by John Updike
“Poor Zack, he never saw any real money. We lived on these grudging doles.”
“Angel Bower was used on a postage stamp, as you know, the post-war artists series. I’ve always loved its return to Matisse-y colors.”
“I named it, it was one of the last ones he let me help name. There was this shady corner he strung a hammock in, beneath the silver maple, this side of the barn. But it didn’t seem to you to be—how I can put this nicely?—a doodle?”
“No, I find it very contemplated. And the big vertical panel he did as late as ’54, Number 61, the flickering tongues eating into the black center, critics call it his homage to Jarl Anders but I think it’s better than Anders, it has what Anders never has, a feeling of passion and doubt, a sense of fighting through to something, through something else. In Anders, for me, it all happens without enough resistance.”
“Jarl had been a minister’s son. He used to write Zack these insane letters, lots of Xed-out typing, telling him to keep his integrity, fight the good fight, revolutionize humanity, throw out the money changers, et cetera, and Zack took them as encouragement, addressed to his better self, which almost nobody else gave him credit for having, they were so jealous of his fame and disgusted by his drinking and rudeness. I think Jarl reminded Zack of Benton in a way—one of those crusty men’s men from the heartland. And somehow Zack’s difficulties after 1950 proved Jarl’s point about the society being a totalitarian trap and the art community being hopelessly corrupt. He saw painting as a matter of conscience, and this appealed to Zack, with his intense, fragile way of working. But when Zack would get into the old Olds—he never owned a new car, never, think of it, just the Model A and then this overpowered heap that got maybe ten miles a gallon and took at least one quart of oil every time we stopped for gas—and would drive all the way over to where Jarl and Frieda had the Amagansett house and Jarl worked in this abandoned Methodist church, Jarl wouldn’t come out from under his Jaguar, which he was always tinkering with. Frieda had some money, which I didn’t. My father was still alive, and my older brother, the one that wasn’t killed in the war, had the inside track back in Philadelphia; they both disapproved of me and my marriage to Zack, they saw him as a sozzled brute, they couldn’t imagine what attracted me. And in fact, if you must know, Kathryn, there wasn’t much of the family money left, my father had pretty well pissed away—I suppose it’s acceptable English to say that now—what he had inherited from my grandfather. Oh dear, where was I? Jarl. He had this vision of eliminating European influence from American painting, which was about like trying to eliminate European blood from the population. He called Zack’s work ‘unravelled Impressionism.’ He had quite a sharp and funny tongue, but Jarl was one of the few men, I must say, I knew in those days who didn’t strike me as attractive. He was tall and gaunt and yellow in color, with dead-looking hair and protruding teeth. And a glare. Such a glare, I’d feel myself wilting under it. He didn’t approve of me either. He saw me as a playgirl. He saw me as the Devil’s party.”
Kathryn gingerly leans forward to check the little gray tape recorder and satisfies herself that it is still purring. “Hope, could we get back for a moment to your relationship with Bernie Nova?”
Addressed with this sudden familiarity, Hope takes a, for her, violent initiative and stands up; the rocking chair of many woods, relieved of her weight, swings away from the backs of her legs. Her knees ache, her throat is parched, emptiness sits in her stomach like a pain pill she can’t digest. “Oh my dear,” she says. “It was all so long ago. Let’s have something to eat, you must be frantic with hunger.”
