Seek My Face (3 page)

Kathryn brushes this aside as facetious, as unworthy. She can’t imagine hunger and poverty as real cultural factors. Her face presses a few inches deeper into the space between Hope and herself, she in the soft old sunroom chair and Hope in her hard rocker, a rocker made by former hippies in Burlington of no less, the nicely printed (in green ink) leaflet that came with it said, than five different woods; they shrank at different rates and made the fit tighter as the chair aged, so the leaflet claimed. She had given the chair to Jerry for his first birthday up here and the claim is not yet disproved. It supports her weight, as she leans back to keep her inquisitor at a distance. The unkind clarity of the morning light—not a cloud in the blue sky, a glisten of mud on the bare earth outside the kitchen door when she had loaded up the bird feeder ten minutes before Kathryn too punctually arrived—strips the interviewer’s face of beauty and shows it to be horsy and humorless, its plummy eyes astride a long nose with a slight bump in it, its lips downturned in determination not to be distracted or too easily charmed, lips that might melt if kissed but are in danger of settling into a permanent sour frown of unfulfilled ambition. Kathryn glances down into the sheets of paper balanced on her black lap, her thin thighs pressed tightly together, pages of computer-typed questions to help her as the interview tape unwinds in the little machine, a Sony of two tones of gray, its purr tinny in the silence, on the low table between them, not a table but an old wooden sea-chest Hope bought in River-head in the ’forties for twenty dollars and sanded and varnished, those first few years when she and Zack were enthusiastic about making a home together on the light-soaked windy tip of Long Island, worlds removed from
what he called, euphemistically, covering his from-bar-to-bar binges, the “wear and tear” of Manhattan. Kathryn says hurriedly, as if Hope were sensitive to such matters, “The triumph was exploited, I know, politically, by the Rockefellers and the CIA among others, but I don’t see it as a political movement, originally. I see it as innocent, the last flare of our idealistic innocence.”

“Oh dear,” Hope responds. “We didn’t feel innocent to ourselves. We felt very sophisticated and a bit wicked. And the painters didn’t all know each other equally well, or should I say like each other equally. A number of the others, the more intellectual and better organized, didn’t like Zack much, especially after his paintings became so famous and his drinking became terrible again. Zack wasn’t easy to like, or even, after a while, to love.” She lets that float a few seconds, tantalizing this other, tempting her to pounce prematurely on that belly-up word “love,” but Kathryn ignores the provocation, and Hope has to continue, explaining, clarifying what would have always been better left mysterious. Interviewers and critics are the enemies of mystery, the indeterminacy that gives art life. She flutters a hand—knobby, freckled, smelling of paint thinner—at the end of her man’s lumberjack-shirt sleeve and says, “Everybody now is expected to turn inside out on command, like impatiens seeds when touched, or—what is that plant called?—squirting cucumber. Zack hated being interviewed; it offended his lower-class sense of dignity, of there being things one didn’t say. We all—me, Clem, Peggy, Betty, Herbie Forrest—used to coach him on what to say, but when the time came he refused to say it, or mumbled it. It was his arrogance—he thought you shouldn’t chase recognition, it should come to you without being asked. He was wild for it yet despised playing the game.” He is
gropingly coming back to her, his squarish puzzled bad-boy face, its three muscular dents, deep dimples as if in amplification—a stronger restatement—of her own lone dimple, and with his face the look of the Manhattan streets back then, before glass-skin architecture and plastic garbage bags: the curbs of East Ninth Street crowded on collection days with corroded galvanized trash cans, angrily dented on the dump truck’s hydraulically lifted lip, and the huge metal noise they made in the middle of the night, the trash men getting their own back at all those sleeping safe above them. The cans smelled plainly of garbage then, and class war was unconcealed, unions versus management, the Reds against the rich. You were not asked to have a nice day; buildings looked much the same in Manhattan as in any city, brick and four stories high; each block formed a little village, with a shoe repairman, a barber shop, a notions shop run by a pair of sisters, a Chinese laundry, a coal-and-wood cellar, a drugstore with a marble soda counter. Eighth Street was a kind of
souk
, where you were jostled down into the gutter, and the area north and east of Washington Square had a furtive European quality, Grace Church with its waffle-pattern gray steeple presiding where Broadway slightly bent like a medieval street sneaking along, and Cooper Union standing afloat in its square like a brown Venetian palace. University Place was a string of bars, including the Cedar, which when you opened the door always seemed warm, and dim enough so that your defects were left outside. It smelled of smoke and sawdust.

