Bluebeard (7 page)

The formidable widow Berman told me the plot of
The Underground
, which is this: Three girls, one black, one Jewish and one Japanese, feel drawn together and separate from the rest of their classmates for reasons they can’t explain. They form a little club which they call, again for reasons they can’t explain, “The Underground.”

But then it turns out that all three have a parent or grandparent who has survived some man-made catastrophe, and who, without meaning to, passed on to them the idea that the wicked were the living and that the good were dead.

The black is descended from a survivor of the massacre of Ibos in Nigeria. The Japanese is a descendant of a survivor of the atom-bombing of Nagasaki. The Jew is a descendant of a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust.

“The Underground
is a wonderful title for a book like that,” I said.

“You bet it is,” she said. “I am very proud of my titles.” She really thinks that she is the cat’s pajamas, and that everybody else is dumb, dumb, dumb!

She said that painters should hire writers to name their pictures for them. The names of the pictures on my walls here are “Opus Nine” and “Blue and Burnt Orange” and so on. My own most famous painting, which no longer exists, and which was sixty-four feet long and eight feet high, and used to grace the entrance lobby of the GEFFCo headquarters on Park Avenue, was called simply, “Windsor Blue Number Seventeen.” Windsor Blue was a shade of Sateen Dura-Luxe, straight from the can.

“The titles are
meant
to be uncommunicative,” I said.

“What’s the point of being alive,” she said, “if you’re not going to
communicate?”

She still has no respect for my art collection, although, during the five weeks she has now been in residence, she has seen immensely respectable people from as far away as Switzerland and Japan worship some of them as though the pictures were gods almost. She was here when I sold a Rothko right off the wall to a man from the Getty Museum for a million and a half dollars.

What she said about that was this: “Good riddance of bad rubbish. It was rotting your brain because it was about absolutely nothing. Now give the rest of them the old heave-ho!”

She asked me just now, while we were talking about the Survivor’s Syndrome, if my father wanted to see the Turks punished for what they had done to the Armenians.

“I asked him the same thing when I was about eight years old, I guess, and thinking maybe life would be spicier if we wanted revenge of some kind,” I said.

“Father put down his tools there in his little shop, and he stared out the window,” I went on, “and I looked out the window, too. There were a couple of Luma Indian men out there, I remember. The Luma reservation was only five miles away, and sometimes people passing through town would mistake me for a
Luma boy. I liked that a lot. At the time I thought it certainly beat being an Armenian.

“Father finally answered my question this way: ‘All I want from the Turks is an admission that their country is an uglier and even more joyless place, now that
we
are gone.’”

I went for a manly tramp around my boundaries after lunch today, and encountered my neighbor to the north on our mutual border, which runs about twenty feet north of my potato barn. His name is John Karpinski. He is a native. He is a potato farmer like his father, although his fields must now be worth about eighty thousand dollars an acre, since the second-story windows of houses built on them would have an ocean view. Three generations of Karpinskis have been raised on all that property, so that to them, in an Armenian manner of speaking, it is their own sacred ancestral bit of ground at the foot of Mount Ararat.

Karpinski is a huge man, almost always in bib-overalls, and everybody calls him “Big John.” Big John is a wounded war veteran like Paul Slazinger and me, but he is younger than us, so his war was a different war. His war was the Korean War.

And then his only son “Little John” was killed by a land mine in the Vietnam War.

One war to a customer.

My potato barn and the six acres that came with it used to belong to Big John’s father, who sold them to Dear Edith and her first husband.

Big John expressed curiosity about Mrs. Berman. I promised him that our relationship was platonic, and that she had more or less invited herself, and that I would be glad when she returned to Baltimore.

“She sounds like a bear,” he said. “If a bear gets in your house, you had better go to a motel until the bear is ready to leave again.”

There used to be lots of bears on Long Island, but there certainly aren’t bears anymore. He said his knowledge of bears came from his father, who, at the age of sixty, was treed by a grizzly in Yellowstone Park. After that, John’s father read every book about bears he could get his hands on.

“I’ll say this for that bear—” said John, “it got the old man reading books again.”

Mrs. Berman is so God damn nosy! I mean—she comes in here and reads what is in my typewriter without feeling the need to ask permission first.

“How come you never use semicolons?” she’ll say. Or: “How come you chop it all up into little sections instead of letting it flow and flow?”
That
sort of thing.

And when I listen to her moving about this house, I not only hear her footsteps: I hear the opening and closing of drawers and cupboards, too. She has investigated every nook and cranny, including the basement.
She came up from the basement one day and said, “Do you know you’ve got sixty-three gallons of Sateen Dura-Luxe down there?” She had
counted
them!

It is against the law to dispose of Sateen Dura-Luxe in an ordinary dump because it has been found to degrade over time into a very deadly poison. To get rid of the stuff legally, I would have to ship it to a special disposal area near Pitchfork, Wyoming, and I have never got around to doing that. So there it sits in the basement after all these years.

The one place on the property she hasn’t explored is my studio, the potato barn. It is a very long and narrow structure without windows, with sliding doors and a potbellied stove at either end, built for the storage of potatoes and nothing else. The idea was this: a farmer might maintain an even temperature in there, no matter what the weather, with the stoves and the doors, so that his potatoes would neither freeze nor sprout until he was ready to market them.

It was structures with such unusual dimensions, in fact, along with what used to be very cheap property, which caused many painters to move out here when I was young, and especially painters who were working on exceptionally large canvases. I would never have been able to work on the eight panels comprising “Windsor Blue Number Seventeen” as a single piece, if I hadn’t rented that potato barn.