by John Updike
“I think it’s marvellous,” Kathryn says, leaning forward into the statement, her left hand with its black nails giving a twitch in her lap, “that you can be so enthusiastic about Guy after the miserable way he treated you, eventually.”
“Was it miserable? There was nothing malicious about it. We had been useful to each other for seventeen years, and his use for me wore out before mine for him. He was a man who had to keep moving. The last time we met, before the Alzheimer’s had quite taken hold, his restlessness had ceased to be debonair, he could no longer hold it in, his eyes kept darting around the room, he kept baring his long teeth. He looked terrified, he knew things weren’t right. Poor Guy. I had never felt sorry for him before.”
Her remembered insight into Guy’s dismay spreads to her own situation; it attaches to the increasingly obdurate and surreal fact of Kathryn’s presence—a presence becoming as monstrous, here in Hope’s chaste and little-used front parlor, with its brown chintz curtains and lavender-haunted panes of glass, as a stuffed eagle spattered with thinned, dribbling paint. Guy once remarked to her, as they walked together one summer day down West Broadway, how everything, until you focus, looks like chewing gum. This seemed at the time a casual bit of nihilism, a tossoff from his depths of cultivated shallowness, meant to amuse, but the phrase stayed with her, as a clue to the intrinsic monstrousness of everything, its colorless, shapeless thereness. This girl has that quality, insisting on sitting there, on digging at Hope but with no clear concept of what she wants, or when she will have enough.
“What did he look like? In general.”
Hope hesitates—the question seems so simple it must be a trap.
“I mean”—Kathryn blushes, winningly—“what did he look like to you. Accounts vary, and even no two photographs of Guy Holloway look exactly alike.”
“Smooth,” Hope brings out at last. “He had a smooth face that often appeared tipped back to me, maybe because I was so much shorter. His features were not very striking—a small straight nose, a long upper lip, lips that looked buttoned-down, somehow, and slightly pained, perhaps because he so seldom smiled—his keeping deadpan was a lot of his strength—and slightly bulging eyes this washed-out blue, like delftware. It was a face that presented little friction to the world.”
“Unlike Zack.”
“Oh, Zack. He was all friction—that’s why he was stuck so much of the time. With Guy I had this wonderful feeling that I didn’t have to push the cart, or keep pulling it up out of ditches—I just had to ride along.”
“And then, very quickly, you bore him three children. That, to me, is the single most surprising fact about your life.”
“But why? Nothing is more natural, it’s Nature’s business to make it happen. I would have loved to have begun earlier—it turned out to be something I was good at, childbirth. I had the pelvis for it, small as I was. And they didn’t come so quickly, each took nine months—Paul in June of ’59, Piet in November of 1960, and Dot in ’62. We were thrilled to have a girl, we had agreed after Piet to try once more in the hopes we would, she came just a month before I turned forty. You used the word ‘surprising’; I was surprised that Guy asked to name her after his mother, I hadn’t thought they were that close, but maybe in his mind they were, we had named the boys after favorite painters, Guy’s favorites more than mine, dry, cerebral painters—my father had been a prick about my marrying Zack and his had abandoned his family, why reward them?—so it was disconcerting to have to speak to the little innocent bundle, my own daughter, with a name belonging to my rather intimidating mother-in-law. But ‘Dot’ solved it, calling her Dot. And Guy began his Benday series, comic-strip panels with big mechanical dots, soon after, as homage of a sort. He was a good, fun father to the boys, though noticeably competitive, even when they were two and three, but having a daughter absolutely melted him. He would even change her diapers, something he was rather stuffy about doing for the boys. He talked of beginning a series of canvases in baby shit, and I believe looked into the technicalities, but never did—I mentioned this morning the parodies of Zack that involved urinating on copper plates, but it wasn’t Guy, at least my memory is that it wasn’t.”
