Seek My Face (26 page)

“Kathryn, I was thinking,” Hope says, her voice coming out tight and breathy under the pressure of being outdoors, “looking toward Camels Hump—Jerry and I used to climb it easily, even though we weren’t young even then, with a lunch basket and a bottle of wine—thinking about human animals, how marvellous the biological machinery that gives us consciousness, and how we mostly just throw it away; even if we don’t commit suicide, we presume to find life dull and be bored most of the time, and discontented, and just
waste
it; I bet that’s why
Hamlet
appeals to us so much, out of all Shakespeare’s plays, it’s the one we take personally, it expresses this
disregarded
quality of life, the waste of our minds, our bodies, of everything that should make us joyful and careful. Am I making any sense?” For she can go too far, she knows; since childhood she has felt her overflowing spirit back up, meeting resistance in the faces of others, the blood in her own face damming in a blush.

The tall young woman pulls her borrowed parka, stupidly worn like a cape, tighter around her shoulders, her face looking chalky out here in the open, a pimple visible where her nostril wing meets the cheek, traces of plastery powder on her arched nose. Cautiously she responds, “I don’t think anyone would say you’ve wasted your life. That’s what makes it so interesting to me.”

“Oh? Really? You’re honestly interested? To me it all seems terribly scattered—as my daughter says, a lot of catering to men, and then painting in ways that the men said irritated them, and now that it’s almost too late, painting in a way that seems true to myself but maybe is an es
cape
from myself, from the color of the world, which in that rather pompous statement of mine you read to me I said was the Devil—how weird of me to mention the Devil, I know you must think, but there
is
something out there, if you have any feeling for goodness at all, that resists it, that pushes the other way. I know you and your generation will think me quite mad, but God’s non-existence is something I can’t get used to, it seems
unnatural
.”

Kathryn’s lips—intricate braids of muscle, looked at up close in this cold outdoor light, designed to give her and others pleasure, if she doesn’t fear contamination; but how can her generation not fear contamination, just as Hope’s feared constraint?—fumble at her next words, her brain perhaps numbed by this un-asked-for venture into the great outdoors, where small cold raindrops are tearing little holes in the veil of sensation. Or perhaps, if she is Jewish, she is unable to put the question of God quite the way a Christian would put it, in urgent terms of either/or. For the chosen people the relation has evolved beyond the possibility of dropped acquaintance into that of a familiarity that breeds contempt: so Bernie once expounded it to Hope, his weary bulk redolent of sweat and cigarettes beside her in bed while his canvases below them sent up their unheard cries of flat, passionate color. Being Jewish amused him; he played with it, he heaped its ashes on his dandy’s head and turned its tribal fury into visionary Socialism. Kathryn hesistantly states, “An old boyfriend of mine, studying at graduate school to be a physicist at Columbia, told me that
with the thorough understanding they have now there’s really no place for God in the universe.”

“In us, dear. The place is in us, weak and silly as we are.”

“As he explained it, it’s a matter of energy, the equations. Eventually everything will get very far from everything else and trillions of years will go by, with everything dead and dark. There will be no place where we could be, even as pure souls. They need energy too.”

The words chill Hope. Raindrops are unignorably falling on their hands and faces, and pattering on their Gore-Tex parkas. “I’m sure he’s right, from one point of view,” Hope says impatiently. “But look up there, in the woods, you can just make out a glimmer of the springhouse roof. And you can see the path that takes you up to it, and to an even bigger view. Every summer we have to take down some trees to keep the view open. I say ’we,’ but of course it’s men I hire who do it. A family of chauvinists who hate taking direction from a woman.”

“I—”

“Can skip the view. I know. Let’s go back in, before the tea water boils all away.”

