Bluebeard (30 page)

She is the moodiest woman I ever knew.

And what of the broad hints I have given as to the secret of the potato barn? Won’t she read them in this manuscript, and easily guess the rest? No.

She keeps her promises, and she promised me when I began to write that, once I reached one hundred and fifty pages, if I ever reached one hundred and fifty pages, she would reward me with perfect privacy in this writing room.

She said further that when I got this far, if I got that far, this book and I would have become so intimate
that it would be indecent for her to intrude. And that is nice, I guess, to have earned through hard work certain privileges and marks of respect, except that I have to ask myself: “Who is she to reward or punish me, and what the hell is this: a nursery school or a prison camp?” I don’t ask her that, because then she might take away all my privileges.

Two dandified young German businessmen from Frankfurt came to see my wonderful collection yesterday afternoon. They were typical successful post-Nazi entrepreneurs, to whom history was a clean slate. They were so new, new, new. Like Dan Gregory, they spoke English with upper-class British accents, but asked early on if Circe and I understood any German. They wanted to know, it became evident, whether or not they could communicate frankly to each other in that language without being understood. Circe and I said that we did not, although she was fluent in Yiddish, and so understood quite a lot, and so did I, having heard so much of it as a prisoner of war.

We were able to crack their code to this extent: they were only pretending interest in my pictures. They were really after my real estate. They had come seeking signs in me of failing health or intelligence, or domestic or financial distress, which might make it easy for them to diddle me out of my priceless beachfront, where they would be pleased to erect condominiums.

They got precious little satisfaction. After they had
departed in their Mercedes coupe, Circe, the child of a Jewish pants manufacturer, said to me, the child of an Armenian shoemaker,
“We
are the Indians now.”

They were West Germans, as I say, but they could just as easily have been fellow citizens of mine from right down the beach. And I wonder now if that isn’t a secret ingredient in the attitudes of so many people here, citizens or not: that this is still a virgin continent, and that everybody else is an Indian who does not appreciate its value, or is at least too weak and ignorant to defend himself?

The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn’t have to be another country. It can be the past instead—the United States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks.

This state of mind allows too many of us to He and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines?

This state of mind explains a lot of American funeral customs, too. The message of so many obsequies here, if you think about it, is this: that the dead person has looted this alien continent, and is now returning to his or her real home with the gold of El Dorado.

But back to 1936 again! Listen:

Marilee’s and my non-epiphany was soon over. We used it well. Each of us gripped the other’s upper arms, and palpated what there was to palpate there, initiating, I suppose, an exploration from the very beginning of what sorts of devices we might be. There was warm, rubbery stuff over rods of some kind.

But then we heard the big front door open and close downstairs. As Terry Kitchen once said of a postcoital experience of his own: “The epiphany came back, and everybody had to put on their clothes and run around again like chickens with their heads cut off.”

As Marilee and I were dressing, I whispered to her that I loved her with all my heart. What else was there to say?

“You don’t. You can’t,” she said. She was treating me like a stranger.

“I will be as great an illustrator as he is,” I said.

“With some other woman,” she said. “Not with me.” Here we had made all this love, but she was acting
as though I were a nobody trying to pick her up in a public place.

“Did I do something wrong?” I said.

“You didn’t do anything right or wrong,” she said, “and neither did I.” She stopped dressing to look me straight in the eyes. I still had two. “This never happened.” She resumed the making of her toilette.

“Feel better?” she said.

I told her that I certainly did.

“So do I,” she said, “but it won’t last long.”

Talk about
realism]

I thought we had made a contract to pair off permanently. Many people used to think that about sexual intercourse. I thought, too, that Marilee might now bear my child. I did not know that she had been rendered sterile by an infection she picked up during an abortion in supposedly germ-free Switzerland. There was so much I didn’t know about her, and which I wouldn’t find out for fourteen years!

“Where do you think we should go next?” I said.

“Where do I think
who
should go next?” she said.

“Us,” I said.

“You mean after we go leave this warm house forever, smiling bravely and holding hands?” she said. “There’s an opera for you that’ll break your heart.”

“Opera?” I said.

“The beautiful, worldly mistress of a great painter twice her age seduces his apprentice, almost young enough to be her son,” she said. “They are discovered. They are cast out into the world. She believes that her
love and advice will make the boy a great painter, too, and they freeze to death.”

That is just about what would have happened, too.

“You have to go, but I have to stay,” she said. “I’ve got a little money saved up—enough to take care of you for a week or two. It’s time you got out of here anyway. You were getting much too comfortable.”

“How could we ever part after what we just did?” I said.

“The clocks stopped while we did it,” she said, “and now they’ve started up again. It didn’t count, so forget it.”