Seek My Face (27 page)

“Neither man attracted me because he was famous,” Hope says, sitting more upright at the table, feeling her face warm. “Guy appealed to me because of his gaiety, his impudence. Zack was not unknown in art circles when I married him, but he was certainly poor, and going downhill fast. And I disliked his paintings, in fact. My family thought it was a ruinous match, as in many ways it was.”

“Still, you were there when he broke it all open—you were part of it.”

“I got him out to Long Island, that was good. For a time. But my being a small part of it gives me less satisfaction, I can tell only you, than if
I
had been the one to make the breakthrough.”

Is this quite true? Welcoming Zack back to the relatively warm house after one of his freezing hours in the barn had had its satisfactions—a partnered wonder, a worried pride. This man hemmed in by clamoring needs, by chemical dependency and social incoherence, could nevertheless
fetch back to her through the snow not a bloody kill on his back but the ghost, in his hands and eyes, his lovely tawny farsighted Western eyes, of beauty, beauty stretched flat in those great swaths of sized canvas taped to the floor with their swirls and spatters of pure paint drying. Then it was, as he spoke to his mate with breath still visible as frozen vapor, as if she
had
done it with him, ripped those imperishable hours from the perishing world.

“No more sandwich?” Hope says to Kathryn. She is a bit hurt, being rejected in this trivial particular. “I’ll wrap it in Reynolds Wrap for your drive back. Really, it’s not bad for you, though the marmalade has sugar in it. I’ve lived on nothing else some days up here, when I was snowed in.”

“Poor Alec,” the other woman says, off in her own world, where her lover has taken a wound. Hope forgets what weight her words have to these innocents dazzled by even a soft glow of fame. It was true, she had not liked the sound of a man who did not like galleries. To her they were Aladdin’s caves, from her first glimpse of Art of This Century with its curved walls, and then, when married to Guy, of the Hansa and Reuben and Judson and Red Grooms’, where happenings and playlets were staged that would leave the tiny audiences baffled but in some corner of their minds enlisted in a fresh way of seeing things, with less prejudice, with less expectation of familiar hierarchy, and then the midtown galleries, Leo’s and Sidney’s, which gave Pop its celebrity and opened it to the new collectors, the playful new American money, she had met Jerry in one of them. Galleries usually had an embattled, silent feeling to them, underpopulated, the girls at the desk fighting drowsiness, the paintings in their brightness and the sculptures in their savage stasis waiting for love, for the viewer, the buyer, while bored and idle noises leaked through from the back room.
These galleries housed works produced in loneliness and confusion but also in a mood of exalted contentment, of remove from the world’s ruck, work done on the edge of usefulness, art undermining its own uses as fast as these could be identified, art at art’s crumbling edge, fragments arrayed in these bare but for her far from desolate chambers of Manhattan; Hope was always stirred and happy in them, they were meetinghouses sacred in their silence, poised for visitation.

“Don’t mind me at all,” she tells her visitor, sensing but not greatly caring that the girl has been insulted. “Let’s go to the front parlor. I can’t offer you anything else? A quick little salad? Some Brazil nuts? How about a low-fat gluten-free oatmeal cookie?”

Kathryn rises, hands flat on the table to help her up, without deigning a response. Rain thrashes on the kitchen skylight. In the front parlor the sound is subdued. The two women, cups in hand, resettle into their chairs, and even as she leans forward and switches the tape recorder back on Kathryn says, “I’d like to return to Guy for a minute. His leaving you isn’t very clear to me.”

“Nor to me,” Hope allows, sensing that her interrogator was going to dig deeper, to repay her for the doubt over Alec that Hope has sown. “He just seemed to sidle out of my life, and the children’s, after seventeen years of being there, or at least checking in faithfully.”

“Do you really believe he stayed uninvolved in all the drug use at the Hospice? What about amphetamines? Coke? Downers? In a lot of those experimental movies that were turned out under his name the actors are clearly tripping: the transvestite one, or one of the transvestite ones,
Sick Roses
, just the other evening I was watching it on video with Alec, and there’s almost no interrelating, the actors are
each doing their own thing with this tranced smirk on their faces, there is
no
attempt to connect with one another, let alone remember any lines that would advance a story.”

