Seek My Face (31 page)

“I don’t think I need to. You describe them so well.”

“Upstairs, in the various bedrooms—let me think. In the guest room, some old prints, faded, never expensive. Lawrence’s
Pinkie
in a tarnished brass frame, and the Vermeer of the woman with the silver pitcher, in the Met, with that marvellous streak of reflected blue on the back of it, away from the window—blue everywhere, really, even on
the rod at the bottom of the map, you wonder if it hasn’t burned through some other pigments which have bleached out. And on the blank wall of the upstairs landing, a big messy oil of woods that was in my grandfather’s study, the only wall without books or a window; when my grandmother used to complain that she couldn’t understand how he could look at something so gloomy, he’d tell her, ’That’s how woods are, full of fallen deadwood. That painter was an honest man.’ And in my bedroom I have a few modern items, worth something to the right collector, I suppose—the first, rougher version of the pastel Ruk did of me that hangs in the Corcoran, and a silk screen Bernie gave me, an intimate version of one of his heroic oils, a nearly square field of blue, as cold as the underside of an iceberg, with a single strip, well off to one side, of rose madder, done in slightly uneven, jabbing strokes. Would you like to go upstairs to my bedroom to see them?”

“I don’t think that will be necessary.” Aware of possibly seeming unresponsive, Kathryn adds, “You must be tired.”

“You too, dear.”

Her bedroom—she would have liked to exhibit it to this dark-haired young intruder, the site of her nightly surrender to sleep, her airy cell, the tightly made bed, the pink-bordered Amish quilt turned down to the foot with linear precision, with the fussy primness of the old. The first thing Hope does each morning, once she empties her inelastic bladder and brushes her teeth—crowns and implants, most of them; her smile is a lie—is make the bed, having turned on the classical-music station from Burlington, an affiliate of WNYC. She has never painted to music, unlike Zack and his noisy jazz—once they got electricity out to the barn, he turned it up loud as if to keep her away—but she needs it to make the bed to, with aching finger joints; it lifts her mind
up from the ignominy of these daily chores, catering to our own creature comforts, the tedious rites of hygiene. Often, wet from the shower, she makes the bed naked, her ghastly bony and bulging and sagging and spotted old body shining out in the room’s fresh light, the Lord her only witness, and He in her mind’s eye pleased enough by her Schongauer look; that was Protestant art, God looking at us rather than us looking at Him, every Dutchman and Jew in Holland a saint in darkness to Rembrandt’s loaded brush.

“You mustn’t think,” Hope tells Kathryn, who once more has leaned forward anxiously, her body like a folded black jackknife, to check if the Sony is still running, “and I know I sounded like a terrible grouch and philistine, that Jerry and I disdained everything in art after 1975. Those Photo-realistic sculptures that used to startle you at the Whitney because they looked too much like people, lifesize and made of Fiberglas, with glass eyes and real hair, in real clothes, one of them was even of a museum guard, people kept asking it questions,
oh
, what
was
the man’s name. Hanson. Duane Hanson. I should remember it, because he died a few years ago, and he was younger than I am. Even younger, I should say. And there was a young British artist, he might have been Australian if there’s a difference, Ron something, he was in that exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum that got Mayor Giuliani all upset, a German kind of name, Monk or Munck, he has the same idea, though he doesn’t do lifesize, he did a
perfect
little replica of his dying father no bigger than a housecat, and then a huge one of his own face, with every pore rendered, every stubby whisker. I’ve always been so grateful—haven’t you?—that I don’t have to begin the day by shaving, I don’t think feminists are appreciative enough of what men go through, even though it’s true they don’t have to bear the babies, or suffer in love
so horribly. When you look at these Middle Eastern men, with these five days’ beards so they all look like terrorists, and baseball pitchers too now—to intimidate the batters, I suppose—it makes
me
at least thankful. Mueck: his name just came to me. M-U-E-C-K, I do believe.”

Is she rambling to drive this girl away, or because she can’t help emptying herself completely into captive ears?

