Seek My Face (17 page)

“Good. New York used to be safe everywhere, or so we thought, when we were young and foolish. Do sit down. Or would you rather look around, to gather details for your article?”

“It’s not that kind of article, exactly.”

“What kind did you say it
was
, exactly?”

“My articles aren’t like other people’s—they’re more essayistic. Impressionistic, you could say. I never quite know what I’ll say until I start to say it.”

“An excellent way to proceed. I wish I could paint more like that. I must always look ahead, it’s my timidity. Now, let’s see—tuna salad. Here’s the tuna. Would you like to open the can for me? My hands are still good for most things, but turning that little lever does set off my arthritis, I hope you never get it, it comes on knuckle by knuckle; I first noticed it when I would pinch a finger in the pages of a book to mark the place while I answered the telephone. It would hurt, and after that, any pressure sets it off, especially on days like today that are building up for snow or rain.
One of the reasons I thin now with stand oil is that the paint goes on easier. Celery. I know I have celery in one of the drawers, I hope not
too
wilted.”

“Would you like me to chop it for you?” The young woman’s face, above the round squat tuna can she has deftly opened, seems itself to have opened, to be childishly expectant in the stark kitchen light, the illumination that fills every crevice and forms a bulwark against the gloom outside, where cloud shadows dip across the dead lawn like swallows in summer. Kathryn perches on a stool at the serpentine-topped island, and the opened can releases a genie of oily fish-smell, tuna hauled flopping and gasping from thousands of miles away, out in the heaving Atlantic, everything pitching and sliding and flipping and dying.

“No, no—you just sit. You must be tired, on a poor night’s sleep in a strange motel. Are you going back to the motel tonight?”

“Oh no, tonight I’m driving back to New York. I thought I might be on my way already.”

Hope is relieved. This intruder will be leaving soon, or if not soon at least there is a definite end to her visit. Why can’t Hope herself set the limit, asserting the prerogatives of her greater age and superior prestige? Her desire to please, to be loved, has plagued her all her life. Even now, who asked her to feed the girl lunch? From the look of her she can feed herself or skip a meal; if she’s Jewish she was stuffed by her mama from Day One, they take care of their own, compared with Hope’s own mother, who left it up to the cook or put the growing girl on her own diet rations, a little dry cereal for lunch, a canned pear on a leaf of lettuce, wolfing down cigarette smoke instead, loathing the fat Pennsylvania bodies around her; no wonder Hope was a nervous, imperfect mother with such a model to follow. She
feels now the blood beating eagerly in her cheeks and throat, and her hands on the eight-inch knife trembling with the urgency of this quite unnecessary performance. Her back is to the girl, she is at the sink, at the chopping board next to the sink, under the ribbon lights installed beneath the cabinets, within a step of the refrigerator. She rips away the tough and stringy outer celery stalks and chops two paler inner wands into arches half an inch long and, her left hand pushing together a quick small heap, minces these arches into bits smaller than dice, her right hand pumping the knife up and down on the fulcrum of its lethal point. Then from a lower fridge drawer that holds a number of neglected delicacies—she must remind herself to keep cooking, to keep living, to fight slumping into a cranky senility munching nothing but nuts and raisins—she retrieves a tired, shrivelling red pepper, a wilted bouquet of parsley with its paper supermarket band still on, and a lemon going greenish-white at one end. She minces the parsley and cuts the lemon in half, dropping into the Disposall’s rubber mouth the moldy half. She cuts open the pepper, gouges away the seedy interior, and carves the husk into strips she then chops crosswise. She takes the can of tuna from between Kathryn’s idle long black-nailed hands where the girl sits watching at the green island of serpentine, and inverts the can into a drainer held over the sink, removing the excess water, and mixes the friable pinkish-buff fish-flesh, not too long ago supple and swift in the cold Atlantic, in a small Pyrex bowl with a dollop of mayonnaise, stirring in the fragments of celery and red pepper, many of the latter diamond-shaped, she cannot help noticing; from deep in her memory flickers the image of her mother’s sinewy sportswoman’s hands, the fingers too lean for her big diamond rings, swiftly fiddling at some kitchen task at
the level of a child’s eyes on an old wooden counter. So her mother did venture into the kitchen now and then. As Hope mixes, she squeezes in all the juice the unspoiled portion of lemon will yield to her own aching, ugly arthritic fingers. More than the pain she minds, vainly enough, the shame of her bent fingers, fingers no longer parallel; the way they rub together she finds disgusting. As she squeezes and stirs she tells her listener, “Bernie was consoling. He had his own sorrows too in those years, the early ’fifties. His shows at Betty’s in ’50 and ’51 were absolute flops, they were ridiculed—these big canvases with a vertical stripe or two after all his heavy Nietzschean or whatever pronouncements of the ’forties. He wasn’t included in the ‘Fifteen Americans’ show at the Modern in ’52, which infuriated him. People laughed at him—his monocle, his mustache, his grand way of talking. He looked like an absolute washout, supported by his wife’s money. Jeanette part-owned an interior-decorating outfit on Madison Avenue. She was in the city a lot; they had kept their apartment on Central Park West, they could afford to do that, whereas poor Zack and I …”

