Seek My Face (13 page)

Kathryn’s long face gathers a waxy glow to itself as the clouding day shifts past noon. Hope back at Cooper Union used to struggle with skin and skin color, skin’s translucence and the way it takes light at different depths and glows from within. If she were to paint Kathryn she would have to use a lot of green, to catch the matte dullness, the otherworldly tint. In summer such skin would take a deep even tan miles from Hope’s pink freckles. The woman shifts a little in the big plaid armchair that Hope had measured herself in as a child, and clears her throat of a collected dryness. Perhaps she is framing a question to ask, but Hope continues rapidly to prevent her: “So I was floundering in Zack’s shadow and got quite interested in what the
other
painters were doing. They had all come out to the Island, mostly all, here and there within ten miles of East Hampton. By ’48 or ’49, let’s say, after Zack had made his breakthrough though none of them liked to admit it, they had each settled on their
shtik
, a signature style they hoped would be as identifying as Zack’s drips were. I mean, they all still spoke of painting in terms of self-exploration and an agonized authenticity that would revolutionize the world and whatnot, but the results were a little like company logos, everybody working on the scale of nineteenth-century academic art but each of them having come up with some eye-catching simplification. Phil Kaline had his black-and-white girders, and Jarl these flaky flameshapes in two or three flat colors, vertical canvases getting so tall he had to convert an old disused Methodist church in Amagansett to work in, and Seamus, poor sweet fat Seamus, who even when doing his ’thirties urban realism—his marvellous subway scenes!—painted in a kind of Thomist grid, you could say, had turned to these floating rectangular clouds in a fuzzy milky color, the same hardware paints Zack used but thinned way down, curators say they’re desperately
unstable, which could have been part of his intention:
vita brevis, ars brevis
too. Roger, who was always thinking so hard, and full of French theory—symbolism, existentialism, structuralism before anybody else had ever heard of it—really only had one painting, oval black shapes like giant beans squeezed between black upright bookends with swatches of color peeping out behind, and Bernie, the other very clever one of us, took to doing colored strips the width of masking tape between giant flat fields of color. It seemed to me and most other people rather arid and doctrinaire, but he always spoke of the great passion with which he painted, and actually Bernie’s was the direction painting took in the ’fifties, he was the most influential and least arid in that sense. I loved Bernie, but felt closer to Roger as a painter, stuck with those huge squeezed beans, over and over, though in truth he had another thing he kept doing, he called them rather grandly ‘portals,’ they were rectangular, a single rectangle, partially outlined, on lovely big sheets of wove paper, each sheet must have cost
dollars
—well, you’ve been to museums, you’ve seen all this, but at the time it wasn’t so clear that this was
it
, American art’s coming of age, these big cartoony abstractions, to me it almost looked like a giving up, a reduction of a complex subjective process to
ideas
, compared with what Zack was doing out of his instincts. Two who wouldn’t stop painting, painting the old way, with brushwork and variety and a sort of representation, and still giving titles to their paintings—
Dwarf, Woman
—were Mahlon and Onno, and they suddenly seemed quaint, neither here nor there. What’s that thing from the Bible—
lukewarm I spit thee out
? I must have let something of my reservations show, because over in the purple carriage-house that Onno and Renée had inflicted on the landscape, I remember him putting his arm around
my waist and pulling me close and saying, “Dunt you vurry for me, Hope. Mondrian is dead, Picasso keeps on goink.” Meaning that what he was doing, these mad multicolored flurries you could just barely see were seated women, with crossed bare legs and high heels, would survive the devices invented by people like Roger and Bernie, who were intellectuals who really couldn’t paint at all in the old art-school way. Zack he respected—he knew Zack wasn’t taking it easy on himself, and didn’t let it get mechanical. If Zack had been willing to turn himself into America’s marvellous drip machine, he wouldn’t have gotten stuck after 1950. He wouldn’t have killed himself. Zack’s behavior was repetitious, but not his painting. He wouldn’t let it be, and it killed him.”

