by John Updike
“I wouldn’t mind,” the guest admits. The girl is a taker; at her age, that is health. “Let me fetch it,” she says, and quickly stands, with a scrape and clatter of boots and stool legs.
“In the big drawer in the middle at the end next to the sink,” Hope tells her, “there’s a built-in breadbox. The lid has little holes you lift it by, it’s hard with my fingers. There’s Pepperidge Farm rye.” She realizes it may say “Jewish rye” on the label, but then decides it doesn’t matter, the girl may not be Jewish, her black hair in the light here declares its reddish tinge, more blatant than just a tinge, more electric, frankly unnatural, twenty-first century, this seems to be the fashion, nobody lets their hair alone any more, trusts it to be beautiful enough. Body-piercing, tattoos, how strange to her generation, for whom the unadorned untouched body, as pure as unflecked marble (even in staid old Philadelphia, Greek slave girls and Indian maidens stood naked in the galleries, sculpted by American Victorians in Rome, what were their names?), formed the ideal, the ultimate beauty, so that her own freckles, on forearms and shins and the sunbaked area above her breasts’ blue-veined white, were a flaw in her mind, forgiven by the shadows of a bedroom. Bernie’s bright house had discomfited her at first. While the girl fusses at the breadbox and searches the cupboards for a suitable plate—as with most children, it would have been easier to do it yourself—Hope sees through the western window by the table as she controls her impatience and waits for the bread to be clumsily fetched how the sky is darkening behind its close-packed clouds, a sky has materialized behind the sky, a blue-gray haze behind the cauliflower tops, a pattern of agitated streaks and tatters like the mounting flakes in a Jarl Anders painting turned sideways but, because mindless, grander than anything Jarl had done, more merciful because unpremeditated, not indignantly calculated to win glory or reverse two thousand years’ corruption, serene in their aloof yet urgent movement, these spacious eddies of atmosphere expressing a disturbance in the west, a vaporous convulsion approaching from New York State.
“Oh, thank you, perfect,” Hope says, as Kathryn brings a dessert plate holding more bread than three times as many women would eat, and the cow-shaped butter dish discovered in its nook on the fridge door. In eating, Kathryn carefully swallows and more than once touches the corners of her lips with her paper napkin to spare Hope any sight of gluey tuna salad being masticated amid her pretty teeth and tongue. “And yet,” she says, “Bernie Nova’s work was what led to the next stage—color-field painting, and Minimal—”
Hope is so eager to agree she doesn’t let the other pronounce “-ism.” “I know! Who would have thought it! The younger artists saw something in Bernie they could use, whereas Zack and Onno and Phil, there was nothing more to do in their line without being them. They were so individual, so furiously themselves, let’s say—”
She is in turn interrupted: “They were so hot,” Kathryn says, still watchful of her oil-soaked mouth, her tongue and teeth coated with the brackish scent of fish, but eager to arrive at some confluence with Hope’s line of thought, “cool was the only direction left.”
“Yes. I’m glad Zack never saw it, it would have enraged him, what came next, it would have seemed to him so trivial, so insincere.”
