(Not That You Asked) Read Online Free Page B

and applauded when he was introduced, all us drooling acolytes, but the ones who regarded him merely as an eloquent grump, a fading prophet, an old man shouting the world off his porch.
    And Vonnegut seemed to know it, too. He gazed out at the audience, not like his hero Twain, with his inexhaustible charms, his dazzling knack for the mot juste, but in the silent burden of our present condition. His image was magnified, eerily, on the video screen overhead. The camera shook for a moment. He looked stricken. I thought of that passage in Breakfast of Champions where, in exhaustion, he drops the fictional disguise altogether:
     
“This is a very bad book you’re writing,” I said to myself.
    “I know,” I said.
    “You’re afraid you’ll kill yourself the way your mother did,” I said.
    “I know,” I said.
     
    I thought of Vonnegut, a twenty-one-year-old private, returning to Indianapolis to bury his mother after she took her own life. And his imprisonment in Dresden, just a few months later, all that ashen death, the passing of his sister, the madness of his son, his own suicide attempt in the haunted year of 1984. The camera was still fixed on Vonnegut’s face, and it occurred to me, with great clarity, that he was going to die before he could say another word. He would simply and quietly sit back in his chair and perish. He was all done with the rescuing racket.
    Instead, he gathered himself and smiled at all the nice strangers before him and said, with an almost girlish lilt, “Of course I’ll go to the prom with you, Mary. And I love to dance.” And though nobody quite realized it, including Vonnegut himself, he had, with those two fine sentences, answered both her questions.
     
     
     
    THE CROWD RESPONSE to the panel was about what you’d expect. People thought it had been a good show. They liked the fighting. They liked gossiping afterward about the fighting. Simply put: They were Americans.
    Catherine wanted me to come have a drink with a bunch of the money folks, but I had a long drive back to Boston. It was pouring, too, and neither of us had an umbrella, so we lingered in the lobby. The girl with the auburn hair was lingering, too. Her name was Susan. She was talking with the blonde who had utzed her to talk to Vonnegut. The blonde was indignant. She told us that she and Susan had paid a thousand dollars to attend the cocktail party and dinner. They had been promised a meeting with Vonnegut.
    “They just did a group photo, but I wasn’t anywhere close to Kurt,” she said.
    “I made sure to get myself right next to him,” Susan said. “I could see that’s all we were going to get.”
    A thousand bucks for a few minutes of jittery small talk? It sounded like a Bush fundraiser.
    But then Susan told a little story, in her soft Texan accent, that took a little of the edge off my gloom.
    “I followed him, you know. Every time he went to have a cigarette. I just followed him and bummed a cigarette and we sat there talking. He was totally cool, too. Totally on top of it. They wouldn’t let us smoke inside and it was too cold outside, so you know what we did? We got in one of those things, those doors that spin around—”
    “A revolving door?”
    “Yeah. We got in one of the compartments and he pushed it around till there was just a crack. It was pretty warm in there and we could just blow the smoke outside.”
     
     
     
    IT WAS A MISERABLE night for driving. The rain had dissolved into fog, which draped the bare winter trees; my head was still spinning. Focusing on that image—Vonnegut and pretty young Susan puffing away like a couple of truants—helped me feel a little less hopeless. This made no sense. Vonnegut has been killing himself for years, or trying to, with those unfiltered Pall Malls.
    But something occurred to me as I sped through that dirty shroud of fog, something Vonnegut has been trying to explain to the rest of us for most of his life. And that is this: Despair is a form of