Seek My Face (29 page)

A memory of Jerry arises: his tennis. Hope had played a lot in Ardmore and Maine, and on Long Island there would occasionally be games in which, compared with most of the wives and girlfriends and for that matter the men—physically careless intellectuals without her country-club background—she looked pretty stylish and felt strong; but when she played with Jerry, on the rooftop court of his midtown athletic club, his serve, no matter how he tried to weaken it, kicked up high and right at her head. “Oh, dearest!” he would call out when once again she blooped the return. He had more top spin than she could handle, it was embarrassing yet thrilled her so that she remembers it now, the power effortlessly ejected at her from across the net,
sending this fuzzy bullet bouncing up between her eyes; it was typical of him. Where
had
he, with his strictly New York-Jewish background, no Main Line clay courts, no collegiate tennis teams, learned to hit with top spin like that? She smiles to herself, and declines to share the memory with Kathryn. Jerry had a muscular knottiness—bulging hard calves, woolly flat abdomen—his gray business suits concealed. He was fit, a competitor.

“How did your children relate to Jerry?”

“Beautifully. He was warmer than their own father, at least less preoccupied. He would organize outings, get tickets for the Rangers or the Knicks during their school vacations, or take Dot to the Alvin Ailey, she was going through an intense liberal phase and was talking about dropping out of Brearley and serving the city’s poor somehow, he would listen to her for hours, I didn’t have the patience myself, it seemed to me very pretentious, with an undertone of violence toward the elected government that reminded me of Fascism, simple fallible government not good enough for fine spirits like her. And her vegetarianism made every meal an additional headache for me to prepare. I loved it, frankly, when she would go stay with Guy and Gretchen for some of the summer. The boys were in their late teens, college age, and we saw less and less of them even during summers, but Jerry never let up on his involvement, his genuine interest in them; his own children with his first wife, Pearl—he said he only married women with monosyllabic names—they were grown up and married by then and into what sounded like rather vague and directionless things like Ph.D.s in Mandarin and computer start-ups and holistic medicine and organic farming in Colorado, so I think he was pleased when my two boys began to come to him with questions about the world of finance. Not that you should gather the
impression, or pass it on to your on-line readers or whatever they are, that his and Pearl’s children were flops—they’ve all landed on their feet, as adult children tend to do if they haven’t hopelessly addled their heads with drugs, which is what might well have happened with Zack’s and my child if there had been one, but my children with Guy were born too late for that ’sixties naïveté, and at any rate had too much of his and my good Protestant sense. Actually, Mandarin turns out to have been a sensible thing to study, the boy in question lives in Taiwan and is always over in mainland China for various companies, and his younger brother did quite well in the computer start-up until last year’s slowdown. But you don’t want to hear about all this domestic trivia, dear, this
Küche und Kinder
, you care only about painting, just as I did when I was your lovely age.”

“What was Jerry’s attitude toward your painting?”

“
Very
enthusiastic. Utterly supportive. He demanded I do a stint every morning, and one reason we bought this place was to get away from the ringing phone, the idiotic New York social life. The show I mentioned that I did when I was still married to Guy had got such tepid notices I needed to be encouraged; I didn’t pick up a brush in years, and when I did, up here, I tried to forget everything Hochmann had ever told us and did kitchen still lifes, pots and kettles on shelves, the shelf edge exactly horizontal and at the level of the viewer’s eye, in beigy grays, nothing shiny, everything matte like unglazed clay. And windows again, only country windows now, looking out on nothing much, rainclouds with fuzzy edges, barely distinguishable shades of gray but with carefully done muntins and putty, as if in foreground focus by somebody standing there meditating, I had to laugh I was getting so Wyethy, everybody had always sneered at him so, but I was trying to cleanse myself
of abstraction before going back in. I wanted things to look hand-done, but at the same time I had this hunger for the rectilinear and for subdued colors. Jerry, who had built me the studio and would never have said anything to discourage me, did ask me once if I shouldn’t be more violent. Zack of course had been violent, these terrible spatters where you can just feel him whipping the brush in the air as if smashing something, and then of course all the dribbles and daubing with which Guy used to unify his combines and to mock the idea of finish, and what Hochmann preached had been violent in its way, swoops and rectangles of raw color having their tussle within the frame, push and pull, and maybe now, with Jerry giving me a sense of being cherished a little like my grandfather used to do, I was free to express a distrust of violence, a fear of color as the Devil’s motley as I said in that rather sanctimonious statement you began today by reading to me.
Or
,” Hope quickly interposes when Kathryn makes a little move as if to interrupt, “I was catering to Jerry, just as I catered to my painter husbands by imitating them, but in this instance by giving him something to collect—flat, calm canvases of modest size that wouldn’t clash with anything else in the room. You see, Kathryn, there was less and less to collect. Art, Jerry used to say, was off the wall. How do you collect an earthwork? You can’t even get to it, except by driving for hours in Arizona. Or a piece of performance art, all the mock blood and mess of it: a young woman gets naked and dips her long hair in a can of paint—latex, let’s hope—and crawls backward down a long strip of paper to symbolize menstrual flow or the one-track sexist male mind or whatever. What is there left to keep? The long streak of dried paint means nothing if we don’t know it was done with a woman’s head of hair. There was in the ’seventies a Japanese body-artist who used to stick the
handle of a brush up her vagina and squat and paint a few symbols with it, but there really wasn’t too much she could do, a circle maybe or a cross, or some random swings like elephants can be trained to do with a brush in their trunks, and so we had to be told how it meant that all creation comes from the vagina. I’ve seen Zack called the father of performance art—those movies the bossy German took of him that awful day, it was much too cold to be outside, especially in a black T-shirt, a ‘muscle shirt’ they say now but they weren’t called that then—but his performances, so-called, the dances he did when he was alone, were routes to a product, an absolutely gorgeous abstract painting, as explosive and finespun and empty and full as the cosmos itself. Zack reinvented the sublime. He was after eternity. In his mind he was like a Renaissance muralist, working for forever. Permanence was the very thing that the new artists couldn’t abide, and the NEA kept pouring money into all these performances, these videos and light shows and flimsy installations dismantled and trashed the next week. Oh dear, I sound rather Helmsish, don’t I?”

