Seek My Face (33 page)

You should have a pet
. A cat would kill the birds that come to the feeder. A dog would inflict upon her the oppression of love and a need to be walked, to be fed, to be humored, to be accepted as a fully qualified though frequently puzzled person. After talking so much, Hope feels disgusted with
as if after eating too much. Nothing to do but let it work out of her system; it takes days. The thread-thin hands of the mantel clock say seven-forty-seven, a little early for bed, even for her, but her moss-green shirt is wet, along with her hair and Birkenstocks and lint-colored socks, and she doesn’t want to catch her death. Pneumonia is how it happens if cancer or arterial stenosis doesn’t close the deal. When she tries to personify death, she pictures a gallery owner, who always has the advantage, small and humpbacked and deferential as he is. She reaches behind her head and pulls off the candy-colored elastic from the Montpelier five-and-ten that has been holding her gray ghost of a ponytail in place, and absent-mindedly slips it onto her left wrist as she walks into the kitchen, where she vigorously rubs her wet hair over the sink with a checkered blue dish-towel. She unbuttons the wool shirt, heavy with absorbed rain, and moves about in her wheat-yellow turtle-neck, which is wet only at the neck, and with one hand on the marble counter works off her Birkenstocks and soaked heavy gray socks. She boosts up the kitchen thermostat two degrees. She opens the refrigerator, its obedient little light that automatically comes on reminding her of the light that splashed down on Kathryn’s expensive, uncomfortable boots. After contemplation of the meagre fare on the shelves of parallel rods of chrome, she lifts out the half-sandwich that she had wrapped in aluminum foil for Kathryn to take with her but that the girl had snubbed. As Hope unwraps it, glimmers reflected from the crinkling Reynolds Wrap swim unnoticed across the textured composition panels of the dropped ceiling with its inset, rheostatted lights. Snubbed the sandwich, she thinks, snubbed her instant coffee, implied she loved Zack more than Hope ever did, and after all that, a whole day of
assault, gave her rather perfunctory thanks. Hope bites one corner of rice-pecan bread, tasting first the sugary marmalade, then the oleaginous peanut butter, and walks down the corridor to her studio, eating as she goes, making crumbs. Feeding the mice. A cat would kill the mice, too, another unpleasantness, bringing the little furry, chewed bodies to her for praise, or to teach her how to kill mice also, as if she were a kitten. Her days of kittenhood are by. Surely, having given the girl a whole day of her dwindling time on the planet Earth, she can give the mice a few crumbs. Mildred Warren is coming tomorrow to clean. Tomorrow is an eventful day—the cleaning lady and a dental appointment in Burlington with Dr. Weiss, a cavity where her gumline has receded from a crown on a bicuspid, exposing the root to decay. Perhaps filling it will take away the bad taste in her mouth, which no amount of brushing and rinsing with Listerine seems to alter. Her mouth is such a patchwork of crowns and root canals and implants, in any earlier era she would have been one of those grotesque crones such as Leonardo in his cool and unearthly way would draw, with one or two teeth left and the profile all sunk in. Poor man, the genius of geniuses, the first man since the Greeks and Romans to dare to look at everything, the body and its bones and bowels and the watery corkscrews of the winds and river currents, but he had never seen a vagina, evidently, at least the one in his notebooks is clearly that of a female corpse, insensate and agape.

Hope had forgotten to turn off the fluorescent studio lights since briefly entertaining her interviewer here. Their overhead tubes pour sharp blue light into every corner of the great space, a cold unnatural light she prefers not to paint by; even on an overcast day the northern light as it falls, with its hidden rainbow, through the two high win-herself,
dows and the domed Plexiglas skylight, is better, truer. The skylight drums with the sound of rain like a demented man alone in a room talking to himself. She has always been afraid of its leaking but it hasn’t yet, Jerry assured her it wouldn’t when he had this studio built for her. He left her snug. He knew she would be alone again. The space is too big, he didn’t understand that her kind of painting happened in the inches between the hand and the eye, she would have been content to work in the spare upstairs room just as she did in the Flats house until the barn had become hers. Along the walls, behind her, several easels—for she likes to work on two or three paintings at a time, each with its own gray music like harps being strummed in the fog, the gray of graphite and that of pigeon feathers and of silver and stone and dirty soapsuds—canvases lean stacked with their stretcher sides outward, her own, dried and hardened and waiting for their ride to New York and her next show, a retrospective in honor of her eightieth birthday in the year 2002, and a few by her first two husbands, by Zack several scraps of sized cardboard so casually dripped on that she never offered them for sale, in his chaotic way he was a perfectionist and destroyed what he considered failed work, work that lacked the impetus from the Jungian depths, and by Guy a few playful small works, in paper and pastel, one of acrylic and wood and wire and colored paper forming a Pop bouquet interwoven with the words on a ribbon
SPRINGS ETERNAL
, works given to her at family occasions, anniversaries and birthdays in their seventeen married years. Both men, it occurs to her now, believed that order and beauty must be man-made, achieved by a titanic conscious effort like that shown in the musclebound ’thirties murals propagandizing the tragic vision of humanistic Socialism, whereas she sat at her easels hoping that by modestly
holding still she would overhear a music from beyond manly noise. How silly, perhaps. But all the excuses for art are flimsy and fade; what endures is the art itself, the paint keeping intact whatever hope or intention worked for that perilous moment.