Though she is not tall, standing alters her perspective so that the room, this boxy, lightly furnished front parlor with its dainty-muntined windows curtained in faded brownish chintz, is jolted into strangeness: the undersized but formal Ionic-pilastered fireplace mantel, painted cream; its burden of a small gilt-cased clock and two brass candlesticks and a silver-framed color snapshot, its dyes ebbing, of her three children in bathing suits smiling beside a turquoise Connecticut swimming pool when they were all under ten, more than thirty years ago; the walnut piecrust table with its fat blue ball of a ceramic lamp-base and four stacked cork coasters like oversize poker chips; the plaid armchair and a rusty bridge lamp of similar ancient vintage, its paper shade darkened as if charred and bearing the printed image of a pointing setter; the oval rug formed of a coil braid of varicolored rags; the pine floorboards painted a dark red and broader than any you could obtain now; the bare and subtly uneven walls of real plaster, dressed up bleakly with a few small abstract prints, gifts from old friends now dead; against one wall, a bookcase whose lower shelves are too narrow for all the art books that jut out. It all seems charged with strangeness, the strangeness that the afterlife, however much like our life on earth it is, must have to the newly dead. She rarely sits in this room; the kitchen, her bedroom above it, and the studio beyond it contain her usual orbit. Each evening, having added the supper plate and glass to those already waiting in the dishwasher for it to be full enough to run, she thinks of coming in here and drawing the curtains behind the plaid chair against a draft and reading her book of the week, or even looking into one of the art books growing dusty, but she rarely does, drifting upstairs to the warmth of her bedroom instead. Climbing the stairs—“climbing the wooden hill,” her grandfather used to call it—hurts her knees and left hip but helps keep her mobile, she believes, helps keep her for another year out of one of those assisted-living facilities with rubber floors and off-limits stairwells where her two sons would like to see her settled for the ease of their own consciences, it would make them look bad if she were to die alone and broken on the stairs à la Edna St. Vincent Millay. She so rarely sits in the front parlor that the space from her standing, momentarily light-headed perspective appears startled, its corners jarred into flight, elastic and awry like the corners in rooms by Van Gogh or Lucien Freud. There is something lavender, a psychedelic tinge, in the papered walls, in the thin warped windowpanes, that at moments enters Hope’s eyes from the side, as if the room’s inhabitants in the century now gone had breathed a tint of their lives onto these surfaces.
She turns to lead the way to the kitchen, and behind her Kathryn snaps off the little Sony, their faithful witness, impassive as a security camera whose fuzzy evidence is eventually tossed out of court. She sees, walking past windows, that the sky, this morning so blank and pure a blue, is closing down, the scattered white clouds expanding to crowd out the spaces between them, packing themselves together as tightly as gray flagstones, with something vaporous arising even in the chinks, so that the sunlight leaking through is tremulous, like the shuddering reflections from the windows of a passing train. When shadows return after these gleaming intervals, the light seems deeper, more enclosed, having dipped deeper into some darker element, so that the twigs and branches around the bird feeder look blackly wet. Hope switches on the rheostatted kitchen lights overhead, portholes sunk into a drop ceiling concealing the one of stamped tin, painted pumpkin-color and smoke-stained, here when she and Jerry bought the place twenty years ago. The digital clock on the microwave oven says in segmented red numbers 1:22.
“So long ago,” she repeats, “and Bernie I know would want me to be discreet. He and Jeanette had the kind of tactful arrangement between them that Zack and I never arrived at. I was too young and idealistic; Zack was too primitive, too square in his way. Now, Kathryn. Let’s think together. I could heat up some canned soup—split pea, or chicken with rice—and make a tuna salad. I know I have one can left, because I made a note to buy some more in Montpelier.”
“What would you do if you were alone?”
“But I’m not alone. If I were, I’d probably go wander outdoors with a handful of Brazil nuts and dried apricots—there’s a health-food store in Montpelier where everything is monkey-food, to be eaten with your hands, all sorts of nuts and dried fruits and yogurt-covered little pretzels, that you imagine must be terribly good for you but in f
act are loaded with calories and sugar. People speak of natural foods as if nature isn’t where everything bad ultimately comes from. I’m looking into the fridge, but we don’t want to make sandwiches, do we? Too much starch, whoever said bread was the staff of life? Either Jesus or Mr. Pepperidge. And the canned soup, chock-a-block full of salt and preservatives. You must starve yourself to keep so lean, those drinks and heavy meals boyfriends make you consume, taking you out, trying to impress you with their fat wallets. Or are you in, what do they call it now, a relationship?”
“I run,” Kathryn says, ignoring the last question. “I’ve loved to run ever since I was a girl.”
“So did I, but then it wasn’t considered proper after a certain age, away from the hockey field. Now exercise is so fashionable, in the summer people are running all over the roads up here, it’s a wonder more of them aren’t killed.”
“I live on Liberty Street, near the World Trade Center, and can run in Battery Park City, along the river.”
“Is it safe?”