“Or like another kind of artist. But why should art be permanent when nothing else is? Why should it privilege itself? You think those cave artists had more in mind than the hunt the next day? And look at the actual state most Renaissance murals are in—Piero della Francesca is almost all restorer by now, and
The Last Supper
just a few glued-on crumbs in an empty room in Milan.”

This is the longest continuous speech Kathryn has yet delivered. She is showing her claws, the skulking intellect behind the deference. That deconstructionist verb “privilege.” Both women are tired. The two heads of hair, grizzled auburn and tinted raven, are loosening in the humidity as the rain drums outside. Light has ebbed from the windows;
the thin panes, with their lavender tint and warping bubbles, give back the room fragmentary reflections of furniture, curved gleams of lamplight on ceramic surfaces, pallid unsteady shadows that are faces and hands. The first time she went to one of Hochmann’s classes, there had been this sidelit still life mixed up with reflective cellophane. Hope lifts her chin to repel the invader with a blast of energy: “How can you collect a big tangle of rope hung all over a museum room? Or a heap of used bricks or four square yards of zinc plates on the floor? Or a rolled-up thirty-five-foot sheet of lead—this was somebody’s masterpiece, I forget whose, maybe that bully who put a big sheet of rusty iron across a nice little park downtown. Jerry did have some Minimalist pieces, some very nice cubes of Plexiglas, and people kept setting their drinks down on them. How can you collect so-called light sculpture? Or graffiti art sprayed over the entire side of a subway car? It’s all so liberal
chic
, so
faux
demotic. And all these photographs artists began to take of themselves, Cindy Sherman and everybody else, making faces or spouting water or rolling in broken glass or riddled with body-piercing, how can you put them on your wall with a straight face? Or basketballs suspended in a tank of Perrier water, or sliced-up cows in formaldehyde? Who would want to own these things?”

“I suppose,” Kathryn says, her voice retracted from its surge of assertion, “it could be argued that art has no obligation to honor the concept of ownership. It shouldn’t be owned, it should just
be
.”

“Well, who is going to
pay
for it to be? What is the point of its being, if all it does is express the grudges and neuroses of the artist? Where is the
transaction
?”

The younger woman, no doubt not wishing her interview to deteriorate into a quarrel, or a debate that could be
held in any art school, or any twenty-first-century equivalent of the Cedar Tavern’s leathery back booths, declines to answer Hope’s questions and reverts to the personal; she recrosses her long legs in their black-ribbed mystery fabric, clears her throat of a dry tickle, and ponders her by now creased and much-shuffled laser-printed pages before asking in a strengthened voice: “Could it be said that Jerry, in the absence of things to collect, collected
you
?”

Hope has to laugh, in admiration of youthful nerve and hard-heartedness. “It
was
said,” she says, “no doubt, but never to my face before.”

“It seems rather obvious,” says Kathryn, as if Hope is indeed an object to be dispassionately critiqued and not a person, a former child, with feelings and a sentimental, organic view of her own value. “Zack, Guy—in you Jerry had them both, major artists in terms he could understand, producers of wall-dressing. You were house-dressing.”

“How harsh you are, my dear. We’ve been so friendly.”

