A Complicated Marriage (57 page)

Later, at lunch in Rye, Norden revealed two memories. He, who had never revealed anything “inner” to me before, told me about the eleven-year-old who had stood on the upper landing of that staircase, the Con Man in the hall below. A stand-off. The man in a fury, demanding repeatedly that he be called Father; the boy above, mute, his knuckles clenched white with hate around the mahogany railing. And he told me about the boy in his midteens who had slapped his mother hard across the face when she had said something about a girl he was dating. For the first time I saw the boy in my brother—not the pampered, cocksure golden child who took life in stride, but the hurting child who, as he grew up, had simply become more skillful than I in shutting the lid on the past. I finally believed that we really had grown up in the same house. And by
the time we finished the rounds of our haunts, I had folded my brother into my heart with an unconditional love.

Perhaps still on the wings of my experience with Norden, a few years later I sought and finally found a lasting peace with my mother. I had made a rare visit to Cape Cod to spend a week with my friend Edith Kurtzweil in Wellfleet. On my way back to the city, I was overcome with a desire to visit my mother's grave, which I hadn't seen since she died. After much searching, I found her under a tree, a few yards away from her sister, Elfrida. By then the sun had turned to clouds, the air cold and damp. I sat, my back against the tree, by the simple granite headstone and talked to her as I never had talked to her before, about the small daily stuff and the big changes, about past feelings and feelings at that moment, about Sarah and Clem, about her great-grandchildren, about widowhood, about my fears and confusions. I crisscrossed twenty-five years. And I heard what she had to say to me. I settled in. There was no rush.

As a light drizzle stirred the leaves above, I sang “The Donkey Serenade,” her favorite song. Once again, I saw her tears when I came to the part when the girl becomes a nun and kneels to pray as her lover sadly rides away. I ate a tuna sandwich, took a pee behind the tree, cried a lot. I asked her forgiveness for the pain I had caused her, and began to forgive myself. Maybe that's what a meander is about: It takes as long as it takes. The rest is just detours.

The past has a funny way of reasserting itself. In 2002 I was at the Whitney Museum, and there, in a dimly lit room of its own, was a replica of our living room as it was in 1964 when it had been photographed for
Vogue
. The installation, “Empire,” by a young artist, Paul Sietsema, was like an oversized dollhouse. The shock of recognition. Transfixed, I peered down into my living room across forty years. Everything in its place, from the smallest bibelots to the tattered brown foam couch from Altman's to the chattels of all the matriarchs who had preceded me. And the art: from the smallest sculptures to the largest pictures, all exquisitely reproduced to scale and in breathtaking detail. The only flaw, the color in Noland's glorious six-foot chevron,
Sarah's Reach
. But then, Noland's palette was a gift from God and therefore inimitable. The time
and industry Sietsema had expended! As for his agenda, whatever it may have been—and it was no doubt highly political, rather than aesthetic, as most art is these days—it didn't interest me. I revisited the exhibit with my five-year-old granddaughter, Clementine, and we played a game—how many things do you see that are in Gramma's living room? I felt he had created the room for our delight.

I had always thought of the art world as the family I had married into. Of course, as with any in-laws, our relationship had been rocky. But I had changed, the times had changed. I would be hard put to call today's art world a “family.” Nonetheless, endangered though the old-timers may be, in the years after Clem died, there would still be a few family reunions where my past and present could collide.

In 2001 I saw a screening of the movie
Pollock
, followed by a Q & A session with Ed Harris and the cast. All proceeded predictably until the final question. A man asked whether in the closing images Harris had intended to suggest that Jackson had committed suicide. Harris, as I can best recall, said that that was a question that could never be answered. There was a bit of back-and-forth, and I was getting ready to leave, when I heard Harris say the word
murder
in relation to Jackson's role in Edith Metzger's death. I let out a whoop of surprise, startling the people around me. Of course, Harris was not suggesting willful intent; he was speaking of Jackson's ultimate responsibility. My surprise was that it was the first time in over forty years that I had heard anyone other than Clem use that word in connection with the tragedy.

