Seek My Face (21 page)

“You married him that same year,” Kathryn further accuses.

“Dear Kathryn, yes. One didn’t live in sin those days, and we were crazy about each other. He was everything Zack wasn’t, and yet a genius of sorts too, and I—well, who knows what he saw in me? A mother he could fuck, I suppose, classically enough. His actual mother was from Rhode Island, descended from one of the refugees who thought the Massachusetts Puritans were tyrants. They weren’t Quaker but something else—Antinomian, I think they were called, meaning they believed anything goes, or
should go. Pearson had been her maiden name. His father, Mr. Holloway, had been English, that was how Guy got his accent, which he could turn on and off, and his feeling for America: he saw us as savages, really, full of vitality and appetite and an outrageous wonderful vulgarity, where my feeling about Americans is that what they are basically is conscientious, conscientious and usually exhausted, with the muggy climate and the work ethic and the expectations those heroic founding fathers saddled us with, though in fact they had rather low opinions of the common man, the founding fathers did. The average American is far less vulgar and bumptious than, say, the English themselves—we have nothing like soccer hooligans, for example. His father, Guy’s, had faded away early. His mother still lived in Rhode Island, in Jamestown, a rickety shingled house on the Bay with a view of a bridge, and one of the things Guy liked about me, maybe one of the main things, was that I could stand up to her. Like me, she was short and feisty—she twittered away with this seductive malice you acquire living in out-of-the-way pretty places, and we got along ‘rippingly,’ Guy would say, his mother and I, when we met, which we tried not to make too often. She saw me as taking him in hand, and assumed he needed it, staying unmarried into his thirties; she imagined his life in New York as nothing but folly and Sodom and Gomorrah, and was such a materialist and snob she was oblivious to the really quite remarkable success he was having. I supplied
that
omission, too; I told her how I had never seen an artist produce work and make money like her son did. Especially in the ’sixties: it seemed every city in the country over two hundred thousand in population had these new high-rises with blank apartment walls, and they all had to have a Holloway filling the space. The things he painted to make his frightfully
clever point about representation and reality—‘This is not a pipe, or is it?’—they just took at face value; the flags and giant Coke bottles and blown-up comic-strip panels were things they knew and loved, American things. I must say—I can tell you this even though he’s still alive, he’s too Alzheimerish to be hurt—that I had my reservations about much of it. Those stencilled alphabet paintings, for example, with B-L-U-E spelled out in the color orange, and S-T-O-P signs painted green, struck me as Dada all over again; Zack and his generation had rejected the supercilious playfulness of the Surrealists who were here during the war, they were trying instead to extend, after Cubism, the legacy of Cézanne and Velázquez—the
majesty
of paint, of color and form. Guy had a good, professional eye—his compositions, even the combines with stuffed animals and so on, always balanced, and he knew when to stop, when enough was enough—but he was basically an idea man. After him, American art became one idea after another.”

“Dripping paint was not an idea?”

“Kathryn, the tuna salad has made you so oppositional. Dripping, not touching the canvas, having it flat on the floor were all ideas, but the ideas were nothing without the execution. Nobody has ever imitated Zack without looking second-rate. Not even that—third-rate. Whereas Guy, once he got his full assembly-line down at the Hospice going, could give an idea to his assistant and have them turn out Holloways while he was sitting in the uptown apartment with me or going to a movie in Times Square. He reinvented the medieval workshop, he took art back from being a confession, something all yours, to being an artifact, something that belonged to everybody and anybody. In a way, he went beyond the concept of good or bad: if an assistant would use the wrong color or make a smear doing
a silk screen, Guy would look at it and decide it might do fine, an artist wasn’t a judge, he wasn’t sitting there in robes and a wig ordering executions.”

“I think it’s marvellous,” Kathryn says, leaning forward into the statement, her left hand with its black nails giving a twitch in her lap, “that you can be so enthusiastic about Guy after the miserable way he treated you, eventually.”

“Was it miserable? There was nothing malicious about it. We had been useful to each other for seventeen years, and his use for me wore out before mine for him. He was a man who had to keep moving. The last time we met, before the Alzheimer’s had quite taken hold, his restlessness had ceased to be debonair, he could no longer hold it in, his eyes kept darting around the room, he kept baring his long teeth. He looked terrified, he knew things weren’t right. Poor Guy. I had never felt sorry for him before.”

