Bluebeard

by Kurt Vonnegut

  Hard times!

  So I signed up for a course in creative writing instead--taught three nights a week at City College by a fairly famous short-story writer named Martin Shoup. His stories were about black people, although he himself was white. Dan Gregory had illustrated at least a couple of them--with the customary delight and sympathy he felt for people he believed to be orangutans.

  Shoup said about my writing that I wasn't going to get very far until I became more enthusiastic about describing the looks of things--and particularly people's faces. He knew I could draw, so he found it odd that I wouldn't want to go on and on about the looks of things.

  "To anybody who can drawn," I said, "the idea of putting the appearance of anything into words is like trying to make a Thanksgiving dinner out of ball bearings and broken glass."

  "Then perhaps you had better resign from this course," he said. Which I did.

  I have no idea what finally became of Martin Shoup, either. Maybe he got killed in the war. Circe Berman never heard of him. Now you see him, now you don't.

  Bulletin from the present: Paul Slazinger, who himself teaches creative writing from time to time, has come back into our lives in a great big way! All is forgiven, apparently. He is sound asleep here now in an upstairs bedroom. When he wakes up, we shall see what we shall see.

  The Rescue Squad of the Springs Volunteer Fire Department brought him here at about midnight last night. He had awakened his neighbors in Springs by yelling for help out different windows of his house--maybe every window he owned before he was through. The Rescue Squad wanted to take him to the Veterans Administration hospital at Riverhead. It was well known that he was a veteran. It is well known that I am a veteran.

  But he calmed down, and he promised the rescuers that he would be all right if they brought him over here. So they rang my doorbell, and I received them in the foyer with its pictures of little girls on swings. Supported and restrained in the midst of the compassionate volunteers was a straitjacket containing the frantic meat of Slazinger. If I gave them permission, they were going to turn him loose as an experiment.

  Circe Berman had come down by then. We were both in our nightclothes. People do strange things when suddenly confronted by a person out of his or her mind. After taking one long, hard look at Slazinger, Circe turned her back on all of us and started straightening the pictures of the little girls on swings. So there was something this seemingly fearless woman was afraid of. She was petrified by insanity.

  Insane people are evidently Gorgons to her. If she looks at one, she turns to stone. There must be a story there.

  24

  SLAZINGER WAS A LAMB when they unswad-dled him. "Just put me to bed," he said. He named the room he wanted to be put in, the one on the second floor with Adolph Gottlieb's "Frozen Sounds Number Seven" over the fireplace and a bay window looking across the dunes to the ocean. He wanted that room and no other, and seemed to feel entitled to sleep there. So he must have been dreaming in detail of moving in with me for hours at least, and maybe even for decades. I was his insurance plan. Sooner or later, he would simply give up, go limp, and have himself delivered to the beach house of a fabulously well-to-do Armenian.

  He, incidentally, was from a very old American family. The first Slazinger on this continent was a Hessian grenadier serving as a mercenary with General John Burgoyne, the British general who was defeated by forces commanded in part by the rebel General Benedict Arnold, who would later desert to the British, at the second Battle of Freeman's Farm, north of Albany, two hundred years ago. Slazinger's ancestor was taken prisoner during the battle, and never went home, which was in Wiesbaden, Germany, where he had been the son of--guess what?

  A cobbler.

  "All God's chilluns got shoes."

  --OLD NEGRO SPIRITUAL

  I would have to say that the widow Berman was a lot scarier than Slazinger the night Slazinger arrived in a straitjacket. He was pretty much the same old Slazinger when the Rescue Squad turned him loose in the foyer. But Circe, almost catatonic, was a Circe I had never seen before.

  So I put Slazinger to bed unassisted. I didn't undress him. He didn't have that many clothes on anyway--just Jockey shorts and a T-shirt that said, STOP SHOREHAM. Shoreham is a nuclear generating plant not far away. If it didn't work the way it was supposed to, it might kill hundreds of thousands of people and render Long Island uninhabitable for centuries. A lot of people were opposed to it. A lot of people were for it. I myself think about it as little as possible.

  I will say this about it, although I have only seen it in photographs. Never have I contemplated architecture which said more pointedly to one and all: "I am from another planet. I have no way of caring what you are or what you want or what you do. Buster, you have been colonized."

  A good subtitle for this book might be this: Confessions of an Armenian Late Bloomer or Always the Last to Learn. Listen to this: I never even suspected that the widow Berman was a pill freak until the night Slazinger moved in.

  After I had put him to bed, with the Belgian linen sheets pulled right up to the nostrils of his big Hessian nose, I thought it might be a good idea to give him a sleeping pill. I didn't have any, but I hoped Mrs. Berman might have some. I had heard her come up the stairs very slowly and go into her bedroom.

  Her door was wide open, so I paid her a call. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, staring straight ahead. I asked her for a sleeping pill, and she told me to help myself in the bathroom. I hadn't entered that bathroom since she took up residence. In fact, I don't think I had been in it for years and years. There is a good chance that I had never been in that bathroom before.

