Seek My Face (24 page)

Her grandfather used to quote, with his frisky twinkle, “
God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap
.” A woman, too, reaps. The seductress turned wife is replaced by the next. Yet Guy had not been basically about sex, his power was pre-sexual, his freshness, his art was never more beautiful than when it was childish—oversize Popsicles and wedges of layer cake worked out in vinyl, sewed together by slaves at the Hospice, stuffed with kapok, ten times lifesize, or else machinery like pay phones pieced together in canvas and left limp, hanging on the museum wall like the skin of Marsyas, or huge letters of the alphabet cast in bronze like men on horseback, or solemnly displayed bales of play money.

“The bastard shrugged me off,” Hope tells Kathryn, not wanting to tell her about the tears they had shared or the semen she had juggled in her mouth where he could see it with a flicker of disgust that reminded her of Bernie, “leaving me with a stack of his money and three half-grown children. There I was. Looking up at this clever, sorry, amiable, perfectly opaque face, I had this panicky sensation—I’m sure you’ve had them—when you ask yourself, ‘Do I know this man at all? Did I ever know him? Was I ever
anything
to him?’ ”

What she cannot share, because it too deeply shames her,
is the image in hindsight of her fifty-three-year-old body in its poses of fury and supplication, begging Guy not to leave, proposing to him open marriage, split residences, a reformed personality, an intensified subservience: an actress under the lights, seen small, the stage changing from the East Side apartment with its geometrical furniture and space-enlarging mirrors to the Connecticut farmhouse with its white fences and red stables and columned porch and dart-and-egg ceiling mouldings in the front hall. The stage lights are harsh enough to throw the gleam from the actress’s unfeigned tears into the back balcony seats as she cringes and writhes in the invisible grip of humiliation, rejected once again by a man who in the end loves nothing but his art, whose personality is just a glossy shell protecting the artist, the immortal striver, eternally young at fifty.

“It was like dealing with a child,” she tells Kathryn, “but then it made me realize how childish I was, too, what needy children we still are at any age. I had this sense,” she goes on, “of Dorothy eavesdropping and judging me; I was losing her father, her only father. She didn’t have the vocabulary for all the later judgments and dismissals of me, my pathetic male-oriented femaleness, et cetera, and I don’t think she ever realized how much of my grief had to do with not failing her, her and the boys.”

“The boys, you don’t talk much about the boys.”

“They were older than Dot. Paul once told me he was surprised it hadn’t happened long before, Dad was such a cold fish. The boys were off at Putney, and Guy in the summer would take them in Connecticut, up there with hard-assed Gretchen, and for trips to Europe, which is more than he did very often with me, he didn’t like to fly over water, he said; he said it added to his anxieties if I came with him to big shows in Venice or Brussels, they were pure business,
meat markets of a kind, he came home as quick as he could; he said he needed to live in America, to know what was on television and in the stores, Europe threw his sensibility off, their art was like their manners—supercilious, high-end kitsch, he called it; it lacked a sense of crisis. If he hadn’t been half English, I don’t think he would have seen us—America—as amusing as he did. The boys loved their father, of course, though the degree of his fame made them wary when they were old enough to grasp it, and they shared that male whatever it is, silence. Maybe that’s why I like men so much—they can hold their tongues, unlike me. Oh dear, I keep looking at the windows to see if it’s dark yet, and it isn’t, it’s spring and the days are lengthening, behind the clouds.”

“Paul and Piet are both in finance. In investments.”

“Yes, isn’t that surprising? One heads a mutual fund, and the other is in M and A, they call it, mergers and acquisitions, I forget which boy does which. Both make more money than I can imagine, they try to shelter me from it, but I can see from how and where they live, and how their wives spend. Guy was shrewd about money, and had that aesthetic fascination with dollar bills, so it isn’t all that surprising. Both boys had the wonderful good sense to steer clear of art—they have the most pedestrian possible things in their homes, entirely their wives’ and their decorators’ taste, Guy used to complain about it before he went quite so gaga, but I think he was secretly pleased that they turned out to be so practical.
He
was practical, I suppose I keep saying. I’m nagged by a feeling there’s something about Guy I haven’t managed to say. It’s hard to be clear about a man who’s dumped you. Critics even now dismiss him as lightweight, but he wasn’t; like Dürer and Leonardo, he was trying to improve our grip on the actual, he was the last
Mohican, in a way, of the pre-post-modern, when it was necessary to be light, when lightness was the only alternative to sinking, sinking like Zack and Seamus and Phil did, the only way to keep an identify afloat, post-modern, post-God, post-seriousness, really. When Nixon ended the draft and then resigned, those were the last serious things that the American people
felt
as serious, before news became all entertainment.”

