Bluebeard (21 page)

“After his office,” said Celeste, “he had her paper his home.”

“He was lucky she didn’t paper
him!”
I said.

And Celeste said, “You know you dropped your patch?”

“My what?” I said.

“Your eye patch,” she said. “It’s on the floor and you’re stepping on it.”

It was true! I was so upset that at some point, maybe while tearing my hair, I had stripped the patch from my head. So now they were seeing the scar tissue which I had never even shown Edith. My first wife had certainly seen a lot of it, but she was my nurse in the Army hospital at Fort Benjamin Harrison, where a plastic surgeon tried to clean up the mess a little bit after the war. He would have had to do a lot more surgery to get it to the point where it would hold a glass eye, so I chose an eye patch instead.

The patch was on the floor!

My most secret disfigurement was in plain view of the cook and her daughter! And now Paul Slazinger came into the foyer in time to see it, too.

They were all very cool about what they saw. They didn’t recoil in horror or cry out in disgust. It was
almost as though I looked just about the same, with or without the eye patch on.

After I got the eye patch back in place, I said to Slazinger: “Were you here while this was going on?”

“Sure,” he said. “I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.”

“Didn’t you know how it would make me feel?” I said.

“That’s why I wouldn’t have missed it for anything,” he said.

“I just don’t understand this,” I said. “Suddenly it sounds as though you’re all my enemies.”

“I don’t know about these two,” said Slazinger, “but I’m sure as hell your enemy. Why didn’t you tell me she was Polly Madison?”

“How did you find out?” I said.

“She told me,” he said. “I saw what she was doing here, and I begged her not to—because I thought it might kill you. She said it would make you ten years younger.

“I thought it might really be a life-and-death situation,” he went on, “and that I had better take some direct physical action.” This was a man, incidentally, who had won a Silver Star for protecting his comrades on Okinawa by lying down on a fizzing Japanese hand grenade.

“So I gathered up as many rolls of wallpaper as I could,” he said, “and ran out into the kitchen and hid them in the deep freeze. How’s that for friendship?”

“God
bless
you!” I exclaimed.

“Yes, and God fuck you,” he said. “She came right after me, and wanted to know what I’d done with the wallpaper. I called her a crazy witch, and she called me a freeloader and ‘the spit-filled penny whistle of American literature.’ ‘Who are you to talk about literature?’ I asked her. So she told me.”

What she said to him was this: “My novels sold seven million copies in the United States alone last year. Two are being made into major motion pictures as we stand here, and one of them made into a movie last year won Academy Awards for Best Cinematography, Best Supporting Actress and Best Score. Shake hands, Buster, with Polly Madison, Literary Middleweight Champion of the World! And then give me back my wallpaper, or I’ll break your arms!”

“How could you have let me make such a fool of myself for so long, Rabo—” he said, “giving her tips on the ins and outs of the writing game?”

“I was waiting for the opportune time,” I said.

“You missed it by a mile, you son of a bitch,” he said.

“She’s in a different league from you anyway,” I said.

“That’s right,” he said. “She’s richer and she’s better.”

“Not better, surely,” I said.

“This woman is a monster,” he said, “but her
books are marvelous! She’s the new Richard Wagner, one of the most awful people who ever lived.”

“How would you know about her books?” I said.

“Celeste has them all, so I read them,” he said. “How’s that for an irony? There I was all summer, reading her books and admiring the hell out of them, and meanwhile treating her like a half-wit, not knowing who she was.”

So that’s what
he
did with this summer, anyway: he read all the Polly Madison books!

“After I found out who she was,” he said, “and the way you’d kept it from me, I became more enthusiastic than she was about redoing the foyer. I said that if she really wanted to make you happy, she would paint the woodwork babyshit brown.”

He knew that I had had at least two unhappy experiences with the color practically everybody calls “babyshit brown.” Even in San Ignacio when I was a boy, people called it “babyshit brown.”