Still, it has done Hope good to be out in the cosmos, so different in feeling, so capacious, intricate, and benign, from the picture painted by Kathryn’s old boyfriend. How old was old? Does this girl have a boyfriend who is not old, who is waiting to warm and console her, to listen to her story about this babbling old witch on her lonely hill it took forever to drive to and even longer to drive back from? Hope feels her face freshened by its brush with the outdoors; her skin is taut with that fullness she remembers from childhood, when it seemed too good to be true that she was she, her life a daily growing fuelled by food in the day and sleep at night, the moon and sun the same exact
size in the sky though there was no necessary reason for it. She leads Kathryn back around the house, past the bird feeder hanging from the bare beech, over the gleams of mud by the millstone step up to the door of the kitchen; the mismatching storm door twangs on its rusty spring, and the real door, slightly sunk on its hinges, pops at a push from Hope’s shoulder. Kathryn, too, despite herself, from the briskness of her steps and the speed with which she sheds Jerry’s maroon parka, has had her spirit lifted. “How nice it must be,” she exclaims, “to have so much space to yourself. The whole of my apartment I think is no bigger than your kitchen. And these boring towers absolutely dominating my view.”

“My boys think it’s too much space for one little old lady. Now, what can we give you to eat?”

“Eat? I don’t need anything, but if I could use your bathroom …”

“Of course. You know where it is. But you
must
have something on your stomach before you set out.”

“I still have a few questions. We’re just up to the ’seventies.”

“I know, but my main story is over. The unusual part, marriage to two men of genius. Jerry was no genius, but he was a sweetheart. First of all, is it tea you want, or that ancient instant coffee you turned your nose up at before?”

“The coffee, please. That was
chilly
out there.” Her voice recedes and the door to the bathroom shuts, under the stairs. Hope, alone, feels the cosmos around her, as many stars under her feet as over her head, the endless galaxies and the trillions of dark years to come, and hurriedly gathers cups and saucers, a tea bag for herself—herbal, chamomile, from the health-food store, this time of day, a night of insomnia after being stirred up all day is the last
thing she needs, she wants to start a new canvas tomorrow, a little broader in its stripes and a browner, warmer gray than the last, to sleep well she needs physical exercise and this sitting in a rocker talking is not it—and for her guest the Taster’s Choice undecaffeinated with its red label and friendly little waist (the incurved glass sides in her bent fingers remind her of something; what?) and from the refrigerator the heavy loaf of rice-pecan bread (
No Preservatives, Fruit-Juice Sweetened
) from the same quaint store run by aged former hippies in Montpelier and from the cupboard beyond the double sink the squat straight-sided jars of Dundee marmalade and Skippy peanut butter. The girl must eat. It comes to Hope what the concave sides of the instant-coffee jar reminded her of: the curved walls of Peggy’s Art of This Century gallery, designed by, what was his name, Fritz, one of those pushy Germans like that Hans who drove Zack back to drink, Fritz Kiesler, not Kreisler, Kiesler with his seven-way chairs that could turn into tables or lecterns or easels, an idea that didn’t catch on but seemed perfectly adapted for the future at the time, wood covered in bright colors of linoleum, shaped plastic not yet invented, the floor turquoise. The future was here, in 1942, above a grocery store on West Fifty-seventh street. There were contraptions, a pinwheel of Duchamps, a conveyor belt of Klees, Hope had just come to New York, it seemed such glorious giddy fun to her, all so new; the walls curved out, not in like the sides of the coffee jar, but it was the same idea, of curves where you expected straight sides, that had reminded her, the touch of them, taking her so far back it was frightening, that feeling returning that she used to get on the top of the cathedrals and the Eiffel Tower when Jerry began taking her to Europe, which Zack and Guy were too poor or uncaring to do, the feeling that she
was much too high, that she might slip through the floor into all those uncaring galaxies beneath her feet.

Kathryn returns, having peed. Hope can see the difference on her newly relaxed face; how modest a lowering of tension it takes to satisfy what Freud called the pleasure principle. “This is a treat I sometimes give myself,” Hope announces. “A marmalade-and-peanut-butter sandwich on this special rice-pecan bread. You must have one with me. It will get us through.”

“I—”

“You don’t eat junk, but this isn’t junk,” Hope finishes for her. “The bread is from a health-food store fifteen miles away, I risk my life every time I drive there. You must be starving, dear; I know I am.”

Against the grain of her self-denying, ambitious, yet clumsy nature, Kathryn sits and warily consumes half the sandwich, its heavy dun-colored bread, its childish spreads, spread not too thickly or one’s fingers, Hope has learned through experience, become sticky. The two women, who have been so busy asking and answering, eat in a silence new to them. Time presses; the digital kitchen clock says 5:06. Rain, gathering volume, runs down the far window through which Hope had earlier studied the tousled sky, its torment resolved into a pearly brightness beyond the rivulets of rain, the hidden sun lowering to the west. Kathryn sips at her coffee, though it must still be, like Hope’s tea, scalding, and Hope takes pity on her: “If you’re in such a hurry, we can take our cups back to the front room and the tape recorder. But do finish your sandwich. Isn’t it good?”