“And Dorothy? What does she do?”

“Poor thing, she stayed in art, pecking away at the fringes. Film scripts that almost get produced, working in a gallery in San Francisco until it failed, writing poems published in lesbian magazines. As I said, we don’t communicate, she lives out there in Marin County, where the ’sixties never quite died, with a Dutch woman, the real thing, not some long-ago-transplanted Ouderkirk, but the real thing fresh from Holland, they met at some conference or protest on the West Coast, saving the redwoods or the salmon or the seals or the darter snail; when I last visited Paul in Brooklyn Heights, I saw on his bulletin board a snapshot of the two of them Dot had sent him at Christmas. Dot’s hair was snow white, not yet forty and white as a dandelion, cut short enough to stand up all around and possibly dyed, some women when they go half gray bleach it all the way, their vanity won’t let them dye it back to what it was, so they make this statement in the other direction, but I don’t think Dot would do that. Her eyebrows were still dark, dark and broad over those cool, pale eyes of Guy’s, and she still had that thickset look of clay pottery, her pock-marks like a mistake in the firing, but the look on her face jaunty and spoiling for a fight, my dear little Dot a white-haired dyke. Her friend had a toothy smile and seemed grotesquely tall, six feet at least, which is not how you think
of the Dutch, certainly not the Ouderkirks. We were all on the compact side.” She dabs with a middle finger at the tears on her face, still left over evidently from the day Guy departed.

Kathryn clears her own throat, she is running dry, and asks, “Did it ever occur to you that Dorothy’s silence is a way of being kind to you, since she guesses that you see her as a failure? That she embarrasses you?”

“But she doesn’t, she
doesn’t
. I love her. I love her the most of—” No, that would be too hard on the boys, who put up with her now, as her brothers once did, and will have to deal with her when she takes the next step downhill and can no longer hold on here, where Jerry left her. To escape choosing, she turns her head and through the thin panes examines the sky. It looks like the underside of something, it has formed itself into rolls of nimbus clouds, breakers in an upside-down ocean. Yet the sky contains enough light to make her pupils wince. In the east, white wisps scud on a mottled grisaille. The distant mountain’s hump frowns in a dip of shadow. Hope speaks as if making her way word by word. “I think she may have been right in accusing me of living my life in terms of men. But the art world then
was
almost all male; it was men who had the excess energy, the instinct for battle. This is terribly unpolitic to confess to you, but female artists have always struck me as hangers-on, whether genteel old maids like Cassatt or else layabouts and models like Valadon some man like Degas fed brushes and a pat on the head to. What do we remember best about Valadon? That she was Utrillo’s mother and managed to nurse him along through his alcoholism so that he lived till seventy. I hate myself for saying this—these are my fellow-students, my bohemian sisters, much more fun than the men, more perceptive and harder-working, one of my spinster
aunts used to do charming watercolors of nasturtiums and the Brandywine—but women don’t go over the top; they’re too timid and respectful, which is understandable enough, and easily distracted, again understandable. I loved Grace Hartigan, she was my exact contemporary,
so
confident,
so
unafraid of color, but even
she
couldn’t quite let go and give herself to total abstraction, she couldn’t believe she couldn’t lean
just a little
on the scenery around her, for her titles and for sneaky little cute bits of pictorial allusion. She couldn’t paint just out of nothing, out of herself, only a man would dare do that. And all these much-publicized women artists of the last thirty years, what have they been saying but ‘I have a cunt’? Well, everybody knew they had cunts. Other women knew it,
I
knew it, and the news very quickly becomes boring. Men are the only ones excited by the information, so there we are again. Pointing ourselves at men. But is that so bad? Isn’t it healthful, and fruitful?”
By their fruits ye shall know them
was another frequent saying of her grandfather’s. And
Lukewarm I spit thee out
, said most commonly of his second cup of morning coffee. Hope’s face feels hot, with that desire to please, to plead, which illustrates her very point, female weakness.

