Bluebeard (22 page)

The cook’s daughter laughed, and I asked her loftily what she thought was funny.

She said, “Everybody’s got the dropsies today.”

So Circe, picking up the watch, asked who else had dropped something, and Celeste told her about my eye patch.

Slazinger took the opportunity to mock what was under the eye patch. “Oh, you should
see
that scar,” he said. “It is the most
horrible
scar! I have never seen such disgusting disfigurement.”

I wouldn’t have taken that from anybody else, but I had to take it from him. He had a wide scar that looked like a map of the Mississippi Valley running from his sternum to his crotch, where he had been laid open by the hand grenade.

He has only one nipple left, and he asked me a riddle one time: “What has three eyes, three nipples and two assholes?”

“I give up,” I said.

And he said, “Paul Slazinger and Rabo Karabekian.”

There in the foyer, he said to me, “Until you dropped your eye patch, I had no idea how
vain
you were. That’s a perfectly acceptable wink under there.”

“Now that you know,” I said, “I hope that
both
you and Polly Madison clear the hell out of here and never come back again. How you two took advantage of my hospitality!”

“I paid my share,” said Mrs. Berman. This was true. From the very first, she had insisted on paying for the cook and the food and liquor.

“You are so deep in my debt for so many things besides money,” she went on, “you could never pay me back in a million years. After I’m gone, you’re going to realize what a favor I did you with this foyer alone.”

“Favor? Did you say favor?” I jeered. “You know
what these pictures are to anybody with half a grain of sense about art? They are a
negation
of art! They aren’t just neutral. They are black holes from which no intelligence or skill can ever escape. Worse than that, they suck up the dignity, the self-respect, of anybody unfortunate enough to have to look at them.”

“Seems like a lot for just a few little pictures to do,” she said, meanwhile trying without any luck to clip her watch around her wrist again.

“Is it still running?” I said.

“It hasn’t run for years,” she said.

“Then why do you wear it?” I said.

“To look as nice as possible,” she said, “but now the clasp is broken.” She offered the watch to me, and made an allusion to my tale of how my mother had become rich in jewels during the massacre. “Here! Take it, and buy yourself a ticket to someplace where you’ll be happier—like the Great Depression or World War Two.”

I waved the gift away.

“Why not a ticket back to what you were before I got here?” she said. “Except you don’t
need
a ticket. You’ll be back there quick enough, as soon as I move out.”

“I was quite content in June,” I said, “and then you appeared.”

“Yes,” she said, “and you were also fifteen pounds lighter and ten shades paler, and a thousand times more listless, and your personal hygiene was so careless that I
almost didn’t come to supper. I was afraid I might get leprosy.”

“You’re
too
kind,” I said.

“I brought you back to life,” she said. “You’re my Lazarus. All Jesus did for Lazarus was bring him back to life. I not only brought you back to life—I got you writing your autobiography.”

“That was a big joke, too, I guess,” I said.

“Big joke like what?” she said.

“Like this foyer,” I said.

“These pictures are twice as serious as yours, if you give them half a chance,” she said.

“You had them sent up from Baltimore?” I said.

“No,” she said. “I ran into another collector at an antique show in Bridgehampton last week, and she sold them to me. I didn’t know what to do with them at first, so I hid them in the basement—behind all the Sateen Dura-Luxe.”

“I hope this babyshit brown isn’t Sateen Dura-Luxe,” I said.

“No,” she said. “Only an idiot would use Sateen Dura-Luxe. And you want me to tell you what’s great about these pictures?”

“No,” I said.

“I’ve done my best to understand and respect
your
pictures,” she said. “Why won’t you do the same for
mine?”

“Do you know the meaning of the word “kitsch”?” I said.

“I wrote a book called
Kitsch,”
she said.

“I read it,” said Celeste. “It’s about a girl whose boyfriend tried to make her think she has bad taste, which she does—but it doesn’t matter much.”

