Bluebeard

by Kurt Vonnegut

  After we had been measured for suits we went back down to the tavern for more food and drink and talk, talk, talk, we were joined by a seemingly rich and distinguished gentleman, about sixty years old. I had never seen him before, and neither had any of the others, as nearly as I could tell.

  "I hear you are painters," he said. "Do you mind if I just sit here and listen in?" He was between me and Pollock, and across the table from Kitchen.

  "Most of us are painters," I said. We weren't about to be rude to him. It was possible that he was an art collector, or maybe on the board of directors of an important museum. We knew what all the critics and dealers looked like. He was much too honest, obviously, to take part in either of those scruffy trades.

  "Most of you are painters," he echoed. "Aha! So the simplest thing would be for you to tell me who isn't one."

  Finkelstein and Slazinger so identified themselves.

  "Oh--guessed wrong," he said. He indicated Kitchen. "I wouldn't have thought he was a painter, either," he said, "despite his rough clothes. A musician maybe, or a lawyer or a professional athlete, maybe. A painter? He sure fooled me."

  He had to be a clairvoyant, I thought, to home in on the truth about Kitchen with such accuracy! Yes, and he kept his attention locked on Kitchen, as though he were reading his mind. Why would he be more fascinated by somebody who had yet to paint a single interesting picture, than by Pollock, whose work was causing such controversy, and who was sitting right next to him?

  He asked Kitchen if he had by any chance seen service in the war.

  Kitchen said that he had. He did not elaborate.

  "Did that have something to do with your decision to be a painter?" asked the old gentleman.

  "No," said Kitchen.

  Slazinger would say to me later that he thought that the war had embarrassed Kitchen about how privileged he had always been, easily mastering the piano, easily getting through the best schools, easily beating most people at almost any game, easily getting to be a lieutenant colonel in no time at all, and so on. "To teach himself something about real life," said Slazinger, "he picked one of the few fields where he could not help being a hopeless bungler."

  Kitchen said as much to his questioner. "Painting is my Mount Everest," he said. Mount Everest hadn't been climbed yet. That wouldn't happen until 1953, the same year Finkelstein would be buried and have his one-man show.

  The old gentleman sat back, seemingly much pleased by this answer.

  But then he got much too personal, in my opinion, asking Kitchen if he was independently wealthy, or if his family was supporting him while he made such an arduous climb. I knew that Kitchen would become a very rich man if he outlived his mother and father, and that his parents had refused to give him any money, in the hopes of forcing him to start practicing law or enter politics or take a job on Wall Street, where success was assured.

  I didn't think that was any of the old gentleman's business, and I wanted Kitchen to tell him so. But Kitchen told him all--and when he was done answering, his expression indicated that he was ready for another question, no matter what it might be.

  This was the next one: "You are married, of course?"

  "No," said Kitchen.

  "But you like women?" said the old gentleman.

  He was putting that question to a man who before the end of the war was one of the planet's greatest cocksmen.

  "At this point in my life, sir," said Kitchen, "I am a waste of time for women, and women are a waste of time for me."

  The old man stood. "I thank you for being so frank and polite with me," he said.

  "I try," said Kitchen.

  The old gentleman departed. We made guesses as to who and what he might have been. Finkelstein said, I remember, that whoever he was, his clothes had come from England.

  I said I was going to have to borrow or rent a car the next day--to get the house out here ready for my family. I also wanted to have another look at the potato barn I'd rented.

  Kitchen asked if he could come along, and I said, "Sure."

  And there was this spray rig waiting for him in Montauk. Talk about fate!

  Before we dropped off to sleep on our cots that night, I asked him if he had the least idea who the old gentleman who had questioned him so closely could have been.

  "I'll make a really wild guess," he said.

  "What is it?" I said.

