Seek My Face (32 page)

“You should go now,” she tells her guest.

“I really should. But it’s so pleasant here, I have this—”

“Inertia.”

“Yes. Exactly.”

“You must get back to your life. You tell that young man of yours to open himself up when he goes with you to a gallery. If he can’t see the fun of it he may not be the right man for you.”

“I think it’s hard for Alec to have fun with so much of life—his career and all—undecided.”

“By the time everything is decided, it will be too late. The moment is always
now
. There is no
then
, it turns out. Everything real is a kind of now.”

“You tell
him
that,” Kathryn says.

“I’d be happy to. I was born too long ago to be ashamed
to learn from men, but there are things they can learn from us, too, and the smarter of them know it. Men see what’s in front of them but not always all the rest.” Kathryn is in front of Alec, Hope’s impression is, and he does not quite see that she might not always be, that she is ripe and should be plucked.

The two women hesitate at the threshold before them: the end of words, a resumption of their burdens. “Before I switch off the machine, is there anything you still wanted to say?”

Hope holds her mouth open and looks at the far edge of the slightly sagging, here and there discolored ceiling as if at something astonishing. “It feels as though there is, but I can’t imagine what it would be.” She adds, “I’ve been a fortunate woman. I don’t really believe the world is the Devil’s. Or
only
the Devil’s.”

Kathryn leans forward with that awkward impatience of hers, as if overcoming a mechanical tendency to get stuck, and touches into silence the tiny Sony, dove gray, the third presence in the room, motionless, unsleeping, all-aware. With a snuffly sigh of effort the interviewer stands, and Hope rocks back in her chair of many woods at the splendor of this unfolding—the long black legs; the fine-ribbed pants tight around the thighs and flared above the boot tops; the brief jacket of soft black imitation-leather, which the girl has never removed, in silent comment upon the chilliness of the room compared with almost any New York apartment. The contrasting white turtleneck protects her throat, and above her small cupped ears two curved silver combs pin the long glossy hair tinged with henna flat against her skull. From her square-toed boot soles to the top of her skull she must be fully five foot ten; one of Alec’s holds over her is presumably that he is as tall or taller.
Hope, being short, had her pick of men. Both women affect the pulled-back, quickly assembled hairdos of art’s camp followers, of those pursuing, through thickets of commerce, neglect, and personal entanglement, a glimmering activity disinterested, incorruptible, and ardent. Kathryn thrusts the Sony and her printed notes into the big black pocketbook, almost the size of a tote bag, which has waited beside the armchair, on the rug of braided rags.

Hope asks, “Would you like your half-sandwich for the trip? And I could make up a little Ziploc bag of nuts and raisins and dried fruit. I worry about you; there really aren’t many places to stop between here and the New York Thruway—those terrible convenience stores that sell mostly stale candy and
National Enquirer
s. Don’t you love the headlines?
Julia’s True Love Kidnapped by Space Aliens. Whitney’s Weight Loss Horrifies Fans
.”

“No, I’ll be fine, Hope. It’s Alec’s car, and if I got the wheel sticky with marmalade he’d kill me.”

“Oh my. He sounds not easy to please.”

“He’s sweet, basically. But as I explained he’s at a difficult time of life.”

“Well, aren’t we all? What would an easy time of life look like? Goodbye, Kathryn. I’ve stupidly forgotten your last name.”

“D’Angelo. With an apostrophe.”

“Of course.” It rings a very faint bell, from their introductory phone conversation, a distant rustle in her ear. How stupid she had been, sitting here all these hours assuming the girl was Jewish. Well, she
is
a child of the Mediterranean, the middling mother of wine and of olive-skinned races and of all the ideas we still live by, we children of the Northern mists.

“Thank you
so
much,” the intruder says. “You’ve given
me so much, more than I can possibly use. I feel guilty about taking your whole day.”

“I did my hour or two at the easel before you came. After that, my time is worth very little, and there seems a lot of it. I fear I talked your pretty ears off. I go many days up here talking to no one except over the telephone—not that it rings every day.”

“You should have a pet.”

