Seek My Face (12 page)

Had she got it wrong? There
was
such a moment, but had it been Onno who had presented the bottle? Not Bernie, he was too sensitive. And her account left out the tranquillizers that the doctor in Southampton prescribed, and that made Zack so dopey and amiable he wouldn’t go near the barn, just wander all day with Trixie over the fields and dunes. And the binges now and then that would leave him stumbling home at three in the morning, having passed out in the woods by the side of the road on the way back from the Lemon Drop. After two years of bicycling and begging rides they scraped up money for a car, a Model A Ford that cost ninety dollars, and Hope would lie awake upstairs terrified that he would run the car against a tree; his binges had gained a lethal potential. Still, he had joined her in the struggle against his drinking, they were on the same side of the problem, and if taming it took a little more rear presentation than she would have chosen for herself,
then this was life, of the creature, and worth the potential prize. She would love this man’s greatness up out of him. And, to be fair, Zack was beautiful, the blond furriness of him, curly small hairs pale against his tan, and the muscular push-and-pull of his torso in the summer light, from collarbones and nipples down to his pubic bush, that whole classic terrain of human anatomy symmetrically subdivided like the plaster casts of
kouroi
at the Cooper Union, a youth’s abdomen only slightly pot-bellied in Zack at thirty-five, liquor’s bloat counteracted by home carpentry and his walks and the work of their garden. With the tide of liquor ebbed out of his system, Zack smelled of cigarettes and linseed oil and garden soil and salt air. When Trixie flushed a skunk, the smell of the spray spread from the dog’s hair to his hands and blue jeans and from them to her, and because they were so much alone those first glorious rough seasons on the Island they didn’t care. She can see herself kneeling and washing his back, herself naked, in the claw-footed old cast-iron tub Al Treadwell had salvaged from another job and, saving them money as he kept pointing out, installed in their new little bathroom; she can see herself, her rounded freckled arms, her pointed tan fingers, lathering Zack’s back and shoulders as he smoked a cigarette even in the tub, keeping one hand dry to remove it from his pensive mouth and tip the ash into the cocktail peanuts can that did in this room for an ashtray.

“He began to drip when?” Kathryn asks, then quickly answers herself. “Early in ’47? What do you remember of that moment? Did it seem epochal to you and Zack? Did he talk about it as something revolutionary?”

Abruptly bored, touched as if by a clammy hand by the desolation of these same old questions, Hope looks for
escape toward the window and sees that small puffy clouds, mere shreds, have appeared in the unflecked ozone-rich blue framed an hour ago by the skylight. As the sun warms the mountains, these wisps of vapor are stirred into visibility above the valleys. The front-parlor windows, curtained in a faded chintz of roses more brown than red, have delicately thin muntins, which were one of the house’s charms when she fell in love with it and persuaded Jerry to buy. He couldn’t see it as a big part of his future, but she knew in her bones it would be hers for life. Not just the sashes but the glass itself, the bubbled, faintly wavy, faintly violet-tinged panes, had seemed thinned, like the skin of an old person; at a blast of wind from a certain angle or even a moment of evening cooling, a window vibrates like a harp string stroked. The house talks to her. This girl is not avoiding the obvious, as her polite, factual telephone voice had seemed to promise she would; there had been something scattered and off-center about her proposal that led Hope to say yes and set a day well into the future, which has become today. If she were only outdoors, Hope could be silent, and the past would be left untouched, like mulch in the woods: scuff a few leaves, and the wood lice scurry, miserably exposed, panicked beneath the glare. There was in her years with Zack a considerable soreness that has not gone away; the unhealable soreness in him had rubbed off on her and become an area of shame, of guilt. She had drawn him out into the greatness he wanted—she had found him the space he needed—but perhaps to serve herself, not him. His nature had been too frail for success.

“The key thing,” she dutifully told her interviewer, “was the barn itself, making it into a studio. He had never before had a floor big enough to work on. Ever since I knew Zack
he would move his painting around on the easel, looking at it sideways or upside down and even painting on it that way—his instinct was to liberate the image from gravity. Even those figurative family scenes from the early ’forties—they’re like a dinner party viewed from above.”

“Or like the Navajo sand-paintings he had seen as a child.”

“Zack,” Hope says, rocking back a little and speaking levelly to conceal the hatred she is beginning to feel for this prying, self-serving intruder, “was never as much of a Westener as he liked to let on. He was an Angelino, if anything: his critical years in high school came in Los Angeles, and the first art teachers who were in any way inspiring. But, yes, once he got the canvas taped to the barn floor he could attack from all sides, and the dripping began to happen. Spattering was a way he could reach the center of the canvas. There are paint dribbles in the early work, of course—he painted with the tube even before the war—and the Surrealists had played with pouring or spilling to give them their automatic effects. You know, Matta, Masson. But Zack always insisted there was nothing accidental about his drips, that he intended everything. It was true, he learned just how to thin the paint and what tools—sticks, dried brushes, glass turkey-basters—could do what. Nobody had ever had to master exactly those skills before; he was wonderful to watch, so graceful and sure of himself in the very way he wasn’t usually. I think it was that, the athleticism, that generated the publicity, the appeal to the masses: it was like what they saw in the movies. This beautiful torso in the black T-shirt, the tight dark jeans, the bald head, the intensity. He was not only uncharacteristically graceful, he was
decisive
. When that horrible German—I keep forgetting his name—”

Kathryn supplies it.

