Bluebeard (28 page)

Only now do I realize that Dan Gregory caught us at a moment when we had somehow agreed that we were going to make love that afternoon. I now think we were out of control, and would have made love whether we had run into him or not. Every time I have told this story before, I have indicated that there would have been no lovemaking if it hadn’t been for the confrontation.

Not so.

“I don’t give a
hoot
what pictures you look at,” he said. “All I asked was that you not pay your respects to an institution which thinks that the smears and spatters and splotches and daubs and dribbles and vomit of lunatics and degenerates and charlatans are great treasures we should all admire.”

Reconstructing what he said to us long ago, I am touched by how careful he and almost all angry males used to be, when in mixed company, not to use words which might offend women and children, such as
shit
and
fuck.

Circe Berman argues that the inclusion of once-taboo words into ordinary conversations is a good thing, since women and children are now free to discuss their bodies without shame, and so to take care of themselves more intelligently.

I said to her, “Maybe so. But don’t you think all this frankness has also caused a collapse of eloquence?” I reminded her of the cook’s daughter’s habit of referring to anybody she didn’t like for whatever reason as “an asshole.” I said: “Never did I hear Celeste give a thoughtful explanation of what it was that such a person might have done to earn that protological sobriquet.”

“Of all the ways to hurt me,” Gregory went on in that British accent of his, “you could not have picked a crueler one. I have treated you as a son,” he said to me,
“and you like a daughter,” he said to Marilee, “and this is the thanks I get. And it’s not your going in there which is the most insulting. No, it isn’t that. It’s how
happy
you were when you were coming out! What could that happiness be but a mockery of me and of every person who ever tried to keep control of a paintbrush?”

He said that he was going to have Fred drive him to City Island, where his yacht the
Ararat
was in dry dock, and he was going to live aboard her until Fred could assure him that we were out of his house on Forty-eighth Street, and that every trace of our ever having been there had been removed.

“Out you go!” he said. “Good riddance of bad rubbish!” What a surreal thing this master realist was about to do! He was going to take up residence on an eighty-foot sailing yacht in dry dock! He would have to come and go by ladder, would have to use a boatyard toilet and telephone!

And think of what a bizarre creation his studio was, an hallucination created at tremendous expense and effort!

And he would eventually arrange to have himself and his only friend killed while wearing Italian uniforms!

Everything about Dan Gregory, except for his paintings, had fewer connections with reality and common sense than the most radical modern art!

Bulletin from the present: Circe Berman has just discovered, after questioning me closely, that I have never actually read a whole book by Paul Slazinger, my former best friend.

She, it turns out, has read them all since moving in. I
own
them all. They have a little shelf of honor in the library, and are autographed beneath testimonials as to how close Paul and I have been for so many years. I have read reviews of most of them, and have a pretty good idea of how they go.

I think Paul knew this about me, although we have certainly never discussed it openly. It is impossible for me to take his writings seriously, knowing how reckless he has been in real life. How can I study his published opinions on love and hate and God and man and whether the ends ever justify the means and all that with solemnity? As for a quid pro quo: I don’t owe him one. He has never honored me as a painter or collector, nor should he have.

So what was our bond?

Loneliness and wounds from World War Two which were quite grave.

Circe Berman has broken her silence about the mystery of the locked potato barn. She found a big picture book in the library whose spine is split and whose pages are not only dog eared but splotched with painty finger-prints, although it was published only three years ago. It depicts virtually all the uniforms worn by every
sort of regular soldier or sailor or airman during World War Two. She asked me point blank if it had anything to do with what was in the barn.

“Maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t,” I said.

But I will tell you a secret: it does, it does.

So Marilee and I slouched home from the Museum of Modern Art like whipped children. We laughed sometimes, too, just fell into each other’s arms and laughed and laughed. So we were feeling each other up and liking each other terrifically all the way home.

We stopped to watch a fight between two white men in front of a bar on Third Avenue. Neither one was wearing green. They snarled in some language we did not understand. They may have been Macedonians or Basques or Frisian Islanders, or something like that.

Marilee had a slight limp and a list to the left, as permanent consequences of her having been pushed down the stairs by an Armenian. But another Armenian was groping her and nuzzling her hair and so on, and had an erection with which you might have smashed coconuts. I like to think we were man and wife. Life itself can be sacramental. The supposition was that we would be leaving the Garden of Eden together, and would cleave to one another in the wilderness through thick and thin.

I don’t know why we laughed so much.

Our ages again: I was almost twenty, and she was twenty-nine. The man we were about to cuckold or
whatever was fifty-three, with only seven more years to go, a mere stripling in retrospect. Imagine having all of seven more years to go!

Maybe Marilee and I laughed so much because we were about to do the one thing other than eat and drink and sleep which our bodies said we were on Earth to do. There was no vengeance or defiance or defilement in it. We did not do it in the bed she and Gregory shared, or in Fred Jones’s bed next door, or in the immaculate French Empire guest-room, or in the studio—and not even on my own bed, although we could have done it almost anywhere except in the basement, since Fu Manchu was the only other person in the house just then. Our brainless lovemaking anticipated Abstract Expressionism in a way, since it was about absolutely nothing but itself.

Yes, and I am reminded now of what the painter Jim Brooks said to me about how he operated, about how all the Abstract Expressionists operated: “I lay on the first stroke of color. After that, the canvas has to do at least half the work.” The canvas, if things were going well, would, after that first stroke, begin suggesting or even demanding that he do this or that. In Marilee’s and my case, the first stroke was a kiss just inside the front door, a big, wet, hot, hilariously smeary thing.

Talk about paint!

Marilee’s and my canvas, so to speak, called for more and wetter kisses, and then a groping, goosey, swooning tango up the spiral staircase and through the grand dining room. We knocked over a chair, which we set up-right again. The canvas, doing
all
the work and not just half of it, sent us through the butler’s pantry and into an unused storage room about eight feet square. The only thing in there was a broken-down sofa which must have been left by the previous owners. There was one tiny window, looking northward, into the leafless treetops of the back garden.