Seek My Face (16 page)

She says to Kathryn, “I suppose it should please me to know that he treated Meredith as miserably as he did me; but she got him, the poor dear, only when he was far gone, she never knew the sober Zack, the hardworking outdoors-loving Zack who was always so sweet to children. At the beach he used to take them aside and build towers of rounded beach stones; that German took photographs of some of them, as if they were works of art too. Am I repeating myself?” She smiles to conceal the taste in her mouth, of sorrow and defeat. “And maybe they were—Tanguys of a sort. There are times, Kathryn, when this whole art business, which has been my life of course, seems terribly transitory and disposable. I go into museums now and look at those oversize, boastful canvases by Zack and Phil and Jarl
and it all seems
so
tired—Phil’s paintings especially have cracked and puckered, the black looks like tar dried up on a flat roof in the sun, and Seamus’s colors have chemically shifted, that marvellous
hovering
they used to do doesn’t quite happen any more, the pinks and salmons have gone chalky and scrubby, they’ve sunk into dullness, and even the aluminum paint Zack used so much in the late ’forties has blackened, I’ve talked to curators and they say there’s nothing to be done, I can remember when those elements
flashed
out at you.” Hope looks directly at Kathryn as if somehow challenged by her, somehow doubted. She sighs and goes on, “They weren’t Old Masters. They weren’t even Picasso: those Cubist paintings he and Braque did side by side in that little village in the Pyrénées in 1910, what was it called?—Céret—are still as fresh as new, I looked at them the last time I was in MoMA a few years ago—maybe more than a few, come to think of it. Zack and the others got away from permanence, they didn’t grind their own pigments or have apprentices do it, they took what materials were for sale around them, they didn’t care about a hundred years from now, from them, maybe they didn’t believe there
was
such a long future, with the atomic bomb; they were like performance artists in a way, going after the effect in the present and not pretending to be making something eternal. Bernie was a little different—he cared about traditional methods. He painted slowly, on sized canvas. When I visited MoMA that time, the two or three big Novas they have looked just the way they always did, they were dear old friends.”

“You have gone on record,” Kathryn tells her, “as having little use for performance art.”

“Well, on the one hand, it’s a—what’s the word?—tautology: all art is performance, from the caves on. On the
other hand, what is commonly meant by it goes against my every sense of what art is.
Life
is the performance; art is what outlives life. Which of course is why they do it—to upset old-fashioned souls like me. But it has gone old-fashioned itself very quickly, hasn’t it?”

Kathryn doesn’t answer; she poses another question, in a tone of voice meant to be just like that in which she couched the previous one but to Hope’s ear coated with a glaze, a transparent hardening as if chemically to neutralize its entry into a more intimate region of memory. “How important to you was your relationship to Bernie Nova?”

Hope doesn’t give her the satisfaction of more than a moment’s pause. “It was important as a transition,” she stated. “Bernie had always teased me, I knew he liked me, we all knew it, and after Zack’s death there weren’t so many of the old Cedar Tavern crowd who wanted, frankly, much to do with me. They were jealous of Zack’s fame—he had become, almost the instant his head hit that tree,
the
painter of his time, the performer and symbol both, yet he had been such an impossible drunken boor toward the end that a kind of stink clung to his widow as well. I was just thirty-three when Zack died—I had this huge empty life in front of me.” She tries to clear her throat of its sudden roughness, its lump of revived desolation. “Oh my goodness,” she says, laughing as her eyes tear up and Kathryn’s severe face blurs, “I’ve got this terrible frog suddenly. My throat isn’t used to so much talking. We should eat.”

“Before we do,” Kathryn persists, “there’s something I’d like to come back to. You speak of Zack’s last five years as pure disaster, but several critics in the ’nineties have been looking hard at what he
did
manage to do. One of those semi-poured black-on-white biomorphs on canvas went for nearly three million at Sotheby’s last year.”

“Poor Zack, he never saw any real money. We lived on these grudging doles.”

“
Angel Bower
was used on a postage stamp, as you know, the post-war artists series. I’ve always loved its return to Matisse-y colors.”

