by John Updike
“I—”
“Can skip the view. I know. Let’s go back in, before the tea water boils all away.”
Still, it has done Hope good to be out in the cosmos, so different in feeling, so capacious, intricate, and benign, from the picture painted by Kathryn’s old boyfriend. How old was old? Does this girl have a boyfriend who is not old, who is waiting to warm and console her, to listen to her story about this babbling old witch on her lonely hill it took forever to drive to and even longer to drive back from? Hope feels her face freshened by its brush with the outdoors; her skin is taut with that fullness she remembers from childhood, when it seemed too good to be true that she was she, her life a daily growing fuelled by food in the day and sleep at night, the moon and sun the same exact size in the sky though there was no necessary reason for it. She leads Kathryn back around the house, past the bird feeder hanging from the bare beech, over the gleams of mud by the millstone step up to the door of the kitchen; the mismatching storm door twangs on its rusty spring, and the real door, slightly sunk on its hinges, pops at a push from Hope’s shoulder. Kathryn, too, despite herself, from the briskness of her steps and the speed with which she sheds Jerry’s maroon parka, has had her spirit lifted. “How nice it must be,” she exclaims, “to have so much space to yourself. The whole of my apartment I think is no bigger than your kitchen. And these boring towers absolutely dominating my view.”
“My boys think it’s too much space for one little old lady. Now, what can we give you to eat?”
“Eat? I don’t need anything, but if I could use your bathroom …”
“Of course. You know where it is. But you must have something on your stomach before you set out.”
“I still have a few questions. We’re just up to the ’seventies.”
“I know, but my main story is over. The unusual part, marriage to two men of genius. Jerry was no genius, but he was a sweetheart. First of all, is it tea you want, or that ancient instant coffee you turned your nose up at before?”
“The coffee, please. That was chilly out there.” Her voice recedes and the door to the bathroom shuts, under the stairs. Hope, alone, feels the cosmos around her, as many stars under her feet as over her head, the endless galaxies and the trillions of dark years to come, and hurriedly gathers cups and saucers, a tea bag for herself—herbal, chamomile, from the health-food store, this time of day, a night of insomnia after being stirred up all day is the last thing she needs, she wants to start a new canvas tomorrow, a little broader in its stripes and a browner, warmer gray than the last, to sleep well she needs physical exercise and this sitting in a rocker talking is not it—and for her guest the Taster’s Choice undecaffeinated with its red label and friendly little waist (the incurved glass sides in her bent fingers remind her of something; what?) and from the refrigerator the heavy loaf of rice-pecan bread (No Preservatives, Fruit-Juice Sweetened) from the same quaint store run by aged former hippies in Montpelier and from the cupboard beyond the double sink the squat straight-sided jars of Dundee marmalade and Skippy peanut butter. The girl must eat. It comes to Hope what the concave sides of the instant-coffee jar reminded her of: the curved walls of Peggy’s Art of This Century gallery, designed by, what was his name, Fritz, one of those pushy Germans like that Hans who drove Zack back to drink, Fritz Kiesler, not Kreisler, Kiesler with his seven-way chairs that could turn into tables or lecterns or easels, an idea that didn’t catch on but seemed perfectly adapted for the future at the time, wood covered in bright colors of linoleum, shaped plastic not yet invented, the floor turquoise. The future was here, in 1942, above a grocery store on West Fifty-seventh street. There were contraptions, a pinwheel of Duchamps, a conveyor belt of Klees, Hope had just come to New York, it seemed such glorious giddy fun to her, all so new; the walls curved out, not in like the sides of the coffee jar, but it was the same idea, of curves where you expected straight sides, that had reminded her, the touch of them, taking her so far back it was frightening, that feeling returning that she used to get on the top of the cathedrals and the Eiffel Tower when Jerry began taking her to Europe, which Zack and Guy were too poor or uncaring to do, the feeling that she was much too high, that she might slip through the floor into all those uncaring galaxies beneath her feet.
