Seek My Face (11 page)

“Weren’t you lonely?”

Hope gives it a second’s reflection. She wants to be honest but not to feed this young inquisitor’s desire to come between her and Zack, to fit their marriage into a frame somehow flattering to herself. “I wanted to be. I wanted to be alone with Zack, because I loved him and because it was the best thing for him and his work. We were just married, this was our honeymoon.”

“How old were you?”

“We moved in November of ’45. I turned twenty-four in May of ’46.”

“Wasn’t that terribly young, to be taking charge like that?”

“In the war, nobody seemed young. Zack was ten years older, but as I say he was a child. He was missing about half the components of a mature human being.”

“Really?”

“Kathryn. How can you doubt it? You know what happened afterward.”

This silences the doubter. Hope goes on, “And then, eventually, spring came. It came early that year, actually. In the dunes, there were all these tiny pink blossoms—people
called them bearberries. The farmers began to plow up the ryegrass for potato planting. The fishermen began to put out their nets for striped bass. The ocean, the ocean that had been such a bitter dark enemy while we suffered through the winter, softened in color, became a mild china blue. Zack was ecstatic. I could hardly get him to come indoors. He dug and planted a big garden for vegetables and melons, the way his father had done years ago. He brought home a mongrel dog one of the neighbors wanted to get rid of, he had had a piebald dog like that as a child. We walked with that dog, Trixie, for miles, and rode our bicycles all over, to Montauk and back, to East Hampton and back. It was a pleasure to bicycle, there was nothing like today’s traffic. The last time I visited the Flats, to check on the museum they’ve made of our old house, I was struck by how stifling everything has become: stop-and-go traffic all along Route 27, the people from New York bring their congestion out with them, along with their laptops and Starbuckses.”

Hope remembers the sense, new to her, of claiming a region, making a stretch of scenery and history their own, finding a leafy corner of America where she and Zack could taste freedom. The simplest transactions of country living pleased her—being greeted “Madame McCoy” by Henry Drayton at his store with a solemn ironical nod that said he knew what she was putting up with but saluting her undiscourageable youth and perkiness. He would add her purchases to their lengthening tab, and she would bicycle home fighting the front-heavy wobble from her loaded basket, between the new-sown potato fields and blossoming wild cherries beside the road. The most mundane signs of communal acceptance took her back to Ardmore, where the tradespeople had seemed giants at the back door, family members. The Flats’ plumber, Al Treadwell, would let himself
into the downstairs noisily, to warn them in case they were upstairs making love, as he installed, bit by bit, carton by carton, a plain but functioning bathroom to end forever their windblown winter trips to the outhouse. For two weeks later that summer, as the albizia dropped its feathery blossoms on the lawn, in whose center some previous owner had left a collection of six or so large boulders, she and Zack woke each dry day to the whistling, knocking sounds of Jimmy Herrick and his two adolescent sons arriving to paint the house’s weathered shingles white and the trim and windows blue. Owning this house restored her to certain simplicities of childhood, when houses and yards demarcated territories of safety and drew upon deep wells, mysterious cisterns brimming with communal reserves. “Zack surprised me by being so handy,” she tells Kathryn. “I didn’t really know that much about his boyhood, just that his father had owned a twenty-acre dirt farm outside of Santa Fe and after the farm failed and the father faded away—he got road-building jobs, surveying jobs, and came home less and less, there was never a clear break—the mother took all these boys to California and kept moving from place to place, sometimes little boarding houses they would run, I don’t know how many, as I say he didn’t like to talk about his past, his family made him very uncomfortable, which may be another thing we had in common; what I’m trying to say is that he was fearless about doing things. Plumbing, wiring—he’d tackle it. He and Eddie Strode, a fireman he had met at the Lemon Drop, ripped off the whole roof of Eddie’s house, right down to the rafters.” In her mind’s eye Zack sits silhouetted, shirtless and laughing, holding a beer can, his legs dangling down on either side of the bare ridge beam, the bright thunderheads of a coming storm piled behind him against a sky as profoundly blue as
the indigo sky she has just seen through the skylight of her studio. His bald head glinted. “Neither he nor I liked the way this shabby barn came between us and the view of the harbor, so all by himself he laid down a cement foundation thirty yards up the hill, to one side, and he and some other men girdled the barn and its shed in two-by-fours and tried to push it uphill but finally had to get a local fisherman, his name was Brick, it just came to me, Brick Lester, he died not long after, to haul it up on the winch on the back of his truck.” Has she already told Kathryn this story, or just passed it through her mind? An epic tale deserving to be oft-told, the moving of the barn: Hope can still feel in her gut and groin the sensation of release when the winch creaked, the cables tautened, the chocks under the truck’s back wheels held, and the barn, big and hollow as the Trojan horse, budged and tottered forward beneath the great silver maple that sticky summer day, the watching men, having sweated their shirts wet in vain, cheering, shouting admonitions and encouragements to one another, dancing about to see that the girdle of beams was holding together, Brick’s face reddening, his fat white hand bunched on the black winch lever; the sputtering engine fed its power into the cable reel and all the nails and rivets held as human ingenuity and good fortune majestically converted desire into movement. Brick had a great drooping gut, which dragged him down into death not long after. “I kept serving everybody lemonade, and then beer when they were done. If they hadn’t done that, think of it,” Hope tells Kathryn, “the barn wouldn’t have been close enough to the house to use as a studio, and Zack’s paintings would have stayed easel-size. He cut a big north window high in one wall, but when I suggested another window lower down, toward McGonicle’s Harbor, he said No, he didn’t want to be distracted
by any view. He loved the view, he would spend hours sitting looking at the dunes, and the marshes, with the ducks and red-winged blackbirds, but he wanted the studio sealed off. He wasn’t articulate but he was smart enough to know that—his painting now had to come entirely from within.”