A few months after I had seen
Pollock
, I found myself sitting across from three women on a Madison Avenue bus. They had just come from the movie, and I listened to them commiserating with “that poor Lee,” who, as it were, had laid down her brushes and her life for “that man.” “Why did she put up with him?” They used the word
suffocated
. Oh, they were identifying, all right. What woman hasn't thought at one time or another that her life has been consumed and detoured by a man? I was itching to interrupt them:
No, you don't get it. Not only did she choose that life, she had been on the prowl for years, and when she found him, she got him in her sights and bagged him
.

If the women and I had stayed on that bus all the way to Washington
Heights, I might have told them about Lee's early days at the Hofmann School in the thirties. About the three sirens, Lee, Elaine, and Mercedes. All good painters. All savvy to the near impossibility of a woman's getting recognition in those years. It wouldn't have been enough for our trio to hook up with any artist; he had to be a genius who one day would be the greatest painter in New York. Mercy, the raving beauty, would undoubtedly be deemed the also-ran when she married Herbert Matter, a fine photographer and graphic designer. The race between Lee and Elaine, who snagged de Kooning, would be hotly contested over the next decades. Bill would be the popular favorite, with his more accessible art and personality. He would have won the Most Likely to Succeed and Mr. Congeniality awards if the art press and his peers had been judging. Despite the odds, Lee's genius pulled ahead in the final lap and she found herself in the winners' circle.

I could well understand that this take on Lee would be unacceptable to all women, whose knee-jerk response after seeing the movie would be to identify with Lee as the victim. In fact, they probably would have asked me,
What about all those painful years in between? The sacrifice
? I would have said,
Again, you're missing the point. She loved her life. She knew that with every Pollock that got painted, her faith in him was reaffirmed. And for every Krasner that didn't get painted, Lee had a moment of glory as Jackson's wife and then widow. She hugged her life to her chest and never let go. Well, only for a moment that summer of 1956, and look what happened when she did
.

What did I think about the movie? I thought Harris was extraordinary, right on target. I couldn't say the same for the actor who played Clem. He delivered a caricature, from posture to delivery: the art critic who leans back, looks down his nose with a condescending sneer, and pontificates. Very un-Clem. As for Lee, I couldn't find the Lee I knew in the movie. Marcia Gay Harden, by choosing to deliver a softened Lee, reduced the story to the overbearing man and the beaten-down woman. As I had never personally seen the soft underbelly of Lee, most of that would have ended up on my cutting-room floor. In my movie I would have portrayed a perfectly matched, toe-to-toe marriage. A win-win, lose-lose kind of marriage. As for Harden, she picked up an Oscar. Harris got
passed over. The movie became Lee's. But Best
Supporting
Actress? Lee would have hated that.

For the most part, the time I write of was before all the mythologizing about the first-generation artists. To me, they were just the guys in Clem's life. But Jackson, from the time he was dubbed Jack the Dribbler to the notoriety of the “death car,” had become the juiciest target for the myth-spinners. And then it got personal: Jackson the roaring drunk, who slugged this one and that, who ripped doors off hinges and pissed in fireplaces. Fortunately for them, once upon a time he did piss in Peggy Guggenheim's fireplace. Sadly, for posterity, those are the myths that stick—like gum in your hair—and then get embellished. And what about the five-hundred-pound biography by “the two boys of the street,” as Clem called them—they, too, lived on Central Park West—who went so far as to try to make a case for Jackson's being gay? It reminded me of the absurdity of watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin plant that little American flag on the moon. All I know is, Jackson, as the subject of so much speculation, is a stranger to me. I imagine how he would have hung his head even lower and retreated even more deeply inside himself. And, of course, it isn't just Jackson, but all of the superstar artists. Myth-making explodes the truth and guts out of people. And to have known them in the day-to-day of our lives and then watch them be stretched this way and that sickens me.