This directive takes her aback, but perhaps she asked for it, seeming more helpless than she felt. “Jerry and I did have dogs up here, lovely good-natured goldens, we’d haul them back and forth to New York and put them in a kennel down toward Bolton when we went to Europe, they would look so
wounded
as we drove off, and be so frantic to see us when we came back, I feared their hearts would burst with happiness, talk about passion! After Jerry died, Jupiter, the last of the goldens, died too, he wore himself out going to the door looking for him. Dogs don’t really respect women the way they do men, and I thought of getting a cat, but then decided it was purer to have no pets, and not to leave my boys the problem of how to dispose of it. The creatures of the wilderness are my pets. Even the bears, though I don’t like seeing their claw marks in the woods too close to the house. There are more bears in these woods now than since the early nineteenth century, you know.”

“I didn’t know.”

There was something Hope had been on her way to say when interrupted, and now she says it: “It’s been a gift to me, to be allowed to tell so much. To look at my poor little life entire.”

Kathryn matches this somewhat stilted declaration with one of her own: “It’s so unusual for someone of my generation,” she says, “to talk with anybody so pleased with her
life. My friends, they’re well fed, and make good money, some of them, and have enough sex, I guess, but they’re not really
pleased
. They don’t have that capacity. You
are
pleased, aren’t you?”

Hope laughs, it has become so oddly formal again. “I’m pleased to meet
you
, Ms. D’Angelo. And I’m pleased I guess that every time I was left alone in my life I still had a reason to keep going. Art, if you have any vocation for it at all, doesn’t desert you. It’s always willing to flirt. Now, really, before you rush off, you
should
use the bathroom. That I insist on. It’s so hard, even not in the rain, to find rest rooms along the road that don’t humiliate you by making you ask for the key.”

Even while Hope is saying these things to her, Kathryn has stalked across the parlor floor to the front hall and in one large swift gesture dressed herself in the purple cashmere cloak she came in and deposited on the spindle-back settee. The hood makes her look sinister yet winsome, her long nose jutting now from shadow, her big black purse dangling from a bent forearm. She reflects and decides, “Yes, that I
will
accept. Thank you.”

Again, then, in those noisy boots, she visits the bathroom under the back stairs. In the kitchen, Hope quickly, furtively extracts a medium Ziploc bag from its box in a drawer and, opening the refrigerator, from a set of plastic containers on a door shelf, portions out a modest quantity of Brazil nuts, raw peanuts, lightly salted roasted pecans, raisins, yogurt-covered baby pretzels, and dried apricots. She seals the Ziploc with a painful squeeze of her fingers; Kathryn accepts the fat package of snacks without protest or a word of thanks, like a child hurriedly going off to school. Her mind is on the journey ahead; her eyes are already looking through the windshield, its beating wipers.
“You’ve been very kind,” she says in her daze of departure.

“Shall I send you a transcript when I have one made?”

“Oh my goodness, no. I couldn’t bear to read it.”

“Would you like to approve of the quotes I use in my article? As I said, you’ve given me much more than I can use.”

“Not really, dear. I’m sure you’ll get them right enough. You had the tape recorder. And I honestly can’t picture who the reader of this article is going to be.”

“There might even be some print options, depending on the slant I give it. My agent is very enthusiastic about the possibilities.”

“I’ve never had an agent, I suppose it’s their business to be enthusiastic. If you begin to feel tired, and your eyes start to close, and having a dried apricot doesn’t help, dear, you must promise me to pull over, and not just to the side of the road or in one of those vast truck-rests where dreadful things happen, but next to a restaurant with its lights on and people coming in and out.”

“I’ll be fine, honest. Goodbye again, Mrs. Chafetz.” Kathryn tugs at the front door handle but has no success; Hope, who knows all the tricks of this latch, in damp weather or dry, yanks it open it for her. The live wet breath of the rain, the sound and stir of it in the dark, the glimpse by doorlight of its thin vertical rods sparkling with reflections, its towering presence stretching up out of sight into the darkness from which it falls: the beast confronts the two women. The lamps of the living room reveal only a few strides of dead lawn, plus the spangled tops of the bushes planted close to the house, soaked white spiderwebs spread on the flat-cut yew like doilies on a table. The irregular flagstones dimly lead into the whispering, pattering darkness where the visitor’s car is hidden. “Oh, don’t come out!”
Kathryn cries, when Hope steps with her out of the shelter of the little roof here, over the porch of flagstones that twenty years ago had replaced rotted porch boards. “You’ll get wet!”

“Only for a minute. It will do me good. Jerry always saw guests to their cars.”