Kathryn’s heavy dark eyes drop down to her long black lap, and study the sheaf of notes prepared in laser-printed lines. “You began to paint again,” she says, “somewhat before Guy left you in ’75.”

“Yes, I did. The boys were up here in Vermont and Dot off all day at Brearley and Guy down at the Hospice with his mischief-makers, and I set up my paints in what had been a maid’s little corner room. Its one window faced a dingy beige apartment building over on Park. The curious madness of people living different lives behind all these identical apertures and balconies—it led me, I suppose for
the first time, to grids, to regular all-over patterns. Op Art had come and gone in the ’sixties, and all of its stars had been foreigners—Vasarely, Soto, Riley—but there was something still in it for me, something very American and Sundayish: the sidewalks in a small town, the front yards with nothing much in them, a calm emptiness yet full of American plenty. You see it in Sheeler, in Grant Wood. I loved the
quietness
of carefully painting horizontal patterns, the colors close enough together so nothing obvious jumped out at the viewer, nothing anecdotal. At first I tried putting things in, little variations, hiccups in the stripes, but they felt impure to me. ’Invisible painting,’ some critics called a one-room show that Leo put on for me, not kindly. But I had to avoid strong color for fear of people comparing me with Zack, when I was married now to Guy. In deference to Guy, at first I put in bits of lettering or arrows to give a Pop touch, but it didn’t please him. He thought what I was doing was like knitting, and maybe it helped turn him off.” Hope laughs. “He said it gave him the creeps, seeing me fill in all these tiny spaces.”

Kathryn says, “I don’t think Bridget Riley fits your description of female artists. She’s still going strong, too.”

“No, I guess she doesn’t. And, yes, she is. I admire Riley, of course. I’ve mentioned Marisol. Cassatt at her best breaks my heart—those little square feet being so solemnly bathed, the stripes on the woman’s bathrobe. You shouldn’t use my words against me—they were an attempt to describe my own self-distrust, and to respond to my daughter, whose accusations still rankle.”

“Do I remind you,” Kathryn asks, raising her eyes from the notebook so that again their whites flash in the gloom, “of your daughter?”

“No. Well, in ways. You both have—had—dark hair
with a lot of body. You both put me on the defensive. But you”—she doesn’t want to say
are beautiful—
“feel to me successful, or headed that way, whereas I see Dorothy still in terms of the little girl begging to be let into our bed, and later begging to have a clear face.”

“It’s possible she doesn’t see herself that way at all. In photographs I’ve seen of her, before her hair turned white as you describe, she looks triumphant. And rather attractive.”

“That’s kind of you to say.”

Being charged with kindness makes Kathryn uncomfortable. Hope has overstepped, as so often in her life with men, presuming an intimacy that was not yet quite established. She is aware of a pain in her hands, the upper joints of her right hand, at the base of her fingernails. The body, attacked by itself, gives out a secret cry. She folds that hand within her left, to hush the hurt. Kathryn leans forward to check the worrisome Sony, as it sits drinking in their silence with a whirr, and shuffles through her six or seven sheets of notes and questions. “
I
know,” Hope says brightly, in what she perceives as a lull. “It’s about to rain, let’s go stretch our legs in the yard. You haven’t looked at the view. Then we’ll have tea, or coffee if you can bring yourself to drink instant, and maybe a snack, since you can’t drive all the way back to New York on an empty stomach. I used to be able to eat only at mealtimes,” she goes on, softening her firm proposal, blurring the edges, “feast or famine, but as you get older the stomach must shrink, because I’ve become what they call a grazer, nibbling constantly and being rather revolted by a full meal if one should appear, I keep dodging these awards dinners. Some evenings I don’t even bother to heat up any soup, just mix what berries and nuts I have in the fridge in a bowl with a little milk, while I watch the news. I can get only one station up here without one of
those unsightly satellite dishes, they’re as bad in my view as having cars in the front yard with their tires stripped, it’s Dan Rather I get, I can hardly make out his rumble, depending on the reception that evening. And he looks so often the way I feel, like a petulant old woman. I rarely watch to the end, the commercials are so insulting, all for iron pills and hemorrhoid medicine and incontinence diapers, it tells you how little the young care about the news, I’m generally upstairs and in my nightie before eight.”