“Oh, sure. My building’s tacky but it’s less rent than in TriBeCa. I’m above a mattress showroom and a hair stylist. In the daytime the whole area bustles with all these beefy young guys in finance, but when they go home to New Jersey or wherever it quiets down. It’s a very safe area.”
“Good. New York used to be safe everywhere, or so we thought, when we were young and foolish. Do sit down. Or would you rather look around, to gather details for your article?”
“It’s not that kind of article, exactly.”
“What kind did you say it was, exactly?”
“My articles aren’t like other people’s—they’re more essayistic. Impressionistic, you could say. I never quite know what I’ll say until I start to say it.”
“An excellent way to proceed. I wish I could paint more like that. I must always look ahead, it’s my timidity. Now, let’s see—tuna salad. Here’s the tuna. Would you like to open the can for me? My hands are still good for most things, but turning that little lever does set off my arthritis, I hope you never get it, it comes on knuckle by knuckle; I first noticed it when I would pinch a finger in the pages of a book to mark the place while I answered the telephone. It would hurt, and after that, any pressure sets it off, especially on days like today that are building up for snow or rain. One of the reasons I thin now with stand oil is that the paint goes on easier. Celery. I know I have celery in one of the drawers, I hope not too wilted.”
“Would you like me to chop it for you?” The young woman’s face, above the round squat tuna can she has deftly opened, seems itself to have opened, to be childishly expectant in the stark kitchen light, the illumination that fills every crevice and forms a bulwark against the gloom outside, where cloud shadows dip across the dead lawn like swallows in summer. Kathryn perches on a stool at the serpentine-topped island, and the opened can releases a genie of oily fish-smell, tuna hauled flopping and gasping from thousands of miles away, out in the heaving Atlantic, everything pitching and sliding and flipping and dying.
“No, no—you just sit. You must be tired, on a poor night’s sleep in a strange motel. Are you going back to the motel tonight?”
“Oh no, tonight I’m driving back to New York. I thought I might be on my way already.”
Hope is relieved. This intruder will be leaving soon, or if not soon at least there is a definite end to her visit. Why can’t Hope herself set the limit, asserting the prerogatives of her greater age and superior prestige? Her desire to please, to be loved, has plagued her all her life. Even now, who asked her to feed the girl lunch? From the look of her she can feed herself or skip a meal; if she’s Jewish she was stuffed by her mama from Day One, they take care of their own, compared with Hope’s own mother, who left it up to the cook or put the growing girl on her own diet rations, a little dry cereal for lunch, a canned pear on a leaf of lettuce, wolfing down cigarette smoke instead, loathing the fat Pennsylvania bodies around her; no wonder Hope was a nervous, imperfect mother with such a model to follow. She feels now the blood beating eagerly in her cheeks and throat, and her hands on the eight-inch knife trembling with the urgency of this quite unnecessary performance. Her back is to the girl, she is at the sink, at the chopping board next to the sink, under the ribbon lights installed beneath the cabinets, within a step of the refrigerator. She rips away the tough and stringy outer celery stalks and chops two paler inner wands into arches half an inch long and, her left hand pushing together a quick small heap, minces these arches into bits smaller than dice, her right hand pumping the knife up and down on the fulcrum of its lethal point. Then from a lower fridge drawer that holds a number of neglected delicacies—she must remind herself to keep cooking, to keep living, to fight slumping into a cranky senility munching nothing but nuts and raisins—she retrieves a tired, shrivelling red pepper, a wilted bouquet of parsley with its paper supermarket band still on, and a lemon going greenish-white at one end. She minces the parsley and cuts the lemon in half, dropping into the Disposall’s rubber mouth the moldy half. She cuts open the pepper, gouges away the seedy interior, and carves the husk into strips she then chops crosswise. She takes the can of tuna from between Kathryn’s idle long black-nailed hands where the girl sits watching at the green island of serpentine, and inverts the can into a drainer held over the sink, removing the excess water, and mixes the friable pinkish-buff fish-flesh, not too long ago supple and swift in the cold Atlantic, in a small Pyrex bowl with a dollop of mayonnaise, stirring in the fragments of celery and red pepper, many of the latter