by John Updike
She arrives, thus, at an impasse, a sealed cul-de-sac, a kind of blank-faced monument to the something obdurate and shrewd that had lifted Zack, for all his limits, far above her. Freshly married, she thought she had rejoiced to see Zack regain health and enterprise, but there was a part of her that resented the way that he seized her initiative and accepted her services, those glorious first years on the Island, yet shut her out, leaving her as an artist far behind.
Kathryn tells her, “The paintings he did in ’46 have a lovely outdoors feeling, like watercolors. Those clear pastel colors, Matisse-y almost, peach and lime green and powder blue. And the brush strokes,” she goes on a bit breathlessly, getting her art-crit voice in gear, “are so free-flowing, transparent somehow, at the opposite end from the clotted, dark canvases he was doing just a year or two earlier.”
“I had never liked those, though Herbie did,” Hope says with deliberate crispness, curbing the other’s rapture. “We were happy,” she firmly states. “We would sleep as late as we could, spend time together in the garden in the morning, he would work in the studio in the afternoon and I might shop and do housework, we would take walks with Trixie in the late-afternoon light, and come home and eat, and listen to records, and make love. Making love had always been easy for me, but not for Zack. That was why he talked about fucking so much, and was so rude to women when he had some drinks inside him.” And would have been rude to you, she does not say, had you been there.
Yet always, she remembers, and can almost taste it, a bitter nugget in the midst of this translucent happiness, there had been his ambition, and the fear that sealed his ambition in, and his insulting need for alcohol’s spell of self-forgetfulness. Her eyes surprise her by feeling hot and watery. “I made love to him,” she tells Kathryn, “to keep him from running off to the Lemon Drop in the evening. He would fuck me and put his clothes on and go off anyway. He would walk a mile in the dark to be with these ignorant men who wouldn’t even talk to him.”
“You made him into a heterosexual,” Kathryn explains to her, as if in reproach, with that easy New York knowingness that withers all it touches.
Hope feels blood rush to her face in her eagerness to turn aside such an impudent implication. “Zack never thought of himself as anything but. Biographers have made much too much of certain minor incidents. In his teens, when his brothers were leaving the household one by one and his mother was working late hours and he was pretty much on his own in Los Angeles, and then when he first came to New York and hardly had a place to stay, but really, in that blue-collar world he came from, there was nothing homosexual about liking to sit around getting sloshed with other men, it was simply how men were. He was awkward with women, but not unresponsive to them. Believe me, dear. Don’t ask me to spell it out.”
“May I ask—was there anything, oh, out of the way about his lovemaking? Did you have to do anything unusual to arouse him?”
Hope can hardly believe she is being asked this, but then must admit to herself that she deserves it, for flaunting her sexuality before this young woman—rubbing her nose in it, as they say—with her talk of being wicked and of going to the costume ball in little more than coal dust. It was a way of teasing her, of keeping Kathryn from swamping her, but there was no holding off her relentless, humorless demand that Hope bare her life. And it was all so long ago, before even the middle of the last century, when she and Zack came to the sunstruck, wind-raked Flats and filled the forsaken old farmhouse with the sound of their voices, augmenting the warmth of their bodies with that of the woodstove, whose heat parched their skins and hair in its close vicinity but died halfway upstairs to the cold bedroom. “He was an old-fashioned man in many ways,” she tells the other woman. “Just the sight of me naked was usually enough. There wasn’t all this emphasis on oral and anal there is now, though he did like to take me from behind. I would give it to him as a treat, though of course it didn’t do much for me, besides the cuddling part of it. At times I would be left unsatisfied—and angry, I suppose—but there was still this notion in the air, which the war had reinforced, of women serving men, because they were our buffers against the real world, the cruel world. They earned the money and fought the wars. I learned to cook, once we left New York, because Zack’s mother had always put these big square Western meals on the table. In our sex, if you really need know this sort of thing, I wore a diaphragm, and had to guess ahead of time when it would be needed, and sometimes guessed wrong, which was humiliating in a small way. Your intuition, Kathryn, is correct in that Zack did, in general, have to be coaxed into sex, as opposed to being always up for it, as they say now. The liquor acted as a drag when he was off the wagon, and he was constantly preoccupied by this need to be a great painter—not an adequate and earnest one like Mahlon Strunk, or even a famous one like Benton and Mondrian, but great in some deep, final—‘existential’ was the word we all used—way that he couldn’t come out and confess but all the painters we knew