I shared an intimate evening with the past the night I was invited to a screening of a documentary of Hans Hofmann. In the small, dimly lit theater I saw rows of faces, aging faces, turn toward us. A few nodded as we found seats. I knew none of the faces by name, yet from the moment I walked into the room, I knew I was “home.” Soon, the film began and I was twenty-four, feasting on Hans's world: Provincetown, Miz, the magical house of colors, his square feet in those sandals, his thick voice, his heat and intensity, the heft of him. As we all straggled out of the past and out of the theater, a few people greeted me. As always, I was surprised they knew my name. As I searched my mind for theirs, I hugged them close and realized the names didn't matter.

I think of a small birthday dinner given some years ago by my friend Edith Kurtzweil for her husband, William Phillips. It was there that I
once again crossed paths with Roger Straus, renowned publisher and forever renowned in my mind as my first job interviewer. After dinner, I harnessed his attention—at his advanced age, quite an easy task, as he never left his chair. In a breezy, anecdotal way, I at last unburdened myself of the story of our early, brief encounter and the significance it had held for me. It was clear he didn't comprehend much of what I said, but he was still as sartorially splendid and, with his abundant crown of white hair, as handsome and charming as ever. He took the cue from my delivery and nodded and laughed heartily at my story, before looking away desperately in search of rescue and another lemon tart. Both of which were soon supplied by his beautiful wife, Joanna, and I said my good-byes. He died soon after, at age eighty-seven. I was surprised. I had imagined him gracefully sauntering into his hundreds. But I smiled to think that he had been only thirty-eight when he had dismissed me with such finesse and sent me out of publishing and on into my life.

I think of André Emmerich's eightieth birthday party, a large, elegant event. This time I knew many people, but perhaps because of the formality, I found that I had suddenly reached the end of my thread of small talk. Had I really been saying the same things to the same people for fifty years? We had never moved on to new colors and textures. Had it been me? Or them? There would be no answer, but that evening, my words wadded up in my mouth and tasted bad. As for those I knew less well, we were like actors in a play with no plot and lots of loose ends. My attention was transfixed by the tiny bejeweled purses on the tables and the heavily veined, bejeweled manicured hands lying across them.
Ah
, I thought,
the collectors
. With some, we try to sort ourselves out as we smile and move on, but we are stymied by our inability to match the face with a name, and we wonder if we know each other at all. And how could it have been otherwise? We had only had the polite latticework of small talk that had obscured the stuff of what might have been real conversation. I didn't sleep much that night. Often, after these reunions, I don't sleep much. Too many dreams of other nights and times.

I think of one of Helen's openings at Knoedler. In the crush, Gifford and Joanne Phillips greeted me. Their names floated to mind easily; they were like magnets bringing with them all the memories of our many times
together. They were also outstanding collectors. We talked about Helen's art—we liked that picture, that one not so much—the way people used to talk about art when qualitative judgments were still kosher. As we parted, Joanne said how fondly she remembered buying me “the little silver cup at Tiffany's.” A moment of confusion, before I realized she thought I was Sarah.

Just then, a young man with blond spiked hair said, “Jenny!” and grinned at me in passing. Who on earth . . . ? What a comedy it all was. As I left, I waved at Helen, seated in front of a long line of admirers waiting for her attention. As usual she mouthed, “Lunch. Call me.” It was the last time I saw her without a wheelchair. And there would be no more lunches.

And I learned how proprietary I was about my art family when my real family and I were recently invited to Barbara and Ernie Kafka's for Thanksgiving dinner. During the wonderful meal, conversation at the adult end of the table turned to the artists we had known in common—in particular, David Smith, Bob Motherwell, and Ken Noland. Their talk was not just idle gossip, but strong criticism of everything from lifestyles—all the girls and sex—to the management of families, careers, finances, and wills. As surprised as I was by their vehemence after so many years, I was more surprised by how defensive I became. As if I had a stake, as if I hadn't plenty of my own reservations about those artists. But damn it, they were my family and no one could . . . As quickly and easily as that, I was overwhelmed by a groundswell of feelings for them that I had never acknowledged before. They might be out of my life, or long dead, but they were mine.