by John Updike
“I bet you’d like some coffee now, even if it is ancient instant.”
“No, honestly. I never drink coffee this late in the day. It gets to me. I get the jitters.”
“How late is it?”
“Your microwave clock says not yet two.”
“Two, oh my goodness, it is late. I wonder what else there is to say?”
“We’ve only gotten up to 1955,” Kathryn tells her.
“So Zack is dead.”
“But this isn’t only about Zack, it’s about you, you as an artist, and as a, a witness to the whole post-war—”
“ ‘An interested witness,’ is how Clem would have put it. He thought my work was pathetic, and wasn’t too polite to let me know he thought that. When I began at last to get some critical attention, in the late ’seventies, after Guy left me and before I married Jerry, and I had put myself on a schedule of working two solid hours once I had got Dot off to school, he tried to be gallant about it and told me he always knew I had the stuff. ‘Stuff’! That said it all. He had set himself up to be the voice of Abstract Expressionism or whatever it was—the New York School, he liked to call it, as if nobody on the West Coast could do anything—and when it was dead as a doornail he kept huffing and puffing away, still thinking art had to be powered by testosterone. Don’t you love that word? I’m just learning to pronounce it. It, and ‘pheromone.’ It turns out all that romance we all do and die for is pheromones—we’re as brainless as insects. According to a nature show I didn’t shut off soon enough, male lions go into a sort of zombie trance and kill all a lioness’s cubs and then invite her to make love. And she does, poor silly soul.”
And as she lets her tongue tumble on, Hope wonders what pheromones swimming in this young woman’s fresh and oily system are infiltrating her own receptors, leading her to be giddy, flirtatious, girlish, in oblivious despite of her irreversible position on the grave’s edge. But is she any less alive now than when measuring her fat little hand against the breadth of Grandfather’s chair arm? The chair is still there. She is still here. Where there’s life … How often she has had that quoted to her, as a friendly joke. However Godless her gaudy environment, she always harbored the cool white light, the tremulous shy miracle, of being herself, herself and none other. These people who say there is no self, that it’s all a construct of the views of others—have they never been alive?
Kathryn, standing, hunching awkwardly, offers, like a child begging to be excused, “Shall we wash the dishes?”
“No, dear, leave them. When you’re gone I can come in here and the dishes will remind me of our pleasant time.”
Is she getting perilously close to a declaration of senile love? In old age, Hope finds, everything wears thin—the skin thins and declares its sun damage, the cartilage thins and bones grind one upon another, the membrane between what one feels and what one says thins. Sometimes, thrust into a public role, before schoolchildren or a group of professed art-lovers, she must fight the impulse to blurt out the nonsensical, the unacceptable; the ceremonies of polite behavior strain her system. Dry-eyed through most of her life, she can cry now just standing alone in a room, when some moment that will not come again flashes upon her or she finds herself gazing out at a moment of exceptional balance between the day’s ebbing light and the familiar forms of the landscape while the barn swallows cheep encouragement to their young, teaching them to fly, because flight, catching insects on the wing, is the only way they can live. When the little ones first venture from the nest, they wildly career in the air, feathery cannonballs, and then cluster on the house gutter as if still crammed within the abandoned nest.
“I need”—her voice startles her, coming out croaky and cracked, so that she must begin again—“I need a cup of tea if you’re going to make me talk more.”
“Just a little more,” Kathryn promises. The girl hears the parental coaxing in her own voice and smiles at this as broadly as Hope has seen her smile yet, exposing a strip of upper gums and two symmetrical eyeteeth that, although she surely got all the orthodontia a middle-class Jewish girl deserves, were not brought quite into line with the others, instead making a strong, agreeably feral impression. The girl is gawky, the way she moves in the kitchen, her feet in their new boots a bit tender, her shoulders hunched as if to lower her height an inch or two, so that her arms slightly dangle, and her long white hands hesitantly hang between gestures. Hope would worry for Kathryn’s future but knows there are men who are drawn to gawkiness, to a look of largeness in a woman, as to a big field to be brought under control and added to their personal domain. Her own efficient smallness, Hope sometimes suspected, had attracted men who wanted a woman who needed minimal tending.
“None for me, thanks. I don’t want to—”
Don’t say “pee” again, Hope silently begs.
“—feel stuffed. Gluggy. You’re so generous with yourself, you throw out all these leads I want to follow.”
