Bluebeard

  I used to wonder back then what it was like to have one eye instead of two, and experiment by covering one eye with a hand. The world didn't seem all that diminished when I looked at it with only one eye. Nor do I feel today that having only one eye is a particularly serious handicap.

  Circe Berman asked me about being one eyed after we had known each other less than an hour. She will ask anybody anything at any time.

  "It's a piece of cake," I said.

  I remember Dan Gregory now, and he really did resemble, as W. C. Fields had said, "a sawed-off Arapahoe," and of Marilee and Fred Jones at his beck and call. I think what great models they would make for a Gregory illustration of a story about a Roman emperor with a couple of blond, blue-eyed Germanic captives in tow.

  It is curious that Fred and not Marilee was the captive Gregory liked to parade in public all the time. It was Fred he took to parties and on fox hunts in Virginia and cruises on his yacht, the Ararat.

  I do not propose to explain this, beyond declaring for a certainty that Gregory and Fred were men's men. They were not homosexuals.

  Whatever the explanation, Gregory did not mind at all that Marilee and I took long walks all over Manhattan, with heads snapping around to take second, third, and fourth looks at her. People must have wondered, too, how somebody like me, obviously not a relative, could have won the companionship of a woman that beautiful.

  "People think we're in love," I said to her on a walk one day.

  And she said, "They're right."

  "You know what I mean," I said.

  "What do you think love is anyway?" she said.

  "I guess I don't know," I said.

  "You know the best part--" she said, "walking around like this and feeling good about everything. If you missed the rest of it, I certainly wouldn't cry for you."

  So we went to the Museum of Modern Art for maybe the fiftieth time. I had been with Gregory for almost three years then, and was just a shade under twenty years old. I wasn't a budding artist anymore. I was an employee of an artist, and lucky to have a job of any kind. An awful lot of people were putting up with any sort of job, and waiting for the Great Depression to end, so that real life could get going again. But we would also have to get through another World War before real life could get going again.

  Don't you love it? This is real life we are now experiencing.

  But let me tell you that life seemed as real as Hell back in 1936, when Dan Gregory caught Marilee and me coming out of the Museum of Modern Art.

  21

  DAN GREGORY caught Marilee and me coming out of the Museum of Modern Art while a Saint Patrick's Day parade was blatting and booming northward on Fifth Avenue, a half a block away. The parade caused Gregory's automobile, a convertible Cord, the most beautiful American means of transportation ever manufactured, to be stuck in traffic right in front of the Museum of Modern Art. This was a two-seater with the top down, and with Fred Jones, the old World War One aviator, at the wheel.

  What Fred may have been doing with his sperm I never found out. If I had to guess, I would say that he was saving it up like me. He had that look as he sat at the wheel of that sublime motorcar, but the hell with Fred. He was going to be O.K. for quite a while longer, until he was shot dead in Egypt--whereas I was about to go into the real world, ready or not, and try to stand on my own two feet!

  Everybody was wearing something green! Then as now, even black people and Orientals and Hasidic Jews were wearing something green in order not to provoke arguments with Roman Catholic Irishmen. Marilee and Dan Gregory and I and Fred Jones were all wearing green. Back in Gregory's kitchen, Sam Wu was wearing green.

  Gregory pointed a finger at us. He was trembling with rage. "Caught you!" he shouted. "Stay right there! I want to talk to you!"

  He clambered over the car door, pushed his way through the crowd and planted himself in front of us, his feet far apart, his hands balled into fists. He had often hit Marilee, but he had certainly never hit me. Oddly enough, nobody had ever hit me. Nobody has ever hit me.

  Sex was the cause of our excitement: youth versus age, wealth and power versus physical attractiveness, stolen moments of forbidden fun and so on--but Gregory spoke only of gratitude, loyalty and modern art.

  As for the pictures in the museum's being genuinely modern: most of them had been painted before the First World War, before Marilee and I had been born! The world back then was very slow to accept changes in painting styles. Nowadays, of course, every novelty is celebrated immediately as a masterpiece!

  "You parasites! You ingrates! You rotten-spoiled little kids!" seethed Dan Gregory. "Your loving Papa asked just one thing of you as an expression of your loyalty: 'Never go into the Museum of Modern Art.'"

  I doubt that many people who heard him even knew that we were in front of a museum. They probably thought he had caught us coming out of a hotel or an apartment house--someplace with beds for lovers. If they took him literally when he called himself a "Papa," they would have had to conclude that he was my Papa and not hers, since we looked so much alike.

  "It was symbolic!" he said. "Don't you understand that? It was a way of proving you were on my side and not theirs. I'm not afraid to have you look at the junk in there. You were part of my gang, and proud of it." He was all choked up now, and he shook his head. "That's why I made that very simple, very modest, very easily complied-with request: 'Stay out of the Museum of Modern Art.'"

  Marilee and I were so startled by this confrontation, we may even have gone on holding hands. We had come skipping out and holding hands like Jack and Jill. We probably did go on holding hands--like Jack and Jill.

