Bluebeard (44 page)

Well—the execution of that will still lies in the future, but just about everything else has vanished into the past, including Circe Berman. She finished up her book and returned to Baltimore two weeks ago.

On her last night here, she wanted me to take her dancing, and I again refused. I took her to supper at the American Hotel in Sag Harbor instead. Just another tourist trap nowadays, Sag Harbor used to be a whaling port. You can still see the mansions of the brave captains who sailed from there to the Pacific Ocean, around the tip of South America, and then came home millionaires.

In the lobby of the hotel is a guest register opened to a date at the peak of the whale-killing industry, so disreputable nowadays: March 1, 1849. Back then, Circe’s ancestors were in the Russian Empire and mine in the Turkish Empire, which would have made them enemies.

We feasted on lobsters, and drank in moderation in order to become voluble. It is a bad thing to need a
drink, everybody is saying now, and I in fact went without alcohol the whole time I was a hermit. But my feelings about Mrs. Berman on the eve of her departure were so contradictory that, without a drink, I might have eaten in wooden silence. But I certainly wasn’t going to drive with a couple of drinks in me, and neither was she. It used to be almost fashionable to drive when drunk, but no more, no more.

So I hired a boyfriend of Celeste’s to drive us over there in his father’s car, and then pick us up again.

In the simplest terms: I was sorry that she was leaving, because she was exciting to have around. But she could also be too exciting, telling everybody exactly what to do. So I was also glad that she was going, since what I wanted most, with my own book so nearly finished, was peace and quiet for a change. To put it another way: we were acquaintances, despite our months together. We had not become great friends.

That would change, however, once I had shown her what was in the potato barn.

Yes, that’s right: this determined widow from Baltimore, before she left, persuaded this old Armenian geezer to unlock the locks and turn on the floodlights in the potato barn.

What did I get in exchange? I think we’re really friends now.

     
W
HEN WE GOT HOME
from the American Hotel, the first thing she said was: “One thing you don’t have to worry about: I’m not going to badger you about the keys to the potato barn.”

“Thank God!” I said.

I think she was certain right then that, before the night was over, one way or another, she was damn well going to see what was in the potato barn.

“I only want you to draw me a picture,” she said.

“Do what?” I said.

“You’re a very modest man—” she said, “to the point where anybody who believed you would think you were no good at anything.”

“Except camouflage,” I said. “You’re forgetting camouflage. I was awarded a Presidential Unit Citation, my platoon was so good at camouflage.”

“O.K.—camouflage,” she said.

“We were so good at camouflage,” I said, “that half the things we hid from the enemy have to this very day never been seen again!”

“And that’s not true,” she said.

“We’re having a celebration, so all sorts of things have been said which are not true,” I said. “That’s how to act at a party.”

“You want me to go home to Baltimore knowing a whole lot of things about you which are not true?” she said.

“Everything that’s true about me you should have learned before now, given your profound powers of investigation,” I said. “This is just a party.”

“I still don’t know whether you can really draw or not,” she said.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

“That’s the bedrock of your life, to hear you tell it,” she said. “That and camouflage. You were no good as a commercial artist, and you were no good as a serious artist, and you were no good as a husband or a father, and your great collection of paintings is an accident. But you keep coming back to one thing you’re proud of: you could really draw.”

“It’s true,” I said. “I didn’t realize that, but now that you mention it, it’s true.”

“So prove it,” she said.

“It’s a very small boast,” I said. “I wasn’t an Albrecht Dürer. I could draw better than you or Slazinger or the cook—or Pollock or Terry Kitchen. I was born with this gift which certainly doesn’t look like much when you compare me with all the far superior
draughtsmen who’ve lived and died. I wowed the grade school and then the high school in San Ignacio, California. If I’d lived ten thousand years ago, I might have wowed the cave dwellers of Lascaux, France—whose standards for draughtsmanship must have been on about the same level as those of San Ignacio.”

“If your book is actually published,” she said, “you’re going to have to include at least one picture that proves you can draw. Readers will insist on that.”

“Poor souls,” I said. “And the worst thing about getting as old as I am—”

“You’re not that old,” she said.

“Old enough!” I said. “And the worst thing is that you keep finding yourself in the middle of the same old conversations, no matter who you’re talking to. Slazinger didn’t think I could draw. My first wife didn’t think I could draw. My second wife didn’t care whether I could or not. I was just an old raccoon she brought in from the barn and turned into a house pet. She loved animals whether they could draw or not.”

“What did you say to your first wife when she bet you couldn’t draw?” she said.

“We had just moved out in the country where she didn’t know a soul,” I said. “There still wasn’t heat in the house, and I was trying to keep us warm with fires in the three fireplaces—like my pioneer ancestors. And
Dorothy was finally trying to catch up on art, reading up on it, since she had resigned herself to being stuck with an artist. She had never seen me draw—because not drawing and forgetting everything I knew about art, I thought, was the magic key to my becoming a serious painter.

“So, sitting in front of a fire in the kitchen fireplace, with all the heat going up the flue instead of coming out in the room,” I said, “Dorothy read in an art magazine what an Italian sculptor had said about the first Abstract Expressionist paintings ever to be shown in a major show in Europe—at the Venice Biennale in 1950, the same year I had my reunion with Marilee.”

“You had a painting there?” said Circe.

“No,” I said. “It was just Gorky and Pollock and de Kooning. And this Italian sculptor, who was supposedly very important back then, but who is all but forgotten now, said this about what we thought we were up to: ‘These Americans are very interesting. They dive into the water before they learn to swim.’ He meant we couldn’t draw.

“Dorothy picked up on that right away. She wanted to hurt me as much as I had hurt her, so she said, ‘So that’s it! You guys all paint the way you do because you couldn’t paint something real if you
had
to.’

“I didn’t rebut her with words. I snatched a green crayon Dorothy had been using to make a list of all the things inside and outside the house that had to be repaired, and I drew portraits on the kitchen wall of our two boys, who were asleep in front of the fireplace in
the living room. I just did their heads—life size. I didn’t even go into the living room to look at them first. The wall was new Sheetrock which I had nailed over the cracked plaster. I hadn’t got around to filing and taping the joints between the sheets yet, and covering the nailheads. I never would.

“Dorothy was flabbergasted,” I said to Circe. “She said to me: ‘Why don’t you do that all the time?’ And I said to her, and this was the first time I ever said ‘fuck’ to her, no matter how angry we might have been with each other: ‘It’s just too fucking
easy.’
”

“You never did fill in the joints between the Sheet-rock?” said Mrs. Berman.

“That is certainly a woman’s question,” I said. “And my manly answer is this one: ‘No, I did not.’”

“So what happened to the portraits?” she said. “Were they painted over?”

“No,” I said. “They stayed there on the Sheetrock for six years. But then I came home half drunk one afternoon, and found my wife and children and the pictures gone, and a note from Dorothy saying they were gone forever. She had cut the pictures out of the Sheetrock and taken them with her. There were two big square holes where the pictures used to be.”

“You must have felt awful,” said Mrs. Berman.

“Yes,” I said. “Pollock and Kitchen had killed themselves only a few weeks before that, and my own paintings were falling apart. So when I saw those two
squares cut out of the Sheetrock in that empty house—” I stopped. “Never mind,” I said.

“Finish the sentence, Rabo,” she begged.

“That was as close as I’ll ever be,” I said, “to feeling what my father must have felt when he was a young teacher—and found himself all alone in his village after the massacre.”