Bluebeard Read online

  I'm sorry, folks: that whimsical insert, that magic window, wasn't Terry's work, and couldn't have been Terry's work. It was done at Terry's insistence by a hack illustrator with the unlikely name of Rabo Karabekian.

  Terry Kitchen said that the only moments he ever experienced as non-epiphanies, when God left him alone, were those following sex and the two times he took heroin.

  22

  BULLETIN FROM THE PRESENT: Paul Slazinger has gone to Poland, of all places. According to The New York Times this morning, he was sent there for a week by the international writers' organization called "PEN"--as a part of a delegation to investigate the plight of his suffocated colleagues there.

  Perhaps the Poles will reciprocate, and investigate his plight in turn. Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

  Bulletin from the present: the widow Berman has installed an old-fashioned pool table dead center in my living room, having sent the furniture it displaced to Home Sweet Home Moving and Storage. This is a real elephant, so heavy that jack posts had to be put in the basement to keep it from winding up down there amid the cans of Sateen Dura-Luxe.

  I haven't played this game since my Army days, and never played it very well. But you should see Mrs. Berman clear the table of balls no matter where they are!

  "Where did you ever learn to shoot pool like that?" I asked her.

  She said that after her father committed suicide she dropped out of high school and, rather than be sexually promiscuous or become an alcoholic in Lackawanna, she spent ten hours a day shooting pool instead.

  I don't have to play with her. Nobody has to play with her, and I don't suppose anybody had to play with her in Lackawanna. But a funny thing will happen. She will suddenly lose her deadly accuracy, and have a fit of yawns and will scratch herself as though she had a fit of itching, too. Then she will go up to bed, and sometimes sleep until noon the next day.

  She is the moodiest woman I ever knew.

  And what of the broad hints I have given as to the secret of the potato barn? Won't she read them in this manuscript, and easily guess the rest? No.

  She keeps her promises, and she promised me when I began to write that, once I reached one hundred and fifty pages, if I ever reached one hundred and fifty pages, she would reward me with perfect privacy in this writing room.

  She said further that when I got this far, if I got that far, this book and I would have become so intimate that it would be indecent for her to intrude. And that is nice, I guess, to have earned through hard work certain privileges and marks of respect, except that I have to ask myself: "Who is she to reward or punish me, and what the hell is this: a nursery school or a prison camp?" I don't ask her that, because then she might take away all my privileges.

  Two dandified young German businessmen from Frankfurt came to see my wonderful collection yesterday afternoon. They were typical successful post-Nazi entrepreneurs, to whom history was a clean slate. They were so new, new, new. Like Dan Gregory, they spoke English with upper-class British accents, but asked early on if Circe and I understood any German. They wanted to know, it became evident, whether or not they could communicate frankly to each other in that language without being understood. Circe and I said that we did not, although she was fluent in Yiddish, and so understood quite a lot, and so did I, having heard so much of it as a prisoner of war.

  We were able to crack their code to this extent: they were only pretending interest in my pictures. They were really after my real estate. They had come seeking signs in me of failing health or intelligence, or domestic or financial distress, which might make it easy for them to diddle me out of my priceless beachfront, where they would be pleased to erect condominiums.

  They got precious little satisfaction. After they had departed in their Mercedes coupe, Circe, the child of a Jewish pants manufacturer, said to me, the child of an Armenian shoemaker, "We are the Indians now."

  They were West Germans, as I say, but they could just as easily have been fellow citizens of mine from right down the beach. And I wonder now if that isn't a secret ingredient in the attitudes of so many people here, citizens or not: that this is still a virgin continent, and that everybody else is an Indian who does not appreciate its value, or is at least too weak and ignorant to defend himself?

  The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn't have to be another country. It can be the past instead--the United States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks.

  This state of mind allows too many of us to He and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines?

  This state of mind explains a lot of American funeral customs, too. The message of so many obsequies here, if you think about it, is this: that the dead person has looted this alien continent, and is now returning to his or her real home with the gold of El Dorado.

  But back to 1936 again! Listen:

  Marilee's and my non-epiphany was soon over. We used it well. Each of us gripped the other's upper arms, and palpated what there was to palpate there, initiating, I suppose, an exploration from the very beginning of what sorts of devices we might be. There was warm, rubbery stuff over rods of some kind.

  But then we heard the big front door open and close downstairs. As Terry Kitchen once said of a postcoital experience of his own: "The epiphany came back, and everybody had to put on their clothes and run around again like chickens with their heads cut off."

  As Marilee and I were dressing, I whispered to her that I loved her with all my heart. What else was there to say?

  "You don't. You can't," she said. She was treating me like a stranger.

  "I will be as great an illustrator as he is," I said.

  "With some other woman," she said. "Not with me." Here we had made all this love, but she was acting as though I were a nobody trying to pick her up in a public place.

  "Did I do something wrong?" I said.

  "You didn't do anything right or wrong," she said, "and neither did I." She stopped dressing to look me straight in the eyes. I still had two. "This never happened." She resumed the making of her toilette.