Onno was handsome, in a pale-haired Netherlandish style, with white eyelashes and full lips and a long chin and bottle-green eyes whose glance felt like a flick on the skin of Hope’s face. His hand around her waist was broad and workmanlike; though he drank and smoked recklessly enough to be one of the gang and had adored madcap, doomed Korgi, he was sane, Hope felt, sane as Zack was not. Onno’s brushwork looked wild and was subject to such expedients of
dérèglement
as painting with his left hand or pressing a newspaper over a wet canvas and transferring the imprint to another canvas and beginning again, these were all rational maneuvers to suppress his natural facility, his Picassoesque childhood as a precocious product of classic European art-training. He had learned to imitate American violence; Zack, born into it, was its captive. Onno’s hand rested long enough on Hope’s waist to send a message. He and Renée were one of those Continental couples who looked too good in public to be true. Hope was twenty-six, twenty-seven, old enough to believe she deserved a genius
who didn’t need a nursemaid. She could do with a little care herself. The breath from between Onno’s fleshy, inquiring lips possessed beneath the stale tobacco smell a sort of licorice sweetness.

“Onno de Genoog,” Kathryn pronounces. “Would you like to talk about your relationship?”

“Not really. He was a dear, kind, hardworking man and a wonderful painter. He was supportive to me when I needed it, when Zack”—how to say it?—“was falling apart.”

Kathryn leans forward to check that the Sony is still running and asks in a voice from which all fellow-feeling has been edited, “Is it true that he thought in the early ’fifties of leaving Renée for you?”

“No. Never. He and Renée were too much of an act, I would never have wanted to break it up. She has been the perfect great man’s widow, chastely tending the flame, never remarrying, unlike me.”

“You came to the role much younger than she,” Kathryn points out. “What about the time in the early ’fifties when Zack broke his ankle wrestling with Onno. Were they fighting over you?”

“Not at all. My dear, as I said earlier, women didn’t count for much in that macho world. They were drunk and fooling with each other, they had an artistic rivalry, and Zack came down hard on a low spot in the grounds around the famous purple house.”

“Is it true,” Kathryn went on, humorless and relentless not an hour after drinking Hope’s tea and using her bathroom and appearing awkward and guilty in the corridor to the studio, like a lost child, “that Onno called Zack’s work ‘pissing on canvas’?”

Hope smiles. “That was not an unkind remark. Anybody who knew Zack knew he was always pissing, in public if he
could. He used to tell of watching his father urinate off some rocky ledge in Arizona, it made a huge impression on him, in his child’s mind it defined masculinity, the great golden, glinting arc of it. You will remember, Kathryn, that when one of the Pop artists, I forget which but it wasn’t Guy, tried to parody Zack it was by urinating on canvas covered with copper metallic paint so the oxidation created patterns. The patterns were spattery and ugly, though, whereas Zack’s drip paintings are beautiful, stunningly beautiful, don’t you agree?”

“Oh, yes. Certainly.” But Kathryn is affronted, being called onstage this way, to give an opinion into her own tape.

“The early ones, as I perhaps said—do forgive me if I repeat myself—are my favorites. The canvas on the floor but still cut to human scale, six by four or so, before he began to give them numbered titles. Before a show he would call me into the barn to help him name them. It was one of the things we did together, one of the few ways I could be a collaborator. He used a lot of aluminum paint early on, and there was a skyey, spinning feeling to them, so I would suggest names from a star book Zack had bought when we first went out to the Island and he could see the stars the way he had seen them out west.
Sirius
, we called an especially cold-looking one, and a reddish one
Betelgeuse
, and another I wanted to name
Cassiopeia
because I remembered that she had bragged about how beautiful her daughter Andromeda was, or perhaps she herself, but Zack didn’t want people to look for constellations in the spatters, so we used more general terms like
Galaxy
or
Comet
—and there really is a comet in it, his drips were straighter then than they became in the ’fifties, when he got to do what he called drawings in air, which that German whose name I keep
suppressing photographed. One little one done in blues and aluminum paint on a black gesso we called
Magellanic Cloud
. Zack had very little interest in travelling—one of his insecurities—but he did use to talk about going to South America so he could see the Southern Cross and the Coal Sack and the Magellanic Clouds from his star book. And I tried to think of fairy-tale names, like
Sinbad
or
Wotan
. He liked the Jungian idea of mythic prototypes but didn’t want people to think his paintings were in any way portraits, so, beginning in ’48, he and Peggy labelled them with numbers and the dominant colors:
Blue, Red, Yellow; Yellow, Gray, Black
. The sad truth is, which I’d tell only you, Kathryn”—a dash of irony, to see if her interviewer is still paying attention—“is that I liked the later canvases a little less in part because I was locked out of the naming. And it wasn’t long after that that I began to take up my own painting again, which Zack interpreted, not altogether incorrectly, as a hostile gesture.”