She forgot to turn off the lavish lighting Jerry provided and now forgets why she came in here, wet and weary and slightly missing her visitor, that brave, tenacious, aggravating girl, and then remembers: to replace the wall phone on its cradle. She has a machine to pick up messages in the kitchen, but Hope knew she would strain from the living room to hear what they were saying into the device; and it would have been further impolite to make the disconnection there or in the living room and inflict upon her visitor that periodic squawking with which the phone company tries to tell you that your phone is off the hook. Better it squawked unheard in the studio, amid the unseen paintings. The receiver—so much smaller than the old-fashioned ones, which reached from your ear to your mouth as in those old Petty-girl pinups, whereas these new receivers and the flip-open cell phones suggest it is just enough to be in the vague vicinity of the speaking lips, inches to the side, part of the general blurring of attention perhaps, the movies and TV shows where the crucial lines are thrown away with Method acting and the CNN screen tries to give you three news stories at once, talking head and headline crawl and sports score—reminds her, as she settles it back on the upright cradle, of Guy’s old-fashioned pay phones in limp vinyl, limp as Chardin’s dead rabbits, though at the time he was making them she was too thoughtlessly alive to wonder if death was Guy’s intended metaphor, and now he is too gaga, his brain hardening into useless gristle as the medical journals describe, to answer if she asked. Watching
herself daily for signs of the same fate, she often wonders how it feels to know less and less and always arrives at the riddle that one does not know what one does not know, any more than a dog understands the superstructure of language and political and economic arrangement behind the human presences to which the animal is so alert, his nostrils packed with layers and tints of human odor. The obvious analogy is with us and the mind of God, we don’t have a clue, or, rather, clues are all we have.

So. The phone reconnects her with the world, with Mildred, who might have been calling to cancel—she is all friendliness, with her valley gossip and gifts of pies and apple butter in apple season and repeated offers of a Labrador puppy almost for free, but she keeps her own schedule, and has a proud streak, treating Hope as an equal she is doing a favor for—and with her own sons if Paul or Piet had wanted to share news or assuage their filial consciences, though they usually called on weekends; Hope is potentially reconnected with telemarketers and fundraisers and alarmists and gossips, with the several other elderly women of the region with not dissimilar metropolitan pasts and predilections who check in on each other, and with those occasional younger voices, eager opportunists or the children or grandchildren of old friends—Jarl Anders’ granddaughter showed up last summer, with his high Scandinavian coloring but Frieda’s thin sharp features and a wispy do-gooding air that was what remained of Jarl’s terrible prophetic transports—or young art-grant hustlers hoping to cash in on even a little attention or blessing from anyone with a slightly famous name from the past. She is plugged in again to all this, though she doubts that the phone will ring now that it is after eight. Turning off Jerry’s excessively bright fluorescent lights, leaving her canvases to
darkness and the muttering monologue of the rain on the skylight, Hope feels a weight rolled away, the tall dark girl gone, swallowed by the storm, lost in the vortex now that the damp moment is past when she felt her solid in her arms, like Dot in those faraway days when the infant lay wriggling in her lonely cot on the floor dying to be plucked up and held, and delivered that cold wet kiss that made her stiffen there by the pale car fender; Hope is relieved to be alone but the long interview has left her with the disquieting sensation that the events of her life have been too close together, compressed into a single colorful slice of time rather than unfolding in an organic sacred slow procession of nights alternating with days, phases of solitude and uncertainty and desolation but also of fruitful dreaming, daydreams alternating with stripes of activity, of sociability, dancing invitingly around a beautiful man and spending the energy built up in stymied idleness.

