Bluebeard (25 page)

Maybe so.

Anyway: she had to send for me, and I behaved with formality. I did not know that Gregory had almost killed her because of the art materials she had sent to me. If I had known that, I might still have been very
formal. One thing, surely, which prevented my being effusive, was my sense of my own homeliness and powerlessness and virginity. I was unworthy of her, since she was as beautiful as Madeleine Carroll, the most beautiful of all movie stars.

She was cool and stiff with me, too, I have to say, possibly answering formality with formality. There was probably this factor, too: she wanted to make it clear to me, to Fred, to Gregory, to the hermaphrodite cook, to everybody, that she had not caused me to be brought all the way from the West Coast for purposes of hanky-panky.

And if only I could get back there in a time machine, what incredible fortune I could tell for her:

“You will be as beautiful as you are now, but much, much wiser, when you and I are reunited in Florence, Italy, after World War Two. What a war you will have had!

“You and Fred and Gregory will have moved to Italy, and Fred and Gregory will have been killed in the Battle of Sidi Barrani—in Egypt. You will have then won the heart of Mussolini’s minister of culture, Bruno, the Oxford-educated Count Portomaggiore, one of Italy’s largest landowners. He will also have been head of the British spy apparatus in Italy all through the war.”

When I visited her in her palace after the war, incidentally, she showed me a painting given to her by the mayor of Florence. It depicted the death of her late
husband before a Fascist firing squad near the end of the war.

The painting was the sort of commercial kitsch Dan Gregory used to do, and of which I myself was and remain capable.

Her sense of her place in the world back in 1933, with the Great Depression going on, revealed itself, I think, in a conversation we had about
A Doll’s House
, the play by Henrik Ibsen. A new reader’s edition of that play had just come out, with illustrations by Dan Gregory, so we both read it and then discussed it afterwards.

Gregory’s most compelling illustration showed the very end of the play, with the leading character, Nora, going out the front door of her comfortable house, leaving her middle-class husband and children and servants behind, declaring that she had to discover her own identity out in the real world before she could be a strong mother and wife.

That is how the play
ends.
Nora isn’t going to allow herself to be patronized for being as uninformed and helpless as a child anymore.

And Marilee said to me, “That’s where the play
begins
as far as I’m concerned. We never find out how she survived. What kind of job could a woman get back then? Nora didn’t have any skills or education. She didn’t even have money for food and a place to stay.”

That was precisely Marilee’s situation, too, of course. There was nothing waiting for her outside the door of Gregory’s very comfortable dwelling except hunger and humiliation, no matter how meanly he might treat her.

A few days later, she told me that she had solved the problem. “That ending is a
fake!”
she said, delighted with herself. “Ibsen just tacked it on so the audience could go home
happy.
He didn’t have the nerve to tell what really happened, what the whole rest of the play says
has
to happen.”

“What
has
to happen?” I said.

“She has to commit
suicide”
said Marilee. “And I mean
right
away—in front of a streetcar or something before the curtain comes down.
That’s
the play. Nobody’s ever seen it, but
that’s
the play!”

I have had quite a few friends commit suicide, but was never able to see the dramatic necessity for it that Marilee saw in Ibsen’s play. That I can’t see that necessity is probably yet another mark of my shallowness as a participant in a life of serious art.

These are just my
painter
friends who killed themselves, all with considerable artistic successes behind them or soon to come:

Arshile Gorky hanged himself in 1948. Jackson Pollock, while drunk, drove his car into a tree along a
deserted road in 1956. That was right before my first wife and kids walked out on me. Three weeks later, Terry Kitchen shot himself through the roof of his mouth with a pistol.

Back when we all lived in New York City, Pollock and Kitchen and I, heavy drinkers all, were known in the Cedar Tavern as the “Three Musketeers.”

Trivia question: How many of the Three Musketeers are alive today? Answer: me.

Yes, and Mark Rothko, with enough sleeping pills in his medicine cabinet to kill an elephant, slashed himself to death with a knife in 1970.

What conclusion can I draw from such grisly demonstrations of terminal discontent? Only this: some people are a lot harder than others, with Marilee and me typifying those others, to satisfy.

Marilee said this about Nora in
A Doll’s House:
“She should have stayed home and made the best of things.”

     
B
ELIEF IS NEARLY
the whole of the Universe, whether based on truth or not, and I believed back then that sperm, if not ejaculated, was reprocessed by healthy males into substances which made them athletic, merry, brave and creative. Dan Gregory believed this, too, and so did my father, and so did the United States Army and the Boy Scouts of America and Ernest Hemingway. So I cultivated erotic fantasies about making love to Marilee, and behaved as though we were courting sometimes, but only in order to generate more sperm which could be converted into the beneficial chemicals.

I used to shuffle my feet for a long time on a carpet, and then give Marilee an electric shock with my fingertips when she wasn’t expecting it—on the back of her neck or her cheek or a hand. How is that for pornography?

I also got her to sneak off with me and do something which would have made Gregory furious, if he had found out about it, which was to go to the Museum of Modern Art.

But she certainly wasn’t about to promote me erotically above the rank of pest and playmate. Not only did she love Gregory, but he was also making it very easy for both of us to get through the Great Depression. First things first.

Meanwhile, though, we were innocently exposing ourselves to a master seducer against whose blandishments we were defenseless. It was too late for either of us to turn back by the time we realized how deeply embroiled we had let ourselves become.

Want to guess who or what it was?

It was the Museum of Modern Art.

The theory that sperm, if unspent, was converted into cosmic vitamins seemed validated by my own performances. Running errands for Gregory, I became as cunning as a sewer rat about the fastest ways to get from anywhere to anywhere on the island of Manhattan. I quintupled my vocabulary, learning the names and functions of every important part of every sort of organism and artifact. My most thrilling accomplishment, however, was this: I finished a meticulously accurate painting of Gregory’s studio in only six months! The bone was bone, the fur was fur, the hair was hair, the dust was dust, the soot was soot, the wool was wool, the cotton was cotton, the walnut was walnut, the oak was oak, the horsehide was horsehide, the cowhide was cowhide, the iron was iron, the steel was steel, the old was old and the new was new.

Yes, and the water dripping from the skylight in my painting was not only the wettest water you ever saw: in each droplet, if you looked at it through a magnifying glass, there was the whole damned studio! Not bad! Not bad!