Bluebeard (20 page)

I asked him as delicately as I could if making love to a woman so sophisticated in sexual techniques was in any way unusually burdensome. He replied, rolling his eyes at the ceiling, that I had certainly hit the nail on the head. “I have to reassure her that I really love her practically
incessantly,”
he said.

I spent an uneventful late evening watching pornographic TV programs in my room at the Algonquin Hotel. I watched and didn’t watch at the very same time.

I planned to catch a train back the next afternoon, but met a fellow East Hamptonite, Floyd Pomerantz, at breakfast. He, too, was headed home later in the day, and offered me a ride in his Cadillac stretch limousine. I accepted with alacrity.

What a satisfactory form of transportation that proved to be! That Cadillac was better than womblike. The Twentieth Century Limited, as I have said, really was womblike, in constant motion, with all sorts of unexplained thumps and bangs outside. But the Cadillac was
coffinlike.
Pomerantz and I got to be
dead
in there. The hell with this baby stuff. It was so cozy, two of us in a single, roomy, gangster-style casket. Everybody should be buried with somebody else, just about anybody else, whenever feasible.

Pomerantz talked some about picking up the pieces of his life and trying to put them back together again. He is Circe Berman’s age, which is forty-three. Three months before, he had been given eleven million dollars to resign as president of a big TV network. “Most of my life still lies ahead of me,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “I guess it does.”

“Do you think there is still time for me to be a painter?” he said.

“Never too late,” I said.

Earlier, I knew, he had asked Paul Slazinger if there was still time for him to become a writer. He thought people might be interested in his side of the story about what happened to him at the network.

Slazinger said afterwards that there ought to be some way to persuade people like Pomerantz, and the Hamptons teem with people like Pomerantz, that they had already extorted more than enough from the economy. He suggested that we build a Money Hall of Fame out here, with busts of the arbitrageurs and hostile-takeover specialists and venture capitalists and investment bankers and golden handshakers and platinum parachutists in niches, with their statistics cut into stone—how many millions they had stolen legally in how short a time.

I asked Slazinger if I deserved to be in the Money Hall of Fame. He thought that over, and concluded that I belonged in some sort of Hall of Fame, but that all my money had come as a result of accidents rather than greed.

“You belong in the Dumb
Luck
Hall of Fame,” he said. He thought it should be built in Las Vegas or Atlantic City, maybe, but then changed his mind. “The Klondike, I think,” he said. “People should have to come by dogsled or on snowshoes if they want to see
Rabo Karabekian’s bust in the Dumb Luck Hall of Fame.”

He can’t
stand
it that I inherited a piece of the Cincinnati Bengals, and don’t give a damn. He is an avid football fan.

     
S
O
F
LOYD
P
OMERANTZ’S
chauffeur delivered me to the first flagstone of my doorpath. I clambered out of our fancy casket like Count Dracula, blinded by the setting sun. I groped my way to my front door and entered.

Let me tell you about the foyer I had every right to expect to see. Its walls should have been oyster white, like every square foot of wall space in the entire house, except for the basement and servants’ quarters. Terry Kitchen’s painting “Secret Window” should have loomed before me like the City of God. To my left should have been a Matisse of a woman holding a black cat in her arms and standing before a brick wall covered with yellow roses, which dear Edith had bought fair and square from a gallery as a present to me on our fifth wedding anniversary. On my right should have been a Hans Hofmann which Terry Kitchen got from Philip Guston in trade for one of his own pictures, and which he gave to me after I paid for a new transmission for his babyshit-brown convertible Buick Roadmaster.

Those who wish to know more about the foyer need only dig out a copy of the February 1981 issue of
Architect & Decorator.
The foyer is on the cover, is viewed through the open front door from the flagstone walk, which was lined on both sides with hollyhocks back then. The lead article is about the whole house as a masterpiece of redecorating a Victorian house to accommodate modern art. Of the foyer itself it says, “The Karabekians’ entrance hall alone contains what might serve as the core of a small museum’s permanent collection of modern art, marvelous enough in itself, but in fact a mere
hors d’oeuvre
before the incredible feast of art treasures awaiting in the high-ceilinged, stark-white rooms beyond.”

And was I, the great Rabo Karabekian, the mastermind behind this happy marriage of the old and the new? No. Dear Edith was. It was all her idea that I bring my collection out of storage. This house, after all, was an heirloom of the Taft family, full not only of memories of Edith’s happy childhood in summertimes here, but of her very good first marriage, too. When I moved in here from the potato barn, she asked me if I was comfortable in such old-fashioned surroundings. I said truthfully and from the bottom of my heart that I loved it for what it was, and that she shouldn’t change a thing for me.

So by God if it wasn’t
Edith
who called in the contractors, and had them strip off all the wallpaper
right down to bare plaster, and take down the chandeliers and put up track lights—and paint the oak baseboards and trim and doors and window sashes and walls a solid oyster-white!

When the work was done, she looked about twenty years younger. She said she had almost gone to her grave without ever realizing what a gift she had for remodeling and decorating. And then she said, “Call Home Sweet Home Moving and Storage,” in whose warehouse I had stored my collection for years and years. “Let them tell your glorious paintings as they bring them out into the daylight, ‘You are going
home!’
”

When I walked into my foyer after my trip to New York City, though, a scene so shocking enveloped me that, word of honor, I thought an axe murder had happened there. I am not joking! I thought I was looking at blood and gore! It may have taken me as long as a minute to realize what I was really seeing: wallpaper featuring red roses as big as cabbages against a field of black, babyshit-brown baseboards, trim and doors, and six chromos of little girls on swings, with mats of purple velvet, and with gilded frames which must have weighed as much as the limousine which had delivered me to this catastrophe.

Did I yell? They tell me I did. What did I yell? They had to tell me afterwards what I yelled. They heard it, and I did not. When the cook and her daughter, the first to arrive, came running, I was yelling this, they say,
over and over: “I am in the wrong house! I am in the wrong house!”

Think of this: my homecoming was a surprise party they had been looking forward to all day long. Now it was all they could do, despite how generous I had always been with them, not to laugh out loud at my maximum agony!

What a world!

I said to the cook, and I could hear myself now: “Who
did
this?”

“Mrs. Berman,” she said. She behaved as though she couldn’t imagine what the trouble was.

“How could you allow this to happen?” I said.

“I’m just the cook,” she said.

“I also hope you’re my
friend,”
I said.

“Think what you want,” she said. The truth be told, we had never been close. “I like how it looks,” she said.

“Do you!” I said.

“Looks better than it did,” she said.

So I turned to her daughter. “You think it looks better than it did?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Well—” I said, “isn’t this just wonderful! The minute I was out of the house, Mrs. Berman called in the painters and paperhangers, did she?”

They shook their heads. They said that Mrs. Berman had done the whole job herself, and that she
had met her husband the doctor while papering his office. She used to be a professional paperhanger! Can you beat it?