Seek My Face (23 page)

“Shut it off,” Hope says, with sudden sharp desperation. “I’ll tell you if you’ll shut off that poisonous little machine.”

Kathryn’s eyes, dark as plums or round wells of rust-tinged black ink, dart from her downcast face a startled, defiant look that shows a crescent of white beneath each iris. Her lips part, beginning to frame an objection.

Hope explains, “I don’t want anything on the record that would ever hurt my daughter.”

The younger woman stifles the daughterly impulse to argue and obediently reaches—a length of bony wrist leaps from her extended sleeve—to snap off the tape recorder.

Hope rocks back and speaks as if to a woman her age. “Guy and I had assumed,” she confides, “that a daughter of ours would be beautiful. Why would we think that? Because we were both artists, I suppose, and deserved it. We thought of ourselves as—what’s that wonderful old word?—comely. I imagined gangly and smooth plus tidy and pert and rounded would naturally produce a tall, elegant, womanly woman.” It uncomfortably passes through her mind that Kathryn might be considered tall and elegant. “Instead,” she goes on, “Dot had these skin problems I mentioned and coarse black hair and eyebrows that nearly met in the middle and a mulish, thick-lipped expression besides. She never got to be more than my height, and Guy’s pale-blue eyes looked as if they had wandered into her face from some other planet.”

“Still, you know,” Kathryn surprisingly volunteers, as if her tongue, too, is freed by the Sony’s being off, “a face isn’t
just an inventory of its features; if a woman has spirit, and a positive attitude, and uses makeup to good advantage—”

“Dot would not use makeup. She saw it as a sort of hypocrisy. Or else thought it was hopeless in her case, after the scarring. The sad irony is that if she had been born ten years later there would have been a cure, Accutane, which did wonders for the grandson of a partner of Jerry’s, a boy who has the skin of an angel now. But for Dot …”

“Still, it’s just a surface blemish.”

“Easy for the unblemished to say. Most of what we see is surface. I agonized all the while she was growing up, after Guy had left, this miserable fatherless girl hating what she saw in the mirror, and she sensed that, my guilt, of course—when somebody is crying out to be blamed we tend to oblige them. My whole past—my friskiness, let’s call it—offended her. She called me a silly, pathetic person who had traded all my life on attracting men, and to spite me, I suppose, she insisted on keeping up a relationship with Guy, right up until these last few years, when he’s become impossible to communicate with, that beautiful cool mind of his …” Hope realizes she is drifting, skirting the reedy edges of that swamp in her mind. “Oh dear,” she says. “Relationships are so sad, aren’t they?”

Kathryn does not trouble to agree; she presses on, myopically. That pendulous, liquid strangeness to her eyes, could it be contact lenses? “When did Dorothy announce her gender orientation to you? When did it become apparent?”

Suddenly Hope is bored, with an icicle boredom that penetrates her soul to its black nerve of death. “She became active—flagrant, with short hair and men’s jackets and so on—at Stanford, I don’t think she began practicing at Brearley, she hated those blonde rich girls so, or said she
did, but the first significant other she brought back from California in fact was a lovely tall blonde, the state is full of them, sun-bleached surfers, from La Jolla I think this girl was, a Park Avenue princess Los Angeles-style, a honey tan, slate-gray eyes, an enchanting total ignorance of anything cultural.… I was rather drawn to her myself, Marcy her name was, this was not too many years after Jerry had saved me from a certain experimental promiscuity of my own, I suppose in anger over Guy, is it still fashionable to think that everything we do is because of anger? A tan was becoming to Dot, too, it settled the issue of her skin, there was scarring but it went with her squat looks, a kind of bushy-haired menace she had developed, a version of ‘black is beautiful,’ I suppose; she looked
Chicana
, except for this rapid, intelligent conversational style she had inherited from Guy, she didn’t have any of my dithering, rambly way of groping toward the end of the tunnel—to tell the truth, Kathryn, I fell in love with her all over again, my little nervous clinging Dot with this formidable new tough persona. She was tough with me, certainly. She accused me of seducing Guy away from his real orientation, which I had a hard time taking seriously, since he had remarried by this time, to Gretchen, this horse-trainer from Connecticut. Dot said Gretchen, who was hard and slim, like a jockey rather, was just a boy who happened to have a cunt, so there was really no winning against her in her new militance. By the time she graduated she decided my being married to Jerry was such a complete sellout to capitalism she didn’t want anything more to do with me, and, to confess something truly horrible, it was a kind of relief, it was like when she would finally go back to bed as a toddler.”

