Bluebeard (27 page)

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“The orgastic moment for me is when I hand a
manuscript to my publisher and say, ‘Here! I’m all through with it. I never want to see it again,’” she said.

Back to the past again:

Marilee Kemp wasn’t the only one who was trapped like Nora in
A Doll’s House
before Nora blew her cork. I was another one. And then I caught on: Fred Jones was still another one. He was so handsome and dignified and honored, seemingly, to be of assistance to the great artist Dan Gregory in any way possible—but he was a Nora, too.

His life had been all downhill since World War One, when he had discovered a gift for flying rattletrap kites which were machine-gun platforms. The first time he got his hands on the joystick of an airplane, he must have felt what Terry Kitchen felt when he gripped a spray gun. He must have felt like Kitchen again when he fired his machine guns up in the wild blue yonder, and saw a plane in front of him draw a helix of smoke and flame—ending in a sunburst far below.

What beauty! So unexpected and pure! So easy to achieve!

Fred Jones told me one time that the smoke trails of falling airplanes and observation balloons were the most beautiful things he ever expected to see. And I now compare his elation over arcs and spirals and splotches in the atmosphere with what Jackson Pollock used to feel as he watched what dribbled paint chose to do when it struck a canvas on his studio floor.

Same sort of happiness!

Except that what Pollock did lacked that greatest of all crowd pleasers, which was human sacrifice.

But my point about Fred Jones is this: he had found a home in the Air Corps, just as I would find a home in the Corps of Engineers.

And then he was kicked out for the same reason that I was: he had lost an eye somewhere.

So there is something startling I might tell myself as a youth, if I could get back to the Great Depression in a time machine: “Pst—you, the cocky little Armenian kid. Yes, you. You think Fred Jones is funny and sad at the same time? That’s what you’ll be someday, too: a one-eyed old soldier, afraid of women and with no talent for civilian life.”

I used to wonder back then what it was like to have one eye instead of two, and experiment by covering one eye with a hand. The world didn’t seem all that diminished when I looked at it with only one eye. Nor do I feel today that having only one eye is a particularly serious handicap.

Circe Berman asked me about being one eyed after we had known each other less than an hour. She will ask anybody anything at any time.

“It’s a piece of cake,” I said.

I remember Dan Gregory now, and he really did resemble, as W. C. Fields had said, “a sawed-off Arapahoe,” and of Marilee and Fred Jones at his beck and call. I think what great models they would make for a Gregory illustration of a story about a Roman emperor with a couple of blond, blue-eyed Germanic captives in tow.

It is curious that Fred and not Marilee was the captive Gregory liked to parade in public all the time. It was Fred he took to parties and on fox hunts in Virginia and cruises on his yacht, the
Ararat.

I do not propose to explain this, beyond declaring for a certainty that Gregory and Fred were men’s men. They were not homosexuals.

Whatever the explanation, Gregory did not mind at all that Marilee and I took long walks all over Manhattan, with heads snapping around to take second, third, and fourth looks at her. People must have wondered, too, how somebody like me, obviously not a relative, could have won the companionship of a woman that beautiful.

“People think we’re in love,” I said to her on a walk one day.

And she said, “They’re right.”

“You know what I mean,” I said.

“What do you think love is anyway?” she said.

“I guess I don’t know,” I said.

“You know the best part—” she said, “walking around like this and feeling good about everything. If you missed the rest of it, I certainly wouldn’t cry for you.”

So we went to the Museum of Modern Art for maybe the fiftieth time. I had been with Gregory for almost three years then, and was just a shade under twenty years old. I wasn’t a budding artist anymore. I was an
employee
of an artist, and lucky to have a job of any kind. An awful lot of people were putting up with any sort of job, and waiting for the Great Depression to end, so that real life could get going again. But we would also have to get through another World War before
real
life could get going again.

Don’t you
love
it? This is real life we are now experiencing.

But let me tell you that life seemed as real as Hell back in 1936, when Dan Gregory caught Marilee and me coming out of the Museum of Modern Art.

     
D
AN
G
REGORY
caught Marilee and me coming out of the Museum of Modern Art while a Saint Patrick’s Day parade was blatting and booming northward on Fifth Avenue, a half a block away. The parade caused Gregory’s automobile, a convertible Cord, the most beautiful American means of transportation ever manufactured, to be stuck in traffic right in front of the Museum of Modern Art. This was a two-seater with the top down, and with Fred Jones, the old World War One aviator, at the wheel.

What Fred may have been doing with his sperm I never found out. If I had to guess, I would say that he was saving it up like me. He had that
look
as he sat at the wheel of that sublime motorcar, but the hell with Fred. He was going to be O.K. for quite a while longer, until he was shot dead in Egypt—whereas I was about to go into the real world, ready or not, and try to stand on my own two feet!

Everybody was wearing something green! Then as now, even black people and Orientals and Hasidic Jews
were wearing something green in order not to provoke arguments with Roman Catholic Irishmen. Marilee and Dan Gregory and I and Fred Jones were all wearing green. Back in Gregory’s kitchen, Sam Wu was wearing green.

Gregory pointed a finger at us. He was trembling with rage. “Caught you!” he shouted. “Stay right there! I want to
talk
to you!”

He clambered over the car door, pushed his way through the crowd and planted himself in front of us, his feet far apart, his hands balled into fists. He had often hit Marilee, but he had certainly never hit me. Oddly enough, nobody had ever hit me. Nobody has
ever
hit me.

Sex was the cause of our excitement: youth versus age, wealth and power versus physical attractiveness, stolen moments of forbidden fun and so on—but Gregory spoke only of gratitude, loyalty and modern art.

As for the pictures in the museum’s being genuinely modern: most of them had been painted before the First World War, before Marilee and I had been born! The world back then was very slow to accept changes in painting styles. Nowadays, of course,
every
novelty is celebrated immediately as a masterpiece!

“You parasites! You ingrates! You rotten-spoiled little kids!” seethed Dan Gregory. “Your loving Papa asked just one thing of you as an expression of your loyalty: ‘Never go into the Museum of Modern Art.’”

I doubt that many people who heard him even knew that we were in front of a museum. They probably thought he had caught us coming out of a hotel or an apartment house—someplace with beds for lovers. If they took him literally when he called himself a “Papa,” they would have had to conclude that he was
my
Papa and not hers, since we looked so much alike.

“It was
symbolic!”
he said. “Don’t you understand that? It was a way of proving you were on my side and not theirs. I’m not afraid to have you look at the junk in there. You were part of
my
gang, and proud of it.” He was all choked up now, and he shook his head. “That’s why I made that very simple, very modest, very easily complied-with request: ‘Stay out of the Museum of Modern Art.’”

Marilee and I were so startled by this confrontation, we may even have gone on holding hands. We had come skipping out and holding hands like Jack and Jill. We probably did go on holding hands—like Jack and Jill.