Bluebeard (46 page)

When GEFFCo hung “Windsor Blue Number Seventeen” in its lobby, with fanfare about such an old company’s keeping on top of the latest developments not only in technology but in the arts, the company’s publicity people hoped to say that “Windsor Blue Number Seventeen” was superlative in terms of size—if not the largest painting in the world, then at least the largest painting in New York City, or whatever. But there were several murals right in the city, and God knows in the world, which easily exceeded my painting’s 512 square feet.

The publicity people wondered if it might not be a record holder for a painting
hung on a wall
—ignoring the
fact that it was in fact eight separate panels, mated in back with C-clamps. But that wouldn’t do, either, since it turned out that the Museum of the City of New York had three
continuous
paintings on canvas,
stitched
together to be sure, as high as mine and a third again as long! They were curious artifacts—an early effort at making movies, you might say, since they had rollers at either end. They could be unwound from one and rewound on the other. An audience could see only a small part of the whole at any time. These Brobdingnagian ribbons were decorated with mountains and rivers and virgin forests and limitless grasslands on which buffalo grazed, and deserts where diamonds or rubies or gold nuggets might be had for the stooping. These were the United States of America.

Lecturers traveled all over Northern Europe with such pictures in olden times. With assistants to unroll one end and roll up the other, they urged all ambitious and able persons to abandon tired old Europe and lay claim to rich and beautiful properties in the Promised Land, which were practically theirs for the asking.

Why should a real man stay home when he could be raping a virgin continent?

I had the eight panels purged of every trace of faithless Sateen Dura-Luxes, and restretched and reprimed. I had them set up in the barn, dazzling white in their restored virginity, just as they had been before I
transmuted them into “Windsor Blue Number Seventeen.”

I explained to my wife that this eccentric project was an exorcism of an unhappy past, a symbolic repairing of all the damage I had done to myself and others during my brief career as a painter. That was yet another instance, though, of putting into words what could not be put into words: why and how a painting had come to be.

The long and narrow barn, a century old, was as much a part of it as all that white, white, white.

The powerful floodlights dangling from tracks on the ceiling were part of it, pouring megawatts of energy into all that white sizing, making it far whiter than I would have believed white could ever be. I had caused those artificial suns to be installed when I received the commission to create “Windsor Blue Number Seven-teen.

“What are you going to do with it next?” dear Edith asked.

“It’s done,” I said.

“Are you going to sign it?” she said.

“That would spoil it,” I replied. “A flyspeck would spoil it.”

“Does it have a title?” she said.

“Yes,” I said, and I gave it a title on the spot, one as long as the title Paul Slazinger had given his book on successful revolutions: “I Tried and Failed and Cleaned Up Afterwards, so It’s
Your
Turn Now.”

I had my own death in mind—and what people would say about me afterwards. That was when I first locked up the barn, but with only a single padlock and hasp. I assumed, as my father had and as most husbands do, that I would of course be the first of our pair to die. So I had whimsically self-pitying instructions for Edith as to what she was to do immediately following my burial.

“Hold my wake in the barn, Edith,” I said, “and when people ask you about all the white, white, white, you tell them that it was your husband’s last painting, even though he didn’t paint it. And then you tell them what the title is.”

But she died first, and only two months after that. Her heart stopped, and down she fell into a flower bed.

“No pain,” the doctor said.

At her burial at noon in Green River Cemetery, in a grave only a few yards from those of the other two Musketeers, Jackson Pollock and Terry Kitchen, I had my strongest vision yet of human souls unencumbered, unembarrassed by their unruly meat. There was this rectangular hole in the ground, and standing around it were all these pure and innocent neon tubes.

Was I crazy? You bet.

Her wake was in the home of a friend of hers, not
mine, a mile up the beach from here. The husband did not attend!

Nor did he reenter this house, where he had been so useless and contented and loved without reason for one third of his life and one quarter of the twentieth century.

He went out to the barn, unlocked the sliding doors and turned on the lights. He stared at all that white.

Then he got into his Mercedes and drove to a hardware store in East Hampton, which carried art supplies. I bought everything a painter could ever wish for, save for the ingredient he himself would have to supply: soul, soul, soul.

The clerk was new to the area, and so did not know who I was. He saw a nameless old man in a shirt and tie and a suit made to order by Izzy Finkelstein—and a patch over one eye. The cyclops was in a high state of agitation.

“You’re a painter, are you, sir?” said the clerk. He was perhaps twenty years old. He hadn’t even been born when I stopped painting, stopped making pictures of any kind.

I spoke one word to him before leaving. This was it: “Renaissance.”

The servants quit. I had become an untamed old raccoon again, who spent all his life in and around the potato barn. I kept the sliding doors closed, so that
nobody could see what it was that I did in there. I did it for six months!

When I was done, I bought five more locks and hasps for the sliding doors, and snapped them shut. I hired new servants, and had a lawyer draw up a new will, which stipulated, as I have said, that I be buried in my Izzy Finkelstein suit, that all I owned was to go to my two sons, provided that they did a certain thing in memory of their Armenian ancestors, and that the barn was not to be unlocked until after my burial.

My sons have done quite well in the world, despite the horrors of their childhood. As I’ve said, their last name now is that of their good stepfather. Henri Steel is a civilian contract compliance officer at the Pentagon. Terry Steel is a publicity man for the Chicago Bears, which, since I own a piece of the Cincinnati Bengals, makes us sort of a football family.

Having done all that, I found I was able to take up residence in this house again, to hire new servants, and to become the empty and peaceful old man to whom Circe Berman addressed this question on the beach four months ago: “Tell me how your parents died.”

On her last night in the Hamptons, she now said to me: “Animal, vegetable
and
mineral? All three?”

“Word of honor,” I said. “All three, all three.” With colors and binders taken from creatures and plants and the ground beneath us, every painting was surely all three, all three.

“Why won’t you show it to me?” she said.

“Because it is the last thing I have to give to the world,” I said. “I don’t want to be around when people say whether it is any good or not.”

“Then you are a coward,” she said, “and that is how I will remember you.”

I thought that over, and then I heard myself say: “All right, I will go get the keys. And then, Mrs. Berman, I would be most grateful if you would come with me.”

Out into the dark we went, a flashlight beam dancing before us. She was subdued, humble, awed and virginal. I was elated, high as a kite and absolutely petrified.

We walked on flagstones at first, but then they veered off in the direction of the carriage house. After that we trod the stubble path cut through the wilderness by Franklin Cooley and his mowing machine.

I unlocked the barn doors and reached inside, my fingers on the light switch. “Scared?” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

“So am I,” I said.

Remember now: we were standing at the extreme right end of a painting eight feet high and sixty-four feet long. When I turned on the floodlights, we would be seeing the picture compressed by foreshortening to a seeming triangle eight feet high, all right, but only five feet wide. There was no telling from that vantage point
what the painting really was—what the painting was all
about.