She arrives, thus, at an impasse, a sealed cul-de-sac, a kind of blank-faced monument to the something obdurate and shrewd that had lifted Zack, for all his limits, far above her. Freshly married, she thought she had rejoiced to see Zack regain health and enterprise, but there was a part of her that resented the way that he seized her initiative and accepted her services, those glorious first years on the Island, yet shut her out, leaving her as an artist far behind.

Kathryn tells her, “The paintings he did in ’46 have a lovely outdoors feeling, like watercolors. Those clear pastel colors, Matisse-y almost, peach and lime green and powder blue. And the brush strokes,” she goes on a bit breathlessly, getting her art-crit voice in gear, “are so free-flowing, transparent somehow, at the opposite end from the clotted, dark canvases he was doing just a year or two earlier.”

“I had never liked those, though Herbie did,” Hope says with deliberate crispness, curbing the other’s rapture. “We were happy,” she firmly states. “We would sleep as late as we could, spend time together in the garden in the morning, he would work in the studio in the afternoon and I might shop and do housework, we would take walks with Trixie in the late-afternoon light, and come home and eat, and listen to records, and make love. Making love had always been easy for me, but not for Zack. That was why he talked about fucking so much, and was so rude to women when he had some drinks inside him.”
And would have been rude to you
, she does not say,
had you been there
.

Yet always, she remembers, and can almost taste it, a bitter nugget in the midst of this translucent happiness, there had been his ambition, and the fear that sealed his ambition in, and his insulting need for alcohol’s spell of self-forgetfulness. Her eyes surprise her by feeling hot and watery. “I made love to him,” she tells Kathryn, “to keep him from running off to the Lemon Drop in the evening. He would fuck me and put his clothes on and go off anyway. He would walk a mile in the dark to be with these ignorant men who wouldn’t even talk to him.”

“You made him into a heterosexual,” Kathryn explains to her, as if in reproach, with that easy New York knowingness that withers all it touches.

Hope feels blood rush to her face in her eagerness to turn aside such an impudent implication. “Zack never thought of himself as anything but. Biographers have made much too much of certain minor incidents. In his teens, when his brothers were leaving the household one by one and his mother was working late hours and he was pretty much on his own in Los Angeles, and then when he first came to New York and hardly had a place to stay, but really, in that blue-collar world he came from, there was nothing homosexual about liking to sit around getting sloshed with other men, it was simply how men were. He was awkward with women, but not unresponsive to them. Believe me, dear. Don’t ask me to spell it out.”

“May I ask—was there anything, oh, out of the way about his lovemaking? Did you have to do anything unusual to arouse him?”