“Yes. When Hans took those movies, he complained that Zack didn’t hesitate enough; he didn’t
ponder
, he just jumped right in, spattering and waving his wet stick in the air. That was part of it, that speed, when he was, as he used to say,
in it
.”

“How wonderful to watch!” Kathryn cries, spontaneously, Hope decides, and not to demonstrate that she loves Zack more purely than Hope ever could, this man dead twenty years before she was born.

“I didn’t watch often. It would have been violating his privacy, disturbing the process.” She pushes on with her complaint: “Hans had a director’s idea of how a painter painted, with a lot of contemplation. Zack would go out into the barn and contemplate in the evening, I’ve known him just to look at the works in process all day and never touch them. But in action he had a tempo to keep up. Jazz of a sort, your feet can’t hit the ground. The German interfered with that. There were retakes, and waits while the cameraman got in a new position, or reloaded film. Zack stood there waiting with his dribble stick while the German talked at him. It was being
directed
, and taking the direction more or less meekly, that drove Zack back to drink, I honestly do believe. An ordinary person would have shrugged the whole business off, as a route to making money—for we still weren’t making money, a few sales for a couple hundred here and there, all through the ’forties, when thanks to
Life
he had become quite famous, ‘notorious’ I suppose is the real word—but Zack wasn’t an ordinary person. He had this old-fashioned macho sense of honor, and putting himself on show like that—though Picasso could do it, in his little swimming shorts even, as an old man—was for Zack the betrayal of the only thing he believed in, painting. The
paintings he did on camera were useless to him, he never looked at them or displayed them, they were failures because he wasn’t
in
them, he was on camera. His way of working did produce failures, of course. Sometimes they got what he called ‘messy’—too many drips, too many spatters, the whole surface covered, so any rhythm was lost. Then, to lighten it, he would cut away pieces, biomorphic Miró shapes, and mount what was left on fiberboard, and dabble on the fiberboard—I never much liked these, but it was his stubbornness again, refusing to give up, thinking he could pull something out of any mess he made. Those winters of ’47 and ’48, we were so hard up for canvas he would paint over some of my old work for Hochmann, pouring on these tangles and letting it dry, and then coming back to it three weeks later, going out to the barn even when it was so cold he could only stay an hour and would come back into the house scared his fingers had gotten frostbite, holding them close to the stove.”

“Wonderful,” Kathryn repeats, more weakly, watching Hope’s face to see that she doesn’t offend, doesn’t trespass.

“Maybe because,” Hope volunteers, “I saw how he suffered making them, those early ones, when they still had names and were more vertical than horizontal in shape, are among my favorites.
Galaxy
—they were all galaxies in a way. We could see the stars out on the Island in a way we could never in the city.
Full Fathom Five, Sea-Change
, when there was still some brushwork mixed in with the drips.
Cathedral, Phosphorescence
. He had discovered aluminum paint, gallons of it sold right off Henry Drayton’s shelves. There had never been anything like those paintings he did in the cold those first winters. He said it was cold but the light, with the snow, in the barn was glorious. He was so excited how they were turning out, so proud that, as you
know, one of the first mural-sized ones, he slapped his hand loaded with black paint along the top as if to say, ‘I made this.’ It became a cliché, painting with your body, but Zack was the first. All alone in that barn with his sticks and hardware paints, he was inventing performance art.”

After a reverent pause, seeing that Hope for the moment has no more word pictures for her, Kathryn asks, “And what were you painting at this time?”

“Nothing. Zero, dear. Zilch. My easel was upstairs, in the little room Zack had vacated, but it basically gathered dust. I was busy with the sort of woman’s work that leaves no trace. Cooking, as I said. Zack expected square meals like his mother made, and I had to learn almost from scratch, my own mother had always had cooks, and the cooks would chase me out of the kitchen once I had passed the age where my being there was cute. To be fair, other girls might have insisted on learning more but I liked being
out
, playing with boys. And then I married an artist and became a house slave for his sake. We would give little dinner parties, mostly in the summer, when we could have drinks outdoors, sitting on the boulders in the shade. Eight, ten people at most, counting us—maybe one other painter and his wife and a critic and his and somebody from the gallery world—all designed, you see, to advance Zack’s career. I was on the phone a lot, trying to generate more sales; the smaller works on paper were the best bet, being cheaper, and you could hang them on a small wall, an entrance hall or a bedroom. They didn’t demand all the oxygen in the room the way the big poured works did.”