She and Bernie would go to bed on some of those afternoons when Jeanette was in town working at a client’s apartment, but not as many stolen afternoons as might have been, had lovemaking been the essence of their coming together. They were artistic waifs, lost here, toward the tip of Long Island, between Onno’s flickering mastery and Zack’s epochal liberation into dripping; even Roger, that perpetual schoolboy copiously producing his French-flavored collages and Zen-like dashes and blobs of black on princely large sheets of white wove paper, enjoyed a security within the well-heeled world of critics and collectors, museums and galleries, which magnified his modest talent and give him substance, a grip on slippery artistic fashion. Hope was demoralized by Zack’s scorning her work as pathetically female and Bernie by the art establishment’s dismissing him as foppish and “literary.” In an hour’s escape from a house where all was sullen hangover, inflamed resentment, daily blockage, and nightly binge, she took nurture in the Novas’ newly built home—its shining floorboards of pale maple, its bare beams of oak, its picture windows in which strips of gleaming sea and milky sky were mounted above a breadth of dusted green potato rows, its two-story studio where Bernie’s mocked monochromatic canvases grew defiantly bigger and bigger, boasting Latin titles like medals the painter himself had bestowed. The second floor of the house was a huge loft; it gave, beyond a low balustrade, on the upper space of the studio, so the paintings were presences that shared the bedrooms, which were fragrant of new wood, and had the simplicity of a den, in Scandinavian shades of teak and blondness and unbleached wool, most starkly in the guest room, where, on a mattress supported by a sheet of plywood, Bernie played host to Hope’s rounded body, which even through winter stayed drenched in reddish freckles, freckles so thick on her shoulders and shins as to merge and approach the Mediterranean tan of the other wives. Hope thought her bare body a fair swap for Bernie’s cocky sardonic humor, the dandyish visual jokes of his monocle and tailored English suits, the fatherly rumble of his voice in his chest, broad as a Cossack’s. He was a third-generation Russian Jew, his name a self-invented simplification of Novakhov, and his mustache like a detail from Gogol, with a life of its own. When he talked, the waxed tips twitched and it was easy to forget the rest of his face—the porous blunt nose, the bear-brown eyes, the rather feminine hidden lips, rapid and decisive in their enunciation.
“I don’t give a rat’s fuck if I ever show in New York again,” he told her. “Why bother, it’s all politics, all you get is abuse. They’re scared of me, I’m too serious for those gossipy queer bastards. I frighten them by thinking seriously, by thinking religiously. They aren’t ready to have their cozy little chattery world rattled by a revolution—a revolution arriving from within, out of an artist’s passion. I’ve got my painting now so it’s pure passion, high passion pure and simple, and it scares the stoops shitless. I scare them because, where they just talk, I do. Where they chew the old cud, the old pieties, I believe. I believe my art, if its principles were grasped in full seriousness, would mean the end of state capitalism.”
“Oh, Bernie, how?” Hope drowsily asked. A breeze from the outdoors stroked her skin, dried the sweat on the side not pressed against the wrinkled sheet. Bernie when making love sweated like a man in a steam bath, and a partner took the bath with him.
“Geometry,” he answered, emphatically. “Geometry is what imprisons us, and it has to be overthrown from within. It all goes back to Cubism; my geometry refutes Cubism. Where they drew edges, using outlines to set off shapes and spaces, my drawing declares the space. Instead of segments of space, I work with the whole space; I fill it to bursting with color. I’ve killed anecdote and set color free, for the first time in the history of man. No more anecdotes, representational or abstract. The critics don’t get it. They’re the last people equipped to get it. The art world lives under the capitalist table, happy to pick up scraps. The slaves don’t realize that upsetting the table is the way to get fed.”
“You sound so violent, for such a pussycat.”
“The bastards have made me violent. They’ve put my back against the wall. It’s the artist’s lot to set himself against the world. The point is the painting, period. Being unknown and shat upon is the true heroism. Anonymity is the true and only thing. Look at your hubby. He’s famous now—Life, the gossip columns—and it’s driving him nuts, right over the edge. But being nobody is doing the same for me, frankly. It’s a miserable trade, Red—how the fuck did we get into it?”
“Our love of beauty?”
“Beauty—nobody uses the word. That’s not the category, my little Hottentot.” She had told him that story from her flaming youth; he twirls his fingers at one end of his mustache and gives a villain’s laugh. “Your category is doomed, my fair lady
. The sublime is the category. If it ain’t sublime, haul it to the dump. It’s anecdote. Brushwork is anecdote. It’s taken me twenty years to figure that out, that’s how dumb I am.”