Her remembered insight into Guy’s dismay spreads to her own situation; it attaches to the increasingly obdurate and surreal fact of Kathryn’s presence—a presence becoming as monstrous, here in Hope’s chaste and little-used front parlor, with its brown chintz curtains and lavender-haunted panes of glass, as a stuffed eagle spattered with thinned, dribbling paint. Guy once remarked to her, as they walked together one summer day down West Broadway, how everything, until you focus, looks like chewing gum. This seemed at the time a casual bit of nihilism, a tossoff from his depths of cultivated shallowness, meant to amuse, but the phrase stayed with her, as a clue to the intrinsic monstrousness of everything, its colorless, shapeless
thereness
. This girl has that quality, insisting on sitting there, on digging at Hope but with no clear concept of what she wants, or when she will have enough.

“What did he look like? In general.”

Hope hesitates—the question seems so simple it must be a trap.

“I mean”—Kathryn blushes, winningly—“what did he look like to
you
. Accounts vary, and even no two photographs of Guy Holloway look exactly alike.”

“Smooth,” Hope brings out at last. “He had a smooth face that often appeared tipped back to me, maybe because I was so much shorter. His features were not very striking—a small straight nose, a long upper lip, lips that looked buttoned-down, somehow, and slightly pained, perhaps because he so seldom smiled—his keeping deadpan was a lot of his strength—and slightly bulging eyes this washed-out blue, like delftware. It was a face that presented little friction to the world.”

“Unlike Zack.”

“Oh, Zack. He was
all
friction—that’s why he was stuck so much of the time. With Guy I had this wonderful feeling that I didn’t have to push the cart, or keep pulling it up out of ditches—I just had to ride along.”

“And then, very quickly, you bore him three children. That, to me, is the single most surprising fact about your life.”

“But why? Nothing is more natural, it’s Nature’s business to make it happen. I would have loved to have begun earlier—it turned out to be something I was good at, childbirth. I had the pelvis for it, small as I was. And they didn’t come so quickly, each took nine months—Paul in June of ’59, Piet in November of 1960, and Dot in ’62. We were thrilled to have a girl, we had agreed after Piet to try once more in the hopes we would, she came just a month before I turned forty. You used the word ‘surprising’;
I
was surprised that Guy asked to name her after his mother, I hadn’t thought they were that close, but maybe in his mind they
were, we had named the boys after favorite painters, Guy’s favorites more than mine, dry, cerebral painters—my father had been a prick about my marrying Zack and his had abandoned his family, why reward
them
?—so it was disconcerting to have to speak to the little innocent bundle, my own daughter, with a name belonging to my rather intimidating mother-in-law. But ‘Dot’ solved it, calling her Dot. And Guy began his Benday series, comic-strip panels with big mechanical dots, soon after, as homage of a sort. He was a good, fun father to the boys, though noticeably competitive, even when they were two and three, but having a daughter absolutely melted him. He would even change her diapers, something he was rather stuffy about doing for the boys. He talked of beginning a series of canvases in baby shit, and I believe looked into the technicalities, but never did—I mentioned this morning the parodies of Zack that involved urinating on copper plates, but it wasn’t Guy, at least my memory is that it wasn’t.”

Of course it wasn’t. It was somebody secondary, looking for a cheap shot of fame. Urine, feces, the first media. Hope sneaks a look out the windows at the darkening April day. A sickly wash of white light lies low over the horizon of the mountains but no direct sunlight penetrates the clouds. The darkness to the west has expanded and moved around to the south as well, and against its blue-black a few dry flakes of snow flutter back and forth, up and down, as if never to touch the ground. But she knows in her sensitive bones that the day is not cold enough to snow, at least at this middling elevation. Up near the crests, where the youthful skiers slide over the frozen granular toward the end of the season, snow may accumulate, but down here it will turn to rain. The tingle of suspense makes her rub her arms through the woolen shirtsleeves. She wonders if it is
three o’clock by now. She never got the habit of wearing a watch, even when living in a world of city appointments. She knows time is more elastic than a watch says. Some activities—painting, playing tennis when she and Jerry were still young enough for sports—speed it, so an hour goes by as if your life has slipped a cog, and others—gardening, housework, making conversation with awkward company—stretch it as if life will last forever, like those snowflakes unable to touch the ground.

