Seek My Face (18 page)

“I don’t give a rat’s fuck if I ever show in New York again,” he told her. “Why bother, it’s all politics, all you get
is abuse. They’re scared of me, I’m too serious for those gossipy queer bastards. I frighten them by thinking seriously, by thinking religiously. They aren’t ready to have their cozy little chattery world rattled by a revolution—a revolution arriving from within, out of an artist’s passion. I’ve got my painting now so it’s pure passion, high passion pure and simple, and it scares the stoops shitless. I scare them because, where they just talk, I
do
. Where they chew the old cud, the old pieties, I believe. I believe my art, if its principles were grasped in full seriousness, would mean the end of state capitalism.”

“Oh, Bernie, how?” Hope drowsily asked. A breeze from the outdoors stroked her skin, dried the sweat on the side not pressed against the wrinkled sheet. Bernie when making love sweated like a man in a steam bath, and a partner took the bath with him.

“Geometry,” he answered, emphatically. “Geometry is what imprisons us, and it has to be overthrown from within. It all goes back to Cubism; my geometry refutes Cubism. Where they drew edges, using outlines to set off shapes and spaces, my drawing
declares
the space. Instead of
segments
of space, I work with the
whole
space; I fill it to bursting with color. I’ve killed anecdote and set color free, for the first time in the history of man. No more anecdotes, representational or abstract. The critics don’t get it. They’re the last people equipped to get it. The art world lives under the capitalist table, happy to pick up scraps. The slaves don’t realize that upsetting the table is the way to get fed.”

“You sound so violent, for such a pussycat.”

“The bastards have made me violent. They’ve put my back against the wall. It’s the artist’s lot to set himself against the world. The point is the painting, period. Being unknown and shat upon is the true heroism. Anonymity is
the true and only thing. Look at your hubby. He’s famous now—
Life
, the gossip columns—and it’s driving him nuts, right over the edge. But being nobody is doing the same for me, frankly. It’s a miserable trade, Red—how the fuck did we get into it?”

“Our love of beauty?”

“Beauty—nobody uses the word. That’s not the category, my little Hottentot.” She had told him that story from her flaming youth; he twirls his fingers at one end of his mustache and gives a villain’s laugh. “Your category is doomed, my fair lady. The
sublime
is the category. If it ain’t sublime, haul it to the dump. It’s anecdote. Brushwork is anecdote. It’s taken me twenty years to figure that out, that’s how dumb I am.”

Hope wondered how much of what he said was parody, employing a vocabulary he detested. Yet his canvases bore trumpeting titles like
Vir Heroicus, Crux, Spatialis, Ultimo Ratio, Animus Sine Termine
, grand names like
Solomon, Moloch, Guinevere, Azrael
. “The stoops say my canvases are empty but in fact they’re full, full to bursting. Anybody who stands in front of them with eyes and a heart can feel the dome of sky over his head, the horizon at his back. They’re full of
color
, not colors. You know as well as I do there’s such a thing as false excitement. Spatters and swirls and dabbles that don’t fill the void at all.” This was a dig at Zack, but she, having betrayed Zack with her body, was in no position to defend him. “Empty activity,” Bernie pronounced, rolling toward her so that an amber whiff of his aftershave washed across her nostrils, followed by a sadness of elderly sweat, the sourness men come to carry in the wrinkles of their neck. “You look, and there’s a lot there, a lot of colors swooping this way and that, but there’s no sense of fulfillment, it’s anecdotes, it’s like drinks, one demands another, they don’t
lead anywhere, it’s
The Perils of Pauline
, each episode leaves us hanging. But the stoops in New York, the stoops in charge of reputations, they don’t want fulfillment, they want excitement. Fuck ’em, I say. What do you say, Red?”

“To be honest, Bernie, I wouldn’t mind some recognition. On my own, away from Zack.”

“I hereby recognize you, Hope McCoy, as the sweetest tootsie to come my way since I hit forty-five. These sessions are saving my life.”

“How you tease.”

“I tease you not. Come live with me and be my love, and we shall something something prove.”

“ ‘All the pleasures.’ That’s cruel teasing, now. Jeanette is a treasure, Zack is so jealous of—” She stops herself from saying,
of painters whose wives have money
.

But he sensed where she was going, and his fine little mouth, its sardonic small muscles, twitched the tips of his mustache. “Jealous of the bucks she brings in. I bet he is. When is the poor shmuck going to ease off the sauce? He’s going to kill himself and take somebody else with him. I don’t want it to be you.”