Hope wondered how much of what he said was parody, employing a vocabulary he detested. Yet his canvases bore trumpeting titles like Vir Heroicus, Crux, Spatialis, Ultimo Ratio, Animus Sine Termine, grand names like Solomon, Moloch, Guinevere, Azrael. “The stoops say my canvases are empty but in fact they’re full, full to bursting. Anybody who stands in front of them with eyes and a heart can feel the dome of sky over his head, the horizon at his back. They’re full of color, not colors. You know as well as I do there’s such a thing as false excitement. Spatters and swirls and dabbles that don’t fill the void at all.” This was a dig at Zack, but she, having betrayed Zack with her body, was in no position to defend him. “Empty activity,” Bernie pronounced, rolling toward her so that an amber whiff of his aftershave washed across her nostrils, followed by a sadness of elderly sweat, the sourness men come to carry in the wrinkles of their neck. “You look, and there’s a lot there, a lot of colors swooping this way and that, but there’s no sense of fulfillment, it’s anecdotes, it’s like drinks, one demands another, they don’t lead anywhere, it’s The Perils of Pauline, each episode leaves us hanging. But the stoops in New York, the stoops in charge of reputations, they don’t want fulfillment, they want excitement. Fuck ’em, I say. What do you say, Red?”
“To be honest, Bernie, I wouldn’t mind some recognition. On my own, away from Zack.”
“I hereby recognize you, Hope McCoy, as the sweetest tootsie to come my way since I hit forty-five. These sessions are saving my life.”
“How you tease.”
“I tease you not. Come live with me and be my love, and we shall something something prove.”
“ ‘All the pleasures.’ That’s cruel teasing, now. Jeanette is a treasure, Zack is so jealous of—” She stops herself from saying, of painters whose wives have money.
But he sensed where she was going, and his fine little mouth, its sardonic small muscles, twitched the tips of his mustache. “Jealous of the bucks she brings in. I bet he is. When is the poor shmuck going to ease off the sauce? He’s going to kill himself and take somebody else with him. I don’t want it to be you.”
“Bernie, you care. How dear. He needs the intensity,” she tried to explain. “The way he paints, it’s like playing jazz, he needs to drown out other noise. I don’t think, when he’s quiet, his head is quiet, if you know what I mean.” Who says I’m crazy? The draft board, for one.
“Poor shmuck,” Bernie said, and rolled himself heavily out of bed, launching them into the awkwardness of scuttling, Vir Heroicus and Hottentot, into their clothes. As she stood naked by the balustrade, spattered with freckles, the smell of paint and its chemical thinners rose to her from the studio a floor below, the vast monochromatic canvases, and she remembered the name of the once-famous sculptor of the Greek slave: Hiram Powers. Powers and his friend Horatio Greenough, who sculpted George Washington as a bare-chested Zeus. Through Bernie and Jeanette’s huge glass wall she saw the potato fields in their sunstruck, industrious rows; orderly rows of things, from desks in a classroom to stripes in seersucker, always spoke to her in her private language of peace.
“Bernie was nice to me,” she tells Kathryn, “at a time when I felt lost. Lost in regard to my own work, lost in regard to what to do about Zack. He was destroying himself, and for my own sake I had to stop caring so much.”
“Did you and Bernie ever discuss marriage?”
“Never. He and Jeanette had a fine arrangement. He was happy enough with her and, happy or not, he was financially dependent. I wasn’t happy with Zack, but I was bound to him. The worse we fought, the closer we were bound. He had done something great, and to me that made him a hero. Also, let’s face it, where else did I have to go? Back then there wasn’t this absolute freedom that your generation has grown up with, this almost duty to do whatever you want. We expected hardship. Depression and war and then the Chinese and the Russians to stave off. We were hardy, pious folk in our way. And yet, you know, I wonder if we didn’t get more fun out of being American than you do. The oceans our people had come over were still huge, and things still felt new—banjos and streets on a grid and jazz and all those inventions we took credit for, like the airplane. The songs on the radio, the Sunday-night comedians, the soda fountains and patent medicines—they were ours.” She is beginning to sound like a windbag; thinking back to Bernie has made her oratorical. He loosened her up. With each different person we are slightly different and, yes, she had liked the self he gave her. He kidded her, and she liked being kidded. Her grandfather used to kid her, gently.
