Seek My Face (28 page)

“I wonder why,” Kathryn muses, “art can’t be a business. It used to be a trade, and there was no shame in that.”

“I suppose the same way religion shouldn’t be a business, or be
only
one. Except that religion has a dependable product, our fear and loneliness, to trade on, whereas art has to convince people that they need it, they need something purer and more authentic than they get elsewhere, in all of life’s
other
business. That purity and authenticity are worth having, or witnessing from however far away. The soul—can you stand the word?—can’t be sullied by worry and self-interest. Guy had a lovely untroubled productive disinterest when I met him, living in that loft full of junk he’d stolen from the street, and as the money and flattery and awards poured in, he felt it slipping away from him, the purity, the heedlessness that can make something truly
new. He began to care too much, because he
had
to care, because all of us around him depended on him; it was cruel. But, I must say, he never did anything that mattered—that had enough soul, enough disinterest to matter—while he was in the care of Little Miss Hardbum. And now she’s nursemaid to a man who hasn’t a clue as to who she is or he is.”

“We should move on,” Kathryn has the nerve to tell Hope, when it was her obtuse question that had prompted the monologue. “Tell me about Jerry. The two of you met when? Do you remember the occasion?”

“Oh, it was at one of Guy’s openings. Unlike most of the people there, he was trying to look at the works, and I was worn out with making conversation, and we were standing side by side in front of a limp old-fashioned typewriter, twice real size and made of shiny white vinyl, all the round button keys overlapping and jumbled and the keys and carriage return dangling like a newborn lamb’s helpless little legs, and we both said, together, ‘Beautiful.’ Beautiful. What can I say about Jerry that everybody doesn’t already know? He was a dear man. He was dear at least to me, divorcing his wife to marry me, a favor I must say I never received from Bernie. Not that I wanted it. Bernie was too … too citified, he and Jeanette were too much a team. As we were saying earlier, in the decade after I … knew him
well
, Bernie had come up roses, the father of this, the father of that, when they’d had no children actually, Color Field, Hard Edge, the father even, supposedly, of some of the earthworks, those two-mile-long chalk lines somebody drew in the Mojave Desert in the late ’sixties, as I remember, using the desert like one of Bernie’s big monochromatic canvases. Those big flat paintings everybody hated for years—Peggy couldn’t stand them, and neither could
Betty—they turned out to be the road to the future, while Jarl’s huge, scraggly vertical things were an embarrassment to museums he had bullied into buying them, they took up too much wall space, Jarl wanted room after room to himself, and Zack was stuck in his moment, a classic like Ryder or Bierstadt but absolutely fatal to imitate, in fact nobody else knew how to do it, how much to thin the enamel and what stick to use. Bernie was even named the father of Guy’s early flat look and lack of impasto, and I’ve never seen Guy so miffed, it was as if he resented the little part that Bernie had played in my life before, of course I had told him, but that kind of conventional sexual jealousy was the last thing Guy would ever let himself confess to.”

“And weren’t there, even while you were married, a few younger men,” Kathryn asks in the careful, slightly retracted voice with which she hopes to enter Hope’s bloodstream without breaking the skin, “performance artists?”

Young male bodies, shadowy, the rounded muscle mass of shoulder and thigh, the flat stomachs and their tender pendants, stir in her mind like bodies buried in mud, faces without marked expressions. Jeb. Randy. They had names, addresses, philosophies, aspirations. They had hoped to use her, but she was hard to use, even by herself for her own benefit. The blacks were an adventure for her, dancers, their touching knobby hardworking feet. Henry. Kyle. They differed from whites in that as soon as you began to talk to them they assumed they knew what you wanted and they were right. She wanted release. They were gentle in adhering and gentle in letting go, too much so for their own benefit, but this was a time when profitless bestowals were the political fashion. “Please, my dear,” she protests. “I was in my early fifties. I was a
grande dame
.”

“But still very attractive. I’ve seen lots of photographs.
I’ve also seen,” Kathryn goes on when Hope says nothing, “you described as another of Bernie’s disciples. The stripes.”

