Bluebeard

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Her daughter, Celeste, does no work for me, but simply lives here and eats my food, and entertains her loud and willfully ignorant friends on my tennis courts and in my swimming pool and on my private oceanfront.

Paul Slazinger says, incidentally, that the human condition can be summed up in just one word, and this is the word: Embarrassment.

“Never trust a survivor,” my father used to warn me, with Vartan Mamigonian in mind, “until you find out what he did to stay alive.”

And if an artist wants to really jack up the prices of his creations, may I suggest this: suicide.

Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren, so that the message of our principal art forms, movies and television and political speeches and newspaper columns, for the sake of the economy, simply has to be this: War is hell, all right, but the only way a boy can become a man is in a shoot-out of some kind, preferably, but by no means necessarily, on a battlefield.

That’s what I think. And of course a scheme like that doesn’t make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world’s champions.

What a satisfactory form of transportation that proved to be! That Cadillac was better than womblike. The Twentieth Century Limited, as I have said, really was womblike, in constant motion, with all sorts of unexplained thumps and bangs outside. But the Cadillac was coffinlike. Pomerantz and I got to be dead in there. The hell with this baby stuff. It was so cozy, two of us in a single, roomy, gangster-style casket. Everybody should be buried with somebody else, just about anybody else, whenever feasible.

What a fool I would have been to let self-respect interfere with my happiness!

A lot of people were opposed to it. A lot of people were for it. I myself think about it as little as possible.

“Lovers? Lovers? Lovers?” she mocked me raucously. The echoes of her scorn for lovers sounded like warring blackbirds overhead.

She said to him that the whole world suddenly seemed to be going crazy. He commented that there was nothing sudden about it, that it had belonged in a prison or a lunatic asylum for quite some time.

“I hope you won’t be so quick to forget me this time,” she said. “I never did that,” I said. “You forgot to worry about me,” she said.

I had made her so unhappy that she had developed a sense of humor, which she certainly didn’t have when I married her.

“Everything about life is a joke,” I said. “Don’t you know that?”

“Because of the movies,” he predicted, “nobody will believe that it was babies who fought the war.”

“I can’t help it,” I said. “My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat just keeps right on doing bad, dumb things.”

“Dorothy was flabbergasted,” I said to Circe. “She said to me: ‘Why don’t you do that all the time?’ And I said to her, and this was the first time I ever said ‘fuck’ to her, no matter how angry we might have been with each other: ‘It’s just too fucking easy.’”