“The, the physical part with Bernie—”
Oh my, this girl is determined to get into bed with Hope and her men, even without her tape recorder running. In a fit of impatience that shakes her old body like a creaky cat-boat in a gust of wind, Hope tells Kathryn firmly, “Bernie Nova was a sensitive, healthy man who didn’t drink usually until six in the evening, and for me that was a very welcome change.” At a softer, forgiving pitch, woman to woman: “He was a dandy but not a ladies’ man. I think, as with a lot of men, he found sex philosophically embarrassing. He and Jeanette had grown out of it. Or so he told me. But, then, that’s what married men do say. Now: there’s a little more tuna salad.”
“Oh no, I couldn’t. It was delicious, but more than enough. I often just have a cup of yogurt for lunch.”
“Then let me finish it up for you, right out of the bowl, if you don’t mind. I hate to throw anything away, it’s such a nuisance shopping for it and hauling it home, but then I hate filling the fridge with moldy leftovers.”
Recalling Bernie has stirred her up, given her an appetite. Eastern Long Island had seemed young itself then, thinly populated, sparsely invaded by a few choice souls from the city, the marshes and beaches and rocky bays locked into communion with the days of the glaciers; the sun beat down even into November, unsoftened by the heavy green trees of Ardmore, those black walnuts and horse chestnuts and broad-leaved tulip poplars towering up out of the lawns and estate grounds like thunderheads, their shade making the grass thready and tender, even the tennis players hardly tan beneath the muggy white sky. Ostensibly off to East Hampton for an hour of errands, she would speed over the flat and sandy terrain in the Olds convertible like some noontide version of Emma Bovary running barefoot through the dawn meadows to her rendezvous; Hope sees herself skimming between the potato fields and farm stands to Bernie’s elegant house—Bernie’s great canvases of passionately blank color, Jeanette’s smart subfusc Madison Avenue taste—while Zack, having bicycled to the Lemon Drop or in his baffled funk gone walking the marsh edges with Trixie, was lifted from her mind, the gloomy burden of him. She, in her flapping headscarf and sunglasses, feeling as weightless as an arrow, did not pollute the landscape but instead took innocence from the fields, the salt-bleached cottages, the shingled windmill at the end of Fireplace Road. Zack rarely stirred from his marital stupor to ask where had she been, why these few vegetables from Drayton’s or a roadside stand, these toiletries and aspirin from Rowe’s Pharmacy, had taken so long to purchase, or how she had spent two hours sizing up sweaters and pleated skirts at the Hamptons Department Store and not buying any. “Also,” she would lie, if he asked, “I checked out the fall line at the Kip Shop. There was nothing for my figure, it’s all for skeleton-types eighteen years old. I thought of looking at the stores in Sag Harbor, but halfway there thought better of it. The car, by the way, sounds funny underneath, when it changes gears. When did they last check the transmission fluid?” Having sex with Bernie, she wants to tell Kathryn, was like a woman serving herself lunch, taking pleasure twice, in giving the food and then in consuming it.
“No, I don’t mind,” the girl stupidly responds, as if Hope had really asked for her approval. Perhaps she was off in her own mental world, looking backward or ahead, beyond this inte
rview, whose limits she had already gauged, though, strengthened by food, she would not give up on it quite yet.
“Dessert!” Hope proclaims. “I have some raspberry sorbet, absolutely hard as a rock but the microwave can soften it, or English oatmeal cookies. Carr’s Hob Nobs they’re called, from the health-food store, so they must be low on calories and full of whatever it is that’s good for us—bran. Or you could have both.”
“No, neither, honestly. Maybe half a cookie, if you can find a broken one. We should be getting back to the front room so you can get me off your hands.”
“Well, to be honest, Kathryn, I was thinking of walking you around outdoors for a minute or two, for a change of air. It feels so stuffy indoors, a whole winter’s worth of the same air. If we walk up toward the springhouse, there’s a little meadow from which you can see clear to New Hampshire, the White Mountains.”
“No, really, Hope—if I may—I don’t have the right shoes, for one thing.”
“You have sturdy boots.”
“They’re not sturdy. They’re new Via Spigas, and they hurt, rather.”
“Take them off.”
“No, please—”
“Your feet wouldn’t be my size, but I have some very roomy Wellingtons I live in in mud season. They might be a bit skiddy on the pine needles, though, going up the hill.”
“You’re so nice—”