“My stripes are much smaller and more numerous than his,” Hope says, her voice firmer on the ground of her art. “I would describe myself as a Hochmann disciple, one of the last. I’m still trying to do the ‘push and pull’ he taught us, but in a quieter, shallower space.” With her bent fingers Hope measures for the girl an inch or less of space, to show how subtle the push and pull have become in her gray mists. “Like the push and pull, scarcely noticeable, of breathing.”

She wonders now if any of her infidelities hurt Guy. At the time she felt, or made herself feel, that he wanted it, with that obscure impulse that led him to hide himself in a mass of identities, an outpour of parodies, an art that committed itself to no one personality. Her little band of lovers were her Hospice, her self-effacing haven.

Kathryn decides she is going to penetrate no deeper in this direction and says, “And all this time, you were holding on to your and Zack’s place in the Flats.” This seems an accusation. Though Hope has tried to sell her interviewer on Guy, painting an affecting portrait of his beautiful fluency and flair and eventual stymied sorrow, the art world cycling even the blithest talent out of fashionability, Zack is where Kathryn’s heart lies; Zack has brought the two women together. Her interviewer is implying that Hope betrayed her second and third husbands by holding on to the house where she had lived with the first.

She doesn’t deny it. “It was security, I suppose, to have a property that was all mine, that I had inherited. At first I had the paintings he left to deal with and protect. Then, when they became too valuable for me to protect, and I was spending more time in the city, it was easier to leave the old
furniture in place, it would have looked like junk mixed in with Guy’s and my expensive things. We would spend summers out there, the children loved it—the beaches, the funky feel of the Island out that far—though Guy came with us less and less, he said he hated rich people’s parties and sand in his shoes. Zack’s ghost oppressed him, I think. The new art crowd was more Fire Island than East Hampton. Off-season, I rented it, for quite little if the renter seemed sympathetic, sometimes a Lemon Drop buddy of Zack’s or one of Guy’s protégés who needed somewhere to cool off, the money was less important than that the place not be damaged or go to ruin. When Jerry came into the picture, he had his own place in Southampton but never saw any need to sell the Flats, he called it my ace in the hole. The collector in him was excited, actually; he hired a custodian to live in the house, since things were getting broken or stolen under my system, and we both saw that the value of it was to keep the place, especially including the barn, the way it was when Zack lived there.”

“And now it’s a museum.”

“By appointment only. Schoolchildren come, on trips. Documentary filmmakers use the house, I’m the only one left who knows how it isn’t exactly right, what furniture is missing and so on, but it’s close enough. There are people to whom Zack has become a cult, not as big a one as Elvis’s or Marilyn’s but like James Dean’s, say; Zack was a far more important painter than Dean was an actor but, still, car crashes, and that uneasy cocky look—these people should have a place to visit, and where better than where he did all his important work?”

“Of course,” Kathryn says. “And it keeps a part of your life intact, too.”

“You object to that?”

“Not at all. I envy it. Most of us live in a place, and then move out, and the landlord moves another person in.”

“Don’t envy me, my dear. You have your life ahead of you, and mine is behind me. You wouldn’t want to be in my body a minute, there are so many aches I’ve learned to overlook that you would notice; you would find them unendurable.” This would be impolite to dispute, though Hope sees that Kathryn is tempted to argue, her long head recoiling as if at a scent or to hearken to the rain that taps at the windows and makes that low groaning harmonic in the gutter, and Hope notices for the first time a beauty to the underside of the other woman’s nose: its curve ends in a tip where two small planes meet, the lower facet continuous with the flesh of the septum, which extends lower than is common, so that her nostril flares in profile, tender and avid and redly suffused with blood. This glimpse of live creatureliness brings the girl’s other features up into a feral glory: her plum-dark eyes with their curious glassiness, her unpainted lips pursed and unsmiling under the tension of this interview, her somewhat cupped and uncannily white little ears, small for the size of her jaw and fully exposed by the silver combs that flatten her hair against her skull, hair that, left to its own tendencies, would sprawl hugely on the pillow. Hope sees the other woman as one a man could adore, go sick in love of, sink his seed into the groin of as if his life’s work would be thereby accomplished. The strange concept, which she heard herself just propose, of this alien young identity seated opposite her transposed into Hope’s own body, with its arthritic fingers, passing chest pains, frequent shortness of breath, and abdominal complaints as her shrinking stomach resists the daily meals she force-feeds it, engenders more quick fantasies—the half-dreams that flutter through a weary mind—of their interpenetration, scorpions
in a bottle, this girl invading her with her questions while Hope in turn tries to imagine Kathryn’s intimate life, the sensate creature beneath the oily pubic curls.

