Bluebeard (32 page)

There were about twelve students in the room and busy at their easels, all making pictures of the same nude model. I looked forward to joining them. They seemed to be a happy family, and I needed one. I was not a member of the family at Leidveld and Moore. There was resentment there about how I’d got my job.

Bauerbeck was old to be teaching—about sixty-five, I’d guess. I knew from the head of the art department at the ad agency, who had studied under him, that he was a native of Cincinnati, Ohio, but had spent most of his adult life in Europe, as so many American painters used to do. He was so old that he had conversed, however briefly, with James Whistler and Henry James and Emile Zola and Paul Cezanne! He also claimed to have been a friend of Hitler in Vienna, when Hitler was a starving artist before the First World War.

Old Bauerbeck must have himself been a starving artist when I met him. Otherwise, he would not have
been teaching at the Art Students League at that advanced age. I have never been able to find out what finally became of him. Now you see him, now you don’t.

We did not become friends. He leafed through my portfolio while saying things like this, very quietly, thank God, so his students could not hear: “Oh, dear, dear, dear,” and “My poor boy,” and “Who did this to you—or did you do it to yourself?”

I asked him what on Earth was wrong, and he said, “I’m not sure I can put it into words.” He really did have to think hard about it. “This is going to sound very odd—” he said at last, “but, technically speaking, there’s nothing you can’t do. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“No,” I said.

“I’m not sure I do, either,” he said. He screwed up his face, “I think—I think—it is somehow very useful, and maybe even essential, for a fine artist to have to somehow make his peace on the canvas with all the things he
cannot
do. That is what attracts us to serious paintings, I think: that shortfall, which we might call “personality,” or maybe even “pain.””

“I see,” I said.

He relaxed. “I think I do, too,” he said. “It’s something I’ve never had to articulate before. How
interesting!”

“I can’t tell if you’ve accepted me as a student or not,” I said.

“No, I’ve rejected you,” he said. “It wouldn’t be fair to either one of us if I were to take you on.”

I was angry. “You’ve rejected me on the basis of some high-flown theory you just made up,” I protested.

“Oh, no, no, no,” he said. “I rejected you before I thought of the theory.”

“On the basis of what?” I demanded.

“On the basis of the very first picture in your portfolio,” he said. “It told me, ‘Here is a man without passion.’ And I asked myself what I now ask you: ‘Why should I teach him the language of painting, since there seems to be absolutely nothing which he is desperate to talk about?’”

Hard times!

So I signed up for a course in creative writing instead—taught three nights a week at City College by a fairly famous short-story writer named Martin Shoup. His stories were about black people, although he himself was white. Dan Gregory had illustrated at least a couple of them—with the customary delight and sympathy he felt for people he believed to be orangutans.

Shoup said about my writing that I wasn’t going to get very far until I became more enthusiastic about describing the looks of things—and particularly people’s faces. He knew I could draw, so he found it odd that I wouldn’t want to go on and on about the looks of things.

“To anybody who can drawn,” I said, “the idea of
putting the appearance of anything into words is like trying to make a Thanksgiving dinner out of ball bearings and broken glass.”

“Then perhaps you had better resign from this course,” he said. Which I did.

I have no idea what finally became of Martin Shoup, either. Maybe he got killed in the war. Circe Berman never heard of him. Now you see him, now you don’t.

Bulletin from the present: Paul Slazinger, who himself teaches creative writing from time to time, has come back into our lives in a great big way! All is forgiven, apparently. He is sound asleep here now in an upstairs bedroom. When he wakes up, we shall see what we shall see.

The Rescue Squad of the Springs Volunteer Fire Department brought him here at about midnight last night. He had awakened his neighbors in Springs by yelling for help out different windows of his house—maybe every window he owned before he was through. The Rescue Squad wanted to take him to the Veterans Administration hospital at Riverhead. It was well known that he was a veteran. It is well known that I am a veteran.