  Only now do I realize that Dan Gregory caught us at a moment when we had somehow agreed that we were going to make love that afternoon. I now think we were out of control, and would have made love whether we had run into him or not. Every time I have told this story before, I have indicated that there would have been no lovemaking if it hadn't been for the confrontation.

  Not so.

  "I don't give a hoot what pictures you look at," he said. "All I asked was that you not pay your respects to an institution which thinks that the smears and spatters and splotches and daubs and dribbles and vomit of lunatics and degenerates and charlatans are great treasures we should all admire."

  Reconstructing what he said to us long ago, I am touched by how careful he and almost all angry males used to be, when in mixed company, not to use words which might offend women and children, such as shit and fuck.

  Circe Berman argues that the inclusion of once-taboo words into ordinary conversations is a good thing, since women and children are now free to discuss their bodies without shame, and so to take care of themselves more intelligently.

  I said to her, "Maybe so. But don't you think all this frankness has also caused a collapse of eloquence?" I reminded her of the cook's daughter's habit of referring to anybody she didn't like for whatever reason as "an asshole." I said: "Never did I hear Celeste give a thoughtful explanation of what it was that such a person might have done to earn that protological sobriquet."

  "Of all the ways to hurt me," Gregory went on in that British accent of his, "you could not have picked a crueler one. I have treated you as a son," he said to me, "and you like a daughter," he said to Marilee, "and this is the thanks I get. And it's not your going in there which is the most insulting. No, it isn't that. It's how happy you were when you were coming out! What could that happiness be but a mockery of me and of every person who ever tried to keep control of a paintbrush?"

  He said that he was going to have Fred drive him to City Island, where his yacht the Ararat was in dry dock, and he was going to live aboard her until Fred could assure him that we were out of his house on Forty-eighth Street, and that every trace of our ever having been there had been removed.

  "Out you go!" he said. "Good riddance of bad rubbish!" What a surreal thing this master realist was about to do! He was going to take up residence on an eighty-foot sailing yacht in dry doc
k! He would have to come and go by ladder, would have to use a boatyard toilet and telephone!

  And think of what a bizarre creation his studio was, an hallucination created at tremendous expense and effort!

  And he would eventually arrange to have himself and his only friend killed while wearing Italian uniforms!

  Everything about Dan Gregory, except for his paintings, had fewer connections with reality and common sense than the most radical modern art!

  Bulletin from the present: Circe Berman has just discovered, after questioning me closely, that I have never actually read a whole book by Paul Slazinger, my former best friend.

  She, it turns out, has read them all since moving in. I own them all. They have a little shelf of honor in the library, and are autographed beneath testimonials as to how close Paul and I have been for so many years. I have read reviews of most of them, and have a pretty good idea of how they go.

  I think Paul knew this about me, although we have certainly never discussed it openly. It is impossible for me to take his writings seriously, knowing how reckless he has been in real life. How can I study his published opinions on love and hate and God and man and whether the ends ever justify the means and all that with solemnity? As for a quid pro quo: I don't owe him one. He has never honored me as a painter or collector, nor should he have.

  So what was our bond?

  Loneliness and wounds from World War Two which were quite grave.

  Circe Berman has broken her silence about the mystery of the locked potato barn. She found a big picture book in the library whose spine is split and whose pages are not only dog eared but splotched with painty finger-prints, although it was published only three years ago. It depicts virtually all the uniforms worn by every sort of regular soldier or sailor or airman during World War Two. She asked me point blank if it had anything to do with what was in the barn.

  "Maybe it does and maybe it doesn't," I said.

  But I will tell you a secret: it does, it does.

  So Marilee and I slouched home from the Museum of Modern Art like whipped children. We laughed sometimes, too, just fell into each other's arms and laughed and laughed. So we were feeling each other up and liking each other terrifically all the way home.

  We stopped to watch a fight between two white men in front of a bar on Third Avenue. Neither one was wearing green. They snarled in some language we did not understand. They may have been Macedonians or Basques or Frisian Islanders, or something like that.

  Marilee had a slight limp and a list to the left, as permanent consequences of her having been pushed down the stairs by an Armenian. But another Armenian was groping her and nuzzling her hair and so on, and had an erection with which you might have smashed coconuts. I like to think we were man and wife. Life itself can be sacramental. The supposition was that we would be leaving the Garden of Eden together, and would cleave to one another in the wilderness through thick and thin.

  I don't know why we laughed so much.

  Our ages again: I was almost twenty, and she was twenty-nine. The man we were about to cuckold or whatever was fifty-three, with only seven more years to go, a mere stripling in retrospect. Imagine having all of seven more years to go!

  Maybe Marilee and I laughed so much because we were about to do the one thing other than eat and drink and sleep which our bodies said we were on Earth to do. There was no vengeance or defiance or defilement in it. We did not do it in the bed she and Gregory shared, or in Fred Jones's bed next door, or in the immaculate French Empire guest-room, or in the studio--and not even on my own bed, although we could have done it almost anywhere except in the basement, since Fu Manchu was the only other person in the house just then. Our brainless lovemaking anticipated Abstract Expressionism in a way, since it was about absolutely nothing but itself.