more or less shared. They were out for big game. Zack didn’t have the facility, the intellectual background, of Roger or Bernie, and where someone like Onno was such a natural painter he could do his thing at the canvas for hours a day and then just forget it, like natural exercise, it wasn’t a natural thing for Zack: he had to find, or invent would be better, a manner in which he could be fluent like the others, and though Herbie loved him and Peggy supported him in her Faginlike fashion and Clem thought he might be a winning bet to make his own name as a critic on, Zack knew he hadn’t found it yet, those outdoorsy watercolory Matisse-y paintings you were praising weren’t quite there yet, though, you’re right, they were closer, they were freer, he’d gotten away from those deadly brown Mexican muralists and that Miróesque Surrealist clutter. What I’m trying to say with all this—your poor tape recorder!—is that though he wasn’t very self-reflective Zack knew that the move to the Island with me might be his last chance to be great. It sounds stupid and naïve to you, I’m sure, being great, but it was very real to Zack, this possibility, and to the other painters too, as I’ve said, a very American notion, no doubt, a kind of holy state—imagine if Picasso had bothered himself with so gross an ambition, how could he have played the way he did?—and time was running out. And he had me now to run interference for him and do a ton of scut work and get on the phone for hours trying to boost his stock in the city—I pretended to believe in him more than I did, and then, about our second year on the Island, I became a believer. So he had a reason to try to avoid the Lemon Drop and, when he went into town, the Cedar or loft parties; it wasn’t just screwing me that kept him home. Zack got himself down to wine and beer on his own. Roger had a place in East Hampton, the Georgica section, and Onno and Renée had bought on Two Holes of Water Road a carriage house they painted this sardonic Easterish purple to annoy the uptight neighbors, and Bernie and Mahlon had followed by ’48—Mahlon and Myrtle went all the way to Montauk, typically isolating themselves somewhat—so there was a real artists’ colony growing up, with lots of parties and booze, and it was after Roger brought a bottle of Jack Daniel’s to the place on Fireplace Road when we were giving him and Tasha dinner with two other couples and Herbie that Zack solemnly handed it back to him and looked him in the eye—there had always been a little bad blood between them, Roger was so much what Zack wasn’t, so effortlessly au courant—and told him, ‘Thanks, but I don’t need this stuff any more.’ ”
Had she got it wrong? There was such a moment, but had it been Onno who had presented the bottle? Not Bernie, he was too sensitive. And her account left out the tranquillizers that the doctor in Southampton prescribed, and that made Zack so dopey and amiable he wouldn’t go near the barn, just wander all day with Trixie over the fields and dunes. And the binges now and then that would leave him stumbling home at three in the morning, having passed out in the woods by the side of the road on the way back from the Lemon Drop. After two years of bicycling and begging rides they scraped up money for a car, a Model A Ford that cost ninety dollars, and Hope would
lie awake upstairs terrified that he would run the car against a tree; his binges had gained a lethal potential. Still, he had joined her in the struggle against his drinking, they were on the same side of the problem, and if taming it took a little more rear presentation than she would have chosen for herself, then this was life, of the creature, and worth the potential prize. She would love this man’s greatness up out of him. And, to be fair, Zack was beautiful, the blond furriness of him, curly small hairs pale against his tan, and the muscular push-and-pull of his torso in the summer light, from collarbones and nipples down to his pubic bush, that whole classic terrain of human anatomy symmetrically subdivided like the plaster casts of kouroi at the Cooper Union, a youth’s abdomen only slightly pot-bellied in Zack at thirty-five, liquor’s bloat counteracted by home carpentry and his walks and the work of their garden. With the tide of liquor ebbed out of his system, Zack smelled of cigarettes and linseed oil and garden soil and salt air. When Trixie flushed a skunk, the smell of the spray spread from the dog’s hair to his hands and blue jeans and from them to her, and because they were so much alone those first glorious rough seasons on the Island they didn’t care. She can see herself kneeling and washing his back, herself naked, in the claw-footed old cast-iron tub Al Treadwell had salvaged from another job and, saving them money as he kept pointing out, installed in their new little bathroom; she can see herself, her rounded freckled arms, her pointed tan fingers, lathering Zack’s back and shoulders as he smoked a cigarette even in the tub, keeping one hand dry to remove it from his pensive mouth and tip the ash into the cocktail peanuts can that did in this room for an ashtray.
“He began to drip when?” Kathryn asks, then quickly answers herself. “Early in ’47? What do you remember of that moment? Did it seem epochal to you and Zack? Did he talk about it as something revolutionary?”