  "I could be wrong, but I think that was my father," he said. "Looked like Dad, sounded like Dad, dressed like Dad, made wry jokes like Dad. I watched him like a hawk, Rabo, and I said to myself, 'Either this is a very clever imitator, or this is the man who fathered me.' You're smart, and you're my best and only friend. Tell me: if he was simply a good imitator of my father, what could his game have been?"

  32

  I WOUND UP RENTING a truck instead of a car for Kitchen's and my fateful foray out here. Talk about Fate: if I hadn't rented a truck, Kitchen might be practicing law now, since there is no way we could have fit the spray rig into a closed sedan, which is the kind of car I would have rented.

  Every so often, but not often enough, God knows, I would think of something which would make my wife and family a little less unhappy, and the truck was a case in point. The least I could do was get all the canvases out of our apartment, since they made poor Dorothy feel sick as a dog, even when she was well.

  "You're not going to put them in the new house, are you?" she said.

  That is what I had intended to do. I have never been famous for thinking far ahead. But I said, "No." I formulated a new scheme, which was to put them into the potato barn, but I didn't say so. I hadn't had the nerve to tell her I had rented a potato barn. But she'd found out about it someway. She would find out someway, too, that I had bought myself and Painters X, Y and Z and Kitchen tailor-made suits of the finest materials and workmanship the night before.

  "Put them in the potato barn," she said, "and bury them under potatoes. Potatoes we can always use."

  That truck should have been an armored car in a convoy of state police, considering what some of the paintings in there are worth today. I myself considered them valuable, but certainly not that valuable. So I could not bring myself to put them in the barn, which was then a musty place, having been home for so long for nothing but potatoes and the earth and bacteria and fungi which so loved to cling to them.

  So I rented a dry, clean space under lock and key at Home Sweet Home Moving and Storage out here instead. The rental over the years would absorb a major part of my income. Nor did I overcome my habit of helping painter pals in trouble with whatever cash I had or could lay my hands on, and accepting pictures in return. At least Dorothy did not have to look at the detritus of this habit. Every painting which settled a debt in full went straight from the needy painter's studio to Home Sweet Home.

  Her parting words to Kitchen and me when we at last got the pictures out of the apartment were these: "One thing I like about the Hamptons: every so often you see a sign that says 'Town Dump.'"

  If Kitchen had been a perfect Fred Jones to my Dan Gregory, he would have driven the truck. But he was very much the passenger, and I was the chauffeur. He had grown up with chauffeurs, so he didn't think twice when he got in on the passenger side.

  I talked about my marriage and the war and the Great Depression, and about how much older Kitchen and I both were, compared with the typical returning veteran. "I should have started a family and settled down years ago," I said. "But how could I have done that when I was the right age to do it? What women did I know anyway?"

  "All the returning veterans in the movies are our age or older," he said. That was true. In the movies you seldom saw the babies who had done most of the heavy fighting on the ground in the war.

  "Yes--" I said, "and most of the actors in the movies never even went to war. They came home to the wife and kids and swimming pool after every grueling day in front of the cameras, after firing off blank cartridges while men all around them were spitting catsup."

&nb
sp; "That's what the young people will think our war was fifty years from now," said Kitchen, "old men and blanks and catsup." So they would. So they do.

  "Because of the movies," he predicted, "nobody will believe that it was babies who fought the war."

  "Three years out of our lives," he said about the war.

  "You keep forgetting I was a regular," I said. "It was eight years out of mine. And there went my youth, and God, I still want it." Poor Dorothy thought she was marrying a mature, fatherly retired military gentleman. What she got instead was an impossibly self-centered and undisciplined jerk of nineteen or so!

  "I can't help it," I said. "My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat just keeps right on doing bad, dumb things."

  "Your what and your what?" he said.

  "My soul and my meat," I said.

  "They're separate?" he said.

  "I sure hope they are," I said. I laughed. "I would hate to be responsible for what my meat does."

  I told him, only half joking, about how I imagined the soul of each person, myself included, as being a sort of flexible neon tube inside. All the tube could do was receive news about what was happening with the meat, over which it had no control.

