Seek My Face (22 page)

Her memory now serves up poor Dot at thirteen going off to Brearley and crying and screaming there in the foyer because her braces and acne humiliated her and she didn’t want to go, ever, ever, she
hated
all those skinny smooth spoiled blonde bitches. Dot’s figure in adolescence had become stocky and her sallow skin was breaking out and Hope felt so helpless, unable to change the body of her daughter as you would scrape down and redo a painting, and no father on hand to tell Dot she was still his beautiful baby, because by that point, in 1975, Guy had left. His mother died and he left, as if her distant will, her sense of propriety, had been holding him here, among the empty rooms and forgotten toys and female voices. Paul and Piet had gone off to boarding school. Jeanette Nova—Bernie too had died, a loquacious old master sheepishly basking in the limelight after a life of defiant obscurity, but Jeanette lived on and on, thinner and thinner, a thread vibrating on the city’s loom, kept alive by interior decoration and gallery parties and gossip—said it was a compliment to Hope that he had stayed that long. She had been a saint, turning such a blind eye. Blind eye? But Hope didn’t really want to ask her,
Blind eye to what?
Jeanette was spinning on, her shrivelled silver-ringed hands flickering in whatever bright room had housed this conversation, city lights splashed beyond the triple-glazed windows, a dash of vengeance in her animation perhaps, the two women’s fondness for each other a mixture like Irish coffee, pulling several ways. “Nobody,” she told Hope in her raucous, party-worn voice, “foresaw all those children!”

“People were surprised,” Hope tells Kathryn, “that Guy proved to be as much of a father as he did, but that was his nature, to give everything a try, and to be productive. What he didn’t have, I suppose, was staying power. His styles tended to last two or three years at the most, and he often would be working in two styles at the same time. For instance, at the same time as he was doing those hilarious huge plastic reproductions of junk food, all gloppy with paint just like a real Big Mac, mustard and ketchup and relish, he and his assistants were turning out those multiple silk screens of car accidents and electric chairs, after 1963 of Jackie looking stunned in her pillbox hat, with such a different, impersonal visual feel, in those icy Day-Glo colors. Though in everything Guy did there was a hospitality to accident, to the unplanned. It’s a paradox: Zack, whose best work looks like
all
accident, as though a whirling dervish had gotten loose among the paint cans, in fact was very emphatic about his work containing
no
accidents, as I may have said before—forgive me, Kathryn, if I have. It was one of the few consistent things in his public statements, where Clem or I didn’t have to put the words into his mouth. It had to do with the dignity of what he was doing, his masculine control over it. Whereas Guy, who made himself into a kind of factory, once he bought that town house on Twenty-seventh Street and called it Holloway Hospice and even signed everything with a stencilled ‘HH,’
depended
on accident, on human imperfection intervening. I remember, before it became quite so clear that he didn’t want me down at the Hospice—that he was quite happy with the gang of weirdos and druggies that were collecting there—my taking off an afternoon from the kids and helping with some acrylic silk screens, I was interested in learning the process, I hadn’t touched a brush to canvas in years, I hadn’t done
anything but some charcoal sketches of the children asleep and a quick gouache or two out of our apartment windows. Anyway, down at the Hospice—Guy claimed the name meant art was on its last legs, this was where it had come to die—he looked at my results in that quick, almost frighteningly concentrated way he had and said, ‘No, darling, you’ve done them too perfectly, you must let some carelessness in. Here.’ And he smeared several with the side of his hand, and once I got over the shock I could see it looked better, the mechanical had been touched by the human, it made the whole idea of repetition, of a repeatable process, poignant. The imperfections are us, trying to break out. The smaller the imperfection is, the more poignant in a way. He went from putting pieces of torn cartons into his combines to duplicating the cartons themselves, as precisely as possible, but still you can see they are done by hand. I don’t think his helpers at the Hospice understood any better than I did why doing one silk screen from a newspaper paragraph is just copying but doing a whole band of them, sixteen of them, all overlaid with cerise or turquoise, was a work of art that would say something on a museum wall. Zack was interested only in expressing what the painter felt, Guy more in what the viewer saw. He was as sophisticated a theoretician in his way as Bernie and Roger, but he never talked theory. At least to me.”