  And, my God--I wish you could see the pills she had! They were apparently samples from drug salesmen which her late doctor husband had accumulated over decades! The medicine cabinet couldn't begin to hold them all! The marble counter-top around the washbasin was about five feet long and two feet wide, I would estimate, and an entire regiment of little bottles was deployed there. The scales dropped from my eyes! So much was suddenly explicable--the strange salutation when we first met on the beach, the impulsive redecoration of the foyer, the unbeatable pool game, the dancing madness, and on and on.

  And which patient needed me most now in the dead of night?

  Well--what could I do for a pill freak that she couldn't do better or worse for herself? So I went back to Slazinger empty handed, and we talked about his trip to Poland for a while. Why not? Any port in a storm.

  Here is the solution to the American drug problem suggested a couple of years back by the wife of our President: "Just say no."

  Maybe Mrs. Berman could say no to her pills, but poor Paul Slazinger had no control over the dangerous substances his own body was manufacturing and dumping in his bloodstream. He had no choice but to think all kinds of crazy things. And I listened to him rave on awhile about how well he could write, if only he were in hiding or in prison in Poland, and how the Polly Madison Books were the greatest works of literature since Don Quixote.

  He did get off one pretty good crack about her, but I don't think it was meant to be a crack, since he was so rapt when he said it. He called her "the Homer of the bubblegum crowd."

  And let's just get it out of the way right here and now about the merits of the Polly Madison books. To settle this question in my own mind, without having to actually read them, I have just solicited by telephone the opinions of a bookseller and a librarian in East Hampton, and also the widows of a couple of the old Abstract Expressionist gang who have teenage grandchildren now.

  They all said about the same thing, boiling down to this: "Useful, frank, and intelligent, but as literature hardly more than workmanlike."

  So there it is. If Paul Slazinger wants to keep out of the nuthouse, it certainly isn't going to help his case if he says he spent this past summer reading all the Polly Madison Books.

  It won't help his case much, either, that when he was a mere stripling he lay face down on a Japanese hand grenade, and has been
in and out of laughing academies ever since. He was seemingly born not only with a gift for language, but with a particularly nasty clock which makes him go crazy every three years or so. Beware of gods bearing gifts!

  Before he went to sleep the other night, he said that he could not help being what he was, for good or ill, that he was "that sort of molecule."

  "Until the Great Atom Smasher comes to get me, Rabo," he said, "this is the kind of molecule I have to be."

  "And what is literature, Rabo," he said, "but an insider's newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the Universe but a few molecules who have the disease called 'thought.'"

  "It's all so clear to me now," he said. "I understand everything."

  "That's what you said the last time," I reminded him.

  "Well--it's clear to me again," he said. "I was put on Earth with only two missions: to get the Polly Madison Books the recognition they deserve as great literature, and to publish my Theory of Revolution."

  "O.K.," I said.

  "Does that sound crazy?" he said.

  "Yes," I said.

  "Good," he said. "Two monuments I must build! One to her and one to me. A thousand years from now her books will still be read and people will still be discussing Slazinger's Theory of Revolution."

  "That's nice to think about," I said.

  He became foxy. "I never told you my theory, did I?" he said.

  "No," I said.

  He tapped his temple with his fingertips. "That's because I've kept it locked up here all these years in this potato barn," he said. "You're not the only old man, Rabo, who has saved the best for last."

  "What do you know about the potato barn?" I said.

  "Nothing--word of honor: nothing. But why does an old man lock up anything so tight, so tight, unless he's saving the best for last?" he said. "It takes a molecule to know a molecule."

  "What's in my barn is not the best and is not the worst, although it wouldn't have to be very good to be the best I ever did, and it would have to be pretty awful to be the worst," I said. "You want to know what's in there?"

  "Sure, if you want to tell me," he said.

  "It's the emptiest and yet the fullest of all human messages," I said.

  "Which is?" he said.

  "'Good-bye,'" I said.

  House party!

  And who prepares the meals and makes the beds for these increasingly fascinating guests of mine?

  The indispensable Allison White! Thank goodness Mrs. Berman talked her into staying!

  And while Mrs. Berman, who says she is nine tenths of the way through her latest epic, can be expected to return to Baltimore in the near future, Allison White will not leave me high and dry. For one thing, the stock market crash two weeks ago has reduced the demand for domestic help out this way. For another, she is pregnant again, and determined to carry the fetus to term. So she has begged permission to stay on with Celeste for the winter at least, and I have told her: "The more the merrier."

  Perhaps I should have scattered milestones along the route this book has taken, saying, "It is now the Fourth of July," and "They say this is the coolest August on record, and may have something to do with the disappearance of ozone over the North Pole," and so on. But I had no idea that this was going to be a diary as well as an autobiography.

  Let me say now that Labor Day was two weeks ago, just like the stock-market crash. So zingo! There goes prosperity! And zingo! There goes another summertime!

  Celeste and her friends are back in school, and she asked me this morning what I knew about the Universe. She has to write a theme about it.

  "Why ask me?" I said.

  "You read The New York Times every day," she said.

  So I told her that the Universe began as an eleven-pound strawberry which exploded at seven minutes past midnight three trillion years ago.

  "I'm serious!" she said.