Of course it wasn’t. It was somebody secondary, looking for a cheap shot of fame. Urine, feces, the first media. Hope sneaks a look out the windows at the darkening April day. A sickly wash of white light lies low over the horizon of the mountains but no direct sunlight penetrates the clouds. The darkness to the west has expanded and moved around to the south as well, and against its blue-black a few dry flakes of snow flutter back and forth, up and down, as if never to touch the ground. But she knows in her sensitive bones that the day is not cold enough to snow, at least at this middling elevation. Up near the crests, where the youthful skiers slide over the frozen granular toward the end of the season, snow may accumulate, but down here it will turn to rain. The tingle of suspense makes her rub her arms through the woolen shirtsleeves. She wonders if it is three o’clock by now. She never got the habit of wearing a watch, even when living in a world of city appointments. She knows time is more elastic than a watch says. Some activities—painting, playing tennis when she and Jerry were still young enough for sports—speed it, so an hour goes by as if your life has slipped a cog, and others—gardening, housework, making conversation with awkward company—stretch it as if life will last forever, like those snowflakes unable to touch the ground.
“Do you think,” Kathryn asks in the accusatory tone her voice has taken on since Guy became the subject, a tone that reminds Hope of a daughter full of psychotherapeutically induced indignation, “that you and Guy were trying to prove something?”
“What would that have been?”
“In Guy’s case that he wasn’t gay, and in yours that you were still a young woman.”
“I was, wasn’t I?”
“Not for becoming a mother.” The girl’s voice has defensively retracted, she having never been a mother.
“Oh dear.” Hope sighs mercifully. “I was half my age now. I must have been very young.”
The children. Who would have thought that they would ever fall into place as part of the past, a chapter closed? For twenty years they had been present at every turn, not merely companions and dependents in her life but that life’s justification, its near-total environment, their innocent ravenous egos filling every room where their cries could reach and their commotion speeding every day so that time flew by, at least so it seems in the backward glance through all those veils of change and outgrowing, growth with its fatal undercurrent of leaving behind, of leaving one set of toys behind and hungering for another, of shedding speech impediments and mistaken grammar, of learning away their enchanting misspeakings, their gains her losses, their breath her breath as she leaned over the beds where each small head slept, warm and damp to her touch in the fever of fragile new life, in the unearthly beauty of children asleep, their abandoned limbs palely flowing among the tossed covers, their dreams sometimes waking them to terror, their fears her own, their rages stains on her heart, their losses and gains hers as they grew day by day, inch by inch, into language, into social custom, into schooling, into ever more defined and limited personalities—Paul diffident and fair and cunning like his father, Piet excitable and malleable like her, and little Dot, who inherited the name Dorothy at thirteen when her grandmother died, a puzzling unstable mixture of genes latent for generations, full lips and dusky sun-loving skin and coarse black hair they could only trace to Hope’s maternal grandmother, Virginia Lafitte, who came from New Orleans and had died the year Hope had been born, and to Guy’s absconded father, whom photographs showed with a crown of upright dark hair and pronounced black brows above the milky-pale, slightly protuberant eyes. Dot tomboyishly insisted on wearing boy’s clothes, to be like Daddy. Until she was six or seven, her nervous system woke her in the middle of the night and drove her into her parents’ room for comfort. So often scolded for disturbing their sleep, she resigned herself to waiting out the
wakeful spells herself; it would sadden Hope, with a sorrow that seemed close to the root of human existence, to find in the child’s room evidence, in some scattered dolls, a disarranged dollhouse, or an opened picture book, that she had entertained herself in the pit of the night while her brothers and parents slept, safely tucked into their dreams. At some point in Dot’s childhood, in the East Seventy-ninth Street apartment, they had acquired a cat, Pierre, a declawed Siamese with a silky small head that he thrust into a stroking with the force of a fist and a purr that could be heard in the next room: Pierre’s purpose, neither Hope nor Guy admitted in so many words, was to provide Dot with another nocturnal creature while her parents self-absorbedly slept. How odd, the little that Hope’s memory had brought out of that long, jostling pilgrimage of parenthood—the push of Pierre’s purring skull; the sugar-sack dead weight of little Piet’s body when she was nursing him in the big leather bean-bag chair (Paul the year before had felt so much lighter, though their birth-weights had differed by only four ounces); the linoleum smell of the clattering stairways of the non-sectarian preschool over on Park on a rainy day; the endless picking up of blocks and Lego and broken plastic cars and undressed Barbie dolls; the kiddie meals of peas and fish sticks and sandwiches cut up in pieces the size of dominoes on plastic plates imprinted with fuzzy ducks and moles and hedgehogs and bunnies, in blue coats with big buttons.