But he calmed down, and he promised the rescuers that he would be all right if they brought him over here. So they rang my doorbell, and I received them in the foyer with its pictures of little girls on swings. Supported
and restrained in the midst of the compassionate volunteers was a straitjacket containing the frantic meat of Slazinger. If I gave them permission, they were going to turn him loose as an experiment.

Circe Berman had come down by then. We were both in our nightclothes. People do strange things when suddenly confronted by a person out of his or her mind. After taking one long, hard look at Slazinger, Circe turned her back on all of us and started straightening the pictures of the little girls on swings. So there was something this seemingly fearless woman was afraid of. She was petrified by insanity.

Insane people are evidently Gorgons to her. If she looks at one, she turns to stone. There must be a story there.

     
S
LAZINGER WAS A LAMB
when they unswad-dled him. “Just put me to bed,” he said. He named the room he wanted to be put in, the one on the second floor with Adolph Gottlieb’s “Frozen Sounds Number Seven” over the fireplace and a bay window looking across the dunes to the ocean. He wanted that room and no other, and seemed to feel entitled to sleep there. So he must have been dreaming in detail of moving in with me for hours at least, and maybe even for decades. I was his insurance plan. Sooner or later, he would simply give up, go limp, and have himself delivered to the beach house of a fabulously well-to-do Armenian.

He, incidentally, was from a very old American family. The first Slazinger on this continent was a Hessian grenadier serving as a mercenary with General John Burgoyne, the British general who was defeated by forces commanded in part by the rebel General Benedict Arnold, who would later desert to the British, at the second Battle of Freeman’s Farm, north of Albany, two hundred years ago. Slazinger’s ancestor was taken
prisoner during the battle, and never went home, which was in Wiesbaden, Germany, where he had been the son of—guess what?

A cobbler.

I would have to say that the widow Berman was a lot scarier than Slazinger the night Slazinger arrived in a straitjacket. He was pretty much the same old Slazinger when the Rescue Squad turned him loose in the foyer. But Circe, almost catatonic, was a Circe I had never seen before.

So I put Slazinger to bed unassisted. I didn’t undress him. He didn’t have that many clothes on anyway—just Jockey shorts and a T-shirt that said,
STOP SHOREHAM.
Shoreham is a nuclear generating plant not far away. If it didn’t work the way it was supposed to, it might kill hundreds of thousands of people and render Long Island uninhabitable for centuries. A lot of people were opposed to it. A lot of people were for it. I myself think about it as little as possible.

I will say this about it, although I have only seen it in photographs. Never have I contemplated architecture which said more pointedly to one and all: “I am from another planet. I have no way of caring what you are or
what you want or what you do. Buster, you have been
colonized.”

A good subtitle for this book might be this:
Confessions of an Armenian Late Bloomer or Always the Last to Learn.
Listen to this: I never even
suspected
that the widow Berman was a pill freak until the night Slazinger moved in.

After I had put him to bed, with the Belgian linen sheets pulled right up to the nostrils of his big Hessian nose, I thought it might be a good idea to give him a sleeping pill. I didn’t have any, but I hoped Mrs. Berman might have some. I had heard her come up the stairs very slowly and go into her bedroom.

Her door was wide open, so I paid her a call. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, staring straight ahead. I asked her for a sleeping pill, and she told me to help myself in the bathroom. I hadn’t entered that bathroom since she took up residence. In fact, I don’t think I had been in it for years and years. There is a good chance that I had
never
been in that bathroom before.

And, my God—I wish you could see the pills she had! They were apparently samples from drug salesmen which her late doctor husband had accumulated over decades! The medicine cabinet couldn’t begin to hold them all! The marble counter-top around the washbasin was about five feet long and two feet wide, I would estimate, and an entire
regiment
of little bottles was deployed there. The scales dropped from my eyes! So
much was suddenly
explicable
—the strange salutation when we first met on the beach, the impulsive redecoration of the foyer, the unbeatable pool game, the dancing madness, and on and on.