A little laundry room was added when Jerry built the studio wing for her, and in its small space, snug as an ice-cube tray holding two huge cubes, the twin white appliances and shelves of detergent and spare light bulbs and spray cans of sizing and Bounce sheets/feuilles/hojas of fabric softener, Hope drops the wet lumberjack shirt and removes the yellow cotton turtleneck, its soaked neck like a slimy garrote, and her brown corduroys made baggier by being out in the rain, and puts them all in the washer without getting down the orange jug of Tide or touching the controls—the wash cycle would be twenty-five minutes and the drying could take forty or fifty, but if left in the dryer overnight everything gets wrinkled, and she doesn’t want to come down again or be barred from falling soon asleep if the little Spark novel lulls her. Mildred can run a load tomorrow,
while she pushes the vacuum around where she pleases and dusts the surfaces that are easiest to reach, never getting the cobwebs around the chair rungs or in the high corners. The woman still smokes, as so many of these “real” Vermonters do, and the rasping don’t-give-a-damn smell in the house reminds Hope fondly of the days when everybody smoked, at the Cedar on University Place or the Waldorf Cafeteria on Sixth Avenue, at the Artists Union loft parties at Sixteenth and Sixth, thick drifts of it, atmospheric effects out of Whistler, fumes of depression and war and reckless artistic aspiration. Hope feels the air on her bare skin, bringing up goosebumps. If any prowler or long-clawed bear looks in the side windows he will get what he deserves, the sight of a barefoot old lady in her underwear—white underpants, the broad un-bikini, un-thong style, and so-called flesh-colored bra, though not the flesh color of Titian or Fragonard or Bonnard or Modigliani.

Her mouth feels dry and loose from all that talking. She sucks at her teeth to see how bad her breath is; she can never quite tell. She licks her fingers, still sticky from the marmalade sandwich, and from the breadbox takes out two brittle Carr’s Hob Nobs and pours herself a small tumbler of fat-free milk, first checking that there is enough for tomorrow’s breakfast cereal plus a splash into the mug of tea she carries with her in the mornings into the studio. She sees herself doing this so vividly it is as if the night has already passed. The sense of compressed simultaneity hangs in her head like the cerebral displacement the morning after a night of drinking wine and smoking pot, a kind of sideslipped hangover. For fear of addling their heads, she and Guy quit dope, at least inside the Seventy-ninth Street apartment he did—undoubtedly, as Jeanette Nova maliciously
hinted, more may have gone on down at the Hospice than she ever realized, events out of sight like water seepage that finally undermines the foundations of a house—but she and Guy, descendants of radical Protestantism, were alike in distrust of gilding the lily of earthly existence, being alive was itself the trip. In her mind’s eye Zack feels more distant than Guy, a woeful ogre who upset tables and crashed cars, tucked into that far corner of the Island where she had taken him; she should feel close to him since he left clear and dynamic traces of his hand in his drip paintings, but those canvases poured and spattered in a shaman’s dance have become monuments as rigid as those of Egypt, built of blocks of hand-smoothed stone.

In the living room, where Hope wanders with the day’s last handful of unsalted almonds, her attention gravitates to objects salvaged from the Germantown and Ardmore houses, ones her surviving brother did not claim. On the top of a simple square curly-maple sewing table she sees a worn blue-and-red cotton runner whose faded threads still describe two stylized Arabian birds whose exact anatomy her childish eyes had puzzled over, and a peened copper ashtray still holding the smudge of her father’s stubbed-out Chesterfields, and a crude ceramic candlestick with a celadon glaze and jaunty handles like the arms of a man with his hands on his hips: meaning had inhered in these objects before she had words to weaken meaning, her hands and eyes had explored them in the silent anteroom just this side of her entry into the world. At the back of the next-to-top shelf of a glass-fronted breakfront there are two curious vases that she tried to paint in watercolor when she was taking lessons from Rudolph Hartz. One was heavy and brown, so heavy it felt full though it was always empty, with
a dumpy waist and purple streaks in its glaze, and the other vase cylindrical and diagonally streaked somewhat like a barber pole in strands of muddy color, reminding her of marbled endpapers in a fancy book or, now, of the colors in the wings of the angel kneeling in the Annunciation Fra Angelico had painted on the gallery wall at the head of the stairs in the Convent of San Marco. It was a deathless work but showy, in its feathers and pillars and flowers, the cloistered painter guilty of virtuosity; Hope preferred, when she toured the convent with Jerry two decades ago, the severer Annunciation in a monk’s cell, two feminine creatures transfixed in a bare room.