Bluebeard (49 page)

“I understand,” I said. We had been out there for two hours. I myself was all worn out, but also twangingly proud and satisfied.

So there we were back in the doorway again, and I had my hand on the light switch. Since there were no stars that night, and no moon, a flick of that switch would plunge us into total darkness.

She asked me this: “Is there anything anywhere in the picture which says when and where this happened?”

“Nothing to say
where
it was,” I said. “There’s one place that says
when
it was, but that’s at the other end and way up high. If you really want to see it, I’ll have to get not only a stepladder but a magnifying glass.”

“Some other time,” she said.

I described it for her. “There’s this Maori, a corporal in the New Zealand Field Artillery who was captured in a battle outside Tobruk, Libya. I’m sure you know who the Maoris are,” I said.

“They’re Polynesians,” she said. “They’re the aborigines of New Zealand.”

“Exactly!” I said. “They were cannibals and were divided into many warring tribes until the white man came. So this Polynesian is sitting on a discarded German ammunition box. There are three bullets still in the bottom of it, in case anybody needs one. He is trying to read what is an inside page from a newspaper. He has
grabbed it as it scuttled across the valley in the breeze that came with sunrise.”

I went on, my fingertips touching the light switch: “The page is from an anti-Semitic weekly published in Riga, Latvia, during the German occupation of that little country. It is six months old, and offers tips on gardening and home canning. The Maori is studying it very earnestly, in the hopes of learning what we would all like to know about ourselves: where he is, what is going on, and what is likely to happen next.

“If we had a stepladder and a magnifying glass, Mrs. Berman, you could see for yourself that written in tiny characters on the ammunition box is this date, when you were only one year old: ‘May 8, 1945.’”

I took one last look at “Now It’s the Women’s Turn,” which was foreshortened again into a seeming triangle of close-packed jewels. I did not have to wait for the neighbors and Celeste’s schoolmates to arrive before knowing that it was going to be the most popular painting in my collection.

“Jesus, Circe!” I said. “It looks like a million bucks!”

“It really does,” she said.

Out went the lights.

     
W
HEN WE SAUNTERED
back to this house through the darkness, she held my hand, and she said I had taken her dancing after all.

“When was that?” I said.

“We’re dancing now,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.

She said again that she couldn’t imagine how I or anybody could have made such a big, beautiful painting about something so important.

“I can’t believe I did it myself,” I said. “Maybe I didn’t. Maybe it was done by potato bugs.”

She said that she looked at all the Polly Madison books in Celeste’s room one time, and couldn’t believe she’d written them.

“Maybe you’re a plagiarist,” I said.

“That’s what I feel like sometimes,” she said.

When we reached this house, and although we had not and never would make love, our moods were postcoital. May I say, without seeming boastful, that I had never seen her so
languorous?

She surrendered her body, ordinarily so restless, so twitchy and itchy, to a voluptuously cushioned easy chair in the library. Marilee Kemp was in the room, too, in a ghostly way. The bound volume of letters she had written to an Armenian child in California was on the coffee table between me and Mrs. Berman.

I asked Mrs. Berman what she would have thought if the barn had been empty, or if the eight panels had been blanks, or if I had reconstructed “Windsor Blue Number Seventeen.”

“If you had really been that empty, which I thought you were,” she said, “I guess I would have had to give you an A-plus for sincerity.”

I asked her if she would write. I meant letters to me, but she thought I meant books. “That’s all I do—that and dancing,” she said. “As long as I keep that up, I keep grief away.” All summer long, she had made it easy to forget that she had recently lost a husband who was evidently brilliant and funny and adorable.

“One other thing helps a little bit,” she said. “It works for me. It probably wouldn’t work for you. That’s talking loud and brassy, telling everybody when they’re right and wrong, giving orders to everybody: ‘Wake up! Cheer up! Get to work!’”

“Twice now I’ve been a Lazarus,” I said. “I died with Terry Kitchen, and Edith brought me back to life
again. I died with dear Edith, and Circe Berman brought me back to life again.”

“Whoever that is,” she said.

We talked some about Gerald Hildreth, the man who would come at eight in the morning to take her and her luggage to the airport in his taxicab. He was a local character about sixty years old. Everybody out this way knows Gerald Hildreth and his taxicab.

“He used to be on the Rescue Squad,” I said, “and I think he and my first wife might have had a little fling. He was the one who found Jackson Pollock’s body sixty feet from where his car hit the tree. Then, in a few weeks, he was gathering up the pieces of Terry Kitchen’s head in a plastic bag. You’d have to say he’s played an important part in Art History.”

“The last time I rode with him,” she said, “he told me his family had been working hard out here for three hundred years, but that all he had to show for it was his taxicab.”

“It’s a nice taxicab,” I said.

“Yes, he keeps it polished on the outside and vacuumed on the inside,” she said. “I guess that’s how
he
keeps grief away—whatever it is he’s got to grieve about.”

“Three hundred years,” I said.

We worried about Paul Slazinger. I speculated as to what his helpless soul must have felt like when it realized that his meat had thrown itself down on a hand grenade which was about to go off.

“Why didn’t it kill him?” she said.

“Unforgivably sloppy workmanship at the hand grenade factory,” I said.

“His meat did that, and
your
meat made the picture in the potato barn,” she said.

“Sounds right,” I said. “My soul didn’t know what kind of picture to paint, but my meat sure did.”

She cleared her throat. “Well, then,” she said, “isn’t it time for your soul, which has been ashamed of your meat for so long, to thank your meat for finally doing something wonderful?”

I thought that over. “That sounds right, too,” I said.

“You have to actually
do
it,” she said.

“How?” I said.

“Hold your hand in front of your eye,” she said, “and look at those strange and clever animals with love and gratitude, and tell them out loud: ‘Thank you, Meat.’”

So I did.

I held my hands in front of my eyes, and I said out loud and with all my heart: ‘Thank you, Meat.’”

Oh, happy Meat. Oh, happy Soul. Oh, happy Rabo Karabekian.