“He was,” Hope says, halting, conscious of herself as the possessor, in this other’s pendulous black eyes, of a wandering, frayed old mind, beyond any usefulness but some shreds of memory to be woven into another’s story, “he was self-indulgent and hardly even self-educated. And of
course drank too much. But we all drank too much, it was part of the war, the blackouts, our desperate dingy mood, all that death, the newspapers dealing every day in death, hundreds, thousands, numbers that would make screaming headlines now. It was a man’s world. Art was a man’s world. They could hardly make room for women, even when they married us. It was a tough, man’s world. You speak of Zack and the rest as heroes of this historic moment you have—what’s the word now?—constructed, you see them as Titans in the clouds, but the Titans were a sad group actually, who came to a sorry end, if I remember my childhood Bulfinch. Except for funny old Bernie, who had married money, and Roger, who had a trust fund, and Onno, who began to sell before any of the others—he had that European flair that dealers and buyers could already understand, not our poor American groping, up from the depths, Jung and all those archetypes—
everybody
was poor and had been for years, living off the Project, the Federal Arts Project, before the war and even during it, though the dole was drying up. At the moment you mention, post-war, even after the publicity had begun to come in, Zack was still not selling paintings. A few prints and works on paper but not the big paintings. He was getting to be famous, but we stayed surprisingly poor—it maddened him. Peggy’s gallery gave Zack a dole, we had to borrow from her to buy the house, a house and three acres for four thousand dollars, think of it, the land alone would be a million now, out there close to the Hamptons; he never earned it out, and so the gallery kept his paintings. Just kept them, for years. Most people had no idea anything wonderful was happening. They didn’t know there was a moment. They were still thinking Picasso and Miró and the Surrealists. Not Dalí—he was as much despised as Benton, standing for everything we hated.”

“Of course,” Kathryn murmurs, placatingly, sensing a kindling, wanting Hope to run on.

“Dalí was a one-man circus, department-store window-dressing. He actually
did
some windows for Bonwit’s, and then fell through the glass tearing up the display when the management insisted on putting clothes on the mannequins, who were, I don’t know, stepping into fur-lined bathtubs and lying on beds of red coals, a lot of feathers and disembodied hands holding mirrors. It made all the papers, which of course is what he wanted. He understood publicity, and was shameless. Europeans are, when they get over here. This was before I moved to New York, but Zack somehow had been there and would describe it and laugh, but it also offended his sense of dignity that an artist would sell out like that. Zack could be in rags, filthy from a night in the gutter, but he had this ideal of dignity, of, I don’t know, the artist not as some performer and society leech but as a
worker
, and at least as worthy of respect as a preacher or a banker. It was one of the things about him I loved.” Hope feels herself roused, her face reddening, her heart pumping, striving to please, stung by the fear of appearing doddery; the old deprivations and ridicule seem as close as if this interloping girl had been one of the glib art journalists who had served up easy wisecracks in the ’forties
Time
and
Life
. But by the time these publications were taking any notice, a tide had turned. “You speak about a historic moment, Kathryn, but the attention was all in a few galleries, with a few critics, who had their own fish to fry for that matter, their own names to make—Clem used Zack to make his own name, and when Zack faltered Clem was the first one off the boat. The canvases, the ones that later everybody could see were magnificent, and that went for millions—what good were they? They were too big.
They were public art without a public. Zack—it was pathetic—when he was in his cups used to tell people what a great investment his work would be, and of course he was right. One man in the Flats—Jimmy Quinn, who ran what was really a glorified vegetable stand—took a little thirty-by-forty fiberboard of Zack’s in payment and ten years or so ago finally sold it for two million dollars. He still drives around in his beat-up pickup. Zack would have liked that.”