Hope can hardly believe she is being asked this, but then must admit to herself that she deserves it, for flaunting her sexuality before this young woman—rubbing her nose in it, as they say—with her talk of being wicked and of going to
the costume ball in little more than coal dust. It was a way of teasing her, of keeping Kathryn from swamping her, but there was no holding off her relentless, humorless demand that Hope bare her life. And it was all so long ago, before even the middle of the last century, when she and Zack came to the sunstruck, wind-raked Flats and filled the forsaken old farmhouse with the sound of their voices, augmenting the warmth of their bodies with that of the woodstove, whose heat parched their skins and hair in its close vicinity but died halfway upstairs to the cold bedroom. “He was an old-fashioned man in many ways,” she tells the other woman. “Just the sight of me naked was usually enough. There wasn’t all this emphasis on oral and anal there is now, though he did like to take me from behind. I would give it to him as a treat, though of course it didn’t do much for me, besides the cuddling part of it. At times I would be left unsatisfied—and angry, I suppose—but there was still this notion in the air, which the war had reinforced, of women
serving
men, because they were our buffers against the real world, the cruel world. They earned the money and fought the wars. I learned to cook, once we left New York, because Zack’s mother had always put these big square Western meals on the table. In our sex, if you really need know this sort of thing, I wore a diaphragm, and had to guess ahead of time when it would be needed, and sometimes guessed wrong, which was humiliating in a small way. Your intuition, Kathryn, is correct in that Zack did, in general, have to be coaxed into sex, as opposed to being always up for it, as they say now. The liquor acted as a drag when he was off the wagon, and he was
con
stantly preoccupied by this need to be a great painter—not an adequate and earnest one like Mahlon Strunk, or even a famous one like Benton and Mondrian, but great in some deep, final—‘existential’
was the word we all used—way that he couldn’t come out and confess but all the painters we knew more or less shared. They were out for big game. Zack didn’t have the facility, the intellectual background, of Roger or Bernie, and where someone like Onno was such a natural painter he could do his thing at the canvas for hours a day and then just forget it, like natural exercise, it wasn’t a natural thing for Zack: he had to find, or
invent
would be better, a manner in which he could be fluent like the others, and though Herbie loved him and Peggy supported him in her Faginlike fashion and Clem thought he might be a winning bet to make his own name as a critic on, Zack knew he hadn’t found it yet, those outdoorsy watercolory Matisse-y paintings you were praising weren’t quite there yet, though, you’re right, they were closer, they were freer, he’d gotten away from those deadly brown Mexican muralists and that Miróesque Surrealist clutter. What I’m trying to say with all this—your poor tape recorder!—is that though he wasn’t very self-reflective Zack knew that the move to the Island with me might be his last chance to be great. It sounds stupid and naïve to you, I’m sure, being great, but it was very real to Zack, this possibility, and to the other painters too, as I’ve said, a very American notion, no doubt, a kind of holy state—imagine if Picasso had bothered himself with so gross an ambition, how could he have
played
the way he did?—and time was running out. And he had me now to run interference for him and do a ton of scut work and get on the phone for hours trying to boost his stock in the city—I pretended to believe in him more than I did, and then, about our second year on the Island, I became a believer. So he had a reason to try to avoid the Lemon Drop and, when he went into town, the Cedar or loft parties; it wasn’t just screwing me that kept him home. Zack got himself
down to wine and beer on his own. Roger had a place in East Hampton, the Georgica section, and Onno and Renée had bought on Two Holes of Water Road a carriage house they painted this sardonic Easterish purple to annoy the uptight neighbors, and Bernie and Mahlon had followed by ’48—Mahlon and Myrtle went all the way to Montauk, typically isolating themselves somewhat—so there was a real artists’ colony growing up, with
lots
of parties and booze, and it was after Roger brought a bottle of Jack Daniel’s to the place on Fireplace Road when we were giving him and Tasha dinner with two other couples and Herbie that Zack solemnly handed it back to him and looked him in the eye—there had always been a little bad blood between them, Roger was so much what Zack wasn’t, so effortlessly
au courant
—and told him, ‘Thanks, but I don’t need this stuff any more.’ ”