“I named it, it was one of the last ones he let me help name. There was this shady corner he strung a hammock in, beneath the silver maple, this side of the barn. But it didn’t seem to you to be—how I can put this nicely?—a doodle?”

“No, I find it very contemplated. And the big vertical panel he did as late as ’54,
Number 61
, the flickering tongues eating into the black center, critics call it his homage to Jarl Anders but I think it’s better than Anders, it has what Anders never has, a feeling of passion and doubt, a sense of
fighting through
to something, through something
else
. In Anders, for me, it all happens without enough resistance.”

“Jarl had been a minister’s son. He used to write Zack these insane letters, lots of Xed-out typing, telling him to keep his integrity, fight the good fight, revolutionize humanity, throw out the money changers, et cetera, and Zack took them as encouragement, addressed to his better self, which almost nobody else gave him credit for having, they were so jealous of his fame and disgusted by his drinking and rudeness. I think Jarl reminded Zack of Benton in a way—one of those crusty men’s men from the heartland. And somehow Zack’s difficulties after 1950 proved Jarl’s point about the society being a totalitarian trap and the art community being hopelessly corrupt. He saw painting as a matter of conscience, and this appealed to Zack, with his intense, fragile way of working. But when Zack would get into the old Olds—he never owned a new car,
never
, think
of it, just the Model A and then this overpowered heap that got maybe ten miles a gallon and took at least one quart of oil every time we stopped for gas—and would drive all the way over to where Jarl and Frieda had the Amagansett house and Jarl worked in this abandoned Methodist church, Jarl wouldn’t come out from under his Jaguar, which he was always tinkering with. Frieda had some money, which I didn’t. My father was still alive, and my older brother, the one that wasn’t killed in the war, had the inside track back in Philadelphia; they both disapproved of me and my marriage to Zack, they saw him as a sozzled brute, they couldn’t imagine what attracted me. And in fact, if you
must
know, Kathryn, there wasn’t much of the family money left, my father had pretty well pissed away—I suppose it’s acceptable English to say that now—what he had inherited from my grandfather. Oh dear, where was I? Jarl. He had this vision of eliminating European influence from American painting, which was about like trying to eliminate European blood from the population. He called Zack’s work ‘unravelled Impressionism.’ He had quite a sharp and funny tongue, but Jarl was one of the few men, I must say, I knew in those days who
didn’t
strike me as attractive. He was tall and gaunt and yellow in color, with dead-looking hair and protruding teeth. And a
glare
. Such a glare, I’d feel myself wilting under it. He didn’t approve of me either. He saw me as a playgirl. He saw me as the Devil’s party.”

Kathryn gingerly leans forward to check the little gray tape recorder and satisfies herself that it is still purring. “Hope, could we get back for a moment to your relationship with Bernie Nova?”

Addressed with this sudden familiarity, Hope takes a, for her, violent initiative and stands up; the rocking chair of many woods, relieved of her weight, swings away from the
backs of her legs. Her knees ache, her throat is parched, emptiness sits in her stomach like a pain pill she can’t digest. “Oh my dear,” she says. “It was all so long ago. Let’s have something to eat, you must be frantic with hunger.”

