Bluebeard (24 page)

Yes, and now that I think about it: maybe the most admirable thing about the Abstract Expressionist painters, since so much senseless bloodshed had been caused by cockeyed history lessons, was their refusal to serve on such a court.

Dan Gregory kept me around as long as he did, about three years, because I was servile and because he needed company, since he had alienated most of his famous friends with his humorlessness and rage during political arguments. When I said to Gregory that first night that I had heard the famous voice of W. C. Fields from the top of the spiral staircase, he replied that Fields would never be welcome in his house again, and neither would Al Jolson or any of the others who had drunk his liquor and eaten his food that night.

“They simply do not, will not understand!” he said.

“No, sir,” I said.

And he changed the subject to Marilee Kemp. He said she was clumsy to begin with, but had gotten drunk on top of that, and had fallen downstairs. I think he honestly believed that by then. He could easily have indicated which stairs she had fallen down, since I was
standing right at the top of them. But he didn’t. He felt it sufficed to let me know that she had fallen downstairs
somewhere.
What did it matter where?

While he went on talking about Marilee, he never mentioned her name again. She simply became “women.” “Women will never take the blame for anything,” he said. “No matter what troubles they bring on themselves, they won’t rest until they’ve found some man to blame for it. Right?”

“Right,” I said.

“There’s only one way they can take anything, and that’s
personally,”
he said. “You’re not even talking about them, don’t even know they’re in the room, but they will still take anything you say as though it were aimed right at them. Ever notice that?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. It seemed that I
had
noticed that, now that he mentioned it.

“Every so often they will get it into their heads that they understand what you’re doing better than you do yourself,” he said. “You’ve just got to throw them out, or they will screw up everything! They’ve got their jobs and we’ve got ours. We never try to horn in on them, but they’ll horn in on us every chance they get. You want some good advice?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Never have anything to do with a woman who would rather be a man,” he said. “That means she’s never going to do what a woman is supposed to do—which leaves you stuck with both what a man’s supposed
to do and what a woman’s supposed to do. You understand what I am saying?”

“Yes, sir, I do,” I said.

He said that no woman could succeed in the arts or sciences or politics or industry, since her basic job was to have children and encourage men and take care of the housework. He invited me to test this statement by naming, if I could, ten women who had amounted to anything in any field but domesticity.

I think I could name ten now, but back then all I could come up with was Saint Joan of Arc.

“Jeanne d’Arc,” he said, “was a hermaphrodite!”

     
I
DON’T KNOW
where this fits into my story, and probably it doesn’t fit in at all. It is certainly the most trivial footnote imaginable in a history of Abstract Expressionism, but here it is:

The cook who had begrudgingly fed me my first supper in New York City, and who kept asking, “What next, what next?” died two weeks after I got there. That finally became what was going to happen next: she would drop dead in Turtle Bay Chemists, a drugstore two blocks away.

But here was the thing: the undertaker discovered that she wasn’t just a woman, and she wasn’t just a man, either. She was somewhat both. She was a hermaphrodite.

An even more trivial footnote: she would be promptly replaced as Dan Gregory’s cook by Sam Wu, the laundry man.

Marilee arrived home from the hospital in a wheelchair two days after my arrival. Dan Gregory did not come down to greet her. I don’t think he would have stopped working if the house were on fire. He was like my father making cowboy boots or Terry Kitchen with his spray gun or Jackson Pollock dribbling paint on a canvas on the floor: when he was doing art, the whole rest of the world dropped away.

And I would be like that, too, after the war, and it would wreck my first marriage and my determination to be a good father. I had a very hard time getting the hang of civilian life after the war, and then I discovered something as powerful and irresponsible as shooting up with heroin: if I started laying on just one color of paint to a huge canvas, I could make the whole world drop away.

And Gregory’s total concentration on his work for twelve or more hours a day meant that I, as his apprentice, had a very easy job indeed. He had nothing for me to do, and did not want to waste time inventing tasks. He had told me to make a painting of his studio, but once he himself got back to work, I think he forgot all about it.

Did I make a painting of his studio which was virtually indistinguishable from a photograph? Yes, I did, yes I did.

But I was the only person who gave a damn if I
even
tried
to work such a miracle, or not. I was so unworthy of his attention, so far from being a genius, a Gregorian to his Beskudnikov, a threat or a son or whatever, that I might as well have been his cook, who had to be told what to prepare for dinner.

Anything! Anything! Roast beef! Paint a picture of this studio! Who cares? Broccoli!

O.K. I would show
him.

And I did.

It was up to his real assistant, Fred Jones, the World War One aviator, to think up work for me to do. Fred made me a messenger, which must have been a terrible blow for the messenger service he had been using. Somebody who desperately needed a job, any kind of job, must have been thrown out of work when Fred gave me a handful of subway tokens and a map of New York City.

He also set me the task of cataloguing all the valuable objects in Gregory’s studio.

“Won’t that bother Mr. Gregory while he’s working?” I said.

And he said: “You could saw him off at the waist while singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ and he wouldn’t notice. Just keep away from his eyes and hands.”

So I was up in the studio, just a few feet from Dan Gregory, itemizing in a ledger his extensive collection of bayonets, when Marilee came home. I remember still how full of bad magic all those spearpoints to be put on the ends of rifles seemed to be. One was like a sharpened curtain rod. Another was triangular in cross-section, so that the wound it made wouldn’t close up again and keep the blood and guts from falling out. Another one had sawteeth—so it could work its way through bone, I guess. I can remember thinking that war was so horrible that, at last, thank goodness, nobody could ever be fooled by romantic pictures and fiction and history into marching to war again.

Nowadays, of course, you can buy a machine gun with a plastic bayonet for your little kid at the nearest toy boutique.

The sounds of Marilee’s homecoming floated up from down below. I myself, so much in her debt, didn’t hurry down to greet her. I think the cook and my first wife were right: I have always been leery of women—possibly because, as Circe Berman suggested at breakfast this morning, I considered my mother faithless, since she had up and died on me.