“Yes. I wanted to get back to that.”

“You needn’t bother, dear. It was rather paltry, the good wife in me fought the painter all the way. As I said, I tried being Abstract Expressionist, as people were beginning to call it—I think that big red-headed art critic
The New Yorker
had, Coates, Bob Coates, was the first, and he capitalized only the “e”—but as Zack pointed out, I wasn’t very good at it, there wasn’t when I did it that eerie control Zack had, no matter how many beach pebbles or cigarette butts he dropped in; he had a sense of balance, of balancing rhythms, that critics since have traced back to his years under, of all people, Benton. The things I did, trying to be free, came out looking like I had burned the dinner, so I began to follow Roger’s lead—imitate him, I suppose you could say—and do these austere collages, paper on paper,
with a few black lines in Conté crayon or a Japanese calligraphy brush, looking for the point of balance, the look of
quiet
. The strange thing, Kathryn—I know you didn’t come all this way for my, oh, what’s the word,
vaporing
about works that have already had bushels of criticism dumped all over them—the strange thing about Zack’s drip canvases is that, for all the violence of the details, the spattering, the gummy pooling, the overall effect has this, this quiet. Someone somewhere, maybe it was Frank O’Hara, funny old Frank with his poems scribbled on odd bits of paper in his pockets, called Zack our Ingres. Our
Ingres
. It made me think, it made me cry in fact, years after he was dead, when the turmoil Zack always created around himself had died down. There was this peace, this balance and calm, in his paintings, and I can only think that that was his mood, out there in the cold in the barn, away from me, away from the clever critics, away from the bitchy rich women and cagey foreigners who ran the galleries, away even from his need to drink: he was at peace, drooling one design on top of another until he had to stop and wait for the paint to dry. And there is so much innocence in that man dancing and kneeling around the piece of canvas on the floor, such sweet childish absorption in the
doing
, that I want to hug him and beg his forgiveness for bringing him out to where he could wrestle beauty to a fall and yet being unable to show him how to get any lasting happiness out of his having done it.” The image of Zack painting, and then the two of them side by side bestowing names on his canvases as upon a set of babies, afflicts Hope so that her throat catches and she has to pause. Perhaps happiness cannot be lasting. Perhaps the nugget of woe and confusion within Zack was beyond dissolving. Yet the memory of him with his habitual scowl (that baffled crease of extra skin
between his eyebrows) and paint-spattered old shoes making those beautiful things in a style never before known, for a public that almost never bought one, for a gallery owner who was losing interest in him, while cigarette smoke dribbled back into his squinting eyes and the cold numbed his hands, seemed in her mind the image of life lost, beautiful life that erases itself, like her young body emerging into besmirched pallor as the coal dust was rubbed off by those hours of sweaty dancing.

To rescue Hope from her pause, Kathryn tells her, “Why would it be your job to show him how to reap happiness? His happiness was Zack’s own responsibility, surely.”

Hope clears her throat and smiles, tearily, to thank the other woman for giving her her voice back. “Oh, I know that’s sensible, everybody is responsible for themselves, that’s the theory now, it makes it easier to get out of a relationship, but back then the wife, even a child wife as I was in a way, ten years younger, was supposed to do everything for the husband, the way women did for their children, if anything turned out wrong for the child it was your fault, and Zack was very dependent, worse than a child really, since you got the blame and not any obedience, the guilt and not any credit. Women now talk about empowerment and have all these paying jobs, but back then a woman really was thought to be omnipotent, on no salary, and if anything went wrong in your vicinity it was all your fault. Any resentments about my own upbringing I had I always directed toward my mother, for instance, and not toward my father, who though he supported us was considered otherwise perfectly ineffectual, like a man in a Thurber cartoon.”