  "Feel better?" she said.

  I told her that I certainly did.

  "So do I," she said, "but it won't last long."

  Talk about realism]

  I thought we had made a contract to pair off permanently. Many people used to think that about sexual intercourse. I thought, too, that Marilee might now bear my child. I did not know that she had been rendered sterile by an infection she picked up during an abortion in supposedly germ-free Switzerland. There was so much I didn't know about her, and which I wouldn't find out for fourteen years!

  "Where do you think we should go next?" I said.

  "Where do I think who should go next?" she said.

  "Us," I said.

  "You mean after we go leave this warm house forever, smiling bravely and holding hands?" she said. "There's an opera for you that'll break your heart."

  "Opera?" I said.

  "The beautiful, worldly mistress of a great painter twice her age seduces his apprentice, almost young enough to be her son," she said. "They are discovered. They are cast out into the world. She believes that her love and advice will make the boy a great painter, too, and they freeze to death."

  That is just about what would have happened, too.

  "You have to go, but I have to stay," she said. "I've got a little money saved up--enough to take care of you for a week or two. It's time you got out of here anyway. You were getting much too comfortable."

  "How could we ever part after what we just did?" I said.

  "The clocks stopped while we did it," she said, "and now they've started up again. It didn't count, so forg
et it."

  "How could I?" I said.

  "J already have," she said. "You're still a little boy, and I need a man to take care of me. Dan is a man."

  So I slunk to my room, confused and humiliated. I packed up my belongings. She did not see me out. I had no idea what room she had gone to, or what she might be doing there. Nobody saw me out.

  And I left that house forever as the sun went down on Saint Patrick's Day, 1936, without a backward glance at the Gorgon on the front door of Dan Gregory.

  I spent my first night on my own only a block away, at the Vanderbilt YMCA, but would not see or hear from her again for fourteen years. It seemed to me that she had dared me to become a great financial success, and then to come back and take her away from Dan Gregory. I fantasized about that as a real possibility for perhaps a month or two. Such things happened all the time in stories Dan Gregory was given to illustrate.

  She would not see me again until I was worthy of her. Dan Gregory was working on a new edition of Tales of King Arthur and His Knights when he got rid of me. Marilee had posed as Guinevere. I would bring her the Holy Grail.

  But the Great Depression soon made clear to me that I would never amount to anything. I couldn't even provide decent food and a bed for my worthless self, and was frequently a bum among bums in soup kitchens and shelters for the homeless. I improved myself in libraries while keeping warm, reading histories and novels and poems said to be great--and encyclopedias and dictionaries, and the latest self-help books about how to get ahead in the United States of America, how to learn from failures, how to make strangers like and trust you immediately, how to start your own business, how to sell anybody anything, how to put yourself into the hands of God and stop wasting so much time and precious energy worrying. How to eat right.

  I was certainly a child of Dan Gregory, and of the times, too, when I tried to make my vocabulary and familiarity with great issues and events and personalities throughout recorded time equal to those of graduates of great universities. My accent, moreover, was as synthetic as Gregory's, and so, by the way, was Marilee's. Marilee and I, a coal miner's daughter and an Armenian shoemaker's son, remember, had sense enough not to pretend to be upper-class British. We obscured our humble origins in vocal tones and inflections which had no name back then, as nearly as I can remember, but which are now known as "trans-Atlantic"--cultivated, pleasant to the ear, and neither British nor American. Marilee and I were brother and sister in that regard: we sounded the same.

  But when I roamed New York City, knowing so much and capable of speaking so nicely, and yet so lonely, and often hungry and cold, I learned the joke at the core of American self-improvement: knowledge was so much junk to be processed one way or another at great universities. The real treasure the great universities offered was a lifelong membership in a respected artificial extended family.

  My parents were born into biological families, and big ones, too, which were respected by Armenians in Turkey. I, born in America far from any other Armenians, save for my parents, eventually became a member of two artificial extended families which were reasonably respectable, although surely not the social equals of Harvard or Yale:

  The Officer Corps of the United States Army in time of war,

  the Abstract Expressionist school of painting after the war.

  23

  I COULD NOT GET WORK with any of the companies which had come to know me as Dan Gregory's messenger boy. He had told them, I imagine, although I have no proof of this, that I was self-serving, disloyal, untalented, and so on. True enough. Jobs were so scarce anyway, so why should they give one to anyone as unlike themselves as an Armenian? Let the Armenians take care of their own unemployed.

  And it was, in fact, an Armenian who came to my rescue while I was caricaturing willing sitters in Central Park--for the price of a cup of coffee and little more. He was neither a Turkish nor a Russian Armenian, but a Bulgarian Armenian, whose parents had taken him to Paris, France, in his infancy. He and they had become members of the lively and prosperous Armenian community in that city, then the Art Capital of the World. As I have said, my own parents and I would have become Parisians, too, had we not been diverted to San Ignacio, California, by the criminal Vartan Mamigonian. My savior's original name had been Marktich Kouyoumdjian, subsequently Frenchified to Marc Coulomb.

