Bluebeard (41 page)

Bulletin from the present: Paul Slazinger has voluntarily committed himself to the psychiatric ward at the Veterans Administration hospital over at Riverhead. I certainly didn’t know what to do about the bad chemicals his body was dumping into his bloodstream, and he was becoming a maniac even to himself. Mrs. Berman was glad to see him
out
of here.

Better he should be looked after by his Uncle Sam.

     
O
F ALL THE THINGS
I have to be ashamed of, the most troublesome of this old heart of mine is my failure as a husband of the good and brave Dorothy, and the consequent alienation of my own flesh and blood, Henri and Terry, from me, their Dad.

What will be found written after the name of Rabo Karabekian in the Big Book on Judgment Day?

“Soldier: Excellent.

“Husband and Father: Floparroo.

“Serious artist: Floparroo.”

There was Hell to pay when I got home from Florence. The good and brave Dorothy and both boys had a brand new kind of influenza, yet another postwar miracle. A doctor had been to see them and would come again, and a woman upstairs was feeding them. It was agreed that I could only be in the way until Dorothy got back to her feet, and that I should spend the next few
nights at the studio Terry Kitchen and I had rented above Union Square.

How smart we would have been to have me stay away for a hundred years instead!

“Before I go, I want to tell you I’ve got some really good news,” I said.

“We’re not going to move out to that godforsaken house in the middle of nowhere?” she said.

“That isn’t it,” I said. “You and the kids will get to love it out there, with the ocean and lots of fresh air.”

“Somebody’s offered you a steady job out there?” she said.

“No,” I said.

“But you’re going to look for one,” she said. “You’re going to take your degree in business administration that we all sacrificed so much for, and knock on doors out there till somebody in some decent business hires you, so we’ll have steady money coming in.”

“Honeybunch, listen to me,” I said. “When I was in Florence I sold ten thousand dollars’ worth of paintings.”

Our basement apartment resembled a storage room for scenery in a theater, there were so many huge canvases in there—which I had accepted in lieu of repayments of debts. So she got off this joke: “Then you’re going to end up in prison,” she said, “because we don’t even have three dollars’ worth of paintings here.”

I had made her so unhappy that she had developed a sense of humor, which she certainly didn’t have when I married her.

“You’re supposed to be thirty-four years old,” she said. She herself was twenty-three!

“I
am
thirty-four,” I said.

“Then
act
thirty-four,” she said. “Act like a man with a wife and family who’ll be forty before he knows it, and nobody will give him a job doing anything but sacking groceries or pumping gas.”

“That’s really laying it on the line, isn’t it?” I said.

“I don’t lay it on the line like that,” she said. “Life lays it on the line like that. Rabo! What’s happened to the man I married? We had such sensible plans for such a sensible life. And then you met these people—these bums.”

“I always wanted to be an artist,” I said.

“You never told me that,” she said.

“I didn’t think it was possible,” I said. “Now I do.”

“Too late—and much too risky for a family man. Wake up!” she said. “Why can’t you just be happy with a nice family? Everybody else is.”

“I’ll tell you again: I sold ten thousand dollars’ worth of paintings in Florence,” I said.

“That’ll fall through like everything else,” she said.

“If you love me, you’d have more faith in me as a painter,” I said.

“I love you, but I hate your friends and your paintings,” she said, “and I’m scared for me and my babies, the way things are going. The war is
over
, Rabo!”

“What is
that
supposed to mean?” I said.

“You don’t have to do wild things, great big things, dangerous things that don’t have a chance,” she said. “You’ve already got all the medals anybody could want. You don’t have to conquer France.” This last was a reference to our grandiose talk about making New York City rather than Paris the Art Capital of the World.

“They were on our side anyway, weren’t they?” she said. “Why do you have to go conquer them? What did they ever do to you?”

I was already outside the apartment when she asked me that, so all she had to do to end the conversation was what Picasso had done to me, which was to close the door and lock it.

I could hear her crying inside. Poor soul! Poor soul!

It was late afternoon. I took my suitcase over to Kitchen’s and my studio. Kitchen was asleep on his cot. Before I woke him up, I had a look at what he had been doing in my absence. He had slashed all his paintings with an ivory-handled straight razor inherited from his paternal grandfather, who had been president of the New York Central Railroad. The Art World certainly wasn’t any the poorer for what he had done. I had the obvious thought: “It’s a miracle he didn’t slash his wrists as well.”

This was a great big beautiful Anglo-Saxon sleeping there, like Fred Jones a model for a Dan Gregory
illustration of a story about an ideal American hero. And when he and I went places together, we really
did
look like Jones and Gregory. Not only that, but Kitchen treated me as respectfully as Fred had treated Gregory, which was preposterous! Fred had been a genuine, dumb, sweet lunk, whereas my own buddy, sleeping there, was a graduate of Yale Law School, could have been a professional pianist or tennis player or golfer.

He had inherited a world of talent along with that straight razor. His father was a first-rate cellist and chess player and horticulturalist, as well as a corporation lawyer and a pioneer in winning civil rights for the black people.

My sleeping buddy had also outranked me in the Army, as a lieutenant colonel in the Paratroops, and in deeds of derring-do! But he chose to stand in awe of me because I could do one thing he could never do, which was to draw or paint a likeness of anything my eye could see.

As for my own work there in the studio, the big fields of color before which I could stand intoxicated for hour after hour: they were meant to be
beginnings.
I expected them to become more and more complicated as I slowly but surely closed in on what had so long eluded me: soul, soul, soul.

I woke him up, and said I would buy him an early supper at the Cedar Tavern. I didn’t tell him about the big deal I had pulled off in Florence, since he couldn’t
be a part of it. He wouldn’t get his hands on the spray rig for two more days.

When the Contessa Portomaggiore died, incidentally, her collection would include
sixteen
Terry Kitchens.

“Early supper” meant early drinking too. There were already three painters at what had become our regular table in the back. I will call them “Painters X, Y and Z.” And, lest I give aid and comfort to Philistines eager to hear that the first Abstract Expressionists were a bunch of drunks and wild men, let me say who these three
weren’t.

They were
not
, repeat, were
not:
William Baziotes, James Brooks, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, who was already dead by then anyway, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Hans Hofmann, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Syd Solomon or Bradley Walker Tomlin.

Pollock would show up that evening, all right, but he was on the wagon. He would not say a word, and would soon go home again. And one person there wasn’t a painter at all, as far as we knew. He was a tailor. His name was Isadore Finkelstein, and his shop was right above the tavern. After a couple of drinks, he could talk painting as well as anyone. His grandfather, he said, had been a tailor in Vienna, and had made several suits for the painter Gustav Klimt before the First World War.

And we got on the subject of why, even though we
had been given shows which had excited some critics, and which had inspired a big story in
Life
magazine about Pollock, we still weren’t making anywhere near enough to live on.

We concluded that it was our clothing and grooming which were holding us back. This was a kind of joke. Everything we said was a kind of joke. I still don’t understand how things got so gruesomely serious for Pollock and Kitchen after only six more years went by.