One experience took place outside Brooks Brothers years ago, where I had bought a summer suit which I thought looked pretty nice, which had been altered for me, and which I decided to wear home. I was then married to Dorothy, and we were still living in the city, and both still planning on my being a businessman. The minute I stepped outside, two policemen grabbed me for hard questioning. Then they let me go with an apology, explaining that a man had just robbed a bank down
the street, with a lady’s nylon stocking over his head. “All that anybody could tell us about him,” one of them said to me, “was that his suit was babyshit brown.”

My other unhappy association with that color had to do with Terry Kitchen. After Terry and I and several others in our gang moved out here for the cheap real estate and potato barns, Terry did his afternoon drinking at bars which were, in effect, private clubs for native working men. This was a man, incidentally, who was a graduate of Yale Law School, who had been a clerk to Supreme Court Justice John Harlan, and a major in the Eighty-second Airborne. I was not only supporting him in large measure: I was the one he called or had somebody else call from some bar when he was too drunk to drive home.

And here is what Kitchen, arguably the most important artist ever to paint in the Hamptons, with the possible exception of Winslow Homer, is called in the local bars by the few who still remember him: “The guy in the babyshit-brown convertible.”

“
W
HERE IS
M
RS.
B
ERMAN
at this moment?” I wished to know.

“Upstairs—getting dressed for a big date,” said Celeste. “She looks terrific. Wait till you see.”

“Date?” I said. She had never gone on a date as long as she had been living here. “Who would she have a date with?”

“She met a psychiatrist on the beach,” said the cook.

“He drives a Ferrari,” said her daughter. “He held the ladder for her while she hung the paper. He’s taking her to a big dinner party for Jackie Kennedy over in Southampton, and then they’re going dancing in Sag Harbor afterwards.”

At that moment, Mrs. Berman arrived in the foyer, as serene and majestic as the most beautiful motor ship ever built, the French liner
Normandie.

When I was a hack artist in an advertising agency before the war, I had painted a picture of the
Normandie
for a travel poster. And when I was about to sail as a soldier for North Africa on February 9, 1942, and was giving Sam Wu the address where he could write to me, the sky over New York Harbor was thick with smoke.

Why?

Workmen converting an ocean liner into a troopship had started an uncontrollable fire in the belly of the most beautiful motor ship ever built. Her name again, and may her soul rest in peace: the
Normandie.

“This is an absolute outrage,” I said to Mrs. Berman.

She smiled. “How do I look?” she said. She was overwhelmingly erotic—her voluptuous figure exaggerated and cocked this way and that way as she teetered on high-heeled, golden dancing shoes. Her skintight cocktail dress was cut low in front, shamelessly displaying her luscious orbs. What a sexual bully she could be!

“Who gives a damn what
you
look like?” I said.

“Somebody will,” she said.

“What have you
done
to this foyer?” I said. “That’s what I’d like to discuss with you, and the
hell
with your clothes!”

“Make it fast,” she said. “My date will be here at any time.”

“O.K.,” I said. “What you have done here is not only an unforgivable insult to the history of art, but you
have spit on the grave of my
wife!
You knew perfectly well that she created this foyer, not I. I could go on to speak of sanity as compared with insanity, decency as compared with vandalism, friendship as compared with rabies. But since you, Mrs. Berman, have called for speed and clarity in my mode of self-expression, because your concupiscent shrink will be arriving in his Ferrari at any moment, try this: Get the hell out of here, and never come back again!”

“Bushwa,” she said.

“‘Bushwa’?” I echoed scornfully. “I suppose that’s the high level of intellectual discourse one might expect from the author of the Polly Madison books.”

“It wouldn’t hurt
you
to read one,” she said. “They’re about life right now.” She indicated Slazinger. “You and your ex-pal here never got past the Great Depression and World War Two.”

She was wearing a gold wristwatch encrusted with diamonds and rubies which I had never seen before, and it fell to the floor.