Bluebeard (45 page)

Slazinger was another one who had never seen me draw, who wondered if I could really draw. I had been living out here for a couple of years by then, and he came by to watch me paint in the potato barn. I had set up a stretched and primed canvas eight by eight feet, and was about to lay on a coat of Sateen Dura-Luxe with a roller. It was a shade of greenish burnt orange called “Hungarian Rhapsody.” Little did I know that Dorothy, back at the house, was slathering our whole bedroom with “Hungarian Rhapsody.” But that is another story.

“Tell me, Rabo—” said Slazinger, “if I put on that same paint with that same roller, would the picture still be a Karabekian?”

“Absolutely,” I said, “provided you have in reserve what Karabekian has in reserve.”

“Like what?” he said.

“Like this,” I said. There was dust in a pothole in the floor, and I picked up some of it on the balls of both my thumbs. Working both thumbs simultaneously, I
sketched a caricature of Slazinger’s face on the canvas in thirty seconds.

“Jesus!” he said. “I had no idea you could draw like that!”

“You’re looking at a man who has
options,”
I said.

And he said: “I guess you do, I guess you
do.”

I covered up that caricature with a couple of coats of “Hungarian Rhapsody,” and laid on tapes which were supposed to be pure abstraction, but which to me were secretly six deer in a forest glade. The deer were near the left edge. On the right was a red vertical band, which to me, again secretly, was the soul of a hunter drawing a bead on one of them. I called it “Hungarian Rhapsody Number Six,” which was bought by the Guggenheim Museum.

That picture was in storage when it started to fall apart like all the rest of them. A woman curator just happened to walk by and see all this tape and flakes of Sateen Dura-Luxe on the floor, so she called me up to ask what could be done to restore the picture, and whether they might be at fault someway. I didn’t know where she had been the past year, when my pictures had become notorious for falling apart everywhere. She honestly thought maybe the Guggenheim hadn’t provided proper humidity controls or whatever. I was at that time living like an animal in the potato barn, friendless and unloved. But I did have a telephone.

“One very strange thing—” she went on, “this big
face has emerged from the canvas.” It was the caricature, of course, which I had drawn with filthy thumbs.

“You should notify the Pope,” I said.

“The Pope?” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “You may have the next best thing to the
Shroud of Turin.”

I had better explain to young readers that the
Shroud of Turin
is a linen sheet in which a dead person has been wrapped, which bears the imprint of an adult male who has been crucified, which the best scientists of today agree may indeed be two thousand years old. It is widely believed to have swaddled none other than Jesus Christ, and is the chief treasure of the Cathedral of San Giovanni Battista in Turin, Italy.

My joke with the lady at the Guggenheim suggested that it might be the face of Jesus emerging from the canvas—possibly just in time to prevent World War Three.

But she topped my joke. She said, “Well—I would call the Pope right away, except for one thing.”

“What’s that?” I said.

And she said: “You happen to be talking to somebody who used to date Paul Slazinger.”

I made her the same offer I had made everybody else: that I would duplicate the painting exactly in more durable materials, paints and tapes which really
would
outlive the smile on the “Mona Lisa.”

But the Guggenheim, like everybody else, turned
me down. Nobody wanted to spoil the hilarious footnote I had become in art history. With a little luck, my last name might actually find its way into dictionaries:

     
W
HEN
I
REFUSED
to draw a picture for Mrs. Berman, she said, “Oh—you are such a
stubborn
little boy!”

“I am a stubborn little old
gentleman,”
I said, “clinging to his dignity and self-respect as best he can.”

“Just tell me what
kind
of thing it is in the barn—” she wheedled, “animal, vegetable or mineral?”

“All three,” I said.

“How big?” she said.

I told her the truth: “Eight feet high and sixty-four feet long.”

“You’re kidding me again,” she surmised.

“Of course,” I said.

Out in the barn were eight panels of primed and stretched canvas placed side by side, each one eight feet by eight feet. They formed, as I had told her, a continuous surface sixty-four feet long. They were held upright in back by two-by-fours, and ran like a fence down the middle of the potato barn. These were the same panels which had shed the paint and tape of what had been my
most famous and then most infamous creation, the picture which had graced and then disgraced the lobby of the GEFFCo headquarters on Park Avenue: “Windsor Blue Number Seventeen.”

Here is how they came back into my possession, three months before dear Edith died:

They were found entombed in a locked chamber in the bottommost of the three basement floors under the Matsumoto Building, formerly the GEFFCo Building. They were recognized for what they were, with shreds of Sateen Dura-Luxe clinging to them here and there, by an inspector from Matsumoto’s insurance company, who was looking for fire hazards deep underground. There was a locked steel door, and nobody had any idea what was on the other side.

The inspector got permission to break in. This was a woman and, as she told me on the telephone: she was the first female safety inspector for her company, and also the first black. “I am two birds with one stone,” she said, and she laughed. She had a very nice laugh. There was no malice or mockery in it. In offering to return my canvases to me after all those years, with the absent-minded approval of Matsumoto, she was simply expressing her reluctance to see anything go to waste.

“I’m the only one who cares one way or another,” she said, “so
you
tell me what to do. You’d have to pick them up yourself,” she said.

“How did you know what they
were?”
I said.

She had been a prenursing student at Skidmore College, she said, and had taken, as one of her precious few electives, a course in art appreciation. She was a registered nurse like my first wife Dorothy, but had given up that profession because doctors, she said, treated her like an idiot and a slave. Also: the hours were long and the pay was low, and she had an orphaned niece to support and keep company.

Her art appreciation teacher showed slides of famous pictures, and two of these were of “Windsor Blue Number Seventeen,” before and after it fell apart.

“How can I thank him?” I said.

“I think he was trying to lighten up the course,” she said. “The rest of it was so
serious.”

“Do you want the canvases or not?” she said. There was a long silence, so she finally said, “Hello? Hello?”

“Sorry,” I said. “That may seem like a simple question to you, but it’s a biggie to me. To me it’s as though you called me up out of the blue on a day like any other day, and asked me if I was grown up yet.”

If harmless objects like those rectangles of stretched canvas were hobgoblins to me, could fill me with shame, yes, with rage at a world which had entrapped me into being a failure and a laughingstock and so on, then I
wasn’t a
grown-up yet, although I was then sixty-eight years old.

“So what is your answer?” she said on the telephone.

“I’m waiting myself to hear it,” I said. I had no use for the canvases—or so I thought back then. I honestly never expected to paint again. Storing them would be no problem, since there was plenty of space in the potato barn. Could I sleep well here with the worst of the embarrassments from my past right here on the property? I hoped so.

I heard myself say this at last: “Please—don’t throw them away. I will call Home Sweet Home Moving and Storage out here, and have them picked up as soon as possible. Please tell me your name again—so they can ask for you.”

And she said this: “Mona Lisa Trippingham.”