  "So when people I like do something terrible," I said, "I just flense them and forgive them."

  "Flense?" he said. "What's flense?"

  "It's what whalers used to do to whale carcasses when they got them on board," I said. "They would strip off the skin and blubber and meat right down to the skeleton. I do that in my head to people--get rid of all the meat so I can see nothing but their souls. Then I forgive them."

  "Where would you ever come across a word like flense?" he said.

  And I said: "In an edition of Moby Dick illustrated by Dan Gregory."

  He talked about his father, who is still alive, by the way, and who has just celebrated his hundredth birthday! Think of that.

  He adored his father. He also said that he would never want to compete with him, to try to beat him at anything. "I would hate that," he said.

  "Hate what?" I said.

  "To beat him," he said.

  He said that the poet Conrad Aiken had lectured at Yale when Kitchen was in law school there, and had said that sons of gifted men went into fields occupied by their fathers, but where their fathers were weak. Aiken's own father had been a great physician and politician and ladies' man, but had also fancied himself a poet. "His poetry was no damn good, so Aiken became a poet," said Kitchen. "I could never do such a thing to my old man."

  What he would do to his father six years later, in the front yard of Kitchen's shack about six miles from here, was take a shot at him with a pistol. Kitchen was drunk then, as he often was, and his father had come for the umpteenth time to beg him to get treatment for his alcoholism. It can never be proved, but that shot had to have been intended as a gesture.

  When Kitchen saw that he had actually gunned down his father, with a bullet in the shoulder, it turned out, nothing would do but that Kitchen put the pistol barrel in his own mouth and kill himself.

  It was an accident.

  It was on that fateful truck trip, too, that I got my first look at Edith Taft Fairbanks, who would be my second wife. I had negotiated the rental of the barn from her husband, who was an affable idler, who seemed a useless, harmless waster of life to me back then, but who would become the role model I kept in mind when he died and I became her husband.

  Prophetically, she was carrying a tamed raccoon in her arms. She was a magical tamer of almost any sort of animal, an overwhelmingly loving and uncritical nurturer of anything and everything that looked half alive. That's what she would do to me when I was living as a hermit in the barn and she needed a new husband: she tamed me with nature poems and good things to eat which she left outside my sliding doors. I'm sure she tamed her first husband, too, and thought of him lovingly and patronizingly as some kind of dumb animal.

  She never said what kind of animal she thought he was. I know what kind of animal she thought I was, because she came right out and said it to a female relative from Cincinnati at our wedding reception, when I was all dressed up in my Izzy Finkelstein suit: "I want you to meet my tamed raccoon."

  I will be buried in that suit, too. It says so in my will: "I am to be buried next to my wife Edith in Green River Cemetery in the dark blue suit whose label says: 'Made to order for Rabo Karabekian by Isadore Finkelstein.'" It wears and wears.

  Well--the execution of that will still lies in the future, but just about everything else has vanished into the past, including Circe Berman. She finished up her book and returned to Baltimore two weeks ago.

  On her last night here, she wanted me to take her dancing, and I again refused. I took her to supper at the American Hotel in Sag Harbor instead. Just another tourist trap nowadays, Sag Harbor used to be a whaling port. You can still see the mansions of the brave captains who sailed from there to the Pacific Ocean, around the tip of South America, and then came home millionaires.

  In the lobby of the hotel is a guest register opened to a date at the peak of the whale-killing industry, so disreputable nowadays: March 1, 1849. Back then, Circe's ancestors were in the Russian Empire and mine in the Turkish Empire, which would have made them enemies.

  We feasted on lobsters, and drank in moderation in order to become voluble. It is a bad thing to need a drink, everybody is saying now, and I in fact went without alcohol the whole time I was a hermit. But my feelings about Mrs. Berman on the eve of her departure were so contradictory that, without a drink, I might have eaten in wooden silence. But I certainly wasn't going to drive with a couple of drinks in me, and neither was she. It used to be almost fashionable to drive when drunk, but no more, no more.