  "All I can tell you is what I read in The New York Times," I said.

  Paul Slazinger has had all his clothes and writing materials brought here. He is working on his first volume of nonfiction, to which he has given this title: The Only Way to Have a Successful Revolution in Any Field of Human Activity.

  For what it is worth: Slazinger claims to have learned from history that most people cannot open their minds to new ideas unless a mind-opening team with a peculiar membership goes to work on them. Otherwise, life will go on exactly as before, no matter how painful, unrealistic, unjust, ludicrous, or downright dumb that life may be.

  The team must consist of three sorts of specialists, he says. Otherwise, the revolution, whether in politics or the arts or the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail.

  The rarest of these specialists, he says, is an authentic genius--a person capable of having seemingly good ideas not in general circulation. "A genius working alone," he says, "is invariably ignored as a lunatic."

  The second sort of specialist is a lot easier to find: a highly intelligent citizen in good standing in his or her community, who understands and admires the fresh ideas of the genius, and who testifies that the genius is far from mad. "A person like that working alone," says Slazinger, "can only yearn out loud for changes, but fail to say what their shapes should be."

  The third sort of specialist is a person who can explain anything, no matter how complicated, to the satisfaction of most people, no matter how stupid or pigheaded they may be. "He will say almost anything in order to be interesting and exciting," says Slazinger. "Working alone, depending solely on his own shallow ideas, he would be regarded as being as full of shit as a Christmas turkey."

  Slazinger, high as a kite, says that every successful revolution, including Abstract Expressionism, the one I took part in, had that cast of characters at the top--Pollock being the genius in our case, Lenin being the one in Russia's, Christ being the one in Christianity's.

  He says that if you can't get a cast like that together, you can forget changing anything in a great big way.

  Just think! This one house by the seaside, so empty and dead only a few months ago, is now giving birth to a book about how to revolt successfully, a book about how poor girls feel about rich boys, and the memoirs of a painter whose pictures all came unstuck from canvas.

  And we are expecting a baby, too!

  I look out my window and see a simple man astride a tractor which drags a madly chattering gang of mowers across my lawns. I know little more about him than his name is Franklin Cooley, and that he drives an old, babyshit-brown Cadillac Coupe de Ville, and has six kids. I don't even know if Mr. Cooley can read and write. At least forty million Americans can't read and write, according to this morning's New York Times. That is six times as many illiterates as there are people of Armenian descent anywhere! So many of them and so few of us!

  Does Franklin Cooley, that poor, dumb bastard with six kids, his ears filled with the clashing gibberish of the mowers, have the least suspicion that earthshaking work is going on in here?

  Yes, and guess what else The New York Times said this morning? Geneticists have incontrovertible evidence that men and women were once separate races, men evolving in Asia and women evolving in Africa. It was simply a coincidence that they were interfertile when they met.

  The clitoris, so goes the speculation in the paper, is the last vestige of the inseminating organ of a conquered, enslaved, trivialized and finally emasculated race of weaker, but not necessarily dumber, anthropoids!

  Cancel my subscription!

  25

  BACK TO THE GREAT DEPRESSION!

  To make a long story short: Germany invaded Austria and then Czechoslovakia and then Poland and then France, and I was a pipsqueak casualty in faraway New York City. Coulomb Freres et Cie was out of business, so I lost my job at the agency--not that long after my father's Moslem obsequies. So I joined what was still a peacetime United States Army, and scored high on their classification test. The Great Depression was as discouraging as ever, and the Army was still a very little family
in this country, so I was lucky to be accepted. The recruiting sergeant on Times Square, I remember, had indicated that I might be a more attractive relative in prospect if I were to have my name legally changed to something more American.

  I even remember his helpful suggestion: that I become "Robert King." Just think: somebody might now be trespassing on my private beach and gazing in awe at this mansion, and wondering who could be rich enough to live this well, and the answer could so easily have been this: "Robert King."

  But the Army adopted me as Rabo Karabekian--as I was soon to discover, for this reason: Major General Daniel Whitehall, then the commander of the combat troops of the Corps of Engineers, wanted an oil painting of himself in full uniform, and believed that somebody with a foreign-sounding name could do the best job. As an Army regular, of course, I would have to paint him for free. And this was a man ravenous for immortality. He was going to be retired in six months, by reason of failing kidneys, having barely missed service in two world wars.

  God only knows what became of the portrait I did of him--after hours during basic training. I used the most expensive materials, which he was more than glad to buy for me. There is one painting of mine which might actually outlive the "Mona Lisa"! If I had realized that at the time I might have given him a puzzling half-smile, whose meaning only I knew for certain: he had become a general, but had missed the two big wars of his lifetime.

  Another painting of mine which just might outlive the "Mona Lisa," for better or for worse, is the gigantic son of a bitch out in the potato barn.

  So much I only now realize! When I did the portrait of General Whitehall in a mansion nearly as grand as this one, which was the property of the Army, I was stereotypically Armenian! Welcome home to my true nature! I was a scrawny recruit and he was a Pasha weighing more than two hundred pounds, who could squash me like an insect anytime he pleased.