Hope feels she is trying to sell Guy to Kathryn, as a worthy successor to Zack, but the other woman isn’t buying, some taint or smallness clings to Guy in her mind, whereas Zack is all wide-screen glamour. The young woman’s voice, growing huskier with a touch of catarrhal rasp as the room cools in tune with the darkening snow-spitting day outside, suggests she has heard enough about Bernie and Roger and artistic theories. “You bring up the Hospice,” she says in an
accusatory tone. “There was quite a lot of drug activity associated with the people who hung out there, especially when Guy began to make experimental movies. At least one of the staff died of a heroin OD, and an actress in one of his films—quite unwatchable, of course; that was the joke, I gather—committed suicide. How did you feel, while you were trying to raise three children on the Upper East Side, about Guy going off every day to the site of all this ’sixties-early-’seventies craziness?” A concluding sniff resounds in her long, stuffed-up nose.

“Well,” Hope says. She feels the blood warm her cheeks as her Quaker blood rises to protest. “I never thought a modern artist could or should be a standard off-the-shelf member of the bourgeoisie. Art has no comfortable place in American life; the artist has to be outside the system. But Guy was never an addict. He didn’t smoke cigarettes and hardly drank. Even on our West Coast pre-honeymoon, he was very measured with the pot—he didn’t want to put any particle of his brain at risk, he had known from boyhood that he must live by his wits. And he had of course this beautiful ability to compartmentalize. Like most American men, he had an office life and a home life. We were like the sheltered spoiled family of a nineteenth-century sweatshop owner, who didn’t bring any ugly details home. He would spend an evening with me and the boys watching
The Andy Griffith Show
and then put some Schubert on the hi-fi and play a game of backgammon with me and the next morning go down to where some of his tripped-out hangers-on were doing a threesome with cameras rolling. Squalor didn’t bother Guy, he saw it as part of the urban reality we walk through every day. He had great faith in his ability to remain pure, a pure transmitter, turning everything into art. And he did this by simply saying it
was
art. And without
ever raising his voice—that was what I marvelled at most about him, his good humor and even temper. With the children
he
, believe it or not, was the calm disciplinarian, I was too hot-headed and took everything they did I didn’t like as a personal affront. When Dot would come in and wake us, in spite of our getting her a cat, it was I who would—what’s the phrase?—‘go ballistic’ and Guy who would be the soothing one and lead her back gently to bed. At the same time, some of the art critics, who had gotten comfortable with Abstract Expressionism by now, just as it was quite clearly dead, were denouncing him as an artistic anti-Christ, a kind of King of Misrule recycling everything crass and stupid about American life and fooling museums into displaying it; Robert Hughes in
Time
was especially vitriolic. It was true, the museum directors liked what he did, it fit with everything outside the museum that the people had to pass through to get there; it connected with the life of the street. It connected with the gift shop.”

“Well, you are certainly generous, talking about Guy.”

“He was generous to me. Even at the end, in the settlement. Money was something that didn’t interest him, except the actual
look
of it, he always said American money was the best-designed. I didn’t have to marry Jerome Chafetz for financial reasons. I did it because we fell in love.”

Kathryn yields up what sounds to Hope like a sigh through her nose, slightly liquid. Poor thing, she is fighting a cold, and with a long drive back to the city still ahead of her. And still waiting to catch up to this love that Hope keeps flaunting. Some women fall in love easily and have babies easily and their genes pour into the future, making the species ever more romantic. Then there is this other kind of woman, where it stops. The interview must be getting to the end.

“Your daughter, Dorothy. Did her eventual gender preference shock or disturb you?”

Now Hope gives a little sigh, refolding her hands in her lap after rocking a beat or two, trying to think what an honest answer would be. Her dammed-up love for her lesbian daughter makes within her a black swamp of sadness her inner travels generally skirt. She stalls, she stonewalls. “No, why would it?”

