, the Emperor has no clothes, the Emperor has no clothes."

  "That was a really fine performance," he said, "really topping, really first rate." He clapped his hands appreciatively.

  How was I supposed to respond to that? I felt like Alice in Wonderland.

  "I want you to say that out loud and with just that degree of conviction," he said, "anytime anyone has anything good to say about so-called modern art."

  "O.K.," I said.

  "It's the work of swindlers and lunatics and degenerates," he said, "and the fact that many people are now taking it seriously proves to me that the world has gone mad. I hope you agree."

  "I do, I do," I said. It sounded right to me.

  "Mussolini thinks so, too," he said. "Do you admire Mussolini as much as I do?"

  "Yes, sir," I said.

  "You know the first two things Mussolini would do if he took over this country?" he said.

  "No, sir," I said.

  "He would burn down the Museum of Modern Art and outlaw the word democracy. After that he would make up a word for what we really are, make us face up to what we really are and always have been, and then strive for efficiency. Do your job right or drink castor oil!"

  About a year later, I got around to asking him what he thought the people of the United States really were, and he said, "Spoiled children, who are begging for a frightening but just Daddy to tell them exactly what to do."

  "Draw everything the way it really is," he said.

  "Yes, sir," I said.

  He pointed to a clipper ship model on a mantelpiece in the murky distance. "That, my boy, is the Sovereign of the Seas," he said, "which, using nothing but wind power, was faster than most freighters are today! Think of that!"

  "Yes, sir," I said.

  "And when you put it into the wonderful picture you are going to paint of this studio, you and I are going to go over your rendering of it with a magnifying glass. Any line in the rigging I care to point to: I expect you to tell me its name and what its function is."

  "Yes, sir," I said.

  "Pablo Picasso could never do that," he said.

  "No, sir," I said.

  He removed from a gun rack a Springfield 1906 rifle, then the basic weapon for the United States Infantry. There was an Enfield rifle in there, too, the basic weapon of the British Infantry, a sort of gun which may have killed him. "When you include this perfect killing machine in your picture," he said of the Springfield, "I want it so real that I can load it and shoot a burglar." He pointed to a nubbin near the muzzle and asked me what it was.

  "I don't know, sir," I said.

  "The bayonet stud," he said. He promised me that he was going to triple or quadruple my vocabulary, starting with the parts of the rifle, each of which had a specific name. We would go from that simple exercise, he said, required of every Army recruit, to the nomenclature of all the bones, sinews, organs, tubes and wires in the human body, required of every student in medical school. This had been required of him as well, he said, during his Moscow apprenticeship.

  He asserted that there would be a spiritual lesson for me in my study of the simple rifle and then the bewilderingly complex human body, since it was the human body the rifle was meant to destroy.

  "Which represents good and which represents evil--" he asked me, "the rifle or the rubbery, jiggling, giggling bag of bones we call the body?"

  I said that the rifle was evil and the body was good.

  "But don't you know that this rifle was designed to be used by Americans defending their homes and honor against wicked enemies?" he said.

  So I said a lot depended on whose body and whose rifle we were talking about, that either one of them could be good or evil.

  "And who renders the final decision on that?" he said.

  "God?" I said.

  "I mean here on Earth," he said.

  "I don't know," I said.

  "Painters--and storytellers, including poets and playwrights and historians," he said. "They are the justices of the Supreme Court of Good and Evil, of which I am now a member, and to which you may belong someday!"

  How was that for delusions of moral grandeur!

  Yes, and now that I think about it: maybe the most admirable thing about the Abstract Expressionist painters, since so much senseless bloodshed had been caused by cockeyed history lessons, was their refusal to serve on such a court.

  Dan Gregory kept me around as long as he did, about three years, because I was servile and because he needed company, since he had alienated most of his famous friends with his humorlessness and rage during political arguments. When I said to Gregory that first night that I had heard the famous voice of W. C. Fields from the top of the spiral staircase, he replied that Fields would never be welcome in his house again, and neither would Al Jolson or any of the others who had drunk his liquor and eaten his food that night.