diamond-shaped, she cannot help noticing; from deep in her memory flickers the image of her mother’s sinewy sportswoman’s hands, the fingers too lean for her big diamond rings, swiftly fiddling at some kitchen task at the level of a child’s eyes on an old wooden counter. So her mother did venture into the kitchen now and then. As Hope mixes, she squeezes in all the juice the unspoiled portion of lemon will yield to her own aching, ugly arthritic fingers. More than the pain she minds, vainly enough, the shame of her bent fingers, fingers no longer parallel; the way they rub together she finds disgusting. As she squeezes and stirs she tells her listener, “Bernie was consoling. He had his own sorrows too in those years, the early ’fifties. His shows at Betty’s in ’50 and ’51 were absolute flops, they were ridiculed—these big canvases with a vertical stripe or two after all his heavy Nietzschean or whatever pronouncements of the ’forties. He wasn’t included in the ‘Fifteen Americans’ show at the Modern in ’52, which infuriated him. People laughed at him—his monocle, his mustache, his grand way of talking. He looked like an absolute washout, supported by his wife’s money. Jeanette part-owned an interior-decorating outfit on Madison Avenue. She was in the city a lot; they had kept their apartment on Central Park West, they could afford to do that, whereas poor Zack and I …”
She can feel the tension in her listener, Kathryn fearing that Hope will spill the details of her affair with Bernie Nova while the tape recorder is idle in the other room. She leans forward at the green island as if to rise, asking, “Can I do anything to help?”
“No, dear, you sit. This is very simple.” Hope has found a head of iceberg lettuce, pounds it on the cutting board to loosen the leaves from the heart, and tears off four large leaves to share between the two lunch plates—they have chipped pink rims and botanical images of wildflowers in the center, lavender Veronica anagallis-aquatica for Kathryn, yellow Diplotaxis muralis for herself—and with a sterling-silver serving spoon she has many times seen in her mother’s glittering hand tries to measure out equal portions of mucilaginous tuna salad onto the overlapped lettuce leaves. She sprinkles on the minced parsley and, in a final inspiration, tops the mounds with a few walnut halves from a plastic health-food-store envelope on a fridge door shelf. “Tell me what you want to drink.”
“What are the choices?”
Yes, her mother spoiled her, waited on her, as Hope is doing now. “Skim milk, cranberry juice, orange juice, faucet water, ginger ale but the bottle’s been op
ened, I can’t guarantee it won’t be flat. I’m having cranberry juice.”
“Doesn’t it make you pee? I mean, people in general. I’m thinking I’ll be in the car a long time.”
Hope has to smile at how this young woman keeps holding out hope of her departing and yet keeps saying “pee” and appears more and more trustfully dependent. “I’ve not noticed that effect myself. But, then, I tend to be at home most of the time. You can have water, but it won’t be the bottled water you’re used to, the big plastic jugs are too heavy for an old lady to lug home from the supermarket, and the water here is from our own spring, farther up the hill, as pure as God makes it.” She supposes that “God” from her lips is as gauche as “pee” was from Kathryn’s. They are both growing too used to each other’s company. They are like boxers whose reflexes are slowing in the late rounds.
“Is it filtered?”
“By the sand in the ground.”
“I’d like to try it, please. Real spring water. The salad looks lovely. The walnuts are a jolly idea.”
“I would have added olives and anchovies if I had them.”
“I’m so embarrassed, I never meant to make you feed me.”
“My pleasure, truly. I eat alone all the time. Let’s sit over here.” The kitchen table, under the Andersen window, is a five-foot circle of two-inch oak screwed fast to an octagonal column whose four long oak feet need a folded piece of cardboard—a matchbook is too thick—to level them; the table is a remnant of her marriage with Guy, from the kitchen in the Seventy-ninth Street apartment. They all ate on it—children, the help, Guy and she late at night. Now the table is permanently set with two straw placemats fabricated of a continuous braid on the principle of the oval rag rug in the front parlor. Hope brings forks and paper napkins and in a second trip the glasses of cranberry juice and spring water, continuing, “They say the old forget to eat eventually, but it hasn’t quite happened to me. Food is—what?—the last intimacy. We don’t want to give it up.” The tuna, she thinks, beginning to eat, could do with salt. The lemon juice is sharp, on the edge of turning. She should have thrown the whole lemon away. “We could do with bread, I suppose,” she says.