Having no choice, unless she uses her greater size and youthful strength to push the older woman back into the house, Kathryn turns with a perhaps humorously despairing sweep of her arm, leaping in black from its cape, and heads down the flagstones with at first firm and then, in the dark, groping footsteps. Hope, who knows each tilt and gap in the walk, takes Kathryn’s arm, feeling through cashmere the other’s tense, resilient flesh, flesh hardened by “working out,” running on pavement; rain, cold and lightly wind-tossed, coats Hope’s face with delectable sensation. Under the beech, the drops are bigger, gathered and released by bare branches. They hit hollow metal noisily; the borrowed automobile, its unpainted fender glimmering, forms a shape in the night less distinct to the eye than to the ear as Kathryn arrives at its side and scratches with her key at the door, which she absurdly locked out of city habit, here on this Vermont hill where seldom more than six cars a day pass. It is an aging cheap car, not equipped to lock and unlock at the squeeze of an electronic remote, as does Hope’s royal-blue Caravan. Oh, she knows that her SUV guzzles gas, yet the space inside, enough for canvases five feet by six, and the exaltation of sitting up so high on the road seem luxuries she owes herself near her life’s end: let the young inherit a depleted world. Methane is coming, and hydrogen separated from water by windmill-generated electric power, she heard about it on the NPR station on a Science Friday.

Under the beech she feels her face flood with an excited warmth of pity and envy, as if encountering in the dripping dark a younger self; when Kathryn turns, having unlocked the door, to say a formal final goodbye, holding out a long white cold wet hand, Hope instead embraces her, though being so much shorter she lands her lips not on the other woman’s cheek but on the bony curve of her jaw. Still she hangs on, relishing this muffled, impatient other body, naked and savory beneath its clothes, warmer than the air: amid the rods of rain, a scent of thick black hair. “
Have
your life,” she says, in a whisper pushed from within like a shout, “go and have it, dear. It won’t be mine, it can’t be mine, we were all so naïve in a way, thinking we were so important to the world, but it will be yours, your own. Don’t hang back. Don’t let this Alec or any man take it from you.”

Kathryn, rigid for a moment, returns the hug, perhaps more crunchingly than she had intended, and lowers her face enough to promise, “O.K., I’ll try not to.” The peck of a kiss her wet face gives the older woman’s wet face has the stern, statuesque quality her mouth has: hardened by seriousness, by concentration on the effort of an interview, denying itself all but a few smiles. Now it does seem to smile from within the drenched hood of soft wool. The invader says, “
Thank
you for being so generous with your time, and so frank. Please, you
must
run inside.”

“Thank
you
for letting me go on and on, making it real to myself again.”
Had
she been frank? Too frank? About Dot? About Zack? No matter. So little matters, it turns out. Why do we get so fussed? Hope quits the embrace; she feels the rain seeping through her thick wool shirt to her skin and beyond, into that layer of her where death will one day settle. “Catch your death” was a phrase of her childhood, used by grown-ups of colds, which lurked in the air like ghosts
and polio and radio waves. Our African ancestors thought we walked through swarms of spirits and it turns out we are in fact wreathed in invisible microörganisms.

Kathryn finds the door handle of Alec’s car; the dark and rain release the concussive pang of the driver’s side opening, spilling a wedge of light onto Kathryn’s square-toed boots, the patch of ground turning to mud beneath them, some flattened blades of grass here at the lawn’s edge, and a scattering of pebbles each with its sharp projection of shadow, like something Mr. Hartz would have wanted Hope to see. What would he think seeing
her
, approaching eighty and as blind now as when ten! Not daring to run, she makes her way back along the flagstones, whose placement her feet know by heart, though still she is grateful for the growing visibility as she nears the house’s lit windows. Kathryn’s headlights come on and then swing in the start of a three-point turn, so that the earth beneath Hope’s feet seems to wheel, to tilt on a wave of raking illumination that exaggerates each contour and pocket of shadow in the colorless lawn; it rises toward her like the lunar surface to a moon lander, but subsides as the visitor’s automobile turns farther, changes gear, and heads down the dirt driveway with red taillights blinking like angry dragon eyes. The horn honks once, the headlight cones full of sparkling rain pause and then disappear behind the stone wall at the upper side of the public, macadamized road. Hope has reached the half-dry porch, gives an unseen wave, and lets herself into her house.