Kathryn returns, having peed. Hope can see the difference on her newly relaxed face; how modest a lowering of tension it takes to satisfy what Freud called the pleasure principle. “This is a treat I sometimes give myself,” Hope announces. “A marmalade-and-peanut-butter sandwich on this special rice-pecan bread. You must have one with me. It will get us through.”
“I—”
“You don’t eat junk, but this isn’t junk,” Hope finishes for her. “The bread is from a health-food store fifteen miles away, I risk my life every time I drive there. You must be starving, dear; I know I am.”
Against the grain of her self-denying, ambitious, yet clumsy nature, Kathryn sits and warily consumes half the sandwich, its heavy dun-colored bread, its childish spreads, spread not too thickly or one’s fingers, Hope has learned through experience, become sticky. The two women, who have been so busy asking and answering, eat in a silence new to them. Time presses; the digital kitchen clock says 5:06. Rain, gathering volume, runs down the far window through which Hope had earlier studied the tousled sky, its torment resolved into a pearly brightness beyond the rivulets of rain, the hidden sun lowering to the west. Kathryn sips at her coffee, though it must still be, like Hope’s tea, scalding, and Hope takes pity on her: “If you’re in such a hurry, we can take our cups back to the front room and the tape recorder. But do finish your sandwich. Isn’t it good?”
“It is, it takes me back. Delicious. But I really can eat only half. It’s funny, on weekends my boyfriend tells me I eat like a horse, it’s a wonder I’m not fat, but when I’m on assignment I really have no appetite, I’m so focused. I didn’t sleep much last night, either. The motel was just off 89, the traffic never stopped, you’d think it would way up here in the country.”
So she does have a present, active boyfriend. Hope feels relief. And jealousy. “You poor thing. You must have been anxious. What about?”
“Not asking the right questions.”
“Oh, I’m sure they’re right enough. I’ll tell you if we miss anything important. But isn’t that what Freud’s theory of psychotherapy claims, that it all comes around to the main thing even if you talk quite at random? What does your boyfriend do, may I ask?”
Kathryn lowers her lids, lids that seem in the fluorescent kitchen light gorgeously greasy, those of some sinful, defiant Biblical queen. The girl is offended to have the interview turned on her but has accepted enough of the other woman’s kindness to see no way out. “He’s in film, that’s what he loves,” she says. “He’s on a team making trailers, part-time, but he wants to move to the West Coast and climb the ladder to be a director. He acts, too, but that doesn’t turn him on.”
“Doesn’t it? How interesting,” Hope says, not finding it particularly so. “He isn’t a painter?”
“Oh no. He goes with me to openings and shows now and then and can’t see what I see in any of it. He’s a real philistine that way.”
“You said he helps make what?”
“Trailers. You call them previews. There’s an art to it, sequencing the high-energy bits. They work sometimes from rushes on a picture that isn’t half finished and nobody knows the ending.”
“Well, the ending is just what we don’t want these—what are they?—‘trailers’ to disclose. Jerry was a keen moviegoer, he liked going out, so we would bestir ourselves and go, in New York up to Eighty-sixth Street and here over to Burlington. But after a while every movie seemed to be made for adolescent boys; they made you feel processed—so many car chases you were supposed to care about, so many explosions and narrow escapes, and that was it. It must be a worry for you, to have him wanting to move to Los Angeles.”
“Well, not too much. It’s less than six hours in the air. I want him to
succeed and be happy at what he loves.”
“Of course. But what of you? New York is where you must be, surely.”
“I liked L.A., the one time I was there. The mild weather, the Spanish flavor, the freeways. It feels like the future.”
“You didn’t find it … cheesy?”
“They do have art there. A very lively art scene, actually.”
“They have those low-riding cars and some handsome, virtually empty museums.”
“You left New York.”
“Not far. Not in my mind. I kept going back, until I got too stodgy to travel. Don’t sacrifice your own work, for the sake of a man.”
Kathryn does not say, You did, but both think it, Hope with the reservation that she never betrayed herself absolutely, she postponed rather than sacrificed, she somehow knew she had time to wait it all out, to get to this present, to be herself in the end.
