Bluebeard

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

How did I come to possess Kim Bum Suk’s invaluable doctoral thesis at precisely the moment I must write about my reunion with Marilee in 1950? We have here another coincidence, which superstitious persons would no doubt take seriously. Two days ago, the widow Berman, made vivacious and supranaturally alert by God only knows what postwar pharmaceutical miracles, entered the bookstore in East Hampton, and heard, by her own account, one book out of hundreds calling out to her. It said that I would like it. So she bought it for me. She had no way of knowing that I was on the brink of writing about Florence. Nobody did. She gave me the book without herself examining the contents, and so did not know that my old girlfriend’s palazzo was therein described. One would soon go mad if one took such coincidences too seriously. One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the Universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.