“But, Kathryn dear, perhaps the point is that there isn’t a story because there
shouldn’t
be a story, because there aren’t any stories any more, just as painting, you say, or Alec says, had to give up anecdote. That was why Hopper and Wyeth seemed to us such dinosaurs, they seemed to be still telling us stories. A story presupposes an author, moving the characters about from above, moving
us
about from above, to some morally intelligible end, and who believed that any more, after the Holocaust, after the A-bomb—”

Kathryn reacts so swiftly that the sheaf of questions in her lap slides and has to be slapped to keep from falling to the floor, its old boards painted the shiny black-red of Bing cherries. “Thank you for mentioning the A-bomb. In all this Cold War period, ’45 to ’89, did the threat of nuclear annihilation affect your thinking? Were you ever afraid?”

“A bit in ’62, the Cuba crisis they just made a movie about, but not really. It was a lovely October day, that day when the world might blow up, with the Russian ships steaming toward ours. I remember pushing Paul and Piet in their twin stroller all the way over to the pediatrician’s on East End Avenue and being much too hot in my new fall coat, and the television in his office being turned to a soap opera. People are optimists. They must be. I could never believe the world’s leaders would be so stupid as to blow it all up.”

“But—”

“Hitler would have, you are going to say. But the Russians, the Soviets, were like us—big bumbling countries with no need for
Lebensraum
, not little overachieving countries like Germany and Japan, driven crazy by these racist,
death-loving myths they had. The Russians love life—read their novels. They were Communists, the ones running things, but so had been most of the older painters I knew, even into the war. In describing the post-war period you younger people keep telling us how haunted we were by the threat of nuclear Armageddon, but the fact is it hardly ever entered my head, and if it did what could I do about it? It was like being hit by a trolley car—that could happen, too. And about Guy and drugs, you should remember that most of his assistants at the Hospice were a generation younger than he and much more self-indulgent and nihilistic, they had grown up sheltered and spoiled and believed simultaneously that they shouldn’t be denied anything at all and that the existing power structure, which had given them everything they had, was totally evil. Guy was three years younger than I, but we had both felt the Depression and the war; in fact, as you know from your research, he served in it, two years in the Coast Guard, sitting up in the Aleutians freezing his skinny butt but doing his bit. He didn’t talk much about it, but he used to go about every five years to these little reunions of the guys he had served on the cutter with. There was a connection, though you’re right, connection wasn’t what he was about. Or passion. The artists I first knew were always talking about passion, Bernie of course, and Roger always going on about his
feelings
as he painted, and Onno and Zack pouring this passion onto the canvas, these furious strokes and frenetic overpainting, but I never saw Guy lose his temper or express disappointment or dislike of another person, even the critics in the beginning who were so stupid about the beauty and really stunning variety of what he was doing. He read them but never let on, if anything he acted amused. And he didn’t express much rapture, either, when the money began to pour in.”

Why is she talking without letup? Because she wants to exhaust this woman on the subject, she wants to hide the humiliation Guy did inflict upon her with his casual abandonment, her and the children, the pain of seeing this, her only set of children, ever, maimed and puzzled by his defection. She is like Guy in being well bred, in seeing the value in a front, in seeing everything as a front, in believing in a controlled finish, for all the incidental dribbles. She had felt in league with his coolness, that calmly considered distance in him which was necessary to his steady good nature, and then she had been spurned, turned out of their little club. She tells Kathryn before the tenacious, clinging girl can think of another question, “Toward the end, as I said, as the ’seventies wore on, I think he began to feel strain, the strain of keeping ahead, of staying sexy for the galleries and the museums. It’s not easy, making kitsch and trash seem something else. The tragedy of the modern, or should we say post-modern, artist is that the public’s attention span is so much shorter than his normal creative life. Duchamp quit and gained a lot of points, Korgi and Seamus committed suicide, and Zack too in a way, but for a non-self-destructive artist there is just too much
time
. If he hits his vein early, his art is eventually exhausted. Those things Guy was doing before and after leaving me, the huge public statues, the pseudo-billboards, the giant coloring books with hideous colors, were not good. They had the same effrontery but lacked the original—what can we call it?—merriment. He thought leaving me might give him back his merriment.” That is how she has framed the abandonment, as a byproduct of the artist’s quest.