  Yes, and I am reminded now of what the painter Jim Brooks said to me about how he operated, about how all the Abstract Expressionists operated: "I lay on the first stroke of color. After that, the canvas has to do at least half the work." The canvas, if things were going well, would, after that first stroke, begin suggesting or even demanding that he do this or that. In Marilee's and my case, the first stroke was a kiss just inside the front door, a big, wet, hot, hilariously smeary thing.

  Talk about paint!

  Marilee's and my canvas, so to speak, called for more and wetter kisses, and then a groping, goosey, swooning tango up the spiral staircase and through the grand dining room. We knocked over a chair, which we set up-right again. The canvas, doing all the work and not just half of it, sent us through the butler's pantry and into an unused storage room about eight feet square. The only thing in there was a broken-down sofa which must have been left by the previous owners. There was one tiny window, looking northward, into the leafless treetops of the back garden.

  We needed no further instructions from the canvas as to what to do, should we wish to complete a masterpiece. This we did.

  Nor did I need instructions from the experienced older woman as to what to do.

  Bull's-eye and bull's-eye and bull's-eye again!

  And it was so retroactive! This was something I had been doing all my life! It was so prospective, too! I would be doing one hell of a lot of this for the rest of my life.

  And so I did. Except that it would never be that good again.

  Never again would the canvas of life, so to speak, help me and a partner create a sexual masterpiece.

  Rabo Karabekian, then, created at least one masterpiece as a lover, which was necessarily created in private and vanished from the Earth even more quickly than the paintings which made me a footnote in Art History. Is there nothing I have done which will outlive me, other than the opprobrium of my first wife and sons and grandchildren?

  Do I care?

  Doesn't everybody?

  Poor me. Poor practically everybody, with so little durable good to leave behind!

  After the war, when I told Terry Kitchen something about my three hours of ideal lovemaking with Marilee, and how contentedly adrift in the cosmos they made me feel, he said this: "You were experiencing a non-epiphany."

  "A what?" I said.

  "A concept of my own invention," he said. This was back when he was still a talker instead of a painter, long before I bought him the spray rig. As far as that goes, I was nothing but a talker and a painters' groupie. I was still going to become a businessman.

  "The trouble with God isn't that He so seldom makes Himself known to us," he went on. "The trouble with God is exactly the opposite: He's holding you and me and everybody else by the scruff of the neck practically constantly."

  He said he had just come from an afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where so many of the paintings were about God's giving instructions, to Adam and Eve and the Virgin Mary, and various saints in agony and so on. "These moments are very rare, if you can believe the painters--but who was ever nitwit enough to believe a painter?" he said, and he ordered another double Scotch, I'm sure, for which I would pay. "Such moments are often called 'epiphanies' and I'm here to tell you they are as common as houseflies," he said.

  "I see," I said. I think Pollock was there listening to all this, although he and Kitchen and I were not yet known as the "Three Musketeers." He was a real painter, so he hardly talked at all. After Terry Kitchen became a real painter, he, too, hardly talked at all.

  "'Contentedly adrift in the cosmos,' were you?" Kitchen said to me. "That is a perfect description of a non-epiphany, that rarest of moments, when God Almighty lets go of the scruff of your neck and lets you be human for a little while. How long did the feeling last?"

  "Oh--maybe half an hour," I said.

  And he leaned back in his chair and he said with deep satisfaction: "And there you are."

  That could have been the same afternoon I rented studio space for the two of us in a loft owned by a photographer at the top of a building on Union Square. Studio space in Manhattan was dirt cheap back then. An artist could actually afford to live in Ne
w York City! Can you imagine that?

  After we had rented the studio space, I said to him: "My wife will kill me, if she hears about this."

  "Just give her seven epiphanies a week," he said, "and she'll be so grateful that she'll let you get away with anything."

  "Easier said than done," I said.

  The same people who believe that Circe Berman's Polly Madison books are destroying the fabric of American society, telling teenage girls that they can get pregnant if they're not careful and so on, would surely consider Terry Kitchen's concept of non-epiphanies blasphemous. But I can't think of anybody who tried harder than he did to find worthwhile errands to run for God. He could have had brilliant careers in law or business or finance or politics. He was a magnificent pianist, and a great athlete, too. He might have stayed in the Army and soon become a general and maybe Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  When I met him, though, he had given all that up in order to be a painter, even though he couldn't draw for sour apples, and had never had an art lesson in his life! "Something's just got to be worth doing!" he said. "And painting is one of the few things I haven't tried."

  A lot of people, I know, think that Terry could draw realistically, if he wanted to do so. But their only proof of that is a small patch in a painting that used to hang in my foyer here. He never gave the picture a title, but it is now generally known as Magic Window.

  Except for one little patch, that picture is a typical Kitchen airbrush view of a brightly colored storm system as viewed from an orbiting satellite, or whatever you want to call it. But the little patch, if examined carefully, turns out to be an upside-down copy of John Singer Sargent's full-length "Portrait of Madame X," with her famous milk-white shoulders and ski-jump nose and so on.