Hope had not meant to be generous with herself, but instead sparing and judicious, every word being recorded on tape. Perhaps she would be dead before the interview and whatever gawky nonsense the girl made of it would be in print. What did Emerson say about death? No more trips to the dentist. She forgoes tea. The front parlor, now that she has given her light head the ballast of food, has firmed up its corners and seems as trim and transparently rectilinear as a factory photographed or painted by Charles Sheeler. Precisionism: it keeps coming around, there is a fundamental pleasure, a primitive triumph, in capturing an appearance, whether with the frontal trompe-l’œil of a Harnett or the multiple angular reflections of an Estes. The women resume their chairs; Kathryn fiddles with the tape recorder, inserting a fresh tape, and sets it purring on the old sea-chest with its brass nailheads. “So,” Hope begins, taking the initiative, wanting to get away from Zack, she has violated the poor sick man’s privacy enough, “I’m a widow. At the age of Christ crucified, left with nothing but an old farmhouse and three acres and a barn-full of paintings nobody wanted to buy.”
“But they did want to, once Zack was dead.”
“Yes, some did. I was in no hurry to sell. I passionately believed in Zack’s work now—at first, I hadn’t—and there was only so much of it; the longer I could hold on to the paintings, the more they would be worth. I only sold them one at a time, and the buyer had to come to me. No dealers, no middlemen. The collectors who could have had them for hundreds when Peggy or Betty were showing them paid me thousands, tens of thousands. And even so they got bargains. When a Zack comes on the market now it goes for millions, he’s bigger than Picasso, he lived half as long and didn’t have all those decades of turning out self-parodies.”
“But your being his posthumous dealer wasn’t much of a career for you, was it?” Since relaxing her guard at lunch a little, Kathryn has turned stiff again, a touch accusatory.
“Well, no—but I don’t believe I framed what I was doing quite that way to myself. I felt plenty busy, with Zack dead. I could paint longer hours, without his jazz blaring at me from downstairs. Some of my old friends—women I had known during the war, in the city—emerged from nowhere with husbands and children, and without Zack around to embarrass everybody and pick fights all the time the other painters and their wives were more cordial than they had been for years. Bernie and Jeanette, Onno and Renée, Roger and Linda—they were just married, she was twenty years younger than he, a former student of his at Hunter—Mahlon and Myrtle, though they were both showing their age, he had never quite made it into Abstract Expressionism, he hung back in that suddenly very dated limbo of late Surrealism, even Jarl and Frieda, though he was about to move to northern California and in fact pretty much ceased to be a part of the New York scene, as if he could keep mailing in these huge canvases from sequoia country and still make an impression, but out on the West Coast he became one more pseudo-Oriental mystic painter like Tobey or Graves, not quite shouldering, you know, the European burden, the strenuous tradition, copouts really, though Jarl would have killed me if h
e heard me saying that, he always saw me as frivolous, when in fact I was one of the few who knew where he was coming from: the Christian wrath, the terrible impatience with creatureliness. They were all nice to me, and we had some good times, some lovely lawn parties especially at Onno’s purple carriage-house and Bernie’s mostly glass house, and cookouts on the beach, though the Island was changing, there were Levittowns farther in, and tasteless new money in the Hamptons, building all over the dunes as if no winter storm could touch them, these nouveaux kept inviting us constantly, but there were still nice sunny barefoot times to be had, and the wives tried to be good, especially Jeanette and Renée, about having me along, though it was the ’fifties and it was unimaginably important to be one of a couple, the men they found to match me with at dinner parties were generally gay, we didn’t call them that then, we still called them ‘fairies,’ I’m afraid. I wonder now that they bothered to include me, I had taken over some of Zack’s manner, drinking more than my share and liking rubbing people the wrong way and becoming very combative about his work, I was passionate about it now that it was all I had left of him, and not at all interested in finding another mate for myself; it was the women, actually, that took my eye at those parties, the stringy, tan bohemian wives, ten years or so older than I, Europeans a number of them, and terribly funny and bangly and wise, the way women can be, that witchy offhand rather helpless wisdom. I kept wondering if their being so nice to me wasn’t a way of rubbing it in, my being single again, as if a proper artist’s mate should do what Jeanne Hébuterne did, throw herself out the window, pregnant or not, but the awful truth was that having Zack gone had its compensations: I could sleep at night without the police calling me up or Zack barrelling in at four in the morning, and eventually I moved my easel into the barn and had Zack’s stuff inventoried and put into storage—it was hard to tell what was finished or unfinished, so I gave up on making the distinction—and painted bigger and bigger, I had the space now, big runny things in series, using rags and sponges, a rubber basting spatula, a Windex spray bottle I had enlarged the aperture of with a fork tine, anything to get away from brushes and palette knives, I wanted paint closer to liquid than that, I wanted it to soak in. I never primed and I never used the floor, in fact I covered it with linoleum, and ten years ago, when I gave the place to be a historic site, they looked under the linoleum and discovered all of Zack’s spatters over the edge of the canvases like a final masterpiece, you can tell from the colors which paintings left what. In my own painting I felt for the first time this masculine thing about scale the guys were always talking about. Work so big you’re not conscious of where the canvas ends—get into it, and fight for your life!”