Though she is not tall, standing alters her perspective so that the room, this boxy, lightly furnished front parlor with its dainty-muntined windows curtained in faded brownish chintz, is jolted into strangeness: the undersized but formal Ionic-pilastered fireplace mantel, painted cream; its burden of a small gilt-cased clock and two brass candlesticks and a silver-framed color snapshot, its dyes ebbing, of her three children in bathing suits smiling beside a turquoise Connecticut swimming pool when they were all under ten, more than thirty years ago; the walnut piecrust table with its fat blue ball of a ceramic lamp-base and four stacked cork coasters like oversize poker chips; the plaid armchair and a rusty bridge lamp of similar ancient vintage, its paper shade darkened as if charred and bearing the printed image of a pointing setter; the oval rug formed of a coil braid of varicolored rags; the pine floorboards painted a dark red and broader than any you could obtain now; the bare and subtly uneven walls of real plaster, dressed up bleakly with a few small abstract prints, gifts from old friends now dead; against one wall, a bookcase whose lower shelves are too narrow for all the art books that jut out. It all seems charged with strangeness, the strangeness that the afterlife, however much like our life on earth it is, must have to the newly dead. She rarely sits in this room; the kitchen, her bedroom above it, and the studio beyond it contain her usual orbit. Each evening, having added the supper plate and glass to those already waiting in the dishwasher for it to be full enough to run, she thinks of coming in here and drawing the curtains behind the plaid chair against a draft and reading
her book of the week, or even looking into one of the art books growing dusty, but she rarely does, drifting upstairs to the warmth of her bedroom instead. Climbing the stairs—“climbing the wooden hill,” her grandfather used to call it—hurts her knees and left hip but helps keep her mobile, she believes, helps keep her for another year out of one of those assisted-living facilities with rubber floors and off-limits stairwells where her two sons would like to see her settled for the ease of their own consciences, it would make
them
look bad if she were to die alone and broken on the stairs à la Edna St. Vincent Millay. She so rarely sits in the front parlor that the space from her standing, momentarily light-headed perspective appears startled, its corners jarred into flight, elastic and awry like the corners in rooms by Van Gogh or Lucien Freud. There is something lavender, a psychedelic tinge, in the papered walls, in the thin warped windowpanes, that at moments enters Hope’s eyes from the side, as if the room’s inhabitants in the century now gone had breathed a tint of their lives onto these surfaces.

She turns to lead the way to the kitchen, and behind her Kathryn snaps off the little Sony, their faithful witness, impassive as a security camera whose fuzzy evidence is eventually tossed out of court. She sees, walking past windows, that the sky, this morning so blank and pure a blue, is closing down, the scattered white clouds expanding to crowd out the spaces between them, packing themselves together as tightly as gray flagstones, with something vaporous arising even in the chinks, so that the sunlight leaking through is tremulous, like the shuddering reflections from the windows of a passing train. When shadows return after these gleaming intervals, the light seems deeper, more enclosed, having dipped deeper into some
darker element, so that the twigs and branches around the bird feeder look blackly wet. Hope switches on the rheostatted kitchen lights overhead, portholes sunk into a drop ceiling concealing the one of stamped tin, painted pumpkin-color and smoke-stained, here when she and Jerry bought the place twenty years ago. The digital clock on the microwave oven says in segmented red numbers 1:22.

“So long ago,” she repeats, “and Bernie I know would want me to be discreet. He and Jeanette had the kind of tactful arrangement between them that Zack and I never arrived at. I was too young and idealistic; Zack was too primitive, too square in his way. Now, Kathryn. Let’s think together. I could heat up some canned soup—split pea, or chicken with rice—and make a tuna salad. I know I have one can left, because I made a note to buy some more in Montpelier.”

“What would you do if you were alone?”

“But I’m not alone. If I were, I’d probably go wander outdoors with a handful of Brazil nuts and dried apricots—there’s a health-food store in Montpelier where everything is monkey-food, to be eaten with your hands, all sorts of nuts and dried fruits and yogurt-covered little pretzels, that you imagine must be terribly good for you but in fact are loaded with calories and sugar. People speak of natural foods as if nature isn’t where everything bad ultimately comes from. I’m looking into the fridge, but we don’t want to make sandwiches, do we? Too much starch, whoever said bread was the staff of life? Either Jesus or Mr. Pepperidge. And the canned soup, chock-a-block full of salt and preservatives. You must starve yourself to keep so lean, those drinks and heavy meals boyfriends make you consume, taking you out, trying to impress you with their fat wallets. Or are you in, what do they call it now, a relationship?”

“I run,” Kathryn says, ignoring the last question. “I’ve loved to run ever since I was a girl.”

“So did I, but then it wasn’t considered proper after a certain age, away from the hockey field. Now exercise is so fashionable, in the summer people are running all over the roads up here, it’s a wonder more of them aren’t killed.”

“I live on Liberty Street, near the World Trade Center, and can run in Battery Park City, along the river.”

“Is it safe?”

“Oh, sure. My building’s tacky but it’s less rent than in TriBeCa. I’m above a mattress showroom and a hair stylist. In the daytime the whole area bustles with all these beefy young guys in finance, but when they go home to New Jersey or wherever it quiets down. It’s a very safe area.”