She can feel the tension in her listener, Kathryn fearing that Hope will spill the details of her affair with Bernie Nova while the tape recorder is idle in the other room. She leans forward at the green island as if to rise, asking, “Can I do anything to help?”

“No, dear, you sit. This is very simple.” Hope has found a head of iceberg lettuce, pounds it on the cutting board to loosen the leaves from the heart, and tears off four large leaves to share between the two lunch plates—they have chipped pink rims and botanical images of wildflowers in the center, lavender
Veronica anagallis-aquatica
for Kathryn,
yellow
Diplotaxis muralis
for herself—and with a sterling-silver serving spoon she has many times seen in her mother’s glittering hand tries to measure out equal portions of mucilaginous tuna salad onto the overlapped lettuce leaves. She sprinkles on the minced parsley and, in a final inspiration, tops the mounds with a few walnut halves from a plastic health-food-store envelope on a fridge door shelf. “Tell me what you want to drink.”

“What are the choices?”

Yes, her mother spoiled her, waited on her, as Hope is doing now. “Skim milk, cranberry juice, orange juice, faucet water, ginger ale but the bottle’s been opened, I can’t guarantee it won’t be flat. I’m having cranberry juice.”

“Doesn’t it make you pee? I mean, people in general. I’m thinking I’ll be in the car a long time.”

Hope has to smile at how this young woman keeps holding out hope of her departing and yet keeps saying “pee” and appears more and more trustfully dependent. “I’ve not noticed that effect myself. But, then, I tend to be at home most of the time. You can have water, but it won’t be the bottled water you’re used to, the big plastic jugs are too heavy for an old lady to lug home from the supermarket, and the water here is from our own spring, farther up the hill, as pure as God makes it.” She supposes that “God” from her lips is as gauche as “pee” was from Kathryn’s. They are both growing too used to each other’s company. They are like boxers whose reflexes are slowing in the late rounds.

“Is it filtered?”

“By the sand in the ground.”

“I’d like to try it, please. Real spring water. The salad looks lovely. The walnuts are a jolly idea.”

“I would have added olives and anchovies if I had them.”

“I’m so embarrassed, I never meant to make you feed me.”

“My pleasure, truly. I eat alone all the time. Let’s sit over here.” The kitchen table, under the Andersen window, is a five-foot circle of two-inch oak screwed fast to an octagonal column whose four long oak feet need a folded piece of cardboard—a matchbook is too thick—to level them; the table is a remnant of her marriage with Guy, from the kitchen in the Seventy-ninth Street apartment. They all ate on it—children, the help, Guy and she late at night. Now the table is permanently set with two straw placemats fabricated of a continuous braid on the principle of the oval rag rug in the front parlor. Hope brings forks and paper napkins and in a second trip the glasses of cranberry juice and spring water, continuing, “They say the old forget to eat eventually, but it hasn’t quite happened to me. Food is—what?—the last intimacy. We don’t want to give it up.” The tuna, she thinks, beginning to eat, could do with salt. The lemon juice is sharp, on the edge of turning. She should have thrown the whole lemon away. “We could do with bread, I suppose,” she says.

“I wouldn’t mind,” the guest admits. The girl is a taker; at her age, that is health. “Let me fetch it,” she says, and quickly stands, with a scrape and clatter of boots and stool legs.

