Bluebeard (15 page)

I have since tried out this human-beings-as-nothing-but-radio-receivers theory on Paul Slazinger, and he toyed with it some. “So Green River Cemetery is full of busted radios,” he mused, “and the transmitters they were tuned to still go on and on.”

“That’s the theory,” I said.

He said that all he’d been able to receive in his own head for the past twenty years was static and what sounded like weather reports in some foreign language he’d never heard before. He said, too, that toward the end of his marriage to Barbira Mencken, the actress, she acted “as though she was wearing headphones and listening to the
1812 Overture
in stereo. That’s when she was becoming a real actress, and not just another pretty girl onstage that everybody liked a lot. She wasn’t even ‘Barbara’ anymore. All of a sudden she was ‘Bar-beer-ah!’”

He said that the first he heard of the name change was during the divorce proceedings, when her lawyer referred to her as “Barbira,” and spelled it for the court stenographer.

Out in the courthouse corridor afterwards, Slazinger asked her: “Whatever happened to Barbara?”

She said Barbara was dead!

So Slazinger said to her: “Then what on Earth did we waste all this money on lawyers for?”

I said that I had seen the same sort of thing happen to Terry Kitchen the first time he played with a spray rig, shooting bursts of red automobile paint at an old piece of beaverboard he’d leaned against the potato barn. All of a sudden, he, too, was like somebody listening through headphones to a perfectly wonderful radio station I couldn’t hear.

Red was the only color he had to play with. We’d gotten two cans of the red paint along with the spray rig, which we’d bought from an automobile repair shop in Montauk a couple of hours before. “Just
look
at it! Just
look
at it!” he’d say, after every burst.

“He’d just about given up on being a painter, and was going into law practice with his father before we got that spray rig,” I said.

“Barbira was just about to give up being an actress and have a baby instead,” said Slazinger. “And then she got the part of Tennessee Williams’s sister in
The Glass Menagerie.”

Actually, now that I think back: Terry Kitchen went through a radical personality change the moment he saw the spray rig for sale, and not when he fired those first bursts of red at the beaverboard. I happened to spot the rig, and said that it was probably war surplus, since it
was identical with rigs I had used in the Army for camouflage.

“Buy it for me,” he said.

“What for?” I said.

“Buy it for me,” he said again. He had to have it, and he wouldn’t even have known what it was if I hadn’t told him.

He never had any money, although he was from a very rich old family, and the only money I had was supposed to go for a crib and a youth bed for the house I’d bought in Springs. I was in the process of moving my family, much against their will, from the city to the country.

“Buy it for me,” he said again.

And I said, “O.K., take it easy. O.K., O.K.”

And now, let us hop into our trusty old time machine, and go back to 1932 again:

Was I angry to be stood up at Grand Central Station? Not a bit. As long as I believed Dan Gregory to be the greatest artist alive, he could do no wrong. And before I was done with him and he with me, I would have to forgive him for a lot worse things than not meeting my train.

What kept him from coming anywhere near to greatness, although no more marvelous technician ever lived? I have thought hard about this, and any answer I
give refers to me, too. I was the best technician by far among the Abstract Expressionists, but I never amounted to a hill of beans, either, and couldn’t have—and I am not talking about my fiascoes with Sateen Dura-Luxe. I had painted plenty of pictures before Sateen Dura-Luxe, and quite a few afterwards, but they were no damned good.

But let’s forget me for the moment, and focus on the works of Gregory. They were truthful about material things, but they lied about time. He celebrated moments, anything from a child’s first meeting with a department store Santa Claus to the victory of a gladiator at the Circus Maximus, from the driving of the golden spike which completed a transcontinental railroad to a man’s going on his knees to ask a woman to marry him. But he lacked the guts or the wisdom, or maybe just the talent, to indicate somehow that time was liquid, that one moment was no more important than any other, and that all moments quickly run away.

Let me put it another way: Dan Gregory was a taxidermist. He stuffed and mounted and varnished and mothproofed supposedly great moments, all of which turn out to be depressing dust-catchers, like a moosehead bought at a country auction or a sailfish on the wall of a dentist’s waiting room.

Clear?

Let me put it yet another way: life, by definition, is never still. Where is it going? From birth to death, with no stops on the way. Even a picture of a bowl of pears on a checkered tablecloth is liquid, if laid on canvas by
the brush of a master. Yes, and by some miracle I was surely never able to achieve as a painter, nor was Dan Gregory, but which was achieved by the best of the Abstract Expressionists, in the paintings which have greatness birth and death are always there.

Birth and death were even on that old piece of beaverboard Terry Kitchen sprayed at seeming random so long ago. I don’t know how he got them in there, and neither did he.

I sigh. “Ah, me,” says old Rabo Karabekian.

     
B
ACK IN
1933:

I told a policeman in Grand Central Station Dan Gregory’s address. He said it was only eight blocks away, and that I couldn’t get lost, since that part of the city was as simple as a checkerboard. The Great Depression was going on, so that the station and the streets teemed with homeless people, just as they do today. The newspapers were full of stories of worker layoffs and farm foreclosures and bank failures, just as they are today. All that has changed, in my opinion, is that, thanks to television, we can
hide a
Great Depression. We may even be hiding a Third World War.

So it was an easy walk, and I soon found myself standing in front of a noble oak door which my new master had used on the cover of the Christmas issue of
Liberty
magazine. The massive iron hinges were rusty. Nobody could counterfeit rust and rust-stained oak like Dan Gregory. The knocker was in the shape of a Gorgon’s head, with intertwined asps forming her necklace and hair.

If you looked directly at a Gorgon, supposedly, you were turned to stone. I told that today to the kids around my swimming pool. They had never heard of a Gorgon. I don’t think they’ve heard of anything that wasn’t on TV less than a week ago.

On the
Liberty
cover, as in real life, the lines in the Gorgon’s malevolent face and the creases between the writhing asps were infected with verdigris. Nobody could counterfeit verdigris like Dan Gregory. There was a holly wreath around the knocker on the cover, which had been taken down by the time I got there. Some of the leaves had been brown around the edges or spotted. Nobody could counterfeit plant diseases like Dan Gregory.

So I lifted the Gorgon’s heavy necklace and let it fall. The
boom
reverberated in an entrance hall whose chandelier and spiral staircase would also be old stuff to me. I had seen them in an illustration of a story about a fabulously rich girl who fell in love with her family’s chauffeur: in
Collier’s
, I believe.

The face of the man who answered my
boom
was also well known to me, if not his name, since he had been a model for many of Gregory’s pictures—including one about a rich girl and her chauffeur. He had been the chauffeur, who in the story would save the girl’s father’s business after everybody but the girl scorned him as being nothing but a chauffeur. That story, incidentally, was made into the movie
You’re Fired
, the second movie
to star sound as well as images. The first one was
The Jazz Singer
, starring Al Jolson, who was a friend of Dan Gregory until they had a falling out about Mussolini during my first night there.