“Bernie, you care. How dear. He needs the intensity,” she tried to explain. “The way he paints, it’s like playing jazz, he needs to drown out other noise. I don’t think, when he’s quiet, his head is quiet, if you know what I mean.”
Who says I’m crazy? The draft board, for one
.

“Poor shmuck,” Bernie said, and rolled himself heavily out of bed, launching them into the awkwardness of scuttling,
Vir Heroicus
and Hottentot, into their clothes. As she stood naked by the balustrade, spattered with freckles, the smell of paint and its chemical thinners rose to her from the studio a floor below, the vast monochromatic canvases,
and she remembered the name of the once-famous sculptor of the Greek slave: Hiram Powers. Powers and his friend Horatio Greenough, who sculpted George Washington as a bare-chested Zeus. Through Bernie and Jeanette’s huge glass wall she saw the potato fields in their sunstruck, industrious rows; orderly rows of things, from desks in a classroom to stripes in seersucker, always spoke to her in her private language of peace.

“Bernie was nice to me,” she tells Kathryn, “at a time when I felt lost. Lost in regard to my own work, lost in regard to what to do about Zack. He was destroying himself, and for my own sake I had to stop caring so much.”

“Did you and Bernie ever discuss marriage?”

“Never. He and Jeanette had a fine arrangement. He was happy enough with her and, happy or not, he was financially dependent. I wasn’t happy with Zack, but I was bound to him. The worse we fought, the closer we were bound. He had done something great, and to me that made him a hero. Also, let’s face it, where else did I have to go? Back then there wasn’t this absolute freedom that your generation has grown up with, this almost
duty
to do whatever you want. We expected hardship. Depression and war and then the Chinese and the Russians to stave off. We were hardy, pious folk in our way. And yet, you know, I wonder if we didn’t get more
fun
out of being American than you do. The oceans our people had come over were still huge, and things still felt new—banjos and streets on a grid and jazz and all those inventions we took credit for, like the airplane. The songs on the radio, the Sunday-night comedians, the soda fountains and patent medicines—they were
ours
.” She is beginning to sound like a windbag; thinking back to Bernie has made her oratorical. He loosened
her up. With each different person we are slightly different and, yes, she had liked the self he gave her. He kidded her, and she liked being kidded. Her grandfather used to kid her, gently.

“The, the physical part with Bernie—”

Oh my, this girl is determined to get into bed with Hope and her men, even without her tape recorder running. In a fit of impatience that shakes her old body like a creaky cat-boat in a gust of wind, Hope tells Kathryn firmly, “Bernie Nova was a sensitive, healthy man who didn’t drink usually until six in the evening, and for me that was a very welcome change.” At a softer, forgiving pitch, woman to woman: “He was a dandy but not a ladies’ man. I think, as with a lot of men, he found sex philosophically embarrassing. He and Jeanette had grown out of it. Or so he told me. But, then, that’s what married men do say. Now: there’s a little more tuna salad.”

“Oh no, I couldn’t. It was delicious, but more than enough. I often just have a cup of yogurt for lunch.”

“Then let me finish it up for you, right out of the bowl, if you don’t mind. I hate to throw anything away, it’s such a nuisance shopping for it and hauling it home, but then I hate filling the fridge with moldy leftovers.”

Recalling Bernie has stirred her up, given her an appetite. Eastern Long Island had seemed young itself then, thinly populated, sparsely invaded by a few choice souls from the city, the marshes and beaches and rocky bays locked into communion with the days of the glaciers; the sun beat down even into November, unsoftened by the heavy green trees of Ardmore, those black walnuts and horse chestnuts and broad-leaved tulip poplars towering up out of the lawns and estate grounds like thunderheads, their shade making the grass thready and tender, even the tennis players hardly tan
beneath the muggy white sky. Ostensibly off to East Hampton for an hour of errands, she would speed over the flat and sandy terrain in the Olds convertible like some noontide version of Emma Bovary running barefoot through the dawn meadows to her rendezvous; Hope sees herself skimming between the potato fields and farm stands to Bernie’s elegant house—Bernie’s great canvases of passionately blank color, Jeanette’s smart subfusc Madison Avenue taste—while Zack, having bicycled to the Lemon Drop or in his baffled funk gone walking the marsh edges with Trixie, was lifted from her mind, the gloomy burden of him. She, in her flapping headscarf and sunglasses, feeling as weightless as an arrow, did not pollute the landscape but instead took innocence from the fields, the salt-bleached cottages, the shingled windmill at the end of Fireplace Road. Zack rarely stirred from his marital stupor to ask where had she been, why these few vegetables from Drayton’s or a roadside stand, these toiletries and aspirin from Rowe’s Pharmacy, had taken so long to purchase, or how she had spent two hours sizing up sweaters and pleated skirts at the Hamptons Department Store and not buying any. “Also,” she would lie, if he asked, “I checked out the fall line at the Kip Shop. There was nothing for my figure, it’s all for skeleton-types eighteen years old. I thought of looking at the stores in Sag Harbor, but halfway there thought better of it. The car, by the way, sounds funny underneath, when it changes gears. When did they last check the transmission fluid?” Having sex with Bernie, she wants to tell Kathryn, was like a woman serving herself lunch, taking pleasure twice, in giving the food and then in consuming it.