“There was a certain scandal attached to Guy’s work, especially the movies and the happenings, with all their nudity and homoeroticism. How did you cope with that? How did your children, as they got older?”

“It was part of Daddy’s business,” Hope tells her, slightly lying and not caring; her visitor’s inquisitiveness is wearing down her ethical sense. She feels most ethical in the morning, when she paints, and her exaltation crumbles away as the day goes on. She makes an effort to reflect and be honest. “The boys handled it by becoming very square, beginning at Buckley—it was Guy, by the way, who wanted to send them there, I had thought some school more progressive, but he said No, he didn’t want his children typecast, he wanted them to have the straight educations he and I had had—and then at Putney, where almost nobody else was square. Dot did her own rebellion, as we’ve already discussed, off the record. What is hard to remember about those years is that Guy didn’t put on a suit and tie like the other men in the building but in his turtleneck and tweedy jacket and blue jeans he
did
go off downtown much like they did and came back at dinnertime, or else called me and told me he was being held up at work and that I should eat with the kids without him, again a lot like the other men. He was dutiful, going to school events and playing softball with the other fathers and sons when they had outings in Central Park, and for the first dozen years at least he tried to be a normal husband to me. We would go together to one of these ballets in the basement of the Judson Church and watch a bunch of young people writhe around naked smearing each other with brown fingerpaints to symbolize filthy capitalist lucre or whatever, and then come home and have a lentil salad and a glass of milk in the kitchen, whispering so as not to wake up the children. Guy was a sensible, mild—”

“Or marmalade and peanut butter,” Kathryn interrupts.

“What?” Hope’s inner eye had been intent on the domestic picture, focusing on what she needed to say, to be fair, about Guy.

“I was reminded of the sandwich you just gave me,” says Kathryn. “That was sweet.”

“Too sweet, I suppose. You didn’t finish it. You’re all so afraid of sugar.” This young woman’s presuming to joke about the older one’s apparently innocent tastes inflicts on Hope an irritation she resists revealing, because any sign of a quarrel or difference to be smoothed over will prolong the interviewer’s already excessive stay. Hope tries again: “A mild, sensible man, and it was easy for all of us to forget that he was a celebrity, a major force in American art when it was still the world leader, and that behind all his family-man obligingness he was fighting for his life. He would wake up at night and not get back to sleep, I would roll over and readjust the eye mask and leave him sitting up under the reading light and find him at the breakfast table with the
Times
all read and refolded and lines in his face I had never seen before. With that effortless intuitive sense of his, he could feel it all slipping away, he was falling behind. In the late ’sixties, it wasn’t just Pop and Op and what little was left of Abstract Expressionism, everything was having its start-up then—Minimalism, scatter art, earthworks, conceptual art that used just words, claiming it was a lie to pretend that perception wasn’t a matter of language, or of
theory
. Europe was sending us its critical theory to kill our creativity, Guy used to say. It got so that
any
art that still produced paintings or combines that even if cumbersome could be hung on a wall and sculptures that could actually stand or sit in somebody’s not terribly immodest living room was in danger of being old hat. No matter how hard Guy worked, no matter how inventive he was, Pop was beginning, with its flags and stacks of Wheaties boxes, while these enraged kids were out on the streets
burning
American flags, beginning to look, I hate to say it,
cozy
, and that
was why I couldn’t mind too much the drugs down at the Hospice, and the porno films that look so funny and fuzzy now, because they kept his enterprise—let’s call it that—trendy; they kept for Guy his edge of being
maudit
. For selfish reasons and the sake of the children, which is selfish at one remove, I wanted him as domesticated as possible, but for him as an artist it wasn’t healthy, we can’t have Vermeers and Chardins any more, we can’t glorify bourgeois life any more, not when it was somehow to blame for Vietnam and Birmingham and colonialism and so on, and it was a
strain
, as I said, for Guy to pretend to be bourgeois, to pretend art can be a business. I half-blame myself for going along with it, Guy’s pretense, for my own bourgeois comfort, and that was why when he upped and left I was so halfhearted in resisting. Dot sensed it, and hates me still for being so weak. Don’t put that in anything you write, please. But what could I do? I thought it might be better for him, for his art.”