  So I hired a boyfriend of Celeste's to drive us over there in his father's car, and then pick us up again.

  In the simplest terms: I was sorry that she was leaving, because she was exciting to have around. But she could also be too exciting, telling everybody exactly what to do. So I was also glad that she was going, since what I wanted most, with my own book so nearly finished, was peace and quiet for a change. To put it another way: we were acquaintances, despite our months together. We had not become great friends.

  That would change, however, once I had shown her what was in the potato barn.

  Yes, that's right: this determined widow from Baltimore, before she left, persuaded this old Armenian geezer to unlock the locks and turn on the floodlights in the potato barn.

  What did I get in exchange? I think we're really friends now.

  33

  WHEN WE GOT HOME from the American Hotel, the first thing she said was: "One thing you don't have to worry about: I'm not going to badger you about the keys to the potato barn."

  "Thank God!" I said.

  I think she was certain right then that, before the night was over, one way or another, she was damn well going to see what was in the potato barn.

  "I only want you to draw me a picture," she said.

  "Do what?" I said.

  "You're a very modest man--" she said, "to the point where anybody who believed you would think you were no good at anything."

  "Except camouflage," I said. "You're forgetting camouflage. I was awarded a Presidential Unit Citation, my platoon was so good at camouflage."

  "O.K.--camouflage," she said.

  "We were so good at camouflage," I said, "that half the things we hid from the enemy have to this very day never been seen again!"

  "And that's not true," she said.

  "We're having a celebration, so all sorts of things have been said which are not true," I said. "That's how to act at a party."

  "You want me to go home to Baltimore knowing a whole lot of things about you which are not true?" she said.

  "Everything that's true about me you should have learned before now, given your profound powers of investigation," I said. "This is just a party."

  "I still don't know whether you can really
draw or not," she said.

  "Don't worry about it," I said.

  "That's the bedrock of your life, to hear you tell it," she said. "That and camouflage. You were no good as a commercial artist, and you were no good as a serious artist, and you were no good as a husband or a father, and your great collection of paintings is an accident. But you keep coming back to one thing you're proud of: you could really draw."

  "It's true," I said. "I didn't realize that, but now that you mention it, it's true."

  "So prove it," she said.

  "It's a very small boast," I said. "I wasn't an Albrecht Durer. I could draw better than you or Slazinger or the cook--or Pollock or Terry Kitchen. I was born with this gift which certainly doesn't look like much when you compare me with all the far superior draughtsmen who've lived and died. I wowed the grade school and then the high school in San Ignacio, California. If I'd lived ten thousand years ago, I might have wowed the cave dwellers of Lascaux, France--whose standards for draughtsmanship must have been on about the same level as those of San Ignacio."

  "If your book is actually published," she said, "you're going to have to include at least one picture that proves you can draw. Readers will insist on that."

  "Poor souls," I said. "And the worst thing about getting as old as I am--"

  "You're not that old," she said.

  "Old enough!" I said. "And the worst thing is that you keep finding yourself in the middle of the same old conversations, no matter who you're talking to. Slazinger didn't think I could draw. My first wife didn't think I could draw. My second wife didn't care whether I could or not. I was just an old raccoon she brought in from the barn and turned into a house pet. She loved animals whether they could draw or not."

  "What did you say to your first wife when she bet you couldn't draw?" she said.

  "We had just moved out in the country where she didn't know a soul," I said. "There still wasn't heat in the house, and I was trying to keep us warm with fires in the three fireplaces--like my pioneer ancestors. And Dorothy was finally trying to catch up on art, reading up on it, since she had resigned herself to being stuck with an artist. She had never seen me draw--because not drawing and forgetting everything I knew about art, I thought, was the magic key to my becoming a serious painter.