“How did you react to the seduction charge? May I switch the tape recorder back on?”

“Oh, go ahead. I don’t suppose any of this matters; except to our children, we’re all basically dead.”

The click of the little gray Sony, and the murmur that sits like tinnitus in her ear, make an alteration in the room’s atmosphere. The wooden furniture, the ceramic lamps with their wan, pleated shades, the fading chintz curtains patterned in brownish roses, the thin-paned windows all seem a notch more brittle and fragile. She has lived in this house so long she has ceased to see it, and with the help of this young woman’s eyes now sees that it is waiting, rugs and curtains and staring pottery parrots from a trip she and Guy had taken to Mexico toward the end of their marriage, waiting for the purging and renovation that will follow her death. Paul and Piet and Dorothy will come together, formal at first with one another but falling quickly into the patterns of childhood; goods will be scattered and sold, there will be little they will want to keep, her paintings in progress will be trucked to the dealer, the children will be sad to see how sparse, when held up to a cold light, the residue of a life is. She will be beyond blame and love. Quaker quiet will be her haven and reward. Her early religious indoctrination did not include a vivid afterlife—a purity of absence, rather, a freedom from any creaturely distraction. Beyond the frail, warped windows, the snow has stopped spitting against the blue-black glower over Camels Hump. Upon the bare trees and evergreen bushes and brown lawn has come the greasy lustre, that exciting pregnancy of the air, which precedes a rain.

She stirs, trying to shake her premonition of death, her stab of boredom. “Within your own experience, Kathryn, does one person seduce another? Or is it that two people give off signals—surround themselves with atomic auras—which bring them closer? People are drawn together by the
instinct that their lives can benefit, that there will be—how do physicists talk?—a net gain of order. Guy had a neutral sort of soul that was drawn to my positive energy, and of course he was turned on by my connection to Zack, who once he was dead shed all his pathos and obnoxiousness and became the, the—what?—the Holy Ghost of post-war American art. It amused Guy to subvert everything Zack and the others considered sacred and to take his wife besides. He liked—do I dare say this?—the sexual tricks I had developed to rouse Zack; neither man was easy to arouse, they would lie back and watch me do it all, and in the way of our adaptable gender I got to like doing it all, having them watch, having it happen almost despite them. After Zack, I was terribly attracted to Guy’s lack of self-destructiveness. This bright, boyish creativity that no critic—not Clem, not Hughes or Hilton Kramer—could dent: it just flowed, idea after idea, one idea after another that nobody else had ever thought of, for the whole ’sixties, and into the ’seventies, until just a year or two before he left me, when his work got grandiose and lost its Pop modesty. That modesty was what people responded to, it had opened all that hermetic self-regarding ’forties-’fifties heroic art to the actual world around us. Guy’s art cherished trash, it cherished America as it was, dirty and commercial and visually violent: he was foreign enough, alien enough, to love America. Or so it appeared to me. And he never seemed to strain; he made it look easy.”

Kathryn asks, “How much of your own work did you produce in this happy period?”

“Ooh, that hurts: that ‘happy period.’ As you very well know, not much. Right at the start there were these very small children, even with the staff we could afford they took all my energy, and by the time I
did
have some time the art
climate had changed so much that abstraction and everything Hochmann had taught seemed naïve and, to use my new favorite word, grandiose. There was an irony now that undercut everything, with or without Vietnam, just as Duchamp and Ernst and Breton had undercut everything when I first moved to New York, and I wasn’t good at irony. Maybe women as a rule—what do
you
think?—aren’t good at irony, what matters to us matters whole-heartedly, we don’t have the luxury of distancing ourselves. It takes male power to mock and love at the same time. The only female who could do Pop was Marisol, and she had that Latin American folk-carving thing to give her a way in. She was a sculptress. I wanted
paint
, paint that came out gooey and then hardened and couldn’t be pushed around any more. That was my idea of art.”

Kathryn hesitates to ask the next question, so it must be loaded. “Did Guy give a reason for leaving you?”