  The Coulombs, then as now, were giants in the tourist industry, with travel agencies all over the world, and orchestrators of tours to almost anywhere. When he struck up a conversation with me in Central Park, Marc Coulomb was only twenty-five, and had been sent from Paris to find an advertising agency to make his family's services better known in the U.S.A. He admired my facility with drawing materials, and said that, if I really wished to become an artist, I would have to come to Paris.

  There was an irony lying in wait in the distant future, of course: I would eventually become a member of that small group of painters which would make New York City and not Paris the Art Capital of the World.

  Purely on the basis of race prejudice, I think, one Armenian taking care of another, he bought me a suit, a shirt, a necktie, and a new pair of shoes, and took me to the advertising agency he liked best, which was Leidveld and Moore. He told them they could have the Coulomb account if they would hire me as an artist. Which they did.

  I never saw or heard from him again. But guess what? On this very morning, as I am thinking about Marc Coulomb hard for the first time in half a century, The New York Times carries his obituary. He was a hero of the French Resistance, they say, and was, at the time of his death, chairman of the board of Coulomb Freres et Cie, the most extensive travel organization in the world.

  What a coincidence! But that is all it is. One mustn't take such things too seriously.

  Bulletin from the present: Circe Berman has gone mad for dancing. She gets somebody, simply anybody of any age or station, to squire her to every public dance she hears about within thirty miles of here, many of them fund-raisers for volunteer fire departments. The other morning she came home at three in the morning wearing a fire hat.

  She is after me to take ballroom dancing lessons being offered at the Elks Lodge in East Quogue.

  I said to her: "I am not going to sacrifice my one remaining shred of dignity on the altar of Terpsichore."

  I experienced modest prosperity at Leidveld and Moore. It was there that I did my painting of the most beautiful ocean liner in the world, the Normandie. In the foreground was the most beautiful automobile in the world, the Cord. In the background was the most beautiful skyscraper in the world, the Chrysler Building. Getting out of the Cord was the most beautiful actress in the world, who was Madeleine Carroll. What a time to be alive!

  Improved diet and sleeping conditions did me the disservice of sending me one evening to the Art Students League with a portfolio under my arm. I wished to take lessons in how to be a serious painter, and presented myself and my work to a teacher named Nelson Bauerbeck, a representational painter, as were almost all of the painting teachers then. He was principally known as a portraitist, and his work can still be viewed in at least one place I know of--at New York University, my old alma mater. He did portraits of two of that institution's presidents before my time. He made them immortal, as only paintings can.

  There were about twelve students in the room and busy at their easels, all making pictures of the same nude model. I looked forward to joining them. They seemed to be a happy family, and I needed one. I was not a member of the family at Leidveld and Moore. There was resentment there about how I'd got my job.

  Bauerbeck was old to be teaching--about sixty-five, I'd guess. I knew from the head of the art department at the ad agency, who had studied under him, that he was a native of Cincinnati, Ohio, but had spent most of his adult life in Europe, as so many American painters used to do. He was so old that he had conversed, however briefly, with James Whistler and Henry James and Emile Zola and Paul Cezanne! He also claimed to have been a friend of Hitler in Vienna, when Hitler was a starvi
ng artist before the First World War.

  Old Bauerbeck must have himself been a starving artist when I met him. Otherwise, he would not have been teaching at the Art Students League at that advanced age. I have never been able to find out what finally became of him. Now you see him, now you don't.

  We did not become friends. He leafed through my portfolio while saying things like this, very quietly, thank God, so his students could not hear: "Oh, dear, dear, dear," and "My poor boy," and "Who did this to you--or did you do it to yourself?"

  I asked him what on Earth was wrong, and he said, "I'm not sure I can put it into words." He really did have to think hard about it. "This is going to sound very odd--" he said at last, "but, technically speaking, there's nothing you can't do. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

  "No," I said.

  "I'm not sure I do, either," he said. He screwed up his face, "I think--I think--it is somehow very useful, and maybe even essential, for a fine artist to have to somehow make his peace on the canvas with all the things he cannot do. That is what attracts us to serious paintings, I think: that shortfall, which we might call "personality," or maybe even "pain.""

  "I see," I said.

  He relaxed. "I think I do, too," he said. "It's something I've never had to articulate before. How interesting!"

  "I can't tell if you've accepted me as a student or not," I said.

  "No, I've rejected you," he said. "It wouldn't be fair to either one of us if I were to take you on."

  I was angry. "You've rejected me on the basis of some high-flown theory you just made up," I protested.

  "Oh, no, no, no," he said. "I rejected you before I thought of the theory."

  "On the basis of what?" I demanded.

  "On the basis of the very first picture in your portfolio," he said. "It told me, 'Here is a man without passion.' And I asked myself what I now ask you: 'Why should I teach him the language of painting, since there seems to be absolutely nothing which he is desperate to talk about?'"