“Some of them are lovely, the smaller works on paper. Like Chinese ideograms. The ones where the black enamel dried with a silvery edge, the ones with an unexpected color like orange or teal. Quite Zen in feeling.”

Hope agrees but resists admitting it. What isn’t Zen in feeling, looked at blankly? “He didn’t much like doing them, he thought they were gimcrack. I think that was his word. They weren’t big enough for him to muscle himself
into
.”

His airs, his vanity got worse after the
Life
article, and the world showed signs of coming around to his naïve over-estimation of himself. Collapses would occur, sometimes at one of the dinner parties she so carefully constructed, sometimes in a trip to New York, where the sense of a spotlight on him, of bright lights and fortunes to be made as post-war prosperity seeped into the art market, panicked Zack and he fled to the dark depths of a bar and allowed himself to be found only when sodden and abusive. Bed-wetting: Hope has tried to forget this aspect of his drunkenness, but it was for her the most humiliating. Her skin in her clothes shrinks from the remembered touch of clammy wetness, warm when issued out of his unconsciousness but cold when it reached and woke her, the liquefied mattress and sheets rendered impossible for sleep, and Zack impossible to wake in order to change the bed. She would desert him for the sofa downstairs or the guest room, her wool nightie half soaked and entirely unwearable, the blankets she could find not warm enough in the cooling house, the pre-dawn saturated with her humiliation and infantile discomfort. Her angry, churning mind would finally impale itself on her shame and defeat and wifely captivity, and in the morning she might rouse to the sound of Zack rustling and humming as he draped the polluted bedclothes on chairbacks for the revived furnace to dry. He took pride in awaking from however degrading a binge with his manly energy intact, hungry for breakfast, a fresh slate before him, his bedwetting for him a discharge, a release, a restatement
of his contract with the earth. There is nothing more wonderful about alcoholics than the way they get the world to assume the burden of their misbehavior.

Hope decides to tell Kathryn, “When I did try to take up painting again, he accused me of imitating him. And he said I was lousy at it, any woman would be.”

“When was this?” Kathryn asks sharply, her eyes darting down to make sure the tape in her Sony is still running.

“ ‘Forty-eight.’ Forty-nine. It kept happening. Everything kept happening. He would drink, he would paint, we would go to parties, we would give parties, we would both go to psychiatrists. His brothers and their wives and children would show up at Thanksgiving and Christmas, bringing their mother in tow. She was like a float in a parade, impressive and disconnected—you know, the crowd lining the curbs cheers, the people on the float smile and wave, the parade moves on, the same thing happens farther up the street. His mother had all these domestic skills—cooking, laundry, crocheting, découpage, doing all these dear little artistic things, setting up house in one rough Western town after another, trying to be above it all, creating this island, you see, ignoring the neighbors, drawing the curtains, ignoring the sand and dirt and desolation outside the door, ignoring the way her boys were running wild and her husband hadn’t been on the premises for years. She was—what’s the word?—‘impervious,’ she had this lovely shabby-genteel gift for denial, and I think Zack got his power of concentration, of shutting things out, from her. He got his artistic gift from her, if you think of his drip paintings as a huge kind of crocheting. I liked her, though she wasn’t much of a conversationalist and had no way of pegging me. To her I was a silly rich girl from Philadelphia. The only reason she had for liking me was that I had taken Zack and
his drinking off the family’s hands. He was her baby, and big babies get to be a chore. She had this absolutely eerie way of calming Zack when she was around. I think as the youngest he had never got enough of her attention and was still hoping for it. She was like—oh, these words! never get old, Kathryn, everything flies out of your head—a ‘basilisk,’ isn’t that what I mean? She had a
stare
. Anyway, you didn’t ask me about that. You keep trying to ask me about me and my work, and I keep hiding behind Zack—the fact is, my work wasn’t very interesting at the time, Zack had made this stunning breakthrough and there wasn’t room for two interesting artists in one little farmhouse, I took up painting again mainly to give myself a little self-respect, a tiny space where I wouldn’t be absolutely crushed by the tremendous thing Zack was doing, and the hangers-on who were beginning to crowd around, and the interviews he was supposed to give, and he was right, my attempts to do the big gestures weren’t very convincing. I would get fussy, and try to retouch, to smooth out the holes as Hochmann used to call them, and it pained me to have splotches, it just didn’t fit my philosophy to be that much out of control, some on Zack’s canvases were so big and thick that the paint would curdle and corrugate in drying, these Duco enamels he brought home were never meant to be poured together like that, with sand mixed in, and cigarette ash, and bugs that made the mistake of wandering into the barn. Also, I didn’t have a barn, I had a tiny upstairs room with one window the silver maple shaded so it was always dim, it would have made a great room for developing photographs on cloudy days, or a sewing room with a bridge lamp, so I was stuck with brushes, and collage, which is daintier still—I
couldn’t
imitate him, I didn’t have the equipment, which I suppose is what he was saying. I didn’t have a prick.”