Bluebeard (3 page)

And I
do
have a friend who is mine, all mine. He is the novelist Paul Slazinger, a wounded World War Two geezer like myself. He sleeps alone in a house next door to
my
old house in Springs.

I say he
sleeps
there, because he comes over
here
almost every day, and is probably on the property
some-where at this very moment, watching a tennis game, or sitting on the beach, staring out to sea, or playing cards with the cook in the kitchen, or hiding from everybody and everything, and reading a book where practically nobody ever goes, on the far side of the potato barn.

I don’t think he writes much anymore. And, as I say, I don’t paint at
all
anymore. I won’t even doodle on the memo pad next to the downstairs telephone. A couple of weeks ago, I caught myself doing exactly that, and I deliberately snapped the point off the pencil, broke the pencil in two, and I threw its broken body into a waste-basket, like a baby rattlesnake which had wanted to
poison
me.

Paul has no money. He eats supper with me here four or five times a week, and gobbles directly from my refrigerator and fruit bowls during the daytime, so I am surely his primary source of nutriment. I have said to him many times after supper, “Paul—why don’t you sell your house and get a little walking-around money, and move in here? Look at all the
room
I’ve got. And I’m never going to have a wife or a lady friend again, and neither are you. Jesus! Who would have us? We look like a couple of gutshot iguanas! So move in! I won’t bother you, and you won’t bother me. What could make more sense?”

His answer never varies much from this one: “I can only write at home.” Some home, with a busted refrigerator and nobody ever there but him.

One time he said about this house: “Who could write in a museum?”

Well—I am now finding out if that can be done or not. I am
writing
in this museum.

Yes, it’s true: I, old Rabo Karabekian, having disgraced myself in the visual arts, am now having a go at literature. A true child of the Great Depression, though, playing it safe, I am hanging on to my job as a museum guard.

What has inspired this amazing career change by one so old?
Cherchez la femme!

Uninvited, as nearly as I can remember, an energetic and opinionated and voluptuous and relatively young woman has moved in with me!

She said she couldn’t bear seeing and hearing me do absolutely nothing all day long—so why didn’t I
do
something, do
anything?
If I couldn’t think of anything else to do, why didn’t I write my autobiography?

Why not, indeed?

She is so
authoritative!

I find myself doing whatever she says I must do. During our twenty years of marriage, my dear Edith never
once
thought of something for me to do. In the Army, I knew several colonels and generals like this new woman in my life, but they were
men,
and we were a nation at war.

Is this woman a friend? I don’t know what the hell she is. All I know is that she isn’t going to leave again until she’s good and ready, and that she scares the
pants
off me.

Help.

Her name is Circe Berman.

She is a widow. Her husband was a brain surgeon in Baltimore, where she still has a house as big and empty as this one. Her husband Abe died of a brain hemorrhage six months ago. She is forty-three years old, and she has selected this house as a nice place to live and work while she writes her husband’s biography.

There is nothing erotic about our relationship. I am twenty-eight years Mrs. Berman’s senior, and have become too ugly for anyone but a dog to love. I really do look like a gutshot iguana, and am one-eyed besides. Enough is enough.

Here is how we met: she wandered onto my private beach alone one afternoon, not knowing it was private. She had never heard of me, since she hates modern art. She didn’t know a soul in the Hamptons, and was staying in the Maidstone Inn in the village about a mile and a half from here. She had walked from there to the public beach, and then across my border.

I went down for my afternoon dip, and there she was, fully dressed, and doing what Paul Slazinger does so much of: sitting on sand and staring out to sea. The only reason I minded her being there, or anybody’s being there, was my ludicrous physique and the fact I would have to take off my eye patch before I went in. There’s quite a mess under there, not unlike a scrambled egg. I was embarrassed to be seen up close.

Paul Slazinger says, incidentally, that the human condition can be summed up in just one word, and this is the word:
Embarrassment.

So I elected not to swim, but to sunbathe some distance away from her.

I did, however, come close enough to say, “Hello.”

This was her curious reply: “Tell me how your parents died.”

What a spooky woman! She could be a
witch.
Who but a witch could have persuaded me to write my autobiography?

She has just stuck her head in the room to say that it was time I went to New York City, where I haven’t been since Edith died. I’ve hardly been out of this house since Edith died.

New York City, here I come. This is terrible!

“Tell me how your parents died,” she said. I couldn’t believe my ears.

“I beg your pardon?” I said.

“What good is ‘Hello’?” she said.

She had stopped me in my tracks. “I’ve always thought it was better than nothing,” I said, “but I could be wrong.”

“What does ‘Hello’ mean?” she said.

And I said, “I had always understood it to mean ‘Hello.’”

“Well it doesn’t,” she said. “It means, ‘Don’t talk about anything important.’ It means, ‘I’m smiling but not listening, so just go away.’”

“Tell
Mama!”
Can you
beat
it?

She had straight black hair and large brown eyes like my mother—but she was much taller than my mother, and a little bit taller than me, for that matter. She was also much shapelier than my mother, who let herself become quite heavy, and who didn’t care much what her hair looked like, either, or her clothes. Mother didn’t care because Father didn’t care.

And I told Mrs. Berman this about my mother: “She died when I was twelve—of a tetanus infection she evidently picked up while working in a cannery in California. The cannery was built on the site of an old livery stable, and tetanus bacteria often colonize the intestines of horses without hurting them, and then become durable spores, armored little seeds, when excreted. One of them lurking in the dirt around and under the cannery was somehow exhumed and sent traveling. After a long, long sleep it awakened in Paradise, something we would all like to do. Paradise was a cut in my mother’s hand.”

“So long, Mama,” said Circe Berman.

There was that word
Mama
again.

“At least she didn’t have to endure the Great Depression, which was only one year away,” I said.

And at least she didn’t have to see her only child come home a cyclops from World War Two.

“And how did your father die?” she said.

“In the Bijou Theater in San Ignacio in 1938,” I said. “He went to the movie alone. He never even considered remarrying.”

He still lived over the little store in California where he had got his first foothold in the economy of the United States of America. I had been living in Manhattan for five years then—and was working as an artist for an advertising agency. When the movie was over, the lights came on, and everybody went home but Father.

“What was the movie?” she asked.

And I said,
“Captains Courageous
, starring Spencer Tracy and Freddie Bartholomew.”

What Father might have made of that movie, which was about cod fishermen in the North Atlantic, God only knows. Maybe he didn’t see any of it before he died. If he did see some of it, he must have gotten rueful satisfaction from its having absolutely nothing to do with anything he had ever seen or anybody he had ever known. He welcomed all proofs that the planet he had known and loved during his boyhood had disappeared entirely.

That was
his
way of honoring all the friends and relatives he had lost in the massacre.