“So,” the next question comes, “your relationship with Jerome Chafetz began while you were still married to Guy Holloway?”

“Yes, several years before, but perfectly properly. Jerry had bought a number of Guy’s white vinyl sculptures just as the market not only for Pop but for every kind of art was cooling,” Hope states. It pleases her to demonstrate that, thanks to her third marriage, she knows how money talks: “The Arabs had embargoed oil shipments to the U.S. because we helped Israel win the Yom Kippur War, and the economy had gone into what they called stagflation for the rest of the decade.”

“But Jerome Chafetz didn’t starve.”

“You can call him Jerry if you like. Everybody did, even his underlings and the help up here. Well before I became his wife, Jerry had reached that lovely point where his money couldn’t help making more money. He had been a stockbroker and then a stock analyst for one of the earliest mutual funds; in the early ’sixties, he struck out on his own and set up his own funds, designed to attract small investors as well as the pension-fund managers. He kept it simple, with just three funds in the beginning—Super-Gro, Sur-Gro, and Slo-Gro. Oddly enough, the Slo-Gro was the most heavily subscribed—people trusted it, people with money were still very conservative. The idea that everybody was rich or soon would be was something that Reagan brought in.”

“Jerry”—trying it out, with a twitch of that glorious nose—“died in ’86.”

“Yes. We were married in ’77. Nine wonderful years. We
must have had some cross words, but I can’t remember them. He was eleven years older than I, and saw me, I think, as the companion with whom he would start to have some fun in his life before time ran out. The funds were in the hands of younger managers, and we were always going away to Europe, or the Caribbean, or up here. We bought it in 1980. He had been a city boy all his life and discovered he loved the soil, the grass, the rocks—he built yards of stone walls, with his own hands. They got calluses, he would show me proudly.”

“He was an art collector; there must have been a frustrated artist in him.”

“Not frustrated, he always said picking stocks was an art and not a science. People in money are happier, I decided, than people in art. They’re not always preoccupied, they can relax without getting blind drunk. Jerry played tennis, he read novels and even poetry, he liked to cook, he read cookbooks, doing all the little measurements exactly, where Guy couldn’t have cared less about food, if it wasn’t a case of making a hamburger out of plaster or painting a row of cakes in a bakery window. And Zack, well, Zack would have fallen on his face on the stove.”

This is unjust, Hope feels as soon as the words are out of her mouth: Zack barbecued steaks those first summers on the Island, and some mornings, waking with a hangover earlier than she, he would scramble eggs or make an omelette with whatever stray vegetables he would find in the refrigerator or out in the garden, going out into the dew in his bare feet. The fence on their garden and the carpentry in the house that Zack did when they first moved to the Flats showed an instinct for order, an instinct fighting his pull toward self-destruction.

“I’m sorry,” she confesses to Kathryn, “that’s not quite
fair to Zack, he had a handy streak in fact, but Jerry was my first real experience of someone devoted to what you could call the art of living. My Quaker blood distrusted anything of the creature—”

“Creature?”

“Our bodily self. The
world’s
bodily self. Color, sex, ostentation. You know, the sins. You’ve heard of sins?”

“Of course.” Kathryn turns her head as if the question were a kind of slap.

Hope repents, tries to explain herself, herself and Jerry. “The artists I had lived my life among could be jolly and witty when they got together, but there was always an anxiety, a lot of jealousy and snide joshing—Zack was the butt of a lot of it, but then he would smash up their living rooms in sheer hostility—and a feeling of, what can we call it,
excessive
fun, as if they didn’t quite know what to do with life, the part of life that wasn’t putting in a bid for immortality, the daily pleasures that are all most people have. Jerry brought me back to those, the daily joys. He showed me that a day wasted wasn’t really a day wasted.”