Free Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut Page B

rig,” I said.
    “Barbira was just about to give up being an actress and have a baby instead,” said Slazinger. “And then she got the part of Tennessee Williams’s sister in
The Glass Menagerie.”

    Actually, now that I think back: Terry Kitchen went through a radical personality change the moment he saw the spray rig for sale, and not when he fired those first bursts of red at the beaverboard. I happened to spot the rig, and said that it was probably war surplus, since itwas identical with rigs I had used in the Army for camouflage.
    “Buy it for me,” he said.
    “What for?” I said.
    “Buy it for me,” he said again. He had to have it, and he wouldn’t even have known what it was if I hadn’t told him.
    He never had any money, although he was from a very rich old family, and the only money I had was supposed to go for a crib and a youth bed for the house I’d bought in Springs. I was in the process of moving my family, much against their will, from the city to the country.
    “Buy it for me,” he said again.
    And I said, “O.K., take it easy. O.K., O.K.”

    And now, let us hop into our trusty old time machine, and go back to 1932 again:
    Was I angry to be stood up at Grand Central Station? Not a bit. As long as I believed Dan Gregory to be the greatest artist alive, he could do no wrong. And before I was done with him and he with me, I would have to forgive him for a lot worse things than not meeting my train.

    What kept him from coming anywhere near to greatness, although no more marvelous technician ever lived? I have thought hard about this, and any answer Igive refers to me, too. I was the best technician by far among the Abstract Expressionists, but I never amounted to a hill of beans, either, and couldn’t have—and I am not talking about my fiascoes with Sateen Dura-Luxe. I had painted plenty of pictures before Sateen Dura-Luxe, and quite a few afterwards, but they were no damned good.
    But let’s forget me for the moment, and focus on the works of Gregory. They were truthful about material things, but they lied about time. He celebrated moments, anything from a child’s first meeting with a department store Santa Claus to the victory of a gladiator at the Circus Maximus, from the driving of the golden spike which completed a transcontinental railroad to a man’s going on his knees to ask a woman to marry him. But he lacked the guts or the wisdom, or maybe just the talent, to indicate somehow that time was liquid, that one moment was no more important than any other, and that all moments quickly run away.
    Let me put it another way: Dan Gregory was a taxidermist. He stuffed and mounted and varnished and mothproofed supposedly great moments, all of which turn out to be depressing dust-catchers, like a moosehead bought at a country auction or a sailfish on the wall of a dentist’s waiting room.
    Clear?
    Let me put it yet another way: life, by definition, is never still. Where is it going? From birth to death, with no stops on the way. Even a picture of a bowl of pears on a checkered tablecloth is liquid, if laid on canvas bythe brush of a master. Yes, and by some miracle I was surely never able to achieve as a painter, nor was Dan Gregory, but which was achieved by the best of the Abstract Expressionists, in the paintings which have greatness birth and death are always there.
    Birth and death were even on that old piece of beaverboard Terry Kitchen sprayed at seeming random so long ago. I don’t know how he got them in there, and neither did he.
    I sigh. “Ah, me,” says old Rabo Karabekian.

   10
          B ACK IN 1933:
    I told a policeman in Grand Central Station Dan Gregory’s address. He said it was only eight blocks away, and that I couldn’t get lost, since that part of the city was as simple as a checkerboard. The Great Depression was going on, so that the station and the streets teemed with homeless people, just as they do today. The newspapers were full of stories of worker