Abruptly bored, touched as if by a clammy hand by the desolation of these same old questions, Hope looks for escape toward the window and sees that small puffy clouds, mere shreds, have appeared in the unflecked ozone-rich blue framed an hour ago by the skylight. As the sun warms the mountains, these wisps of vapor are stirred into visibility above the valleys. The front-parlor windows, curtained in a faded chintz of roses more brown than red, have delicately thin muntins, which were one of the house’s charms when she fell in love with it and persuaded Jerry to buy. He couldn’t see it as a big part of his future, but she knew in her bones it would be hers for life. Not just the sashes but the glass itself, the bubbled, faintly wavy, faintly violet-tinged panes, had seemed thinned, like the skin of an old person; at a blast of wind from a certain angle or even a moment of evening cooling, a window vibrates like a harp string stroked. The house talks to her. This girl is not avoiding the obvious, as her polite, factual telephone voice had seemed to promise she would; there had been something scattered and off-center about her proposal that led Hope to say yes and set a day well into the future, which has become today. If she were only outdoors, Hope could be silent, and the past would be left untouched, like mulch in the woods: scuff a few leaves, and the wood lice scurry, miserably exposed, panicked beneath the glare. There was in her years with Zack a considerable soreness that has not gone away; the unhealable soreness in him had rubbed off on her and become an area of shame, of guilt. She had drawn him out into the greatness he wanted—she had found him the space he needed—but perhaps to serve herself, not him. His nature had been too frail for success.
“The key thing,” she dutifully told her interviewer, “was the barn itself, making it into a studio. He had never before had a floor big enough to work on. Ever since I knew Zack he would move his painting around on the easel, looking at it sideways or upside down and even painting on it that way—his instinct was to liberate the image from gravity. Even those figurative family scenes from the early ’forties—they’re like a dinner party viewed from above.”
“Or like the Navajo sand-paintings he had seen as a child.”
“Zack,” Hope says, rocking back a little and speaking levelly to conceal the hatred she is beginning to feel for this prying, self-serving intruder, “was never as much of a Westener as he liked to let on. He was an Angelino, if anything: his critical years in high school came in Los Angeles, and the first art teachers who were in any way inspiring. But, yes, once he got the canvas taped to the barn floor he could attack from all sides, and the dripping began to happen. Spattering was a way he could reach the center of the canvas. There are paint dribbles in the early work, of course—he painted with the tube even before the war—and the Surrealists had played with pouring or spilling to give them their automatic effects. You know, Matta, Masson. But Zack always insisted there was nothing accidental about his drips, that he intended everything. It was true, he learned just how to thin the paint and what tools—sticks, dried brushes, glass turkey-basters—could do what. Nobody had ever had to master exactly those skills before; he was wonderful to watch, so graceful and sure of himself in the very way he wasn’t usually. I think it was that, the athleticism, that generated the publicity, the appeal to the masses: it was like what they saw in the movies. This beautiful torso in the black T-shirt, the tight dark jeans, the bald head, the intensity. He was not only uncharacteristically graceful, he was decisive. When that horrible German—I keep forgetting his name—”
Kathryn supplies it.
“Yes. When Hans took those movies, he complained that Zack didn’t hesitate enough; he didn’t ponder, he just jumped right in, spattering and waving his wet stick in the air. That was part of it, that speed, when he was, as he used to say, in it.”
“How wonderful to watch!” Kathryn cries, spontaneously, Hope decides, and not to demonstrate that she loves Zack more purely than Hope ever could, this man dead twenty years before she was born.
“I didn’t watch often. It would have been violating his privacy, disturbing the process.” She pushes on with her complaint: “Hans had a director’s idea of how a painter painted, with a lot of contemplation. Zack would go out into the barn and contemplate in the evening, I’ve known him just to look at the works in process all day and never touch them. But in action he had a tempo to keep up. Jazz of a sort, your feet can’t hit the ground. The German interfered with that. There were retakes, and waits while the cameraman got in a new position, or reloaded film. Zack stood there waiting with his dribble stick while the German talked at him. It was being directed, and taking the direction more or less meekly, that drove Zack back to drink, I honestly do believe. An ordinary person would have shrugged the whole business off, as a route to making money—for we still weren’t making money, a few sales for a couple hundred here and there, all through the ’forties, when thanks to Life he had become quite famous, ‘notorious’ I suppose is the real word—but Zack wasn’t an ordinary person. He had this old-fashioned macho sense of honor, and putting himself on show like that—though Picasso could do it, in his little swimming shorts even, as an old man—was for Zack the betrayal of the only thing he believed in, painting. The paintings he did on camera were useless to him, he never looked at them or displayed them, they were failures because he wasn’t in them, he was on camera. His way of working did produce failures, of course. Sometimes they got what he called ‘messy’—too many drips, too many spatters, the whole surface covered, so any rhythm was lost. Then, to lighten it, he would cut away pieces, biomorphic Miró shapes, and mount what was left on fiberboard, and dabble on the fiberboard—I never much liked these, but it was his stubbornness again, refusing to give up, thinking he could pull something out of any mess he made. Those winters of ’47 and ’48, we were so hard up for canvas he would paint over some of my old work for Hochmann, pouring on these tangles and letting it dry, and then coming back to it three weeks later, going out to the barn even when it was so cold he could only stay an hour and would come back into the house scared his fingers had gotten frostbite, holding them close to the stove.”