Bluebeard (48 page)

“If she’s a queen of the Gypsies, where are her subjects?” Circe asked again.

I explained that she had been queen of only about forty people at the peak of her power, including babes in arms. While there were notorious disputes in Europe as to which races and subraces were vermin, all Europeans could agree that the thieving, fortune-telling, childstealing Gypsies were the enemies of all decent humankind.
So they were hunted down everywhere. The queen and her people gave up their caravans, and their traditional costumes, too—gave up everything which might identify them as Gypsies. They hid in forests in the daytime, and foraged for food at night.

One night, when the queen went out alone to look for food, one of her subjects, a fourteen-year-old boy, was caught stealing a ham from a Slovak mortar squad which had deserted the German lines on the Russian front. They were headed home, which wasn’t far from Happy Valley. They made the boy lead them to the Gypsy camp, where they killed everybody. So when the queen came back, she didn’t have any subjects.

Such was the story I made up for Circe Berman.

Circe provided the missing link in the narrative. “So she wandered into Happy Valley, looking for other Gypsies,” she said.

“Right!” I said. “But there weren’t many Gypsies to be found anywhere in Europe. Most of them had been rounded up and gassed in extermination camps, which was fine with everybody. Who likes thieves?”

She took a closer look at the dead woman and turned away in disgust. “Ugh!” she said. “What’s coming from her mouth? Blood and maggots?”

“Rubies and diamonds,” I said. “She smells so awful, and looks like such bad luck, that nobody has come close enough to notice yet.”

“And of all these people here,” she said wonderingly, “who will be the first to notice?”

I indicated the former concentration camp guard in the rags of a scarecrow. “This man,” I said.

     
“S
OLDIERS, SOLDIERS, SOLDIERS,”
she mar veled. “Uniforms, uniforms, uniforms.”

The uniforms, what was left of them, were as authentic as I could make them. That was my homage to my master, Dan Gregory.

“Fathers are always so proud, the first time they see their sons in uniform,” she said.

“I know Big John Karpinski was,” I said. He is my neighbor to the north, of course. Big John’s son Little John did badly in high school, and the police caught him selling dope. So he joined the Army while the Vietnam War was going on. And the first time he came home in uniform, I never saw Big John so happy, because it looked to him as though Little John was all straightened out and would finally amount to something.

But then Little John came home in a body bag.

Big John and his wife Dorene, incidentally, are dividing their farm, where three generations of Karpinskis
grew up, into six-acre lots. It was in the local paper yesterday. Those lots will sell like hotcakes, since so many of the second-story windows of houses built on them, overlooking my property, will have a water view.

Big John and Dorene will become cash millionaires in a condominium in Florida, where winter never comes. So they are losing their own sacred plot of earth at the foot of their own Mount Ararat, so to speak—without experiencing that ultimate disgrace: a massacre.

“Was
your
father proud of you when he saw
you
for the first time in a uniform?” Circe asked me.

“He didn’t live to see it,” I said, “and I’m glad he didn’t. If he had, he would have thrown an awl or a boot at me.”

“Why?” she said.

“Don’t forget that it was young soldiers whose parents thought they were finally going to amount to something who killed everybody he’d ever known and loved. If he’d seen me in a uniform, he would have bared his teeth like a dog with rabies. He would have said, ‘Swine!’ He would have said, ‘Pig!’ He would have said, ‘Murderer! Get out of here!’”

“What do you think will eventually become of this painting?” she said.

“It’s too big to throw away,” I said. “Maybe it’ll go to that private museum in Lubbock, Texas, where they have most of the paintings of Dan Gregory. I thought it might wind up behind the longest bar in the world,
wherever that is—probably in Texas, too. But the customers would be climbing up on the bar all the time, trying to see what was really going on—kicking over glasses, stepping on the complimentary hors d’oeuvres.”

I said that it would eventually be up to my two sons, Terry and Henri, to decide what was to become of “Now It’s the Women’s Turn.”

“You’re leaving it to
them?”
she said. She knew that they hated me, and had had their last name legally changed to that of Dorothy’s second husband, Roy—the only
real
father they’d ever had.

“You think it’s kind
of a joke
to leave them this?” said Circe. “You think it’s worthless? I’m here to tell you this is a
terribly
important painting
someway.”

“I think maybe it’s terribly important the same way a head-on collision is important,” I said. “There’s undeniable impact. Something has sure as hell happened.”

“You leave those ingrates this,” she said, “and you’ll make them multimillionaires.”

“They’ll be that in any case,” I said. “I’m leaving them everything I own, including your pictures of the little girls in swings and the pool table, unless you want those back. After I die, they’ll have to do only one little thing to get it all.”

“What’s that?” she said.

“Merely have their names and those of my grandchildren legally changed back to ‘Karabekian,’” I said.

“You care that much?” she said.

“I’m doing it for my mother,” I said. “She wasn’t even a Karabekian by birth, but she was the one who
wanted, no matter where, no matter what, the name Karabekian to live on and on.”

“How many of these are portraits of actual people?” she said.

“The bombardier clinging to my leg: that’s his face, as I remember it. These two Estonians in German uniforms are Laurel and Hardy. This French collaborator here is Charlie Chaplin. These two Polish slave laborers on the other side of the tower from me are Jackson Pollock and Terry Kitchen.”

“So there you are across the bottom: the Three Musketeers,” she said.

“There we are,” I agreed.

“The death of the other two so close together must have been a terrible blow to you,” she said.

“We’d stopped being friends long before then,” I said. “It was all the boozing we did together that made people call us that. It didn’t have anything to do with painting. We could have been plumbers. One or the other of us would stop drinking for a little while, and sometimes all three of us—and that was that for the Three Musketeers, long before the other two killed themselves. ‘Quite a blow,’ you say, Mrs. Berman? Not at all. The only thing I did after I heard about it was become a hermit for eight years or so.”

“And then Rothko killed himself after that,” she said.

“Yup,” I said. We were extricating ourselves from Happy Valley, and returning to real life. The melancholy roll-call of real-life suicides among the Abstract Expressionists again: Gorky by hanging in 1948, Pollock and then almost immediately Kitchen, by drunken driving and then pistol in 1956—and then Rothko with all possible messiness by knife in 1970.

I told her with sharpness which surprised me, and surprised her, too, that those violent deaths were like our drinking, and had nothing to do with our painting.

“I certainly won’t argue with you,” she said.

“Really!” I said. “Word of honor!” I said, my vehemence unspent. “The whole magical thing about our painting, Mrs. Berman, and this was old stuff in music, but it was brand new in painting: it was pure
essence of human wonder
, and wholly apart from food, from sex, from clothes, from houses, from drugs, from cars, from news, from money, from crime, from punishment, from games, from war, from peace—and surely apart from the universal human impulse among painters and plumbers alike toward inexplicable despair and self-destruction!”

“You know how old I was when you were standing on the rim of this valley?” she said. “No,” I said. “One year old,” she said. “And I don’t mean to be
rude, Rabo, but this picture is so rich, I don’t think I can look at it any more tonight.”