Kathryn looks down at the notes in her lap; had Hope’s outburst of confidences frightened her? She was a strange fastidious child, skittish with food and dressing like a neutered man and giving off an offended scent whenever Hope began to talk about sex, though her questions kept dragging them back to it. “Before we go beyond Zack,” Kathryn says, acting the drillmaster now, the prim schoolteacher, “was there anything you wanted to say that you feel we’ve left out?”
“Oh, we’ve left out nearly everything. Did I talk enough about his beautiful body, the way his naked chest smelled nutty? We’ve left out the way he talked, so fantastically rude and yet timidly polite at the same time—the good boy peeping out of the bad boy. Drunk as Zack could get, he was always watching people’s reactions. He was like me, surprisingly, in that he wanted to please people. In our family constellations, as they say now, we were both pleasers, not leaders.”
“Leaders” reminds Hope of the nice intelligent young man from the State Department, a cultural officer, at the party MoMA gave in the spring of 1959 to celebrate the return of the travelling group show “New American Paintings,” that had been touring Western Europe for a year, eight major cities. In the overly familiar art crowd, its smoky chatter of constantly renewed old acquaintance—curators and reporters for art journals and gallery owners and their slender henchmen and pallid handmaidens and the painters themselves, the grizzled, piratical stars—and its fug of stale envy and smothered grudge, the young diplomat stood out by virtue of a certain shine, in his gray flannel suit, white button-down shirt, and blue-striped tie, his hair cut shorter than any other at the party, almost a brush cut such as John Kennedy would wear campaigning for President a year later, sandy short hair with a straight part on one side and at the back a few short hairs boyishly standing straight up; this State Department cultural officer was visibly exhilarated by his sanctioned penetration of the artistic demimonde, with its chance to talk to a famous artist’s widow, though he spoke about Zack with some constraint initially, since she was already remarried and hugely pregnant, the unborn baby (Paul, it would have been) obtruding on their exchange like an eavesdropper bulging behind the arras. Pink-faced, a bit breathless, his breath tinged by champagne, the nice young man in his rimless glasses took a half-step closer and told her, “Your husband—your former husband, excuse me—was the killer. You should have seen the young people, the Italians and the Germans especially, gathering around his canvases. Their silence, the look on their faces—they could have been in church. The whole show was a sensation; you could smell the electricity as those kids shuffled through. And the critical reaction—the USIA is drawing up a sheaf of translations we’ll be sending you, but I can tell you now they were either rapturous or rabid. The left-wing hacks in Paris and Milan and Brussels went apeshit, pardon my French. They knew the jig was up with their pathetic retardataire social realism and Picasso peace doves and hokey peasant art and prole posters in Léger’s clunkiest style. The Communists are funny,” the young man in rimless glasses said, philosophically, trying to see it from the enemy’s point of view, “they’ve had some good art—the Mexicans, the Constructivists—but these hard-assed establishment Soviets run absolutely the other way, they’re terrified of anything with the smallest breath of originality, they know that anybody says ‘Boo!’ the whole house of cards will come tumbling down. Their stooges writing for Le Monde and Corriere della Sera—they didn’t know what had hit them, but they knew a bomb had gone off in their faces: freedom in action, baby. Only in America. All that force, feeling, daring, simultaneous inwardness and outwardness. Hey, you want revolution?—here it is! In every city, even Madrid, the show was jammed. Europe had never seen anything like it—Surrealism without the smirk, abstraction without geometry, every painting a wrestle with God. Self—self and beauty, beauty and self. They weren’t just impressed, they were moved. And these are tough kids—grown up hungry and bombed, brainwashed from both sides after the war, cynical enough to swallow Sartre and Brecht and their grotesque fellow-travelling. It may take a hundred more years of standoff, but this was a turning point. I’m telling you, Mrs. Holloway, the artists of this country have done a great thing. I’m just sorry Mr. McCoy didn’t live to see it. If the fuddy-duddies down in Washington believed in recognizing artists, your husband would have a posthumous medal.”