“Do you think,” Kathryn asks in the accusatory tone her voice has taken on since Guy became the subject, a tone that reminds Hope of a daughter full of psychotherapeutically induced indignation, “that you and Guy were trying to prove something?”

“What would that have been?”

“In Guy’s case that he wasn’t gay, and in yours that you were still a young woman.”

“I was, wasn’t I?”

“Not for becoming a mother.” The girl’s voice has defensively retracted, she having never been a mother.

“Oh dear.” Hope sighs mercifully. “I was half my age now. I must have been very young.”

The children. Who would have thought that they would ever fall into place as part of the past, a chapter closed? For twenty years they had been present at every turn, not merely companions and dependents in her life but that life’s justification, its near-total environment, their innocent ravenous egos filling every room where their cries could reach and their commotion speeding every day so that time flew by, at least so it seems in the backward glance through all those veils of change and outgrowing, growth with its fatal undercurrent of leaving behind, of leaving one set of toys behind and hungering for another, of shedding speech impediments
and mistaken grammar, of learning away their enchanting misspeakings, their gains her losses, their breath her breath as she leaned over the beds where each small head slept, warm and damp to her touch in the fever of fragile new life, in the unearthly beauty of children asleep, their abandoned limbs palely flowing among the tossed covers, their dreams sometimes waking them to terror, their fears her own, their rages stains on her heart, their losses and gains hers as they grew day by day, inch by inch, into language, into social custom, into schooling, into ever more defined and limited personalities—Paul diffident and fair and cunning like his father, Piet excitable and malleable like her, and little Dot, who inherited the name Dorothy at thirteen when her grandmother died, a puzzling unstable mixture of genes latent for generations, full lips and dusky sun-loving skin and coarse black hair they could only trace to Hope’s maternal grandmother, Virginia Lafitte, who came from New Orleans and had died the year Hope had been born, and to Guy’s absconded father, whom photographs showed with a crown of upright dark hair and pronounced black brows above the milky-pale, slightly protuberant eyes. Dot tomboyishly insisted on wearing boy’s clothes, to be like Daddy. Until she was six or seven, her nervous system woke her in the middle of the night and drove her into her parents’ room for comfort. So often scolded for disturbing their sleep, she resigned herself to waiting out the wakeful spells herself; it would sadden Hope, with a sorrow that seemed close to the root of human existence, to find in the child’s room evidence, in some scattered dolls, a disarranged dollhouse, or an opened picture book, that she had entertained herself in the pit of the night while her brothers and parents slept, safely tucked into their dreams. At some point in Dot’s childhood, in the East Seventy-ninth Street apartment, they
had acquired a cat, Pierre, a declawed Siamese with a silky small head that he thrust into a stroking with the force of a fist and a purr that could be heard in the next room: Pierre’s purpose, neither Hope nor Guy admitted in so many words, was to provide Dot with another nocturnal creature while her parents self-absorbedly slept. How odd, the little that Hope’s memory had brought out of that long, jostling pilgrimage of parenthood—the push of Pierre’s purring skull; the sugar-sack dead weight of little Piet’s body when she was nursing him in the big leather bean-bag chair (Paul the year before had felt so much lighter, though their birth-weights had differed by only four ounces); the linoleum smell of the clattering stairways of the non-sectarian preschool over on Park on a rainy day; the endless picking up of blocks and Lego and broken plastic cars and undressed Barbie dolls; the kiddie meals of peas and fish sticks and sandwiches cut up in pieces the size of dominoes on plastic plates imprinted with fuzzy ducks and moles and hedgehogs and bunnies, in blue coats with big buttons.

In her mind’s eye Hope sees a brown female hand with its pale thumbnail, Brenda’s or Martine’s or Josie’s, setting such a plate before one of the children at the white kitchen table, and admits to Kathryn, “I had help. You’re right, I was too old to have three children under four. Just the chasing after them made my back ache, and in winter suiting up everybody for the ten minutes at the playground in the Park before they began to whimper that they were cold. Luckily, Guy had plenty of money, ridiculous amounts after about 1962, so we could hire help, nursemaids though we didn’t call them that, there was the day girl who cooked for the children and the girl from five to seven who fed them the dinner the day girl had cooked and gave the boys their baths. I did Dot in another tub, the boys got just too frisky
and bumptious for me and she was terrified of soap in her eyes. I wanted to do it all, because my own mother hadn’t, but I was too old, and spoiled I suppose, and preoccupied by wanting to get back to my own painting.”