“No, I don’t mind,” the girl stupidly responds, as if Hope had really asked for her approval. Perhaps she was off in her own mental world, looking backward or ahead, beyond this
interview, whose limits she had already gauged, though, strengthened by food, she would not give up on it quite yet.

“Dessert!” Hope proclaims. “I have some raspberry sorbet, absolutely hard as a rock but the microwave can soften it, or English oatmeal cookies. Carr’s Hob Nobs they’re called, from the health-food store, so they must be low on calories and full of whatever it is that’s good for us—bran. Or you could have both.”

“No, neither, honestly. Maybe half a cookie, if you can find a broken one. We should be getting back to the front room so you can get me off your hands.”

“Well, to be honest, Kathryn, I was thinking of walking you around outdoors for a minute or two, for a change of air. It feels so stuffy indoors, a whole winter’s worth of the same air. If we walk up toward the springhouse, there’s a little meadow from which you can see clear to New Hampshire, the White Mountains.”

“No, really, Hope—if I may—I don’t have the right shoes, for one thing.”

“You have sturdy boots.”

“They’re not sturdy. They’re new Via Spigas, and they hurt, rather.”

“Take them off.”

“No, please—”

“Your feet wouldn’t be my size, but I have some very roomy Wellingtons I live in in mud season. They might be a bit skiddy on the pine needles, though, going up the hill.”

“You’re
so
nice—”

“I bet you’d like some coffee now, even if it is ancient instant.”

“No, honestly. I never drink coffee this late in the day. It gets to me. I get the jitters.”

“How late is it?”

“Your microwave clock says not yet two.”

“Two, oh my goodness, it
is
late. I wonder what else there is to say?”

“We’ve only gotten up to 1955,” Kathryn tells her.

“So Zack is dead.”

“But this isn’t only about Zack, it’s about you, you as an artist, and as a, a witness to the whole post-war—”

“ ‘An interested witness,’ is how Clem would have put it. He thought my work was pathetic, and wasn’t too polite to let me know he thought that. When I began at last to get some critical attention, in the late ’seventies, after Guy left me and before I married Jerry, and I had put myself on a schedule of working two solid hours once I had got Dot off to school, he tried to be gallant about it and told me he always knew I had the stuff. ‘Stuff’! That said it all. He had set himself up to be the voice of Abstract Expressionism or whatever it was—the New York School, he liked to call it, as if nobody on the West Coast could do anything—and when it was dead as a doornail he kept huffing and puffing away, still thinking art had to be powered by testosterone. Don’t you love that word? I’m just learning to pronounce it. It, and ‘pheromone.’ It turns out all that romance we all do and die for is pheromones—we’re as brainless as insects. According to a nature show I didn’t shut off soon enough, male lions go into a sort of zombie trance and kill all a lioness’s cubs and then invite her to make love. And she does, poor silly soul.”

And as she lets her tongue tumble on, Hope wonders what pheromones swimming in this young woman’s fresh and oily system are infiltrating her own receptors, leading her to be giddy, flirtatious, girlish, in oblivious despite of her irreversible position on the grave’s edge. But is she any less alive now than when measuring her fat little hand
against the breadth of Grandfather’s chair arm? The chair is still there. She is still here.
Where there’s life
 … How often she has had that quoted to her, as a friendly joke. However Godless her gaudy environment, she always harbored the cool white light, the tremulous shy miracle, of being herself, herself and none other. These people who say there is no self, that it’s all a construct of the views of others—have they never been alive?