  "They simply do not, will not understand!" he said.

  "No, sir," I said.

  And he changed the subject to Marilee Kemp. He said she was clumsy to begin with, but had gotten drunk on top of that, and had fallen downstairs. I think he honestly believed that by then. He could easily have indicated which stairs she had fallen down, since I was standing right at the top of them. But he didn't. He felt it sufficed to let me know that she had fallen downstairs somewhere. What did it matter where?

  While he went on talking about Marilee, he never mentioned her name again. She simply became "women." "Women will never take the blame for anything," he said. "No matter what troubles they bring on themselves, they won't rest until they've found some man to blame for it. Right?"

  "Right," I said.

  "There's only one way they can take anything, and that's personally," he said. "You're not even talking about them, don't even know they're in the room, but they will still take anything you say as though it were aimed right at them. Ever notice that?"

  "Yes, sir," I said. It seemed that I had noticed that, now that he mentioned it.

  "Every so often they will get it into their heads that they understand what you're doing better than you do yourself," he said. "You've just got to throw them out, or they will screw up everything! They've got their jobs and we've got ours. We never try to horn in on them, but they'll horn in on us every chance they get. You want some good advice?"

  "Yes, sir," I said.

  "Never have anything to do with a woman who would rather be a man," he said. "That means she's never going to do what a woman is supposed to do--which leaves you stuck with both what a man's supposed to do and what a woman's supposed to do. You understand what I am saying?"

  "Yes, sir, I do," I said.

  He said that no woman could succeed in the arts or sciences or politics or industry, since her basic job was to have children and encourage men and take care of the housework. He invited me to test this statement by naming, if I could, ten women who had amounted to anything in any field but domesticity.

  I think I could name ten now, but back then all I could come up with was Saint Joan of Arc.

  "Jeanne d'Arc," he said, "was a hermaphrodite!"

  18

  I DON'T KNOW where this fits into my story, and probably it doesn't fit in at all. It is certainly the most trivial footnote imaginable in a history of Abstract Expressionism, b
ut here it is:

  The cook who had begrudgingly fed me my first supper in New York City, and who kept asking, "What next, what next?" died two weeks after I got there. That finally became what was going to happen next: she would drop dead in Turtle Bay Chemists, a drugstore two blocks away.

  But here was the thing: the undertaker discovered that she wasn't just a woman, and she wasn't just a man, either. She was somewhat both. She was a hermaphrodite.

  An even more trivial footnote: she would be promptly replaced as Dan Gregory's cook by Sam Wu, the laundry man.

  Marilee arrived home from the hospital in a wheelchair two days after my arrival. Dan Gregory did not come down to greet her. I don't think he would have stopped working if the house were on fire. He was like my father making cowboy boots or Terry Kitchen with his spray gun or Jackson Pollock dribbling paint on a canvas on the floor: when he was doing art, the whole rest of the world dropped away.

  And I would be like that, too, after the war, and it would wreck my first marriage and my determination to be a good father. I had a very hard time getting the hang of civilian life after the war, and then I discovered something as powerful and irresponsible as shooting up with heroin: if I started laying on just one color of paint to a huge canvas, I could make the whole world drop away.

  And Gregory's total concentration on his work for twelve or more hours a day meant that I, as his apprentice, had a very easy job indeed. He had nothing for me to do, and did not want to waste time inventing tasks. He had told me to make a painting of his studio, but once he himself got back to work, I think he forgot all about it.

  Did I make a painting of his studio which was virtually indistinguishable from a photograph? Yes, I did, yes I did.

  But I was the only person who gave a damn if I even tried to work such a miracle, or not. I was so unworthy of his attention, so far from being a genius, a Gregorian to his Beskudnikov, a threat or a son or whatever, that I might as well have been his cook, who had to be told what to prepare for dinner.