She goes on, “They affect me, these literalist sculptures. They tell us something about being human—our vulnerability, mostly. Just our skins—so bald, so easy to puncture, even without a gun. The fingernails, the eyelashes, even the earwax, all the tiny touches that at some point in evolution apparently enabled some people to survive better than others, or to find mates, though I’m not sure how earwax would help with that, not to mention all the molecular niceties that we notice only when we get so sick because they are going just ever so slightly wrong. Looking back,” Hope confesses, “it’s hard to remember why we all looked down on representation, regarded it with such contempt—we didn’t want painting to be
anecdotal
, that was the scare word, Clem would get quite livid at the thought, so he had to take another drink to steady himself, and Hochmann, too, utterly scornful, in that way Germans have of wishing something out of existence, but I wonder now if all painting isn’t anecdotal, a story the painter wants to tell. What he won’t do, what he
will
do, what he is dying to try, what he is working out from within himself toward some kind of—what?—ultimate economy, let’s say. The canvas is an adventure, Clem was right about that, and the artist is the adventurer, telling his story as he goes. I’m sorry, Kathryn, I fear I’m not saying this very well, it’s clearer when you go back to near the beginning, to Giotto and Cimabue and the Sienese beginning to grasp at perspective and human
expression, and then see these skills so triumphantly mastered in the High Renaissance, where the artist keeps boasting what he can do, Michelangelo telling you he can do
any
thing, Raphael too, in a softer voice, and then these skills becoming so common that art gets bored with them finally, think of Ingres and Copley, that sickly finish, and then, in the ’twenties and ’thirties, magazine illustration and Soviet social realism, terribly skillful really, with this leering sort of
flair
, you see it in Rockwell, who God forbid is marching through the country’s museums even as we sit here, while the mainstream of course since Impressionism has been running the other way, dissolving the image, letting it feather and jiggle away, until you get to Zack and Onno and Bernie and there’s nowhere left to go but parody. I know you’ve thought a lot about decadence—how can one not these days? a whole millennium just went to seed—but it seems as though art has to fumble not to be decadent, it has to be just on the cusp of the possible, or we can’t respond to it as something … something, do you mind if I say, ’heartfelt’? It has to be about us, just a skin away from being nothing. Not nothing perhaps, I don’t know what your religion is, but tumbling back into the radiance.”

The black windows tell them that behind the veil of steady rain the day has moved beyond twilight. The nearly invisible hands of the mantel clock say twenty to seven. If she started right now the girl would get home to New York by midnight at best, bleary and sandy-eyed from squinting through the swishing windshield, deafened by the thud of the wipers and the onrushing of the wet tires and the tinkle of the radio, something Michelangelo didn’t have to keep him company on that scaffold, voices and songs beamed from a cramped, sealed cave lined with insulation, electromagnetic waves what we have now instead of messenger
angels, disk jockeys lulling Hope’s visitor, senses swaddled, her legs cramped, an ache across her shoulders from holding on to the steering wheel with her long white hands—
Mona Lisa
hands, early studies for which can be seen in the portrait allegedly of Ginevra de’ Benci in the National Gallery and that of Cecilia Gallerani in Kraków, but without Kathryn’s black or, better, eggplant-colored nails. As if feeling the car’s confinement already, Kathryn stiffly shifts in the wide-armed plaid chair and gazes down at the Sony. Digital is the coming technology, Hope has read, with virtually infinite storage, but who will listen? Who will transcribe and read the infinity of digits?

“You must go,” Hope tells her.

“Yes. But we haven’t really talked about the fifteen years since Jerry died, and the remarkable way you’ve resurrected yourself, with your paintings of course. You’ve created a new reputation for yourself.”