Hope pauses, and Kathryn’s lips part to spit another question into the tape, but Hope is not done with her long, looping thought; there is a picture of Zack she wants to finish, though the memory of him threatens to suck her back, out, down, like waves foaming at her ankles at one of the beaches, one of the remote rocky ones past the bluffs, past the old fish-factories, toward the Point, where they would stand as the afternoon gave up its strong light and turned ruddy and the breeze picked up, there being nothing to the south but the Atlantic, a few gray ships on the horizon like index tabs in a filing cabinet. “We all drank,” she repeats, “but for Zack it was a poison, it released demons. Like many a famous drinker, he really couldn’t drink. I held my liquor better than he did, and I was just a slip of a thing in my twenties.” Zack was in his thirties when they first went together: his narrow hips, his chest and shoulders coated with blond wool, even his bare feet were beautiful, knobby and broad across the toes, and the insteps as white as the skin inside a woman’s arm. She stood beside him feeling the suck of ankle-high surf, the way it pulls the sand out from under your heels. There had been the white noise of the waves and the far-stretching scent of beach, salt and iodine and rotting marine bodies, fish and jellyfish leaving their round ochre corpses like puddles of varnish on the rocks, collapsed, unable to get back to their element, their
anatomy dimly seen within the puddle, useless, wasted, something like breathing still taking place, poor doomed creatures, so we all. She had liked the way Zack was not too much taller than she, like some men, including Ruk; she felt like an Eve matched to him, as in those marvellous Cranach panels in Pasadena, or the two frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel, the Masaccio so anguished and ashamed, the red angel over their heads banishing them, and the Masolino so serene and stately and haughty, the little benign female snake’s head above Eve’s, Eve cool with her centrally parted fair hair, unrepentant, before the Fall, the cleft of her sex not hidden, nor Adam’s penis. Face it: this young woman, too, is beautiful. Hope imagines Kathryn’s naked body—the swing of hip into thigh, the rose-madder-tipped breasts floating on the rib cage, the pubic triangle pure ivory-black and oily as in a Corot—all in a flash, then renounces the image:
of the creature
. Her susceptibility to beauty, Hope has always known, is what has kept her minor as an artist. The great ones go beyond beauty, they spurn it as desert saints spurned visions of concupiscence and ease: the Devil’s offer of the world as reward.

She tells her interrogator, “The moment you describe, when America came into its own in terms of art, artists had been saying ever since the Armory Show that it must happen; what was Regionalism but an attempt to make it happen?—Benton and so on, the WPA murals. We were terribly marginal, abstraction was a pipe dream like Communism. The media—they weren’t called that then—played us for laughs; we were mad fools. America was titillated. Those pictures of Zack in
Life
, and then the little movie that terrible, bossy German made, Hans something—those were what killed him, really. He hated himself for becoming a celebrity, the new Dalí. For being made to see, I suppose, that becoming
a celebrity was what he had wanted all along. He really had very little talent, the way most art students have it—just this terrible drive to be great. He was desperate to be not just good but
great
. Others thought they had it, too, the drive, but they didn’t stick with it, they got distracted by their talent. Zack wasn’t distracted that way; he
stuck
. He had nothing but this—” She does not want to say “hope.” She goes on, “He was terribly clumsy with a pencil, with a brush. His hands seemed to be too thick for them. And he didn’t
know
anything, compared with most people. He’d gotten in with Benton at the Art Students League; Benton saw himself in him, I suppose, the braggart part of him, the west-of-the-Mississippi thing, and Zack’s talent was no threat, and then when back in California Zack had actually met Siqueiros, and picked up on the messiness, the new industrial paints, the social protest or whatever, everything messy and new, and he had driven out to Pomona College to see a mural Orozco had done of Prometheus; when he was east again he drove up to Dartmouth to see those Orozcos, he loved them, those earth colors, the bad drawing, and like everybody in New York in the ’thirties he inhaled Surrealism, but without having much sense of the psychological theories behind it, it was all just as it applied to him, the would-be great Zack McCoy, personally. You mentioned politics, but I don’t remember that we much noticed it, the things people talk about now. Truman, and the Marshall Plan, China going under to Mao, and Europe on the brink, and all those tests, the test sirens, the talk about annihilation: it didn’t have to do with us. We were utterly selfish. Even the war—though not everybody got out of serving, many did. The board doctors classified them as crazy or homosexual, even when they had wives. I was so shocked, coming to New York
when I was twenty, by how nobody mentioned the war, in the worst year of it, when it looked like we really might lose and Hitler and Tojo would rule the world. All we talked about was painting and who was fucking who.”