Kathryn surprises her by laughing—a prettier, lighter, more musical laugh than her horsy face had prepared Hope for. “You don’t seem to approve of Alec, without knowing him at all!”
“I want the best for you,” Hope tells her, not smiling. “I’m not sure a trailer-maker sounds like it. I’ve always felt squeamish around people who want to be ‘in film.’ What doesn’t your friend like about acting? It seems at least to be straightforward, an ancient art of sorts.”
“He calls it a meat market. Alec is really very nice, you’d like him if you met him, even if he doesn’t think painting amounts to much any more. Once pictures began to move, he says, it was all over for those that didn’t.” She shifts position at the table, looks at the remaining half-sandwich as if to begin eating it, and takes a sip of her rapidly cooling coffee instead. Microwave heat for some microscopic reason fades much faster than good old-fashioned boiling heat: the fact fascinates Hope. “You know,” Kathryn tells her, not exactly rebuking, “most of us can’t find these men of genius to marry. Most of us must muddle along in the middle, and hope at least it is the middle.”
“Neither man attracted me because he was famous,” Hope says, sitting more upright at the table, feeling her face warm. “Guy appealed to me because of his gaiety, his impudence. Zack was not unknown in art circles when I married him, but he was certainly poor, and going downhill fast. And I disliked his paintings, in fact. My family thought it was a ruinous match, as in many ways it was.”
“Still, you were there when he broke it all open—you were part of it.”
“I got him out to Long Island, that was good. For a time. But my being a small part of it gives me less satisfaction, I can tell only you, than if I had been the one to make the breakthrough.”
Is this quite true? Welcoming Zack back to the relatively warm house after one of his freezing hours in the barn had had its satisfactions—a partnered wonder, a worried pride. This man hemmed in by clamoring needs, by chemical dependency and social incoherence, could nevertheless fetch back to her through the snow not a bloody kill on his back but the ghost, in his hands and eyes, his lovely tawny farsighted Western eyes, of beauty, beauty stretched flat in those great swaths of sized canvas taped to the floor with their swirls and spatters of pure paint drying. Then it was, as he spoke to his mate with breath still visible as frozen vapor, as if she had done it with him, ripped those imperishable hours from the perishing world.
“No more sandwich?” Hope says to Kathryn. She is a bit hurt, being rejected in this trivial particular. “I’ll wrap it in Reynolds Wrap for your drive back. Really, it’s not bad for you, though the marmalade has sugar in it. I’ve lived on nothing else some days up here, when I was snowed in.”
“Poor Alec,” the other woman says, off in her own world, where her lover has taken a wound. Hope forgets what weight her words have to these innocents dazzled by even a soft glow of fame. It was true, she had not liked the sound of a man who did not like galleries. To her they were Aladdin’s caves, from her first glimpse of Art of This Century with its curved walls, and then, when married to Guy, of the Hansa and Reuben and Judson and Red Grooms’, where happenings and playlets were staged that would leave the tiny audiences baffled but in some corner of their minds enlisted in a fresh way of seeing things, with less prejudice, with less expectation of familiar hierarchy, and then the midtown galleries, Leo’s and Sidney’s, which gave Pop its celebrity and opened it to the new collectors, the playful new American money, she had met Jerry in one of them. Galleries usually had an embattled, silent feeling to them, underpopulated, the girls at the desk fighting drowsiness, the paintings in their brightness and the sculptures in their savage stasis waiting for love, for the viewer, the buyer, while bored and idle noises leaked through from the back room. These galleries housed works produced in loneliness and confusion but also in a mood of exalted contentment, of remove from the world’s ruck, work done on the edge of usefulness, art undermining its own uses as fast as these could be identified, art at art’s crumbling edge, fragments arrayed in these bare but for her far from desolate chambers of Manhattan; Hope was always stirred and happy in them, they were meetinghouses sacred in their silence, poised for visitation.
“Don’t mind me at all,” she tells her visitor, sensing but not greatly caring that the girl has been insulted. “Let’s go to the front parlor. I can’t offer you anything else? A quick little salad? Some Brazil nuts? How about a low-fat gluten-free oatmeal cookie?”