“Have I? What does Shakespeare call it—‘the bubble reputation’? It amuses people that the old lady keeps at it. Critics talk about the gentle Quaker spirit of my abstractions, but I feel more what Bernie used to insist on, the passion. Those big monotone canvases of his, with a stripe or two in a different color, sometimes only slightly different, people wondered how there could be passion in them, even I wondered, but there it was, a terrific tautness, like the surface created when a big stone basin is filled to the brim, or that neo-Minimalist—on the West Coast, I think—who filled a black cube with black ink so that it looked like the top side, perfectly rigid, and you’re dying to touch it but of course don’t dare. Do you know, my young ophthalmologist—they’re all young now, everybody who used to be old, your doctors, your lawyers—my ophthalmologist explained to me, I found it
fascinating
, that our
eyes achieve the fine resolution they do because on top of the film of water, which smooths out some of the cornea’s microscopic irregularities, little sebaceous glands along the edge of the lids, literally
hundreds
of them, secrete a coating of oil which smooths it out even further. A hawk’s eye is five times finer than ours—five times oilier, it may be. Seeing
is
the predatory sense, isn’t it? We listen and sniff to protect ourselves, but we see to capture and kill.”

She doubts, as soon as she says it, that this is quite true; her interviewer’s forward-leaning, anxious-edged voice cuts across her doubts with another question: “Do you think men and women see the same? Do they paint the same?”

Hope winces, beginning to feel bruised by the demands of this encounter. The question is feminist but not necessarily stupid; she wants to answer it the best she can, and closes her eyes, as if what the Elizabethans called the beams of her eyes can worm in the reddish darkness toward an honest response. “We look,” she says, “at what interests us, what pertains to us. A woman, for example, entering a room, because she is a housekeeper, sees dirt to which men are blind. She sees how the other women have dressed and painted themselves to set off their best qualities. Women fear danger from a greater variety of directions than men, so I suppose there is less, what can I call it,
frontality
in their work. Women in theory should be interested in phalluses, and there is—correct me if you don’t agree—a physiological moment when we are, but there is much more phallic imagery in men’s painting than in women’s. Since O’Keeffe and her damn flowers, rather the opposite. We paint ourselves. So no, not quite, but much the same, would be my answer. The human species is less differentiated by gender than many—the male and female of certain intestinal parasites, I believe, don’t look at
all
alike. We, men and women, are both made to run, and to hang on to branches, and to eat nuts and berries.”

“How interesting.”

“Well, is it? I’ve been thinking about my painting ever since you hit me over the head with that statement I gave five years ago. I was in a rather distinctly religious frame of mind, it seems. Color equals the Devil—what a wild thing to say! I mix
lots
of colors into grays, to produce just hints of lilac, of beige, of pink even, to set up the vibration between the stripes, the
activity
, the atomic activity that is in everything, apparently even the flattest-seeming surface, if you can believe the microscope, this
seethe
, like Zack’s spatters and swirls, in a way, or Guy’s dribbles in that era when I was drawn to him, before he became a factory, declaring we can’t take the imperfection out of art, that’s part of the perfection.”

“Are they your concluding statement? Your recent paintings. They seem darker, richer.”

“They have, I supppose, the terror and sadness of last things, of death—why not say it? Even though it’s impossible to grasp, to picture.” Involuntarily she pictures her bedroom, for which she longs. On the bedside table, spare reading glasses in a paisley cloth case, a copy of the latest little Muriel Spark novel, a square black Braun clock with its face averted so she won’t see its glowing hands if she awakes in the night and have them frighten her into insomnia, an eye mask to keep her asleep as the spring light slants in around the shades earlier and earlier, wax earplugs in a plastic case—four blobs squeezed in a row as in a painting by Roger Merebien—to shut out the Vermont owls and invading coyotes and the murmur of traffic, oddly audible at night, somehow come closer, from Route 89. On her bureau sit silver-backed brushes that had belonged to her
mother and small color photographs of her grandchildren, including the three born since Jerry died. And then in the ’nineties Dot and her giant Dutch housemate adopted a Vietnamese girl; Hope learned of this from Paul, who gave her a color copy of a photograph Dot had sent him, since she had not sent her mother one. The girl, about four in the photograph, looks bony and apprehensive in the glare of the flash but gamely smiling, game to become one more American. “On the other hand,” Hope continues, “when I’m actually at the easel I don’t think of the one I’m working at as at all my last painting, nowhere near it, there is in my mind’s eye a whole string of them, an infinite domino-row, ahead of me.”

“How lovely,” Kathryn says, having waited for the image to continue.
How interesting, how lovely
—the girl has run dry, the way men do. Men do what they came for and then leave, and for the longest time this seemed heartless to Hope.