“In the big drawer in the middle at the end next to the sink,” Hope tells her, “there’s a built-in breadbox. The lid has little holes you lift it by, it’s hard with my fingers. There’s Pepperidge Farm rye.” She realizes it may say “Jewish rye” on the label, but then decides it doesn’t matter, the girl may not be Jewish, her black hair in the light here declares its reddish tinge, more blatant than just a tinge,
more electric, frankly unnatural, twenty-first century, this seems to be the fashion, nobody lets their hair alone any more, trusts it to be beautiful enough. Body-piercing, tattoos, how strange to her generation, for whom the unadorned untouched body, as pure as unflecked marble (even in staid old Philadelphia, Greek slave girls and Indian maidens stood naked in the galleries, sculpted by American Victorians in Rome, what
were
their names?), formed the ideal, the ultimate beauty, so that her own freckles, on forearms and shins and the sunbaked area above her breasts’ blue-veined white, were a flaw in her mind, forgiven by the shadows of a bedroom. Bernie’s bright house had discomfited her at first. While the girl fusses at the breadbox and searches the cupboards for a suitable plate—as with most children, it would have been easier to do it yourself—Hope sees through the western window by the table as she controls her impatience and waits for the bread to be clumsily fetched how the sky is darkening behind its close-packed clouds, a sky has materialized behind the sky, a blue-gray haze behind the cauliflower tops, a pattern of agitated streaks and tatters like the mounting flakes in a Jarl Anders painting turned sideways but, because mindless, grander than anything Jarl had done, more merciful because unpremeditated, not indignantly calculated to win glory or reverse two thousand years’ corruption, serene in their aloof yet urgent movement, these spacious eddies of atmosphere expressing a disturbance in the west, a vaporous convulsion approaching from New York State.

“Oh, thank you, perfect,” Hope says, as Kathryn brings a dessert plate holding more bread than three times as many women would eat, and the cow-shaped butter dish discovered in its nook on the fridge door. In eating, Kathryn carefully swallows and more than once touches the corners of
her lips with her paper napkin to spare Hope any sight of gluey tuna salad being masticated amid her pretty teeth and tongue. “And yet,” she says, “Bernie Nova’s work was what led to the next stage—color-field painting, and Minimal—”

Hope is so eager to agree she doesn’t let the other pronounce “-ism.” “I know! Who would have thought it! The younger artists saw something in Bernie they could
use
, whereas Zack and Onno and Phil, there was nothing more to do in their line without being
them
. They were so individual, so furiously themselves, let’s say—”

She is in turn interrupted: “They were so
hot
,” Kathryn says, still watchful of her oil-soaked mouth, her tongue and teeth coated with the brackish scent of fish, but eager to arrive at some confluence with Hope’s line of thought, “cool was the only direction left.”

“Yes. I’m glad Zack never saw it, it would have enraged him, what came next, it would have seemed to him so trivial, so insincere.”

She and Bernie would go to bed on some of those afternoons when Jeanette was in town working at a client’s apartment, but not as many stolen afternoons as might have been, had lovemaking been the essence of their coming together. They were artistic waifs, lost here, toward the tip of Long Island, between Onno’s flickering mastery and Zack’s epochal liberation into dripping; even Roger, that perpetual schoolboy copiously producing his French-flavored collages and Zen-like dashes and blobs of black on princely large sheets of white wove paper, enjoyed a security within the well-heeled world of critics and collectors, museums and galleries, which magnified his modest talent and give him substance, a grip on slippery artistic fashion. Hope was demoralized by Zack’s scorning her work as pathetically female and Bernie by the art establishment’s
dismissing him as foppish and “literary.” In an hour’s escape from a house where all was sullen hangover, inflamed resentment, daily blockage, and nightly binge, she took nurture in the Novas’ newly built home—its shining floorboards of pale maple, its bare beams of oak, its picture windows in which strips of gleaming sea and milky sky were mounted above a breadth of dusted green potato rows, its two-story studio where Bernie’s mocked monochromatic canvases grew defiantly bigger and bigger, boasting Latin titles like medals the painter himself had bestowed. The second floor of the house was a huge loft; it gave, beyond a low balustrade, on the upper space of the studio, so the paintings were presences that shared the bedrooms, which were fragrant of new wood, and had the simplicity of a den, in Scandinavian shades of teak and blondness and unbleached wool, most starkly in the guest room, where, on a mattress supported by a sheet of plywood, Bernie played host to Hope’s rounded body, which even through winter stayed drenched in reddish freckles, freckles so thick on her shoulders and shins as to merge and approach the Mediterranean tan of the other wives. Hope thought her bare body a fair swap for Bernie’s cocky sardonic humor, the dandyish visual jokes of his monocle and tailored English suits, the fatherly rumble of his voice in his chest, broad as a Cossack’s. He was a third-generation Russian Jew, his name a self-invented simplification of Novakhov, and his mustache like a detail from Gogol, with a life of its own. When he talked, the waxed tips twitched and it was easy to forget the rest of his face—the porous blunt nose, the bear-brown eyes, the rather feminine hidden lips, rapid and decisive in their enunciation.