Bluebeard (29 page)

We needed no further instructions from the canvas as to what to do, should we wish to complete a masterpiece. This we did.

Nor did I need instructions from the experienced older woman as to what to do.

Bull’s-eye and bull’s-eye and bull’s-eye again!

And it was so
retroactive!
This was something I had been doing all my life! It was so
prospective
, too! I would be doing one hell of a lot of this for the rest of my life.

And so I did. Except that it would never be that good again.

Never again would the canvas of life, so to speak, help me and a partner create a sexual masterpiece.

Rabo Karabekian, then, created at least one masterpiece as a lover, which was necessarily created in private and vanished from the Earth even more quickly than the paintings which made me a footnote in Art
History. Is there nothing I have done which will outlive me, other than the opprobrium of my first wife and sons and grandchildren?

Do I care?

Doesn’t everybody?

Poor me. Poor practically everybody, with so little durable good to leave behind!

After the war, when I told Terry Kitchen something about my three hours of ideal lovemaking with Marilee, and how contentedly adrift in the cosmos they made me feel, he said this: “You were experiencing a
non-epiphany.”

“A what?” I said.

“A concept of my own invention,” he said. This was back when he was still a talker instead of a painter, long before I bought him the spray rig. As far as that goes, I was nothing but a talker and a painters’ groupie. I was still going to become a businessman.

“The trouble with God isn’t that He so seldom makes Himself known to us,” he went on. “The trouble with God is exactly the opposite: He’s holding you and me and everybody else by the scruff of the neck practically
constantly.”

He said he had just come from an afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where so many of the paintings were about God’s giving instructions, to Adam and Eve and the Virgin Mary, and various saints in agony and so on. “These moments are very rare, if you can
believe the painters—but who was ever nitwit enough to believe a painter?” he said, and he ordered another double Scotch, I’m sure, for which I would pay. “Such moments are often called ‘epiphanies’ and I’m here to tell you they are as common as houseflies,” he said.

“I see,” I said. I think Pollock was there listening to all this, although he and Kitchen and I were not yet known as the “Three Musketeers.” He was a real painter, so he hardly talked at all. After Terry Kitchen became a real painter, he, too, hardly talked at all.

“‘Contentedly adrift in the cosmos,’ were you?” Kitchen said to me. “That is a perfect description of a non-epiphany, that rarest of moments, when God Almighty lets go of the scruff of your neck and lets you be human for a little while. How long did the feeling last?”

“Oh—maybe half an hour,” I said.

And he leaned back in his chair and he said with deep satisfaction: “And there you are.”

That could have been the same afternoon I rented studio space for the two of us in a loft owned by a photographer at the top of a building on Union Square. Studio space in Manhattan was dirt cheap back then. An artist could actually afford to live in New York City! Can you imagine that?

After we had rented the studio space, I said to him: “My wife will kill me, if she hears about this.”

“Just give her seven epiphanies a week,” he said,
“and she’ll be so grateful that she’ll let you get away with anything.”

“Easier said than done,” I said.

The same people who believe that Circe Berman’s Polly Madison books are destroying the fabric of American society, telling teenage girls that they can get pregnant if they’re not careful and so on, would surely consider Terry Kitchen’s concept of non-epiphanies blasphemous. But I can’t think of anybody who tried harder than he did to find worthwhile errands to run for God. He could have had brilliant careers in law or business or finance or politics. He was a magnificent pianist, and a great athlete, too. He might have stayed in the Army and soon become a general and maybe Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

When I met him, though, he had given all that up in order to be a painter, even though he couldn’t draw for sour apples, and had never had an art lesson in his life! “Something’s just got to be worth doing!” he said. “And painting is one of the few things I haven’t tried.”

A lot of people, I know, think that Terry could draw realistically, if he wanted to do so. But their only proof of that is a small patch in a painting that used to hang in my foyer here. He never gave the picture a title, but it is now generally known as
Magic Window.

Except for one little patch, that picture is a typical
Kitchen airbrush view of a brightly colored storm system as viewed from an orbiting satellite, or whatever you want to call it. But the little patch, if examined carefully, turns out to be an upside-down copy of John Singer Sargent’s full-length “Portrait of Madame X,” with her famous milk-white shoulders and ski-jump nose and so on.

I’m sorry, folks: that whimsical insert, that magic window, wasn’t Terry’s work, and
couldn’t
have been Terry’s work. It was done at Terry’s insistence by a hack illustrator with the unlikely name of Rabo Karabekian.

Terry Kitchen said that the only moments he ever experienced as non-epiphanies, when God left him alone, were those following sex and the two times he took heroin.

     
B
ULLETIN FROM THE PRESENT:
Paul Slazinger has gone to Poland, of all places. According to
The New York Times
this morning, he was sent there for a week by the international writers’ organization called “PEN”—as a part of a delegation to investigate the plight of his suffocated colleagues there.

Perhaps the Poles will reciprocate, and investigate his plight in turn. Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

Bulletin from the present: the widow Berman has installed an old-fashioned pool table dead center in my living room, having sent the furniture it displaced to Home Sweet Home Moving and Storage. This is a real elephant, so heavy that jack posts had to be put in the basement to keep it from winding up down there amid the cans of Sateen Dura-Luxe.

I haven’t played this game since my Army days, and never played it very well. But you should see Mrs. Berman clear the table of balls no matter where they are!

“Where did you ever learn to shoot pool like that?” I asked her.

She said that after her father committed suicide she dropped out of high school and, rather than be sexually promiscuous or become an alcoholic in Lackawanna, she spent ten hours a day shooting pool instead.

I don’t have to play with her. Nobody has to play with her, and I don’t suppose anybody had to play with her in Lackawanna. But a funny thing will happen. She will suddenly lose her deadly accuracy, and have a fit of yawns and will scratch herself as though she had a fit of itching, too. Then she will go up to bed, and sometimes sleep until noon the next day.