“Do men need to give a reason? They just move on, like buffalo. At one point, as I remember, he admitted I bored him.”

He had said, “Don’t be boring, Hope. Don’t keep proposing this and that, as cures. There are no cures.”

“Why not, Guy, why not?!” She was fluttering up against him, in a flimsy chiffon nightgown; she could feel her swinging breasts exposed to the air, she had surrendered any thought of dignity or shame.

“Please, darling, don’t give me a headache. I get these headaches lately; they’re frightening. Your life will go on as before. You’ll have the apartment and the children and plenty of money, you just won’t see as much of me. You can start seeing other people.”

“I’m fifty-three, you complacent idiot! That part of my life is over, I don’t want to see anybody but you, you,
you
,
you bastard!” Even at the time she wondered why she burst into tears at the thought of his absence; in truth he had been more and more absent for years.

She tells Kathryn, “He poked fun at me for trying to think of a solution. I had proposed we leave the city—people were, in droves; cities were awful with the drugs back then, and not enough taxes for the schools and services, garbage everywhere—and keep a smaller apartment there, or make an apartment for us and the children when they visited on the top floor of the brownstone in Chelsea that housed the Hospice. Ha! The last thing Guy wanted was me down at the Hospice. I thought we could keep a little apartment and move to the Connecticut farm he had bought as a place to park his money, real estate in those years was a much better bet than the stock market, which people forget didn’t go anywhere for a whole decade, it was like it is now, exhausted. Since we had the acreage, up beyond New Milford, another safe bet, Guy thought, and here maybe his brain was already starting to soften, he was investing in horses, and that was how Gretchen had come into our lives, as a horsewoman. Come to think of it, he did say about her, almost the first time I heard of her, that she was hard-assed as a boy, from all her riding. By the time he left me, it had all come out in the open, he wasn’t bothering to deny it, I was so desperate, Kathryn, I begged him to keep her, to keep sleeping with her, just so he didn’t leave me and the children.”

“How had the sex between the two of you been going?” Sex again, Hope thought. It had been her mistake to touch on it; now the girl would not let up.

“I thought well enough,” she tells her, lifting her chin, “but maybe I hadn’t been paying enough attention. Guy had never made a big production of sex, the way Ruk had,
or Jerry did. Jerry just lived for it; he snorted, he yelled, he wanted to have it every day. Every day, old as we were. Guy and I were down to, I don’t know, less than once a week, maybe twice a month, when we’d come back from an opening a little high on the plastic glasses of champagne they give you and the evening still ahead of us but not enough of it for Guy to do anything at his desk or drawing board; he was very efficient with his time usually. The boys were off at Putney, and Dot stayed in her room listening to her tapes. She showed less emotion than she had five years before, when the Beatles broke up. Guy kept telling me how it wouldn’t make a difference to anybody, except to me for a while, but I’d get over it—I’d find a new phase. He thought in terms of phases. And of course he was right in a sense. He was rarely really wrong, Guy.”

And yet, in her mind’s eye, he had cried with her, when she cried. His cold blue eyes produced tears that ran down his still-smooth face. He hugged her close, both their breaths hot, as he murmured, “I’m so sorry, Mickey. I’m so sorry things end. Life is rotten.”

“Mickey” was a pet name left over from the days of courtship, when she had been the Widow McCoy. He thought it suited her better than “Hope.” He shied from her real name’s bluntness, its too-eager gift of herself. The tears he shed at the end of their segment of the road were genuine yet perfunctory, a tax he paid before moving on. His mind was always active, always ahead of her, ahead of the pack. Remembering how Guy had turned slippery in her grasp and politely slipped away, she wonders if her daughter was not right, she had seduced him, their getting together had been more her idea than his, more her wiles than his desire. In the heat of a new man, female instinct guides us to extremes otherwise out of bounds. She would
blow him while he kneeled straddling her face on the tatty brown sofa in his Pearl Street loft, a sofa that looked like one more piece of street refuse, and then show him his pale semen inside her mouth, displayed on her arched tongue like a little Tachiste masterpiece before she swallowed it or disgorged it back onto his still-firm prick; even his prick was smooth, barely marked by the ridges and homely veins that other men had, like an ivory dildo or the erection in that Marisol masterpiece with the cigarette lighter.