“It is, it takes me back. Delicious. But I really can eat only half. It’s funny, on weekends my boyfriend tells me I eat like a horse, it’s a wonder I’m not fat, but when
I
’m on assignment I really have no appetite, I’m so focused. I didn’t sleep
much last night, either. The motel was just off 89, the traffic never stopped, you’d think it would way up here in the country.”

So she does have a present, active boyfriend. Hope feels relief. And jealousy. “You poor thing. You must have been anxious. What about?”

“Not asking the right questions.”

“Oh, I’m sure they’re right enough. I’ll tell you if we miss anything important. But isn’t that what Freud’s theory of psychotherapy claims, that it all comes around to the main thing even if you talk quite at random? What does your boyfriend do, may I ask?”

Kathryn lowers her lids, lids that seem in the fluorescent kitchen light gorgeously greasy, those of some sinful, defiant Biblical queen. The girl is offended to have the interview turned on her but has accepted enough of the other woman’s kindness to see no way out. “He’s in film, that’s what he loves,” she says. “He’s on a team making trailers, part-time, but he wants to move to the West Coast and climb the ladder to be a director. He acts, too, but that doesn’t turn him on.”

“Doesn’t it? How interesting,” Hope says, not finding it particularly so. “He isn’t a painter?”

“Oh no. He goes with me to openings and shows now and then and can’t see what I see in any of it. He’s a real philistine that way.”

“You said he helps make what?”

“Trailers. You call them previews. There’s an art to it, sequencing the high-energy bits. They work sometimes from rushes on a picture that isn’t half finished and nobody knows the ending.”

“Well, the ending is just what we don’t want these—what are they?—‘trailers’ to disclose. Jerry was a keen
moviegoer, he liked going out, so we would bestir ourselves and go, in New York up to Eighty-sixth Street and here over to Burlington. But after a while every movie seemed to be made for adolescent boys; they made you feel
processed
—so many car chases you were supposed to care about, so many explosions and narrow escapes, and that was it. It must be a worry for you, to have him wanting to move to Los Angeles.”

“Well, not too much. It’s less than six hours in the air. I want him to succeed and be happy at what he loves.”

“Of course. But what of you? New York is where you must be, surely.”

“I liked L.A., the one time I was there. The mild weather, the Spanish flavor, the freeways. It feels like the future.”

“You didn’t find it … cheesy?”

“They do have art there. A very lively art scene, actually.”

“They have those low-riding cars and some handsome, virtually empty museums.”

“
You
left New York.”

“Not far. Not in my mind. I kept going back, until I got too stodgy to travel. Don’t sacrifice your own work, for the sake of a man.”

Kathryn does not say,
You did
, but both think it, Hope with the reservation that she never betrayed herself absolutely, she postponed rather than sacrificed, she somehow knew she had time to wait it all out, to get to this present, to be herself in the end.

Kathryn surprises her by laughing—a prettier, lighter, more musical laugh than her horsy face had prepared Hope for. “You don’t seem to approve of Alec, without knowing him at all!”

“I want the best for
you
,” Hope tells her, not smiling. “I’m not sure a trailer-maker sounds like it. I’ve always felt
squeamish around people who want to be ‘in film.’ What doesn’t your friend like about acting? It seems at least to be straightforward, an ancient art of sorts.”

“He calls it a meat market. Alec is really very nice, you’d like him if you met him, even if he doesn’t think painting amounts to much any more. Once pictures began to move, he says, it was all over for those that didn’t.” She shifts position at the table, looks at the remaining half-sandwich as if to begin eating it, and takes a sip of her rapidly cooling coffee instead. Microwave heat for some microscopic reason fades much faster than good old-fashioned boiling heat: the fact fascinates Hope. “You know,” Kathryn tells her, not exactly rebuking, “most of us can’t find these men of genius to marry. Most of us must muddle along in the middle, and hope at least it
is
the middle.”