Kathryn rises, hands flat on the table to help her up, without deigning a response. Rain thrashes on the kitchen skylight. In the front parlor the sound is subdued. The two women, cups in hand, resettle into their chairs, and even as she leans forward and switches the tape recorder back on Kathryn says, “I’d like to return to Guy for a minute. His leaving you isn’t very clear to me.”
“Nor to me,” Hope allows, sensing that her interrogator was going to dig deeper, to repay her for the doubt over Alec that Hope has sown. “He just seemed to sidle out of my life, and the children’s, after seventeen years of being there, or at least checking in faithfully.”
“Do you really believe he stayed uninvolved in all the drug use at the Hospice? What about amphetamines? Coke? Downers? In a lot of those experimental movies that were turned out under his name the actors are clearly tripping: the transvestite one, or one of the transvestite ones, Sick Roses, just the other evening I was watching it on video with Alec, and there’s almost no interrelating, the actors are each doing their own thing with this tranced smirk on their faces, there is no attempt to connect with one another, let alone remember any lines that would advance a story.”
“But, Kathryn dear, perhaps the point is that there isn’t a story because there shouldn’t be a story, because there aren’t any stories any more, just as painting, you say, or Alec says, had to give up anecdote. That was why Hopper and Wyeth seemed to us such dinosaurs, they seemed to be still telling us stories. A story presupposes an author, moving the characters about from above, moving us about from above, to some morally intelligible end, and who believed that any more, after the Holocaust, after the A-bomb—”
Kathryn reacts so swiftly that the sheaf of questions in her lap slides and has to be slapped to keep from falling to the floor, its old boards painted the shiny black-red of Bing cherries. “Thank you for mentioning the A-bomb. In all this Cold War period, ’45 to ’89, did the threat of nuclear annihilation affect your thinking? Were you ever afraid?”
“A bit in ’62, the Cuba crisis they just made a movie about, but not really. It was a lovely October day, that day when the world might blow up, with the Russian ships steaming toward ours. I remember pushing Paul and Piet in their twin stroller all the way over to the pediatrician’s on East End Avenue and being much too hot in my new fall coat, and the television in his office being turned to a soap opera. People are optimists. They must be. I could never believe the world’s leaders would be so stupid as to blow it all up.”
“But—”
“Hitler would have, you are going to say. But the Russians, the Soviets, were like us—big
bumbling countries with no need for Lebensraum, not little overachieving countries like Germany and Japan, driven crazy by these racist, death-loving myths they had. The Russians love life—read their novels. They were Communists, the ones running things, but so had been most of the older painters I knew, even into the war. In describing the post-war period you younger people keep telling us how haunted we were by the threat of nuclear Armageddon, but the fact is it hardly ever entered my head, and if it did what could I do about it? It was like being hit by a trolley car—that could happen, too. And about Guy and drugs, you should remember that most of his assistants at the Hospice were a generation younger than he and much more self-indulgent and nihilistic, they had grown up sheltered and spoiled and believed simultaneously that they shouldn’t be denied anything at all and that the existing power structure, which had given them everything they had, was totally evil. Guy was three years younger than I, but we had both felt the Depression and the war; in fact, as you know from your research, he served in it, two years in the Coast Guard, sitting up in the Aleutians freezing his skinny butt but doing his bit. He didn’t talk much about it, but he used to go about every five years to these little reunions of the guys he had served on the cutter with. There was a connection, though you’re right, connection wasn’t what he was about. Or passion. The artists I first knew were always talking about passion, Bernie of course, and Roger always going on about his feelings as he painted, and Onno and Zack pouring this passion onto the canvas, these furious strokes and frenetic overpainting, but I never saw Guy lose his temper or express disappointment or dislike of another person, even the critics in the beginning who were so stupid about the beauty and really stunning variety of what he was doing. He read them but never let on, if anything he acted amused. And he didn’t express much rapture, either, when the money began to pour in.”