Bluebeard (34 page)

Paul Slazinger has had all his clothes and writing materials brought here. He is working on his first volume of nonfiction, to which he has given this title:
The Only Way to Have a Successful Revolution in Any Field of Human Activity.

For what it is worth: Slazinger claims to have learned from history that most people cannot open their minds to new ideas unless a mind-opening team with a peculiar membership goes to work on them. Otherwise, life will go on exactly as before, no matter how painful, unrealistic, unjust, ludicrous, or downright dumb that life may be.

The team must consist of three sorts of specialists, he says. Otherwise, the revolution, whether in politics or the arts or the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail.

The rarest of these specialists, he says, is an authentic genius—a person capable of having seemingly good ideas not in general circulation. “A genius working alone,” he says, “is invariably ignored as a lunatic.”

The second sort of specialist is a lot easier to find: a highly intelligent citizen in good standing in his or her community, who understands and admires the fresh ideas of the genius, and who testifies that the genius is far from mad. “A person like that working alone,” says Slazinger, “can only yearn out loud for changes, but fail to say what their shapes should be.”

The third sort of specialist is a person who can explain anything, no matter how complicated, to the satisfaction of most people, no matter how stupid or pigheaded they may be. “He will say almost anything in order to be interesting and exciting,” says Slazinger. “Working alone, depending solely on his own shallow ideas, he would be regarded as being as full of shit as a Christmas turkey.”

Slazinger, high as a kite, says that every successful revolution, including Abstract Expressionism, the one I took part in, had that cast of characters at the top—Pollock being the genius in our case, Lenin being the one in Russia’s, Christ being the one in Christianity’s.

He says that if you can’t get a cast like that together, you can forget changing
anything
in a great big way.

Just think! This one house by the seaside, so empty and dead only a few months ago, is now giving birth to a book about how to revolt successfully, a book about how poor girls feel about rich boys, and the memoirs of a painter whose pictures all came unstuck from canvas.

And we are expecting a baby, too!

I look out my window and see a simple man astride a tractor which drags a madly chattering gang of mowers
across my lawns. I know little more about him than his name is Franklin Cooley, and that he drives an old, babyshit-brown Cadillac Coupe de Ville, and has six kids. I don’t even know if Mr. Cooley can read and write. At least forty million Americans can’t read and write, according to this morning’s
New York Times.
That is six times as many illiterates as there are people of Armenian descent anywhere! So many of them and so few of us!

Does Franklin Cooley, that poor, dumb bastard with six kids, his ears filled with the clashing gibberish of the mowers, have the least suspicion that earthshaking work is going on in here?

Yes, and guess what
else The New York Times
said this morning? Geneticists have
incontrovertible
evidence that men and women were once separate races, men evolving in Asia and women evolving in Africa. It was simply a coincidence that they were interfertile when they met.

The clitoris, so goes the speculation in the paper, is the last vestige of the inseminating organ of a conquered, enslaved, trivialized and finally emasculated race of weaker, but not necessarily dumber, anthropoids!

Cancel my subscription!

     
B
ACK TO THE
G
REAT
D
EPRESSION!

To make a long story short: Germany invaded Austria and then Czechoslovakia and then Poland and then France, and I was a pipsqueak casualty in faraway New York City. Coulomb Frères et Cie was out of business, so I lost my job at the agency—not that long after my father’s Moslem obsequies. So I joined what was still a peacetime United States Army, and scored high on their classification test. The Great Depression was as discouraging as ever, and the Army was still a very little family in this country, so I was lucky to be accepted. The recruiting sergeant on Times Square, I remember, had indicated that I might be a more attractive relative in prospect if I were to have my name legally changed to something more American.

I even remember his helpful suggestion: that I become “Robert King.” Just think: somebody might now be trespassing on my private beach and gazing in awe at this mansion, and wondering who could be rich enough
to live this well, and the answer could so easily have been this: “Robert King.”

But the Army adopted me as Rabo Karabekian—as I was soon to discover, for this reason: Major General Daniel Whitehall, then the commander of the combat troops of the Corps of Engineers, wanted an oil painting of himself in full uniform, and believed that somebody with a foreign-sounding name could do the best job. As an Army regular, of course, I would have to paint him for free. And this was a man ravenous for immortality. He was going to be retired in six months, by reason of failing kidneys, having barely missed service in two world wars.

God only knows what became of the portrait I did of him—after hours during basic training. I used the most expensive materials, which he was more than glad to buy for me. There is one painting of mine which might actually outlive the “Mona Lisa”! If I had realized that at the time I might have given him a puzzling half-smile, whose meaning only I knew for certain: he had become a general, but had missed the two big wars of his lifetime.

Another painting of mine which just might outlive the “Mona Lisa,” for better or for worse, is the gigantic son of a bitch out in the potato barn.

So much I only
now
realize! When I did the portrait of General Whitehall in a mansion nearly as grand as this one, which was the property of the Army, I was stereotypically Armenian! Welcome home to my true nature! I was a scrawny recruit and he was a Pasha weighing more than two hundred pounds, who could squash me like an insect anytime he pleased.

But what sly and self-serving advice, but actually very good advice, too, I was able to give him along with flattery on this order: “You have a very strong chin. Did you know that?”

In what must surely have been the manner of powerless Armenian advisors in Turkish courts, I congratulated him on having ideas he might never have had before. An example: “You must be thinking very hard how important aerial photography is going to be, if war should come.” War, of course, had come to practically everybody but the United States by then.

“Yes,” he said.

“Would you turn your head the least little bit to the left?” I said. “Wonderful! That way there aren’t such deep shadows in your eye sockets. I certainly don’t want to lose those eyes. And could you imagine now that you are looking from a hilltop at sunset—over a valley where a battle is going to take place the next day?”