Bluebeard

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

When we sauntered back to this house through the darkness, she held my hand, and she said I had taken her dancing after all. “When was that?” I said. “We’re dancing now,” she said. “Oh,” I said. She said again that she couldn’t imagine how I or anybody could have made such a big, beautiful painting about something so important. “I can’t believe I did it myself,” I said. “Maybe I didn’t. Maybe it was done by potato bugs.” She said that she looked at all the Polly Madison books in Celeste’s room one time, and couldn’t believe she’d written them. “Maybe you’re a plagiarist,” I said. “That’s what I feel like sometimes,” she said. When we reached this house, and although we had not and never would make love, our moods were postcoital. May I say, without seeming boastful, that I had never seen her so languorous?