Her visitor’s pale face, like a sheet of photosensitive paper, registers a shadow of dismay. The young don’t credit themselves with the power to hurt those older, richer, and more famous than they are; they think even the faintest celebrity resides in a virtual realm they cannot touch. “I feel
very
friendly,” Kathryn weakly says, “so much so I may be getting careless in how I put things. Also, guilt is gnawing at me, for taking up your entire day. I’m just trying to
see
you and Jerry.”

“Why strain to see? He was an aging man, I was an aging woman, we amused each other. And comforted each other; he was the only one of my husbands I could call
com
forting. He always knew what I meant to say, even if I had trouble saying it.”

“Did Dorothy like him?”

“He couldn’t have been much nicer to her, but, no, I suppose not. She was loyal to Guy, as a way of getting back at me, though it was Jerry and not Guy who put her through Stanford and underwrote all those post-graduate years when she was ‘trying to find herself.’ Whatever that meant—people didn’t use to lose themselves, you were what you were, and that was it, you
couldn’t
lose it—she was conducting the search pretty expensively, it seemed to me, she and her beach-bimbo hangers-on. Don’t you think she wasn’t trading on being Guy’s daughter, for all her ‘independence.’ ”

“Your own self-education wasn’t exactly un-underwritten, was it?”

Another slap. My goodness. This girl is angry. Hope pauses before responding. “I take your point. Indulging one’s creative instincts, one’s search for beauty, is a luxury most people don’t have. My daughter and I are both willful bitches, yes? My poor respectability-loving parents—Philadelphians, the mousiest elite in the East, my father hated to see his name in print even in connection with a court proceeding—it never occurred to me what an embarrassment I must have been, off in New York doing unspeakable things and then marrying an uncouth boozehound from nowhere. I guess I thought, if I thought at all, that they loved me, and whatever made me happy would make them happy.”

“And did it? I mean, were
you
happy?”

“Quite, dear. As much as anyone can be, given our human habit of wanting more than we have. I would love to have a major reputation, instead of being a kind of long-lived footnote.”

“You are
not
a footnote,” Kathryn tells Hope with a startling firmness. “Not to me or to any number of other
younger women. Your work—so balanced and quiet and yet nervy and terribly female—means a great deal to us. That’s why I’m here.”

“You are? How flattering. I thought you were here to share Zack with me. And Guy. Not Jerry, a mere money-man. But art rides on money, you see.” Praise tends to make Hope prickly, awakening a contradictory spirit, the Christian imp of self-negation.

Kathryn fights back. “Graffiti art? Jazz?”

“In the end, yes. It’s how word gets out, it’s the means of marketing, which is always looking for a fresh product to push. Money took up those poor graffiti boys and confused them and dropped them cold when the fad was over, and let dope and AIDS carry them away. Jerry’s money took me to Europe, where my genius previous husbands almost never bothered to. We went again and again, the best hotels, Venice, Paris, London, but Greece and Portugal too, Denmark and Norway, a lot of England and Holland, I saw at last what Henry James was saying—everywhere you look in Europe there is something contemplated and completed, these centuries of previous lives all contributing something of interest, little details like a curving staircase or an old square with a well in the middle of it, a building bent to fit into an odd lot, and the way the Italian towns grow out of their hills like trees on a cliff, and how the centers of cities reached up only so high before elevators were invented, only as many flights of stairs as a healthy person could climb; everything had been cut to human measure, and beauty was just the desire of all those dead people to live decently, they and their parents and their children, polishing the paving stones with the soles of their feet. I know, America isn’t so young any more, it has many of the same things, and without the tyranny and class system that put up
the European palaces, but everything here is still comparatively hasty and square and so quickly shabby and
démodé
, it seems; Europe felt, when Jerry would take me there for weeks at a time, we would rent villas and flats, Europe felt like an ancient forest, everything grown together, vineyards and cities and museums, though of course it’s all being swamped now with Americanism of the tinniest sort, ‘tinny’ because they haven’t had the one thing we have had, our particular encounter with the wilderness, that tragic blankness. And the
people
, the way they treat you and one another, the women in Florence on the street with their round eyes like actresses, always playing a part, and the very precise little Frenchwomen, even the traffic cops, in high heels and stockings and smart dark suits, their decisive gestures, the way the same words are used over and over, even the way the Europeans snub and overcharge you, it’s all so human, so
practical
, as if it’s all been done a thousand times before and nothing more needs to be invented. In school they used to tell us that Americans invented everything, and though of course that wasn’t true, you can see why it
should
be true.
Oh my goodness, so what?
, you’re thinking. But it’s about art and money, you still see there the churches and the palaces, the official market for art we never had, you feel how it was woven in, instead of added on as it has always been here, something extra and faintly silly.”