Her first and only daughter, necessarily neglected. The boys were still toddlers, a menace to themselves and each other; she would rest the baby between feedings in her bassinet on the living-room floor like a parcel addressed to someone else, and when her footsteps in hurrying past would tell the infant someone was near, little Dot would wiggle in her cocoon of blankets with, it seemed, sheer pleasure to be sharing the earth with another live presence. Taken into Hope’s arms, her solid warm body would tense and quiver with its unspeakable private bliss, like a song she could not help singing; she would suckle avidly, clutching and unclutching one of her mother’s fingers in a wrinkled palm that gripped as softly as a snapdragon. Her body adhered and conformed to Hope’s in a way the boys’, resistant and thrusting almost from the start, did not. As in a fogged mirror, her own spirit bent above the life-breath of this other female, anticipating the games they would share, the return to her own girlhood, at the same time consigning Dot to the stoicism of their sex, and feeling justified in neglecting her, for this interval while the demands of the males in their family took precedence. Her brothers continued to outrank, outshout, outshine her, and she and her mother never did have the full-hearted union of spirits, the entry into affectionate conspiracy, that Hope had anticipated. Instead, blockages, stagnation. When she would
wheel the child in her stroller around the windy corner of Seventy-ninth and Park, the fabled wide avenue would seem a huge treadmill hurtling with its yellow taxis toward the barrier of the Pan Am Building thirty blocks away and, like a treadmill, essentially not going anywhere.

Kathryn has not deigned to respond. She is waiting for her victim to elaborate, to fetch up another unshapely nugget from the mire of memory. Anything Hope says about Dorothy will be taped and possibly printed, although she doubts that this awkward, relentless interrogator, her spiritual substance so dense and unyielding, will ever place more than a tiny fraction of these recorded words in print, in this article she is doing for, Hope now remembers from their old telephone call, an “on-line” magazine that exists only in cyberspace. “She inherited Guy’s clear blue English eyes,” Hope tells her, “whereas the boys got my muddy hazel, with varying amounts of green depending on the color shirt they had on.”

“Was she Guy’s favorite?”

“As an infant, yes. But then as she got older, Guy seemed more at ease with the boys. He was friendly and teasy with Dot, but also slightly wary of her, afraid of getting too close to a mechanism he didn’t understand. That was part of his personality, not wanting to wade in without understanding, without being able to foresee the outcome. He was unlike Zack in this. Zack waded in and then got restless. If Guy had been Zack, he would have trained assistants to turn out drip paintings until all the markets, foreign and domestic, had been saturated. That sounds cynical—
ungenerous
, yes?—but there was a
thrift
to Guy’s inspirations, as well as an abundance. Art, which had been so hot and urgent and, yes, existential when I was a young woman, had cooled into ideas, one at a time—have I said this? What wasn’t Pop was
Hard Edge or Color Field. Look at Bernie’s big paintings compared with, oh, Ad Reinhardt and Morris Lewis. What has happened to Bernie’s passion, those giant skies of pure color, the enormous gamble he took? It’s become a flavor of ice cream.”

Hope knows Kathryn doesn’t want more painting talk from her but hopes to distract her from the topic of her daughter. Kathryn will not be distracted.

“How old did you say Dorothy was when Guy left?”

“Well, he’d been leaving for some time. Spending more and more time down at the Hospice, and going to events in Tokyo and Venice and Rio that lasted for weeks. Throughout the ’sixties, his projects had been getting grandiose. Guy became enamored of billboards, and got some real billboard artists to show him how to do it, and then produced these things so enormous they couldn’t be gotten in or out of doors and had to be displayed in museum courtyards or the abandoned old railroad stations that more and more cities had in their centers. As if this wasn’t grandiose enough, he took to designing public monuments—a pair of scissors the size of the Eiffel Tower and huge baseball bats and typewriter erasers and clothespins, no state or city authority could actually vote to build them, though a few actually did, mostly in the Midwest, hoping to put a little pizzazz into their dying downtowns, but even if they were never built they generated all these drawings and blueprints that were worth something, of course. As I say, Guy wasted almost nothing.”

“You were going to tell me how you felt about Dorothy’s gender preference.”

“Was I? Or was I
not
going to tell you?”

In this impasse Kathryn’s face glows with balked current; she tucks one strand of her sleek hair behind a white ear
that is, Hope sees for the first time, not flat to her skull but cupped, like a boy’s at the age before manhood begins to fill him in. Her hand still raised, the interviewer bends forward to check that her tape recorder is still murmuring.