So Zack, too crazy to be a soldier when everybody else was, deserved a medal anyway. For being an exemplary American, in the muddy trenches of self-expression. The President himself in those days had been a Sunday painter. But Hope does not attempt to paraphrase for Kathryn the rhetoric of the young diplomat, old and pensioned now, if not dead, having served his empire in many exotic stations, gaining at each posting another language, another roomful of regional souvenirs. Remembering him has reminded her of what she does say: “During those early winters on the Flats, Zack came in after an hour in the cold and would admit he hadn’t painted a bit, he hadn’t opened a paint can. I asked him what had he had been doing and he said, quick as could be, ‘Praying.’ I don’t think he meant to be taken seriously, but I did anyway. He prayed to be shown the light, and he was, for a while. Remember, he’s the one who wanted us to be married in a church.”
Kathryn uncomfortably switches her long black legs and says, reading from her notes, “It was thr
ough Bernie that you met Guy.”
“I suppose. I actually forget the exact circumstances. As we’ve said, somehow after Zack died Bernie became the wave of the future. His flat colors, the Minimalism—the monocle, too, his touch of the dandy, the titles in Latin and the tinted cigarettes in the tortoiseshell holder—all this made him appealing where Zack and Jarl and even Phil seemed roughnecks who reminded the younger painters of everything crude and fanatic about the America they had come to New York to get away from. Bernie and Jeanette were great entertainers and befrienders of the young—with her business, she took every party as a write-off—and they had Guy and his pals up from downtown to Central Park West back as early as ’56 or so. I think I met Guy in the summer of ’57, but it wasn’t at the Novas’ apartment, it was at Guy’s loft on Pearl Street, he was giving a party to celebrate Leo’s signing him for his first one-man show, he had been scraping a living doing windows at Bonwit’s and drawing shoe ads for Bloomingdale’s, and a bunch of us, Bernie and Jeanette and Seamus and some girl he had at the time—Seamus never had them for long, they were mostly for display, he was a priest at heart—invited me to come along, it must have been August, the city had that dead justus feeling I used to love. Guy had rented this huge space stuffed with all this junk he collected on the streets, though the area of the loft where he painted was a lot tidier than Zack’s barn had been, I noticed. He claimed he had met me before, at some opening or other—I was much more in and out of the city since Zack died, it would have been suicidal to sit out in the Flats all winter, Bernie and Jeanette had an extra room for me, I had become some kind of daughter to them since Bernie and I no longer slept together, that went when Zack went, another man’s wife is one thing and a young widow is another. Men in fact were scared off: I was too available, and hard-up, presumably.”
“Presumably?”
“I hope you never have a husband die on you, Kathryn, but if you do you may find that sex is the last thing you miss—not that Zack had been providing much. The urge just gets lost in all the other feelings, the guilt, not so much survivor guilt as what-might-I-have-done-differently guilt, and irritation at the sloppy state he left all of your affairs in, like the way men drop their socks on the floor and walk away, and the relief, frankly, of being disentangled. Taking on another man is the last thing you want. At least in my case. One of the things I liked about the younger painters was that most of them were gay, I think the word was ‘queer’ then, a nicer word really, not stolen from some totally different meaning, and even those that weren’t gay were fey. Their stuff was deadpan and tricky, and when you asked them about it they would just shrug and act evasive; they came out of commercial work—window-dressing, advertising, design, sign-painting, billboards even—and didn’t have that glowering theoretical passion, left over I suppose from Marxism, that Zack’s generation did. These new artists acted as if it was all a lark, as if life was a joke, and painting too, though they worked hard, on the sly. Guy was tireless, I discovered. Once he got me set up with the children in an apartment and himself down at the Hospice, it was like being married to a Wall Street lawyer, he was never home.”