Bluebeard (26 page)

An idea has just come to me from nowhere, to wit: Might not the ancient and nearly universal belief that sperm could be metabolized into noble actions have been the inspiration for Einstein’s very similar formula: “E equals MC squared”?

“Not bad, not bad,” said Dan Gregory of my painting, and I imagined his feeling like Robinson Crusoe on the occasion of Crusoe’s understanding that he no longer had his little island all to himself. There was now
me
to reckon with.

But then he said, “However,
not bad
is another term for
disappointing
or worse, wouldn’t you say?”

Before I could frame a reply, he had put the picture atop the glowing coals in the fireplace with the skulls on its mantelpiece. Six months’ painstaking work went up the flue in a moment.

I managed to ask chokingly, perfectly aghast, “What was the
matter
with it?”

“No
soul,”
he said complacently.

So there I was in the thrall of the new Imperial engraver Beskudnikov!

I knew what he was complaining about, and the complaint wasn’t laughable, coming from him. His own pictures were vibrant with the full spectrum of his own loves, hates and neutralities, as dated as that spectrum might seem today. If I were to visit that private museum in Lubbock, Texas, where so many of his works are on permanent display, the pictures would create for me a sort of hologram of Dan Gregory. I could pass my hand through it, but it would be Dan Gregory in three dimensions all the same. He lives!

If I, on the other hand, were to die, God forbid, and if some magician were to recover every painting of mine, from the one Gregory incinerated to the last one I will ever do, and if these were to be hung in a great domed rotunda so as to concentrate the soul in each one at the same focal point, and if my own mother and the women who swore they loved me, which would be Marilee and Dorothy and Edith, were to stand for hours at that focal point, along with the best friend I ever had, who was Terry Kitchen, not one of them would find any reason to think about me except randomly. There would not be a trace of their dear departed Rabo Karabekian, or of spiritual energy of any sort, at the focal point!

What an experiment!

Oh, I know: I bad-mouthed Gregory’s works a while back, saying he was a taxidermist, and that his pictures were always about a single moment rather than the flow of life, and so on. But he was sure a better painter than I could ever hope to be. Nobody could put more of the excitement of a single moment into the eyes of stuffed animals, so to speak, than Dan Gregory.

Circe Berman has just asked me how to tell a good picture from a bad one.

I said that the best answer I had ever heard to that question, although imperfect, came from a painter named Syd Solomon, a man about my age who summers not far from here. I overheard him say it to a very pretty girl at a cocktail party maybe fifteen years ago. She was so wide-eyed and on tippy-toe! She sure wanted to learn all about art from him.

“How can you tell a good painting from a bad one?” he said. This is the son of a Hungarian horse trainer. He has a magnificent handlebar mustache.

“All you have to do, my dear,” he said, “is look at a million paintings, and then you can never be mistaken.”

It’s true! It’s true!

The present again:

I must tell what happened here yesterday afternoon, when I received the first visitors to my collection
since the foyer was, to use the decorator’s term, “redone.” A young man from the State Department escorted three writers from the Soviet Union, one from Tallin, Estonia, where Mrs. Berman’s ancestors came from, after the Garden of Eden, of course, and two from Moscow, Dan Gregory’s old hometown. Small world. They spoke no English, but their guide was an able interpreter.

They made no comment on the foyer when they came in, and proved to be sophisticated and appreciative with respect to Abstract Expressionism, quite a contrast with many other guests from the USSR. As they were leaving, though, they had to ask me why I had such trashy pictures in the foyer.

So I gave them Mrs. Berman’s lecture on the horrors which awaited these children, bringing them close to tears. They were terribly embarrassed. They apologized effusively for not understanding the true import of the chromos, and said that, now that I had explained them, they were unanimous in agreeing that these were the most important pictures in the house. And then they went from picture to picture, bewailing all the pain each girl would go through. Most of this wasn’t translated, but I gathered that they were predicting cancer and war and so on.

I was quite a hit, and was hugged and hugged.

Never before had visitors bid me farewell so ardently! Usually they can hardly think of anything to say.

And they called something to me from the driveway,
grinning affectionately and shaking their heads. So I asked the man from the State Department what they had said, and he translated: “No more war, no more war.

     
B
ACK TO THE PAST:

When Dan Gregory burned up my painting, why didn’t I do to him what he had done to Beskudnikov? Why didn’t I mock him and walk out and find a better job? For one thing, I had learned a lot about the commercial art world by then, and knew that artists like me were a dime a dozen and all starving to death.

Consider all I had to lose: a room of my own, three square meals a day, entertaining errands to run all over town, and lots of playtime with the beautiful Marilee.

What a fool I would have been to let self-respect interfere with my happiness!

After the hermaphroditic cook died, incidentally, Sam Wu, the laundryman, asked for the job and got it. He was a wonderful cook of good, honest American food as well as Chinese delicacies, and Gregory continued to use him as a model for the sinister master criminal Fu Manchu.

Back to the present:

Circe Berman said to me at lunch today that I ought to try painting again, since it used to give me such pleasure.

My dear wife Edith made the same suggestion one time, and I told Mrs. Berman what I told her: “I have had all I can stand of not taking myself seriously.”

She asked me what had been the most pleasing thing about my professional life when I was a full-time painter—having my first one-man show, getting a lot of money for a picture, the comradeship with fellow painters, being praised by a critic, or what?

“We used to talk a lot about that in the old days,” I said. “There was general agreement that if we were put into individual capsules with our art materials, and fired out into different parts of outer space, we would still have everything we loved about painting, which was the opportunity to lay on paint.”

I asked her in turn what the high point was for writers—getting great reviews, or a terrific advance, or selling a book to the movies, or seeing somebody reading your book, or what?

She said that she, too, could find happiness in a capsule in outer space, provided that she had a finished, proofread manuscript by her in there, along with somebody from her publishing house.