“You don’t call these pictures of little girls on swings serious art?” jeered Mrs. Berman. “Try thinking what the Victorians thought when they looked at them, which was how sick or unhappy so many of these happy, innocent little girls would be in just a little while—diphtheria, pneumonia, smallpox, miscarriages, violent husbands, poverty, widowhood, prostitution—death and burial in potter’s field.”

There was the swish of tires in the gravel driveway. “Time to go,” she said. “Maybe you can’t stand truly serious art. Maybe you’d better use the back door from now on.”

And she was gone!

     
N
O SOONER
had the snarl and burble of the psychiatrist’s Ferrari died away in the sunset than the cook said she and her daughter would be leaving too. “This is your two weeks’ notice,” she said.

What a blow! “What made you decide so suddenly?” I asked.

“Nothing sudden about it,” she said. “Celeste and I were about to leave right before Mrs. Berman came. It was so
dead
here. She made things exciting, so we stayed. But we’ve always said to each other: “When she goes, we go, too.””

“I really
need
you,” I said. “What could I do to persuade you to stay?” I mean: my God—they already had rooms with ocean views, and Celeste’s young friends had the run of the property, and no end of free snacks and refreshments. The cook could take any of the cars anytime she wanted to, and I was paying her like a movie star.

“You could learn my name,” she said.

What was going on? “Do what?” I said.

“Whenever I hear you talk about me, all you ever call me is “the cook.” I have a name. It’s ‘Allison White,’” she said.

“Goodness!” I protested with terrified joviality, “I know that perfectly well. That’s who I make out your check to every week. Did I misspell it or something—or get your Social Security wrong?”

“That’s the only time you ever think of me,” she said, “when you make out my check—and I don’t think you think about me then. Before Mrs. Berman came, and Celeste was in school, and there were just the two of us in the house alone, and we’d slept under the same roof night after night, and you ate my food—”

Here she stopped. She hoped she’d said enough, I guess. I now realize that this was very hard for her.

“Yes—?” I said.

“This is so
stupid,”
she said.

“I can’t tell if it is or not,” I said.

And then she blurted: “I don’t want to marry you!

My God! “Who
would?”
I said.

“I just want to be a human being and not a nobody and a nothing, if I have to live under the same roof with a man—
any
man,” she said. She revised that instantly: “Any
person,”
she said.

This was dismayingly close to what my first wife Dorothy had said to me: that I often treated her as though I didn’t even care what her name was, as though she really weren’t there. The next thing the cook said I had also heard from Dorothy:

“I think you’re scared to death of women,” she said.

“Me, too,” said Celeste.

“Celeste—” I said, “you and I have been close, haven’t we?”

“That’s because you think I’m stupid,” said Celeste.

“And she’s still too young to be threatening,” her mother said.

“So
everybody’s
leaving now,” I said. “Where’s Paul Slazinger?”

“Out the door,” said Celeste.

What had I done to deserve this? All I had done was go to New York City for one night, giving the widow Berman time to redecorate the foyer! And now, as I stood in the midst of a life she had ruined, she was off hobnobbing in Southampton with Jackie Kennedy!

“Oh, my,” I said at last. “And I know you hate my famous art collection, too.”

They brightened some, because, I suppose, I had broached a subject which was a lot easier to discuss than the relationship between women and men.

“I don’t hate them,” said the cook—said
Allison White, Allison White, Allison White!
This is a perfectly presentable woman, with even features and a trim figure
and nice brown hair. I’m the problem. I am not a presentable man.

“They just don’t
mean
anything to me,” she went on. “I’m sure that’s because I’m uneducated. Maybe if I went to college, I would finally realize how wonderful they are. The only one I really liked, you sold.”

“Which one was that?” I said. I myself perked up some, hoping to salvage something, at least, from this nightmare: a statement from these unsophisticated people as to which of my paintings, one I had sold, evidently, had had such power that even
they
had liked it.