Bluebeard (42 page)

Slazinger was there, too. That was where I met him. He was gathering material for a novel about painters—one of dozens of novels he never wrote.

At the end of that evening, I remember, he said to me: “I can’t get over how passionate you guys are, and yet so absolutely
unserious.”

“Everything about life is a joke,” I said. “Don’t you know that?”

“No,” he said.

Finkelstein declared himself eager to solve the clothing problem of anybody who thought he had one. He would do it for a small down payment and a manageable installment plan. So the next thing I knew, Painters X, Y and Z and I and Kitchen were all upstairs in Finkelstein’s shop, getting measured for suits. Pollock and Slazinger came along, but only as spectators. Nobody else had any money, so, in character, I made
everybody’s down payment with the traveler’s checks I had left over from my trip to Florence.

Painters X, Y and Z, incidentally, would pay me back with pictures the very next afternoon. Painter X had a key to our apartment, which I had given him after he was thrown out of his fleabag hotel for setting his bed on fire. So he and the other two delivered their paintings and got out again before poor Dorothy could defend herself.

Finkelstein the tailor had been a real killer in the war, and so had Kitchen been. I never was.

Finkelstein was a tank gunner in Patton’s Third Army. When he measured me for my suit, a suit I still own, he told me, his mouth full of pins, about how a track was blown off his tank by a boy with a rocket launcher two days before the war in Europe ended.

So they shot him before they realized that he was just a boy.

And here is a surprise: when Finkelstein died of a stroke three years later, when we were all starting to do quite well financially, it turned out that he had been a secret painter all along!

His young widow Rachel, who looked a lot like Circe Berman, now that I think about it, gave him a one-man show in his shop before she closed it up forever. His stuff was unambitious but strong: as representational
as he could make it, much like what his fellow war heroes Winston Churchill and Dwight David Eisenhower used to do.

Like them, he enjoyed paint. Like them, he appreciated reality. That was the late painter Isadore Finkelstein.

After we had been measured for suits we went back down to the tavern for more food and drink and talk, talk, talk, we were joined by a seemingly rich and distinguished gentleman, about sixty years old. I had never seen him before, and neither had any of the others, as nearly as I could tell.

“I hear you are painters,” he said. “Do you mind if I just sit here and listen in?” He was between me and Pollock, and across the table from Kitchen.

“Most of us are painters,” I said. We weren’t about to be rude to him. It was possible that he was an art collector, or maybe on the board of directors of an important museum. We knew what all the critics and dealers looked like. He was much too honest, obviously, to take part in either of those scruffy trades.

“Most of you are painters,” he echoed. “Aha! So the simplest thing would be for you to tell me who
isn’t
one.”

Finkelstein and Slazinger so identified themselves.

“Oh—guessed wrong,” he said. He indicated Kitchen. “I wouldn’t have thought he was a painter, either,” he said, “despite his rough clothes. A musician
maybe, or a lawyer or a professional athlete, maybe. A painter? He sure fooled me.”

He had to be a clairvoyant, I thought, to home in on the truth about Kitchen with such accuracy! Yes, and he kept his attention locked on Kitchen, as though he were reading his mind. Why would he be more fascinated by somebody who had yet to paint a single interesting picture, than by Pollock, whose work was causing such controversy, and who was sitting right next to him?

He asked Kitchen if he had by any chance seen service in the war.

Kitchen said that he had. He did not elaborate.

“Did that have something to do with your decision to be a painter?” asked the old gentleman.

“No,” said Kitchen.

Slazinger would say to me later that he thought that the war had embarrassed Kitchen about how privileged he had always been, easily mastering the piano, easily getting through the best schools, easily beating most people at almost any game, easily getting to be a lieutenant colonel in no time at all, and so on. “To teach himself something about real life,” said Slazinger, “he picked one of the few fields where he could not help being a hopeless bungler.”

Kitchen said as much to his questioner. “Painting is my Mount Everest,” he said. Mount Everest hadn’t been climbed yet. That wouldn’t happen until 1953, the same year Finkelstein would be buried and have his one-man show.

The old gentleman sat back, seemingly much pleased by this answer.

But then he got much too personal, in my opinion, asking Kitchen if he was independently wealthy, or if his family was supporting him while he made such an arduous climb. I knew that Kitchen would become a very rich man if he outlived his mother and father, and that his parents had refused to give him any money, in the hopes of forcing him to start practicing law or enter politics or take a job on Wall Street, where success was assured.

I didn’t think that was any of the old gentleman’s business, and I wanted Kitchen to tell him so. But Kitchen told him all—and when he was done answering, his expression indicated that he was ready for another question, no matter what it might be.

This was the next one: “You are married, of course?”

“No,” said Kitchen.

“But you
like
women?” said the old gentleman.

He was putting that question to a man who before the end of the war was one of the planet’s greatest cocksmen.

“At this point in my life, sir,” said Kitchen, “I am a waste of time for women, and women are a waste of time for me.”

The old man stood. “I thank you for being so frank and polite with me,” he said.

“I try,” said Kitchen.

The old gentleman departed. We made guesses as
to who and what he might have been. Finkelstein said, I remember, that whoever he was, his clothes had come from England.

I said I was going to have to borrow or rent a car the next day—to get the house out here ready for my family. I also wanted to have another look at the potato barn I’d rented.

Kitchen asked if he could come along, and I said, “Sure.”

And there was this spray rig waiting for him in Montauk. Talk about fate!

Before we dropped off to sleep on our cots that night, I asked him if he had the least idea who the old gentleman who had questioned him so closely could have been.

“I’ll make a really wild guess,” he said.

“What is it?” I said.

“I could be wrong, but I think that was my father,” he said. “Looked like Dad, sounded like Dad, dressed like Dad, made wry jokes like Dad. I watched him like a hawk, Rabo, and I said to myself, ‘Either this is a very clever imitator, or this is the man who fathered me.’ You’re smart, and you’re my best and only friend. Tell me: if he was simply a good imitator of my father, what could his game have been?”

     
I
WOUND UP RENTING
a truck instead of a car for Kitchen’s and my fateful foray out here. Talk about Fate: if I hadn’t rented a truck, Kitchen might be practicing law now, since there is no way we could have fit the spray rig into a closed sedan, which is the kind of car I would have rented.

Every so often, but not often enough, God knows, I would think of something which would make my wife and family a little less unhappy, and the truck was a case in point. The least I could do was get all the canvases out of our apartment, since they made poor Dorothy feel sick as a dog, even when she was well.

“You’re not going to put them in the new house, are you?” she said.

That is what I
had
intended to do. I have never been famous for thinking far ahead. But I said, “No.” I formulated a new scheme, which was to put them into the potato barn, but I didn’t say so. I hadn’t had the nerve to tell her I had rented a potato barn. But she’d found out about it someway. She would find out someway,
too, that I had bought myself and Painters X, Y and Z and Kitchen tailor-made suits of the finest materials and workmanship the night before.