Bluebeard (8 page)

The nosy widow Berman, a.k.a. “Polly Madison,” can’t get into the studio or even take a peek inside because it has no windows and because two years ago, right after my wife died, I personally nailed the doors at one end shut from the inside with six-inch spikes, and immobilized the doors at the other end on the outside, from top to bottom, with six big padlocks and massive hasps.

I myself haven’t been in there since. And, yes, there is something in there. This is no shaggy dog story. After I die and am buried next to my darling Edith, and the executors of my estate open those doors at last, they will find more than just thin air in there. And it won’t be some pathetic symbol, such as a paintbrush broken in two or my Purple Heart on an otherwise vacant and clean-swept floor.

And there is no lame joke in there, like a painting of potatoes, as though I were returning the barn to potatoes, or a painting of the Virgin Mary wearing a derby and holding a watermelon, or some such thing.

And no self-portrait.

And nothing with a religious message.

Tantalizing? Here’s a hint: it’s bigger than a bread box and smaller than the planet Jupiter.

Not even Paul Slazinger has come close to guessing what is in there, and he has said more than once that he
doesn’t see how our friendship can continue, if I feel my secret would not be safe with him.

The barn has become quite famous in the art world. After I show visitors the collection in the house, most of them ask if they can see what is in the barn as well. I tell them that they can see the outside of the barn, if they like, and that the outside is in fact a significant landmark in art history. The first time Terry Kitchen used a paint-spraying rig, his target was an old piece of beaverboard he had leaned against the barn.

“As for what’s
inside
the barn,” I tell them, “it’s the worthless secret of a silly old man, as the world will discover when I have gone to the big art auction in the sky.”

     
O
NE ART PUBLICATION
claimed to know
exactly
what was in there: the very greatest of the Abstract Expressionist paintings, which I was keeping off the market in order to raise the value of relatively unimportant paintings in the house here.

Not true.

After that article was printed, my fellow Armenian in Southampton, Kevork Hovanissian, made a serious offer of three million dollars for everything in the barn, sight unseen.

“I wouldn’t want to cheat you that way,” I told him. “That would be un-Armenian.”

If I had taken his money, it would have been like selling him Brooklyn Bridge.

One response to that same article wasn’t that amusing. A man whose name I did not recognize, said in a
letter to the editor that he had known me during the war, which he evidently did. He was at least familiar with my platoon of artists, which he described accurately. He knew the mission we were given after the German Air Force had been knocked out of the sky and there was no longer any need for the big-time camouflage jokes we played. This was the mission, which was like turning children loose in the workshop of Father Christmas: we were to evaluate and catalogue all captured works of art.

This man said he had served in SHAEF, and I must have dealt with him from time to time. It was his belief, as stated in his letter, that I had stolen masterpieces which should have been returned to their rightful owners in Europe. Fearing lawsuits brought by those rightful owners, he said, I had locked them up in the barn.

Wrong.

He is wrong about the contents of the barn. I have to say he is just a little bit right about my having taken advantage of my unusual wartime opportunities. I couldn’t have stolen anything which was handed over by the military units which had captured it. I had to give them receipts, and we were visited regularly by auditors from the Finance Corps.

But our travels behind the lines
did
bring us into contact with persons in desperate circumstances who had art to sell. We got some remarkable
bargains.

Nobody in the platoon got an Old Master, or anything
which obviously came from a church or a museum or a great private collection. At least I don’t
think
anybody did. I can’t be absolutely sure about that. In the Art World, as elsewhere, opportunists are opportunists and thieves are thieves.

But I myself
did
buy from a civilian an unsigned charcoal sketch which looked like a Cezanne to me, and which has since been authenticated as such. It is now a part of the permanent collection of the Rhode Island School of Design. And I bought a Matisse, my favorite painter, from a widow who said her husband had been given it by the artist himself. For that matter, I got stuck with a fake Gauguin, which served me right.

And I sent my purchases for safekeeping to just about the only person I knew and could trust in the whole United States of America anymore, Sam Wu, a Chinese laundryman in New York City who was a cook for a little while for my former master, the illustrator Dan Gregory.

Imagine fighting for a country where the only civilian you know is a Chinese laundryman!

And then one day I and my platoon of artists were ordered into combat, to contain, if we could, the last big German breakthrough of World War Two.

But none of that stuff is in the barn, or even in my possession. I sold it all when I got home from the war, which gave me a nice little bankroll to invest in the stock market. I had given up my boyhood dream of being an
artist. I enrolled in courses in accounting and economics and business law and marketing and so on at New York University. I was going to be a
businessman.

I thought this about myself and art: that I could catch the likeness of anything I could see—with patience and the best instruments and materials. I had, after all, been an able apprentice under the most meticulous illustrator of this century, Dan Gregory. But cameras could do what he had done and what I could do. And I knew that it was this same thought which had sent the Impressionists and the Cubists and the Dadaists and the Surrealists and so on in their quite successful efforts to make good pictures which cameras and people like Dan Gregory could not duplicate.

I concluded that my mind was so ordinary, which is to say empty, that I could never be anything but a reasonably good camera. So I would content myself with a more common and general sort of achievement than serious art, which was money. I was not saddened about this. I was in fact much
relieved
!

But I still enjoyed engaging in the blather of art, since I could talk if not paint pictures as well as anyone. So I would go to bars around NYU at night, and easily made friends with several painters who thought they were right about almost everything, but who never expected to receive much recognition. I could talk as well as the best of them, and drink as much as they could. Best of all, I could pick up the check at the end of the evening, thanks to the money I was making in the stock market, subsistence payments I was receiving from the
government while going to the university, and a lifetime pension from a grateful nation for my having given one eye in defense of Liberty.

To the real painters I seemed a bottomless pit of money. I was good not only for the cost of drinks, but for rent, for a down payment on a car, for a girlfriend’s abortion, for a wife’s abortion. You name it. However much money they needed for no matter what, they could get it from Diamond Rabo Karabekian.

So I bought those friends. My pit of money wasn’t really bottomless. By the end of every month they had taken me for everything I had. But then the pit, a small one, would fill up again.

Fair was fair. I certainly enjoyed their company, especially since they treated me as though I were a painter, too. I was one of them. Here was another big family to replace my lost platoon.

And they paid me back with more than companionship. They settled their debts as best they could with pictures nobody wanted, too.