In her mind’s eye Hope sees a brown female hand with its pale thumbnail, Brenda’s or Martine’s or Josie’s, setting such a plate before one of the children at the white kitchen table, and admits to Kathryn, “I had help. You’re right, I was too old to have three children under four. Just the chasing after them made my back ache, and in winter suiting up everybody for the ten minutes at the playground in the Park before they began to whimper that they were cold. Luckily, Guy had plenty of money, ridiculous amounts after about 1962, so we could hire help, nursemaids though we didn’t call them that, there was the day girl who cooked for the children and the girl from five to seven who fed them the dinner the day girl had cooked and gave the boys their baths. I did Dot in another tub, the boys got just too frisky and bumptious for me and she was terrified of soap in her eyes. I wanted to do it all, because my own mother hadn’t, but I was too old, and spoiled I suppose, and preoccupied by wanting to get back to my own painting.”
Her memory now serves up poor Dot at thirteen going off to Brearley and crying and screaming there in the foyer because her braces and acne humiliated her and she didn’t want to go, ever, ever, she hated all those skinny smooth spoiled blonde bitches. Dot’s figure in adolescence had become stocky and her sallow skin was breaking out and Hope felt so helpless, unable to change the body of her daughter as you would scrape down and redo a painting, and no father on hand to tell Dot she was still his beautiful baby, because by that point, in 1975, Guy had left. His mother died and he left, as if her distant will, her sense of propriety, had been holding him here, among the empty rooms and forgotten toys and female voices. Paul and Piet had gone off to boarding school. Jeanette Nova—Bernie too had died, a loquacious old master sheepishly basking in the limelight after a life of defiant obscurity, but Jeanette lived on and on, thinner and thinner, a thread vibrating on the city’s loom, kept alive by interior decoration and gallery parties and gossip—said it was a compliment to Hope that he had stayed that long. She had been a saint, turning such a blind eye. Blind eye? But Hope didn’t really want to ask her, Blind eye to what? Jeanette was spinning on, her shrivelled silver-ringed hands flickering in whatever bright room had housed this conversation, city lights splashed beyond the triple-glazed windows, a dash of vengeance in her animation perhaps, the two women’s fondness for each other a mixture like Irish coffee, pulling several ways. “Nobody,” she told Hope in her raucous, party-worn voice, “foresaw all those children!”
“People were surprised,” Hope tells Kathryn, “that Guy proved to be as much of a father as he did, but that was his nature, to give everything a try, and to be productive. What he didn’t have, I suppose, was staying power. His styles tended to last two or three years at the most, and he often would be working in two styles at the same time. For instance, at the same time as he was doing those hilarious huge plastic reproductions of junk food, all gloppy with paint just like a real Big Mac, mustard and ketchup and relish, he and his assistants were turning out those multiple silk screens of car accidents and electric chairs, after 1963 of Jackie looking stunned in her pillbox hat, with such a different, impersonal visual feel, in those icy Day-Glo colors. Though in everything Guy did there was a hospitality to accident, to the unplanned. It’s a paradox: Zack, whose best work looks like all accident, as though a whirling dervish had gotten loose among the paint cans, in fact was very emphatic about his work containing no accidents, as I may have said before—forgive me, Kathryn, if I have. It was one of the few consistent things in his public statements, where Clem or I didn’t have to put the words into his mouth. It had to do with the dignity of what he was doing, his masculine control over it. Whereas Guy, who made himself into a kind of factory, once he bought that town house on Twenty-seventh Street and called it Holloway Hospice and even signed everything with a stencilled ‘HH,’ depended on accident, on human imperfection intervening. I remember, before it became quite so clear that he didn’t want me down at the Hospice—that he was quite happy with the gang of weirdos and druggies that were collecting there—my taking off an afternoon from the kids and helping with some acrylic silk screens, I was interested in learning the process, I hadn’t touched a brush to canvas in years, I hadn’t done anything but some charcoal sketches of the children asleep and a quick gouache or two out of our apartment windows. Anyway, down at the Hospice—Guy claimed the name meant art was on its last legs, this was where it had come to die—he looked at my results in that quick, almost frighteningly concentrated way he had and said, ‘No, darling, you’ve done them too perfectly, you must let some carelessness in. Here.’ And he smeared several with the side of his hand, and once I got over the shock I could see it looked better, the mechanical had been touched by the human, it made the whole idea of repetition, of a repeatable process, poignant. The imperfections are us, trying to break out. The smaller the imperfection is, the more poignant in a way. He went from putting pieces of torn cartons into his combines to duplicating the cartons themselves, as precisely as possible, but still you can see they are done by hand. I don’t think his helpers at the Hospice understood any better than I did why doing one silk screen from a newspaper paragraph is just copying but doing a whole band of them, sixteen of them, all overlaid with cerise or turquoise, was a work of art that would say something on a museum wall. Zack was interested only in expressing what the painter felt, Guy more in what the viewer saw. He was as sophisticated a theoretician in his way as Bernie and Roger, but he never talked theory. At least to me.”
Hope feels she is trying to sell Guy to Kathryn, as a worthy successor to Zack, but the other woman isn’t buying, some taint or smallness clings to Guy in her mind, whereas Zack is all wide-screen glamour. The young woman’s voice, growing huskier with a touch of catarrhal rasp as the room cools in tune with the darkening snow-spitting day outside, suggests she has heard enough about Bernie and Roger and artistic theories. “You bring up the Hospice,” she says in an accusatory tone. “There was quite a lot of drug activity associated with the people who hung out there, especially when Guy began to make experimental movies. At least one of the staff died of a heroin OD, and an actress in one of his films—quite unwatchable, of course; that was the joke, I gather—committed suicide. How did you feel, while you were trying to raise three children on the Upper East Side, about Guy going off every day to the site of all this ’sixties-early-’seventies craziness?” A concluding sniff resounds in her long, stuffed-up nose.
“Well,” Hope says. She feels the blood warm her cheeks as her Quaker blood rises to protest. “I never thought a modern artist could or should be a standard off-the-shelf member of the bo
urgeoisie. Art has no comfortable place in American life; the artist has to be outside the system. But Guy was never an addict. He didn’t smoke cigarettes and hardly drank. Even on our West Coast pre-honeymoon, he was very measured with the pot—he didn’t want to put any particle of his brain at risk, he had known from boyhood that he must live by his wits. And he had of course this beautiful ability to compartmentalize. Like most American men, he had an office life and a home life. We were like the sheltered spoiled family of a nineteenth-century sweatshop owner, who didn’t bring any ugly details home. He would spend an evening with me and the boys watching The Andy Griffith Show and then put some Schubert on the hi-fi and play a game of backgammon with me and the next morning go down to where some of his tripped-out hangers-on were doing a threesome with cameras rolling. Squalor didn’t bother Guy, he saw it as part of the urban reality we walk through every day. He had great faith in his ability to remain pure, a pure transmitter, turning everything into art. And he did this by simply saying it was art. And without ever raising his voice—that was what I marvelled at most about him, his good humor and even temper. With the children he, believe it or not, was the calm disciplinarian, I was too hot-headed and took everything they did I didn’t like as a personal affront. When Dot would come in and wake us, in spite of our getting her a cat, it was I who would—what’s the phrase?—‘go ballistic’ and Guy who would be the soothing one and lead her back gently to bed. At the same time, some of the art critics, who had gotten comfortable with Abstract Expressionism by now, just as it was quite clearly dead, were denouncing him as an artistic anti-Christ, a kind of King of Misrule recycling everything crass and stupid about American life and fooling museums into displaying it; Robert Hughes in Time was especially vitriolic. It was true, the museum directors liked what he did, it fit with everything outside the museum that the people had to pass through to get there; it connected with the life of the street. It connected with the gift shop.”